|
|
|
More "Barren" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... still, you will become a known man. The booksellers will remember you, and one day when you reach home from a long and barren ramble, you will find a postcard awaiting you, announcing the discovery of some book for ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... were so nearly gone that, by spring, they were living partly on roots, dug from the ground. All their lives now depended on the crops of grain and vegetables which they could raise in the valley. They made the barren land good by spreading water from the little streams over it,—what we call "irrigating;" and they planted enough corn and grain and vegetables for all the people. Every one helped, and every one watched for the sprouting, with hopes, and ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant
... been a pirate for three years and had, by his industry, won for himself a fortune worth L150,000, but his Scotch partner, Morrison, being a frugal soul, had in the meantime saved an even larger sum. Eventually their ship was wrecked in a fog on a small barren island near Prince Edward Island, and Morrison and most of the crew were drowned, but Nelson and a few others were saved. At last he reached New York, where he lived the rest of his life in peaceful happiness with ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... laugh at the pedantry of our fathers, who complained of the times in which they lived; they are at pains to persuade us how much those were deceived; they pride themselves in defending things as they find them, and in exploding the barren sounds which had been reared into motives for action. To this their style is suited; and the manly tone of reason is exchanged for perpetual efforts at sneer and ridicule. This I hold to be an alarming crisis in the corruption of a state; when not only is virtue declined, and ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... Spirits Vital, and helps all inward Diseases that come of cold, it is good against the shaking of the Palsie; it cures the contraction of the Sinews, helps the conception of Women if they be Barren, it kills the Worms in the Belly and Stomach; it cures the cold Dropsie, and helps the Stone in the Bladder, and in the Reins of the back; it helps shortly the stinking breath, and whosoever useth this Water morning and evening, (and not too often) ...
— A Queens Delight • Anonymous
... Lances into Scythes shall bend, And the broad Falchion in a Plow-share end. Then Palaces shall rise; the joyful Son [6] Shall finish what his short-liv'd Sire begun; Their Vines a Shadow to their Race shall yield, And the same Hand that sow'd shall reap the Field. The Swain in barren Desarts with Surprize [7] Sees Lillies spring, and sudden Verdure rise; And Starts, amidst the thirsty Wilds, to hear, New Falls of Water murmuring in his Ear: On rifted Rocks, the Dragon's late Abodes, The green Reed trembles, and the Bulrush ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... old man when we first met him. He died before we left that part of the country. His last illness was preceded by a drunken spree, during which some rougish boys painted a barren fig-tree on his bald head. He died soon afterward. Notwithstanding the efforts of those who prepared the body for burial, his head went to its last resting-place still marked by some of the paint that portrayed him as ...
— Trials and Triumphs of Faith • Mary Cole
... was their intercourse, viewed in Opdyke's eyes, to Scott it filled the whole horizon, the one near and vital fact which broke in upon its emptiness and cut away the barren wastes about him. He lived alternately upon the memory of Opdyke as he had seen him last, and upon the anticipations of their next meeting. His hours of table service, ceasing to be wearisome, had become veritable social functions, for was there ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... simplicity, and, consequently, with real fear and delight. She was, so to speak, shy before the multitude of the stars, and in this she had possessed herself of the only force which can prevent enjoyment being as black and barren as routine. The faculty of being shy is the first and the most delicate of the powers of enjoyment. The fear of the Lord ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... strangest countries in the world; and yet one which can be most simply described. One long straight strip of rich flat land, many hundred miles long, but only a very few miles broad. On either side of it, barren rocks and deserts of sand, and running through it from end to end, the great river Nile—'The River' of which the Bible speaks. This river the Egyptians looked on as divine: they worshipped it as a god; for on ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... inviting enough, but when the people came close, they were again disappointed; there were not more than three score and ten palm tress, and there were of stunted growth owing to a lack of water, for in spite of the presence of twelve wells of water, the soil was so barren and sandy that the wells were not sufficient to water it. [85] Here again the marvelous intercession of God in favor of the fate of Israel is shown, for the scant supply of water at Elim, which had hardly sufficed for seventy palm ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... the Smith residence was the farm of Alonzo Sanders, now owned by William T. Sampson, commander in the United States Navy. This farm is four miles south of Palmyra, on the road toward Canandaigua. It includes a barren hill which rises abruptly to the height of one hundred and fifty feet. The ridge runs almost due north and south, and from the summit there are beautiful views of the hills surrounding Canandaigua and Seneca Lakes. It is known to the present ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... of awe, wonder, and delight, he stood watching the line of light descending and making the beauties of the volcanic island start out of the gloom. The bands of cloud which hung round the sharp slope became roseate, golden, orange, and purple, and soon after the lad was gazing below the barren, glowing rocks at patches of golden green, then at the beginning of billows and deep valleys running down, the former of wonderful shades of green, the latter of deep dark velvety purple, across which silvery films of vapour ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... this anniversary of American independence to assess the dimensions of a kind deed. Nearly four score years ago the master of a whaling vessel sailing from this port rescued from a barren rock in the China Sea some Japanese fishermen. Among them was a young boy whom he brought home with him to Fairhaven, where he was given the advantages of New England life and sent to school with the boys and girls of the neighborhood, where he excelled in ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... confronted the person of a lad who might, judging from his size, be some seventeen years of age. His form was beautiful in its outline, and his step light and graceful; but the face, alas! that throne of the intellect was a barren waste, and his vacant eye and lolling lip showed at once that the poor boy was little less than an idiot. And yet, as he looked upon the slave, and saw the tear glistening in her eye, there seemed to be a flash ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray
... upon the globe, as we see it, is the result of this blind groping and putting forth of Nature in every direction, with failure of some of her ventures and the success of others, the circumstances, the environments, supplying the checks and supplying the stimulus, the seed falling upon the barren places just the same as upon the fertile. No discrimination on the part of Nature that we can express in the terms of our own consciousness, but ceaseless experiments in every possible direction. The only thing inexplicable is the inherent impulse to experiment, the original push, the ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... with my brethren in our prison-chamber, they expected that, according to our custom, something should be spoken out of the Word for our mutual edification. I felt myself, it being my turn to speak, so empty, spiritless, and barren, that I thought I should not have been able to speak among them so much as five words of truth with life and evidence. At last I cast mine eye upon this prophecy, when, after considering awhile, methought I perceived something of that jasper in whose light you find this holy ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... thousand feet high—indeed, the range of the Andes is one of the highest in the world. It now appeared at the hour the master said it would, standing up rocky and broken, from the very margin of the ocean. As the frigate drew nearer, the land looked very dry and barren, and utterly unworthy ...
— Ben Hadden - or, Do Right Whatever Comes Of It • W.H.G. Kingston
... into their method of life, and conform to their rules, and this proves a happiness to both nations: for according to their constitution, such care is taken of the soil, that it becomes fruitful enough for both, though it might be otherwise too narrow and barren for any one of them. But if the natives refuse to conform themselves to their laws, they drive them out of those bounds which they mark out for themselves, and use force if they resist. For they account it a very just cause of war, for a nation to hinder others from possessing a part of that soil, ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... between the sun and earth seem figured in his mind as so many elastic strings; indeed he accepts the assumed instantaneity of gravity as the expression of the enormous elasticity of the 'lines of weight.' Such views, fruitful in the case of magnetism, barren, as yet, in the case of gravity, explain his efforts to transform this latter force. When he goes into the open air and permits his helices to fall, to his mind's eye they are tearing through the lines of gravitating power, ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... Gazette,' Horace once wrote to a fine and titled lady, 'is very barren of weeds.' Such, however, was rarely the case. Peers, and still better, peeresses,—politicians, actors, actresses,—the poor poet who knew not where to dine, the Maecenas who was 'fed with dedications'—the belle of the season, the demirep ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... Trevor Clarke informs me that he crossed two members of the Pine class (Myatt's B. Queen and Keen's Seedling), with the wood and hautbois, and that in each case he raised only a single seedling; one of these fruited, but was almost barren. Mr. W. Smith, of York, has raised similar hybrids with equally poor success.[719] We thus see[720] that the European and American species can with some difficulty be crossed; but it is improbable that hybrids sufficiently ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... awakening of the faculties in the manner described. There is no doubt of the value of manual training as an aid in giving definiteness, directness, exactness to the mind, but mere technical training alone will be barren of those results, in general discriminating culture, which we ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... yellow with age; but the fatal Cui bono? disheartened me, and I flung it aside. Even my love for the sea had vanished, and I had begun to hate it. During the first few years of my ministry I spent hours by the cliffs and shores, or out on the heaving waters. Then the loneliness of the desert and barren wastes repelled me, and I had begun to loathe it. Altogether I was soured and discontented, and I had a dread consciousness that my life was a failure. All its possibilities had passed without being seized and utilized. I was the barren fig tree, fit only to be cut down. May I escape the ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... face of the cliff, the huge table-rock and flagstaff, the many quaint blocks, pillars and wild escarpments, and the numerous domestic animals, such as mastiffs, pigs, ravens, and goats, all congregated together in a small bay, and literally separated from the world by the barren waste land above, and the huge cliffs and restless sea below, would be beyond the scope of "N. & Q.," though it is worth a note in passing, that for the tourist a visit to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 218, December 31, 1853 • Various
... gazed gloomily at her, for it was very present to his mind that their earlier meetings had, for him, been barren of ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... think such operations held any interest, even for the hungry, when there seemed to be nothing to cook. A few sticks blazing tamely in the dust, a frying-pan, half a tin bucket of lard, some water, and barren plates and knives and forks, and three silent men attending to them—that was all. But the travellers came to see. These waifs drew near us, and stood, a sad, lone, shifting fringe of audience; four to ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... fancy takes wing, Restless am I, ill at ease. Pleasures the city can bring Lose now their power to please. Barren, all barren, are these, Town life's a tedious tale; That cup is drained to the lees— Ho, for ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... a sickness full of woes, All remedies refusing; A plant that with most cutting grows, Most barren with best using. Why so? More we enjoy it, more it dies; If not enjoyed, it sighing ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... To rattle on the ever barren boughs, And friendlier sound was heard. Beside his door Wayworn the messengers of Patrick stood, And showed the gifts, and held his missive forth. Then learned that lost one all the truth. That sage Confessed by miracles, that prophet vouched ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... and fair, Clad in colors of the air Which to those who journey near Barren, brown and rough appear, Still we tread the same coarse way, The ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... as on Captain Falkenberg's land; the ground was stony and barren, covered with heather and pine needles for miles round. They had felled too freely here; the sawmills had taken over much, leaving next to no young wood. It was a melancholy ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... name and influence on the side of the malcontents, increase the difficulties of the government, and prolong the fatal want of moral and political unity, without which the mere material fact of union is barren, and unproductive of benefit to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... circled the house, denuded of undergrowth, seeming always to be edging forlornly closer to the upstanding edifice for comfort because it was barren and unfriendly, too, the new-fallen snow lay shadowy and soft, clothing the barrenness with grace. Giant pine and spruce that had survived his invasion stood up proud and green under the crown of ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... close and small the hedges lie! What streaks of meadows cross the eye! A step methinks may pass the stream, So little distant dangers seem; So we mistake the future's face, Eyed through Hope's deluding glass; As yon summits soft and fair Clad in colours of the air, Which to those who journey near, Barren, brown, and rough appear; Still we tread the same coarse way; The ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... mine to such fine limitations of width, or exclusion of unpayable patches, as would appear practicable when sampling, that is by the inclusion when mining of a certain amount of barren rock. Even in deposits of about normal stoping width, it is impossible to prevent the breaking of a certain amount of waste, even if the ore occurrence is ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... and shamefaced about the hut. It shrank and drooped and faded in its barren field, and seemed to cling only by sufferance to the edge of ...
— The Mansion • Henry Van Dyke
... fat priests, and wandering minstrels, and crusades and tournaments; England in rush-strewn bowers and under green boughs; the England in which Wamba jested and Blondel sung. To enter into that realm is to leave the barren world of prose; to feel again the cool, sweet winds of summer upon the brow of youth; to catch, in fitful glimpses, the shimmer of the Lincoln green in the sunlit, golden glades of the forest, and to hear the merry note of the huntsman commingled, ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... to the 31st of October Maurice was more than usually a victim to this malady of distrust and barren speculation. He listened now approvingly to crude fancies that would formerly have brought a smile of contempt to his lips. Why should he not? Were not imbecility and crime abroad in the land? Was it unreasonable ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... and broken board, How can it bear the painter's dye! The harp of strained and tuneless chord, How to the minstrel's skill reply! To aching eyes each landscape lowers, To feverish pulse each gale blows chill, And Araby's or Eden's bowers Were barren as this ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... mine eyes to close, Dig my grave 'mid the vines on the hill's fair side; For though deep in earth may my bones repose, The juice of the grape shall their food provide. Ah, bury me not in a barren land, Or Death will appear to me dread and drear! While fearless I'll wait what he hath in hand I An the scent of the vineyard ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... sang above the vineyards of the world. And after him the vines with woven hands Clambered and clung, and everywhere unfurled Triumphing green above the barren lands; Till high as gardens grow, he climbed, he stood, Sun-crowned with life and strength, and singing toil, And looked upon his work; and it was good: The corn, ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... an old Corycian swain to know, Lord of few acres, and those barren too, Unfit for sheep or vines, and more unfit to sow: Yet, lab'ring well his little spot of ground, Some scatt'ring pot-herbs here and there he found, Which, cultivated with his daily care And bruis'd with vervain, ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... were routed out, and all saw the rugged outline of the great island—a continent itself, as large as the United States and much the same shape—stretching away to the southward and slowly dwindling into low, sandy, barren shores ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... sands to Calais. Our first care was to procure horses, and although wearied by our night of watching and toil, some of our party immediately went in quest of these in the wide fields of the unenclosed and now barren plain round Calais. We divided ourselves, like seamen, into watches, and some reposed, while others prepared the morning's repast. Our foragers returned at noon with only six horses—on these, Adrian and I, and four others, proceeded on our journey towards the great ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... contact with the "world" (plan of the founding of Platonopolis). Political affairs are at bottom as much a matter of indifference to Neoplatonism as material things in general. The idealism of the new philosophy was too high to admit of its being naturalised in the despiritualised, tyrannical and barren creation of the Byzantine Empire, and this Empire itself needed unscrupulous and despotic police officials, not noble philosophers. Important and instructive, therefore, as the experiments are, which were made from time to time ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... knoll, if there was anything tall, it would spoil the Fairacres' view. So Jacob built this 'Spite House.' He made it as ugly as he could, and he did everything outrageous to make great-grandfather disgusted. He named this rocky barren 'Bareacre,' and that little gully yonder he called 'Glenpolly,' because his enemy had named the beautiful ravine we know as 'Glenellen.' Polly and Ellen were the wives' names, and I've heard they grieved greatly over ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... trim parterres, with the finest turf, to improve fruit trees, to seek out and perfect edible roots and herbs at once for man and cattle. We owe to the Dutch that scurvy and leprosy have been banished from England, that continuous crops have taken the place of barren fallows, that the true rotation of crops has been discovered and perfected, that the population of these islands has been increased and that the cattle and sheep in England are ten times what they were in numbers and three times what they were ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... the third hour, out of the pass through which, skirting the base of Mount Gilead, they had journeyed since leaving Ramoth, the party came upon the barren steppe east of the sacred river. Opposite them they saw the upper limit of the old palm lands of Jericho, stretching off to the hill-country of Judea. Ben-Hur's blood ran quickly, for he knew the ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... Scott exhibits a wonderful knowledge of human nature as well as surprising skill in embodying his perceptions so as to enable others to become participators in that knowledge. Excuse the want of news in this very barren epistle, for I really have none to communicate. Emily and Anne beg to be kindly remembered to you. Give my best love to your mother and sisters, and as it is very late permit me to conclude with the assurance of my unchanged, unchanging, and unchangeable affection for you.—Adieu, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... views may be, it was not for such discoveries as these that astronomers examined the surface of the moon. The examination of mere peculiarities of physical condition is, after all, but barren labour, if it lead to no discovery of physical variation. The principal charm of astronomy, as indeed of all observational science, lies in the study of change—of progress, development, and decay, and specially of systematic variations taking place in regularly-recurring cycles. And it is ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor
... seventy-five miles from the seacoast on the south. If Your Majesty will look into the middle distance when the second picture is again thrown on the screen you will see some small, dark objects; these are one of those immense herds of caribou, which happen to be moving south over this vast barren at the time of year that these pictures were taken—that is, ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... Poetry like this in the earliest ages of the world!" Of Elihu's contentions in chapter xxxiv., "A good many truths, but served up with bitter herbs, not with love": on chapter xxxvii., "Beautiful poetry, but a very bleak and barren picture of God; hard, arbitrary, selfish, self-centred, striking terror into His works, and compelling obedience and service. Nature cannot reveal Him, Elihu!" On the next chapter, "The God of nature turns the picture, and behold it is no more destruction and blind force, but beneficence and gracious ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... without considering that nothing is beautiful that is displaced. Hence we see so many edifices raised that the raisers can never inhabit, being too large for their fortunes. Vistas are laid open over barren heaths, and apartments contrived for a coolness very agreeable in Italy, but killing in the north of Britain: thus every woman endeavours to breed her daughter a fine lady, qualifying her for a station in which she will never appear, ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... great tribulation, shall some day be where they are. While man in this world will meet with sorrow, he can by the grace of God always rejoice. Alum thrown into muddy water will clarify it. The grace of God thrown into a cup of sorrow will turn it to joy. Sorrows are needful. It is only a barren waste where ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... affection. I sometimes feared it was too good to last. Mrs. Branard in particular, I shall ever remember with grateful and affectionate regard. She was more like a mother to me, than a mistress, and I shall ever look back to the time I spent with her, as a bright spot in the otherwise barren desert of my life. Better, far better would it have been for me had I never left her. But I became alarmed, and thought the convent people were after me. It was no idle whim, no imaginary terror. I had good cause to fear, for I had several times seen a priest ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... passage round "The Horn," or by the more uncertain, and at the same time imperfected route, across the Isthmus. But as California was on this continent, he knew that there was a way thither, though it might lead through trackless deserts and barren wastes. These were not enough to daunt his determined spirit. He bent his way to the "Father of Waters," and worked his way as he could, till he found himself at "Independence," in health, and with no less strength, and with 150 dollars in his purse. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... Aldgate proving barren, he turned up into the quieter Minories, skilfully dodging the mechanical cuff of the constable at the corner as he passed, and watching with some interest the efforts of a stray mongrel to get itself adopted. Its victim had sworn at ...
— Light Freights • W. W. Jacobs
... barren and unfertile, the olive groves bear little fruit. I wandered through the lonely country, towards the mountains; the day was overcast and the clouds hung sluggishly overhead. As I walked, suddenly I heard a melancholy ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... of his political campaign in the North, upon the barren banks of the Neva, which, in causing much entertainment to the inhabitants of the fertile banks of the Seine, has not a little ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... endless instant, time seemed to stop. The barren moat and green weeds floated beneath him, and the only reminder of his rapid drop was the air, which whistled past his ears. Suddenly, motion was restored again, and they lit with a jarring crash, just at ...
— Millennium • Everett B. Cole
... the Elizabethan period, so rich in genius of every other type, seems to have been almost wholly barren of liturgical power. Men had not ceased to write prayers, as a stout volume in the Parker Society's Library abundantly evidences; but they had ceased to write them with the terseness and melody that give to the ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... thy path shines bright and clear; Daily thou breath'st the mountain air; But mine is in the barren wild, Where naught looks bright to ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... to spread a cheerful feast, And then thrust in our faces These barren scraps (to say the least) Of ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... to the most insignificant minutiae, and reduced to questions of casuistry, was the only study. This exclusively theological and canonical culture contributed in no respect to refine the intellect. It was something analogous to the barren doctrine of the Mussulman fakir, to that empty science discussed round about the mosques, and which is a great expenditure of time and useless argumentation, by no means calculated to advance the right discipline of the mind. The theological education of the modern ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... conscious of failure and disappointment in life? Are there those of us whose sorrow lies deeper than that which is personal—sorrow over our failure in Christ's work, pain over a life's ministry for Christ that has known no victorious evangel? Turn your eyes from that barren sea to Him who stands upon the shore; He shall yet make you a fisher of men. Turn your eyes from that bleak, dark sea of wasted effort where you have fared so ill; it is always dark till Jesus comes, it is always light when He has come. There is a new day breaking for the ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... motive,—not in feeding him, but in involving her name and fortune in an affair so strangely flavored?... This opened up a desert waste of barren speculation. "What's anybody's motive, who figures in this thundering dime-novel?" demanded the American, almost contemptuously. And—for the hundredth time—gave it up; the day should declare it, if so hap he lived to see that ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... Palma is about a hundred and forty miles; so the morning found us skirting the southwestern extremity of Majorca,—a barren coast, thrusting low headlands, of gray rock into the sea, and hills covered with parched and stunted chaparral in the rear. The twelfth century, in the shape of a crumbling Moorish watch-tower, alone greeted us. As we advanced eastward into ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... other nations. As yet the plains of Pisa had not been reduced to marsh-lands by the combined negligence and jealousy of the Florentine Republic, neither had the rich country that lay around Rome been converted into a barren desert by the wars of the Colonna and Orsini families; not yet had the Marquis of Marignan razed to the ground a hundred and twenty villages in the republic of Siena alone; and though the Maremma ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... rays of the sun which gilded the dew-drops that hung upon leaf and blossom, and, while giving a brighter beauty to each rare flower, brought everything within the limits of ordinary experience. The young man rejoiced that, in the heart of the barren city, he had the privilege of overlooking this spot of lovely and luxuriant vegetation. It would serve, he said to himself, as a symbolic language to keep him in communion with Nature. Neither the sickly and thoughtworn Dr. Giacomo Rappaccini, it ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... you get there by dawn!" he called; and Douglas saw the two figures, dim in the starlight, move upward on the barren shoulder of the mountain. He allowed the Moose to circle for a moment, then he drove the rowells deep. The snorting horse leaped up the steep incline, at a pace that shortly left him groaning for breath. But ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... a flat and uninviting plain—poor and barren, as the uncultivated border-land of the two kingdoms—Guines and its castle offered little attraction, and if possible less accommodation, to the gay throng now to be gathered within its walls. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... sorry, Gentlemen, the Road was so barren of Money. When my Friends are in Difficulties, I am always glad that my Fortune can be serviceable to them. [Gives them Money.] You see, Gentlemen, I am not a mere Court Friend, who professes every thing ...
— The Beggar's Opera • John Gay
... the close of earthly life meant actual night. No new dawn, no mysterious after-life shone upon her with magical gleams of an unknown light upon the other side of the dark river. She had accepted the Materialist's bitter and barren creed, and had taught herself that this little life was all. She had learned to scorn the idea of a great Artificer outside the universe, a mighty spirit riding amidst the clouds, and ruling the course of nature and the fate of man. She had schooled herself ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... only a few hundred feet away? Perhaps it was really a wagon. He stared stupidly, not moving. There were no dream-horses to this ghost-wagon. There was no sign of life. If captured by the Indians, it would not have been left intact. But how came a wagon into this barren world? ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... later when Number 208 left the Orphan Asylum on ——nd Street, they passed quietly out of the child's actual life and entered the fitfully lighted chambers of her childish memory wherein, at times, they paced with noiseless footsteps as once in the barren halls of her ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... and perhaps brain, with little or no soul. Sugar-coat the grim truth as we may, and ward off with outward plausible words, denials, explanations, to the mental inward perception of the land this blank is plain; a barren void exists. For the meanings and maturer purposes of these States are not the constructing of a new world of politics merely, and physical comforts for the million, but even more determinedly, in range with science and the modern, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Tools to pursue our voyage, and the next day stood in for the island of Sharping, the true image of Fontainebleau, for the land is so very lean that the bones, that is, the rocks, shoot through its skin. Besides, 'tis sandy, barren, unhealthy, and unpleasant. Our pilot showed us there two little square rocks which had eight equal points in the shape of a cube. They were so white that I might have mistaken them for alabaster or snow, had he not assured us they were made ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... the story of a man asleep and dreaming, instead of the plain, honest, and straightforward narrative of fact. I will therefore postpone the Story of the Hungry Student till I get into the plains of Italy, or into the barren hills of that peninsula, or among the over-well-known towns of Tuscany, or in some other place where a little padding will do neither you nor me ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... a common joke at an old English feast. These animated pies were often introduced "to set on," as Hamlet says, "a quantity of barren spectators to laugh;" there is an instance of a dwarf undergoing such an incrustation. About the year 1630, king Charles and his queen were entertained by the duke and dutchess of Buckingham, at Burleigh on the Hill, on which occasion JEFFERY HUDSON, the dwarf, was served ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... acquaintance with botanical science might almost be said to consist in the conventional application of a number of arbitrary terms, or in the recollection of a number of names, teratology was regarded as a chaos whose meaningless confusion it were vain to attempt to render intelligible,—as a barren field not ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... change of counsel charges the Most High. What hence infers Lorenzo? Can it be? Matter immortal? And shall spirit die? Above the nobler, shall less noble rise? Shall man alone, for whom all else revives, No resurrection know? Shall man alone, Imperial man! be sown in barren ground, Less privileged than grain, ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... Rhoda with her first conscious delight in it. She gazed round on the farm, under a quick new impulse of affection for her old home. And whose hand was it that could alone sustain the working of the farm, and had done so, without reward? Her eyes travelled up to Wrexby Hall, perfectly barren of any feeling that she was to enter the place, aware only that it was full of pain for her. She accused herself, but could not accept the charge of her having ever hoped for transforming events that should twist and throw the dear old ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... long errors of the way In which our wandering predecessors went, And like th' old Hebrews many years did stray In desarts but of small extent, Bacon like Moses led us forth at last, The barren Wilderness he past, Did on the very Border stand Of the blest promised land, And from the Mountain Top of his Exalted Wit Saw it himself and shew'd us it. But Life did never to one Man allow Time to discover Worlds and conquer too; ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... expository illustrative garment of Fact, or else is of no value to him. Romantic readers of his Literature are much disappointed in consequence, and pronounce it bad Literature;—and sure enough, in several senses, it is not to be called good! Bad Literature, they say; shallow, barren, most unsatisfactory to a reader of romantic appetites. Which is a correct verdict, as to the romantic appetites and it. But to the man himself, this quality of mind is of immense moment and advantage; and forms truly the basis of all he was good for in life. Once for ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... the energy, whatever it is, that pushes through the crust of life, as the flower pushes through the mould. Our dulness, our acquiescence in monotonous ways, arise from our not realising how infinitely important that force is, how much it has done for man, how barren life is without it. Here in England many of us have a dark suspicion of all that is joyful, inherited perhaps from our Puritan ancestry, a fear of yielding ourselves to its influence, a terror of being grimly repaid for indulgence, an old superstitious dread of somehow ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... lay down and began preparing fresh pieces of betel-nut to chew; but Murray's rest was short, and jumping up again, he took a geological hammer from his belt, and began to crack and chip the stones and masses of rock which peered from the barren-looking ground, the two boys, one of whom carried ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... vacant as their heads, will answer, Where are they? The tree shall be known by its fruit: and seeing that this great tree, with all its specious seeming, brings forth no fruit, I do denounce it as a barren fig. ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... predominate too far over their impulses to allow of their becoming partisans, is offensive alike to the aristocrat and the democrat. By the one he is denounced as a man who holds incendiary principles, by the other as a half-hearted "trimmer." He has no sympathy, as he says, with "that vague, barren pathos, that useless effervescence of enthusiasm, which plunges, with the spirit of a martyr, into an ocean of generalities, and which always reminds me of the American sailor, who had so fervent an enthusiasm for General ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... cause of shame; the moment I denied my faith, and put on a visage of brass, great possibilities opened before me. Of course I understand the moralist's position. It behoved me, though I knew that a barren and solitary track would be my only treading to the end, to keep courageously onward. If I can't believe that any such duty is imposed upon me, where is the obligation to persevere, the morality of doing so? That is the worst ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... Malemute Kid. Before him alone did the priest cast off the sacerdotal garb and stand naked. And why not? These two men knew each other. Had they not shared the last morsel of fish, the last pinch of tobacco, the last and inmost thought, on the barren stretches of Bering Sea, in the heartbreaking mazes of the Great Delta, on the terrible winter journey from Point Barrow to the Porcupine? Father Roubeau puffed heavily at his trail-worn pipe, and gazed on the ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... neighbourhood by the nickname of Skin-flint, in illusion to her keen business habits (her real name is lost in oblivion), but has of late years been the property of a German from Petersburg. The village lies on the slope of a barren hill, which is cut in half from top to bottom by a tremendous ravine. It is a yawning chasm, with shelving sides hollowed out by the action of rain and snow, and it winds along the very centre of the village street; it separates the two sides of the unlucky ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... won, How sweet to feel your festal fame, In woman's glance instinctive thrown: Repose is yours—your deed is known, It musks the amber wine; It lives, and sheds a litle from storied days Rich as October sunsets brown, Which make the barren place to shine. ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... learning anything under heaven? Did He say one word about intellectual liberty? Did he say one word about reason or about justice? Did He make the slightest effort to improve them? All that He did in the world was to give them one poor little miserable, barren command, "Thou shalt not eat of a certain fruit." That's all that amounted to anything; and, when they sinned, did this great God take them in the arms of His love and endeavor to reform them? No; He simply put upon them a curse. When they were expelled He said to the woman: "I will greatly multiply ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... range it was very pleasant to find, as one constantly did, by the side of some "motte" (Texan for a considerable cluster of scrub growth), or beneath the shade of a great live-oak, or on the barren face of a divide, the little canvas A-tents of the herders, nestled cosily to circular pens for the sheep, and generally surrounded by brush to prevent the intrusion of inquisitive cattle. Within the tent a sheepskin or so, stretched on the ground or on a lattice of branches, for his bed, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... present fame as a Spa. It was a hedge alehouse, where the Border farmers of either country often stopped to refresh themselves and their nags, in their way to and from the fairs and trysts in Cumberland, and especially those who came from or went to Scotland, through a barren and lonely district, without either road or pathway, emphatically called the Waste of Bewcastle. At the period when the adventures described in the novel are supposed to have taken place, there were many instances of attacks by freebooters ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the reverse of that presented by many high mountains on land. For these are white with snow at the top, while their bases are clothed with an abundant and gaudily-coloured vegetation. But the coral cones would look grey and barren below, while their summits would be gay with a richly-coloured parterre ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... journey leaves one more and more at a loss to discover the sources of the wealth of this enormous country. The soil, for miles and miles a dead flat, is now barren as a desert, and we meet hardly a sign of active traffic. During the night we certainly did encounter a long train of heavily-laden bullock-waggons; but the merchandize was gunpowder, and its destination was up, ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... in conversation some years ago, till past midnight, with an old man. He had been for years wandering on the barren mountains of sin. That night he wanted to get back. We prayed, and prayed, and prayed, till light broke in upon him; and he went away rejoicing. The next night he sat in front of me when I was preaching, and I think that I never saw any one look so sad and wretched in all my life. ...
— The Way to God and How to Find It • Dwight Moody
... essential, and how that knowledge had been gained: some of it from the experience of early explorers,—how to avoid the dreaded scurvy, how to build a ship that could withstand the tremendous pressure of the floes; and some from the Eskimos,—how to live in that barren region, and how to travel with dogs and sledges;—and some, too, from Peary's own early experiences,—how he had struggled for twenty years to reach the goal, and had added this experience to that until ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... reflect upon the vast barren wilderness of human intellect which on every side stretches around us—to know that thousands of powerful minds are condemned by the hopeless degradation of their circumstances to struggle on in obscurity, without ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... the slumbering city the rising moon shines over a wide expanse of glistening water. It silvers the snow upon a barren heath between two shores, and shortens with each passing minute the shadows of countless headstones that bear no names, only numbers. The breakers that beat against the bluff wake not those who sleep there. In the deep trenches they ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... Stone was left to the right, for there was this time no party of allies to meet; and very soon the great heavy mass of barren rocky hill loomed up before them, higher and higher, till the party were out from among the trees which had so far concealed their march, and proof was soon ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... wrote to a trusted servant that all his thoughts were bent on thwarting Philip.[10] While the Christian navies were fighting at Lepanto, the King of France was treating with the Turks. His menacing attitude in the following year kept Don Juan in Sicilian waters, and made his victory barren for Christendom. Encouraged by French protection, Venice withdrew from the League. Even in Corsica there was a movement which men interpreted as a prelude to the storm that France was raising against the empire of Spain. Rome trembled in expectation ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... blooms beside another, and when the wind rises, the delicate white petals flutter through the air and fall among the bright blossoms in the grass, and on the clear surface of the river. There are also numerous barren cliffs on the higher portions of the mountains, and where they towered in the most rugged, inaccessible ridges, our ancestors built their fastnesses, to secure themselves from the attacks of their enemies. Our castle stands on a mountain-ridge in the midst of the valley of the Saale. There ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... exhausted from want of supplies, but the enemy had been much encouraged by our long inaction. Of Wellington we had no great fear. We had found him to be brave and cautious, but with little enterprise. Besides, in that barren country his ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... thought of her as he set his traps; he thought of her, as, hard on the trail of moose, or deer, or wolf, or bear, he scoured the valleys and hills; in the shadow of the trees at twilight, in fancy he saw her lurking; even amidst the black, barren tree-trunks down by the river banks. His eyes and ears were ever alert with the half-dread expectation of seeing her or hearing her voice. The scene Victor had described of the white huntress leaning upon ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... principal European Powers appeared to be willing and even eager to become mandatories over territories possessing natural resources which could be profitably developed and showed an unwillingness to accept mandates for territories which, barren of mineral or agricultural wealth, would be continuing liabilities rather than assets. This is not stated by way of criticism, but only in explanation of what ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... swan flew away. The prince looked after her for a long time, and then continued his journey. He travelled on and on and on, over high mountains, through dark forests, across barren deserts, and so to the middle of a vast plain where every green thing had been burnt up by the rays of the sun. Not a single tree, not even a bush or a plant of any kind was to be seen. No bird was heard to sing, no insect to hum, no breath of air to stir the stillness of this land ...
— Fairy Tales of the Slav Peasants and Herdsmen • Alexander Chodsko
... been above described—an uninterrupted succession of rich landscape, in which every thing is united which constitutes the picturesque. The country sometimes rises into hills, and even mountains; none of which are so barren but to have vineyards, or gardens, to their very summits. In many of them, where the surface is common property, the peasantry, in order to make the most of its superficial area, have dug it into terraces, on which each of them has his vineyard, or garden for herbs, corn, and fruits. ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... hill-sides. The farm-house of Dalemore, twelve miles from Thurso as the crow flies, and rather more than thirteen miles from Wick, occupies, as nearly as may be, the centre of the county; and yet there, as on the sea-shore, the boulder-clay is charged with its fragments of marine shells. Though so barren elsewhere on the east coast of Scotland, the clay is everywhere in Caithness a shell-bearing deposit; and no sooner had Mr. Dick determined the fact for himself, at the expense of many a fatiguing ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... a party of slaves, hidden in the long grasses, trap and catch birds. Higher still, boat-making, rope-making, and fish-curing are going on. Finally, in the highest register of all, next the ceiling, are depicted the barren hills and undulating plains of the desert, where greyhounds chase the gazelle, and hunters trammel big game with the lasso. Each longitudinal section corresponds, in fact, with a plane of the landscape; but the artist, instead of placing his planes in perspective, ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... relic of the past, to be reverently enshrined but not seriously accepted? Far from it. The glory of the Genesis story lies in its wonderful power to grow. It strengthened the minds of a persecuted tribe wandering in the desert who finally settled in a small and barren country. It brought the truth to them so clearly that they have persuaded much of the world of that truth and bid fair to persuade the rest. The story has grown with the mind of man. As it served the Hebrew in his time it has grown to serve others to this day. ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... thing is true of all Crusaders, they are not necessarily Christians. And there is that about Chesterton which sometimes makes me wonder whether, after all, he is not "a child of the French Revolution" in a sense he himself does not suspect. He has cursed the barren fig-tree of modern religious movements. But there comes a suspicion that he denies too much; that from between those supple sentences and those too plausible arguments one may catch a glimpse of the features ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... their money wages depend on the productiveness of the least fertile land, or least productive agricultural capital: on the point which cultivation has reached in its downward progress—in its encroachments on the barren lands, and its gradually increased strain upon the powers of the more fertile. Now, the force which urges cultivation in this downward course is the increase of people; while the counter-force, which checks the descent, is the improvement of agricultural science and practice, enabling the same soil ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... has been singularly barren of heroic figures, perhaps because the magnitude of the events has called forth such a multitude of individually heroic acts that no one can be placed before the rest; yet, when this greatest phase of history ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... institution would shortly possess many agents in Spain, who, with far more power and better opportunities than I myself could ever expect to possess, would scatter abroad the seed of the gospel, and make of a barren and thirsty wilderness ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... over a large town which could be none other than Antioch. Half-an-hour more brought him within sight of another city, doubtless Aleppo. He still steered almost due east, though a point or two southward would be more direct, because he wished to avoid the Syrian desert; a breakdown in such a barren tract of country would mean a fatal delay. Soon afterwards he reached a broad full river, ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... view. Tributaries join. Nicholls's Fish ponds. Characteristics of watering places. Red hill. Another spring. Unvarying scene. Frost, thermometer 28 degrees. A bluff hill. Gibson's Desert again. Remarks upon the Ashburton. The desert's edge. Barren and wretched region. Low ridges and spinifex. Deep native well. Thermometer 18 degrees. Salt bush and Acacia flats. A rocky cleft. Sandhills in sight. Enter the desert. The solitary caravan. Severe ridges ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... and the freed slaves sang hymns of joy to God. I saw the roads, five miles wide, level, barren, and crossed with ruts, where Northern and Southern armies had marched, and where villages and plantations had once been. I saw countless friends or acquaintances, who had once smiled with pitying ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... that the matter of most consequence was the grip with which they held their convictions and their willingness to sacrifice the interests on which they could lay their hands, in loyalty to some nobler faith. He taught that beliefs by hearsay are not only barren but ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... Guelder roses, all large and disorderly for want of trimming; there were leafy walls of scarlet beans and late peas; there was a row of bushy filberts in one direction, and in another a huge apple-tree making a barren circle under its low-spreading boughs. But what signified a barren patch or two? The garden was so large. There was always a superfluity of broad beans—it took nine or ten of Adam's strides to get to the ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... view of beautiful Siout standing in the midst of a loop of the Nile was ravishing. A green deeper and brighter than England, graceful minarets in crowds, a picturesque bridge, gardens, palm-trees, then the river beyond it, the barren yellow cliffs as a frame all around that. At our feet a woman was being carried to the grave, and the boys' voices rang out the Koran full and clear as the long procession—first white turbans and then ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and say, 'Tis all barren': and so it is: and so is all the world to him who will not cultivate the fruits ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... February 15, 1609, Shakespeare, who was apparently represented by his solicitor and kinsman, Thomas Greene, obtained judgment from a jury against Addenbroke for the payment of L6 and L1 5s. costs, but Addenbroke left the town, and the triumph proved barren. Shakespeare avenged himself by proceeding against one Thomas Horneby, who had acted ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... man's search for comfort and security in an alien and hostile world. The simple demand of the human heart is to be recognized and to be loved. Love is the magic touch that transforms all that is barren and cold into all that is rich and warm and fruitful. But man is neither loved nor recognized by the immensities of the universe. And in face of the illimitable stretches of time and space even the stoutest heart involuntarily quakes. We cannot consider the vast power of the universe ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... version of the "Poetics" of Aristotle, with illustrations drawn liberally from recent authors, was perhaps begotten of a natural wish to satisfy the public that qualifications for the laurel were not wholly wanting. A barren devotion to the drama was always his foible. It was freely indulged. With few exceptions, his plays were affairs of partnership with Samuel James Arnold, a writer of ephemeral popularity, whose tale of "The Haunted Island" was wildly admired by readers of the intensely romantic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... and Lord Foppington, Western and Tom Jones, my Father and my Uncle Toby, Millament and Sir Sampson Legend, Don Quixote and Sancho, Gil Blas and Guzman d'Alfarache, Count Fathom and Joseph Surface—have all met and exchanged commonplaces on the barren plains of the haute litterature—toil slowly on to the Temple of Science, seen a long way off upon a level, and end in one dull compound of ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... journals, Mr. O. P. Q. Philander Smiff, and again, in a lower social scale, Mr. Alfred Sloper, became recognised by a later generation. This unfortunate gentleman of the Bar—a gentleman always, in spite of his weakness of intellect and character—was shown in all the difficulties germane to his barren profession, and in all the ludicrous situations that came natural to the man. Many of his quaint aphorisms are still remembered, such as that, elsewhere recorded—"As my laundress makes my bed, so I must lie upon it," and "The clerk brings down his master's grey horsehair ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... of affection—is painfully indicated by the circumstance that wives were, among many races, valued (apart from grossly utilitarian and sensual motives) as mothers only, and that the men had a right, of which they commonly availed themselves, of repudiating a wife if she proved barren. On the lower Congo, says Dupont (96), a wife is not respected unless she has at least three children. Among the Somali, barren women are dieted and dosed, and if that proves unavailing they are usually chased away. (Paulitschke, B.E.A.S., 30.) If a Greenlander's wife did not bear ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... had been accustomed, each day at noon, to eat his salame and drink his Calabrian wine, and seated himself against a column. Here he could enjoy a view from both ends of the ruin. In the one direction it was only a narrow strip of sea, with the barren coast below, and the cloudless sky above it; in the other, a purple valley, rising far away on the flank of the Apennines; both pictures set between Doric pillars. He lit a cigar, and with a smile of contented thought abandoned ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... distance,—some delicious landscape! My road conducted me through countries where 110 The war has not yet reached. Life, life, my father— My venerable father, life has charms Which we have ne'er experienced. We have been But voyaging along its barren coasts, Like some poor ever-roaming horde of pirates, 115 That, crowded in the rank and narrow ship, House on the wild sea with wild usages, Nor know aught of the main land, but the bays Where safeliest they may venture a thieves' landing. Whate'er in the inland dales ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... narrow and irregular sea,** are the countries of Europe, rich in meadows and cultivated fields. On its right, from the Caspian Sea, extend the snowy and naked plains of Tartary. Returning in this direction that white space is the vast and barren desert of Cobi, which separates China from the rest of the world. You see that empire in the furrowed plain which obliquely rounds itself off from our sight. On yonder coasts, those ragged tongues of land and scattered points are the peninsulas and islands of the ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... the bottom of a hill and started up another, and I found myself walking ahead of the 'mobile. I turned around to look for the little girl, and instead of her I found a kitten capering beside me, and when we reached the top of the hill we were looking out over a most barren and desolate waste of sand-heaps without a speck of vegetation anywhere, and the kitten said, 'This view beggars all admiration.' Then all at once we were in a great group of people and I undertook to repeat to them the kitten's remark, but ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... line, eight or nine miles; and the country about two miles to the southward of Port Jackson abounds with high trees, and little or no underwood; but between that and Botany-Bay, it is all thick, low woods or shrubberies, barren heaths, and swamps; the land near the sea, although covered in many places with wood, is rocky from the water-side to the ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter
... abed with fresh morning smiling in through the open window, for the first time he looked forward, following the face he had pursued through his dreams, into the future. Its chambers he found ghastly barren. He visualised it as a vast unfurnished house. To the merry eye with which two days ago he had looked upon the world, the picture, had he then conjured it, would have given him no gloom. He would have thought ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... her on the barren moor, And call her on the hill, 'T is nothing but the heron's cry, And plover's answer shrill; My child is flown on wilder wings, Than they have ever spread, And I may even walk a waste That widened ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... them, but they did not come. The situation was the reverse of pleasant, the soil about was barren, and there were no shade or fruit trees. It was a crazy idea, selecting such a spot for a summer boarding-house, ...
— The Young Musician - or, Fighting His Way • Horatio Alger
... Fame smooth and accessible for you. Never, too, while you aspire to honour, shall you steel your heart to tranquillity. For you, my child, shall be the joys of home and love, and a mind that does not sicken at the past, and strain, through mere forgetfulness, towards a solitary and barren distinction for the future. Not only what your father gains you shall enjoy, but what has cursed him his vigilance shall ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the location of the smoke toward which he sought to go, so that he would not miss it. Nature aided him, making the spot distinctive. Everywhere the cliffs were barren, just rock and more rock, a jumble of great boulders strewn along sheer precipices, everywhere save alone in this one spot. But there was a scant table land, and from it a small grove of pines rose high in the blue of the brightening sky, their gnarled ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... even what has already been said relating to the crops produced has been enough to cause disbelief in those who have not visited Babylonia[29]." To-day great tracts of undulating moorland, which aforetime yielded two and three crops a year, are in summer partly barren wastes and partly jungle and reedy swamp. Bedouins camp beside sandy heaps which were once populous and thriving cities, and here and there the shrunken remnants of a people once great and influential eke out precarious livings under the ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... about for half an hour they suddenly broke through the trees and found themselves on a shore, the like of which they had never seen before. It was wild and rocky and barren, and some of the rocks were of very curious shapes. A few were high and conical, like caves, and had ...
— The Enchanted Island • Fannie Louise Apjohn
... place, the fact is equally certain that descendants of one and the same species which, according to the dogma of the old schools, could always effect a fertile union under certain circumstances, either cannot effect such a union or produce only barren hybrids (the Porto-Santo rabbit, the different races of horses, dogs, roses, hyacinths, &c.; see "History of Creation," vol. ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... cries out, "All, do you say? No—not all. This vulture cannot touch the heather field! My hope,—it is my only hope, and it will save me in the end. Ha, ha! These wise ones! They did not think the barren mountain of those days worth naming in their deed. But now that mountain is a great green field worth more than all they can seize, (with a strange intensity) ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... the "world" (plan of the founding of Platonopolis). Political affairs are at bottom as much a matter of indifference to Neoplatonism as material things in general. The idealism of the new philosophy was too high to admit of its being naturalised in the despiritualised, tyrannical and barren creation of the Byzantine Empire, and this Empire itself needed unscrupulous and despotic police officials, not noble philosophers. Important and instructive, therefore, as the experiments are, which were made from time to time by the state and by individual philosophers, to unite the monarchy ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... interpenetration of ideas than a barren interchange of courtesies, or a bush-fighting argument, in which each man tries to cover as much of himself and expose as much of his opponent as the tangled thicket of the disputed ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the classes and the masses, so-called, and that erected in self-defence by the exploited is the higher and more difficult to climb. On the one side is a disciplined, fortified Gibraltar, held by the gentry; then comes a singularly barren and unstable neutral zone; and on the other side is the vast chaotic mass. In Under Town, I notice, a gentleman is always gen'leman, a workman or tramp is man, but the fringers, the inhabitants of the neutral zone, are called persons. ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... store for him? ... Quickly life came flooding back. Indifference fell from him. In one blinding flash his new condition was revealed. His life had been a futile compromise. He had sowed passivity and he had reaped a barren harvest of negative virtues. He would compromise again, and he would be passive again, and he would bow his neck to authority ... but from this moment on he would wither the cold fruits of such enforced planting in a steadily ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... a twig, on which to tie his handkerchief and erect it above the clump of mesquite as a signal to the searchers in case they should be overcome by fatigue or sleep, he would have been happy. But the plain was barren of brush or timber; he did not dream that this omission and the very unobtrusiveness of his hiding-place would be his salvation ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... spanning or running parallel to the bright stream that had been the delight of Eric's innocent childhood. There was something enjoyable at first to the poor boy's eyes, so long accustomed to the barren sea, in resting once more on the soft undulating green of the summer fields, which were intertissued with white and yellow flowers, like a broidery of pearls and gold. The whole scene was bathed in the exquisite light, and rich with the ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... man of grit, and a hero of the faith. He wanted a quiet base of supplies from which he could send out expeditions into the heart of China. He had no means of any account. But he saw the possibilities in these steep and barren hillsides opposite Swatow, and for six hundred dollars he bought a tract which he gradually turned into a garden, with twenty mission buildings and residences so thrust into the rocks and so overhanging ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... are very numerous, were content to reside in their castles and houses, in that bleak and barren climate; and although some of them made frequent journeys to London, yet I do not remember any of their greatest families, till very lately, to have made England their constant habitation, before the Union: Or, if they did, I am sure ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... landing. She flung open a door, and the new governess found herself stepping forth into utter darkness, where Nan herself was groping about for matches. The air of the place was cold and damp. It had the feel of a room that was unused. It was barren and cheerless. But in the second preceding Nan's discovery of the matches Miss Blake hoped that when the gas was lit it would seem more inviting. But it did not. It was bare and undecorated, and presented ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... torn to pieces by wind and storm; the only glimpse of peace is derived from the view on either side of the sea, which sometimes shows itself on the horizon, a misty line, half silver, half ether. This barren wilderness again softens into gracefully-swelling hills turned towards Florence. The fair olive tree and the dark cypress mingle their foliage with the luxuriant chestnut boughs, and the frequent marble villa flashes a white gleam from amid its surrounding laurel bowers. The ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 394, October 17, 1829 • Various
... present claimants that he would have been a subtle lawyer who could have pronounced upon the rightful owner. The demesne around the castle contained some well-grown and handsome timber, and as the soil was undulating and fertile, presented many features of beauty; beyond it, all was sterile, bleak, and barren. Long tracts of brown heath-clad mountain or not less unprofitable valleys of tall and waving fern were all that the eye could discern, except where the broad Shannon, expanding into a tranquil and glassy lake, lay still and motionless beneath the dark mountains, a few islands, with ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... history, had run from south to north, or vice versa. Or rather, to be honest, it was the observant Hans who made this discovery from various indications which had escaped my notice. I need not stop to detail them, but one of these was that at certain places the water-holes on a high, rather barren land had been dug out, and in one or more instances, lined with stones after the fashion of an ancient well. Evidently we were following an old trade route made, perhaps, in forgotten ages when Africa was more ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... above all, it presents frequent occasions of embarrassment. The writing of history is a strongly selective operation, the outcome being valuable just in so far as the choice what to reject and what to include has been judicious; and the task is no light one of discriminating between barren speculations and ideas pregnant with coming truth. To the possession of such prescience of the future as would be needed to do this effectually I can lay no claim; but diligence and sobriety of thought are ordinarily within reach, and these I shall have exercised to good purpose if I ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... I do know. And the poor children, too! They ought to have places where they can be jolly and make a noise besides in these barren streets. ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... gloomily at her, for it was very present to his mind that their earlier meetings had, for him, been barren of joy; ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... a sudden turn ahead. "Around that bend," I said aloud, "lies Goodale." We went faster. We rounded the bend, only to see the dusky, heartachy, barren stretch. ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... future retribution. Plato had still a goodly number of disciples; and though his doctrines, containing not a few elements of sublimity and beauty, exercised a better influence, it must be admitted, after all, that they constituted a most unsatisfactory system of cold and barren mysticism. The ancient philosophers delivered many excellent moral precepts; but, as they wanted the light of revelation, their arguments in support of duty were essentially defective, and the lessons which they taught had often very little ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... formed hills about Dunedin are not mere barren rocks,—they have their suggestiveness, speaking of volcanic eruptions, of wild upheavals, dating back for thousands of years. Scientists tell us that these islands are of the earliest rock formations. The ground ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... rudeness of climate which had so impressed the Portuguese adventurer was the source of their success. Cold and poverty and storm are the nurses of the qualities which make for empire. It is the men from the bleak and barren lands who master the children of the light and the heat. And so the Dutchmen at the Cape prospered and grew stronger in that robust climate. They did not penetrate far inland, for they were few in number and all they wanted was to be found close at hand. But they built themselves ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Called the Saintes' Legend of Cupid: There may he see the large woundes wide Of Lucrece, and of Babylon Thisbe; The sword of Dido for the false Enee; The tree of Phillis for her Demophon; The plaint of Diane, and of Hermion, Of Ariadne, and Hypsipile; The barren isle standing in the sea; The drown'd Leander for his fair Hero; The teares of Helene, and eke the woe Of Briseis, and Laodamia; The cruelty of thee, Queen Medea, Thy little children hanging by the halse*, *neck For thy ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... their silvery light, and something in the surroundings touched a sympathetic cord in the men. "Oh that I were young again," said Cortlandt, "and had life before me! I should like to remain here and grow up with this planet, in which we already perceive the next New World. The beauties of earth are barren compared with the scenes we have here." "You remember," replied Bearwarden, "how Cicero defends old age in his De Senectute, and shows that while it has almost everything that youth has, it has also a sense of calm and many ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... and the few sheep that Simon Wallace attended were nibbling earnestly the stunted grass, having spent the greater part of the day in the shade of a small knoll, listless from the heat which oppressed them. In the midst stood Simon, enjoying the scene around him, which, barren and desolate as it might be in the eyes of a stranger, was to him the loveliest spot in the universe; nor would he have bade it farewell to dwell in the most fertile vale in the Lothians. Here he had been born sixty summers before, and here he had enjoyed as much of happiness as falls ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... sustenance, the bare means of a livelihood, would be a hindrance to human progress, a hindrance not to be removed by all of the maxims of the philosopher or the theories of the doctrinaire. Promise without fulfillment is barren, but when you can place before the mechanic the assured fact that the performance of his duty means success in life, and that his non-performance means failure; when you can show him that this law is immutable, you have made of him a useful citizen and have instilled into his mind a firm belief ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... was insignificance or remoteness alone that protected the libeler. The leading newspapers of the state, however much they might abuse his writings, learned to be very cautious of what they said of him personally. But it was a barren victory he had won. He had lost far more than he had gained. That such would be the result, he knew, while (p. 198) he was engaged in the controversy. It affected, at the time, his literary reputation, and, as ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... For the moment I was so utterly taken aback that I could decide upon no new plan of action. I sat there helplessly staring at the poor creature, so full of grief and remorse that I was quite unable to rise to the occasion. I had counted so securely upon tricking Lord Blackadder into a barren pursuit that my disappointment was overwhelming and paralyzed ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... are, in Park Lane, and the park neighborhood of Piccadilly, and the larger and lesser streets of Mayfair, and the different squares and gardens and places; and certain of them may be visited at certain times on application by the tourist. But that is a barren pleasure which one easily denies oneself in behalf of the simpler and more real satisfactions of London. The charm of the vast friendly old place is not in such great houses, as its grandeur is not in its monuments. Now and then such a house gave evidence of high ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... severance of friends, about mere logical abstractions in our remote island, as would have sufficed for the great dogmatic battles of the Continent. It would be difficult to exaggerate the pity that fills the heart at such a reflection; at the thought of how this neck of barren hills between two inclement seaways has echoed for three centuries with the uproar of sectarian battle; of how the east wind has carried out the sound of our shrill disputations into the desolate Atlantic, and the west wind has ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Sundown. Hunger and thirst and a burning sun may not be immediately conducive to poetry or romantic imaginings. But the 'dobe in the distance shaded by a clump of trees, the gleam of the drying chiles, the glow of flowers, offered an acceptable antithesis to the barren roadway and the empty mesas. Sundown quickened his pace. Eden, though circumscribed by a barb-wire fence enclosing scant territory, invited him to rest and refresh himself. And all unexpected the immemorial Eve stood in the doorway of the 'dobe, gazing down the road and doubtless wondering why this ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... but clear, an ideal one for a ride, and mile after mile was passed, between the now almost barren fields, and through long groves of leafless trees. The horses from Riverlawn had always been boasted of as being the best in that section of the country, and now they were proving ...
— An Undivided Union • Oliver Optic
... went home—took hold. Between the feeling in her heart which might have reached and touched this despair, and the woman before her, there seemed to be a barrier she could not break. Or was it that she was really barren and poor in soul, and had never realised it before? A strange misery rose in her too, as she still knelt, tending and consoling, ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... before us, with a few rugged and barren heights scattered over it. As we proceeded vegetation grew more and more scanty, till after we had marched scarcely half a mile, it ceased altogether. We had slept, we found, on the borders of a desert. The ground was at first composed ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... buoyant, loveable type of the self-reliant American. Her philosophy is one of love and kindness towards all things; her hope is never dimmed. And by the sheer beauty of her soul, and the purity of her vision, she wins from barren and unpromising surroundings those ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... deed is never lost. He who sows courtesy reaps benefit; and he who gathers kindness gathers love. Pleasure bestowed on a grateful mind was never barren, but always brings a good recompense; and that is the moral of the story I ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... very Pole. Geographical lines may confine our bodies; but nature is an untamed wild, where the spirit roams at will. If I am here hemmed in by barren hills, and live in a desert waste, yet, as one of your sweetest poets ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... his life, so barren, so void. He recalled the days gone by, the days of his infancy, the house, the house of his parents; his college days, his follies, the time of his probation in Paris, the illness of his father, his death. He then returned to live with his ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... but an abrupt transition from Marino to Chiabrera would be impossible. It is like passing from some luxurious grove of oranges and roses to a barren hill-top without prospect over sea or champaign. We are fortunate in possessing a few pages of autobiography, from which all that is needful to remember of Gabriello Chiabrera's personal history may be extracted. He was born in ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... as he would there was not a soul in sight. All about him stretched the barren frowning mountains sleeping ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... in land of stony dearth Like barren rock thou sit, Round which the phantom-waters flit Of heart- and brain-mirage That can no thirst assuage, Yet be thou still, and wait, wait long; A right sea comes to drown the wrong; God's glory comes to fill the earth, And thou, no more a scathed rock, Shalt start alive with ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... more, and I said to myself, "He who took thy father will not spare thee." Now the night I wedded thee, thou madest me swear that I would never take a second wife nor a concubine, Abyssinian or Greek or other, nor would lie a night from thee: and behold, thou art barren, and swiving thee is like boring into the rock.' 'God is my witness,' rejoined she, 'that the fault lies with thee, for that thy seed is thin.' 'And how is it with him whose seed is thin?' asked he, and she, 'He cannot get women with child nor beget children.' 'What thickens seed?' ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... over, cannot you look at us, even should you return to the manor? The two girls followed you to the stagehouse, saw you seated and drive off. Frederick's tooth prevented his attendance. My heart is full of affection, my head too barren to express it. I am impatient for evening; for the receipt of your dear letter; for those delightful sensations which your expressions of tenderness alone can excite. Dejected, distracted with out them; elated, giddy even to folly with them; ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... a barren tree before, I blew a quenched coal, I could not, on their midnight shore, The ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The Blackfeet do not especially say that this future life is an unhappy one, but, from the way in which they speak of it, it is clear that for them it promises nothing desirable. It is a monotonous, never ending, and altogether unsatisfying existence,—a life as barren and desolate as the country which the ghosts inhabit. These people are as much attached to life as we are. Notwithstanding the unhappy days which have befallen them of late years,—days of privation and hunger,—they cling to life. Yet they seem to have no fear of death. ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... him of one of Mr. Burke's playful sallies upon Dean Marlay: 'I don't like the Deanery of Ferns, it sounds so like a BARREN title.'—'Dr. HEATH should have it;' said I. Johnson laughed, and condescending to trifle in the same mode of conceit, suggested ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... pouring from our own? Does the general grief of our fellow-creatures lessen our own private and particular woe? No, no, each suffers on his own account, each struggles with his own grief, each sheds his own tears. And besides," he went on, "what has my life been up to the present moment? A cold, barren, sterile arena, in which I have always fought for others, never for myself. Sometimes for a king, sometimes for a woman. The king has betrayed, the woman disdained me. Miserable, unlucky wretch that I am! Women! Can I not make all expiate the crime ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... finds our poor array Like drift upon a barren shore, Perchance we gaze on it and say With vigor, "We will roam no more." But when the year its course hath run, And May completes the rhythmic span, Again, I wot, we'll call upon The ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... much frequented by pilgrims, was situate on a lake called Logh Derg, in the Southern part of the county of Donegal, near the borders of Tyrone and Fermanagh. It was surrounded with wild and barren mountains, and was almost inaccessible by horsemen even in summer time, on account of great bogs, rocks, and precipices which environed it. The popular tradition concerning it is as ridiculous as is to be found in any legend of the Romish ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... fish that might be caught during hurried nightly launch or morning landing. Sometimes they hid in a berry patch, when the fruit was gathered and boiled, but camp-fires were stamped out and covered. Turning westward, they crossed the barren region of iron-capped rocks and dwarf growth between the Upper Ottawa and the Great Lakes. Now they were farther from the Iroquois, and staved off famine by shooting an occasional bear in the berry patches. For a thousand miles they had travelled against stream, carrying their boats across ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... concreteness. When not challenged, the point of view of common sense, for instance, seems concrete and natural. The reaction of common sense to the world is direct and practical, it has few questions to ask, and philosophic speculations appear to it abstract and barren. But, upon analysis, it is the common sense view that stands revealed as abstract and barren. For an abstract object is one that does not fully correspond to the rich and manifold reality; it is ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... delicacy,—the mental improvement resulting from such calm discussions as the Tarbolton and Mauchline clubs indulged in, was not injurious to men engaged in the barn and at the plough. A well-ordered mind will be strengthened, as well as embellished, by elegant knowledge, while over those naturally barren and ungenial all that is refined or noble will pass as a sunny shower scuds over lumps of granite, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... by man, Had fall'n in Lyonnesse about their lord, King Arthur. Then, because his wound was deep, The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him, And bore him to a chapel nigh the field, A broken chancel by a broken cross, That stood in a dark strait of barren land: On one side lay the Ocean, and on one Lay a great water, ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... reduction of copper, have not played so long on the surrounding atmosphere without doing their work. Everywhere within their influence, the perennial vegetation is meagre and stinted. The hills, particularly to the southeast of the copper-works, are barren in the extreme. Not one spark of green, not one solitary lichen, can withstand the ravages of the poison. Time was, we were told by an old inhabitant, when these hills produced the earliest and finest corn in the principality; but now they only ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... the wilderness," continued the minister. "You have fed with the swine and the goats. You have found no nourishment there. All was bleak, and barren, and desolate there. The living waters were dried up, and the bread of life was denied to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... passed Abilene, Texas, in safety, but no word had reached our employer since, and it was believed that they had turned eastward and would come up the Chisholm Trail. Bob reported the country between Abilene and Doan's Crossing as cut into dust and barren of sustenance, many weak cattle having died in crossing the dry belt. But the most startling news, seriously disturbing us both, was that Archie Tolleston was stationed at Doan's Crossing on Red River as ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... dust or all mud. The river is the meanest apology for a frog-pond that I ever saw. It is a queer country, you would like to see it, but you would not like to live here long. The hills are mostly of clay, the sides of some very steep and barren of all vegetation. You would think cattle would starve there, but all the cattle that have wintered here are fat now and they say here that cattle brought from any other part will improve in size and quality. Theodore ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... good Master, you shall not sow your seed in barren ground, for I hope to return you an increase answerable to your hopes; but however, you shal find me obedient, and thankful, and serviceable to my ...
— The Compleat Angler - Facsimile of the First Edition • Izaak Walton
... extension of the mountains of central Colorado, standing more than five thousand feet above the valleys of the Colorado and the Gunnison rivers. To certain montane mammals the mesa is a peninsula of cool, moist, forest surrounded by inhospitable, hot, dry, barren lowland. ...
— Mammals of the Grand Mesa, Colorado • Sydney Anderson
... those shoes! By special request I rubbed the soles on the gravel paths, so that they might not look too newly married. Quite certainly Kathie will be throwing an occasional thought to the girl she left behind her, a "poor old Evelyn!" with a dim, pitiful little ache at the thought of my barren lot. Quite certainly, too, for one moment when she remembers, there will be twenty when she forgets. Quite right, of course! Quite natural, and wife-like, and just as it should be, and only a selfish, ungenerous wretch ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... hours' journey they came clean out of the pine-wood, and before them lay the black wilderness of the bare mountains, and beyond them, looking quite near now, the great ice- peaks, the wall of the world. It was but an hour short of noon by this time, and the high sun shone down on a barren boggy moss which lay betwixt them and the rocky waste. Sure-foot made no stay, but threaded the ways that went betwixt the quagmires, and in another hour led Face-of-god into a winding valley blinded by great rocks, ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... Philip in armour, mounted on an Andalusian charger, the king was so pleased, that he permitted the picture to be publicly exhibited, amidst the plaudits of the spectators, in front of the church of San Felipe el Real in Madrid. Nor was the exhibition a barren honour to the painter, for the king not only 'talked of collecting and in future Velasquez should have the monopoly of the royal countenance,' he paid three hundred ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... several deep ravines, and going round the heads of others, over a barren country for an hour, the land grew better, and was tolerable, till one o'clock, when it again grew bad and rocky. The natives informed them that this part of the country was inhabited by the Bidjigals, but that most of the tribe were dead of the small-pox. Though the country they passed over ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter
... Du Camp, an eminent member of the French Academy, travelling from the Red Sea to the Nile through the Desert of Kosseir, came to a barren slope covered with boulders, rounded ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Mount Vesuvius, which has ever since been celebrated for its volcano. Before this time, Vesuvius is spoken of, by ancient writers, as being covered with orchards and vineyards, and of which the middle was dry and barren. The eruption was accompanied by an earthquake, which destroyed several cities of Campania, particularly Pompeii and Herculaneum; while the lava, pouring down the mountain in torrents, overwhelmed, in various directions, the adjacent ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... reason," said Buzzford. "'Tis barren ignorance that leads to such words. He's a simple home-spun man, that never was fit for good company—think nothing of ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... other barren dreams formed to promote universal felicity. The extreme facility of the means which you recommend is quite sufficient to expose its hollowness. Do you believe that if it were merely needful to print bank-notes in order to satisfy all our ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... have seen in this position, though she succeeded to it after the custom of the country. I imagine she must have had a worthless husband, since every sultan can have as many wives as he pleases, and the whole could never have been barren. I rallied the porters for pulling up after so short a march, but could not induce them to go on. They declared that forests of such vast extent lay on ahead that it would be quite impossible to cross them before ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... City, which covered the slopes above the plateau at the three-thousand-foot level like a checker-board of shimmering, silken circles, would spring to febrile life as the spider monsters went streaking and leaping across the barren, distorted granite on the day's business, the hunt for food in the lowlands, and the opening of the trap-doors to gather in the heat of the day in the silken tunnel homes set in the gorges and among the boulders. At sunset the ...
— Loot of the Void • Edwin K. Sloat
... sacredness of color. "Since he loves beauty so, why does he not love me?" I asked myself; and perhaps the feverish hope and suspense only lit up that beauty and fed it with fresh fires. Ah, the July days! Did you ever wander over barren, parched stubble-fields, and suddenly front a knot of red Turk's-cap lilies, flaring as if they had drawn all the heat and brilliance from the land into their tissues? Such were they. And if I were to grow old and gray, they would light down all my life, and I could be willing to lead a dull, grave ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... terrorism of the pro-King komitadjis. If he had been in Montenegro during the years after the War he would possibly agree that komitadji is the proper name for the many lawless elements who have found the traditional fighting life more congenial than the thankless task of tilling their very barren land. The moral effect of opposing to these the Montenegrin Omladina instead of Serbian troops was to destroy all pretence of the movement being a national Montenegrin insurrection against the union, and the cessation of assistance from ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... described in the Word; in that when the children of Israel lived according to the commandments, the earth yielded its increase, likewise the flocks and herds; but when they lived contrary to the commandments the ground was barren, and as it is said, accursed; instead of harvests it yielded thorns and briars, the flocks and herds miscarried, and wild beasts broke in. The same may be inferred from the locusts, frogs, and lice ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... how that knowledge had been gained: some of it from the experience of early explorers,—how to avoid the dreaded scurvy, how to build a ship that could withstand the tremendous pressure of the floes; and some from the Eskimos,—how to live in that barren region, and how to travel with dogs and sledges;—and some, too, from Peary's own early experiences,—how he had struggled for twenty years to reach the goal, and had added this experience to that until finally the prize was his. We may differ as to ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... remarked, "which I admire most—the gift of directness. Now I would speak to you of myself. When I was young, I was penniless, with no inheritance save a grim castle, a barren island, and a great name. The titular head of my family was a Cardinal of Rome, my father's own brother. I went to him, and I demanded the means of support. He answered me with an epigram which I will not repeat, besides which it is untranslatable. I will only ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Wall of old. There was a region of desolation and death, extending from the Sierra Nevadas to the border lines of Nebraska, and from the Yellowstone to the Colorado Rivers. A profane writer once suggested that the same Creator could hardly have brought into existence this arid, barren and inhospitable region and the fertile plains and beautiful mountains which surrounded it ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... notion got hold of me, I surveyed with anxious scrutiny the open spaces before me; but no living creature appeared upon the barren strand. ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... reluctant gaze Upon the path of duty; Its barren, uninviting ways Are void of bloom and beauty. Yet in that road, though dark and cold, It seems as we begin it, As we press on—lo! we ...
— Poems of Sentiment • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... After an hour's journey, on a dry, not high elevation, they chanced upon gigantic thistles having stems as thick as the trunk of a tree and flowers the size of a man's head. On the sides of some mountains which from a distance appeared barren they saw furze-bushes about twenty-six feet high. Other plants which in Europe belong to the smallest varieties assumed here proportions corresponding to the thistles and furze-bushes; and gigantic, isolated trees rose ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... division was within easy support of this wing. Thus the whole army was in good position and in good condition. We had largely subsisted on the country; our wagons were full of forage and provisions; but, as we approached the sea-coast, the country became more sandy and barren, and food became more scarce; still, with little or no loss, we had traveled two-thirds of our distance, and I concluded to push on for Savannah. At Millen I learned that General Bragg was in Augusta, and ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... of interest to observe in the somewhat barren-looking country through which the railroad ran; and voting France (Paris excepted) a very slow place indeed, Will buried himself for the rest of the afternoon in a boy's book of travels. Nevertheless, the journey proved a very tedious one, and after ...
— Harper's Young People, March 9, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... of sin, as of trouble. No matter." Then, with an awful solemnity, he added: "My soul is barren. It is already given over to the undying worm. I shall die to-morrow ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... under the houses, at two sides of the square, or again by narrow alleys. Nor is the same level always preserved. Small flights of time-worn steps continually surprise us in our pilgrimage. The aggregate—barren courts, narrow passages, and winding lanes—forms a perfect labyrinth, very trying to a stranger or to one possessing a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... of thee, When we have ta'en these arms? Have we not Teucer, Skilled in this mystery? Yea, I may boast Myself thine equal both in strength and aim To wield them. Fare thee well, then! Thou art free To roam thy barren isle. We need thee not. Let us be going! And perchance thy gift May bring thy destined ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... proved to be Chatham Island, one of the Galapagos, a group of volcanic islands almost under the line, some hundred miles away from the coast of Peru. We brought up in a fine bay, but the shore as far as we could see looked black and barren. There were, however, thick, low bushes of a peculiar kind, covering the ground at some distance from the beach. As Dr Cockle was going on shore with one of the mates and a party of the men, he to botanise and they to obtain fresh provisions, I went up to ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... is a terrible place, barren and desolate, for it is avoided as a spot accursed. No living thing moves upon it; the earth is streaked with patches of dark moss and drifts of ghastly skulls, like a scattered harvest of death. Once, says the legend, a wayfarer, surprised ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... mountain in whose heart lies the poet's solitude now rose before us at the foot of the lofty Mount Ventoux, whose summit of snows extended beyond. We left the river and walked over a barren plain across which the wind blew most drearily. The sky was rainy and dark, and completed the desolateness of the scene, which in nowise heightened our anticipations of the renowned glen. At length we rejoined ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... are also furnished by the bands of Snake Indians from the Yellowstone. The pearl ornaments which they esteem so highly come from other bands, whom they represent as their friends and relations, living to the southwest beyond the barren plains on the other side of the mountains: these relations they say inhabit a good country, abounding with elk, deer, bear, and antelope, where horses and mules are much more abundant than they ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... islands, but they are mostly barren uninhabited rocks. Archangel, a port on this sea, is famous for the manufacture of linen sheeting. Now quit we these dreary regions for the bright and enlivening southern climes; and, if all parties are agreeable, ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... a soothing and agreeable spectacle, so on the other hand it is not less true that its immediate tendency is, to clip the wings of the thinking principle within us, and plunge the members of the community in which we live into a barren and ungratifying mediocrity. Hence it should be the aim of those persons, who from their situation have more or less the means of looking through the vast assemblage of their countrymen, of penetrating "into the seeds" of character, and determining "which grain will grow, ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... played without stopping, in a way which is seen and heard only on a battle-field or during a tornado in the desert. It sounded as if the pent-up fury of a thousand years had suddenly been let loose upon that little collection of houses on the vast barren plain. ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, though the soil is much less alkaline, and the so-called "sage-brush" plants characteristic of an alkaline district are mostly absent. To the north of the Karroo and of the mountains which bound it, a similar district, equally arid, dreary, and barren, stretches away to the banks of the Orange River, which here in its lower course has less water than in its upper course, because, like the Nile, it receives no affluents and is wasted by the terrible sun. In fact, one may ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... exhiliarated by the wit of Fielding and humour of Smollett, I yet presume not to attempt pursuing the same ground which they have tracked; whence, though they may have cleared the weeds, they have also culled the flowers; and, though they have rendered the path plain, they have left it barren. ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... with the flesh of the whale, it was none the less obvious that members of the party were starting out for home, perhaps disposed to this by the discomfort of life in rough weather with no better shelter than they could find on this somewhat barren coast. These natives nearly always hunt in districts where they know there can be found a barabbara or so, and such huts are used as common property by all who find them, although the loose title of ownership probably rests in the man or family who first erected them. When ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough
... crisp afternoon in late October. The road leading west from Clayton ran the gantlet of fiery maples and sumac until it reached the barren hillside below "Who'd 'a' Thought It." The little cabin clung to the side of the steep slope like a bit of fungus to the trunk ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... threefold union with Reality, as your attention is focussed now on one aspect, now on another, of its rich simplicity, will be actualised by you in many different ways: for you are not to suppose that an unchanging barren ecstasy is now to characterise your inner life. Though the sense of your own dwelling within the Eternal transfuses and illuminates it, the sense of your own necessary efforts, a perpetual renewal of contact with the Spiritual World, a perpetual ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... the mission of the seventy, several miracles, some striking lessons of instruction from passing incidents, and no less than twelve parables: the good Samaritan, the unfortunate friend, the unclean spirit, the rich fool, the barren fig-tree, the lost sheep, the lost pieces of silver, the prodigal son, the unfaithful steward, the rich man and Lazarus, the unjust judge, the Pharisee and publican. While the attentive reader perceives ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... was not to be deterred. With his own hands he unmoored a vessel and sailed across to Oberwoerth. Having landed at that part of the island furthest from the convent, he was obliged to pass the haunted spot on his way thither. The circular patch of barren earth was said to be a spot accursed, by reason of sacrilege and suicide committed there. But such things were far from the thoughts of the ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... country, or who improvise satires or panegyrics. This last class are dreaded, though despised. They are richly rewarded in their lifetime, but after death they are not even given a decent burial. If they were buried in the ground, it would become barren; if in the river, the water would be poisoned, and the fish would die: so they are buried in ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... seen, but all communicated, and by that very circumstance, and by the necessity of perpetually classifying them, transmuted into words and generalities; pride, flattery, irritation, artificial power; these, and circumstances resembling these, necessarily render the heights of office barren heights, which command, indeed, a vast and extensive prospect, but attract so many clouds and vapors, that most often all prospect is precluded. Still, however, Mr. Pitt's situation, however inauspicious for his real being, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... barred, would not all progress, all conquest of knowledge, be totally arrested? Rome herself is nowadays a terrible example of such a disastrous experiment—Rome with her congealed soil, her dead sap, killed by centuries of papal government, Rome which has become so barren that not a man, not a work has sprung from her midst even after five and twenty years of awakening and liberty! And who would accept such a state of things, not among people of revolutionary mind, but among those of religious mind that might possess any culture and breadth of view? Plainly enough ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... in the time of Abraham (xxi. 22-34, J and E). Beersheba, which figures in both, is celebrated by the planting of a sacred tree and (like Bethel) by the invocation of the name of Yahweh. This district is the scene of the birth of Ishmael and Isaac. As Sarai was barren (cf. xi. 30)2 the promise that his seed should possess the land seemed incapable of fulfilment. According to one rather obscure narrative, Abram's sole heir was the servant, who was over his household, apparently a certain Eliezer of Damascus3 (xv. 2, the text is corrupt). ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... ascetic Church itself. The intellectual life, also, nearly restricted to priests and monks, had been formalized and conventionalized, until in spite of the keenness of its methods and the brilliancy of many of its scholars, it had become largely barren and unprofitable. The whole sphere of knowledge had been subjected to the mere authority of the Bible and of a few great minds of the past, such as Aristotle. All questions were argued and decided on the basis of their assertions, which had often become wholly inadequate ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... most beloved! The conviction that it is to ensure the peace of my now only friend on earth, my faithful Pembroke, that I resign the hope of ever beholding thee again in this life, will bring me one comfort, at least, in my barren exile!" ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... mother's? 4. There is nobody here but me. 5. The fine arts were all but proscribed. 6. There's not a breeze but whispers of thy name. 7. The longest life is but a day. 8. What if the bee love not these barren boughs? 9. That life is long which answers life's great end. 10. What! I the weaker vessel? 11. Whom should I obey but thee? 12 What by industry and what by economy, he had amassed a fortune. 13. I long ago found that out. 14. One should not always eat ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... other female souls, mainly French, among whom the incipient Fritz now was, appear to have done their part as well as could be looked for. Respectable Edict-of-Nantes French ladies, with high head-gear, wide hoops; a clear, correct, but somewhat barren and meagre species, tight-laced and high-frizzled in mind and body. It is not a very fertile element for a young soul: not very much of silent piety in it; and perhaps of vocal piety more than enough in proportion. An element founding on what they call "enlightened Protestantism," "freedom of thought," ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... other men, in other critical situations, where women are concerned. I know, now, that I should have questioned myself from the first. I should have asked why any room in the house was better than home to me when she entered it, and barren as a desert when she went out again—why I always noticed and remembered the little changes in her dress that I had noticed and remembered in no other woman's before—why I saw her, heard her, and touched ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... the three great butts at which Hosea Biglow and Parson Wilbur shoot, at point-blank range, and with shafts drawn well to the ear. The fringe of its seaboard (itself consisting chiefly of unapproachable swamp or barren sand wastes), surrounded by weak neighbours or thin wandering hordes, only too easy to bully, to subdue, to eat up; from which bands of pirates, under the name of liberators, swarm forth year after ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... hand, as the eyes of faith are lifted, there shines into view, and in the closest spiritual proximity (for the believing company has actually "come unto it," ver. 22), the hill eternal, the true Mount Sion, where shines the city of the living God, the Jerusalem of heaven. No barren rocks are there, nor do menaces of articulate thunder sound from and around that height. All is light, and all is life. Yes, above all things all is life. Behold the countless thousands ([Greek: myriasin]) of radiant denizens, the angelic friends of man; and then beatified men besides (ver. 23), ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... of July General Bonaparte left Alexandria for Damanhour. In the vast plains of Bohahire'h the mirage every moment presented to the eye wide sheets of water, while, as we advanced, we found nothing but barren ground full of deep cracks. Villages, which at a distance appear to be surrounded with water, are, on a nearer approach, discovered to be situated on heights, mostly artificial, by which they are raised above the inundations of the Nile. This illusion continually recurs; ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... but when he found that the English were victorious, he muttered a great oath and refused to hear more. To him the English were fiends incarnate. Had they not slowly murdered his Emperor on their barren ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... went to Vera Cruz for a newspaper syndicate, and after the first sharp engagement in the Mexican seaport there was nothing for the correspondent to do but kill time on that barren, low lying strip of Gulf coast, hemmed in on all sides by Mexicans and the sea, and time is hard to kill there. Yet there was a story to be got, but it required nerve to go ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... black beetles and rats. Her face might have been a dead, blank wall, or cut out of cold, white stone, for all it expressed; and as she lightly held up her rich robes in one hand, and in the other bore the light, the dark, shining eyes were fixed on his face, and were as barren of interest, eagerness, compassion, tenderness, or any other feeling, as the shining, black glass ones of a wax doll. So they stood looking at each other for some ten seconds or so, and then, still looking full at ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... often stirred in monstrous wrath, welcomed us with a spread of dazzling silk. The clumsy junks that appeared to have come down from the days of Confucius, were languid on the gentle ripples. The outstanding Asian islands, small and grim, are singularly desolate, barren as if splintered by fire, gaunt and forbidding. Hongkong is an island that prospers under the paws of the British lion, and it is a city displayed on a mountain side, that by day is not much more imposing than the town of ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... on the contrary regarded mathematics as a useful exercise for the mind, apart from any immediate practical object, and he considered that the general command of mathematics gained by handling abstruse mathematical investigations (though barren in themselves) would be valuable for whatever purpose mathematics might be required: he also thought it likely that his researches and advances in the field of Pure Mathematics might facilitate the solution of physical problems and tend to the progress of the practical sciences. ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... totter, and give way. The baby was in the front room, but was under the windward wall. In the teeth of the gale the old man crawled out of the hole, extended his length on the ground, and began to drag his stiff and trembling frame, with hands, elbows and knees, across the fifty feet or so of barren soil that lay between the hole and the cottage. He heard the crash of bricks before he had accomplished half the distance; without pausing to look he crawled rapidly on till he crossed the threshold, and saw the babe still sleeping safely in its wooden cradle. There were two large ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... adventures, some Russian chiefs might allow themselves to be sprinkled with the waters of baptism; and a Greek bishop, with the name of metropolitan, might administer the sacraments in the church of Kiow, to a congregation of slaves and natives. But the seed of the gospel was sown on a barren soil: many were the apostates, the converts were few; and the baptism of Olga may be fixed as the aera of Russian Christianity. [74] A female, perhaps of the basest origin, who could revenge the death, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... for, although he knew that he bore a charmed life, yet he shrank with a loathing from the idea of having to battle with such a horrible serpent. Starting from the ground, he rushed—flew, rather than ran, higher up the acclivity, and speedily entered on a wild scene of rugged and barren rocks: but he cared not whither the windings of the natural path which he now pursued might lead him, since he had escaped from the view of the hideous boa-constrictor gamboling in ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... on the barren heath—a girl sat alone on the grass before the gipsy camp, braiding her hair in the ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... that look upon it; when once this Gorgon claims acquaintance with us, the phantom of friendship, that before courted our notice, will vanish into unsubstantial air, and the whole world before us appear a barren waste. Pardon me, ye dear spirits of benevolence, whose benign smiles and cheerful-giving hand have strewed sweet flowers on many a thorny path through which my wayward fate forced me to pass; think not, that, in condemning the unfeeling texture of ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... Province'—such expressions as these abound in the journals and diaries of the settlers. There were complaints that deception had been practised. 'All our golden promises,' wrote a Long Island Loyalist, 'are vanished in smoke. We were taught to believe this place was not barren and foggy as had been represented, but we find it ten times worse. We have nothing but his Majesty's rotten pork and unbaked flour to subsist on... It is the most inhospitable clime that ever mortal set foot on.' At first there was great distress among the refugees. ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... to speak, to think, to love, his thought seeks another thought to reveal and quicken itself; his speech is lost sorrowfully in the air, or only awakens an echo which reverberates it, but cannot reply; his love knows not where to fix itself, and falling back on itself, threatens to become a barren egotism; in short, fill his being aspires to another self, but his other self does not exist. At this time, when the desire for communion was stifling him, he slept, and from his side God took a rib and made woman, and brought her to him. Behold Adam. ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... than its construction was its situation. This particular spot was a corner of real "bad lands," and lumpy ridges, hogbacks, and barren buttes arose on all sides like waves in a sea. So numerous were they that unless riders passed directly by the sheepmen's hiding place the chances of discovery were almost nil. At one spot only was it visible, and that was a place where the ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... me wonder more than all the rest, that at this time of the year, when every tree is barren of his fruit, from whence you had these ripe ...
— Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... Covan the Brown-haired they walked onwards, Covan following ever behind them, and looking neither to the right nor to the left. All that day they walked, and when night fell they were in a barren plain, ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... boat-ride from France he would have said so if it had been Barren Island, or any other place-just so long as it was free from earthquakes and didn't roll none," Abe agreed. "Also, Mawruss," he continued, "some day the President is going to begin a speech with, 'May I not,' and the chairman of the meeting will take him at his word and put it to ...
— Potash and Perlmutter Settle Things • Montague Glass
... subscribe to the disgraceful capitulation whereby Field-marshal Jellachich had promised to hand over to the French, the flags and the arms of the Austrian troops, and had fled into the Tyrol; where he too would have led the brigade were it not for the fact that he feared that in that barren mountain country, there would not be enough fodder for so many horses. But now they had open country in front of them and having, by a ruse of which he was proud, gained a lead of six leagues over the French troops, he invited ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... will become covetous. And opposed to one another, men will, at such a time, seek one another's lives; and divested of Yuga, people will become atheists and thieves. And they will even dig the banks of streams with their spades and sow grains thereon. And even those places will prove barren for them at such a time. And those men who are devoted to ceremonial rites in honour of the deceased and of the gods, will be avaricious and will also appropriate and enjoy what belongs to others. The father will enjoy what belongs ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... and multiply, he can justify the large celibate class created by positive command of the Catholic church, not only by the ordination of priests, but by the constant urging of the church that women should become the barren brides of Christ by taking on ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... discoveries I could. When we came to land, we saw no river, or spring, nor any sign of inhabitants. Our men therefore wandered on the shore to find out some fresh water near the sea, and I walked alone about a mile on the other side, where I observed the country all barren and rocky. I now began to be weary, and seeing nothing to entertain my curiosity, I returned gently down toward the creek; and the sea being full in my view, I saw our men already got into the boat, and rowing for life to the ship. I was going to holla after them, although it had been to little ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... last, an hour or more before the sunset, just as the spurs of Cithaeron, the long mountain over against Attica, began to thrust their bald summits up before the runner's ken, far ahead upon the way approached a cloud of dust. The Athenian paused in his run, dashed into the barren field, and flung himself flat between the furrows. He heard the hoof-beats of the wiry steppe horses, the clatter of targets and scabbards, the shrill shouts of the raiders. He lifted his head enough to see the red streamers on their lance tips flutter past. He let the noise die away before ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... route to the sea the road is lined with gardens. Nothing could be more unpromising in appearance than this soil before it is ploughed and pulverized by the cultivator. It looks like a barren waste. We passed a tract that was offered three years ago for twelve dollars an acre. Some of it now is rented to Chinamen at thirty dollars an acre; and I saw one field of two acres off which a Chinaman has sold in one season $750 worth ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... may reckon that, of the space lying between the summits of the Alps and the low country on either side, one-quarter is available for cultivation, of which about one-half may be vineyards and corn-fields, while the remainder produces forage and grass. About another quarter is utterly barren, consisting of snow-fields, glaciers, bare rock, lakes and the beds of streams. There remains about one-half, which is divided between forest and pasture, and it is the produce of this half which mainly supports the relatively large population. For a quarter of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of brown and barren earth that screened the camp from view there came, at the very moment that the ramrods were drawn out with a shrill, sharp ring from the carbine-barrels, a single figure—tall, stalwart, lithe, with the spring of the deerstalker in its rapid step, and the sinew of the ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... the deserted waste. A blade of grass or an insect finds no existence there. The shrivelled lichen alone, clinging to the weathered surface of the broken brick, seems to glory in its universal dominion over those barren walls. Of all the desolate pictures I have ever seen that of Warka incomparably surpasses all." Surely in this case it cannot be said that appearances are deceitful; for all that space, and much more, is a cemetery, and what a cemetery! "It is difficult," ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... took us on to the main Amiens road at Corbie, and turning East along it we jolted and bumped and splashed our way through Brie-sur-Somme to Tertry. The country—what we could see of it in the dark—seemed to consist of a barren waste of shell holes with here and there a shattered tree or the remains of some burnt-out Tank standing forlornly near some dark and stagnant swamp. Villages were practically non-existent, and Tertry was no exception, but we soon settled ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... an outpost of the trader Presbrey, of whom Shefford had heard at Flagstaff and Tuba. No living thing appeared in the limit of Shefford's vision. He gazed shudderingly at the unwelcoming habitation, at the dark eyelike windows, at the sweep of barren slope merging into the vast red valley, at the bold, bleak bluffs. Could any one live here? The nature of that sinister valley forbade a home there, and the spirit of the place hovered in the silence and space. Shefford thought irresistibly ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... the town and port of Suakin might afford a useful instance to a cynical politician. Most of the houses stand on a small barren island which is connected with the mainland by a narrow causeway. At a distance the tall buildings of white coral, often five storeys high, present an imposing appearance, and the prominent chimneys of the ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... dwindle. Only here and there did it leap forward with its old savage fury. Presently these sporadic plunges wore themselves out for lack of fuel. The devastated area became a smouldering, smoking char showing a few isolated blazes in the barren ruin. There were still possibilities of harm in them if the wind should shift again, but for the present they were subdued to a shadow of their former strength. It remained the business of the fire-fighters to keep a close watch on the red-hot embers to prevent them ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... high hill of great steepness. The hill has two peaks, with a sort of natural ditch some thirty feet in depth between them. The castle was built upon the seaward peak, and a narrow drawbridge crossed the gully to the other summit, which was barren and open to the sight. The river swept round the northern side of the hill with considerable force. To the south the hill was precipitous, and of such "infinite asperity," that no man could climb it. To the east was ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... Oh, not the dry, barren border country, but my Mexico, rich with jewels and gold, studded with magnificent cities, flowering with rare fruits and spices, a mellow, golden, matchless land, peopled by those who are skilled in arts and science, lovers of beauty, and—Ah, you do not know Mexico. You know only the half-breed ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... rising steeply from the sea, are rugged and mountainous; South Georgia is largely barren and has steep, glacier-covered mountains; the South Sandwich Islands are of volcanic origin with ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Germany, truthful and brave in England, must yet be moulded to a higher quality amid this varying climate and on these low shores. The regions of the world most garlanded with glory and romance, Attica, Provence, Scotland, were originally more barren than Massachusetts; and there is yet possible for us such an harmonious mingling of refinement and vigor, that we may more than fulfil the world's expectation, and may become ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... own with Anne. And it is probable that Richard, who, whatever his crimes, was far from inaccessible to affection, might have really loved his early playmate, even while his ambition calculated the wealth of the baronies that would swell the dower of the heiress and gild the barren coronet of his duchy. [Majerns, the Flemish chronicler, quoted by Bucke ("Life of Richard III"), mentions the early attachment of Richard to Anne. They were much together, ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... no more; But useless Lances into Scythes shall bend, And the broad Falchion in a Plow-share end. Then Palaces shall rise; the joyful Son [6] Shall finish what his short-liv'd Sire begun; Their Vines a Shadow to their Race shall yield, And the same Hand that sow'd shall reap the Field. The Swain in barren Desarts with Surprize [7] Sees Lillies spring, and sudden Verdure rise; And Starts, amidst the thirsty Wilds, to hear, New Falls of Water murmuring in his Ear: On rifted Rocks, the Dragon's late Abodes, The green Reed trembles, and the Bulrush nods. Waste sandy Vallies, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... heroically fought and so victoriously ended shall pass into history a miserable failure, barren of permanent results,—a scandalous and shocking waste of blood and treasure,—a strife for empire, as Earl Russell characterized it, of no value to liberty or civilization,—an attempt to re-establish a Union by force, which must be the merest ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... proud exclusiveness of Brahma, and even the zealous warmth of other northern faiths, are all emotions utterly unknown and foreign to the followers of Buddhism in Ceylon. Yet, strange to tell, under all the icy coldness of this barren system there burns below the unextinguished fires of another and a darker superstition, whose flames overtop the icy summits of the Buddhist philosophy, and excite a deeper and more reverential awe in the imagination of the Singhalese. As the Hindus in process ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... rather than cricket. Here and there a little dried-up grass occurred, but it collected in lonely tufts, between which extended great ravines and hillocks and boulders and patches of desolation. Upon a barren spot in the middle, the wickets had been pitched. When we arrived, they appeared to be an object of no little interest to sundry goats. These beasts evidently regarding the stumps as some strange new form of vegetation, sprang up in a single ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... was devoting all his attention to a matter which he had much at heart. So far Collingwood's great services to his country had been rewarded with the barren honour of a peerage which had made an unwelcome claim upon his slender means, and with regard to which his one petition had been refused—that since he had no son to succeed him the title should descend to one of his daughters. ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... to enslave a goodly number of the rebels. Such occasions rejoiced their hearts, over the profits they thus derived from the struggles of the unhappy natives to recover their freedom, and it may likewise without sin be supposed that their ingenuity was not barren in suggesting devices for provoking such ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... the other hand, Henry II of France prohibited the appearance of a single French prelate, and began to talk of a Gallican council. Thus the brief series of sessions held at Trent from May, 1551, to April, 1552, proved in the main, though not altogether, barren of results. Unless the assembled fathers were prepared to reconsider the decrees already passed, and to force the assent of the Pope to a religious policy of quite unprecedented breadth, another deadlock was at hand; and already, in the early months of 1552, the council, this time with the manifest ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... how knowledge was essential, and how that knowledge had been gained: some of it from the experience of early explorers,—how to avoid the dreaded scurvy, how to build a ship that could withstand the tremendous pressure of the floes; and some from the Eskimos,—how to live in that barren region, and how to travel with dogs and sledges;—and some, too, from Peary's own early experiences,—how he had struggled for twenty years to reach the goal, and had added this experience to that until finally the prize ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... of the murky, stagnant air. It was such a strange, sickly, wavering gleam as she had seen above decaying wood, fish, and other substances. All around was absolute stillness. Not a swallow waved his wing nor an insect hummed in that barren immensity. Nature was ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... joyous in Germany, truthful and brave in England, must yet be moulded to a higher quality amid this varying climate and on these low shores. The regions of the world most garlanded with glory and romance, Attica, Provence, Scotland, were originally more barren than Massachusetts; and there is yet possible for us such an harmonious mingling of refinement and vigor, that we may more than fulfil the world's expectation, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... It was rather barren of interest, to say the truth; and the greater part of it may be summed up in one word. Dollars. All their cares, hopes, joys, affections, virtues, and associations, seemed to be melted down into dollars. ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... trees were all about us. The earth wore a verdant coat of grass, ferns, and vines, so profuse and bright that by contrast a remembrance of the barren parts of America crossed my mind, with the fulsome praise of them by the pious thieves of that region who sell them. It would be impossible and cruel, I reflected, to convey to those extravagants in adjectives ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... did not think that any human being could improve it, but had no doubt of its having changed very considerably for the worse, since the days when the now barren rocks were covered with the immense forest of Snowdon, which must have contained a very fine race of wild men, not less than ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... of the vital quality of illusion which would make them wonder or speculate, else a religion might have grown up around these mysterious visitations. But the men of Fish were beyond all religion—the barest and most savage tenets of even Christianity could gain no foothold on that barren rock—so there was no altar, no priest, no sacrifice; only each night at seven the silent concourse by the shanty depot, a congregation who lifted up a prayer ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... both devoted to music. It was a substitute for happiness to me, and in the empire of harmony I tried to forget my barren life. A certain trouble happened to me; in a twinkling all the ties which bound me to home were broken, and I fled, with misery and desperation in my heart! Madame, I was then hardly twenty, but virtue, honesty and love were already to ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... literature so far back as the tenth century, only, however, to be ridiculed as an impossibility; the circulation of the blood is hinted at; added to which is the marvellous anticipation of anaesthetics as applied to surgery, to be mentioned later on, an idea which also remained barren of results for something like sixteen centuries, until Western science stepped in and secured the prize. Here it may be fairly argued that, considering the national repugnance to mutilation of the body in any form, it could hardly be ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... after ages took conspicuous part in the festival, renders it probable that the hymn was composed in the far off time when Eleusis was still a petty independent state, and before the stately procession of the Mysteries had begun to defile, in bright September days, over the low chain of barren rocky hills which divides the flat Eleusinian cornland from the more spacious olive-clad expanse of the Athenian plain. Be that as it may, the hymn reveals to us the conception which the writer entertained of the character and functions of the two goddesses; their natural shapes ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... From Hemlock Mountain's barren crest The roaring gale flies down the west And drifts the snow on Redmount's breast In ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... himself capable of. He was not made like other men; and he did not live, think, or feel like them. A singular organization was singularly and fatally deranged in its action before it could show its best quality. Marvelous analytical faculty he had; but it all oozed out in barren words. Charming eloquence he had; but it degenerated into egotistical garrulity, rendered tempting by the gilding of his genius. It is questionable whether, if he had never touched opium or wine, his real achievements would have been substantial, for he had no conception of a veritable ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... denizens as well as the water and the earth. But supposing that there were places without animals, these places might have uses necessary for other places which are inhabited. So for example the mountains, which render the surface of our globe unequal and sometimes desert and barren, are of use for the production of rivers and of winds; and we have no cause to complain of sands and marshes, since there are so many places still remaining to be cultivated. Moreover, it must not be supposed that all is made for man alone: ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... exist through the three years after the production of "Three Hours After Marriage" is one of the stumbling blocks for the biographer. Of literary achievement during this period his life was barren. It is true that when he was abroad or in the country he was a guest, but even with this his expenses must have amounted to something. As he earned nothing by his pen, unless his friends provided him with money as well as giving him ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... nursed her tenderly, to Berlin for a visit. Paul went through a great deal of worry and anxiety this summer. He had everything at stake in waiting for the results of his undertaking. All his money was in the buildings, the earth-works, and waterworks; if the barren swamp did not yield twice the sum intrusted to it he was a ruined man. But as July drew near, and Paul looked at the thick standing ears of barley and wheat, he felt the weight of his anxiety lifted, and in August he proclaimed in letters to his friends that the battle ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... thresh, and work with the bricklayers; the country women, as well as the ladies, wear veils to shade their faces from the glare of the snow in winter, and from the scorching rays of the sun reflected from the barren rocks ...
— The World's Fair • Anonymous
... of thy inland seas, The eternal forest girdling either shore, Its belt of dark pines sighing in the breeze, And rugged fields, with rude huts dotted o'er, Show cultivation unimproved by art, That sheds a barren chillness on ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... waste. A blade of grass or an insect finds no existence there. The shrivelled lichen alone, clinging to the weathered surface of the broken brick, seems to glory in its universal dominion over those barren walls. Of all the desolate pictures I have ever seen that of Warka incomparably surpasses all." Surely in this case it cannot be said that appearances are deceitful; for all that space, and much more, is a cemetery, and what ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... edge of the barren spot and began to circle around its edge, while Dick did likewise, following his example. They found a footprint at last and took the trail. It did not lead them far before they came to a path on top of the hill that was so well used that ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... Prince's Quest Mr. Watson exhibited a rather remarkable command of a barren technique. He had neither thoughts that breathe, nor words that burn. He had one or two unusual words—his only indication of immaturity in style—like "wox" and "himseemed." (Why is it that when "herseemed" as used by Rossetti, ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... aloof—not constrained (for then she would have been happy, at the profoundly affecting knowledge that she had carried the day), but unsympathetically and unlovingly at ease. She could not read his face: in his manner she read only a barren kindness that took all and gave nothing. If he didn't love her she need not have come. It would have been better to go on as she had been doing, dreaming of him until—until what? Jenny sighed at the grey vision. Only hunger had driven her to his side on this evening—the imperative ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... northern lands Had covered Italy with barren sands, Rome's Genius, smitten sore, Wail'd on the Danube, and was heard no more. Centuries twice seven had past And crush'd Etruria rais'd her head at last. A mightier Power she saw, Poet and prophet, give three worlds the law. When Dante's strength ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... trial in 1902; Fleisham in 1904, and Gresham in 1907. Since the time of Gresham's disappearance we have lost sight of DeBar, and only recently, as you know, have we got trace of him again. He is somewhere up on the edge of the Barren Lands. I have private information which leads me to believe that the factor at Fond du Lac can take ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... at that fruit tree in the orchard close,— No blossom on its barren branches blows. You should have seen last year with what brave airs It staggered underneath ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... selves, is "up to us." We can delay arrival at the goal of our desires; we can dally by the wayside if we will. Only our own loss, our own suffering, our own unsatisfied longing shall punish us. But who is so stupid that he would remain wandering in the bleak and barren desert, when he might by a turn of his hand enter fields Elysian and merge his soul into the boundless areas ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... however, to my own experiences I must say something further respecting the general position. The battle of Coulmiers (November 9) was followed by a period of inaction on the part of the Loire Army. Had D'Aurelle pursued Von der Tann he might have turned his barren victory to good account. But he had not much confidence in his troops, and the weather was bad—sleet and snow falling continually. Moreover, the French commander believed that the Bavarian retreat concealed a trap. At a conference held between him, Gambetta, Freyoinet, and the generals at the ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... The tribune of France spoke, and every sentient being on this earth betook itself to reflection; the words sped into the obscurity, through space, at hazard, no matter where,—"It is only the wind, it is only a little noise," said the barren minds that live upon irony; but the next day, or three months, or a year later, something fell on the surface of the earth, or something rose. What had been the cause of that? The noise that had vanished, the wind that had passed away. This noise, this ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... as they were very low, requiring an oriental squat at which I am not adept. I compromised by stretching out along a hard couch raised some six inches above the floor. There were no gadgets to tinker with, the place was to me barren of necessary appurtenances ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... the old house, hard as he would fight for it, acknowledged another man's will. But the patch of ground by the cliff was his own. He had claimed its virginity, chosen and tamed it, marked it off, fenced it about, broken the soil, trenched it, wrought it, taught the barren to bear. It lay remote, approachable only by a narrow cliff-track, overlooked by no human dwelling, doubly concealed—by a small twist of the coast-line and a dip of the ground—from the telescopes of the coastguard in their ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... hard, brown protective sheath; then the main body of the gall, of firm and dense tissue; and finally, at the heart, like the Queen's chamber in Cheops, the irregular little dwelling-place of the grub. This was not empty and barren; but the blackness and silence of this vegetable chamber, this architecture fashioned by the strangest of builders for the most remarkable of tenants, was filled with a nap of long, crystalline hairs or threads like the spun-glass ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... members of which they are composed, the wisdom of legislators, and the learning of philosophers, the earth seems to exhibit nothing to the eye of man but what is great and resplendent; nevertheless, in the eye of God it was equally barren and uncultivated, as at the first instant of the creation. "The earth was WITHOUT FORM AND VOID."(34) This is saying but little: it was wholly polluted and impure, (the reader will observe that I speak here of the heathens), and appeared to God only as ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... the trouble which Milton's words cost him, was his care in preserving them. His few Latin letters to his foreign friends are remarkably barren either of fact or sentiment. But Milton liked them well enough to have kept copies of them, and now allowed a publisher, Brabazon Aylmer, to issue them in print, adding to them, with a view to make out a volume, his college exercises, which he ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... Congress altogether barren of positive result; for it gave birth to that conception of a "Confederation of Europe," which, though never realised, has been one of the guiding ideas of nineteenth-century politics. As this solution of the world's problems is likely to be urged upon us with great insistency ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... that had glowed with ruddy light were naked now; mere black trunks and rigid arms pointing to heaven. An earthy smell filled the air; a hundred paces away a wall of mist closed the view. We plodded on sadly up hill and down hill, now fording brooks, already stained with flood-water, now crossing barren heaths. But up hill or down hill, whatever the outlook, I was never permitted to forget that I was the jailor, the ogre, the villain; that I, riding behind in my loneliness, was the blight on all—the death-spot. True, I was behind the others—I escaped their eyes. But there ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... the barren woman, the Drinker of Life, but she had at least drunken without ostentation, and if she murdered with her own large hands, or staked men and women from a sheer lust of cruelty, there were none alive to ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... immense baggage-train. Personally his habits were simple and careless, but he loved to display his riches and magnificence, and made his marches and encampments as much scenes of festival as of war. What this showy duke wanted from their poor cities and barren country the Swiss could not very well see. "The spurs and the horses' bits in his army are worth more money than the whole of us could pay in ransom if we were all ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... storks, these are blocks, have no sense of honor, or concern in the sufferings of others. But as the AEtolians, a state of the like fabric, were reproached by Philip of Macedon to prostitute themselves; by letting out their arms to the lusts of others, while they leave their own liberty barren and without legitimate issue; so I do not defame these people; the Switzer for valor has no superior, the Hollander for industry no equal; but themselves in the meantime shall so much the less excuse their governments, seeing that to the Switz it is well enough known that the ensigns of ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... the ground by fire during the carousal of a New Year's morning, and himself, impaired in purse, in spirits, and in character, returned to Lochlea to find misfortunes thickening round his family, and his father on his death-bed. For the old man, his long struggle with scanty means, barren soil, and bad seasons, was now near its close. Consumption had set in. Early in 1784, when his last hour drew on, the father said that there was one of his children of whose future he could not ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... crowded streets with the friend and monitor of his childhood, confiding the simple tale of his earlier trials,—when, amidst the wreck of fortune and in despair of fame, the Child-angel smiled by his side, like Hope,—all renown seemed to him so barren, all the future so dark! His voice trembled, and his countenance became so sad, that his benignant listener, divining that around the image of Helen there clung some passionate grief that overshadowed all worldly success, drew Leonard gently and gently on, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... dissolving and perfumed, as we find in the melons, gourds, cucumbers, vegetable-marrows, and squashes. But these are slightly laxative if partaken of largely. In tropical countries, this order furnishes the inhabitants with a large portion of their food, which, even in the most arid deserts and most barren islands, is of the finest quality. In China, Cashmere, and Persia, they are cultivated on the lakes on the floating collections of weeds common in these localities. In India they are everywhere abundant, either in a cultivated or wild state, and the seeds ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... "ropes and revolvers," Brann wrote for only three years, and wrote as Shakespeare wrote, unmindful alike of critics, binders and bookworms. Only by the doubtful faith that men are made by their adversity can we reconcile our charge against the Sower who cast the seed of genius to fall on such barren ground, amid the stones of a sterile time and the ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... make them accept present knowledge, and present things, as all that can be attained to. This is all— there is nothing more—is the iterated preaching of house-life. Remain; becontent; go round and round in one barren path, a little money, a little food and sleep, some ancient fables, old age and death. Of all the inventions of casuistry with man for ages has in various ways which manacled himself, and stayed his own advance, there is none equally potent ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... people, that they were deeply religious and patriotic, that they hated Napoleon bitterly, and that they could be trusted not to revolt. He likewise knew well the character of the 800 miles of comparatively barren steppes that intervened between the Niemen and Moscow, whereon small armies could be beaten and large ones starved. Against the Grande Armee therefore, Alexander directed that no decisive battle be risked, but that the Russian forces, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... year that Da Gama returned from India by a route around the south end of Africa, with his ships loaded with rich produce, Sebastian Cabot returned from a fruitless voyage to the strange, barren coast of North America. ...
— Discoverers and Explorers • Edward R. Shaw
... the mantel on which Tesuque still sat open-mouthed, with his bowl. The room had lost its former barren aspect. There was now a carpet, while muslin shades softened the glare of the Colorado sun and the view of the sterile hills. Geraniums bloomed on the window-sills, and some young cottonwoods grew greenly ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... low pitched with three windows; the walls whitewashed; no furniture. Before the house a barren plain; gradually sloping downwards, it stretches into the distance; a grey monotonous sky hangs over it, like the ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... that? The first archbishop fled, And York lay barren for a hundred years. Why, by this rule, Foliot may claim the ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We call aloud, and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word; but in the night of death, hope sees a star ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... uninhabited, barren, sub-Antarctic islands were transferred from the UK to Australia in 1947. Populated by large numbers of seal and bird species, the islands have ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... could have pronounced upon the rightful owner. The demesne around the castle contained some well-grown and handsome timber, and as the soil was undulating and fertile, presented many features of beauty; beyond it, all was sterile, bleak, and barren. Long tracts of brown heath-clad mountain or not less unprofitable valleys of tall and waving fern were all that the eye could discern, except where the broad Shannon, expanding into a tranquil and glassy lake, lay still and ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... burning anxiety that I had felt for some months—ever since Dinah Shadd, the strong, the patient, and the infinitely tender, had of her own good love and free will washed a shirt for me, moving in a barren land where washing ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... on whose barren musical soil we have already descanted, and who has not hitherto disputed to the Old World her privilege of pouring out on our untutored continent the accumulated wealth of years of musical study and training, has at last gone far to redeem her reputation of artistic nullity, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... island, extending back for over one hundred miles. The native city across the bay is Kowloon, and is reached by a short ride on the new railroad which will eventually connect Hankow with Paris. On the barren shore, about a mile from Hongkong, has been founded the European settlement of Kowloon City. It comprises a row of large warehouses, or godowns, a big naval victualling station and coaling depot, large barracks ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... allowed myself a good deal of licence and speculation in treating certain unwitnessed scenes in "The Barren Wooing." But the theory that I develop in it to account for the miscarriage of the matrimonial plans of Queen Elizabeth and Robert Dudley seems to me to be not only very fully warranted by de Quadra's correspondence, but the only theory that will convincingly ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... last evening—came in R. Road cars from Baltimore, 39 miles, in two hours, over a barren and almost uncultivated tract of country. The public buildings and one street called Pennsylvania Avenue are all that are worth mention in this place.... As a specimen of some of the big finery in the ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... clamour that might have been heard for miles. One of these banks— the northernmost—showed traces of herbage, grey in colour and dull by contrast with the verdure of the Island. The rest were but barren sand. ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... the Kennebec, on approaching it from the sea, presents to the stranger a barren and uninviting picture. Hemmed in on either side by low, rocky isles, studded with scraggy pines that have long defied old Atlantic's blasts, it must have been a dreary and disappointing sight, indeed, to the little band of voyagers ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... strings of dried beef, called charqui, which was brought from the mainland in dirty canvas bags. This was often supplemented by boiled seaweed. Being accustomed to self- preservation, I was able to augment this diet with fish caught while sitting on the barren rocks of our sea-girt prison. Prison it certainly was, for sentries, armed with Remingtons, ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... acquisitions which geography has made since the boundaries of commerce have been extended, and the spirit of enterprise has carried our adventurous countrymen into countries which had never yet been indented by a European foot; and which, in the great map of the world, appeared as barren and uninhabitable places, destitute of all resources from which the traveller could derive a subsistence. It must, however, on the other hand, be admitted, that design has frequently had little to do in the discovery of those countries, however well it may have been conceived, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... fellows, built when the street was still a country lane, edging the marshes, strikes a strange note of individuality amid the surrounding harmony of hideousness. It is encompassed on two sides by what was once a garden, though now but a barren patch of stones and dust where clothes—it is odd any one should have thought of washing—hang in perpetuity; while about the door continue the remnants of a porch, which the stucco falling has left exposed in all its ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... The horse and the ass, for instance, if so crossed, give rise to the mule, and there is no certain evidence of offspring ever having been produced by a male and female mule. The unions of the rock-pigeon and the ring-pigeon appear to be equally barren of result. Here, then, says the physiologist, we have a means of distinguishing any two true species from any two varieties. If a male and a female, selected from each group, produce offspring, and that offspring is fertile ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... like my fastidious friend, who go through the world "from Dan to Beersheba, finding all barren,"—who have always some fault or other to find with Nature and Providence, seeming to consider themselves especially ill used because the one does not always coincide with their taste, nor the other with their narrow notions of personal convenience. In one of his ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... been intimate, how happy was I to meet with him. For years had I been in the habit of seeing him every day, when all was happiness, and now to be with him again, though my prospects were as gloomy as the barren moors around us! I felt how different was my regard for him to that for friends of later date. The truth is, we knew ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... laws, struggling for existence on the bleak brown bogs and moors, sowing a little barley and flax, feeding a few rough cattle, breeding a few great black horses; generation after generation fighting their way southward, as they exhausted the barren northern soils, or became too numerous for their marches, or found land left waste in front of them by the emigration of some Suevic, Vandal, or Burgund tribe. We know nothing about them, and never shall know, save ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... the old footing, without comprehensive plan, developing only the same spasmodic encounters, barren of strategic result, that had marked the course of the earlier ten years' rebellion as well as the present insurrection from its start. No alternative save physical exhaustion of either combatant, and therewithal the practical ruin of the island, ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • William McKinley
... truth I should have done even more than what your barren imagination has here depicted. Smith's figure, his ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... and uncultivated was always this good man's object. The Falkland Isles were dreary enough, but they were a paradise compared to the desolate fag-end of the American world,—a cluster of barren rocks, intersected by arms of the sea, which divide them into numerous islets, the larger ones bearing stunted forests of beech and birch, on the skirts of hills covered with perpetual snow, and sending down blue glaciers to the water's ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... circle, and the people busily employed in preparing their evening meal. Other evidences there were, however, to show that the toils of the desert were but too frequently fatal to the wretched beasts of burthen employed in traversing these barren wastes; the whitened bones of camels and donkeys occurred so frequently, as to ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... slide into one another by insensible gradations; and differences of accessibility, that is, of distance from markets do the same; and since there is land so barren that it could not pay for its cultivation at any price; it is evident that, whatever the price may be, there must in any extensive region be some land which at that price will just pay the wages of the cultivators, and yield to the capital employed the ordinary profit, and no more. Until, therefore, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... yet before a good many of these ones will be soldiers," he, observed, with a disrespectful wave of his thumb towards the awkward squad still manoeuvering its way about over the barren stretch of the parade ground. "They ride like tailors squatting on their press-boards, and they salute like a parrot scratching his head with his hind paw. A soldier is like a poet, born, ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... races, with its futilities, but to be hung up with its immortal beacon-light, to shew the track of a new learning, to shew to the contrivers of the chart of new ages, the breakers of that old ignorance, that old arrogant wordy barren speculation. For these men were men who would not fish up the chart of a drowned world for the purpose of seeing how nearly they could conduct another under different conditions of time and races to the same conclusion. And they were men of a different turn of mind entirely from ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... city somewhat as their own when they saw, appearing in the background of the bay, its forests of masts and its conglomeration of gray edifices upon which sparkled the Byzantian domes of the new cathedral. Around Marseilles there opened out a semi-circle of dry and barren heights brightly colored by the sun of Provence and spotted by white cottages and hamlets, and the pleasure villas of the merchants of the city. On beyond this semi-circle the horizon was bounded by an amphitheater of rugged and ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Where bowl the second charms like bowl the first; Say how, and why, the sparkling ill is shed, The heart which hardens, and which rules the head. When winter stern his gloomy front uprears, A sable void the barren earth appears; The meads no more their former verdure boast, Fast bound their streams, and all their beauty lost; The herds, the flocks, in icy garments mourn, And wildly murmur for the spring's return; From snow-topp'd hills the whirlwinds ...
— Inebriety and the Candidate • George Crabbe
... the shore—and then we'll have to do some nice work and lay the Ertak parallel to the edge of the water. The beach is narrow, but apparently the only barren portion. Will that ...
— Vampires of Space • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... privilege of looking over, it will be seen that his equanimity, admirable as it was, was not incapable of being disturbed, and that on rare occasions he could give way to the feeling which showed itself of old in the doom pronounced on the barren fig-tree. ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... behind the barren scrub-topped hills, the scows were beached at the mouth of a deep ravine, from whose depths sounded the trickle of a tiny cascade. Lapierre assisted the women from the scow, issued a few short commands, and, as if by magic, ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... Orlando Innamorato could hardly write, even upon the driest matters of government, with the aridity of a common clerk. Some little lurking well-head of character or circumstance, interesting to readers of a later age, would probably break through the barren ground. Perhaps the letters went counter to some of the ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... less intolerable than servitude under the victors. He even defeated them in a decisive action, which they fought under Galgacus, their leader; and having fixed a chain of garrisons between the firths of Clyde and Forth, he thereby cut off the ruder and more barren parts of the island, and secured the Roman province from the incursions of the barbarous inhabitants [n]. [FN ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... through the Highlands of the Hudson. The great garrison flag was still slowly fluttering earthward, veiled partially from the view of the throng of spectators by the snowy cloud of sulphur smoke drifting lazily away upon the wing of the breeze. Afar over beyond the barren level of the cavalry plain the gilded hands of the tower-clock on "the old Academic" were blended into one in proclaiming to all whom it might concern that it was five minutes past the half-hour 'twixt seven and eight, and there ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... led from Benton down across the barren desert toward Medicine Bow. The railroad track split it and narrowed to a mere thread upon the horizon. The crowd of watching, waiting men saw smoke rise over that horizon line, and a dark, flat, creeping object. Through the ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... been superseded in my heart by the divine Ossian. Through what a world does this angelic bard carry me! With him I wander over barren wastes and frightful wilds; surrounded by whirlwinds and hurricanes, trace by the feeble light of the moon the shades of our noble ancestors; hear from the mountainous heights, intermingled with the roaring of waves and cataracts, their plaintive ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... was slender enough. Unless he live by the ingenuity of his own manufactures, or by thieving or intimidating the people of the country, a French soldier has but barren fare and a hard struggle with hunger and poverty; and it was the one murmur against him, when he was lowest in the ranks, that he would never follow the fashion, in wringing out by force or threat the possessions of the native population. The one reproach, ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... To this barren war of the schools came a fact at last, and its bearer was a gorgeous figure of a man-at-arms (who, later, got into trouble by talking too much), who came swaggering down the road from the New Inn, blowing smoke into the air, with his hat on one side, and his breast-piece loose; ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... I enjoyed my stroll in among the trees, even barren as they are now of leaves, very much. It brought back to my ...
— The Erie Train Boy • Horatio Alger
... the past, the King of Saxony would have found himself master of one of the most extensive kingdoms of Europe; but fortune was hereafter to be always adverse, and even our victories brought us only a barren glory. ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... their assailants might be, and the fall of the man beside me created a hasty rumor that I was killed, so that it was on the whole an alarming experience for them. They kept together very tolerably, however, while our assailants, dividing, rode along on each side through the open pine-barren, firing into our ranks, but mostly over the heads of the men. My soldiers in turn fired rapidly,—too rapidly, being yet beginners,—and it was evident that, dim as it was, both sides had ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... the colonial eye, and the interest of their new labors might have extinguished the prevailing discontent. But while the governor waited for instructions the men were idle, or employed in useless attempts at cultivation on barren land, of which the produce rarely defrayed the ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... sprang, to detail the various acts of bribery and intimidation, cajolery and hostility, by which Alexius contrived to make each of the leaders in succession, as they arrived, take the oath of allegiance to him as their suzerain. One way or another he exacted from each the barren homage on which he had set his heart, and they were then allowed to proceed into Asia Minor. One only, Raymond de St. Gilles count of ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... He beheld the other vessel with her light ahead, still sailing on and leaving them. The day was now dawning, and there was sufficient light to make out the land. The Dort was on shore not fifty yards from the beach, and surrounded by the high and barren rocks; yet the vessel ahead was apparently sailing on over the land. The seamen crowded on the forecastle watching this strange phenomenon; at last it vanished ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the Field thou thoughtest barren, how great a glory hath the moon unveiled! "'And I beheld and was sore amazed, for I was no longer Myself, but Another "'And the sword of death was in that Other's soul,—and yet that Other was but Myself in pain "'And I knew not the things which were once familiar, and my ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... and I who write their history might also sink under it, but that I am supported by the fact that it is so typical, in this respect. I even imagine that ideal reader for whom one writes as yawning over these barren details with the life-like weariness of an actual travelling companion of theirs. Their own silence often sufficed my wedded lovers, or then, when there was absolutely nothing to engage them, they fell back upon the story of their love, which they were never ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... a young woman she didn't have no children, so her master thought sure she was barren. He sold her to Taylors. Here come 'long eleven children. Taylor sold them. After freedom she had another. He was her onliest boy. That was so funny to hear her tell it. I never could forgit it long as I ever know ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... Verdandi is, therefore, not merely a representative of present Being, but of the process of Growing, or of Evolution—which gives her figure a profounder aspect. Indeed, there is generally more significance in mythological tales than those imagine who look upon them chiefly as a barren play ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... florin; the fins, tail, and lips were blue. Another one, weighing less, had a differently-shaped head, with a curious, pipe-like mouth; this was a uniform dull blue. A similar upturning from the ocean's dark depths of strange fish occurred during a submarine earthquake near Rose Island, a barren spot to the south-west of Samoa. The disturbance threw up vast numbers of fish upon the reefs of Manua, the nearest island of the group, and the natives looked upon their great size and peculiar appearance ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... supposed to be connected, with religious belief, to the dogmas and decrees of the Church and the authority of the early Fathers, and wasting the understanding and intellect in dry formalism or subtle but barren controversies. This conception fails to appreciate the vast labour of thought bestowed by leading minds on the attempt to unravel the mass of ecclesiastical teaching which had twined round the innermost lives of themselves and their fellow-Christians, and ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... their extraordinary complexity at this period; and even more like the mountains when you are close to them, for then, losing sight of the whole, you become aware of the details, and are surprised at their wonderful diversity, at the heights and hollows, the barren wastes, fertile valleys, gentle slopes, and giddy precipices—heights and hollows of hope and despair, barren wastes of mis-spent time, fertile valleys of intellectual accomplishment, gentle slopes of aspiration undefined, and giddy precipices of passionate impulse and desperate revolt. ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... island will be preserved from utter destruction, or the stream will overrun the forests of the Far West, and not a tree or plant will remain on the surface of the soil. We shall have no prospect but that of starvation upon these barren rocks—a death which will probably be anticipated by the explosion of ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... first reading of those pregnant words, all the even and hopeless monotony, all the dull and barren plane of life had suddenly erupted into one towering and consuming passion for activity, for return to his old world with its gentle anaesthesia of ever-widening plans and its obliterating and absolving years of ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... soon found himself again on the barren desert. A side track of the railroad, named White Plains, gave him rest for the night. The spot is surrounded by a white alkali desert, covered in places with salt and alkali deposits. Hot Springs is another station in the midst of the desert, and ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... arrangements for "accommodations" and credit, their superior cleanliness, good mattresses, and coffee with a real taste, she did not find them preferable to others. In their rows of cuspidors and shouldering desks, and barren offices hung with insurance calendars, and dining-rooms ornamented with portraits of decomposed ducks, they were typical of all ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... the seeds have almost been cultivated out; in the best pine-apples, and in the small grapes known in the dried state as currants, they have quite disappeared; while in some varieties of pears they survive only in the form of shrivelled, barren, and useless pips. But the banana, more than any other plant we know of, has managed for many centuries to do without seeds altogether. The cultivated sort, especially in America, is quite seedless, and the plants are ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... fresh shoots that will not readily bind to the wall; for if any be twisted or bruised in the binding, they will in time decay, and the sap will issue from the place. Vines should not be cut too close to please the eye, as by that means they have sometimes been rendered barren of fruit. Two knots should generally be left on new shoots, which will produce two bunches of grapes, and which are to be cut off at the next pruning. New branches are to be left every year, and some of the old ones must be removed, which will ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... islands, rising steeply from the sea, are rugged and mountainous; South Georgia is largely barren and has steep, glacier-covered mountains; the South Sandwich Islands are of volcanic ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... magazine presented a graphic picture of the Horseshoe Falls as they were and the same Falls as they would be if more water was allowed to be taken for power: a barren coal-pile with a tiny rivulet of water trickling down its sides. The editorial asked whether the American women were going to allow this? If not, each, if an American, should write to the President, and, if a Canadian, ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... river, partly on a low range of rocks. With its suburbs it may contain about one hundred and sixty thousand inhabitants, a little more than half of whom are Hindoos, and the remainder nominally Mahometans, in creed. Around the wall stretches a wide, barren, irregular plain, covered, mile after mile, with the ruins of earlier Delhis, and the tombs of the great or the rich men of the Mahometan dynasty. There is no other such monumental plain as this in the world. It is as full of traditions and historic memories ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... could ascertain whether any of its more finished passages, e.g. the admirable conversation between the Miss Dashwoods and Willoughby in chapter x., were the result of those fallow and apparently barren years at Bath and Southampton, or whether they were already part of the second version of 1797-98. But upon this matter the records are mute. A careful examination of the correspondence published by Lord Brabourne in 1884 only reveals two definite references to Sense and Sensibility ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... himself of the time to submit to the most exhaustive examinations on the part of his own experts. The defendant's physicians came to court brimming with facts to which they could testify; while the State's experts had only the barren opportunity for determining the defendant's condition afforded by observing him daily in the court room and hearing what Thaw's own doctors claimed that they had discovered. There was no chance to rebut ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... the Eddystone at a short distance from us. Two attempts were ineffectually made to gain soundings, and the extreme density of the fog precluded us from any other means of ascertaining the direction in which we were driving until half past twelve, when we had the alarming view of a barren rugged shore within a few yards, towering over the mast heads. Almost instantly afterwards the ship struck violently on a point of rocks, projecting from the island; and the ship's side was brought so near to the ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... an army of natural pioneers whence men have learned cuniculos agere, the art of undermining. They thrive best on barren ground, and grow fattest in the hardest frosts. Their flesh is fine and wholesome. If Scottish men tax our language as improper, and smile at our wing of a rabbit, let us laugh at their ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... to escape the heavier yoke of the Athenians, who compelled them to: "Dig clay in the valleys, and carry it in leathern bags to the top of the highest mountains, and the most craggy rocks, in order to form a soil upon those barren places, and make them fruitful, and able to bear corn." That history should repeat itself is, of course, to be recognised as merely a commonplace fact; but a myth reproducing itself in the shape of events happening visibly before our ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... Division. If anyone ferreted him out way down here on the edge of civilization he had gambled with himself that it would be Cassidy. And Cassidy had come—Cassidy, who had hung like a wolf to his trails for three years, who had chased him across the Barren Lands, who had followed him up the Mackenzie, and back again—who had fought with him, and starved with him, and froze with him, yet had never brought him to prison. Deep down in his heart Jolly Roger loved Cassidy. They had played, and were still playing, a thrilling game, and ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... of him?" It would take the wind out of my sails, when I came to preach about Redemption, because I should be tempted to believe that, after all, human beings were only in the world on sufferance, and that the aching, frozen, barren earth, so inimical to life, was in even more urgent need of redemption. Day by day, among the heights, I grew to feel that I wanted some explanation of why the strange panorama of splintered crag and hanging ice-fall was there at all. It certainly is not there with any reference to man—at ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Death waits his hour, nor takes me now: But this sad thought augments my pain, That prayer and largess, fast and vow, And Heavenward service are in vain. Ah me, ah me! with fruitless toil Of rites austere a child I sought: Thus seed cast forth on barren soil Still lifeless lies and comes to naught. If ever wretch by anguish grieved Before his hour to death had fled, I mourning, like a cow bereaved, Had been this ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... her bow being repaired, there was nothing more to keep the Southern Cross and her escort in the dreary river, and with no regrets at leaving such a barren, inhospitable country behind them, the pole-seekers weighed anchor early the ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... the possessors of some barren mountain lands in North Carolina, and her description of their former life was wonderful indeed to the ears of the Parisian. She herself had been brought up with marvelous simplicity and hardihood, barely learning to read and write, and in absolute ignorance of society. ...
— Esmeralda • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... so neither do they conduce to any ultimate benefit for those treading them. How striking the contrast between the retrospect of a literary man, who has spent, perhaps, brilliant abilities in supporting every bad cause and every condemned error of his time, and necessarily found all barren at last, and the reflections of one like Francis Jeffrey, who, having embraced just views at first, continued temperately to advocate them until he saw them adopted as necessary for the good of his country, and had the glory of being almost universally ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... determined by no external circumstances, but depends solely on the mental characteristics of the tribes themselves. Environment does not exert any appreciable influence either. Both decimal and vigesimal numeration are found indifferently in warm and in cold countries; in fruitful and in barren lands; in maritime and in inland regions; and among highly civilized or ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant
... best nurse of talent has long been a most humiliating truism; and the fountain of the Muses, bursting from a barren rock, is but too apt an emblem of the hard source from which much of the genius of this world has issued. How strongly the young translators of Aristaenetus were under the influence of this sort of inspiration appears from every paragraph ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... we move. If this prophecy be right, and if the other forecasts to which I have alluded be right, then indeed it is true that we live in an interesting age; then indeed it is true that we may look forward to a time full of fruit for the human race—to an age which cannot be sterilised or rendered barren even by politics." ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... situation: "He that condemns himself to compose on a stated day, will often bring to his task an attention dissipated, a memory embarrassed, an imagination overwhelmed, a mind distracted with anxieties, a body languishing with disease: he will labour on a barren topick, till it is too late to change it; or, in the ardour of invention, diffuse his thoughts into wild exuberance, which the pressing hour of publication cannot suffer judgment to examine or reduce." ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... a road so barren of interesting scenes as that from Cracow to Warsaw—for the most part level, with little variation of surface; chiefly overspread with tracts of thick forest; where open, the distant horizon was always skirted with wood (chiefly pines and firs, intermixed with ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... portions of Burke's journey had to be made through rugged and barren regions, destitute of water, and with nothing that could serve as food for man or beast. Driven to extremities by hunger, the pioneers devoured the venomous reptiles they killed, and on one occasion Burke came near dying from the poison of a snake he had eaten. All their ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... too absorbed for conversation, I had tossed aside the barren paper, and leaning back in my chair, I fell into a brown study. Suddenly my companion's voice broke in upon ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... So much for the independence of Denmark. These two propositions having been made, the one disastrous to the integrity and the other to the independence of Denmark, the Conference, even with these sacrifices offered, was a barren failure. ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... martyrs shed their blood for Christianity? Where did it fulfil its lofty task of saturating the heart of mankind with love, softening the customs of rude pagans, clearing away forests, transforming barren wastes into cultivated fields, planting the cross on chapels and churches, summoning men with the consecrated voice of the bell to the sermon which proclaims love and peace? Where did it open the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the individuals who came under the ban of such a pessimism, we nevertheless can be glad of the fact that the consequences of such a separation from God are at least exposed so clearly, and return from wandering through such barren steppes with renewed thankfulness to our Christian view of the world, with ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... this to the whites, they point to the barren hillside, as evincing the truth of the story, affirming that one day the forest trees stood thick upon it, but was stripped of them by the great serpent as he rolled down its declivity. The round stones found there in great abundance, resembling in size and shape the human head, are taken as ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... to most English travellers, who have no hobbies to ride, the barren appearance of Syria and Palestine is a disenchantment. Accustomed to their own moist climate and green fields, they are not prepared for the dry and parched, and abandoned appearance of the greater part of the country. With us an abundance ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... Serb, the enmity of the Magyar is disconcerting. By crossing the Danube, Serbia has become genuinely part of Europe; she has turned her back on the Balkans and the eternal strife on barren empty hills. The new Serbia can afford to forget and forgive Bulgaria, now a remote sort of country. She can retort to Greece concerning Salonica—We have no need of that port now, for we no longer aspire to be a power on the Aegean, we are a Central-European people. Jugo-Slavia ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... of the round year God sends some day-doves of summer into the barren spring-time, to sing of coming joys and peck the buds into opening. One of His sending brooded over Redleaf when I walked forth in its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... deal about the good time that is coming to this world, when it is to be girded with salvation. Holiness on the bells of the horses. The lion's mane patted by the hand of a babe. Ships of Tarshish bringing cargoes for Jesus, and the hard, dry, barren, winter-bleached, storm-scarred, thunder-split rock breaking into floods of bright water. Deserts into which dromedaries thrust their nostrils, because they were afraid of the simoom—deserts blooming into carnation roses and ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... sailing upon the bayou and lakelet had been the children's greatest pleasure at Viamede, their greatest regret in leaving it. Knowing this, their ever indulgent parents had prepared a pleasant surprise for them, causing a small tract of barren land on the Ion estate to be turned into an artificial lake. It was this, shining in the golden beams of the morning sun, and a beautiful boat moored to the hither shore, that had called forth from the lips of the little girls those exclamations of almost incredulous ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... the rocks into turquoise and emerald or the silvery look of the diver as he plunges into the waves. Twice in their course the cliffs reach a height of thirteen hundred feet above the sea, but their grandeur is never the barren grandeur of our Northern headlands; their sternest faces are softened with the vegetation of the South; the myrtle finds root in every cranny and the cactus clings to the bare rock front from summit to base. A cliff wall hardly inferior in grandeur to that of the coast runs across the midst of ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... soil, dry climate, and single river. It was a narrow strip, inclosed between the Mediterranean Sea and the river Jordan, which runs due south down a steep wooded cleft into the Dead Sea, the lowest water in the world, in a sort of pit of its own, with barren desolation all round it, so as to keep in memory the ruin of the cities of the plain. In the north, rise the high mountains of Libanus, a spur from which goes the whole length of the land, and forms two slopes, ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... was very lonely after a little part of the village had been gone through. It left the main street, then bid farewell to a few scattering distant houses and approached what was called Barley Point;—a barren piece of ground from which a beautiful view of the Sound and the ocean line, and perhaps porpoises, could be had. But at the foot of this field the road turned, round the end of that belt of woods spoken of; and getting on the other side of ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... lik a flock of ship just shared, dat come up from de ship-wash; every one of em bears tweens, an nare a one among em is barren. ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... mother in a gush of pride greater than any he had since experienced. She had never used it, but it always hung upon the one nail in the one place, as a symbol of his love and of hers. And there, higher up on the end of the shelf barren enough of ornaments, God wot, were a broken toy and a much-defaced primer, mementos likewise of his childhood; and farther along the wall, on a sort of raised bench, a keg, the spigot of which he was once guilty of turning ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... Christine and Lisa, who follow her about and ask questions to their hearts' content, which she is never tired of answering. The garden, we revelled in, and found it hard to believe that the terrace, which rises to a height of one hundred feet, was once a barren rock until Count Borromeo covered it with a luxuriant growth of orange, olive, and lemon trees, cedars, oleanders, roses, camellias, and every tree and plant that you can think of. It is really a bewilderingly lovely garden, and we wandered through its paths joyously until we came suddenly ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... placing him in his sack, proceeded upon his journey, and travelling for many days he at last reached a country so barren and rocky that not a single living thing grew upon it—everywhere reigned grim desolation. And in the midst of this dead region he ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various
... meet with another desert of eight days journey in extent, and terribly barren, having neither trees or water, except what is extremely bitter, insomuch, that beasts refuse to drink of it, except when mixed with meal, and travellers are therefore obliged to carry water along with them. After passing this desert, you come to the kingdom of Timochaim[6], in the north ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... "I have merely come to make your fortune; that is to say, I offer you a superb opportunity of making your entry into the artistic world. Art, you know, is a barren route, of which ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... lay down universal or eternal laws, and limits himself to the exploration of the phenomena appearing in a certain stage of historical development. We are not to have another abstract economic man with a world of abstractions all his own; lone, shipwrecked mariners upon barren islands, imaginary communities nicely adapted for demonstration purposes in college class rooms, and all the other stage properties of the political economists, are to be entirely discarded. Our author does not propose to give us a set of principles by which we shall be able to understand ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... verandah-post beside her with folded arms, looking down. "But that is what you won't see; how should you? You will only see dusty, upstart towns, with horrible corrugated-iron hotels, where you will swelter in heat and flies and eat abominable tinned stuffs. It is a barren, comfortless land at present, with a possibility of being useful some day. They want money, energy, brains to develop it thoroughly; and they won't accept them when they are offered, because a few stiff-necked Englishmen happen to be in power. It is absurd to go there at ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... as March, 1850, Daniel Webster said in the United States Senate: "California is Asiatic in formation and scenery; composed of vast mountains of enormous height, with broken ridges and deep valleys. The sides of these mountains are barren—entirely barren—their tops capped by ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... the beautiful and bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by their tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So omnipotent is art; which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced bright terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside at creation's final day. And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match that bloom of theirs, ye cannot, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... further than Raumur, and burned with the same fire as Fabre, for he also had the makings of a great poet. His curiosity had assembled enormous collections, but he considered, as Fabre considered, that collecting is "only the barren contemplation of a vast ossuary which speaks only to the eyes, and not to the mind or imagination," and that the true history of insects should be that of their habits, their industries, their battles, their ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... of her happy disposition might have borne their natural fruit. But at her father's death she found herself isolated, without friends and without amusements. She found herself marooned on the island of Eurasia, a flat and barren land of narrow confines and stunted vegetation. The Japanese have no use for the half-castes; and the Europeans look down upon them. They dwell apart in a limbo of which Baroness ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... for speculation, do the streets of London afford! We never were able to agree with Sterne in pitying the man who could travel from Dan to Beersheba, and say that all was barren; we have not the slightest commiseration for the man who can take up his hat and stick, and walk from Covent-garden to St. Paul's Churchyard, and back into the bargain, without deriving some amusement—we had almost said instruction—from his perambulation. And yet there are such beings: we meet ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... southward and joins the Rio Grande. There is verdure along these streams, and gardens and fruit orchards repay the rude irrigation. In spite of these watercourses the aspect of the landscape is wild and desert-like—low barren hills and ragged ledges, wide sweeps of sand and dry gray bushes, with mountains and long lines of horizontal ledges in the distance. Laguna is built upon a rounded elevation of rock. Its appearance is exactly that ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... deformities, such as toads, spiders, or that most loathsome of nature's excrements, the bat, are not indifferent or insignificant: their very existence is directly at enmity and wages war with his. In truth, one might smile at the unbelievers whose imagination is too barren for ghosts and fearful spectres, and those births of night which we see in sickness, to take root therein, or who stare and marvel at Dante's descriptions, when the commonest every-day life brings before our eyes such frightful distorted master-pieces ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... on the snow, now seem even brighter than they were—the blue violet rises among the sheltered moss by the old tree roots, and the broad-leaved adder tongue gives out its orange and purple blossoms to gladden the brown earth, while the trees are yet all black and barren, save the various species of pine and spruce, which now wear a fringe of softer green. The May flowers of New Brunswick seldom blossom till June, which is rather an Irish thing of them to do, and although the weather has been fine, and recalls to the memory the balmy breath ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... the numbers of animals grouped around each type. No attempt was made to see connection between type and type, for where these had been separately created there was nothing to connect them except possibly some idea in the mind of the Creator. This apparently barren attitude to nature was stronger in men's minds because it had inspired the colossal achievements of Cuvier, a genius who, under whatever misconceptions he had worked, would have added greatly to knowledge. As we have seen in the first chapter, Huxley, through ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... asked the impertinent question, not for Farquhart, whose honor he, apparently, doubted. "Lord Farquhart's not to blame, as you know well enough. The mess is of Lord Gordon's making, for Lord Gordon holds in trust even the barren lands that came to Percy with ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... strange than the scene which he sketches, the deep blue light which turns the rocks into turquoise and emerald or the silvery look of the diver as he plunges into the waves. Twice in their course the cliffs reach a height of thirteen hundred feet above the sea, but their grandeur is never the barren grandeur of our Northern headlands; their sternest faces are softened with the vegetation of the South; the myrtle finds root in every cranny and the cactus clings to the bare rock front from summit to base. A cliff ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... the year growing ancient, Nor yet on summer's death, nor on the birth Of trembling winter, the fairest flowers o' the season Are our carnations, and streaked gilliflowers, Which some call nature's bastards: of that kind Our rustic garden's barren; and I care not To get ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... Kardelj in a daze, through a door to the rear of the desk, and into a somewhat bigger room, largely barren of furniture save for a massive table with a dozen chairs about it. At the table, looking some ten years older than in any photo Josip had ever seen, sat ...
— Expediter • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... would I giue a thousand furlongs of Sea, for an Acre of barren ground: Long heath, Browne firrs, any thing; the wills aboue be done, but I would faine dye a ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... that the Session of the Parliament up to this point, notwithstanding the great business of the Petition and Advice and the Kingship question, had by no means been barren in legislation, the House had gathered up all the Bills already passed, but not yet assented to, for presentation to his Highness in a body. On the 9th of June thirty-eight such Bills, "some of the public, and the others of a more private, ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... strange taste of the Spanish kings," he observed to Gerald Burke, "to plant their capital at Madrid in the centre of a barren country, when they might make such a splendid city as this their capital. I could see no charms whatever in Madrid. The climate was detestable, with its hot sun and bitter cold winds. Here the temperature is delightful; the air is soft ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... wide hall gleaming with its superb trophies of priceless arms, with a quick glance at the crowd of sable retainers, Major Hawke realized in all the barren splendors of the first story the absence of any womanly hand. As he followed the obsequious house butler into a vast ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... cargo of this second vessel consisted almost entirely of remarkably heavy cases marked "machinery." The two vessels, once out of English waters, showed great fondness for each other, and proceeded together to a deserted, barren island near Madeira. Here they anchored side by side; and the mysterious gentlemen, now resplendent in the gray and gold uniform of the Confederacy, stepped aboard the "Shenandoah." Then the cases were hoisted out of the hold of the smaller vessel; and, when the "machinery" was ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... wakened him, and now he lay staring into utter darkness and marveling that the dream was so much like the reality. He was traveling over barren wastes with a caravan; had been for three days. But the waste they crossed was a waste of snow. His companions were natives—who like the Arabs, lived a nomadic life. Their steeds the swift footed reindeer, their tents the igloos of walrus and reindeer skins, they roamed over a territory hundreds ...
— Triple Spies • Roy J. Snell
... passed no one. The road was surprisingly barren of shelters, and, strangely enough, of the two houses they saw one was temporarily deserted and the other unoccupied. The wind came with the breaking of the storm—that cold, piercing wind that often comes in June as a reminder that winter has not passed by so very long before. It whipped the rain ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... of Kensington Gardens," he said. "For some time past I have been living in a flat, ugly, barren, agricultural district. You can't think how pleasant I found the picture presented by the Gardens, as a contrast. The ladies in their rich winter dresses, the smart nursery maids, the lovely children, the ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... watch the path slipping along beneath his horse's hoofs, like the unwinding of coils of brown ribbon, "is like that witch-face slope that we saw awhile ago. It seems to occur at long intervals in patches. You see down that declivity how little grows, how barren." ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... believed that she would never bear a child." She remains at home till the symptoms have ceased, and during this time she may be fed by none but her mother. When the flux is over, her father and mother are bound to cohabit with each other, else it is believed that the girl would be barren all her life.[67] Similarly, among the Baganda, when a girl menstruated for the first time she was secluded and not allowed to handle food; and at the end of her seclusion the kinsman with whom she was staying (for among the Baganda young people did not reside with their parents) ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... France spoke, and every sentient being on this earth betook itself to reflection; the words sped into the obscurity, through space, at hazard, no matter where,—"It is only the wind, it is only a little noise," said the barren minds that live upon irony; but the next day, or three months, or a year later, something fell on the surface of the earth, or something rose. What had been the cause of that? The noise that had vanished, ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... silence; but let not thy faith Fail for a moment in God's boundless grace. But know, oh know, He has prepared a place Fairer for our dear dead than worlds beneath, Yet not beneath; for those entrancing spheres Surround our earth as seas a barren isle. Ours is the region of eternal fears; Theirs is the region where God's radiant smile Shines outward from the centre, and gives hope Even to those who in the shadows grope. They are not far from us. At first though long And lone may seem the paths that intervene, If ever on the staff of prayer ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Johnson exclaimed, 'he was a blockhead;' and upon my expressing my astonishment at so strange an assertion, he said, 'What I mean by his being a blockhead is that he was a barren rascal.' BOSWELL. 'Will you not allow, Sir, that he draws very natural pictures of human life?' JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, it is of very low life. Richardson used to say, that had he not known who Fielding was, he should have believed he was an ostler. Sir, there is more ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... Great Britain? and their independence does not at all prevent England from deriving all the advantage from them ever to be derived from colonies. The only good which England can derive from her extensive colonization is not to be gained by swaying a barren sceptre over distant colonies, but by spreading abroad her race, her language, her civilization, and thus enlarging the sphere of her commerce. Under a free system of intercourse England would not derive less benefit, at present, from the ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... the hostility of Chinese officials towards British merchants and the legitimate expansion of their trade, quarrels were frequent, culminating in the so-called Opium War of 1840-42, resulting in the acquisition by us of the small, barren island of Hongkong, and the opening to foreign trade of five ports, including Canton and Shanghai, at all of which small plots of land some half a mile square were set apart for the exclusive residence of foreigners generally but of Englishmen in particular. Disputes, however, did ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... stretching inland, with the rivers meandering through it, and the long sweep of shore which encompasses the Greve, with Avranches, and its groves and gardens, in the back ground. Close at hand, and almost beneath one's feet, as it were, is the barren rock called the Tombelaine, which, though somewhat larger than the Mont St. Michel, is not inhabited. Even this rock, however, was formerly fortified by the English; and several remains of the old towers are still found among the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 479, March 5, 1831 • Various
... noble and useful books to St. Albans' store. William of Trompington (1214) distinguished himself by giving to the abbey books he had taken from his prior. Abbot Roger was a better man, and gave many books and pieces; but John III and IV and Hugh are barren rocks in our fertile valley, for apparently they did nothing for the library. Richard of Wallingford did worse than nothing. He bribed Richard de Bury with four volumes, and sold to him thirty-two books for fifty pounds of silver, retaining one-half of this sum for himself, and devoting ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... knocked their dhows to pieces to save them; but the men who manned them, as well as the poor slaves with which the majority of them had been crammed, we found, on pulling inshore to examine them later on, had all got safely beyond our reach, far away amid the khors of the desert coast of the barren ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... formation of the land, occurred at every mile of their progress, the view was bounded, on two of the sides, by the gradual and low elevations, which gave name to the description of prairie we have mentioned; while on the others, the meagre prospect ran off in long, narrow, barren perspectives, but slightly relieved by a pitiful show of coarse, though somewhat luxuriant vegetation. From the summits of the swells, the eye became fatigued with the sameness and chilling dreariness of the landscape. The earth was not unlike the Ocean, when its restless waters are ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... shouted again at the barren shoreline where the fire ate at the drift and nothing stirred, yet something very much alive and conscious lay hidden. This time there was more than simple challenge in Ross's demand—there was ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... Eskimo lives and loves after his kind and works out his own destiny. This diameter we are to follow. To what end? Not, we hope, to come back like him who went from Dan to Beersheba to say "All is barren," but to come near to the people, our fellow-Britons, in this transverse section of a country bigger than Europe. We want to see what they are doing, these Trail-Blazers of Commerce, who, a last vedette, are holding the ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... the interest of the story, to have filled, from these slight sketches, a number of pages, more considerable than those which have been already presented. But, in reality, these hints, simple as they are, are pregnant with passion and distress. It is the refuge of barren authors only, to crowd their fictions with so great a number of events, as to suffer no one of them to sink into the reader's mind. It is the province of true genius to develop events, to discover ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... falling from above. At the head of the bay is an extensive piece of low flat ground, intersected by numerous rivulets, which, uniting at a short distance from the beach, formed a deep and rapid stream, near the mouth of which we landed. This spot was, I think, the most barren I ever saw, the ground being almost entirely covered with small pieces of slaty limestone, among which no vegetation appeared for more than a mile, to which distance Mr. Ross and myself walked inland, following the banks of the stream. Among the fragments we picked up one piece ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... said the other man, "stand not to reason on it, but up and away. Lords' hests must be listened to with a quick ear. Thou hast had thy day, old dame, but thy sun has long been set. Thou art now the very emblem of an old war-horse turned out on the barren heath—thou hast had thy paces in thy time, but now a broken amble is the best of them—Come, amble off ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... of the spot. It really seemed to me as if our voices and laughter, so far from breaking the deep eternal silence, only brought it out into stronger relief. On either hand rose up, shear from the waters edge, a great, barren, shingly mountain; before us loomed a dark pine forest, whose black shadows crept up until they merged in the deep crevasses and fissures of the Snowy Range. Behind us stretched the winding gullies by which we had climbed to this mountain tarn, and Mr. K——'s little hut and scrap of a garden ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... She had sought for it, and never found it until now, and her senses doubted it. It was a paradise of love, to be sure; but one, too, of duty. Duty made it real. Work was there, and fulfilment of the purpose of life itself. And if his days hitherto had been useless, hers had in truth been barren. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... received arose from our travelling as we did, without speaking or understanding the language, with no servant and no carriage, taking the common conveyances of the country. Our fare, chiefly fish, black bread, and brandy. The country round Falkenborg is barren, with cultivated spots ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury
... His heart sank within him. He had been dreaming golden dreams of fortune for a week past, but now he was brought down to the cold and barren reality. All his money was gone except a dollar, on which he must live for two days and a half, till his ...
— Sam's Chance - And How He Improved It • Horatio Alger
... great and right fierce; that break ice and glass with their claws, and make many holes therein, and dive there-through into the sea, and take fish under the ice and glass, and draw them out through the same holes, and bring them to the cliff and live thereby. The land is barren, out-take a few places in the valleys, in the which places unneth grow oats. In the places that men dwell in, only grow herbs, grass, and trees. And in those places breed beasts, tame and wild. And so for the more part men of the land live by fish and by hunting ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... The bold soldier who stormed a battery felt his heart beat more proudly and more securely beneath the cordon of the Legion than behind a cuirass of steel; and to a people in whom the sense of duty alone would seem cold, barren, and inglorious, he had substituted a highly-wrought chivalrous enthusiasm; and by the prestige of his own name, the proud memory of his battles, and the glory of those mighty tournaments at which all Europe were the spectators, he had converted a ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... or may not remove mountains, but it has certainly made the Northland. No Christian martyr ever possessed greater faith than did the pioneers of Alaska. They never doubted the bleak and barren land. Those who came remained, and more ever came. They could not leave. They "knew" the gold was there, and they persisted. Somehow, the romance of the land and the quest entered into their blood, the spell of it gripped hold of them and ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... sterile, is now deemed fit to put some sort of live stock upon, though, of course, the more arid the soil, the greater the area required to feed one sheep. To the traveller who crosses its weary stretches in the train, the Karroo seems a barren waste; but it produces small succulent shrubs much relished by sheep, and every here and there a well or a stagnant pool may be found which supplies water enough to keep the creatures alive. Here six acres is the average allowed for one sheep. Tracts of rough ground, covered with patches of thick ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... a couple of chairs and a three-cornered washhand-stand. There was neither sofa nor writing-table. There was not an ornament on the high wooden mantelshelf, or a picture on the panelled walls. Vixen shivered as she surveyed the big barren room. ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... himself: Stay'd much at home, and when in luckless hour His state affairs would drag him from his tower, Left with his spouse a niece himself had bred, To be the partner of her board and bed; And one old priest, a barren lump of clay, To chant their mass, and serve them day by day. Her prison room was fair; from roof to floor With golden imageries pictur'd o'er; There Venus might be seen, in act to throw Down to the mimick fire that gleam'd below The 'Remedies of ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... in vain? It may be another form of westernways, from the A.Sax. wste, barren, empty; wstern, a desert place. Or is it connected with A.Sax. winstre, the left hand? 320 y corse in clot mot colder keue, Thy body in earth (clods) must colder plunge. 321 for-garte forfeited. 322 [gh]ore fader for form-fader, first-father. 323 drwry ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... house on the levee, with which Mr. Anderson had business influence. And Samuel warned him that he must do his best, for he could not come back home now without danger of arrest, and Norman made many promises of amendment; so many, that his future seemed to him barren of all delight. And, by way of encouraging himself in the austere life upon which he had resolved to enter, he attended the least reputable place of amusement in the city, the first night after his ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... writers say, on the sweat of the people, every time the sieve dips down into the taxation-pot by means of a machine called the budget. Adolphe, working early and late and earning little, soon found out the barren depths of his hole; and his thoughts busied themselves, as he trotted from township to township, spending his salary in shoe-leather and costs of travelling, with how to find a ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... with his sphere; but, alas! that sphere is microscopic; it is formed of minutiae, and he surrenders his genuine vision to the artist, in order to embrace it in his ken. His bodily senses grow acute, even to barren and inhuman pruriency; while his mental become proportionally obtuse. The reverse is the man of mind. He who is placed in the sphere of nature and of God, might be a mock at Tattersall's and Brookes's, ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... it not? He will give you a triumphant entrance into His kingdom, those of you who have gone out in loving solicitude and anxious sympathy to labor for the souls of your fellow-men. He will administer unto you an abundant entrance, and then—what? He will give you CHILDREN; and the barren woman shall have more children than she that ...
— Godliness • Catherine Booth
... there to be settled—the postmaster was to be paid off for his light but lonely services, and the "inhabitants" had to be furnished with another month's homely rations, as per agreement. And then Skyland would know J. Pinkney Bloom no more. The owners of these precipitous, barren, useless lots might come and view the scene of their invested credulity, or they might leave them to their fit tenants, the wild hog and the browsing deer. The work of the Skyland ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... flowed with milk and honey might then support a mighty empire, with independent resources sufficient for times of great emergencies, but now that land seems almost barren and supports a few wandering bands of marauding Arabs and ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... country so barren and uninteresting yesterday, that even a professional traveller could not have made a single page of it. It was, in every thing, a perfect contrast to the rich plains of Artois— unfertile, neglected ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... jealousy (the cause of shocking violences) would be heard of: and hypocrisy between man and wife be banished the bosoms of each. Nor, probably, would the reproach of barrenness rest, as it now too often does, where it is least deserved.—Nor would there possibly be such a person as a barren woman. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... reported this morning. We were sceptical, but this afternoon it showed up unmistakably to the west, and there can be no further doubt about it. It is Joinville Island, and its serrated mountain ranges, all snow- clad, are just visible on the horizon. This barren, inhospitable- looking land would be a haven of refuge to us if we could but reach it. It would be ridiculous to make the attempt though, with the ice all broken up as it is. It is too loose and broken to march over, yet not open enough to be able to launch the boats." For the next two or ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... behold, by the iniquity of fate, she had passed through her youth alone, and drew near to the confines of age, a childless woman. The tender ambitions that she had received at birth had been, by time and disappointment, diverted into a certain barren zeal of industry and fury of interference. She carried her thwarted ardours into housework, she washed floors with her empty heart. If she could not win the love of one with love, she must dominate all by her temper. Hasty, wordy, and wrathful, ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... has human knowledge been more extended in our time than in that of astronomy. Forty years ago astronomical research seemed quite barren of results of great interest or value to our race. The observers of the world were working on a traditional system, grinding out results in an endless course, without seeing any prospect of the great generalizations to which they might ultimately ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... this subject in THE CONTINENTAL, we concluded by considering the consequences of an early victory of the North over the entire South, followed by the restoration of the old Union upon precisely the old basis. We showed that, in such an event, the war would have been barren of results even to the extent of removing its own cause, or preventing its almost immediate and more desperate renewal; that the question at issue is a question of paramount governing power between two adverse theories of social existence; between two distinct ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... low barren cliff overhung the house in which he was born, fir and birch looked down on the roof, and wild-cherry strewed flowers over it. Upon this roof there walked about a little goat, which belonged to Oeyvind. He was kept there that he might not go astray, and Oeyvind ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... doesn't know, no one knows, but I think your mother would, how it cut me to turn 'em off just before winter set in. I lay awake many a night thinking of it, and I gave them what I had—I did, indeed. I hadn't got money to pay 'em, but I had three barren cows fattened, and gave every scrap of meat to the men, and I let 'em go into the woods and gather what was fallen, and I winked at their breaking off old branches, and now to have it cast up against me by that cur—that servant. But I'll go on with the ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... too far over their impulses to allow of their becoming partisans, is offensive alike to the aristocrat and the democrat. By the one he is denounced as a man who holds incendiary principles, by the other as a half-hearted "trimmer." He has no sympathy, as he says, with "that vague, barren pathos, that useless effervescence of enthusiasm, which plunges, with the spirit of a martyr, into an ocean of generalities, and which always reminds me of the American sailor, who had so fervent an enthusiasm for General Jackson, that he at last sprang from ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... great ceremony, and did it on the sixth day of the moon, with which day they began both their months and their years. They gave a name to this shrub, denoting that it had the virtue of curing all diseases. They sacrificed victims to it, believing that, by its virtue, the barren were made fruitful. They looked upon it likewise as a preservative against all poisons. Thus do several nations of the world place their religion ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... bind the stubborn will, Wound the callous breast, Make self-righteousness be still, Break earth's stupid rest. Strangers on a barren shore, Lab'ring long and lone, We would enter by the door, And Thou know'st ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... common sense, for instance, seems concrete and natural. The reaction of common sense to the world is direct and practical, it has few questions to ask, and philosophic speculations appear to it abstract and barren. But, upon analysis, it is the common sense view that stands revealed as abstract and barren. For an abstract object is one that does not fully correspond to the rich and manifold reality; it is ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... sandy plain in the heat of the midday sun and you return the same way the next morning after a rainy night—what has happened? The ground which yesterday looked so parched and barren is now covered with millions of tiny blades. Where has this sudden life come from? It was there all the time. There is always latent life beneath the surface, but it is invisible. And as soon as a fertilizing rain comes, it springs up, and everyone ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... the larch, that were once rose-red with the blood of Spring, but now rattle on the leafless branches, black and bare as they. No leaf remains on any bough of the forest, no scarlet streamer of brier flaunts from the steadfast rocks that underlie all verdure, and now stand out, bleak and barren, the truths and foundations of life, when its ornate glories are fled away. The river flows past, a languid stream of lead; a single crow, screaming for its mate, flaps heavily against the north-east gale, that enters here also and lifts the carpet in long waves across the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... Ilbrahim would derive enjoyment from the most trifling events, and from every object about him; he seemed to discover rich treasures of happiness, by a faculty analogous to that of the witch-hazel, which points to hidden gold where all is barren to the eye. His airy gayety, coming to him from a thousand sources, communicated itself to the family, and Ilbrahim was like a domesticated sunbeam, brightening moody countenances, and chasing away the gloom from the dark corners of ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... apt to be tiresome when we are not athirst for information; but, to be quite fair, we must admit that superior reticence is a good deal due to lack of matter. Speech is often barren, but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled nest-egg; and, when it takes to cackling, will have nothing to announce ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... hillside and out across a barren flat. Halfway across the flat the trail forked. Lorry had ceased to whistle. At the fork his pony stopped of its own accord. The man turned questioningly. Lorry gestured toward the right-hand trail. The man staggered on. The horses fretted at the slow pace. Keen to anticipate some trickery, ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... and social sides are organically related, and that education cannot be regarded as a compromise between the two, or a superimposition of one upon the other. We are told that the psychological definition of education is barren and formal—that it gives us only the idea of a development of all the mental powers without giving us an idea of the use to which these powers are put. On the other hand, it is urged that the social definition ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... through a contracted valley, lying between the rocky wall which divided the island, and a chain of sandy hills, which hid the sea and sheltered the valley from the wind. Fritz and I ascended one of these hills, on which a few pines and broom were growing, and perceived beyond them a barren tract, stretching to the sea, where the coral reefs rose to the level of the water, and appeared to extend far into the sea. Any navigators, sailing along these shores, would pronounce the island inaccessible ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... we belong To the wild olive wood; Grace took us from the barren tree, And grafts ...
— Hymns and Spiritual Songs • Isaac Watts
... in Lady Hamilton's behalf, stating the important service which she had rendered to the fleet at Syracuse; and Mr. Addington, it is said, acknowledged that she had a just claim upon the gratitude of the country. This barren acknowledgment was all that was obtained; but a sum, equal to the pension which her husband had enjoyed, was settled on her by Nelson, and paid in monthly payments during his life. A few weeks after this event, the war was renewed; and the ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... Upon the barren sands they bow. What tongue of joy e'er woke such prayer, As bursts in desolation there? What arm of strength e'er wrought such power, As waits to crown that feeble hour? There into life an infant empire springs! There falls the iron from the soul; There liberty's young accents roll, ...
— An Ode Pronounced Before the Inhabitants of Boston, September the Seventeenth, 1830, • Charles Sprague
... the air, who were nevertheless very ill qualified to win admiration for the caste to which they belonged. To state the simple truth, most of them were very ordinary commonplace personages, respectable, sapless, idealess—what Dr. Johnson would have characterized as exceedingly barren rascals. Some were of obscure origin, and would have been hard put to it if required to trace their ancestry beyond a single generation. Of these latter, a few, as has already been seen, had amassed wealth by trade or speculation, and had made their way into the exclusive ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... for teaching by the eye and hand and by real things, and in his aversion to the barren and erroneous method of teaching from books alone, Rousseau, constantly carried away by the passionate ardor of his nature, rushes into an opposite extreme, and exclaims, "I hate books; they only teach us to talk about what we do not understand." Then, checked ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... valley, across the low hills that encircled it, sometimes spanning or running parallel to the bright stream that had been the delight of Eric's innocent childhood. There was something enjoyable at first to the poor boy's eyes, so long accustomed to the barren sea, in resting once more on the soft undulating green of the summer fields, which were intertissued with white and yellow flowers, like a broidery of pearls and gold. The whole scene was bathed in the exquisite light, and rich ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... Agriculture, and the International Boundary and Water Commission, United States and Mexico. A number of these projects are multiple-purpose projects, providing not only for reclamation and irrigation of barren land and flood control, but also for the production of power needed for industrial development of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... know the connection between Beauty and Truth, and the place of Beauty in the moral and intellectual order of the Kosmos. The problems of idealism and realism, as he sets them forth, may seem to many to be somewhat barren of result in the metaphysical sphere of abstract being in which he places them, but transfer them to the sphere of art, and you will find that they are still vital and full of meaning. It may be that it is as a critic of Beauty that Plato ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... his usual simplicity, he gives some account of the island and of Christianity therein: "Our Lord has been well served this year in the island of Bohol, with the fruits gathered from the conversion of those pagans, for in this barren waste we have set out a beautiful garden of new plants which our Lord has planted. Many people have been brought together and induced to settle in villages, wherein they are instructed. At the time when I am writing this, we are in a village on the coast, whither there came down to us yesterday ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, - Volume XIII., 1604-1605 • Ed. by Blair and Robertson
... and he went away glad and brought his young bride. This first great picture of Raphael's represented this marriage taking place at the foot of the Temple steps. The disappointed lovers are present and, I am sorry to say, one of them is showing his anger by breaking his barren rod even while ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... much and acts too little," he said to the Duke of Chevreuse; "his most solid occupations are confined to vague applications of his mind and barren resolutions; he must see society, study it, mix in it, without becoming a slave to it, learn to express himself forcibly, and acquire a gentle authority. If he do not feel the need of possessing firmness and nerve, he will not make any real progress; ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... of human life. A lean and threadbare scarecrow flapped his ragged coat-sleeves in the wind that swept across the barren garden patch farther up the slope,—this was the nearest approach to human life that came within the range of vision. And as if to invite jovial companionship, this pathetic gentleman wore his ancient straw hat cocked rakishly over what would ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... mean time, the inhabitants of the barren island of Nantucket had taken up this fishery, invited to it by the whales presenting themselves on their own shore. To them, therefore, the English relinquished it, continuing to them, as British subjects, the importation of their oils into England, duty free, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... 578-534.—Servius thus succeeded to the throne without being elected by the Senate and the Assembly of the Curiae. The reign of this king is almost as barren of military exploits as that of Numa. His great deeds were those of peace; and he was regarded by posterity as the author of the later Roman constitution, just as Romulus was of the earlier. Three important acts are assigned to Servius by universal ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... Winkle, instead of seeking his repose upon the cold and barren acclivities of the Kaatskills—as we are veritably informed by Irving—but betaken himself to a comfortable bed at Morrison's or the Bilton, not only would he have enjoyed a more agreeable siesta, but, what the event showed of ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... Investigations of this kind would not be unrewarded, nor devoid of a certain amount of interest; and I think that in the present subject we can, by perseverance, penetrate a little distance into an almost untrodden and apparently barren region, and if we cannot reach the source from whence the bright waters spring, can at least obtain some more accurate information ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... elbow-room. It was an irregular little bunch of buildings gathered along an arterial street which, after a run of three hundred yards or so, broke to pieces and scattered its dispersed shanties about a high, barren plain. It stood on the steep bank of a little river, and over against it, on a naked hill, was Uncle Sam's military village,—a fort by courtesy,—where, when not sleeping, black soldiers and white strolled about in the warm sun. When the little street was fairly awake, it presented ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... and barren sand-bank, after all, offered but a feeble chance for life. Even if he did reach it, which was doubtful, what could he do? Starvation instead of drowning would be his fate. More than once it occurred to him that it would be better then and ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... route, he did much to dispel the popular idea created by Long that the plains were barren, and the American Desert began to shrink. In 1843 Fremont was sent out again. Making his way westward through the South Pass, where his work ended in 1842, he turned southward to visit Great Salt Lake, and then pushed on to Walla Walla on the Columbia ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... birth-rate, the future of the race would be the gloomiest possible. An inexorable law would determine that there could be no mental evolution, for the best of the race would cease to propagate their kind. All who would arrive at this standard of mental growth would become barren. And against this there could be ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... faith, And whispered in the maiden's heart, "Rise up and look from where thou art, And scatter with unselfish hands Thy freshness on the barren sands ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... on record; they seem to have had no other object than the gratification of her love of popular applause, and her taste for magnificent entertainments which cost her nothing; and the trivial details of her reception at the different towns or mansions which she honored with her presence, are equally barren of amusement and instruction. But her visit to the university of Cambridge in the summer of 1564 presents too many characteristic traits to be passed ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... trying to tell Nicholas how he can make some money, and have submitted a brilliant plan to him, but my seed, as usual, has fallen on barren soil. Look what a sight he is now: ...
— Ivanoff - A Play • Anton Checkov
... of attention that these charges of aggressive designs on the part of other powers are made by Germany, who, since 1906, has established an elaborate network of strategical railways leading from the Rhine to the Belgian frontier through a barren, thinly populated tract, deliberately constructed to permit of the sudden attack upon Belgium, which was carried out ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... can conceive the beauty, sublimity and inspiration of that scene, especially to one who had for weary months been traversing dusty, treeless and barren plains. The contrast was overwhelming. Tears filled my eyes as I gazed upon the fairy scene. I recall the entrancing picture to-day, in all its splendid detail, so vividly was ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... his doctrines, containing not a few elements of sublimity and beauty, exercised a better influence, it must be admitted, after all, that they constituted a most unsatisfactory system of cold and barren mysticism. The ancient philosophers delivered many excellent moral precepts; but, as they wanted the light of revelation, their arguments in support of duty were essentially defective, and the lessons which they taught had often very little influence either on themselves ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... even here; and no man, how prejudiced soever, can compare with the standing at a deer-path all day long waiting till a great timid beast is driven up within ten yards of your muzzle, with that extraordinary sport on bald and barren mountains, where nothing but vast and muscular exertion, the eye of the eagle, and the cunning of the serpent, can bring you within range of the wild ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... of Borodino was to leave Moscow at the mercy of the invaders, and a barren prize indeed it proved to them. In the horror of the fearful retreat from the ruined city the fame of Ney reached its highest point. Nothing in all history surpasses the record of his indomitable courage and cheerfulness in the most hopeless ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... breeze seems to sparkle and effervesce like the waves that beat upon the rocky shore, and from whose crests it bears off the health-giving ozone to mix with the fragrant scent of the wild thyme and heather of the hills and barren moors. The sea never looks two days alike: now it is glistening like frosted silver, now it is as liquid gold. At one time it is ruddy like wine, at another time rich orange or amber, and a few hours after intensely blue, as if the sky had fallen or joined it then and there. ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... necessity, he would doubtless have descended some distance, at least, to a more warm and sheltered position before seeking repose. A more gloomy and desolate resting-place than the summit of an Alpine pass can scarcely be found. The bare and barren rocks are entirely destitute of vegetation, and they have lost, besides, the sublime and picturesque forms which they assume further below. They spread in vast, naked fields in every direction around ...
— Hannibal - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... is an unhappy one, but, from the way in which they speak of it, it is clear that for them it promises nothing desirable. It is a monotonous, never ending, and altogether unsatisfying existence,—a life as barren and desolate as the country which the ghosts inhabit. These people are as much attached to life as we are. Notwithstanding the unhappy days which have befallen them of late years,—days of privation and hunger,—they ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... fettered me, my flesh the irons tore— Scourged, mocked, and worse than buried me upon a lifeless shore, Where human foot had never trod—upon a barren rock, Whose caves ne'er echoed to a sound save billows as ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... many coasts, sand-hills both protect the shores from erosion by the waves and currents, and shelter valuable grounds from blasting sea-winds. Man, therefore, must sometimes resist, sometimes promote, the formation and growth of dunes, and subject the barren and flying sands to the same obedience to his will to which he has reduced ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... And if anybody can get an untruthful word out of me, I'll pay his score till the Day of Judgment. I'll begin the story at the commencement. First you must cross the horrible Alps. There you see barren, dreary rocks, cold snow, wild glacier torrents on which no boat can be used. Instead of watering meadows, the mad waves fling stones on their banks. Then we reach the plains, where it is true many kinds of plants grow. I was there in June, and made my jokes about the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Cartier, searching for an Eldorado, found Labrador, and in disgust called it the 'Land of Cain.' A century and a half afterward Lieutenant Roger Curtis wrote of it as a 'country formed of frightful mountains, and unfruitful valleys, a prodigious heap of barren rock'; and George Cartwright, in his gossipy journal, summed up his impressions after five and twenty years on the coast. He said, 'God created this country last of all, and threw together there the refuse of his materials as of no ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... Fleisham in 1904, and Gresham in 1907. Since the time of Gresham's disappearance we have lost sight of DeBar, and only recently, as you know, have we got trace of him again. He is somewhere up on the edge of the Barren Lands. I have private information which leads me to believe that the factor at Fond du Lac can ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... gap where the screen of bush broke off, leaving the barren shoulder overlooking the valley. It was where the hard-beaten, converging cattle-paths hurled themselves over the brink ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... we read is useful unless it calls up living things in the soul. To read a mystic book truly is to invoke the powers. If they do not rise up plumed and radiant, the apparitions of spiritual things, then is our labor barren. We only encumber the mind with useless symbols. They knew better ways long ago. "Master of the Green-waving Planisphere,... Lord of the Azure Expanse,... it is thus we invoke," ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... with his hands deep in his trousers pockets and his head down, and as General Ward was out organizing the farmers in a revolt against the dominant party in the state, Barclay was alone most of the time. The picture of that barren office, with its insurance chromos, with its white, cobweb-marked walls, with its dirty floor partly covered with an "X" of red-bordered hemp carpet reaching from the middle to the four corners, the picture of the four tall unwashed windows letting in the merciless afternoon ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... Not only would she have scorned such means of reaching the life of ample ease and rich benevolence, but they were impossible to her nature. A garden that one must crouch to enter was a prison. Better, far better, her barren, dusty, lonely life than such ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... martyr, and they would also transform Napoleon into a demi-god. No, we will not grant him such a triumph, such a glorious end—we will not allow him a speedy death. He shall ignominiously disappear; he shall die slowly on some barren island in the ocean; die amid the tortures of solitude, of weariness, of powerless rage. This must be the vengeance of Europe; this must be the end of the vampire who has ...
— A Conspiracy of the Carbonari • Louise Muhlbach
... tough enough—barren, desolate, forbidding; enough to stop the most adventurous and dedicated. But they had to run head-on against a mad genius who ...
— The Hunted Heroes • Robert Silverberg
... Hamilton contrasts it pointedly with physical science (of which he talks with a sort of supercilious condescension, in one of the worst passages of his writings, p. 401)—when all its apparent fruits were produced in the shape of ingenious but barren verbal technicalities—what hope could be entertained that Formal Logic could hold its ground in the estimation of the recent generation of scientific men? Mr Mill has divested it of that assumed demonstrative authority which Bacon called ...
— Review of the Work of Mr John Stuart Mill Entitled, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.' • George Grote
... smaller than it is at present. The best view of it is from the Mount of Olives; it commands the exact shape, and nearly every particular, namely, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Armenian Convent, the Mosque of Omar, St. Stephen's Gate, the round-topped houses, and the barren vacancies of the city. The Mosque of Omar is the St. Peter's of Turkey. The building itself has a light, pagoda appearance; the garden in which it stands occupies a considerable part of the city, and contrasted with the surrounding desert is beautiful; ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... business-man bears to his Monday life. To the ordinary business man, Christ's words are a seeing guide to be followed in church, but a blind enough guide, not to be followed on the street. Hence Pushkin's life is barren as a source of inspiration towards what life ought to be; but it is richly fruitful as a terrifying warning against what life ought not ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... the ship is worse than prison; but it is something that has to be gone through. Beyond it all lies the south, the land of his youthful dreams, tempting with its sunny smile. In time he arises, half dead. Does he find his south? How often it is but a barren desert he ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... to be illusion, cheat—itself the most cheated of races; lured on to a career of sacrifice and contempt. If he could only keep the hope that had hallowed its sufferings. But now it was a viper—not a divine hope—it had nourished in its bosom. He felt so lonely; a great stretch of blackness, a barren mere, a gaunt cliff on a frozen sea, a pine on a mountain. To be done with it all—the sighs and the sobs and the tears, the heart-sinking, the dull dragging days of wretchedness and the nights of pain. How often he had turned his face to the wall, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... {55} indeed a terrible year for mankind. Demeter no longer smiled on the earth she was wont to bless, and though the husbandman sowed the grain, and the groaning oxen ploughed the fields, no harvest rewarded their labour. All was barren, dreary desolation. The world was threatened with famine, and the gods with the loss of their accustomed honours and sacrifices; it became evident, therefore, to Zeus himself that some measures must be adopted to appease the anger ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... to Loch Scavaig, which in the bright afternoon looked scarcely less dreary than at night, especially now that the 'Diana' was no longer there to give some air of human occupation to the wild and barren surroundings. The sun was well inclined towards the western horizon when the 'Dream' reached her former moorings and noiselessly dropped anchor, and about twenty minutes later the electric launch belonging to the vessel was lowered and I entered it with Santoris, a couple of his men ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... old pit-frame on a barren moor, gaunt, against the yellow west. Gourlay saw bars of iron, left when the pit was abandoned, reddened by the rain; and the mounds of rubbish, and the scattered bricks, and the rusty clinkers from the furnace, and the melancholy shining pools. A four-wheeled old trolley had lost two ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... San Francisco Bay, at a point where the Golden Gate broadens into the Pacific, stands a bluff promontory. It affords shelter from the prevailing winds to a semicircular bay on the east. Around this bay the hillside is bleak and barren, but there are traces of former habitation in a weather-beaten cabin and deserted corral. It is said that these were originally built by an enterprising squatter, who for some unaccountable reason abandoned them shortly after. The "jumper" who succeeded him disappeared one day quite ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... The benefit. Consider, first, that great Or bright infers not excellence. The Earth, Though, in comparison of Heaven, so small, Nor glistering, may of solid good contain More plenty than the Sun that barren shines, Whose virtue on itself works no effect, But in the fruitful Earth; there first received, His beams, inactive else, their vigour find, Yet not to Earth are those bright luminaries Officious, but to thee, Earth's habitant. And, for ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... to Earth's weary voices, Louder every day, Bidding her no longer linger On her charmed way; But hasten to her task of beauty Scarcely yet begun; By the first bright day of summer It should all be done. She has yet to loose the fountain From its iron chain; And to make the barren mountain Green and bright again; She must clear the snow that lingers Round the stalks away And let the snowdrop's trembling whiteness See the light of day. She must watch, and warm, and cherish Every blade of green; Till the tender grass appearing From the earth is ...
— Legends and Lyrics: Second Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... is my verse so barren of new pride, So far from alteration and quick change? Why, with the time, do I not glance aside To new-found methods and to compounds strange? Why write I still all one, ever the same, And ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... for some distance leaves the shore and ascends a range of barren hills containing slate, limestone and granite. Hardy trees become more abundant than the chestnut, and the mountains higher and more imposing, as we approach ...
— Itinerary through Corsica - by its Rail, Carriage & Forest Roads • Charles Bertram Black
... land at Storborg, it remained untouched for the present. Aronsen had no time for working on the soil—where was the sense of digging up a barren moor? But Aronsen had a garden, with a fence all round, and currant bushes and asters and rowans and planted trees—ay, a real garden. There was a broad path down it, where Aronsen could walk o' Sundays and smoke his pipe, and in the background was the verandah of the house, with panes of ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... in the hope that irate farmers might find them when, after our departure, they visited the scenes of our marauding. And to such an extent did this marauding obtain that, by the time we had reached the Mississippi River, I was almost wholly barren of further ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... he growled in Turkish. "Wherefore didst thou come? To cackle like a barren hen that sees another laying? Nichevo," he added, turning his back on me. And that was insolence in Russian, meaning that nobody and nothing could possibly be of less importance. He seemed to keep a separate language for each set of thoughts. ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... blazing sunshine had browned all to a monotonous tone in keeping with the monotonous life it represented. The only corn to be seen was of the variety called sod-corn, which, unwashed by rain for a full month now, had failed to mature, such stalks as had tasselled at all being as barren as the rest because the tender silks had dried too rapidly and could furnish no fertilizing moisture to the pollen which sifted down from the ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... pretty rapid, though it lay through an uninteresting country, in many parts uncultivated and barren-looking. Massillon is a very flourishing town, with some good stores and two or three hotels. As the captain was obliged to make a short stay here, I went into the town and, stepping into an hotel to procure a cigar, I found a company engaged in earnest conversation, ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... keeping at bay an army of thoughts that would leap upon him if he gave them an opportunity. But soon that would be all over—no more battle, no more struggle. He turned the corner and saw Scaw House standing amongst its dark trees, with its black palings in front of its garden and the deserted barren patch of field in front of that again. The sun was getting low and the sky above the house was flaming but the trees were sombre ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... around us—evolved in the reduction of copper, have not played so long on the surrounding atmosphere without doing their work. Everywhere within their influence, the perennial vegetation is meagre and stinted. The hills, particularly to the southeast of the copper-works, are barren in the extreme. Not one spark of green, not one solitary lichen, can withstand the ravages of the poison. Time was, we were told by an old inhabitant, when these hills produced the earliest and finest corn in the principality; but now they only resemble enormous piles of sandy gravel, unbroken ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... section of a garden-bed for our own; I cultivated mine so assiduously that it became quite a deep hole; but I do not recall that anything ever grew in it. The soil was a very rich loam, and ceaseless diligence must have been required in me to keep it barren. ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... not merely for the purpose of raising barren taxes, but taxes that are fertile taxes, taxes that will bring forth fruit—the security of the country which is paramount in the minds of all, provision for the aged and deserving poor. It was time it was done. It is rather a shame for a rich country like ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... is also much that is almost always overflown with waters, and is a perpetual swamp. There are extensive prairies in this Valley; and towards the Rocky mountains; on the upper waters of the Arkansas and Red rivers, there are vast barren steppes or plains of sand, dreary and barren, like the central steppes of Asia. On the east of the Mississippi, are extensive regions of the densest forests, which form a striking contrast with the prairies which stretch on the west of ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... and deaf One-third of Philip's effective navy was thus destroyed One could neither cry nor laugh within the Spanish dominions One of the most contemptible and mischievous of kings (James I) Only citadel against a tyrant and a conqueror was distrust Oration, fertile in rhetoric and barren in facts Others that do nothing, do all, and have all the thanks Passion is a bad schoolmistress for the memory Past was once the Present, and once the Future Patriotism seemed an unimaginable idea Pauper client ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of the county Wicklow, that paradise of our country, a small white cottage, with a neat flower plot before, and a small orchard and garden behind. It stood on a little eminence, at the foot of one of those mountains, which, in some instances, abut from higher ranges. It was then bare and barren; but at present presents a very different aspect, a considerable portion of it having been since reclaimed and planted. Scattered around this rough district were a number of houses that could be classed with neither farm-house nor cabin, but as humble little buildings ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... empty pockets, and a sword which peered through the sheath. The meanest ruffler who, with broken feather and tarnished lace, swaggered at the heels of Turenne, was scarcely to be distinguished from me. I had still, it is true, a rock and a few barren acres in Brittany, the last remains of the family property; but the small small sums which the peasants could afford to pay were sent annually to Paris, to my mother, who had no other dower. And this I would not touch, being ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... the man still young but worn and grey, is she, his sister, who, of all the world, went over to him in his shame and put her hand in his, and with a sweet composure and determination, led him hopefully upon his barren way. ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... Though the Garden of thy Life be wholly waste, the sweet flowers withered, the fruit-trees barren, over its wall hang ever the rich dark clusters of the Vine of Death, within easy reach of thy hand, which may pluck of them when ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... Tethys his espoused, Mother of all. They kindly from the hands Of Rhea took, and with parental care 240 Sustain'd and cherish'd me, what time from heaven The Thunderer hurled down Saturn, and beneath The earth fast bound him and the barren Deep. Them go I now to visit, and their feuds Innumerable to compose; for long 245 They have from conjugal embrace abstain'd Through mutual wrath, whom by persuasive speech Might I restore into each other's arms, They would for ever love me and revere. Her, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... Am not surprised you find Berlin changed for the worse: such a train of calamities must, in the end, make itself felt in a poor and naturally barren Country, where continual industry is needed to second its fecundity and keep up production. However, I will do what I can to remedy this dearth (LA DISETTE), at least as far ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... a picture of light Where nothing abides, All things fade. In fading there is beauty, By shedding tears We bathe our hearts— Those crushed flowers full of smart— For a deity not far from our souls. Yet, no solace in prayer, Pain has no largess; Dark has stars, But no barren earth its flowers. All are dismal and fallow; Yet, from the mountain's stony heart Spring multitudinous rivers Sparkling at dawn, and Deepening night's gloom with mysterious murmurs; And who knows? These streams ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... very narrow island, extending east and west, Captain Marion, in about the latitude of 48 deg. south, and from 16 deg. to 30 deg. of longitude east of the Cape of Good Hope, discovered six islands, which were high and barren. These, together with some islands lying between the Line and the southern tropic in the Pacific Ocean, were the principal discoveries made in this voyage, the account of which, we were told, was ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... head they placed a fruitless crown, And put a barren sceptre in my gripe, Thence to be wrench'd by an unlineal hand, No son ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... may in a great degree command and procure. Experience has taught me that this is true. I had made many sea voyages before this, and therefore had repeated proofs of the observation of Lord Bacon, that, of all human progresses, nothing is so barren of all possibility of remark as a voyage by sea; nothing, therefore, is so irksome, to a mind of any vigour or activity. If a man, by long habit, has obtained the knack of retiring into himself—of putting all his faculties ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... of Nevada a playa lake spreads over an area fifty miles long and twenty miles wide. In summer it disappears; the Quinn River, which feeds it, shrinks back one hundred miles toward its source, leaving an absolutely barren floor of clay, ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... pluck the fragrant rose From the bare rock, or oozy beach, Who from each barren weed that grows, Expects the grape, or blushing peach. With equal faith may hope to find The truth of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... those that come here from India generally break into smaller companies, because in many parts of the route through Persia, a greater number would not find provisions, as all Persia, from hence to Ispahan, is extremely barren, so that sometimes not a green thing is to be seen in two or three days travel; and even water is scarce, and that which is to be got is often brackish, or stinking and abominable. We remained at this city ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
