"Arid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... testifying to the plant's virtue as a love-philter, bridal token, and general cure-all, has now become naturalized from the Old World on the Atlantic and Pacific Slopes; and is rapidly appropriating waste arid cultivated ground until, in many places, it is truly troublesome. In general habit like the blue vervain, its flowers are more purplish than blue, and are scattered, not crowded, along the spikes. The leaves are deeply, but less ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... summit of a rocky knoll some ten miles inland from the Port of Ilsin. It was a place shunned as a rule, and the country all around it was so arid and desolate that there were no residents near it. As it was kept for state use, and might be serviceable in time of war, it was closed with massive iron doors, which were kept locked except upon certain occasions. The keys were at the seat of government ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... dust in the air most of the time, but I do not think that it extends very high. Where it would be the highest and most perceptible would be on the arid plans of Africa and Asia, when the simoom is passing, or in the track of a tornado. But from the multiplicity of these storm centers and the varied winds they would produce even this dust could not ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 433, April 19, 1884 • Various
... that John Hathaway stormed and carried by assault. Her girl's life in a country school and her uncle's very rigid and orthodox home had been devoid of emotion or experience; still, her mother had early sown seeds in her mind and spirit that even in the most arid soil were certain to flower into beauty when the time for flowering came; and intellectually Susanna was the clever daughter of clever parents. She was very immature, because, after early childhood, her environment had not been favorable to her development. At seventeen ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... always felt,—felt rather than known,—that there is a queer strain of mysticism in Gorman. His arid common sense, his politics, his rhetoric, his tricky money-making, are the outside, visible things about him. Behind them, deep down, seldom seen, is a strange, emotional love for his country. When Ascher spoke as he did about the claim of patriotism Gorman understood. The innermost part ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... Julia returned to England he broke ground to his mother on the subject of her making the mistress of Broadwood understand that she and the girls now regarded their occupancy of that estate as absolutely over. He had already, several weeks before, picked a little at the arid tract of that indicated surrender, but in the interval the soil appeared to have formed again to a considerable thickness. It was disagreeable to him to call his parent's attention to the becoming course, ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... superstitious age— May He be praised that sent the healthful tempest And scatter'd all these pestilential vapours! But that we owed them all to yonder Harlot Throned on the seven hills with her cup of gold, I will as soon believe, with kind Sir Roger, That old Moll White took wing with cat arid broomstick, And raised the last night's ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... praises. After speaking of what nature really does for it in the way of vegetation and fruits, he continues: "An admirable terrace-cultivation, where art and industry have combined to overcome the obstacles of nature, has everywhere converted the slopes, naturally sterile and arid, into a succession of gardens, loaded with the choicest vegetable productions. A delicious climate there brings the finest fruits to maturity; the grapes hang in festoons from tree to tree; the song of the nightingale is heard in every grove; all nature seems ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... Alarcon was sent to sail up the Sea of Cortes (now the Gulf of California) to keep in touch with the land expedition, and Melchior Diaz, of that sea party, forced his way up what is now the Colorado River to the arid sands of the Colorado Desert in Southern California, before death and disaster ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... light in which he is estimated by most modern critics, as the explicit champion of rationalism and nothing more. For he is connected with another idea, the course of which is as the course of that great river of his native Arcadia which, springing from some arid and sun-bleached rock, gathers strength and beauty as it flows till it reaches the asphodel meadows of Olympia and the light ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... case of glaciation of the Lake copper deposits, denudation follows close on the heels of alteration, and the surface is so rapidly removed that we may have the primary ore practically at the surface. Flat, arid regions present the other extreme, for denudation is much slower, and conditions are most perfect for deep penetration of oxidizing agencies, and the consequent alteration and concentration of ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... coast, no smoke arose in the distance to indicate that Bennet Islet was inhabited. But William Guy had not found any trace of human beings there, and what I saw of the islet answered to the description given by Arthur Pym. It rose upon a rocky base of about a league in circumference, and was so arid that no vegetation existed ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... women without culture or knowledge of literature or of music have succeeded a former generation who were passionately interested in these things, an interest which extended down even to the wayside cabin. The loss of these elevating influences in Irish society probably accounts for much of the arid nature of Irish controversies, while the reaction against their suppression has given rise to those displays of rhetorical patriotism for which the Irish language has found the expressive term raimeis, and which (thanks largely to the Gaelic movement) ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... sufficient volume to support the Nile throughout its entire course of thirty degrees of latitude. Thus the parent stream, fed by never-failing reservoirs, supplied by the ten months' rainfall of the equator, rolls steadily on its way through arid sands and burning deserts until it reaches the ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... you, Madam, of the heroine of this strange love-story?" he asked with a touch of bitterness in his voice. "Does it not strike you that even in this arid world of much deception, there may be after all such a thing as innocence?—such a treasure as true and trusting love? Were not the eyes of this girl Gloria, when lifted to your face, something like the eyes of a child who has just said its ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... First, on account of its cold and bracing climate; second, because, having never been a slave state, the white population there are more thrifty and industrious, and of course the influence of such a community was better adapted to form thrift arid industry in ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... convicted of partiality, we should be left with little to instruct subsequent ages beyond the dry records of men such as the laborious, the useful, though somewhat over-credulous Clinton, or the learned but arid Marquardt, whose "massive scholarship" Mr. Gooch dismisses somewhat summarily in a single line. Such writers are not historians, but rather compilers of records, upon the foundations of ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... has chanced that hand in hand with the experiments leading to such a goal have gone other experiments arid speculations of exactly the opposite tenor. In each generation there have been chemists among the leaders of their science who have refused to admit that the so-called elements are really elements at all in any ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... of California, near the Arizona line, is the famous Death Valley—a tract of arid, alkaline plain hemmed in by steep mountains and lying below the level of the sea. For years it was believed that no human being could cross that desert and live, for horses sink to their knees in drifts of soda ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... reached the zone of arid compliment, tended to languish. They had now reached Learning's side of the trolley-tracks, and rills in the great morning flood of the scholastic life were beginning to gather about them and to unite in a rolling stream ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... tame in the extreme; the land dropped gently to scarcely more than half its depth, with barely a tree visible on its surface; and at the foot of the hill, stretched out as far as the eye could reach, was a howling, blank-looking desert, all hot and arid, and very wretched to look upon. It was the more disappointing, as the Somali had pictured this to me as a land of promise, literally flowing with milk and honey, where, they said, I should see boundless prairies of grass, large roomy trees, beautiful valleys with deep brooks running down them, ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... variety of shrubs and small plants, and yielded a delightful harvest to the botanists; but to the herdsmen and cultivator it promised nothing: not a blade of grass, nor a square yard of soil from which the seed delivered to it could be expected back, was perceivable by the eye in its course over these arid plains. ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... too—the great barren, undulating deserts that roll up to the foot of the Urals, Caucasus, Altai, Yablonoi, and Stanovoi Mountains—and the Tundras along the shores of the Arctic Ocean—dreary swamps in summer and ice-covered wastes in winter. Here, at night, they wander over the rough, stony, arid ground, picking their way surreptitiously through the scant vegetation, and avoiding all frequented localities; pausing, every now and then, to slake their thirst in deep sunk wells, or to listen for ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... his long habit of sojourning there had obtained. The clatter of English tongues at table d'hote began to weary him; the heated controversy which waged over the gambling-tables of the little principality across the bay left him arid and tired; and the gossip of the place struck him as even more tedious and unprofitable than of old. He could no longer feign a decent interest in the flirtations of the three Miss Smiths, as they were recounted to him ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... from thy lofty height, thy words shall fall Upon their spirits like bright cataracts That front a sunrise; thou shalt hear them call Amid their endless waste of arid facts, As wearily they plod their way along, Upon the rhythmic zephyrs of ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... emerge from the fissures of the rock. A few plants or vines creep over the surface of that grey and parched soil; in the distance, is occasionally seen a grove of olive-trees, casting a shade over the arid side of the mountain—the mouldering walls and towers of the city appearing from afar on the summit of Mount Sion. Such is the general character of the country. The sky is ever pure, bright, and cloudless; never does even the slightest film of mist obscure the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... of desolate space—across the plains, through North-eastern Kansas and into Nebraska, up the valley of the Platte, across the Great Plateau, into the foothills and over the summit of the Rockies, into the arid Great Basin, over the Wahsatch range, into the valley of Great Salt Lake, through the terrible alkali deserts of Nevada, through the parched Sink of the Carson River, over the snowy Sierras, and into the Sacramento Valley—the ...
— The Story of the Pony Express • Glenn D. Bradley
... began fresh and cool, burned, that year, into a scorching heat, until the torrid skies bent in a blue arch of arid cruelty and the ridges stood ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... bid adieu wholly to the world, that she might give herself all to God and live only by His love." To mark her entire separation from the world, she assumed a peculiarly grave style of dress, dismissed her servants, gave up her house, and returned to her father's, where free from all care arid responsibility, she found herself as she desired, alone with God alone. She chose an apartment in the upper story as the most retired, and between this and the adjoining oratory, she passed most of her time in prayer. She was never ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... of pure affection bloomed in the arid desert of Tommy's existence for all that. In the preceding fall a new family had come to Arundel and moved into the tiny house next to the Puffers'. It was a small, dingy house, just like the others, but before long a great change ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... as states of Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma; both declared in favor of legislation against monopolies and trusts; both favored liberal pensions, the construction of an Isthmian canal, irrigation of arid lands, reduction of war taxes and protection of American workmen against cheap foreign labor. Yet it does not by any means follow that a majority of the people voting really endorsed even these planks which were ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... wolf does not curry favor with the sheep-dog when it hungers for a lamb. Such was her creed. In brief, Sylvia had received her training in none of the social schools. She was a daughter of the desert—a bit of that jetsam which the Rio Grande leaves upon its arid banks as it journeys stealthily ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... lonely mountains, honey-combed with dens and caves; arid valleys and barren hills; dreary deserts that glistened under the blinding glare of the sun that poured its heat upon them steadily all the year; strange, grotesque rocks and peaks that assumed all sorts of fantastic shapes ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... here," he said, in an arid voice, and held wide the door of the room where he and Rudyard had settled the first chapter of the future and closed ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... several, to make navigation more easy. They did the same on several other rivers,—nor knew that they were destroying the last remaining vestige of a great people's civilization,—for these dams had been used to save the water and distribute it into the numerous canals, which covered the arid country with their fertilizing network. They may have been told what travellers are told in our own days by the Arabs—that these dams had been constructed once upon a time by Nimrod, the Hunter-King. For some of them remain even still, showing ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... By the shades of Knickerbocker's History of New York I seem now to have gotten at the beginning; but patience, the sun is no detail out in the arid country. It does more things than blister your nose. It is the despair of the painter as it colors the minarets of the Bad Lands which abound around Adobe, and it dries up the company gardens if they don't watch the acequias mighty sharp. To one just out of ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... food as the following: "God—a being who supports all the world at one time;" "Preestablished harmony—the eternal union of things;" "Ratio sufficiens—the sufficient ground;" with many other arid definitions of the same class. One preacher, in explaining the eighth chapter of Matthew, thought it necessary, when noticing the fact of Jesus descending the mountain, to define the term mountain ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... well-budded camellias to have the flowers opened. More warmth, a closer atmosphere, is brought to bear upon them, and down fall the buds in showers on stage or floor—the chief cause of this slip between the buds and the open flowers being a rise of temperature. A close or arid atmosphere often leads to the same results. Camellias can hardly have too free a circulation of air or too low a temperature. Another frequent cause of buds dropping arises from either too little or too much water at the roots. Either ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... atmosphere capable of absorbing heat at an elevation of 190 miles. The probable range of temperature on the moon was discussed by Professor Very in 1898.[953] He concluded it to be very wide. Hotter than boiling water under the sun's vertical rays, the arid surface of our dependent globe must, he found, cool in the 14-day lunar night to about the temperature ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... shows any present intention of doing—am but a soldier of fortune: an officer under the command of the excellent and most noble procurator Albinus," he added sarcastically. "For the rest," he went on, "I have spent a year in this interesting and turbulent but somewhat arid land of yours, coming here from Egypt, and am now honoured with a commission to investigate and make report on a charge laid at the door of your virtuous guardians, the Essenes, of having murdered, or been privy to the murder ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... like a locomotive oil can, designed to poke in out-of-the-way places. With this device she was able to get through my beard and find my mouth. As she gently tipped it, the goodly nectar trickled upon my desert tongue, to be quickly evaporated in that arid area before it reached far along the parched wastes. I wanted to swim in it, but these hospitals provide poor ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... equally against her conscience, the poor old woman took it; but, by so doing, ere long recovered health and spirits, famous appetite, and glad again to see her friends; and having by this experience broken the ice of arid abstinence, never afterwards kept ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... summer walk, The withered tufts of asters nod; And trembles on its arid stalk The hoar plume of the golden-rod. And on a ground of sombre fir, And azure-studded juniper, The silver birch its buds of purple shows, And scarlet berries tell where bloomed the sweet wild-rose! Last Walk in ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... fields with Di,— Fields fresh with clover and with rye; They now seem arid: Then Di was fair and single; how Unfair it seems on me, for now ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... cry of the fisherman, and the "cockler's" whistle, plying his scanty trade among the shoals and sandbanks about the coast. It is scarcely possible to conceive a situation more desolate and uninviting. Hills of arid sand skirting the beach, without vegetation or enclosure, except where the withered bent and little golden-starred stone-crop gave their own wild and peculiar aspect to the scene. The shore is flat ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... subject, of literary as well as philosophic interest, which he was minded to treat before turning his back finally upon the arid wastes of theory;—the subject of realism versus idealism, or, as he decided to phrase it, of naive and sentimental poetry. This essay, published in 1796, was briefly analyzed in the last chapter. ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... traveller begins to observe the effect of liberal agriculture on the sandy soil, while, farther on toward the heart of the region, every thing is still bare and uncultivated. As far as the eye can penetrate, nothing is to be seen in that quarter but arid plains thinly covered with stunted vegetation, while the horizon is bounded by that blue and cloudy line which always marks the limit of a desert. Yet, as we journey over these vast spaces, it is impossible ...
— The Poor Gentleman • Hendrik Conscience
... grasp of the hand, and a few words of condolence, neither interrupted the calm depression rather than grief in which I found myself. When I returned home, there was with my aunt a married sister, whom I had never seen before. Up to this time she had shown an arid despair, and been regardless of everything about her; but now she was in tears. I left them together, and wandered for hours up and down the lonely playground of my childhood, thinking of many things—most of all, how strange it was that, if there ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... so gray and wasted. The few books she owned and loved had generally lain unopened, it is true, upon her bedroom table, and she held herself as having far too little learning to be a worthy companion for Ivory Boynton; but all the beauty and cheer a comfort that could ever be pressed into the arid life of the Baxter household had come from Waitstill's heart, and that heart had grown in warmth and plenty year ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... 'You were expected, you perceive,' he said. A delightful sense of well-being came into my mind. I sat down in the sweetness of ease after fatigue, of refreshment after weariness, of pleasant sounds and sights after the arid way. I said to myself that my past experiences had been a mistake, that this was where I ought to have come from the first, that life here would be happy, and that all intruding thoughts must soon vanish and ...
— The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... one of the book auctions yielded up a copy of the "Complete Works of Miss Mitford." You perhaps can imagine how a city boy, who was allowed to spend two weeks each year at the most on the arid New Jersey seacoast, fell upon "Our Village." It became an incentive for long walks, in the hope of finding some country lanes and something resembling the English primroses. I read and reread "Our Village" until I could close my eyes at any time and see the little world in which Miss ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... may be roughly characterized as a vast sandy plain, arid in the extreme; or rather as two such plains, separated by a chain of mountains running northwest and southeast. In the southern part of the reservation this mountain range is known as the Choiskai ...
— Navaho Houses, pages 469-518 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... employ 3,000. Surely it will have place for one more, then! I am impressed with its grandeur as it rises, red-bricked, with proud, straight towers toward its centre—impressed and frightened by its insistent call as it rattles and hums to me across the one-sixteenth of a mile of arid sand track. At one side Christianity and doctrine have constructed a church: a second one is building. On the other side, at a little distance, lies Granton, second largest mill. All this I take in as I make my way Excelsiorward. Between me and the ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... Lifter was with you still. But I am glad that he has left you. We shall fish arid talk here. Has The Lifter told you anything about the history ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... country, and make a short cut across to the other side of the bend, where he and the men would stop, pitch our night-tent, and wait for me. Herndon assented, and we parted. The low fields around us changed, as I went on, to firm, hard, rising ground, that gradually became sandy and arid. The luxuriant vegetation that clung around the banks of the river seemed to be dried up little by little, until only a few dusty bushes and thorn-acacias studded in clumps a great, sandy, and rocky tract of country, which rolled monotonously back from the river border with a steadily increasing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... the talkers of the Ghetto, earnest as their forefathers before the great folios of the Talmud, made an Oriental oasis amid the simoom whirl of the Occident. And the Heathen Journalist who had discovered it felt, as so often before, that here alone in this arid, mushroom New York was antiquity, was restfulness, was romanticism; here was the Latin Quarter of the city ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... by them... For almost five centuries it was appealed to as the decisive authority on behalf of the people... To have produced it, to have preserved it, to have matured it, constitute the immortal claim of England on the esteem of mankind. Her Bacons arid Shakspeares, her Miltons and Newtons, with all the truth which they have revealed, and all the generous virtues which they have inspired, are of inferior value when compared with the subjection of men and their rulers to the principles of justice; if, indeed, it be ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... little sleeve she was basting in an apron. "And this brings me to the mention of another little Bible character we have a-running about amongst us. It's 'Liza Pike, as should be called one of God's own little ravens arid ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... The whole panorama of the mystic land of the Hindus was unrolled once more by the memories of fifteen clouded years, He saw again his far-away theater of varied action, with its huge grim mountains towering far over the snow line, its arid wastes, its fertile plains bathed in intense sunshine, its mystic rivers, and its silent, solemn shrines ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... and law, and a striking example of the marvellous power which plants, like animals, possess, of adapting themselves to the local peculiarities of their habitat, whether in the fertile shades of the luxuriant 'monte' or on the arid, parched-up plains of ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... gratitude, wandering about Italy, in a blind quest of the girl who had been snatched away from him. He thought of the girl herself, and the love that not all Mrs. Burgoyne's jealous anguish had been able to deny. And then his mind returned to Mrs. Burgoyne, and the arid ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to twelve or thirteen hundred. This weak army was destitute of commissariat and the engines necessary for such a siege. Before long it was a prey to the horrors of thirst. "The neighborhood of Jerusalem," says William of Tyre, "is arid; and it is only at a considerable distance that there are to be found rivulets, fountains, or wells of fresh water. Even these springs had been filled up by the enemy a little before the arrival of our troops. The crusaders issued ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... which and the Cave of the Smell his existence alternated with the monotony of a pendulum—was situated midway on the block on the north side of the street. It boasted a front yard fenced off from the sidewalk with a rusty railing: a plot of arid earth scantily tufted with grass, suggesting that stage of baldness which finally precedes complete nudity. Behind this, the moat-like area was spanned to the front door by a ragged stoop of brownstone. The four-story facade ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... broke the crests of the long Pacific swell that lazily rose and fell on the beach, which only a slanting copse of scrub-oak and willow hid from the cottage. Nevertheless, she knew this league-long strip of shining sand much better, it is to be feared, than the scanty flower-garden, arid and stunted by its contiguity. It had been her playground when she first came there, a motherless girl of twelve, and she had helped her father gather its scattered driftwood—as the fortunes of the Millers were not above ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... coming brings such glad refreshment As May rain o'er the pasture flings! Lifted from passion's melancholy The life breaks forth in fairer flower, The soul receives a new enrichment— Fruition sweet and full of power. But when on later altars arid It downward sweeps, about us flows— Love leaves behind such deathly traces As Autumn tempests where it blows To strip the woods with ruthless hand, And turn to soggy waste ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... than on the arid wastes of the Causse. There were trees, and birds in the trees, moving faintly. The great moon, which had now risen, shone also upon scanty grass and (from time to time) upon the trickle of water passing in runnels ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... the post-office and despatched a telegram. Then, partially eased, she returned to the arid and ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... "Out of 360 meditations made by a priest during the year, 300 of them are arid." We have the testimony of Abbe d'Astros on the efficacy of prayers committed to memory, who was in prison for three years under the first empire and without any books. "I knew the psalms by heart and, thanks to this converse ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... in the eastern portions. From latitude forty-three to fifty, embracing portions of Kief, the Caucasus, and other southern possessions of the empire, the winters are comparatively temperate, and the summers warm and long; but here, again, a great portion of this country consists of mountains, arid plains, and deserts, and it is subject to extreme and terrible droughts. Here is a vast extent of territory, comprising about one hundred and sixty-five degrees of longitude and thirty-five of latitude, which contains within its limits a greater variety ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... of wood which there is to rear. Friedrich, having settled the positions, rides out reconnoitring; hither, thither, over the Heights of Trettin. "The day being still hot, he suffers considerably from thirst [it is our one Anecdote] in that arid tract: at last a Peasant does bring him, direct from the fountain, a jug of pure cold water; whom, lucky man, the King rewarded with a thaler; and not only so, but, the man being intelligent of the localities, took with him to answer questions." ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... lamented my former ungenerous suspicions; but he had wronged us, still—I hoped, I trusted that he had. He had not attempted to cheek the course of our love by actually damming up the streams in their passage, but he had passively watched the two currents wandering through life's arid wilderness, declining to clear away the obstructions that divided them, and secretly hoping that both would lose themselves in the sand before they could be joined in one. And meantime he had been quietly ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... doors. The women, in twos and threes, bareheaded and in white aprons, gossiped in the alley between the blocks. Men, having a rest between drinks, sat on their heels and talked. The place smelled stale; the slate roofs glistered in the arid heat. ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... shadow of a thorn bush, and the two mites, tired with play, cuddled themselves by her side, unreproved. She looked tenderly, delectably feminine. The moon shone full upon her face; but there are no ugly lines to hide, for there are no parched and arid places in her nature. Dews of sympathy, sweet spring floods of love and compassion, have kept all fresh, serene, ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... miraculous rod that smote his petrified affections, and a wellspring of tenderness gushed forth, freshening, softening, and clothing with verdure and bloom his arid, sterile, stony temperament. Long-buried dreams of his boyhood stirred in their chilly graves and flitted dimly before him, and a hope that had slumbered so soundly he had utterly ignored its memory, started up, eager and starry-eyed, ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... supposed that we were making for the actual summit; but on the second terrace my captress bore away to the left and led us by a track that slanted across the northern shoulder of the ridge. A sentry started to his feet and stepped from behind a clump of arid sage-coloured bushes, stood for a moment with the sun glinting on his gun-barrel, and at a sign from the girl dropped back upon his post. Just then, or a moment later, my ears caught the jigging notes of a flute; whereby I knew Mr. Badcock to be close at hand, for it was discoursing the ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... down into the village and could see its extent, precisely how it was placed in the Sahara, in what relation exactly it stood to the mountain ranges, to the palm groves and the arid, sunburnt tracts, where its life centred and where it tailed away into suburban edges not unlike the ragged edges of worn garments, where it was idle and frivolous, where busy and sedulous. She realised for the first time ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... mirage. As it fades away, we discern an arid waste. War broke out between France and Austria within two months of this sanguine utterance. It soon embroiled France and England in mortal strife. All hope of retrenchment and Reform was crushed. The National Debt rose by leaps and bounds, and the Sinking Fund proved to ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... a frightful orgy, and now arid as the Sahara desert and quite as flat and dreary, the bachelor dinner was in truth more often than not, a ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... to himself he was bound to answer "Yes." He lived on the whole a Christian life, prayed but badly, but at any rate prayed without ceasing; only—only—Alas! How worm-eaten, how arid were the poor recesses of his soul! He wondered, with anguish, whether they would not end like the Manor in Edgar Poe's tale, by crumbling suddenly, one fatal day, into the dark waters of the pool of sin which was undermining ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... the water. The moment he suspends the straggle or relaxes his watchfulness, the desert reclaims them and overwhelms them with sterility. Sit was the spirit of the mountain, stone and sand, the red and arid ground as distinguished from the moist black soil of the valley. On the body of a lion or of a dog he bore a fantastic head with a slender curved snout, upright and square-cut ears; his cloven tail rose stiffly behind him, springing from his loins like a fork. He also assumed a human form, or retained ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... thing stirred at the far end of Au Fer reef. A scorched and weakened steer came on through salt pools to stagger and fall. Presently another, and then a slow line of them. They crossed the higher ridge to huddle about a sink that might have made them remember the dry drinking holes of their arid home plains. Tired, gaunt cattle mooing lonesomely, when the man came about them to dig with his bloody fingers in ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... that he would duplicate this bathroom in his own residence as soon as he had his homestead going. Wallie's knowledge of Wyoming was gathered chiefly from an atlas he had borrowed from Mr. Cone. The atlas stated briefly that it contained 97,890 square miles, mostly arid, and a population of 92,531. It gave the impression that the editors themselves were hazy on Wyoming, which very likely was the truth, since it had been published in Mr. Cone's childhood when ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... his livelihood—and a good one, too—as publisher of the Social Era, a sprightly weekly chronicle of happenings in fashionable society, would have appeared anomalous in any but a man gifted in the Greek sophistries and their modern innumerable and arid offshoots. Haynerd was a laughing Democritus, an easy-going, even-tempered fellow, doomed to be loved, and by the same graces thoroughly cheated by the world in general. He had in his rapid career of some thirty-five ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... picture of the huge river of labor that winds its course through arid plains of want and poverty and starvation, which it is capable of fertilising and converting into a modern Paradise? True that on its banks and in its immediate neighbourhood are strips of luxuriant vegetation. But those only show up in painful relief the utter barrenness of ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... arid parts of Australia, where rain rarely occurs, the blacks have acquired much out-of-the-way knowledge on the means of obtaining water. White men, unable to read the secret signs of its existence, have perished in all the agonies of thirst ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... I have special talent for sustaining and enlivening a conversation; there is something in that, I admit, but to do her justice, I must say that in this respect Madame de Maintenon is without a rival. She has quite a wealth of invention; the most arid subject in her hands becomes attractive; while for transitions, her skill is unequalled. Far simpler than myself, she gauges her whole audience with a single glance. And as, since her misfortunes, her rule ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... trees, to say nothing of vines, bushes, and vegetables. He developed the drip of the hills in the canyons and worked out an efficient irrigation scheme, ditching the water from canyon to canyon and paralleling the ditches at different altitudes. His narrow canyons became botanical gardens. The arid shoulders of the hills, where formerly the blazing sun had parched the jungle and beaten it close to earth, blossomed into trees and shrubs and flowers. Not only had the Nature Man become self-supporting, but he was now a prosperous agriculturist with produce ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... the neighbors about them. The first or natural location embodies the complex of local geographic conditions which furnish the basis for their tribal or national existence. This basis may be a peninsula, island, archipelago, an oasis, an arid steppe, a mountain system, or a fertile lowland. The stronger the vicinal location, the more dependent is the people upon the neighboring states, but the more potent the influence which it can, under certain circumstances, exert upon them. Witness Germany in relation to Holland, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... spread its cruel net around him. The stony wastes bore no fruit but briers and thorns. The dark ledges of rock thrust themselves above the surface here and there, like the bones of perished monsters. Arid and inhospitable mountain ranges rose before him, furrowed with dry channels of ancient torrents, white and ghastly as scars on the face of nature. Shifting hills of treacherous sand were heaped like tombs along the horizon. By day, ...
— The Story of the Other Wise Man • Henry Van Dyke
... was complete. All around us lay the dunes, monstrous as still leviathans. Here and there, between their strange, suggestive shapes, under the dark sky one could see the ghastly whiteness of the saltpetre in the arid plains beyond, where the low bushes bent in the chilly breeze. I thought of London—only a few days' journey from me—revelled for a moment in my situation, which, contrary to my expectation, was rather emphasised ...
— The Desert Drum - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... Stagyrite repaired the injustice of his conduct by giving it a pretty long one. My opinion now, as you are anxious to know it, is, that it was a lady, a sweetheart of Aristotle's; for what was to hinder Aristotle having a sweetheart? I dare say Thomas Aquinas, dry and arid as he was, raised his unprincipled eyes to some Neapolitan beauty, began a sonnet to some lady's eyebrow, though he might forget to finish it. And my belief is that this lady, ambitious as Semele, wished to be introduced as an eternal jewel into the great vault ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... before. When? Suddenly he recollected the night he had sat at this same window, at the beginning of this terrible journey; and his thoughts and feelings then, his deep loneliness of soul, the prevision of the pain even of fulfilment—an endless, endless arid waste, with the welling forth of that black spirit of evil in his own nature, as the only vital thing to bear him secret company—a moment that was wolfish to his better nature. Almost with the remembrance came the same mood, but only as reflected ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... purchasing of arid and overflow lands and the State reclamation of all such lands now held by the State or that may be acquired ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... nickel-plating, nor will such an unnecessary expenditure be made as was involved in the construction of the "West Shore"; nor will the feat of Gould and the Santa Fe be repeated of each building two hundred and forty miles, side by side, for construction profits, much of which is located in the arid portion of Kansas where there is never likely to be traffic for even one railway. Much of the republic is covered with closely parallel lines which would never have been built under national ownership, and this process will continue as long as the manipulators ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... the principal range of the wild sheep in America to-day there are still a few of its old haunts not in the mountains which are so arid or so rough, or where the water is so bad that as yet they have not to any great extent been invaded by the white man. Again to the south and southwest, in portions of Arizona, Old Mexico, and Lower California, ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... scene all about me, how different it was from those to which I had been accustomed on Earth! Out of a pink sky flakes of frozen dew were gently falling, starching the arid, verdureless soil with a glistening coat of evanescent white. Along the river bank, tall, slender, lightly-rooted trees reached far up into the breathless air, but there was never the movement of a bough or the rustle of a leaf, except from the flutter ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... and looked one at the other with an air of utter despair. The order to march from this distressing spot was unwillingly and slowly obeyed. So fondly does the human soul cling to the very faintest semblance of hope, that the adventurers would rather have wandered up and down these barren and arid banks, in vain search after water, than tear themselves away by one bold effort from the deceitful expectations held out to them by ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... the coast beginning at Cape Blanco, and extending to the arm of the river Senegal, called the Marigot of the Maringouins; is so very arid, that it is not fit for any kind of cultivation; but from that Marigot, to the mouth of the river Gambia, a space, which may be about a hundred leagues, in length, with a depth of about two hundred, we meet with a vast country, which ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... make their money in the one and live in the other, as though the Queen of Watering-places were an industrial centre. Worthing has a great advantage in its fine old trees; as a matter of fact the place would be unbearably arid and glaring without them in the summer months, for it has undoubtedly proved its claim to be the sunniest south coast resort; a claim at one time or other put forth by all. The most convincing proof to the sceptical stranger will be the miles of glass houses ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... bounds, Within a washerwoman's grounds. Where, hanging on a line to dry, A crimson skirt inflamed his eye. With bellowings that woke the dead, He bent his formidable head, With pointed horns and gnarly forehead; Then, planting firm his shoulders horrid, Began, with rage made half insane, To paw the arid earth amain, Flinging the dust upon his flanks In desolating clouds and banks, The while his eyes' uneasy white Betrayed his doubt what foe the bright Red tent concealed, perchance, from sight. The garment, which, all undismayed, Had never paled ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... I should know it again. The hills around it, the beautiful lake, into which falls many a sparkling stream, rushing down amid rocks and tall trees. Would that we were there now instead of toiling over this arid desert. How delightful it would be to plunge into some cool and sheltered pool where no crocodile or hippopotamus could reach us. What draughts of water we would drink," and the black opened his mouth as if to pour some of the longed-for ...
— Ned Garth - Made Prisoner in Africa. A Tale of the Slave Trade • W. H. G. Kingston
... acrimony of the secretions formed under the influence of a tropical sun and torrid air, with a scanty and irregular supply of water. Plants, likewise, are preserved in a vegetative and living state, mid sandy and arid wastes, by the quantity of gum stored up in them. Hence succulent plants, such as cacti and others, may be found in the steppes and sandy plains of South America, verdant and healthy, though no rain may fall to convey fresh sap into them for months, or even a year. In the ...
— The Church of England Magazine - Volume 10, No. 263, January 9, 1841 • Various
... passed through Miss Norman's room, they formed a striking contrast, Sir John Dene short, thick-set, alert, with the stamp of the West-End upon all he wore; Sir Jasper Chambers tall, gaunt arid dingy, with a forehead like the bulging eaves of an Elizabethan house, and the lower portion of his face a riot of short grizzled grey hair that seemed to know neither coercion nor restraint. His neck appeared intent on thrusting itself as far as possible ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... something quite appalling to a young traveller like me; but my companions rode over everything with the greatest unconcern, confident in the sure-footedness of their horses. Having once ascended the mountains, we entered upon the arid plains of Persia, and here my master's knowledge of the country was again conspicuous. He knew every summit the moment it appeared, with the same certainty as an experienced Frank sailor recognizes a distant ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... behind, knelt; and fragments of his prayer were brought me by the wind, 'O Heavenly Father! let not this blooming soul wither away upon this arid earth! Lead it not into the temptation of human servitude; remove from it all sinful stain! Let it serve Thee alone! Thee and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... skin resembles a piece of good-for-nothing wrinkled parchment. The lips partake of the prevailing sallow tint, and the mouth hangs a little awry. From the cloth in which the head is so elaborately bandaged up strays forth, here and there, an arid lock of hair. The lack of united expression in his features produces an effect seldom observable in a living face. The eyes are lustreless, and densely black; or possibly (the suspicion is a startling one) we are looking ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne |
