"Dreariness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... To increase the dreariness of the scene, a fine cold rain began to fall, as if fate pursued the little prince, who so hated cold weather, even to the very grave. Yes, to the grave; for when the coffin had been lowered, Moronval pronounced ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... happy there, but many people had been very kind; and the place, with all its dreariness, had a strange, still charm, and was full of historic beauty ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... that there are those who can probe into the secrets within you and tell more than you as patient can tell yourself? Has a physician who follows the biblical advice, "Heal thyself," a Fool for a Doctor? What has been taught you in the ill-smelling center of darkness, dreariness and torture, where there is more need for beauty than in any other place, and less of it, more need for gaiety, and less of it, more need for wholesome suggestion and less of it? ... All hospitals should have bright paper on the walls, ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... "A visitor to Plymouth," gives us a picture better than that which hangs in the Pilgrim Hall. If the sternest foe of the Pilgrims across the water could have looked upon the exiles in their winter dreariness, hungry, wasted, dying, cowering beneath the accumulation of their woes, he might have regarded the scene as presenting but a reasonable retribution upon a stolid obstinacy in the most direful and needless self-inflictions. "Why ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... taken a fancy to see him because of his remembered efforts to save her child. Day said apologetically that it was a woman's whim, but he would be obliged if Caius, at his convenience, would call upon her. It spoke much for the long peculiarity and dreariness of Day's domestic life that he evidently believed that this would be a disagreeable thing for Caius ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... of being left to the society of the sheep, of dumb Piers and his peasant parents was dreariness in the extreme to one who had begun to know something like conversation, and to have his countless questions answered, or at any rate attended to. Add to this, he had a deep personal love and reverence for his saint, long before the knowing him as his persecuted King, and thus his sorrow might ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... resistance, and it must have positively terrified her that these small children should so vindictively hate her. She could not have seen it as anything but hatred, being entirely ignorant of children and the strange forces to whose power they are subject, and she must have shivered in her bedroom at the dreariness and terror of the prospect before her. Many, many times she must have resolved not to be beaten, and many, many times she must have admitted herself beaten as badly as any one ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... right, mistress Brookes!" said Arctura with a smile. "If it were not for you it would be dour dour.—You do not know, Mr. Grant—mistress Brookes herself does not know how much I owe her! I should have gone out of my mind for very dreariness a ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... she should not see him, and should thus be less distracted and biased, but it was with a sinking heart that she heard that Lady Kenton had called to take her up in the carriage. Grateful as she was for the kindness, which saved her the dreariness of a solitary arrival, she was a strange mixture of resolution and self-distrust, of moral courage and timidity, as had been shown by her withstanding all Miss Lang's endeavours to make her improve her dress beyond what was ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... spoken Steve recognized the slip. Watching Garry's eyes widen he knew that Garry had caught it also. For a moment a torrent of words trembled on the latter's lips. And then he swallowed and nodded shortly. The vague dreariness of his acceptance was fully as electrical as the threatened outburst ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... reflected from their own smoke, and beyond that again by a zone of darkness which magnified the extent of the chapel, while it rendered it impossible for the eye to ascertain its limits. Some injudicious ornaments, adopted in haste for the occasion, rather added to the dreariness of the scene. Old fragments of tapestry, torn from the walls of other apartments, had been hastily and partially disposed around those of the chapel, and mingled inconsistently with scutcheons and funeral emblems of the dead, ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... every influence that means home and family seems bent on condemning me to the dreariness and mustiness of a life that kills thought. I've thought about it so much that I'm afraid I've grown morbid." Once more her voice rang with passionate insurgency. "I feel as if I were ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... unmusical. It is not properly a screech or a scream, like that of the Hawk or the Peacock, but rather a sort of moaning melody, half music and half bewailment. This wailing song is far from disagreeable, though it has a cadence which is expressive of dreariness and melancholy. It might be performed on a small flute, by commencing with D octave and running down by semitones to a fifth below, and frequently repeating the notes, for the space of a minute, with occasional pauses and slight ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... in the gaudy paper, in the bright-staring carpet, in the very looking-glass over the chimney-piece, where a strip of mirror lay imprisoned in an embrace of frame covered with yellow muslin. We may talk of the dreariness of winter; and winter, no doubt, is desolate: but what in the world is more dreary to eyes inured to the verdure and bloom ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... cheerful, and seemed to enjoy everything; but a kind of dreariness came over me, and I began comparing the loveliness of the summer evening with the cold misty blank that seemed to make up my future. My wretchedness grew greater and greater. The very colours of the flowers, the blue of the sky, ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... was its 'authority.' That fits in with the impression of strength which Mark wishes to make. Another thing that struck them was its unlikeness to the type of synagogue teaching to which they had been accustomed all their lives. They had got so accustomed to the droning dreariness and trivial subtleties of the rabbis, that it had never entered their heads that there could be any other way of teaching religion than boring men with interminable pedantries about trifles of ritual or outward obedience. This new Teacher would startle all, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... horizon, and the turbid waters of the bay assumed that calm and sullen aspect, which so often precedes a tempest. But La Tour was obstinate in his resolution; and, as it was important that the vessels should sail in company, Stanhope yielded to his solicitations, and left the fort with that dreariness of heart, which ever attends the moment of parting from ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... and continuing the tour of inspection, a valley of large dimensions is seen. The contrast between the rich green of almost faultless verdure, and the dreariness of the rocks left behind, is striking. It would seem as though nature had built up an immense barrier between the weird and the natural, so that the one could not affect the other. The Bible speaks of the intense comfort ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... northern peoples into the Roman world profoundly modified Christianity. It shared indeed in the dreariness and corruption of the times commonly called the "dark ages," but when at last a productive period began the Church was the first to profit by it. Since all educated men were priests, it assimilated the new learning—the revived Aristotelianism—and continued its control of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... for the first time the dreariness of his whole attitude—the dejection of his spare angular body and ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... too dark to distinguish the old tower,—Dame Alice's tower as it was called,—which stood some half a mile farther on at its head. But the light shone brightly from the Grange windows, and all feeling of dreariness departed as I drove up to the door. Leaving maid and boxes to their fate, I ran up the steps into the old, well-remembered hall, and was informed by the dignified man-servant that her ladyship and the tea were awaiting me in ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... music; before the low mean portals of the Casino two red posters blazed under the electric lamps, with a cheap provincial effect.—and the emptiness of the quays, the desert aspect of the streets, had an air of hypocritical respectability and of inexpressible dreariness. ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... stepped from the chill and dreariness of a windy day, when it seems as if the very life of all things growing were shrunk to absolute desolation, into the welcome warmth and light and fragrance, the beauty and joy of a glass house full of green and blossoming plants? No matter ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell
... spared by Cooper to make this work a success. On this account as well as for its reception by the public it stands in marked contrast to "The Spy." In the preparation of it he studied historical authorities, he read state papers, he pored over official documents of all kinds and degrees of dreariness. To have his slightest assertions in accordance with fact, he examined almanacs, and searched for all the contemporary reports as to the condition of the weather. He visited Boston in order to go over in person the ground he was to make the scene of his story. As a result of all this labor ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... that the means to this end is the absolute suppression of the desires. To expand the circle of wants is necessarily to multiply temptations and therefore to increase the number of sins.' No material and intellectual advantages, no increase of human happiness, no mitigation of the suffering or dreariness of human life can, according to this theory, be other than an evil if it adds even in the smallest degree or in the most incidental manner to the sins that are committed. 'A sovereign, when calculating the consequences of a ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... death, in the hope of picking up something worth having in the general confusion. There was something strange in the way the pair lived, lonely and unloved in their ancient home, amidst a crowd of ever-changing attendants, who succumbed one by one to the awful dreariness of the isolated life, and went away to give place to others, who, in their turn would give it up after six months or a year. And yet neither Greifenstein nor Clara would have changed ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... comfortless must Eve's bower have been! It makes me shiver to think of it. Well, it seemed as if the world was newly created yesterday morning, and I beheld its birth; for I had risen before the sun was over the hill, and had gone forth to fish. How instantaneously did all dreariness and heaviness of the earth's spirit flit away before one smile of the beneficent sun! This proves that all gloom is but a dream and a shadow, and that cheerfulness is the real truth. It requires many clouds, long ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... Wilde's career. So long as the sunny weather lasted and friends came to visit him from time to time Oscar was content to live in the Chalet Bourgeat; but when the days began to draw in and the weather became unsettled, the dreariness of a life passed in solitude, indoors, and without a library became insupportable. He was being drawn in two opposite directions. I did not know it at the time; indeed he only told me about it months ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... on a fine day, under date of July 2: "A beautiful day for Labrador. Drew another M. articus. Went on shore, and was most pleased with what I saw. The country, so wild and grand, is of itself enough to interest any one in its wonderful dreariness. Its mossy, grey-clothed rocks, heaped and thrown together as if by chance, in the most fantastical groups imaginable, huge masses hanging on minor ones as if about to roll themselves down from their doubtful-looking situations, into the depths of the sea beneath. Bays without ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs
... of its effect through its contrast with the harshness, agitation and gloom of all that has gone before. There is a master-touch when Ortrud calls softly, "Elsa": by one stroke, an abrupt strange chord, the whole atmosphere is for the moment altered: the dreariness of the call is unforgetable. There are many hints of Ortrud's purpose given out more and more plainly till the climax is reached in her invocation to Wotan, chief of the malignant divinities. (It is strange to think that when he wrote ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... a broken chair, evolved out of the drifted accumulations of the place a wonderful romance. But that sort of eager freshness we most of us find to be impossible as we grow older; and we are confronted with the problem of how to keep care and dreariness away, how to avoid becoming mere trudging wayfarers, dully obsessed by all we have to do and bear. Can we not find some medicine to revive the fading emotion, to renew the same sort of delight in new ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... The dreariness outside lent an added charm to the snug and cheerful cosiness within the little parlor, the inmates of which drew closer than usual, as they talked ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... the sweated shopman, the jaded engineer—how good it would be to say to any of them, 'Here, let us change places awhile. Here is my latch-key, my cheque-book, my joy and my leisure. Use them as long as you will. Quick, let us change clothes, and let me take my share of the world's dreariness and pain'! ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... and winter. If I can sell my interest in the Loughlinter property I shall do so, as I am sure that neither the place nor the occupation is fit for me. Indeed I know not what place or what occupation will suit me! The dreariness of the life before me is hardly preferable to the disappointments I have already endured. There seems to be nothing left for me but to watch my father to the end. The world would say that such a duty in life is fit for a widowed ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... wives of soldiers. Their former stately grace had vanished from the women; they were weather-worn and bowed with labour too heavy for their strength, too long for their endurance; they were weak from lack of fit human food, from lack of hope, and the dreariness of the outlook, the ever gray spiritual horizon; they were numbed with the cold that has ceased to be felt, the deadening sense of life as a weight to be borne, not a strength to rejoice in. But they were not abject yet; there was one that loved them—their chief and their friend! Below their ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... freed from all embarrassment, and being sought in marriage by many distinguished persons resolved to remain a widow no longer. The dreariness of her solitary life she might have borne, but her bodily infirmities had become intolerable. This chaste and saintly lady, after so many years of blameless widowhood, without even a breath of scandal, owing to her long absence from a husband's ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... far as my sight could penetrate, to be pierced in all directions with innumerable creeks and pools, some of these latter being very great of extent; and, as I have before made mention, everywhere the country was low set—as it might be a great plain of mud; so that it gave me a sense of dreariness to look out upon it. It may be, all unconsciously, that my spirit was put in awe by the extreme silence of all the country around; for in all that waste I could see no living thing, neither bird nor vegetable, save it ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... kept straight on in its headlong course, then, of a sudden, it swerved to the left. The gleam of a river—all silver with moonlight—struck up through a line of trees on one side of the car, the blank, unbroken dreariness of a stretch of waste land spread out upon the other, and presently, by the slowing down of the motor, Ailsa guessed that they were nearing their destination. They reached it a few moments later, and a peep from the window, as the vehicle ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... such the amusements, such the hopes and fears of our winter quarters off Griffith's Island; and looking back now at that period, we happily forget its dreariness, and recollect only its brighter moments—the fast friendship there formed for many, the ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... drove up the avenue of the park in their neat and well-appointed carriage, Pitt remarked with dismay and wrath great gaps among the trees—his trees—which the old Baronet was felling entirely without license. The park wore an aspect of utter dreariness and ruin. The drives were ill kept, and the neat carriage splashed and floundered in muddy pools along the road. The great sweep in front of the terrace and entrance stair was black and covered with ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a month or two later, on the rebound of another dreariness with Eleanor, that the reality came, and he did "take Lily on." When he did so, no one could have been more astonished—under his ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... far the best work he had yet produced, was given to the world in 1799. Wallenstein is the model of a high-souled, great, accomplished man, whose ruling passion is ambition. A shade of horror, of fateful dreariness, hangs over the hero's death, and except in Macbeth or Othello we know not where to match it. This tragedy is the greatest work of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Dulness and dreariness reigned triumphant at both localities. The calm tranquility that Becker's family formerly enjoyed under similar circumstances had fled. They felt that happiness was no longer to be enjoyed within the limits of their own circle. Study ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... saw her linked arm in arm with young Anna Trevanion, the companion of her lessons and her sports. They could not have borne to see her, so lovely in outward form, and with a mind so full of intelligence, condemned either to the dreariness of a life without companionship, or to the degradation of association with the rude and uncultivated. That this feeling was wholly unconnected with any false views of their own position, or vain estimation of the claims derived from their birth ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... eyes to beauty and their ears to music, that the light and music of the unknown shore might burst upon them as a sudden revelation. They looked not at the stars, lest perchance these should declare a glory which was reserved for other days. Dreary and harsh was the way they trod. But in its very dreariness they found safety. They sought no pleasure, they fought no battles, they wasted no time. In the pushing aside of all temptation, the scorn of all beauty and idleness, they found delight. Against the strength of granite rock they set the force of iron will. Withal, at the bottom ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... to leave. The winter peace of the little village had been like an enveloping anodyne to her weary body and mind. Removed from all her past, from the sights and the people that suggested those obsessing thoughts which had filled her waking hours with dreariness, she had sunk into the simple routine of Grosvenor as the tired body sinks into a soft bed. The daily sight of the snowy fields, the frozen hillsides black with forests, and the dry spirituous air, lifted her. Now and then the effect ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... one ever comes but the minister's wife's sister. She takes a fancy to the dreariness, and always carries the key with her. She's away, and no one ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... for the suffering of her past, the ordeal of the present, and the future dreariness. There had been no suggestion of wrong in her surrender, no perceptible consciousness of shame: it was exactly as though, struggling to the limit of endurance against a powerful adverse current, she had turned and swept ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... energetic habits produced an air of ease and pleasantness that did much to make home agreeable to her father, and removed many cares which oppressed her mother. To her, Mary was all the world-daughter, comforter, friend, and nurse, unfailing in deeds of love or words of cheer, and removing all sense of dreariness and solitude. And Mary had found her mother all, and more than all she remembered, and admired and loved her with a deep, quiet glow of intense affection. There was so much call for Mary's actual exertion of various kinds, that there was little ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... man like Tob could forsake all the older Gods to set up on high some poor mortal who had momentarily caught his fancy, what could be expected from the mere thoughtless mob, when swayed by such a brilliant tongue as Phorenice's? It seemed I was to begin my exile with a new dreariness added to all the ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... called, in the past and gone day of the Angelic promoters, the "railroad plaza." Two chairs, a cheap desk, and a pine table backed by the "string-board" working model of the current time-table, did duty as the furnishings, serving rather to emphasize than to relieve the dreariness of ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... little one—it has only one house on it—is the most easterly Dutch island, and the mainland of Holland ends here, opposite it, at the Ems River'—indicating a dismal cavity in the coast, sown with names suggestive of mud, and wrecks, and dreariness. ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... better that night, and came down to dine with her daughter. The December wind was cold and raw, and a few snowflakes fell on Daisy's hat and cloak as she ran up the steps and entered the warm, bright room, which seemed so pleasant when contrasted with the dreariness without. ...
— Miss McDonald • Mary J. Holmes
... that in point of fact "the fun" did not set in at the time stated; at any rate the appearance of harlequin and clown is now regarded by many of the spectators as a signal for the certain commencement of dreariness, and as a notice to quit their seats. The pantomime Kemble had in contemplation, however, was of the fashion Leigh Hunt looked back upon regretfully. Harlequin was to enter almost in the first scene. "I have hit on nothing I can think of better," writes ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... captured me at the time, I know not that madness of which I was not capable. Day broke at last, but slowly and sullenly; the gray clouds hurried past upon the storm, pouring down the rain in torrents as they went, and the desolation and dreariness on all sides was scarcely preferable to the darkness and gloom of night. My eyes were turned ever towards the plain, across which the winter wind bore the plashing rain in vast sheets of water; the thunder crashed louder and louder; but except the sounds of the ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... in this way because my sister made no answer. I saw her tired eyes gazing into the dreariness of Oakley Street and felt a pang strike through me. After a pause, in which again she said no word, I added: "So, when you write the letter, you might hint, perhaps, that I usually work all the morning, and—er—am not a very lively visitor! Then she'll understand, ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood
... surely very finely painted. "I rushed to the shutter, and flung it back: there was no one in the sacristy. I looked into the garden; it was deserted, and the mid-day wind was roaming among the flowers." The dreariness is wonderfully described: only the poor pale boy looking eagerly out from the window of the sacristy, and the hot mid-day wind walking in the solitary garden. How skilfully is each of these little strokes dashed in, and how well do all together ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Verkhoyansk mountains can be reached in under a week, and here there are elk, wild sheep, and other big game, but for the unfortunate fair sex life is one eternal round of hopeless monotony. There is not even a regiment to enliven the dreariness of existence, for the garrison consists of about one hundred and fifty Cossacks, with only a couple of officers in command. Nor is there a newspaper; only a dry official journal printed once a month, while the telegrams received by the Governor ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... a room, dark as black velvet, weighted with the indescribable, musty odors of an Oriental abode, and possessed of an almost sensuous gloom, a mystic dreariness, a ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... look of the country. It was a lovely evening, and quiet as summer; not a breath stirring. The leaves were all off the trees; the hills were brown; but the soft, warm light that still lingered upon them forbade any look of harshness or dreariness. These hills lay towards the west, and at Thirlwall were not more than two miles distant, but sloping off more to the west as the range extended in a southerly direction. Between, the ground was beautifully broken. Rich fields and meadows lay on all sides, sometimes level, and sometimes ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... massed palms, its wealth of flowers, its brilliant lights, and streams of gorgeously gowned women and prosperous-looking men, and then he wondered what had made him start anything of this sort again. To come had been a sudden decision. Long ago the dreariness of functions such as these had caused their giving-up, but a fancy to look once more upon one had possessed him unaccountably, ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... the time of the Crusaders. The village of Aboo 'l Ghosh is said to be the site of the birth-place of the Prophet Jeremiah, and I can well imagine it to have been the case. The aspect of the mountain-country to the east and north-east would explain the savage dreariness of his lamentations. The whole valley in which the village stands, as well as another which joins it on the east, is most assiduously cultivated. The stony mountain sides are wrought into terraces, where, in spite ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... New Englanders may have been frugal and industrious, giving no scandal nor bad example; but the constant repression, the monotony, the dreariness of the religion often wrought havoc with the sensitive nerves of the women, and many of them needed, far more than prayers, godly counsel and church trials, the skilled services of a physician. Two incidents related by Winthrop should be sufficient to impress the pathos or the down-right ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... extremely—while, in her intense terror lest he might die, she fidgeted him still more. At last, seeing he really was getting well, she left him to himself—which he was most glad of, in spite of his dullness and dreariness. There he ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... steersman occasionally threw a demure, quizzical glance at a young girl who was hanging on by one hand to the companion hatch. The wind had heightened her colour, and the chance gleams of the moon showed the girl's face as a flash of warm brightness in the chill dreariness of the night. It was a strange place and strange weather for a young lady to be out in, for the autumn was far advanced, and the deadly gales might be expected at any time; but this young person was in no way discomposed. There was something almost weird in the sight of ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... followed night, and night had followed day monotonously, without a change in the heartbreaking dreariness of their round. ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... enfeeble their dignity. To me, his eloquence now resembles those midsummer night dreams, in which all is contrast, and all is magical. Shapes, diminutive and grotesque for a moment, and then suddenly expanding into majesty and beauty; solitudes startling the eye with hopeless dreariness, and at a glance converted into the luxury of landscape, and filled with bowers of perpetual spring. The power of his contrasts still haunts me; Aladdin's palace, starting from the sands, was not more sudden, fantastic, or glittering. Where all seemed barren, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... stones stained apparently with iron ore, and, as the huts were covered with the same material, instead of lending the landscape a more humanized air, they rather added to its appearance of sterile dreariness. There were a few tolerably good bits of savage mountain scenes, especially in a wooded glen or two by the wayside; but, on the whole, I thought this the least striking of the ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... me, something like the vague discomfort of my dreams; then, almost instantly, it crystallized into the blood-curdling suggestion: What if this were divine chastisement? what if all the outer and inner dreariness that had so steadily enveloped me since I had witnessed the tragedy were punishment for my disbelief? what if this water were really holy, and my sacrilege had ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the Messageries Royales told three as I entered the gateway. The wide court had an air of humid dreariness. On one side stood a dozen of those moving caravansaras, the national vehicles, with their leathern caps—like those of Danish sailors in a north-wester— hanging half off, soaked with wet. Opposite was the range of offices, busy with all the peculiar importance ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 273, September 15, 1827 • Various
... where I was used to deposit it. This being secured, there was nothing to detain me; yet I stood and contemplated awhile the furniture and walls of my chamber. I remembered how long this apartment had been a sweet and tranquil asylum; I compared its former state with its present dreariness, and reflected that I now beheld it ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... night of the Declaration the Under-secretary announced in the House that the Russians were moving down the Baltic, the French toward the Straits: and the next morning dawned with the dreariness of last mornings and days. However, soon after 1 P.M., the Lord of the Sea landed at Bristol, his yacht being one of the swiftest things afloat; there heard the known facts; and thence wired to Beech's London house, to the London Foreign Office, to Cadiz ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... sensation more properly than to the after-dream of a reveler upon opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.... It was, possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... pleasure and no penance. She abandoned herself with a weak luxury to the respite from suffering and anxiety; she made herself the good comrade of the young man whom perhaps she even tempted to flatter her farther and farther out of the dreariness in which she had dwelt; and if any woful current of feeling swept beneath, she would not fathom it, but resolutely floated, as one may at such times, on the surface. They laughed together and jested; they talked in the gay ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Yerbury wore a particularly listless air. The leafless trees hung out long and drooping arms, that swayed to and fro in the biting wind. The sullen sky overhead added its tone of dreariness to the picture. There was no cheerful whir of factories and shops, no brisk steps of men going to and fro, though there were enough standing around in groups with scowling faces and compressed lips, or flushed ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... did she endeavor to wrap Clifford up in her great, warm love, and make it all the world to him, so that he should retain no torturing sense of the coldness and dreariness without! Her little efforts to amuse him! How pitiful, yet magnanimous, ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Rochester Castle and the green drives of Cobham Park, the untroubled dreams of happy childhood. And though he could not know this, yet, as he sat amongst the damp straw piled up round him in the inside of the coach, he "consumed his sandwiches in solitude and dreariness" and thought life sloppier than he had expected to find it. And in David Copperfield he has thrown back into those earlier golden days the shadow of his London privations by bringing the little Copperfield, footsore and tired, ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... any thing the worst, like a man who anticipates evil long-deserved; the broken-hearted mother is on her knees at the cold door-steps, striving to pierce the gloom with her eyes, and ejaculating distracted prayers: and so the live-long night—that night of doubt, and dread, and dreariness—through bitter hours of confusion and dismay, they sought poor ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... new, and yet in the way of slums it was immemorially ancient at the same time, as if the members of old races that had come to fill it had brought with them all the grime, all the dreariness of generations of bitter living. And it was this, rather than the marvelous transformation of the sandy field which Adelle dimly remembered, that seized hold of her. How could people live so thickly together, swarm like flies in so many identical ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... and that we are rapidly verging upon the 'lean and slippered pantaloon.' Were there any future rejuvenation, when we might stand again upon the threshold of life and look over its fair fields with all the joy and hope of anticipation, old age would lose all its dreariness, and become but a brief though painful pilgrimage through which we were to pass to joy beyond. But since this can never be, old age is the rust which dims the brightness of every earthly joy, and is looked forward to by youth only ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... tho' the moon—the white moon Shed all the splendour of her noon, Her smile is chilly—and her beam, In that time of dreariness, will seem (So like you gather in your breath) A portrait taken after death. And boyhood is a summer sun Whose waning is the dreariest one— For all we live to know is known, And all we seek to keep hath flown— Let life, then, as ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... thank you, Mrs. Hooker, and the committee you represent, for your words of cordial approbation. Such a testimony will go far to redeem the ordinary drudgery and dreariness of public life, and I shall ever cherish it with real satisfaction and pride. I ought to say, however, that in performing the acts so handsomely commended by you I did nothing but my simple duty. Indeed, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... where one may have many thoughts and not decide anything. It is a scene which I can not only remember, as I might a vision, but when I will can bodily revisit, and find it even so, unaccountable, yet unpretending in its pleasant dreariness. When my thoughts are sensible of change, I love to see and sit on rocks which I have known, and pry into their moss, and see unchangeableness so established. I not yet gray on rocks forever gray, I no longer green under the evergreens. There is something even ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... receive man after man, astonished and later disgusted him. After all, they were not smart. There was no vivacity of thought there. All that they could do, in the main, he fancied, was this one thing. He pictured to himself the dreariness of the mornings after, the stale dregs of things when only sleep and thought of gain could aid in the least; and more than once, even at his age, he shook his head. He wanted contact which was ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... been aware, she could hardly tell how, that her father had been offered a government appointment connected with the Fiji Islands, and then that, glad to escape from the dreariness which had settled down on the house since his wife's death, about eighteen months previously, he had accepted it, and she had speculated much on her probable fate; but had never before been officially informed of his designs for ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the Brilliant Theatre is a pretty little place,—comfortable, cosy, bright, and deserving of its name;—in broad day, it is none of these things. A squalid dreariness seems to have settled upon it—it has a peculiar atmosphere of its own—an atmosphere dark, heavy, and strangely flavored with odors of escaping gas and crushed orange-peel. Behind the scenes, these odors mingle with a chronic, all-pervading smell of ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... of 1818. Not more than two or three days occurred, during the months of July and August, in which that heavy fall of snow took place which so commonly converts the aspect of nature in these regions, in a single hour, from the cheerfulness of summer into the dreariness of winter. Indeed, we experienced very little either of snow, rain, or fog: vegetation, wherever the soil allowed any to spring up, was extremely luxuriant and forward; a great deal of the old snow, which had laid ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... because of this quality that he had secured the position; it made him a pathetic and memorable figure of failure. Anthony recollected, without humor, a hoary jest about the elevator man's career being a matter of ups and downs—it was, at any rate, an enclosed life of infinite dreariness. Each time Anthony stepped into the car he waited breathlessly for the old man's "Well, I guess we're going to have some sunshine to-day." Anthony thought how little rain or sunshine he would enjoy ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... discolorations as well as its technical treatment indicate. Alongside the rest of the things in this small room it is, in spite of being carried somewhat too far, very forceful and convincing. No matter whether the man succumbed to the dreariness of work or to the malarial fever of the Pontine swamps, all that has ever been said about Millet's man and the terrible fatalism of his facial expression is found in this ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... with himself; he called to mind his idea of the pattern of life: the unhappiness he had suffered was no more than part of a decoration which was elaborate and beautiful; he told himself strenuously that he must accept with gaiety everything, dreariness and excitement, pleasure and pain, because it added to the richness of the design. He sought for beauty consciously, and he remembered how even as a boy he had taken pleasure in the Gothic cathedral as one saw it from the precincts; he went there and looked at the massive ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... the north he looked upon the same grim barrenness, only that far off, against the lighter background of distant sky, there was visible a faint blur, a bluish haze, which he believed to be the distant sand dunes bordering the Arkansas. The intense dreariness of it all left a feeling of depression. His eyes turned and regarded the girl riding silently beside him. The same look of depression was visible upon her face, and she was gazing off into the dull distance with lack-lustre eyes, her slender ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... the day had gone by it had been this dreariness that had deepened on him, after the violent emotions of the morning. It was as if he already saw himself beaten down and crushed by those forces he had begun to recognize. And even this reminder that he was passing for ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... you must refute your rival's view by identifying it with Protagoras's. Thus does all spontaneity of thought, all freshness of conception, get destroyed. Everything you touch is shopworn. The over-technicality and consequent dreariness of the younger disciples at our american universities is appalling. It comes from too much following of german models and manners. Let me fervently express the hope that in this country you will hark back to ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... and soul, and now that he was away and exposed to the machinations of enemies who were hungering and thirsting after a share of his riches, a gloom settled down upon the place and enveloped it in an ill-befitting aspect of dreariness. Baits and hunting parties were alike abandoned; no one felt in the humour to participate in gaieties, of whatever kind, so long as the baron was away; and the guests who had assembled to witness the tournament had, with few exceptions, ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... got rid of her, made her harmless, prevented her grandfather from flourishing his stick— what would be the use of it? It would be like killing one mouse or one snake in the boundless steppe. The vast expanse, the long winters, the monotony and dreariness of life, instil a sense of helplessness; the position seems hopeless, and one wants to do ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... they advanced up the country. They were finally obliged to quit the carriage and proceed on horseback. They arrived late at night, the fires were all out, and the servants had retired to their own houses for the night. The horrible dreariness of such a house, at the end of such a journey, I ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... down on a seat near Felicita, with such a feeling of heart-sickness and heart-faintness as she had never experienced before. The dreariness and perplexity of the present stretched before her into the coming years. For almost the first time in her life she felt worn-out; physically weary and exhausted, as if her strength had been overtaxed. Her childhood on the fresh, breezy uplands, and her happy, ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... battlements. But for great perseverance, we should have seen nothing more; but we obtained, at last, all we wanted. We passed through the vault and passages I have described, and thoroughly examined the cell. No words can convey a sense of its dreariness. I have exaggerated nothing—the dim light, the rotten floor, shining like a pond, the drip of water, the falling flakes of ice, were all there. The stove was removed; but we ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... of a long, dreary tract, which, happily for my readers, I can shorten for them in this my retrospect. From the heights of Henry Vaughan's verse, I look across a stony region, with a few feeble oases scattered over it, and a hazy green in the distance. It does not soften the dreariness that its stones are all laid in order, that the spaces which should be meadows ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... or we'll be caught in the rain," interrupted Dosia, rushing ahead with a rapidity that made further conversation an affair of ineffective jerks, though she dreaded to get back to the house and be left alone to the numb dreariness of her thoughts. Justin and Lois were gathering up the rugs and sofa-pillows, as they reached the piazza, to take them in from the blackly advancing storm. Lois greeted Mr. Sutton with unusual cordiality; perhaps she also dreaded the accustomed ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... till the noise died away. Then she sank all limp in a chair and began to cry. There was wrath in her sobs, and bitter self-pity. She had made a fine tragedy scene, but the glory of it was short. She did not regret it, but an immense dreariness had followed on her heroics. Was there ever, she asked herself, ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... country; the vale widens into spacious and noble meadow-grounds, on which might suitably stand the mansion of any nobleman in England—as you near its head, everything gets wild and broken, with a slight touch of dreariness, and by no very difficult ascent we might reach Easdale-tarn in less than an hour's walking from Grassmere—a lonely and impressive scene, and the haunt of the angler almost as frequently as of ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... Despite the dreariness of durance long and sore, Where fate's relentless hand still holds me fast, My dungeon I have made my treasure-house; its store Is love, and hope for ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium: the bitter lapse into every-day life, the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart, an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.... It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate, its ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... reproach, and have the society of those he loved, than continue in that dreadful isolation. He was thoroughly unmanned. "Oh, that Hardy or Ashton were here, or any friend, just to say, 'George Weston, old fellow,' once more; what a weight of dreariness it would remove!" Then he would wonder what was going on at home, whether his mother was plunged in grief, or whether she was saying, "He has brought it all on himself, let him bear it." But George could not reconcile this last thought; he tried hard to cherish it; he felt he would infinitely rather ...
— Life in London • Edwin Hodder
... port in such weather. Everybody was relieved when April opened with sunny showers and the long and severe winter seemed to be at an end. It had not made Bessie more in love with her life at Abbotsmead: there had, indeed, been times of inexpressible dreariness in it very trying to her fortitude. With the dawning of brighter days in spring she could not but think of the Forest with fresh longing, and she watched each morning's post for the arrival of that invitation to Fairfield ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... set of silly interests and emotions could be effaced at will by simple change of scene, without substitution of new interests and emotions. Excess of frivolous excitement is not repaired or undone by excess of mere blankness and nothingness. The dreariness of the virtue of the villeggiatura is as noxious as the whirl of the mercenary and little virtuous period of the season. Teach young women from their childhood upwards that marriage is their single career, and it is ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... mad caprices and horrid deeds of the Romanoffs, who, in centuries gone by, surpassed in restless melancholy and atrocity the insane Caesars, and were more to be pitied, as well as detested, than Tiberius or Nero—the nature of the landscape, the waste of steppes, the dreariness of winter, and the loneliness of summer—the barbaric extravagance of aristocratic life—the red tape, extortion, and cruelty of officers—the sublime patience of the common people—the devotion of ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... be true, what a warning might not he have bestowed on the young prince Henry, destined to run a like course of perjury and ambition, and to feel it turn back upon him in the dreariness of desolate old age, when "he never smiled again." Had not the penitent Harold more peace at the last than ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... sledge travel would be impossible. So they must wait until the autumnal storms were over and winter had settled down in earnest. But, impatient as they were, time no longer hung heavily on their hands, nor did they now regard their place of abode as a prison. Its solitude and dreariness had fled before the advent of half a hundred Eskimo—short, squarely built men, moon-faced women, and roly-poly children, looking like animated balls of fur, all of whom had been brought from the mission to form a settlement on the beach. It was easier to bring ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... and in a place which was half in the sunshine and half in the shade, they sat down. In a little while the pleasant influence of the scene chased the dreariness from Christie's thoughts, and she looked about with eyes that did not seem able to satisfy themselves with ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... helplessness as the wind smote them like a flail; and it wove a grayish veil over the leafless boughs of bending, shivering elms, on the long, dim avenue. The wintry afternoon closed swiftly, and, in its dusky dreariness, Salome listened to the tattoo of the rain on the roof, and to the miserere that wailed through the lonely chambers of her soul. The chill at her heart froze her to numbness and oblivion of the coldness of the atmosphere, and, ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... been the verdict of the woman who had given all, and who had received nothing. It was a hard philosophy, acquired after years of dreariness, and the child had listened and absorbed and believed. She had heard nothing of love's fulfilment, of the raptures of mutual tenderness. Hence she had been content with Anthony's somewhat somber wooing, until that moment when she had drifted with Justin ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... for the loss of those comforts in a child with which my cruel disappointment forbade my ever being blest—though, in the endeavour to soothe, I often only aggravated both his and my own misery at our irretrievable loss—when a ray of unexpected light burst upon my dreariness. It was amid this gloom of human agony, these heartrending scenes of real mourning, that the brilliant star shone to disperse the clouds which hovered over our drooping heads,—to dry the hot briny tears which were ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 4 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... I must drink absinthe, and hang the night hours with scarlet embroideries. I must have music, and the sins that march to music. There are moments when I desire squalor, sinister, mean surroundings, dreariness, and misery. The great unwashed mood is upon me. Then I go out from luxury. The mind has its West End and its Whitechapel. The thoughts sit in the Park sometimes, but sometimes they go slumming. They enter narrow courts and rookeries. ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... very different character is the next work to be noticed, as one of enduring interest on the Deistical controversy. Bishop Berkeley's 'Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher,' is one of the few exceptions to the general dreariness and unreadableness of controversial writings in the dialogistic form. The elegance and easiness of his style, and the freshness and beauty of his descriptions of natural scenery by which the tedium of the controversy is relieved, render this not only a readable, ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... route which this fellow countryman had taken, I came to the conclusion that it was no exaggeration, but a true bill in all particulars. On the night of our second day in Paris we went to a theater to see one of the topical revues, in which Paris is supposed to excel; and for sheer dreariness and blatant vulgarity Paris revues do, indeed, excel anything of a similar nature as done in either England or in America, which is saying quite ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... preserved to them by abstinence from all the joys of life? Ah! accursed be he who first had the had courage to attach ridicule to that name of "old maid," which recalls so many images of grievous deception, of dreariness, and of abandonment! Accursed be he who can find a subject for sarcasm in involuntary misfortune, and who can crown gray hairs ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... and long-suffering land are also due to the purblind weakness of the exhausted man. The wrought-out writer is not permitted to cease from work; he goes on droning out his fixed quantity of mortal dreariness day by day and week by week until his mind spins along a particular groove, and he probably repeats himself every day of his life without being aware that he is anything but brilliantly original. I am obliged to study many novels, and I know many most successful workers who at this present time ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... contemplating the phenomena of nature, a sea voyage may endure many weeks without wearying. Perhaps some may think that the first glance of ocean and of sky shew all they have to offer; nay, even that that first glance may suggest more of dreariness than sublimity; but to me, their variety appeared endless, and their beauty unfailing. The attempt to describe scenery, even where the objects are prominent and tangible, is very rarely successful; but where the effect is ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... be distinguished from the surrounding ocean, and we discerned hills, shrubberies, and gardens in the vicinity of the town, the appearance of which is not calculated to delight the traveller, for a large desert region of sand girdles both city and gardens, giving an air of dreariness to the ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... for me was illimitable dreariness; and like Archie in Weir of Hermiston, I seemed abroad in a world from which every hope of intimacy was banished. And as with every month the hopelessness of resistance was made plainer and plainer, ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith |
