"Roofless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the abbey, we seem to have entered a Land of Beulah. We see a peaceful valley overlooked on all sides by lofty hills, whose steep sides are clothed with luxuriant woods; we see the Rye flowing past broad green meadows; and beneath the tree-covered precipice below our feet appear the solemn, roofless remains of one of the first Cistercian monasteries established in this country. There is nothing to disturb the peace that broods here, for the village consists of a mere handful of old and picturesque cottages, and we might stay on the ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... breathing could be heard also. His mind was picturing that same coronation—the shattered, roofless cathedral, the ruins of the ancient and magnificent high altar, the multitude of kneeling, famine-scourged people, the battle-worn, wounded and bandaged soldiery! And the King! And his father! Where had his father stood ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... might golf if you wanted; but I seem to have been better employed. You might secrete yourself in the Lady's Walk, a certain sunless dingle of elders, all mossed over by the damp as green as grass, and dotted here and there by the stream-side with roofless walls, the cold homes of anchorites. To fit themselves for life, and with a special eye to acquire the art of smoking, it was even common for the boys to harbour there; and you might have seen a single penny ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... curving green hills, gashed and polluted by the searchers for coal and iron. The whole country had been gutted, and vast piles of refuse and mountains of slag suggested the mighty chambers which the labour of man had burrowed beneath. On the left the road curved up to where a huge building, roofless and dismantled, stood crumbling and forlorn, with the light ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... disagreeable impression, not so much from Vedrine's work, which she scarcely looked at, as from the strange studio with trees growing in it, with lizards and wood-lice running about the walls, and all around it roofless ruins, suggesting recollections of the incendiary mob. But from the second visit the poor little woman had come back literally ill. 'My dear, it is the horror of horrors!' Such was her real opinion, as given ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... simple-minded women; they looked upon it as something very like a disgrace. "A lawyer's foot on the threshold," said Janet, "and who or what is to keep him from putting the key of the cottage in his own pocket, and sending us into a cold and roofless world? No! No! Christina. I had better by far lift the creel to my shoulders again. Thank God, I have the health and strength ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... retracing his steps to the lane, and walking back to the spot where he had left the Rolls Royce, all the time peering about him to right and left. He was looking for a temporary garage for the car, but one from which, if necessary, he could depart in a hurry. The shell of an ancient barn, roofless and desolate, presently invited inspection and, as a result, a few minutes later Colonel Lord Wolverham's luxurious automobile was housed for the night in ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... with two stories above and extensive subterranean rooms, made their stay possible, but involved great suffering and horrible death as the siege went on. The large banquet hall of the Residency near by was converted into a hospital. Both buildings are now in ruins. But the roofless Residency with a tangle of vines (and a decrepit stairway that leads upward) furnishes a fine view of the whole scene, which in its very quietness bespeaks bravery, ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... she could stand with one dim light above her And hear far music, like a sea in caverns, Murmur away at hollowed walls of stone. And here, in a roofless room where it was raining, She bore the patient sorrow of ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... to see them, and they asked him to let them know if it was the Princess's resolution never to see any man whatsoever, and they implored him to speak for them and to tell her the greatness of their love, and how long they had waited through the cold of winter and the heat of summer, sleepless and roofless through all weathers, without food and without rest, in the ardent hope of winning her, and they were willing to consider this long vigil as pleasure if she would but give them one chance of ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... white. No description in words could possibly do it justice or convey anything like an accurate idea of its beauty. Imagine, if you can, a platform eighty feet from the ground reached by beautiful stairways and inclosed by roofless walls of the purest marble that was ever quarried. These walls are divided into panels. Each panel contains a slab of marble about an inch thick and perforated like the finest of lace. The divisions and frame work, the base and frieze ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... however, leave it quite immediately. A little later, when Brian Kilfoyle was escorting Norah Finnegan home, they saw him sitting on the bank near the O'Driscolls' roofless cabin. Its mud walls were fast crumbling into ruin. Already the little window-square had lost its straight outline, and would soon be as shapeless as any hole burrowed in a bank. Con sat with his back turned ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... the summit a western nighthawk sprang up from my feet. On the bare ground, without the faintest sign of a nest, lay her two speckled eggs, which she had been brooding. She swept around above the summit in immense zigzag spirals while I examined her roofless dwelling-place. It was interesting to one bird-lover, at least, to know that the nighthawk breeds in such places. Like their eastern congeners, the western nighthawks are fond of "booming." At intervals a magpie would swing ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... look forward to anything good. When there is a knock, it may be a creditor; when people look at Arsinoe in the street, I seem to see dishonor lurking round her; when my father acts against the advice of the physician I feel as if we were standing already roofless in the open street. What is there that I can do with a happy mind? I certainly am not idle, still I envy the woman who can sit with her hands in her lap and be waited on by slaves, and if a golden treasure fell into my possession, I would never stir ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... he was met by a novice, a priest of the lowest orders, to whom he stated his mission. With a sign to the young man to follow, the priest passed through the porch into the inner court of the temple. This was simply an immense roofless chamber. Its sides were the outer walls of the temple proper, reinforced by stupendous pilasters and elaborated with much bas-relief and many intaglios. The ends were formed by the inner pylons of the porch and outer pylons of the main temple. The latter were guarded by colossal ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... still over the wooded enclosures, the little stone walls, and the copses. A small cloud had come before the sun, and its shadow was moving leisurely across the ridge where stood the roofless abbey. ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... Behind the roofless porches of the forum are other ruined buildings—where the officers of the city did business, where the citizens met to vote, where tailors spread out their cloth and sold robes and cloaks. One large market building is particularly interesting. You will ...
— Buried Cities: Pompeii, Olympia, Mycenae • Jennie Hall
... smoky sparrows; and for miles on miles a black waste spreads around, where furnaces continually smoke, steam-engines thud and hiss, and long chains clank, while blind gin-horses walk their doleful round. From time to time you pass a cluster of deserted roofless cottages of dingiest brick, half-swallowed up in sinking pits or inclining to every point of the compass, while the timbers point up like the ribs of a half-decayed corpse. The majority of the natives of this Tartarian region are in full keeping ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... a shout of joy, the biggest brother made out the farm-house; with an unhappy cry he announced the burning of the stacks. And when the buckboard came still nearer, they could see that the granaries were gone, and that all the sod buildings were roofless and open to the blurred sky, while on every side—the corn-field alone breaking the ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... my horse to the provost-marshal?" "It was I!" said the colonel, to the utter confusion of the querist. Our chief was a good deal nettled at these irregularities; and, some time after, on going to his tent, which was pitched between the roofless walls of a house, conceive his astonishment at finding the calf and the goose hanging in his own larder! He looked serious for a moment, but, on receiving an explanation, and after the row he had made about ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... creek of the Lynher River, and not far from the Cornish borough of Saltash, you may find a roofless building so closely backed with cherry-orchards that the trees seem by their slow pressure to be thrusting the mud-walls down to the river's brink, there to topple and fall into the tide. The old trees, though sheeted with white blossom in the spring, bear little fruit, and that ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... visited the most beautiful parts of this country and Ireland. Afterwards the Alps of Switzerland became his inspirers. "Prometheus Unbound" was written among the deserted and flower-grown ruins of Rome; and, when he made his home under the Pisan hills, their roofless recesses harboured him as he composed the "Witch of Atlas", "Adonais", and "Hellas". In the wild but beautiful Bay of Spezzia, the winds and waves which he loved became his playmates. His days were chiefly spent on the water; the management of his boat, its alterations ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... in idleness and our country in disorder. What would you say to the lord of an estate who complained to you of his poverty and disabilities, and when you pointed out to him that his land was half of it overrun with weeds, and that his fences were all in ruin, and that his cattle-sheds were roofless, and his labourers lying under the hedges faint for want of food, he answered to you that it would ruin him to weed his land or to roof his sheds—that those were too costly operations for him to undertake, and that he knew not how to ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... soughed in the leafless trees that grew around the old roofless barn at the corner of the road that led to the fells. The gurgle of a half-frozen waterfall came from the distant Ghyll. Save for these sounds and the dull thud of Greta's step on the snow-covered ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... were two young ladies of Berhoea, who had given up all the pleasures of life to settle themselves in a roofless cottage outside the town. They had stopped up the door with stones and clay, and allowed it only to be opened at the feast of Pentecost. Around them lived certain female slaves who had voluntarily chosen the same life, and who were taught and exhorted through ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... sun grows hot: I am anhungered. How cheerily the Sabbath-breaking quail Pipes in the corn, and bids us to his Feast Of Wheat Sheaves! How the bearded, ripening ears Toss in the roofless temple of the air; As if the unseen hand of some High-Priest Waved them before Mount Tabor as an altar! It were no harm, if we should ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Queen of England that Richard was born. At the time of his birth, the queen was residing at a palace in Oxford. The palace has gone pretty much to ruin. The building is now used in part as a work-house. The room where Richard was born is roofless and uninhabitable. Nothing even of the interior of it remains except some traces of the fire-place. The room, however, though thus completely gone to ruin, is a place of considerable interest to the English ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... themselves everywhere. The people are poor; they are despondent, broken-spirited. In the south of Ireland decay is written on every town. In the poorer parts you may see every fifth or sixth house tenantless, roofless, allowed from year to year to moulder and moulder away, unremoved, unrepaired.... To make room for these large-scale operations, evictions must go on, and as the process proceeds the numbers must be augmented ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... do you lodge, gentlemen?" inquired our Major, addressing us both; and when he learned that we were roofless he insisted that we remain under his roof, nor would he hear of any excuses touching the present unsuitability of our ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... particular bunkhouse, and there was a great rush for places. It was floorless, doorless and in part roofless. Above the medley of voices I heard that ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... "Haste"! Here a dam and there a jam, that is grabbed by grinning rocks, Gnawed by the teeth of the ravening ledge that slavers at our flocks; Twenty a month for daring Death—for fighting from dawn to dark— Twenty and grub and a place to sleep in God's great public park; We roofless go, with the cook's bateau to follow our hungry crew— A billion of spruce and hell turned loose when the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... the church and buildings; the treasures corded in bundles; the woodwork of the interior put up to auction on the village green; and a few days later the troop would disappear again, heavily laden, leaving behind roofless walls, and bewildered Religious in their new secular dress with a few shillings in their pockets, staring after the rich cavalcade and wondering what was ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... yards farther, the path came to the top of a ridge and began to go down abruptly into a cup-shaped hollow. At the foot, out of a thick wood of flowering hawthorn, two or three roofless gables, blackened as if by fire, and a single tall chimney, marked the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... broken ground, grown with coarse grass and bramble, and as we peeped over this bank the ruined house stood before us—so near as to startle me by its proximity. It must have been a large house originally—if, indeed, it was ever completed. Now it stood roofless, dismantled, and windowless, and in many places whole rods of brickwork had fallen and now littered the ground about. The black gap of the front door stood plain to see, with a short flight of broken steps before it, and by the side of these a thick timber shore supported the front wall. ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... pointed arch. The most amazing cathedral constructed by Nature herself, with lavish outlay of the pointed aisle of branches, is at Jumieges. There, close to the splendid ruins of the Abbey, where the two towers are still intact, while the roofless nave, carpeted with flowers, ends in a chancel of foliage shut in by an apse of trees, three vast aisles of centenary boles extend in parallel lines; one in the middle, very wide, the two others, one on each side, somewhat ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... reach the path which skirts the old heathen sites. Little more than the outline of the former turf houses is visible. The turf roof has fallen in, or been carried away, but the low mounds which formed the walls remain, as also the roofless curving porch, which in each opened out to the sea. More than one hundred persons of both sexes and all ages are said to have inhabited these three houses, and their heathen life here, with its cruelties, sorceries, ...
— With the Harmony to Labrador - Notes Of A Visit To The Moravian Mission Stations On The North-East - Coast Of Labrador • Benjamin La Trobe
... Tierra del Fuego, or the Andaman Islands! It was a foreign country, and the ways of the people were strange to him, and it was a land of very strange things. One of the strangest was an old ruined church in the neighbourhood of the farm where he was shepherd. It was roofless, more than half fallen down, and all the standing portion, with the tower, overgrown with old ivy; the building itself stood in the centre of a huge round earthwork and trench, with large barrows on the ground outside the ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... and he gaed, over round swelling hills, over old battle-fields, past the roofless ruins of houses whose walls were crowned with tall climbing grasses, till he came to a crystal sheet of water, called St. Mary's Loch. Here he paused to take breath. The sky was dull and lowering; but at his feet were ...
— Fairy Book • Sophie May
... church, the principal building of the mission, was built in the form of a cross, of rough stone, with walls several feet thick. At the time of the battle which was to witness its downfall the centre of the structure was roofless, but the ends were well covered. The sides of the church were over twenty feet high, and the windows were exceedingly narrow, for the building had been built to resist attacks by the Indians. It faced both the river ...
— For the Liberty of Texas • Edward Stratemeyer
... peristyle were of dazzling alabaster, with their capitals richly gilt. The space above was roofless; but an immense awning of purple, richly embroidered in Persian looms—a spoil of some gorgeous Mede—shaded the feasters from the summer sky. The couches on which the banqueters reclined were of citron wood, inlaid with ivory, and covered with the tapestries of Asiatic looms. At the four ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... poor, but some old merchant of bygone days had built in a pious mood a large church, which was now too great for the needs of the place; the nave had been unroofed in a heavy gale, and there was no money to repair it, so that it had fallen to decay, and the tower was joined to the choir by roofless walls. This was a sore trial to the old priest, Father Thomas, who had grown grey there; but he had no art in gathering money, which he asked for in a shamefaced way; and the vicarage was a poor one, hardly enough for the old man's needs. So the ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... ceremonies that precede the marching of the nation's armies to battle. The minister had prayed for victory, a prayer which the stranger interprets as a petition that the enemy's country be laid waste, its soldiers be torn by shells, its people turned out roofless, to wander through their desolated land in rags and hunger. It was a scathing arraignment of war, a prophecy, indeed, which to-day has been literally fulfilled. He did not print it, because then it would have been regarded ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... eleven as Mr. Sinclair passed, and the sound made his fleet movements fleeter still. Street after street was traversed without a voice or tread, save his own, breaking the stillness of the night. At length he reached the point of the day's devastations. Dismantled and roofless houses, from which a dull glimmer showed that the fire was not yet wholly extinguished, were seen rising here and there, while in intervening spaces a charred and smouldering heap alone gave evidence that man had had his dwelling there. A rapid glance as he passed without a pause over this ground ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... expect to find ruins, if anywhere. Coronado, as we have seen, invaded the country about three hundred and fifty years ago. At the time of his visit this was then a ruin, for his historian describes one ruin as "a single ruined and roofless house... the work of civilized people who had come from afar." This gives us a point as to the antiquity of some of the ruins in the Gila Valley. As we shall see, there is every reason to suppose that this section was at one time a thickly ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... struck on one occasion by the absence of any dome or roof. It was in Asia Minor, on the seashore, that I came upon a cottage long deserted, its door hanging by one hinge, and all the glass gone from the windows. In the empty rooms numerous swallows were rearing twittering broods in roofless nests. No doubt the birds realised that they had nothing to fear from rain, and were reluctant to waste time and labour in covering their homes ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... night. But you control this by a switch, conveniently placed, so that the darkness which aids reflection is also at your command. Then there is the window, opening right down to the floor, from which, if it please you, you may study the activity of the roofless ant-hill beneath, the restless febrility ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... hands and knees, the three leaders crawled to the top of the break. Sheltered by a couple of sage-bushes and lying flat to the ground, Wilbur looked over and down upon the beach. The first object he made out was a crazy, roofless house, built of driftwood, the chinks plastered with 'dobe mud, the door ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... loves, You wake no sounds of laughter here, Nor mirth in all our silent groves; On one broad waste, by hill or flood, Of ravaged lands your music falls, And where the happy homestead stood The stars look down on roofless halls. ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... other towns they had passed through on their way from Tepic, by way of Jalisco, Aguascalientes and Zacatecas, was in ruins. The black trail of the incendiaries showed in the roofless houses, in the burnt arcades. Almost all the houses were closed, yet, here and there, those still open offered, in ironic contrast, portals gaunt and bare as the white skeletons of horses scattered over the roads. The terrible pangs of hunger seemed to speak from every face; hunger on ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... found, about the old Spanish workings, ancient, roofless, stone buildings with loop-holed turrets for bandits and niches for saints. These structures, as well as the waste dumped by the Spaniards, were being "repicked for values," and broken up and sent through the stamp-mill, ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... Jack, who had been busy with the three tents, for they had decided on Zeb's advice not to use the old roofless shack ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... trail into the silent town where the houses stood roofless and bare, and as he glanced at the ancient gallows-frame above the abandoned mine fresh courage came into his heart. This city of the dead should come back to life if what the stars said was true; and the long rows of ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... Susquehana's side, fair Wyoming! Although the wild-flower on thy ruined wall And roofless homes a sad remembrance bring Of what thy gentle ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... The theatre was roofless and its walls were of grey canvas; they fluttered in the wind and would have blown down had it not been for the poles which held them. Along the sides of the ring was a railing, behind which was the audience, and in a reserved corner we ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... of the comedy, though I was at first unwitting, began to reach me. I went to Wimbledon at times because Saltram was there, and I went at others because he wasn't. The Pudneys, who had taken him to Birmingham, had already got rid of him, and we had a horrible consciousness of his wandering roofless, in dishonour, about the smoky Midlands, almost as the injured Lear wandered on the storm-lashed heath. His room, upstairs, had been lately done up (I could hear the crackle of the new chintz) and the ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... supported, or failed to support, five families; but of these all but Tregarthen had lost their clutch on the barren rock and drifted away to other islands. He could remember their going. He passed their roofless cottages half a ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... crippled in the mud on stilts and crutches; and slimy stakes stuck out of the mud, and slimy stones stuck out of the mud, and red landmarks and tidemarks stuck out of the mud, and an old landing-stage and an old roofless building slipped into the mud, and all about us was stagnation ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... than the Menardes plant, long closed and now half roofless and crumbling. Rows of warehouses, empty after the War until taken over by homeless vagrants. Jerry-built shanties with rattletrap aircars grounded around them. Tramptown, a festering sore on the south ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... depth of the wonderful place, our lanterns and torches making little stars of light in that great blackness. We saw the ruins of granaries still filled with the dust of what I suppose had once been corn, and came at length to a huge, roofless building of which the area was strewn with shattered columns, and among them overgrown statues, covered so thick by dust that we could only discover that most of them seemed ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... beauty of the landscape is blotted with the grim and pitiable signs of war. The sugar cane has turned to a dirty brown where the fire has passed through it, the centrals are black ruins, and the adobe houses and the railroad stations are roofless, and their broken windows stare pathetically at you like blind eyes. War cannot alter the sunshine, but the smoke from the burning huts and the blazing corn fields seems all the more sad and terrible when it rises into such an atmosphere, ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis
... reasonable worship offered, under the same roofs that had protected priest and people in the days of Romanist error. Is the cause of pure and undefiled religion stronger in the land because Melrose and Crossraguel and Pluscarden are desolate; St. Andrews a roofless ruin; Iona as yet open to the Atlantic winds? Is the voice of praise and prayer sweeter in the North because Mortlach is effaced and Fortrose shattered, and the bells are silent which men on the mainland used to hear when the north ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... hero of the following ballad, is a noted personage, both in history and tradition. He was, it would seem from the ballad, a brother of the laird of Mangertoun, chief of the name. His place of residence (now a roofless tower) was at the Hollows, a few miles from Langholm, where its ruins still serve to adorn a scene, which, in natural beauty, has few equals in Scotland. At the head of a desperate band of freebooters, this Armstrong is said to have spread the terror of his name almost as far as Newcastle, ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... to my normal state, and there about me were the miles of desolate streets and the thousands of broken walls, and the black blots of roofless houses and the wide, untenanted plain bounded by the battlemented line of encircling mountain crests, and above all, the great moon shining softly in a ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... wear nothing on his head. On a journey, or when the sun was particularly strong in the roofless theatre or circus, he might put on a broad-brimmed hat, very much like that of the modern Italian priest. Instead of the hat it was common, when the weather so required, either to draw a fold of the toga ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... all of them roofless and half-ruined, were dotted about over the country. Small ones for the most part they were, and of the usual type—a liquid and stinking manure-heap surrounded on three sides by a living-house and barns. Of the roads, ...
— The Doings of the Fifteenth Infantry Brigade - August 1914 to March 1915 • Edward Lord Gleichen
... bestowed in vain, 870 Which Grief could change, and Guilt could stain, It was no vulgar tenement To which such lofty gifts were lent, And still with little less than dread On such the sight is riveted. The roofless cot, decayed and rent, Will scarce delay the passer-by; The tower by war or tempest bent, While yet may frown one battlement, Demands and daunts the stranger's eye; 880 Each ivied arch, and pillar lone, Pleads haughtily for glories gone! "His floating robe around him folding, Slow ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... never more than half an inch thick. When, as on this Sunday, the wind was lulled and the sky was clear, the climate was as mild as in spring on the mainland. As soon as the aspect of the sunrise showed the experienced that the day would be fair, busy hands moved into the old roofless chapel the pulpit and benches which the pastor had brought with him—the pulpit being a mere desk of unpainted wood, and the benches of the roughest sort. For these the interior space of the old building had been cleared during the week; the floor was trodden hard and even; the walls were so ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau
... a parish church on the neighbouring eminence, and it, too, was roofless and a ruin. Alas! I exclaimed, as I drew aside the rank stalks of nightshade and hemlock that hedged up the breach in the wall through which I passed into the interior—alas! have the churches of Scotland ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... spread blankets to cover them from the weather. In the warm straw of the stable, hungry and homesick, the children clung about their mother and wept themselves to sleep. But they were fortunate compared with many of their acquaintances, whom Pierre could see crowded roofless about their fires, in sheltered hollows and under the little hillside copses. The night was raw and showery, and there was not houseroom in Beausejour for a tenth part of the ...
— The Raid From Beausejour; And How The Carter Boys Lifted The Mortgage • Charles G. D. Roberts
... about the art, and those birds are so unsophisticated, I shall be sure to get some. You see if I don't. But first I must build my house. The open sky is all very well, but it might come on to rain, and then the roofless caravanserai would not be very comfortable. It is a good thing we brought an ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... usual, lived in twos and threes in the roofless, half-ruined houses. The seniors tried to collect straw and potatoes and, in general, food for the men. The younger ones occupied themselves as before, some playing cards (there was plenty of money, though there was no food), some with more innocent games, such as quoits and ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... passengers from stated points. This circumstance also brought us acquainted with several very lovely locations. Beneath the old fort of Ticonderago we halted for a few minutes; and at Crown-point our stay was long enough to allow a rough sketch to be taken of the roofless barracks and ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... been devastated, and it was within the roofless walls of Durnovo's house that Joseph finally wrote out laboriously the projected ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... rude and heavy masses. Huge knots of sea-weed hung upon the jagged and pointed stones, trembling in every breath of wind; and the green ivy clung mournfully round the dark and ruined battlements. Behind it rose the ancient castle, its towers roofless, and its massive walls crumbling away, but telling us proudly of its old might and strength, as when, seven hundred years ago, it rang with the clash of arms, or resounded with the noise of feasting and revelry. On either side, the ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... mouldering-pile of logs, confusedly heaped on its floor, or on the earth beneath. The only part of the building yet standing was the cot on the left hand, which consisted of but a single room, and that, as Roland perceived at a glance, almost roofless and ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... magnificence which usually centre about the plazas of the Spanish-American capitals,—not even a carved door-facing or trifling ornament of any description. The entire side on our right, between the two eastern streets, was occupied by the cracked and roofless walls of an ancient church or convent, which had long been a neglected ruin. The fallen stones and mortar had raised a sloping embankment high up its venerable sides; and the small trees, here and there ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... in the center of a vast level plain, apparently endless and roofless, for overhead there was no sky, only an increasing intensity of light. Ranged in rows on the plain were thousands of space ships. Ben turned once as they approached the first line of ships and saw behind him the building from which he had just ...
— Daughters of Doom • Herbert B. Livingston
... singing above you, and the Arab sat beside his camel on the grass in the sunshine. Here nature itself seems blasted by some dreadful flame of death. The streets preserve their contours, but on either side the houses stand like gaunt skeletons, roofless and shattered, fronts knocked out, floors smashed through or hanging in fragments, bedsteads tumbling down through the broken ceiling of the sitting-room, pictures askew on the tottering walls, household treasures a forlorn wreckage, hats ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... inhabitants represented the common lot—for it is the common lot of the overwhelming mass of mankind to live near to nakedness, to shelterlessness, to starvation, without ever being quite naked or quite roofless or quite starved. The masses are eager for the necessities; the classes are eager for the comforts and luxuries. The masses are ignorant; the classes are intelligent—or, at least, shrewd. The unconscious and inevitable ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... destroyed. Its temples are roofless, its columns fallen, the statues of its kings lie face downward in the dust, the pyramids, stripped and bare, stand scarred and silent in the sun. The singing Memnon are as songless from their chiselled lips as the tongueless Sphynx half buried in the yellow sand. The ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... a cavern mouth into which the men had disappeared, but it was not. I reached it without any encounter. It loomed above me, a great archway in the cliff—an opening fifty feet high and equally as broad. And behind it was a roofless cave—a sort of irregularly circular bowl, five hundred feet across its broken, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... the walls in the roofless chambers of both cities, or carefully removed to the museum at Naples, are as fresh and plain, as if they had been executed yesterday. Here are subjects of still life, as provisions, dead game, bottles, glasses, and the like; familiar classical stories, or mythological fables, always forcibly ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... to the trading center marked on Traxt Cam's private map and the Terrans now had another five minutes march, in the middle of the road, ahead of the chieftain who must be inwardly boiling at their presence, before they came out in the clearing containing the roofless, circular erection which served the Salariki of the district as a market place and a common meeting ground for truce talks and the mending of private clan alliances. Erect on a pole in the middle, towering well above the nodding fronds of the ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... a shiver of apprehension, rather than of cold, that the boy drew towards the fire, and the looks which the old woman and her sons exchanged, made him wish that he had preferred the shelter of any one of the roofless cottages which were scattered near, rather than trust himself among persons of such dubious aspect. Dreadful surmises flitted across his brain; and terrors which he could neither combat nor examine imperceptibly stole into his mind; but alone, and beyond the reach of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 355., Saturday, February 7, 1829 • Various
... blending almost imperceptibly with the landscape, the dwellings into which she planned to introduce the luxury of windows; and were not these Standing Stones of Callernish, huge tombstones of a vanished religion, the roofless temple from which the Druids paid their westernmost adoration to the setting sun as he sank into the Atlantic—was not this the place where Sheila picked the bunch of wild flowers and gave it to her lover? There is nothing in history, I am sure, half so real to ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... about for stray morsels of offal. Several of these pariahs have been so unfortunate as to get down into the rampart ditch; we can see the places where they have repeatedly made frantic rushes for liberty up the almost perpendicular escarp, only to fall helplessly back to the bottom of their roofless dungeon, where they will gradually starve to death. The natives down in this part of the city greet us with curious looks; they are wondering at the sight of two Ferenghis promenading the ramparts, far away from the European ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... machine, and with rasping noise and confusion dire laid low the grass which had isolated him from the rest of the world, and that impertinent world poured in. First came crows, from their homes in the woods beyond the pasture, to feast on the numerous hoppers and crawlers left roofless by the mowers, and to procure food for their hungry young, and alighted in the stubble, two or three or half a dozen at a time. By this the soul of the redwing was fired, and with savage war-cries he descended upon them. His manner was to fly laboriously to a great height, and then swoop down ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... A few trees dotted this area, large and massive trees, and seemingly preserved for purposes of shade only. It was the quietest spot in the world, and inspired just that sort of feeling in the contemplative stranger which would be awakened by a ramble among the roofless ruins of the ancient abbey. It was a home for contemplation—in which one might easily forget the busy world without, and deliver himself up, without an effort, to the sweetly sad musings ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... dark crypt, and running considerable risk in climbing to the summit of the tower. Since the spiral stone steps had vanished long ago, the only means of getting to the top was by climbing the gnarled stem of the ivy which grew profusely on the face of the building. The tower was roofless, a low, partly demolished parapet encircling it on three sides, while a couple of weather-worn oak-beams supporting a few planks formed a kind of platform where ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... days bygone, When glad its banks I strolled upon, The river Doon so bonnie; The roofless kirk and yard so green, Where many a tombstone may be seen, With ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... am, my dear friend, at my own house, my roofless home; and my first scrawl from here is to the vicarage. You will be sorry to hear that the Lords of Her Majesty's Council have defied all equitable terms in my eleven years' suffering case. My counsel ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... little farther to another village, where he found everything made ready to burn him, as Crawford had been burned. He was tied to the stake, and the fire was lighted; an orator began to kindle the anger of the savages; but at the last moment a heavy shower of rain burst over the roofless council house where they had gathered to torture their captive, put out the fire, and drove them to a sheltered part of the lodge, where they consoled themselves as best they could by beating him till midnight, and promising him that he should be burned ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... of the shadow of coming winter; and, almost before Murray's army could cut wood for fuel, the cold was upon them. For two months Quebec had been pounded with shot and shell. Her churches and hospitals stood roofless; hundreds of houses had been fired, vaults and storehouses pillaged, doors and windows riddled everywhere. There was no digging entrenchments in the frozen earth. Walls six feet thick had been breached by artillery; ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... my hand; Fell my house I built on sand; Roofless, wounded, maimed by sin, Fightings ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... happening—yet at about noon of the day that Harley P. Hennage looked over the rail fence into the feed corral at San Pasqual and discovered that Bob McGraw's horse was gone, a man on a tired horse rode up from the south, turned in through the ruined doorway of one of the roofless tumble-down adobe houses, and concealed himself and his horse in the area formed by the four ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... blood of myriad provinces was drained To feed that fierce, insatiable red heart. Invulnerably bulwarked every part With serried legions and with close-meshed Code, Within, the burrowing worm had gnawed its home, A roofless ruin stands where once abode The imperial race ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... force. I draw the reader's attention to this unpleasant subject, only to justify what I have said in an earlier chapter of the degradation of mind in which the savages of the mountains are sunk.] Eighteen wounded men lay side by side in a roofless hut. Their faces, drawn by pain and anxiety, looked ghastly in the pale light of the early morning. Two officers, one with his left hand smashed, the other shot through both legs, were patiently waiting for the moment when the improvised tourniquets could be removed and some relief ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... mentioned the ancient church and burial ground of St. Fiacre, or, as he is often styled, St. Fittack, at Nigg, Kincardineshire, on the opposite bank of the Dee from Aberdeen. The bay in the vicinity is known as St. Picker's Bay, and St. Fittack's Well, a clear spring near the roofless ruins of the old church, still recalls his memory. Its existence is a strong proof of the saint's residence in the neighbourhood at some time in his life. The fame of this well {125} for healing powers survived the downfall of religion, ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett
... and St. Kevin's Kitchen, both of enduring gray stone, covered with yellow lichen, which gave a remarkable golden tint to their extreme old age. Architecture there was next to none. St. Kevin's so-called kitchen had a cylindrical tower, crowned by an extinguisher, and within the roofless walls was a flat stone, once the altar, and still a station for pilgrims; and the cathedral contained two broken coffin-lids with floriated crosses, but it was merely four rude roofless walls, enclosing less space than a cottage kitchen, and less ornamental than many ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... spire Seems balanced on a strand Of swaying stone and tottering brick, Two roofless ruins stand; And here, among the wreckage, where the back-wall should have been, We ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... Serapion might have been approached on one side by a slope for carriages, on the other by a flight of a hundred marble steps. On these stood the grand portico with its columns, its chequered corridor leading round a roofless hall, the adjoining porches of which contained the library, and from the midst of its area arose a lofty pillar visible afar off at sea. On one side of the town were the royal docks, on the other the Hippodrome, and ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... of Chan-Santa-Cruz fell upon their ears. Few were the villagers that, taking refuge in the bush, escaped the terrible machete of their enemies. Of this village only the name remains. Its houses roofless, their walls crumbled, are scarcely seen beneath the thick green carpet of convolvulus, and cowage (mecuna). These overspread them with their leaves and beautiful petals, as if to hide the blood that once stained them, and cause to be forgotten the scenes of butchery they ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... nine stories high, raised their heads on little eminences in the neighbourhood of the villages, and attracted attention at a great distance. A number of fortifications, which, however, look more like roofless houses than anything else, ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... probably grew there two thousand years ago, and stuck round with tiny figurines, it was to the advantage of the people's fancy; but it did not appeal so much to the imagination as the mould and moss, and the small, weedy network that covered the ground in the roofless chambers and temples and basilicas, where the broken columns and walls started from the floors which this unmeditated verdure painted in the ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... appeared to be the rugged face of the cliff; but soon the eye began to make out a kind of order here and there, and that rugged ranges of stones had been built up on shelves of the rock, with windows and doors, but as far as could be made out these rock-dwellings had been roofless; and were more like fortifications than anything else, the ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... this is what I wonder: You are thick as poisonous plants, thick the people under; Yet roofless, and homeless, and shelterless they roam, The driftwood of the town who have ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... further still.... Till the Russian turned to the right and took a branching tunnel. Here, lining the curve of the stone wall were twenty little cubicles of light wood, raised a few inches from the moist floor, and roofless except for the arch of the tunnel that ran equally above them all. These were the rooms assigned to the officers de passage, officers whom duty kept for a night in Verdun. Each cubicle held a bed, ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold |
