"Dreary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... through the snow-drifts they came into the dreary disordered back room which had so troubled Penhallow. It was cold with that indoor cold which is so unpleasant. Joe Grace came in—a big strapping young fellow. "I came from the farm and found father in bed and no wood in the stack. Some ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... discredit upon it. He would not lift his hand against it. It was the object of a lifelong allegiance, and he only marveled that, since the uses of the loyalty were at an end, the empty life should go on. He gazed mechanically at the padlock as he sat there with his dreary thoughts, remembering with what different heart he had turned the key. Ah, Happiness—to pass out from a door, and knock there ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... irretrievably ruined. The spacious and magnificent district of Bruchion, [1751] with its palaces and musaeum, the residence of the kings and philosophers of Egypt, is described above a century afterwards, as already reduced to its present state of dreary solitude. [176] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... turned to the future. How were we to support life in this dreary region? or, supposing it to be inhabited, what would be the character of, and disposition shown towards us by, the people we might encounter? I had read of the Arabs of the Desert, and of their generous hospitality ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... apprehension—especially to one journeying alone. On all sides extended a vast plain of sterile soil—the brown earth but thinly covered with a growth of cactus and wild aloes, under the shadow of which appeared a sparse herbage, wild, and of yellowish hue. The aspect was monotonous and dreary beyond expression; while here and there vast clouds of dust rose in whirlwinds, and moved like spectres over the plain. The straggling huts encountered at long intervals on the way were all empty—apparently abandoned by their owners! This strange circumstance combined with the ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... until September the war dragged on. It was a dull and dreary time, and as September drew near Gordon thought of happy days in England, with the scent of autumn leaves, and the whir of a covey of birds rising from the stubble, and he longed for partridge-shooting. But they shot men, not birds, in the Crimea. "The Russians ...
— The Story of General Gordon • Jeanie Lang
... Remark each anxious toil, each eager strife, And watch the busy scenes of crowded life; Then say how hope and fear, desire and hate, O'erspread with snares the clouded maze of fate, Where wavering man, betray'd by venturous pride, To tread the dreary paths without a guide, As treacherous phantoms in the mist delude, Shuns fancied ills, or chases airy good; 10 How rarely Reason guides the stubborn choice, Rules the bold hand, or prompts the suppliant voice; How nations sink, by darling schemes oppress'd, ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... around, myriads of troops, cavalry, artillery, everything, all camped in the open—no concealment. Mud? Why, everyone is mud, up to the eyes, and so are the horses. This big movement has quite dislocated the ordinary trench warfare, and now all over the dreary uplands are trenches hurriedly dug by the Hun and then abandoned. Trenches that often barely shelter you above the knees. Chaos, chaos. Rifles lying to rust in the mud, duds everywhere, men sitting in dug-outs, not knowing what they are expected to do next. Others in mere scratched-out ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... whole day cooped up in a little niche about ten feet long by three wide, even though it be as high as the heavens, is dreary work for a boy. The time dragged terribly. In his work on the school farm Glen had learned to use the sun for a clock quite accurately, so there was no deceiving himself as to time. He had eaten a good breakfast before leaving the Gates' home so there was no occasion for excessive ...
— The Boy Scout Treasure Hunters - The Lost Treasure of Buffalo Hollow • Charles Henry Lerrigo
... dark, dreary morning with a bite in the air that felt like snow. There was no sign of sunshine anywhere, either outside or inside ...
— Billie Bradley at Three Towers Hall - or, Leading a Needed Rebellion • Janet D. Wheeler
... felt inclined to go back to Paris by the next train. She told herself that there was no hope of finding Anna in such a large place, and that it was unlikely that this dreary-looking town would offer anything in the least pleasant or amusing on ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... think of it! For four months in the year I was shut up, half-frozen, in a desolate homestead. There was deep snow all round the place; nobody came. It was a day's drive to a forlorn settlement; nothing ever broke the dreary monotony. In summer one got worn out with the heat and the endless petty troubles. There was not a moment's rest; the house was filled with plowmen and harvesters, uncouth barbarians who ate at our table and must ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... so dreary as the last one, although it was more exposed to the swell of the big waters and the sweep of the wind. To the north we had a view of thirty miles or more, to where horizon and water blended, leaving it doubtful whether land was ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... really commanded, was really a general, just in times of war, while in times of peace he was like a strict teacher in galloons, an old duffer who occasionally shouted himself hoarse out of pure ennui? Was he to long for that dreary treadmill existence again? Was he to hope for the time—to please the gentlemen civilians—when he, the victorious leader of the ——th Army, would be used again merely for reviews? Was he to await impatiently going back ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... turned them toward the bed-sitting-room, the hot little fire, the small, fat black kettle singing on the hob, and the two-and-eleven-penny tea-set. Not being given to crossing bridges before she reached them, she had never contemplated the dreary possibility that her refuge might be taken away from her. She had not dwelt upon the fact that she had no ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... little, last kiss, and she had been so good, quietly acquiescing, like a good wife, not attempting to force her presence upon me in the ship; and I left her there, all widowed, alone on the Continent of Europe, watching after me: and I went out to the bleak and dreary fields ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... of America which now met our view," says Cook, "was dreary enough. It seemed to be cut up into small islands, which though by no means high, were very black, and almost entirely barren. In the background, we saw high ground covered with snow, almost to the water's edge. ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... as I would approach the sepulchre of all my friends. Dreary, solitary, comfortless. It was no longer home. Natalie and ma bonne amie have been with me most of the time since my return (about twenty-four hours past). My letters from Washington broke up that cursed plan of J. B. P.; they do not go in the parliamentaire; ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... the trees of the park, over ridges of roofs and away to the west and north, she saw the weatherbeaten Post building, its distant gray tower cutting mistily out of the dreary sky. From where she sat she could just pick out, as she had so often noticed before, the tops of the fifth-floor row of windows, the windows from which the Post's editorial department looked out upon a world with which it ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... kindled within him, and had returned to a condition somewhat nearer to that in which he was born. With what feelings did he pass from this (p. 089) brilliant interlude, and turn the corner which led him back to the dreary road of commonplace drudgery, which he hoped to have escaped? There can be little doubt that his feelings were those of bitter disappointment. There had been, it is said, a marked contrast between the reception he had met with during his first and second winters ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... their place; Or like the rainbow's lovely form, Evanishing amid the storm. Nae man can tether time or tide; The hour approaches, Tam maun ride; That hour, o' night's black arch the keystane, That dreary hour he mounts his beast in; And sic a night he taks the road in As never ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... bettering their fortunes. The small-pox is hitherto unknown among them, and those, who have attempted to go elsewhere have been cut off by that loathsome disease. In 1783, the entire population of this dreary province amounted to 23,477, of whom 11,985 were of Spanish descent, and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... spirit in the flame, And near the centre took her post; From all sides to her ears there came The dreary ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... The evening was rather dreary. The family was going out, but not until nine thirty, and mother and Leila went over my clothes. They sat, Sis in pink chiffon and mother in black and silver, and Hannah took out my things and held them up. I was obliged ...
— Bab: A Sub-Deb • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... something in his perfect happiness that would not let her grieve, though a dull heavy sense of consternation was growing on her. So it went on through the night—not a long, nor a dreary one—but more like a dream. He dozed and woke, said a few tranquil words, and listened to some prayer, psalm, or verse, then slept again, apparently without suffering, except when he tried to take the cordials, and this he did with such increasing ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... With hecatombs and prayer in pomp preferr'd, Distant he lay: while in the bright abodes Of high Olympus, Jove convened the gods: The assembly thus the sire supreme address'd, AEgysthus' fate revolving in his breast, Whom young Orestes to the dreary coast Of Pluto ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... recall the days gone by, and live A moment in the past; if but to fly The dreary present pressing on my brain, Woe's omened harbinger. In exiled love The scene he drew so fair! Ye castled crags, The sunbeam plays on your embattled cliffs, And softens your stern visage, as his love Softened our early sorrows. But my sun Has set for ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... ever yet took pleasure in it. Mere idleness is the most disagreeable state of existence, and both mind and body are continually making efforts to escape from it. It has been said that idleness is the parent of mischief, which is very true; but mischief itself is merely an attempt to escape from the dreary vacuum of idleness. There are many tasks and occupations which a man is unwilling to perform, but let no one think that he is therefore in love with idleness; he turns to something which is more agreeable to his inclination, and doubtless more suited to his nature; but ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... irresolution, make haste to depreciate his achievements in philosophy, without troubling themselves to inquire too closely into their intrinsic value. I am sorry to be obliged to instance the illustrious Mommsen, who speaks of the De Legibus as "an oasis in the desert of this dreary and voluminous writer." From political partizanship, and prejudices based on facts irrelevant to the matter in hand, I beg all students to free themselves in ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... nothing but Fraulein Mosebach: in any case, the passion of your life becomes more vivid, and you are bound to admit that such a noise is cheap at two shillings. It is cheap, even if you hear it in the Queen's Hall, dreariest music-room in London, though not as dreary as the Free Trade Hall, Manchester; and even if you sit on the extreme left of that hall, so that the brass bumps at you before the rest of the orchestra arrives, it is ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... from their errands of mercy. They find out the red-handed, gloveless undergraduate of bucolic antecedents, as he squirms in his corner, and distil their soft words upon him like dew upon the green herb. They reach even the poor relation, whose dreary apparition saddens the perfumed atmosphere of the sumptuous drawing-room. I have known one of these angels ask, of her own accord, that a desolate middle-aged man, whom nobody seemed to know, should be presented to her by the hostess. He wore no shirt-collar,—he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... dreary watches Of storm and darkness passed, Just as the wreck lurched under, All souls were saved ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... looked round the room. It was peculiarly vast and dreary, decorated with the enormous pictures of still life that he remembered as a boy—sleeping dogs with their noses resting on bunches of carrots, together with onions and grapes lying side by side in mild surprise. The house was a white ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... remembered how in the first months of her marriage she had felt dreary at home alone and had driven into the town to the Circuit Court, at which Pyotr Dmitritch had sometimes presided in place of her godfather, Count Alexey Petrovitch. In the presidential chair, wearing his uniform and a chain on his breast, he was completely changed. Stately gestures, a voice ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... and I am his man, Gallop a dreary dun; Master I have, and I am his man, And I'll get a wife as fast as I can; With a heighly gaily gamberally, Higgledy piggledy, niggledy, ...
— The Nursery Rhyme Book • Unknown
... day Lawrence Pentfield shook hands with him for the last time and watched him, running with his dogs, disappear up the frozen Yukon on his way to salt water and the world. Pentfield went back to his Bonanza mine, which was many times more dreary than before, and faced resolutely into the long winter. There was work to be done, men to superintend, and operations to direct in burrowing after the erratic pay streak; but his heart was not in the work. Nor was his heart in any work till the tiered logs of a new cabin began to rise on the hill ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... over. The Doctor takes his seat and looks out again upon those hard, dreary faces,—his no longer. He has not realized until now how he has been looking forward to this evening. But the vision has fled. No ripples of uncouth laughter, no ready tears. No reaching these dull, violated hearts through the Saint whom they adore: ...
— Saint Patrick - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... summary, uncalculating, and, therefore, merciful in its ebullitions. A head whisked off, brains dashed out, or some other short form of savage dispatch, is the preferential method of destruction. With our author's better masters, there was the long, dreary vicissitude, beginning from the horrors of the capture, and ending perhaps years upon years after, in some bush or under the lash of the driver. The intermediate stages of the starvation life of hunger, chains, ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... women. His eagle eye must have power to quell with a single glance the least approach to ridicule. He will have a pitying smile for those who would jeer at sacred things, above all, at that poetry of the heart, without which life would be but a dreary commonplace. I have the greatest scorn for those who would rob us of the living fountain of religious beliefs, so rich in solace. His faith, therefore, should have the simplicity of a child, though united to the firm conviction of an intelligent man, who has examined the foundations of his creed. ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... play at any game or talk about matters not pertaining to religion. They were not permitted to read any books except such as were "good for Sunday." There were very few religious story-books in those days, and what we had were of a dreary kind; so the boy's time hung ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... the works exhibited here, we see that this dull land of England, with its short summer, its dreary rains and fogs, its mining districts and factories, and vile deification of machinery, has yet produced very great masters of art, men with a subtle sense and love of what is beautiful, original, ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... almost eaten away with rust. In the like condition were also the hinges, which creaked as the door swung back. On entering, we stood still and gazed around us, while we were much impressed with the dreary stillness of the room. But what we saw there surprised and shocked us not a little. There was no furniture in the apartment save a little wooden stool and an iron pot, the latter almost eaten through with rust. In the corner farthest from the door was a low bedstead, on which ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... beggar girl, was very sick. Cold and hunger had done their worst. It had been so hard and dreary since her mother died, with no one to care for her, and to have to dodge around continually, kicked and cuffed and almost starved. And if the ...
— The King's Daughter and Other Stories for Girls • Various
... me: and I felt the strongest wish to perpetuate his partiality. Friendship was gay within my heart, and thenceforth all nature WITHOUT put on her loveliest aspects. The island of sand no longer seemed a dreary waste. Brighter rolled the blue waves of ocean beneath the golden beam; and sweeter murmured the billows on their sandy beach. My heart rejoiced with the playful fishes, as they leaped high wantoning in the air, ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... to make the big east room look less like a barn made Nan feel better in her mind. It was still dreary, it must be confessed. There were a dozen things she wished she could do to improve it. There were nothing but paper shades at the windows. Even a ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... find the match-box; but she did at last, and lighted the lamp after several trials. It was dreary work, though, going down stairs with those sticks in her eyes, ...
— Dotty Dimple at Her Grandmother's • Sophie May
... a blank—my father was dead. I entered the hospital as clerk to the managing board and led a dreary life with one solitary diversion: my Sunday visits to the old house on Piriac road. The saltworks were doing badly; poverty reigned in the land, and Marguerite's parents were nearly penniless. Marguerite, when merely a child, had been fond of me because I trundled her about in a wheelbarrow, but ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... presence achieves but little. From century to century only will one of them for a moment shake off its slumber, and send forth a bewildered cry; stretch the aching arm that supported its head, shift its position, and then lie down and fall asleep once more, until a new pain, born of the dreary fatigue of ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... pines with which these delightful retreats have lately been made green, if not shady. The owl, as is well known, was regarded by the ancients as the Bird of Wisdom. He fully sustained his right to the title by letting severely alone the city parks while they were still dreary and disgusting wastes. The only night-birds by which these were, then occupied were of the featherless (and apparently motherless) kind, and were well known to the police. They were quite as watchful, it is true, as the genuine feathered ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 36, December 3, 1870 • Various
... love song repeated over and over. A sudden wild outbreak, fighting men, shots, the clash of steel—again a tolling bell and a requiem for the dead. A horse galloping in the night. Mountain winds crooning mournfully, rising to the scream of tempest and the crash of thunder. Dreary uplands, the hiss of rain, the sough of drifting snow, the patient plod of a mule along a perilous trail. And then the jungle: its discordant uproar, its hammering of frogs, its hoots and howls, the dismal swash of flood waters. A monotonous ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... tell, my midnight temptation revived. After a time she ceased to dine with us again, and for days I never saw her. It was the old story of suffering with me, only more intense than before. The day was dreary, and the night stormy. "Call her," said my heart; but my ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... emerging from a cloud, Sheds on the dreary earth her gracious light, A smile comes o'er the frowning brow of Night, Who hastens to withdraw her sable shroud; And then the lurking shadows' dark-robed crowd, Pursued with glitt'ring shafts, is put to flight; And, robed in silv'ry raiment, soft and bright ...
— Sonnets • Nizam-ud-din-Ahmad, (Nawab Nizamat Jung Bahadur)
... summer, and the snow and ice gone, we would probably have noticed that there was a terrible storm gathering in the valley back of Cameron's Cone; but with the range all white and dreary we did not notice it. You fellows who have lived here near the mountain know that a storm often rises up there as if by magic. They come so quickly you often wonder where they came from. Of course, being directly in ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... thirty years his task has been, Day after day, more weary; For Heav'n design'd his guilty mind Should dwell on prospects dreary. Bound by a strong and mystic chain, He has not pow'r to stray; But, destin'd mis'ry to sustain, He wastes, in solitude and pain, A loathsome ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... who nursed me through my illness? Was it Pride who so gently bore with my wayward humours; who prepared the cooling draught for my fevered lips, and never seemed weary of watching beside me all through the long dreary night? O Nelly, not one word of reproach did I ever hear from your tongue; but my heart reproaches me the more for having mocked at your tender counsels, given way to impatient temper, and thrown away your love as a worthless thing at ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... successful completion of the work before him would set the seal to his ambitions. He would then be able to lay at the feet of the girl who was the mother of his child the promotion to Superintendentship which should take her away from the dreary life of hardship which he knew to be so rapidly undermining that moral strength which ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... be the easy turning away from a road that was none too dear—it was to be a sacrifice!—the taking up of the cross and the slow, weary mounting up, up to Calvary, with aching back and sweating brow and the dreary tragedy of utter loneliness. ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... flying lead of three lengths, and the mare is left absolutely-absolutely last. The boy whipped her about just as the flag fell." There was the dreary monotone of crushed hope in Porter's voice as ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... Challoner's paralysed brain there was a great wish to speak to his daughter, but the words would not come. He looked at those around him with a dreary indistinctness as from a distance, almost as if he had begun his long journey and was looking back ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... dust, were ornamented in various ways. From all of these tokens Oliver concluded that a long time ago, before the old Jew was born, it had belonged to better people, and had perhaps been quite gay and handsome: dismal and dreary as ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... high-bosomed maids and the Lady of Calamities and when Wird Khan, in presence of his papa (Nights cmxiv-xvi.) discharges his patristic exercitations and heterogeneous knowledge. Yet Al-Mas'udi also relates, at dreary extension (vol. vi. 369) the disputation of the twelve sages in presence of Barmecide Yahya upon the origin, the essence, the accidents and the omnes res of Love; and in another place (vii. 181) shows Honayn, author of the Book of Natural Questions, undergoing ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... found her evenings especially long and dreary. It was her habit to write her letters then, and read, particularly in French and Italian, which, she had some vague notion, helped to improve her mind. But she often wearied for a word, and began to hear voices herself in the howling winter winds, and to brood upon the possible meaning of her own ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... none of the boys replied. But they could not help but think what a dreary time it would be, searching among those rocks and that loose dirt day after day, if the lost mine ...
— Dave Porter in the Gold Fields - The Search for the Landslide Mine • Edward Stratemeyer
... My wings!" Peachy did not shriek these words with maniacal despair. She did not whisper them with dreary resignation. She breathed them with the rapture of one who looks through a narrow, dark tunnel to measureless reaches ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... this dreary exercise they were dismissed to prepare for church where there followed a service which Avery regarded as downright revolting. It consisted mainly of prayers—as many prayers as the Vicar could get in, rendered ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... month. Another month I waited, nervous, fierce With love's impatience. When that month was gone My heart was all afire; I could not stay. Consumed with jealous fears that wore me down Into a fever, necklace, earrings—all I sold, and on to Venice rushed. How long That dreary, never-ending journey seemed! I cursed the hills up which we slowly dragged, The long, flat plains of Lombardy I cursed, That kept me back ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... A dreary laugh answered the girls. "You must be joking," the voice said. "But if you are human, you will help me get out of this hole. I have been imprisoned for I don't know how long. Oh, it is a long story. Once I am out, I can explain everything to you. I ...
— Madge Morton's Secret • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... It was a dreary, stormy afternoon in the month of November. It began to get dark already as he left school and slowly walked along the village road to-go home. Issuing from the public-house, which used to be frequented ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... Alpine exile, much good; so much, that I hope to leave it now for ever, but would not be understood to boast. In my present unpardonably crazy state, any cold might send me skipping, either back to Davos, or further off. Let us hope not. It is dear; a little dreary; very far from many things that both my taste and my needs prompt me to seek; and altogether not the place that I should choose of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dialect as to be scarce understood, I resolved to chance it, and with some difficulty hiring a farmer's gig, I started out on a six-mile drive over the bleak moorlands, which seemed to stretch as far as the eye could reach in a dim vista of brown heath and distant snow-clad fell. It was a dreary and unseasonable evening, with a damp mist rising from the sodden ground, and occasional falls of sleet, mingled with rain that chilled one to the bone. I buttoned my coat closely round my throat, and braced my nerves to meet the elements, hoping I might find my reward at the end of ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... before his desk and gazed listlessly out of the window. The day arose before him in prospect, drab, desolate, and dreary. High up overhead, through the dingy panes, he could see the little fleecy clouds floating about in peaceful unconcern. May was a slack month. And at its end came June—June, with its four weeks' inventory period wherein each stick and stone of the entire plant, ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... of our several timber trees, and a tribute to our native streams, and woods; and after describing in happy lines Kamtschatka's dreary coast, he concludes his poem with reflections on the ill-fated Queen of ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... from the wharf", she said, "and heard the hammering. I supposed it was you, mending the porch. It's a good thing. I was always tripping over those loose planks last summer. How dreary ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... Cortlandt, "that no paradise or heaven described in anything but the Bible compares with this. According to Virgil's description, the joys on the banks of his river Lethe must have been most sad and dreary, the general idleness and monotony apparently being broken only by wrestling matches between the children, while the rest strolled about with laurel wreaths or rested in the shade. The pilot Palinurus, who had been drowned by falling overboard while ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... But snapp'd his falchion; him Peneleus smote Beneath his ear; the whole blade entering sank Into his neck, and Lycon with his head Depending by the skin alone, expired. 410 Meriones o'ertaking Acamas Ere yet he could ascend his chariot, thrust A lance into his shoulder; down he fell In dreary death's eternal darkness whelm'd. Idomeneus his ruthless spear enforced 415 Into the mouth of Erymas. The point Stay'd not, but gliding close beneath the brain, Transpierced his spine,[12] and started forth beyond. It wrench'd his teeth, and fill'd his eyes with blood; Blood also blowing ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... like, man is made for action. My life is now harmonious, and sleep has now become what nature willed it, a solace, not a contest. Before, it was a struggle of dark passions and bright dreams, in whose creative fancy and fair vision my soul sought refuge from the dreary bale of daily reality. ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... Robson; "poor old gentleman! he is dead, sure enough; and, Heaven knows, many have been the dreary hours the dear young man has watched by his pillow! He died in ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... store, where the cases were to be housed. The bullock carts with the heavier packages came in in the evening, and we sent the men five litres of plum brandy to put some warmth into their miserable bodies. This moved them once more to singing, but we think the songs sounded a little less dreary. ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... private interest? No: If I must be a fool, as all those who reason or believe any thing certainly are, my follies shall at least be natural and agreeable. Where I strive against my inclination, I shall have a good reason for my resistance; and will no more be led a wandering into such dreary solitudes, and rough passages, as ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... in the open borders during the summer to be taken up, the roots carefully cut back, and repotted; to be placed in a gentle bottom heat, or in some close place, until they have made fresh roots, the better to resist the vicissitudes of the dull, dreary months of ...
— In-Door Gardening for Every Week in the Year • William Keane
... freedom of the poor nor the leisured freedom of the rich, came specially within the range of her sympathy. It was sad to think that there were young people who, after a long day's work, had to sit alone in chill, dreary bedrooms because they could not afford the price of a cup of coffee and a sandwich in a restaurant, still less a shilling for ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... out next day, but it was a bitter morning when we started upon our journey. We saw the cold winter sun rise over the dreary marshes of the Thames and the long, sullen reaches of the river, which I shall ever associate with our pursuit of the Andaman Islander in the earlier days of our career. After a long and weary journey we alighted at a small station some miles from ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... resolved to remain on this sand-bank, for dreary and uninhabited though it was, they preferred to take their chance of being picked up by a passing ship rather than run the risks of crossing the wide ocean in open boats, so their companions bade them a sorrowful farewell, and left them. But this island is ...
— Fighting the Whales • R. M. Ballantyne
... not deny that, looking round upon the dreary region, and seeing nothing but bleak fields and naked trees, hills obscured by fogs, and flats covered with inundations, he did for some time suffer melancholy to prevail upon him, and wished himself again safe ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the young men only left their houses to seek for food, so dreary had the Valley of Wolves become. At last Slagfid and Eigil could bear it no longer, and declared they would travel through the whole world till they found their wives; but Wayland, the youngest, determined to ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... over and all were back in Hamburg again, Lischen used to come sometimes to Frau Brahms, of whom she soon grew very fond. But it troubled her tender heart to see the poor little flat so dark and dreary; for even the living room had but one small window, looking into the cheerless courtyard. She felt very sorry for her friends, and proposed to Hannes they should bring some scarlet runners to be ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... call, mingled with the shrill piping wail of their whistles and the tramp of hurrying feet as the men straggled up the hatchway to stow their hammocks in the nettings above, awoke me from my slumbers next morning in the dreary ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... was young then, and went with stocking feet under the servants' windows! He and Soeren cared nought for each other! Maren had not been here since—Soeren would not allow it. And he himself never set foot inside, since that dreary visit about Soerine. A promise was ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... John Gower, wrote his Vox Clamantis in Latin, his Speculum Meditantis (a lost poem), and a number of ballades in Parisian French, and his Confessio Amantis (1393) in English. The last named is a dreary, pedantic work, in some 15,000 smooth, monotonous, eight-syllabled couplets, in which Grande Amour instructs the lover how to get ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... tone—a hint of dreary disappointment, of a wretchedness hitherto well concealed, made Barry feel compunction for his own rough handling of what must have been in reality a sore subject; and quite suddenly he abandoned his own superior, not to say condemnatory, ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... loved, left the paternal roof to be placed far from their family at school. Her mother's health necessitated a painful and dangerous operation, and from that time for several years, alternate hopes and fears through long and dreary watchings beside the sick bed of that beloved mother, became the portion of her gifted child. But even this depressing and arduous change in the duties of her existence did not suspend her literary pursuits and labors. She profited by all the intervals she could ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... timid mother, Where the broad oak, with intercepting boughs, Chequers the sunbeam in the green-sward alley— Up and away!—for lovely paths are these To tread, when the glad Sun is on his throne Less pleasant, and less safe, when Cynthia's lamp With doubtful glimmer lights the dreary forest. ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... he leave you, Mistress Fell?" "Magic laid its dreary spell.— Stranger, he was fast asleep; Into his dream I tried to creep; Called his name, soft was my cry; He answered—not ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... economy to live in the Mission. She had two rooms there in the old Vallejo Hotel, a hostelry once fashionable, now fallen on dreary days. It fronted on a wide street where new business buildings rose beside gabled houses, detached and disconsolate in the midst of withered lawns. The Vallejo was a connecting link between these samples of the new and the old. It belonged ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... before the tired girls finished the two rooms. They got a dreary bite in the kitchen and intended to wash the dishes at once. But Faith happened to pick up a new story-book Di Blythe had lent her and was lost to the world until sunset. Una took a cup of rank tea up to Carl but found him asleep; so she curled herself ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of definite news, it was edifying with views of foreign travel and cartoons bearing on the larger issues of the election. Within doors the telegraph operator was already installed at the ancient table which had graced the grand-paternal distillery, and William Irons was making good the tedium of a dreary day in the deserted office by goggling from the ticking instrument to a consignment of iced champagne just arrived ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... at the River Jordan. How different a place from the dreary, desolate Dead Sea! Beautiful trees grow on the banks, and the ends of the branches dip into the stream. The minister chose a part quite covered with branches and bathed there, and as the waters went ...
— Far Off • Favell Lee Mortimer
... sum fixed for the expenses of the war was paid General Staveley was left with three thousand men in command at Tientsin, and Gordon remained with him. Tientsin is a dreary place in a salt plain, and the climate is very cold, as it is throughout North China. But Gordon minded cold far less than heat and mosquitoes, and besides his days were full from morning till night, building huts for the soldiers and stables for the horses, and in managing ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... admirably in their encampment at Fort Bridger under these trying privations. In the midst of the mountains, in a dreary, unsettled, and inhospitable region, more than a thousand miles from home, they passed the severe and inclement winter without a murmur. They looked forward with confidence for relief from their country in due season, and in ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... Latterly, since this dreary famine-time had come upon them, an intimacy had sprung up between Clara and the Castle Richmond girls, and in a measure, too, between Clara and Herbert Fitzgerald. Lady Desmond had seen this with great pleasure. Though she had objected to Owen Fitzgerald for her ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... a time that day, strongly influenced by Martin Sprague's conviction. It was, for one thing, easier to believe than that Emily Benton had committed a crime. And, as if to lend color to his assertion, the sunlight, falling onto the dreary bookshelves, picked out and illuminated dull gilt letters on the brown back of a volume. It was ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Frenchmen spend just as little time in them as they possibly can. Half the cafes in Paris would promptly put up their shutters if Parisian homes could all at once turn themselves into something like English or American ones. As for La Lierre, it was even more dreary and bare and tomblike than other country-houses, because it was, after all, a sort of ruin, and had not been lived in for fifteen years, save by an ancient caretaker and his nearly as ancient wife. And that was, perhaps, why it could be taken on a short ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... depression is only reaction! fatigue! the effect of this damp, dull, dreary room! We will change all this!" said Lyon Berners, cheerfully, as he pulled the bell-cord and rang a peal that presently brought the ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... case is very simple and goes back to a personal experience. When the author first studied the history of our literature there was put into his hands as a textbook a most dreary catalogue of dead authors, dead masterpieces, dead criticisms, dead ages; and a boy who knew chiefly that he was alive was supposed to become interested in this literary sepulchre or else have it said that there was something hopeless about him. ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... Becky?" said Maisie, looking out of the play-room window at the dreary dripping scene. "She won't be able to go out ...
— Black, White and Gray - A Story of Three Homes • Amy Walton
... his had taken note of the proceedings of a hundred scoundrels in whose hands the redoubtable Steinberg himself would have had but poor chances. The Greek had been Philip's standing joy, the dish best spiced to suit his intellectual palate. He had delighted over him aboard ship, on the monstrous dreary railway journey between Atlantic and Pacific, in the little towns which form the centre of scores of Texan ranches, in hells at the Cape and in California, in the free ports of China, and on the borders of the Bosphorus. In point of fact ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... down to overwhelm the settlement. A horde of Frenchmen turned half Indian, and savages armed with civilized powers of destruction, under Hertel de Rouville, a French officer of the line, were hurrying towards our doomed frontier, over the dreary waste of snow which stretched away for three hundred miles to the St. Lawrence. In the dark shade of some secluded glen, or deep ravine, a day's march nearer our border, each night their camp was pitched and kettles hung. Their fires lighted up the mossy trunks and overhanging ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... concluded, they separate into their original tribes, each taking opposite directions with their share of the plunder, to escape the risk of being captured. A considerable portion of the almost unexplored district—the Gran Chaco—which they inhabit is a dreary waste of lagoons and marshes, traversed by rapid, muddy, ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... indeed, there are many others which look best when seen in this way, and I can call to mind vignettes of housetops with surmounting steeples in quite another category of art than those formed by the dreary streets of Combray. I shall never forget, in a quaint Norman town not far from Balbec, two charming eighteenth-century houses, dear to me and venerable for many reasons, between which, when one looks up at them from a fine garden which descends in terraces to the river, the ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... was rais'd To be a mystery of loveliness Unto all eyes, the time is well nigh come When I must render up this glorious home To keen Discovery: soon yon brilliant towers Shall darken with the waving of her wand; Darken, and shrink and shiver into huts, Black specks amid a waste of dreary sand, Low-built, mud-walled, Barbarian settlement, How chang'd from this fair City!' Thus far the Spirit: Then parted Heavenward on the wing: and I Was left alone on Calpe, and the Moon Had fallen from the night, ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... a dreary day it had been to her. Could she live through such another? Half the night she lay awake, wondering if Hugh's answer to her letter would come by the first post, and whether Lord Earle would say anything if he noticed another letter from Brookfield. Fortune favored her. In the morning Lord Earle ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... glides away 'Mid mirth and music, flattery's whispered tone, Her dreary penance—ever to be gay, Yet longing, oh! how oft—to be alone; But when all other hearts seek needful rest, And heavy sleep the saddest eyelids close, Her dreams are those the wretched only know, As memory o'er her soul ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... had cleverly adapted their plans to the conditions. "The effect might so easily have been monotonous and cold, and it might have been flat and dreary. It was a fine idea to lift the central portion of each of those main palaces above the surfaces of the roofs to introduce the semicircular windows in the domes. It helped to infuse the scene with a kind of tenderness and spirituality. And see how the two groups on top ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... piquant, and most entertaining. Like many a merry, warm-hearted girl, she cherished a half-contemptuous opinion of much that was fashionable and gay; and to hear her speak of the crowded assemblies, the dreary dinner parties, the exciting balls, and the endless morning calls, was to give Grace ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... battle is in the words of one who passed over the field of Jemappe, after Doumourier's victory: 'It was on the third day after the victory obtained by general Doumourier over the Austrians, that I rode across the field of battle. The scene lies on a waste common, rendered then more dreary by the desertion of the miserable hovels before occupied by peasants. Everything that resembled a human habitation was desolated, and for the most part they had been burnt or pulled down, to prevent their ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... drink of milk," said the visitor. In comparison with the dwellings of small farmers in Eastern France or in Southern Italy this Donegal cabin was not only clean but attractive. It was more squalid perhaps, but less dreary than the extemporised and flimsy dwellings of settlers in the extreme Far West of the United States, and I should say decidedly a more wholesome habitation than the hermetically sealed and dismal wooden houses of hundreds of struggling farmers in the older Eastern States. ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... inditement on the landscape never to be erased by any human court—lonely, solemn, desolate, bereaved of any summer flower, written all over with the purple shadows of an endless Miserere. Thirty-six years have run through the hourglass since these dreary hills and the flowing river listened to the furious speech of rifles and the warwhoop of desperate redmen. The snows have piled high the parchment of winter—a shroud for the deathless dead—whiter than the white slabs. ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... turning out beings moulded after all the standards society abhors. Fortunately the psychologists have made it unnecessary to explain that there is nothing willful or personally reprehensible in the vagrancy of these vagrants. Their histories show that, starting with the long hours and dreary winters of the farms they ran away from, through their character-debasing experience with irregular industrial labor, on to the vicious economic life of the winter unemployed, their training predetermined but one ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... length, very peculiar effects would follow. For instance, terrible heat would be absorbed by the side of the planet facing the sun in the perpetual summer; and the cold which would be felt in the dreary winter's night would far exceed our bitterest Arctic climate. We cannot but fancy that any beings who might live on a planet of this kind must be different altogether from ourselves. Then, there is another point: ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... south. Although that gave them little or no clew to their ultimate destination, they felt some comfort in the knowledge that the shore of America lay to the starboard, and away off somewhere beyond the dreary horizon was the country they all loved, and where their anxious friends and families were awaiting some word ...
— A Voyage with Captain Dynamite • Charles Edward Rich
... met with the usual adventures incident to these regions. We had set fire to the forests of the Little Atlas Mountains, and been obliged to raise our camp, and fly in terror from the conflagration. We had crossed the dreary solitudes of Goor and Shott, through which our daily march had been enlivened by songs, or beguiled by listening to the wild legends of our Arab guides; and night after night we had encamped, like the vagabond tribes of Sahara, either round the mouths of wells, or without water in the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... "On his descending these dreary mansions of woe, and beholding the numerous spectacles of wretchedness and despair, his soul fainted within him. A little epitome of hell,—about 300 men confined between decks, half Frenchmen. He was informed there were three more of these vehicles of contagion, which ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... of "Far from mortal cares retreating,") is its association with "Greenville," the production of that brilliant but erratic genius and freethinker, Jean Jacques Rousseau. It was originally a love serenade, ("Days of absence, sad and dreary") from the opera of Le Devin du Village, written about 1752. The song was commonly known years afterwards as "Rousseau's Dream." But the unbelieving philosopher, musician, and misguided moralist builded better than he knew, and probably better than he meant when he wrote ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... devoting himself to astronomical observations and musings with nature, but who, nevertheless, felt compelled to relieve his overburdened mind by muttering to himself details of the murder while taking his long and dreary walks on the moor. ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... of this country, has built a house for painting and enjoying the scenery. One of our party clambered down to see the "Trou d'Enfer," a tremendously deep hole in the rocks, the bottom covered with a pink sort of sea-weed, and the water as clear as crystal. The whole country is a dreary sandy level, with salt-marshes, over which we passed to the ruined church of St. Fiacre, and close by is that of St. Guenole, both situated near the sea. The countryman who showed us the church, ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... breakfast. As he was leaving the table his mother said, "I am sorry you did not take advantage of the beautiful sunshine yesterday, for the wind has changed and is now blowing severely from the north and it is very cold and dreary out." ...
— The Pastor's Son • William W. Walter
... How dreary the passage across those wide waters to the shores of the smiling Adriatic for the desolate woman who had left them in the first flush of her youth, with hopes as brilliant as the skies of Venice, and with a promise as fair—to return to them lonely, despoiled, heart-broken, ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... the blood 'twas Hell my soul was fearing; And dark and dreary in my eyes the future was appearing, While conscience told its tale of sin And caused ...
— God's Plan with Men • T. T. (Thomas Theodore) Martin
... wound. It has been a dream, you know, a schoolboy's dream, but I always realised that the princess was not for me. She is so lovely that one's heart goes out to her instinctively, but it never seemed possible to think of her as a part of my work-a-day life. It's dreary work walking in the cold grey light and realising that the dream is over, but I shall pull myself together as time goes on, and make the ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... And in the dreary days that followed, and in the wild nights when they pushed the trenches closer, there was much discussion as to the wisdom of letting the Sunlanders go. But of this they were afraid, and the women raised a cry always at the thought This much they had seen of the ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... interests; impatient of regular, and much more of exceptional restraint; had no natural nucleus of gravitation, nor any forces but centrifugal; were always on the verge of civil war, and slunk at last into the natural almshouse of bankrupt popular government, a military despotism. Here was indeed a dreary outlook for persons who knew democracy, not by rubbing shoulders with it lifelong, but merely from books, and America only by the report of some fellow-Briton, who, having eaten a bad dinner or lost a carpet-bag here, ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... teeth of the furious northeast winds; and after that we lay becalmed, I have no idea in what latitude, though the passengers now talked quite like seamen, at least till the sea got up again. However, at last we made the English Channel, in the dreary days of November, and after more peril there than any where else, we were safely docked at Southampton. Here the Major was met by two dutiful daughters, bringing their husbands and children, and I saw more of family life (at a distance) than had fallen to my lot to observe before; and although there ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... married so short a time; to what a dreary length the future stretched before her, and she did not love the man she had chosen, as she understood love. How was life to be lived? She did not reproach herself. If she could have done that, if she could have accused herself of deliberate self-betrayal, it would have been better; but she ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... on to an ancient cluster of storerooms. Years back when the old farmhouse had been an inn, shivering servants had made these chill and dusty rooms more habitable. Now with the deserted wing below and the wind-feet of the Bacchante on the roof above, they were inexpressibly lonely and dreary. ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... and the poor little Fairies looked about in amazement at the dreary scene before them. The Goblins that escaped were running around and calling on the Queen to help them rescue ...
— Sandman's Goodnight Stories • Abbie Phillips Walker
... finds some dreary consolation for the present state of things in standing at his deserted shop-door and watching the doors of his brethren. He finds them equally deserted. In his own he has had to dismiss a number of his attendants. "When a man finds he is taking in ten shillings a day, ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... where he and his grandfather had headed the deer: it was covered with hundreds of dirty, yellow tents now. Around there were hills like uncouth monsters, swathed in ice, holding up the soggy sky; shivering pine-forests; unmeaning, dreary flats; and the Cheat, coiled about the frozen sinews of the hills, limp and cold, like a cord tying a dead man's jaws. Whatever outlook of joy or worship this region had borne on its face in time gone, it turned to him to-day nothing but stagnation, a great death. He wondered ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... should have been most carefully guarded, when her feelings were most sensitive, he, for all he knew to the contrary, broke her heart. And, under the cowardly pretence that it was she who bade him go, he left her to live, for aught he cared, a dreary, colorless existence at ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... steep mountains, where he frightened the eagles in their eyries; away down the clattering ravines, where the flashing cataracts tumble; away through the dark pine-forests, where the hungry wolves are howling; away over the dreary wolds, where the wild wind walks alone; away through the splashing quagmires, where the will-o'-the wisp slunk frightened among the reeds; away through light and darkness, storm and sunshine; away by ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... not sent for; he desired her to put it on, and see if it required alteration. She said it would do very well as it was. He then told her that, before her coronation, another crown was to be made for her husband. Lady Jane started; and it seemed as if for the first time the dreary {p.010} suspicion crossed her mind that she was, after all, but the puppet of the ambition of the duke to raise his family to the throne. Winchester retired, and she sat indignant[17] till Guilford Dudley appeared, when she told him that, young as she ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... a dreary pilgrimage, for though he possessed for his young, giddy wife, a strong, ardent affection, he had long known that it was not returned, and he felt that she would be happier if he were dead. She, however, paid him ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... somewhat resembling an aloe. The sole luxury which these men enjoyed was smoking the little paper cigars, and sucking mat,. I used to think that the carrion vultures, man's constant attendants on these dreary plains, while seated on the little neighbouring cliffs, seemed by their very patience to say, "Ah! when the Indians come we shall have ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... or change,—the clouds of time— Sorrow,—winter storm, or blight, Comes not near our peaceful clime; Nor the strife of day with night. Death, who walks the earth in riot, Stirs not our primeval quiet: Scarce his distant rage we know From the dreary things of clay, Slain, alas! in ocean's play, Whom the sea-maids shroud and lay In the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... itself was a dreary muddle, cold, wind-swept, and filthy, with the accumulated dirt incident to the passage through of many divisions. Their train came in at seven one night, and they waited in line until one while a military tangle was straightened out somewhere ahead. Officers ran up and down ceaselessly, ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... are not going to wait in this dreary hole," said Manners. "I don't enjoy eels when I've got ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn
... congratulate you. I expected to find you as gloomy as the poor monks of the Chartreuse, with their long white robes, who used to frighten me so much in my childhood; though, to tell the truth, I was never easily frightened. Instead of that I find you in the midst of this dreary October, as smiling ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... complaints, but the dignified and chastened expression of sorrow, which a mind, constituted as Johnson's, must have experienced on the departure of a mother. A heart, tender and susceptible of pathetic emotion, as his was, must have deeply felt, how dreary it is to walk downward to the grave unregarded by her "who has looked on our childhood." Occasions for more violent and perturbed grief may occur to us in our passage through life, but the gentle, quiet death of a mother speaks to us with "still small voice" ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... method of nervous development, the attainment of control and co-ordination, the capacity of quick and accurate response to circumstances and obedience to the will. Compare, for instance, the girl who has played games, avoiding danger as she crosses the road, with another whose youth has been made dreary by dumb-bells. It may freely be laid down, then, that systems of physical training are good in proportion as they approximate to play, and bad in proportion as they depart from it; and, further, that the very best of them ever devised is worthless in comparison with a good game. ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... and be told of his welfare, with such bits of news concerning him as the messenger could glean. Usually the information was meagre enough, yet comforting; at times she heard he was at home; then she would issue from her dreary cell at break of day, and sit till noon, and from noon to set of sun, a motionless figure draped in white, looking, statue-like, invariably to one point—over the Temple to the spot under the rounded sky where the old house stood, dear in memory, and dearer because he was there. Nothing ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... dreamed of. For in all existence there can be no such isolation as that of the woman cast out from among her kind, yet too much one of them to endure the companionship of others. At the same time, since no brave fight can leave either man or woman as it found them, so, through the dreary years of her disgrace, Alexandrine Nikitenko, buoyed up by her unbreakable pride, had gathered from her blackened fields no small harvest of broad-mindedness, philosophy, and courage. The Alexandrine of old, acknowledged priestess of frivolity, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... accrue to me, when I wandered back along the pathway of memory, catching sunny glimpses of the rosy future which my imagination had marked out, and then comparing these with the dreary ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... I did not want to go up the gorge, in that it was so dreary a place and narrow and horrid and drear-seeming, after the light and wideness of the Country in which ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... circuit. At starting he had also the society of his friend Grant Duff. They walked together in the summer of 1855, and visited the Trappist Monastery in Charnwood Forest. There they talked to a shaven monk in his 'dreary white flannel dress,' bound with a black strap. They moralised as they returned, and Fitzjames thought on the whole that his own life was wholesomer than the monastic. He hopes, however, that the monk and his ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... long and dreary way did he find it! The first half-mile was tolerably level, but the next two miles and a half were all uphill, only with a very little going down sometimes. The sun was shining without clouds, and his bones were sore, and he was getting hungry; ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... there was a faint legendary report that a certain Abbot had dined there in old days, after having been bewildered in a hunting expedition amongst the wilds which lie to the northward. But that the present Lord Abbot should have taken a voluntary journey to so wild and dreary a spot, the very Kamtschatka of the Halidome, was a thing never dreamt of; and the news excited the greatest surprise in all the members of the family ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... at Pittsburgh, on the morning of December 2d, 1875, after a dreary night's ride by rail from the Atlantic coast, I found my boat—it having preceded me—safely perched upon a pile of barrels in the freight-house of the railroad company, which was conveniently situated within a few rods of the muddy waters ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... was beginning to outline the dreary shore. The chilly rain still poured. The reader can imagine in what a plight we were. The fire had gone out. Our skin-tent lay in a wad; and in the midst of our beds sprawled the dead sea-horse, weltering in its blood; while we ourselves, drenched ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... of listening and the effort of making practical arrangements and seeing that things worked smoothly, absorbed all Terence's power. Involved in this long dreary nightmare, he did not attempt to think what it amounted to. Rachel was ill; that was all; he must see that there was medicine and milk, and that things were ready when they were wanted. Thought had ceased; life ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... take a very complacent view of the dreary prospect without," Mrs. Mayburn remarked, as Graham came smilingly into the breakfast-room and greeted her with a cheerful note in his tones. "Such a day as this means rheumatism for me and an aching leg for ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... dreary, never-changing tale Of mortal maladies is worn and stale. You cannot charm or interest or please By harping ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... had little comfort for him; he felt baffled and disheartened—indeed, quite sick. Was it not sickening to hear her talk of this dreary process of preparation?—as if any one cared about that, and would know whether Verena were prepared or not! Had Miss Chancellor no faith in her girlhood? didn't she know what a card that would be? This was the last inquiry Olive allowed him the opportunity ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... after the Welcome Dance to the new girls, and it was raining. Not a nice, heavy pouring rain, but a dreary persistent drizzle. The girls wandered aimlessly about the corridors in the most woe-begone fashion, for there was no chance of getting out of doors ...
— Polly's Senior Year at Boarding School • Dorothy Whitehill
... life. The fresh spring flowers, large and coarse, but bright-coloured, are all I have of company, and the sky is blue and the air like crystal. So I go up, ever up, and at last am by the gate of Mola, and enter the stony-hearted town. A place more dreary, desolate to the eye, is seldom seen. There are only low, mean houses of gray stone, and the paved ways. If you can fancy a prison turned inside out like a glove, with all its interior stone exposed to the sunlight, which yet seems sunlight in a prison, and silence ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... leaves are beautiful; but more is wanted than leaves. If he persists in his endeavor blindly, believing that he has reached his goal when he has not even perceived it, then he finds himself in that dreary place where good is done perforce, and the deed of virtue is without the love that should shine through it. It is well for a man to lead a pure life, as it is well for him to have clean hands,—else he becomes repugnant. But virtue as we understand it now can no more have any special relation ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins |
