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More "Bleak" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ten years. It was like a vision in a crystal—if such a thing could exist. I saw the whole past scene. The bare room—the old dead man—myself; the overwhelming wish to avenge my wrongs, and the sudden suggestion that turned the wish cold. I saw the long, bleak night in which I completed the colossal task of copying the Scitsym line for line; I saw the gray morning steal in across the room as I closed the book, returned it to its safe and replaced the key on my uncle's neck in preparation for the arrival of the Arch-Councillor. It all passed before ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... bosom of that exemplary female, so also in the maternal confidences volunteered by the same witness, there was an appreciable reminder of another lady who will be remembered as having been introduced at the Coroner's Inquest in Bleak House as "Anastasia Piper, gentlemen." Regarding that as a favourable opportunity for informing the court of her own domestic affairs, through the medium of a brief dissertation, Mrs. Cluppins was interrupted by the irascible Judge at the most interesting point ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... time there stood in the midst of a bleak moor, in the north country, a certain village. All its people were poor, for their fields were barren, and they had little trade; but the poorest of them all were two brothers called Scrub and Spare. They were cobblers, and had ...
— Granny's Wonderful Chair • Frances Browne
... 'Twas a bleak day in December when we sailed into Plymouth Sound. As soon as we had spoken the port a boat put off hearing a paper sealed with the seal of Prince George, the Lord High Admiral. And there fell to my captain a duty which sure no man could have performed ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... English prose he has left no adequate successor; [Footnote: The nearest being the now foremost prose writers of our time, Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Froude.] the throne that does not pass by primogeniture is vacant, and the bleak northern skies seem colder and grayer since that venerable head was laid to rest by the village churchyard, far from the smoke and din of the great city on whose streets his figure was long familiar and his name was ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... advised to call again on Sunday morning and drove to Heath's Hotel, where they had taken up their quarters. How quiet and deserted the Golden City looked! How bleak and desolate, with the first ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... that he was in Oban on 22nd October, Aberdeen on 5th November, Inverness on the 9th, and thence he went to Tain, Dornoch, Wick, John o'Groat's, and to the island towns, Stromness, Kirkwall, and Lerwick. He was in Shetland on the 1st of December—altogether a bleak, cheerless journey, we may believe, even for so hardy a tramp as Borrow, and the tone of the following extract from one of his rough notebooks in my possession may perhaps be explained by the circumstance. Borrow is on the way to Loch Laggan and visits ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... that savage musk, the rending, goring bison herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the prairies, which this instant they may be trampling into dust. Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings of the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt! Though neither knows where ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... bleak to view the hills at length recede, And, less luxuriant, smoother vales extend:[bq] Immense horizon-bounded plains succeed! Far as the eye discerns, withouten end, Spain's realms appear whereon her ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... This was all a bleak, desolate region—curiously so—and I think, one of the very few so desolate on Earth. As we advanced, the Siberian coast spread out before us. Mountains behind, and a strip of rocky lowland along the sea. There were patches of snow—the mountains were white with ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... follow them cautiously, until the enemies were all gathered on the desired spot, with the woods to their left and rugged, barren cliffs and peaks to their right. Then the trap would be sprung; and if the Queres took to those bleak fastnesses for defence it would be easy to surround them, cut them off from water, and thus exterminate ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... than we had looked for. The summits, which had hitherto been conical, with vines straggling up their sides, now became rounded, or ran off in serrated lines, with sides scarred with tempests and strewn with stones. The scenery was bleak and desolate, as that of the Grampian pass leading by Spittal of Glenshee to Dee-side. But as we continued our descent, the richly wooded glens returned; the clouds rose; and at one time I ventured ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... In the bleak weather of this spring, 1842, he was again abroad for a little while; partly from necessity, or at least utility; and partly, as I guess, because these circumstances favored, and he could with a good countenance indulge a little wish he had ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... paced the deck, and watched the bleak shores of Cork fading in the distance, his thoughts were full of the banished Costellos, and he wondered with what eyes those exiles had looked their last on the Old Head of Kinsale a quarter of a millennium ago. Those fierce old chieftains, ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... horizon for mountains, but there did not appear to be any. She received a vague, slow-dawning impression that was hard to define. She did not like the country, though that was not the impression which eluded her. Bare gray flats, low scrub-fringed hills, bleak cliffs, jumble after jumble of rocks, and occasionally a long vista down a valley, somehow compelling—these passed before her gaze until she tired of them. Where was the West Glenn had written about? One thing seemed sure, and it was that every mile of this crude country brought ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... and a wall. The wooden one-storied homestead, with its thatched roof, shaded by the "toft" of ash and elm and maple, was pulled down, and a square fortress with loopholes and battlement stood in solitary nakedness upon some bleak hill, ugly and defiant. There with a band of armed men—sometimes with a wife and children, and not unfrequently with an unhappy victim of his licentiousness—the baron lived in gloom and gluttony, till the love of excitement, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... with a slender black mustache was the first to voice a query, not from the fact that his curiosity was large—it was perhaps less than that of any other man in the room—but for the reason that he chose to satisfy it at once. Morrow's personality was cold and bleak, inviting no close friendships or intimacies; uncommunicative to a degree that had impressed itself on his companions of the last few days and they looked up, mildly surprised at his ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... to the dimity vallance that hung across the low window. In autumn and winter the bleak wind whistled through the chimneys and rattled the casements in a way that would have prevented a town-bred child from sleeping, and up in those bare rooms there was cold enough to pinch you black and blue; but Elsie and Duncan had never thought much of that, for they ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... of the year 1421 was bleak and dreary in that wild lonely vale, and large was the fire burning on the hearth in the castle hall, in the full warmth of which there sat, with a light blue cloth cloak drawn tightly round him, a tall old ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... walk was first across fields, by pleasant footpaths; and then up the valley of a little noisy stream, that obstinately refused to keep Scotch Sabbath, praising the Lord after its own fashion. They emerged into rather a bleak country before reaching the church, which was quite new, and perched on a barren eminence, that it might be as conspicuous by its position, as it was remarkable for its ugliness. One grand aim of the reformers of the Scottish ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... evening of a bleak, cold March day, in an early year of this century, a woman, scantily clad, led a boy about eight years old, along the high-road towards the old city of Exeter. They crept close to the hedge-side to shelter themselves from the clouds of dust, ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... at their room one bleak raw night, and had just left, except Rod, who had gone with the captain into the Anchorage for a parcel Mrs. Britt wished to send to the rectory. He had been there only a few minutes when several loud ...
— Rod of the Lone Patrol • H. A. Cody
... Pour forth their brown inhabitants. The hare, Though timorous of heart, and hard beset By death in various forms, dark snares and dogs, And more unpitying men, the garden seeks, Urg'd on by fearless want. The bleating kind [sic] Eye the bleak heav'n, and next, the glist'ning earth, With looks of dumb despair; then, sad dispers'd, Dig for the wither'd ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... was the room that it was filled by our little party of six; yet I felt there another presence which none of us could see—a grey ghost agonising for his sins, through a bleak eternity. ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... able either to talk or read, and Mr. Lanhearne, out of pure sympathy for the miserable young man, retired to his own apartment very early. This was always the signal for Roland's dismissal, and five minutes after it Mr. Lanhearne, looking from his window into the bleak, wind-swept street, saw Roland rapidly descend the steps and ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... since yesterday we have an unobstructed view. I dismount and look round. Backward stretches an endless expanse of bleak and stormy-swept billowy mountains; before us looms, in serried phalanx, the western Cordillera, dazzling white, all save one black-throated colossus, who vomits skyward thick clouds of ashes and smoke, and down whose ragged flanks course streams ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... found my ride from the north village this afternoon bleak enough. You know how the wind sweeps across the road near the Pond schoolhouse. I believe there is to be a Christmas-eve celebration in the Town Hall ...
— Phil the Fiddler • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... the peach, and the olive, we are in a region of scant fruitage, and only the hardiest crops, apple orchards sparsely mingled with fields of oats and rye. And yet again we seem to be traversing a Scotch or Yorkshire moor—so vast and lonely the heather-clad wastes, so bleak and wild ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... in Babbulkund, and one for the princesses of his own kith, whose brown cheeks blush with the blood of ancient Pharaohs and who exult with Babbulkund in her surpassing beauty, and who know nought of the desert or the jungle or the bleak hills to the north. Quite unadorned and clad in simple garments go all the kith of Nehemoth, for they know well that he grows weary of pomp. Unadorned all save one, the Princess Linderith, who weareth Ong Zwarba and the three lesser gems of the sea. ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... away, and Winter, cold, bleak, and cheerless, settled over the land. The bright and many-colored leaves that had flashed their myriad beauties in the full glare of the sunlight, had fallen from the trees, leaving their trunks, gnarled and bare, to the mercy of the sweeping winds. The streams were frozen, and the ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... exhilarating; but, to say nothing of the injury which not unfrequently attends the sudden change from the stagnant heat of our furnaced dwellings to the bleak winds of the icy lake, is it not true that the chest-muscles are so little moved that the finest skating may be done ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... and fenced with the bright two-edged blade of her wit, and tossed down the wines into her little throat like a trooper, she was thinking nothing at all of what was around her, and very little of what she said or she did. She was thinking of the starless night out yonder, of the bleak, arid country, of the great, dim, measureless plains; of one who was passing through them all, and ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... a clear view above the little oak copse, the lines of empty freight cars on the siding, and a mile of low meadow that lay between the cottage and the fringe of settlement along the lake. Through another window at the north the bleak prospect of Stoney Island Avenue could be seen, flanked on one side by a huge sign over a saloon. Near this window on a lounge ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... stage, it seems, was put too far behind the proscenium, "owing to the headstrong perversity of Dickens, who never forgave the Bath people." Charles Knight, it was said, remonstrated, but in vain. Boz, however, was not a man to indulge in such feelings. In "Bleak House" he calls ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... by the Dardale-road, I believe?" said the doctor (village folk are curious). "A dismal moss is Dardale Moss, sir; and a bleak clim' up the ...
— Madam Crowl's Ghost and The Dead Sexton • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... the forest bare; Is it the wind that moaneth bleak? There is not wind enough in the air 45 To move away the ringlet curl From the lovely lady's cheek— There is not wind enough to twirl The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, 50 Hanging so light, and hanging so high, On the topmost ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Instead of the mild and whispering breezes of southern skies, we have the wild winds rushing impetuously forth from their caves in the icy north, and the sun of the land of the Chepewyans, knowing his uselessness, and the inability of his beams to rend the fetters which ice has thrown around our bleak hills and verdureless plains, stays with us but for a little season, leaving us for many weary days to be lighted only by the glare of the moon and stars, on the field of ice and snow. Yet the Chepewyan is not without his pleasures, ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... trees for miles around. It is the oaks that suffer principally. The tops are nipped first, and then they gradually die downwards till the whole tree is decayed all through. The absence of trees makes the country bleak and desolate, and I cannot help thinking the unlovely surroundings affect us all. The people themselves are unlovely in thought, and word, and deed; but I have found a good deal of rough kindliness amongst them nevertheless. They did mob me on one occasion, and made most unkind ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... his wife, and brought her and her aged relative away from their bleak home and dangerous duties and settled them in a pretty rural cottage within easy walking distance of his own thriving place of business—the fashionable bazaar of "Bastiennello ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... as a support, but the prelate did not accept it. They arrived in this manner at the government house, Baisemeaux rubbing his hands and glancing at the horse from time to time, while Aramis was looking at the bleak bare walls. A tolerably handsome vestibule and a staircase of white stone led to the governor's apartments, who crossed the ante-chamber, the dining-room, where breakfast was being prepared, opened a small side door, and ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... hill-top, the shepherd and his sheep, a fowling-piece, a spade, a pipe, a dunghill, a crowing cock, the shining and the withdrawal of the sun. An occasional pathos of simple humanity, and frequent patches of big Biblical words, relieved the homely tissue. It was a poetry apart; bleak, austere, but genuine, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... qualification would exclude,—ploughmen, labourers, and country mechanics, who reside permanently in humble cottages, the property of the owner of the soil, and who, though their course through life lies on the bleak edge of poverty, are God-fearing, worthy men, at least morally qualified to give, in the election of a teacher, an honest and not unintelligent voice. And yet, hitherto at least, we have failed to see any ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... lady, who in a parabolical account of that time, has described both my conduct as she felt it, and that of such as herself. In a singularly graphic, amusing vision of pilgrims, who were making their way across a bleak common in great discomfort, and who were ever warned against, yet continually nearing, "the king's highway" on the right, she says, "All my fears and disquiets were speedily renewed by seeing the most daring of our leaders (the same who had first forced his way through the palisade, and in whose ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... greenroom in the Westervelt, the reading took place on the open stage, which was bleak and draughty. The company sat in a funereal semicircle, with the author, the star, and the manager in a short line facing them. All the men retained their overcoats, for the morning was miserably raw, and at Helen's positive command kept their heads covered; and the supernumerary ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... the streams again. A snowy mantle covered the hills and valleys, and the bleak winds moaned through the naked trees. The merry sleigh-bells jingled in the streets, and merrier lads and lasses filled the village school-house. The skating grounds never presented more attractions to Nat ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... altar this bleak sand; That Thou O God my life hast lighted, With ray of light, steady, ineffable, vouchsafed of Thee, Light rare untellable, lighting the very light, Beyond all signs, descriptions, languages; For that O God, be it my latest word, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... pounds. We marched from eight o'clock in the morning until nine at night, with a short interval for lunch, and that first day out we covered twenty miles and arrived on the Great Ice Barrier at the close of our march. The Barrier in its bleak loneliness is probably the most desolate portion of the earth's surface, with the possible exception of the high plateau which forms the ice cap of the great Antarctic mountain ranges. Although only twenty miles from our winter quarters at Cape Evans, the temperature ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... possibly happen!' he thought. 'I have ridden much too long in the bleak forest. This is only ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... unappeased. Sir Walter Raleigh had the materials, at the Tower, to write a history; Lafayette, at Olmutz, lived in perpetual expectancy of release; Moore and Byron, children, flowers, birds, and the Muses cheered Leigh Hunt's year of durance: but in this bleak fortress, innocent and magnanimous men beheld the seasons come and go, night succeed day, and year follow year, with no cognizance of kindred or the world's doings,—no works of bard or sage,—no element of life,—but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... were almost obliterated by the jumbled heap of stone, wood-work and bricks lying across them. Bodies in every inconceivable state of partial or whole dismemberment made a ghastly array in the bleak sunlight, blood from man and animal formed dark pools in the hollow sections of the shattered roadway. Progress could only be made by moving apprehensively close up to what walls were still standing, and to sprint wildly over the open. Wounded were streaming ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... storm clouds cleared away, and the bleak, uninviting face of Labrador was plainly visible. The ship had settled to an altitude of fifteen hundred feet, and was moving northeasterly at the rate of thirty miles ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... Islands in May, that is, three months after the same species had taken its autumal departure from the neighbouring mainland. Can it be believed that these late visitors to the Falklands were breeders in Patagonia, and had migrated east to winter in so bleak a region? It is far more probable that they came from the south. Officers of sailing ships beating round Cape Horn might be able to settle this question definitely by looking out, and listening at night, for flights of ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... a bleak and musty cellar, beneath an old stable of dingy, brick construction. The building had been modernized to the extent of one single decoration on the street front, an electric sign: "Garage." On the floor, level with the sidewalk, stood half a dozen automobiles of varied ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... the only house visible from the cove. As you turned the southern point, a village was seen down the coast; and about half way between that and the pines was a wooden house, brown and weather-beaten, standing unsheltered on the bleak shore. Back of this house, shutting out all prospect but that of the ocean, was a tall cliff, covered with ragged yellow pines and stunted cedars, from which on stormy nights many a quivering flame had shot upward, luring ships to their ruin. Still, with this grim ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... Scotland was a considerable change. Not a change for the better, in the opinion of the new arrival there. The Montrose household, ruled by Captain Craigie's elderly sisters, was a dour and strict one, informed by an atmosphere of bleak and chill Calvinism. All enjoyment was frowned upon; pleasure was "worldly" and had to be severely suppressed. No more petting and spoiling for the little girl. Instead, a regime of porridge and prayers and unending ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... wooded crest or timbered ravine. The withered ranks of wild oats gave a dull procession of uniform color to the hills, unbroken by any relief of shadow in their smooth, round curves. As far as the eye could reach, sea and shore met in one bleak monotony, flecked by no passing cloud, stirred by no sign of life or motion. Even sound was absent; the Angelus, rung from the invisible Mission tower far inland, was driven back again by the steady northwest trades, that for half the year ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... though they undoubtedly were, law and justice were more respected and more frequently appealed to in Norway than in almost any other country. Liberty, crushed elsewhere under the deadweight of feudalism, found a home in the bleak North, and a rough but loving welcome from the piratical, sea-roving! She did not, indeed, dwell altogether scathless among her demi-savage guardians, who, if their perceptions of right and wrong were somewhat confused, might have urged in excuse ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... thought of the past years, it seemed to him that they had been very bleak and barren. True, he had done many things; he had influenced many people, and accomplished some good work; but what had he got out of it for himself? He was an Individualist at heart, as most men are, and he felt conscious ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... thou art kind, Thou art standing in the room,— In a molten glory shrined, That rays off into the gloom! But thy smile is bright and bleak Like cold waves—I cannot speak; I sob in it, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... here," he rippled on; "and I need hardly say that it's a pleasure to meet on this bleak shore two gentlemen of your caliber. I told a friend of mine in Chicago that I was enormously fed up with cities and the general human pressure and wanted to go to the most God-forsaken spot in America. ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... Reservation is in above here, below the mouth of the Cheyenne River. From there the river takes a pretty straight shoot up into North Dakota. A great game country, a wild cow country, and now a quiet farming country. A bleak, snow-covered, wind-swept waste it then was. And it was winter that first stopped that long, slow, steady, tireless advance ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... in Topeka, a candidate for the mayoralty, supposed to represent the liquor element, speaking on the afternoon of election day—bleak, dismal and shoe-top deep in snow and mud—said: "I will lose 1,000 votes on account of the weather as the women are out and they are opposed to me. It is impossible to keep ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... shipwreck by drawing them often to the sheltered corner by the fireside! The poor artist; the wandering genius who has lost his way in this world, and stumbles like a child among hard realities; the many men and women who, while they have houses, have no homes, see from afar, in their distant, bleak life journey, the light of a true home fire, and, if made welcome there, warm their stiffened limbs, and go forth stronger to their pilgrimage. Let those who have accomplished this beautiful and perfect work of divine art be liberal of its influence. Let them not seek to bolt the doors ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach, A fisherman stood aghast, To see the form of a maiden fair, Lashed close ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... than elsewhere so often occur. Actually she was a simple and devout soul, loving husband and child and the poor people with whom they lived. Doubtless she had looked more appropriate to her surroundings in the tangled garden of her father's vicarage than in the bleak Mission House of Lima Street; but inasmuch as she never thought about her appearance it would have been a waste of time for anybody to try to romanticize her. The civilizing effect of her presence in the slum was quickly felt; and though Lidderdale continued ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... Mrs. Richie said, "one." Her voice was bleak; the gayety had dropped out of it; for an instant she looked old. ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... they loose the lengthing twine, Bait harmless hooks, and launch a leadless line! Their shadows on the stream, the sun behind— Egregious anglers! are the fishes blind? Gull'd by the sportings of the frisking bleak, That now assemble, now disperse, in freak; They see not deeper, where the quick-eyed trout, Has chang'd his route, and turned him quick about; See not those scudding shoals, that mend their pace, Of frighten'd bream, and silvery darting ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... a more distant, and a wilder scene. Near the bleak shores of Hudson's Straits there flows a river which forms an outlet to the superfluous waters of the almost unknown territory lying between the uninhabited parts of Labrador and that tract of desert land which borders Hudson's Bay on the east, and is known to the fur-traders by the appellation of ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... horizon we detected the heights of Mount Desert, our old familiar haunt. All the northern semicircle was lost to us by the fog. We lost also the view of the mountain itself. All the bleak, lonely, barren, ancient waste of the bare summit was shrouded in cold fog. The impressive gray ruin and Titanic havoc of a granite mountain top, the heaped boulders, the crumbling crags, the crater-like depression, the long stern ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... Gern guards snapped like whips around them as she and the other Rejects crowded and stumbled down the boarding ramp and out onto the rocky ground. There was the pull of a terrible gravity such as she had never experienced and they were in a bleak, barren valley, a cold wind moaning down it and whipping the alkali dust in bitter clouds. Around the valley stood ragged hills, their white tops laying out streamers of wind-driven snow, and the ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... twilight had given place to bleak night as two men cantered from the palace courtyard and turned their horses' heads northward toward Lutha's nearest boundary. All night they rode, stopping at daylight before a distant farm to feed and water their ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... just ended. Captain Butch Brewster's followers had trailed dejectedly from Bannister Field to the Gym, where Head Coach Corridan was flaying them with a tongue as keen as the two-edged sword that drove Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. A cold, bleak November afternoon, a leaden sky lowered overhead, and a chill wind swept athwart the field; in the concrete stands, the loyal "rooters" of the Gold and Green, or of the Gold and Blue, shivered, stamped, and swung ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... the room, his head between his hands. Speech lofty and ridiculous burst from him in a sort of splutter of fireworks, but the Englishman sat still in his chair, and a gray, bleak look came upon him, for he began to understand. He was more or less used to these outbursts, and he bore them as patiently as he could, but though seven times out of the ten they were no more than spasms of pure joy of living, and meant, "It's a fine spring day," or "I've just seen two ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... his band Came marching through the Holy Land, He had to lead, the way to seek, His noble force o'er mountains bleak. Of bread there rose a painful need, Though stones were plentiful indeed, And many a German rider fine Forgot the taste of mead and wine. The horses drooped from meagre fare, The rider had to hold his mare. There was a knight from Suabian land Of noble build and mighty hand; His ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... It was bleak and wild here. Even the shanties of the three little villages, with their fish-sheds, their racks with nets spread, the rickety wharves—all looked dismal. It seemed as though here must be one of the spots where only a scanty living is ...
— The Submarine Boys for the Flag - Deeding Their Lives to Uncle Sam • Victor G. Durham
... then, to turn their attention to the land, which is their chief source of wealth. Let them buy it up, or gain it by long leases, inch by inch and acre by acre, until not only the bleak bogs and wild mountains of Connaught are again their own, but the rich meadow-lands and smiling wheat-fields of Munster and Leinster. Let their brethren in America and Australia associate with them in this, and thus will they build up again a true Irish yeomanry and nobility—for ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... of Edelweiss is built along the side of the mountain, its narrow streets winding upward and past countless terraces to the very base of the rocky, jagged eminence at whose top, a full mile above the last sprinkling of houses, stands the isolated, bleak Monastery. The view from these upper streets, before one enters the circuitous and hidden Monastery road that winds afar in its climb, is never to be forgotten by the spectator, no matter how often he traverses the lofty thoroughfares. ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... their powers of perception, and have failed to grasp the truth that human nature is in most respects the same the world over, and that persons and places, apparently the most ordinary, have stories to tell. Before Mary E. Wilkins began to write her New England tales few thought to look to those bleak hills and commonplace people for literary material; and doubtless many New Englanders, feeling the impulse to write, viewed with scorn their unpoetic surroundings and longed for the glamour of some half-guessed clime; Miss Wilkins, appreciating ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... full hour and a half before his friend would return to business. What should he do? The Verein where he had once been entertained was deserted even by its waiters; the garden, with its ostentatious out-of-door tables, looked bleak and bare. Mr. Clinch was not artistic in his tastes; but even he was quick to detect the affront put upon Nature by this continental, theatrical gardening, and turned disgustedly away. Born near a "lake" larger than ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... of Franky's funeral had been the first to bring home the fact that summer was gone. The chapel had been cold and bleak, and while they stood around the grave it began to rain. In the drawing-room at Cashelthorpe the fire had been lit, and tea awaited the brother and sister. Consoling as these comforts were they could not dispel the sadness which oppressed the kind ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... They should always keep their warm wool coats until the cold spring winds are over. Some farmers are very thoughtless about this, and their sheep and lambs suffer and die from cold. It would make your heart ache to see, as I have often seen, the little dead lambs in the bleak pastures." ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... dreadful curse Of widowhood; the vigils, fasts, And penances; no life is worse Than hopeless life,—the while it lasts. Day follows day in one long round, Monotonous and blank and drear; Less painful were it to be bound On some bleak rock, for aye to hear— Without one chance of getting free— The ocean's melancholy voice! Mine be the sin,—if sin there be, But thou ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... immortal soul, the prince of the creatures, rises up and decrees that something shall happen, if it be only the slaughter of a policeman. But this is a digressive way of stating what I have said already—that the bleak sky awoke in me a hunger for some change of plans, that the monotonous weather seemed to render unbearable the use of the monotonous train, and that I set out into the country lanes, out of the town of Oxford. It was, perhaps, at that moment that a strange curse came ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... mumbling and mummery, and finding his "glory" incomprehensibly enhanced thereby:—just as on the other hand the formless spaciousness of pantheism appears quite empty to ritualistic natures, and the gaunt theism of evangelical sects seems intolerably bald and chalky and bleak. ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... those youthful hearts were bleak and bare, That not a germ had ever flourished there, Unless perchance the night-shade of despair, Which blooms amid the ...
— Heart Utterances at Various Periods of a Chequered Life. • Eliza Paul Kirkbride Gurney
... Lawrence from Lake Ontario with eight thousand men to join General Hampton coming by the way of Lake Champlain with another five thousand men in united attack against Montreal. November 5 Wilkinson's troops descended in three hundred flat-boats through the Thousand Islands, now bleak and leafless and somber in the gray autumn light. It seemed hardly possible that the few Canadian troops cooped up in Kingston would dare to pursue such a strong American force, but history is made up of impossibles. Feeling ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... taken all the snow from the hills. She had heard her elders say about her so many times that she could not stand the cold, that she shivered at the very thought of cold weather, and certainly nothing could look colder than that bleak country into which the train was now slowly making ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield
... winter's day; who shivered in insufficient rags and whose gaunt bodies never knew any nourishment save what could be got from "Indian meal stir-about" (a kind of weak and watery porridge made from maize). And it was not the children of the labourers alone who endured this bleak and starved and sunless childhood; the offspring of the smaller struggling farmers were often as badly off—they were all the progeny of the poor, kept poor and impoverished by landlordism. This further bond of blood and even class relationship also bound the farmers and labourers ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... with which they hope to cast a line over the wreck. But the swell is heavier than ever, the timbers nearer to parting. At last a flash of lurid light from the dim shore-line,—a great boom of sound, and a line goes spinning out like a spider's web up into the gray, bleak sky. Too far! too short! and the line tumbles, plashing into the water. A new and fearful lift of the sea shatters the wreck, the fore part of the ship still holding fast to the sands; but all abaft the mainmast lifts, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... Cove, as well as the only doctor. For a day or two after my arrival I accompanied the local parson, Mr. Barnett, on visits to people he considered to be in need of my ministrations. Now they are coming in droves, and many scattered dwellers on the bleak coast have heard of me. Little fishing-smacks meeting others from farther outports have spread the amazing news that there is a doctor ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... Hitherto, in that bleak and lonely household, there had been little comfort for the woman who knew no hour, no second, free from pain. But Masha, like many country-bred women, was skilled in the decoction of those herbs and simples that seem, at times, more efficacious than more ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... cordial meeting between the two, and when they sat down to luncheon in a peaceful corner where their talk would be uninterrupted, Mr. Osgood was more alert and cheerful than the veteran underwriter had been since the bleak day when O'Connor and the Eastern Conference moved on Boston; and as Smith went on, his companion's ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... to lumber along the edges of the town with its dense cargo of hats and parasols and lunch parcels. We were a most extraordinary litter of man and womankind. There was the severe New England type, improving each shining hour, and doing it in bleak costume and with a thoroughly northeast expression; there were pink sunbonnets from (I should imagine) Spartanburg, or Charlotte, or Greenville; there were masculine boots which yet bore incrusted upon their heels the red mud of ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... dear to us. The sunny plains and deep indigo transparent skies of Italy are all indifferent to the great sick heart of a Sir Walter Scott: on the back of the Apennines, in wild spring weather, the sight of bleak Scotch firs, and snow-spotted heath and desolation, brings tears ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... showed a fine sturdiness he had never seen exceeded elsewhere. He went on musing over the permanence of things and the mutability of mortal joy, wondering if, in this world He had made without remedies for its native ills, God could take pleasure in the bleak framework of it. And when he had nearly reached the top of the slope, the three firs, where a turn to the left would bring him to the log cabin door, suddenly he stopped as if his inner self heard ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... let thy music ring with tone That speaks the budding year; The Winter's blast too soon will moan Through the forest bleak ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... old place, Susie, waiting for you," he said. "It doesn't look so very bleak, does it, after all the fine city houses ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... day in the end of October I started from Guachochic bound for the upper part of the great Barranca de San Carlos and the country southward as far as there were Tarahumares. Everything seemed bleak and dreary. The corn was harvested, the grass looked grey, and there was a wintry feeling in the air. The sere and withered leaves rustled like paper, and as I made camp near an Indian ranch I saw loose stubble and dead leaves carried up in a whirlwind, two or three ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... to-day—it was an afternoon tea—Mary Alice had been more bitterly conscious than ever before of her lack of charms and the bleak prospect that lack entailed upon her. For the tea was given for a girl who was visiting in town, a girl of a sort Mary Alice had never seen before. She was pretty, that visiting girl, and she was sweet; ...
— Everybody's Lonesome - A True Fairy Story • Clara E. Laughlin
... to see those countries beyond the sea? I know I do. I am tired of this life, this continual struggle for a bare existence. The same thing day after day, year after year; nothing new happens. Why did M. Bois-le-Duc teach me of an outer world beyond the bleak Gulf of St. Lawrence? Why did he teach me to read Virgil and Plato? He did it for the best, no doubt; but I think he did wrong. He has stirred up within me a restless evil spirit of discontent. Oh! Marie, to think I am ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... to gabble him out a salutation, and having shook their feathers, they would sail in the same direction, so long as there was water, and then take leave of him with a loud gabbling. But this homage brought him no consolation: indeed, the bleak earth seemed sending a deeper chill to his heart; and the brown leaf that hung twirling and dripping from the almost naked tree by the roadside, invested his feelings with a deeper melancholy, for in it he read the sorrows of ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... North Hospital yesterday, to take the deposition of a dying man as to his ill treatment by the second and third mates of the ship Assyria, on the voyage from New Orleans. This hospital is a very gloomy place, with its wide bleak entries and staircases, which may be very good for summer weather, but which are most congenial at this bleak November season. I found the physicians of the house laughing and talking very cheerfully with Mr. Wilding, who had preceded me. We went forthwith, up two ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... rattled once more, and soon left the town behind us. The wild mountain tract which stretched on either side of the road presented one bleak and brown surface, unrelieved by any trace of tillage or habitation; an apparently endless succession of fern-clad hills lay on every side; above, the gloomy sky of leaden, lowering aspect, frowned darkly; the sad and wailing ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... Incidentally these storage reservoirs, by increasing the surface exposed to evaporation and the consequent rainfall, have a very beneficial effect on the dry regions in the interior of the continent, and in some cases have almost superseded irrigation. The windmill and dynamo thus utilize bleak mountain-tops that, till their discovery, seemed to be but indifferent successes in Dame Nature's domain. The electricity generated by these, in connection with that obtained by waterfalls, tidal dynamos, thunderstorms, chemical action, ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... went on horseback, as the most convenient manner of traveling; I was but lightly clothed, and of this I felt the inconvenience the more I advanced northeast. What must not a poor old man have suffered in that severe weather and climate, whom I saw on a bleak common in Poland, lying on the road, helpless, shivering, and hardly having wherewithal to cover his nakedness? I pitied the poor soul; though I felt the severity of the air myself, I threw my mantle over him, and immediately ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... but it was bleak: and there were times when Richard regretted his acceptance of the Prince's offer, and yearned after family ties, equality, and freedom. Simon and Guy had never been kind to him, but at least they were his brothers, and ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... longer able to derive a profit from it, hence their desire to abolish the revenue of the South. I assure you, sir, if the colored man could endure the climate of their bleak land there would be ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... and August—and even then the nights are always cool; while for six or eight weeks between December and February there may be a couple of feet of ice on the river. Canton, on the other hand, has a tropical climate, with a long damp enervating summer and a short bleak winter. The old story runs that snow has only been seen once in Canton, and then it was thought by the people to ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... impatience, fear, all mixed. What had he done, said, lost? It was that horrid feeling of when one has not been kind and not quite true, yet might have been kinder if one had been still less true. Ah! but it was all so mixed up. It felt all bleak, too, and wintry in him, as if he had suddenly lost everybody's love. Then he was ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... ridiculous; and I did think the convent gardens as I saw them from the chapter-house window were beautiful, and the hills around majestic and serious, with no intention of falling upon my prostrate spirit. Yes, and after a lifelong abhorrence of that bleak king who founded the Escorial, I will own that I am, through pity, beginning to feel an affection for Philip II.; perhaps I was finally wrought upon by hearing him so endearingly called Philly by ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... me my scarf. In all probability I may not be home to-night—perhaps not till late to-morrow. God bless you, Mary!" and away the doctor went on his cold bleak ride ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... Ted Holiday had to carry about with him all that bleak day and a half sleepless, uneasy night. And in the morning he was summoned home to the House on the ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... colonel, greatly delighted, 'you could provide us with a few of these crows, we should really feel very much obliged to you; for we have a long and cold campaign before us among the bleak hills of Nepal; and we are ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... over the land from north to south and from the bleak shores of the ocean even to the banks of the Mississippi River. Evangeline wandered from place to place looking for Gabriel Lajeunesse, and Gabriel sought Evangeline as earnestly. Sometimes they heard of one another but through long years they ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... No, nor your dainty lass, either; and so we are here again to levy taxation without representation on them all. 'T is to be hoped, Mrs. Meredith, that 't will be met more kindly than our Parliamentary attempt at the same game. Ah, Miss Janice, your face is a pleasant sight to look at after the bleak banks of the Delaware, at which we've been staring and cursing for the last ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... once before saved the squire's life. But he was alive. It would not take much to kill him; a little pressure on his wounded throat would be enough. Even to leave him there, uncared for, till morning in the bleak wind, lying upon the cold ground, would be almost certain to put an end to his life. But to the honour of Charles James Juxon be it said that such thoughts never crossed his mind. He pulled off his heavy ulster greatcoat, wrapped it about the ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... we looked around, Waiting to hear the last trumpet sound. From living death in that desolate Bay, We had sprung to welcome the judgment day; Although in the pit should our lot be cast, So that this our great woe should end at last. The bleak spring came, the ice did part; Devils entered each sailor's heart; No blessed thoughts sweetened our wretched lives, Of the distant mother's, sweethearts, and wives; Of innocent pleasures we valued most, In ...
— Verses and Rhymes by the way • Nora Pembroke
... taunted me from afar with its lack of warmth and colour, for I cared not for either; but now it seems to me that the bright gleam of your golden hair, and the warm glow of your violet robe, are far more beautiful than my ice-diamonds and sparkling crystals, and that my palace will be very bleak and desolate when you have gone. Stay with us, gentle fairy, and ...
— How the Fairy Violet Lost and Won Her Wings • Marianne L. B. Ker
... gorgeous asters of all shades of purple. In the less cultivated places, heather blooms luxuriantly and yellow gorse which attracted Miss Cassandra's trained botanist's eye, and she suddenly quoted the old Scotch saw, with about the same appropriateness as some of the remarks of "Mr. F's Aunt" in Bleak House: "'When gorse is out of season, kissing is out of fashion,'" and looking straight at Archie, she added encouragingly "you ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... land that lifts around it Threatening peaks, while stern seas bound it, With cold winters, summers bleak, Curtly smiling, never meek, 'Tis the giant we must master, Till he work our will the faster. He shall carry, though he clamor, He shall haul and saw and hammer, Turn to light the tumbling torrent,— All his din and rage ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... happened very often, but when it did, a nameless something seemed to cover us, and in passing, left a shadow which turned our happy evenings cold and bleak. ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... because much better preserved and because it is clearly derived, in part at least, from Batalha, is the cathedral of Guarda, begun by Joao I. Guarda is a small town, not far from the Spanish border, built on a hill rising high above the bleak surrounding tableland to a height of nearly four thousand feet, and was founded by Dom Sancho I. in 1197 to guard his frontier against the Spaniards and the Moors. Begun by Joao I. the plan and general ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... been looking at Zion all day, and my feet are sore and my legs are weary. I go back to the Salt Lake House and have a talk with landlord Townsend about the State of Maine. He came from that bleak region, having skinned his infantile eyes in York county. He was at Nauvoo, and was forced to sell his entire property there for 50 dollars. He has thrived in Utah, however, and is much thought of by the Church. He is an Elder, and preaches occasionally. ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... writes the traveller, "we visited the far-famed Niger or Quorra, which flows by the city about a mile from our residence, and were greatly disappointed at the appearance of this celebrated river. Bleak, rugged rocks rose abruptly from the centre of the stream, causing strong ripples and eddies on its surface. It is said that, a few miles above Boussa, the river is divided into three branches by two small, fertile islands, and that it flows from hence in one continued stream to Funda. The ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... Petit Nord and Labrador are so much alike in climate, people, and conditions that this part of the island is often designated locally as Labrador (never has it been my lot to see a more desolate, bleak, and barren spot). The traveller who described Newfoundland as a country composed chiefly of ponds with a little land to divide them from the sea, at least cannot be impeached for unveracity. In this northern part even that little is rendered ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... of sun, In winter bleak and summer brown, She'd steal across the little run, And shyly let the sliprails down. And listen there when darkness shut The nearer spur in silence deep; And when they called her from the hut Steal home and cry herself ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... pass a whole day without seeing one mammal, and perhaps not more than a dozen birds of any size. The weather at that time was cheerless, generally with a gray film of cloud spread over the sky, and a bleak wind, often cold enough to make my bridle-hand quite numb.... At a slow pace, which would have seemed intolerable under other circumstances, I would ride about for hours together at a stretch. On arriving at a hill, I would slowly ride to its summit, and stand there to survey the prospect. On ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... show me what she thought. But granting that our employer led a double and dubious life, who could she be, this mysterious woman who kept him company in the old tower? I knew from my own inspection how bleak and bare a room it was. She certainly did not live there. But in that case where did she come from? It could not be anyone of the household. They were all under the vigilant eyes of Mrs. Stevens. The visitor must come from without. ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Tregeagle is a household word in nearly every part of Cornwall. His wild spirit rages of nights along the rocky coasts, across the bleak moors and through the sheltered valleys. For Tregeagle is a Cornish "Wandering Jew"; his spirit can never rest, since in life he was the most evil man ...
— Legend Land, Vol. 1 • Various
... four years ago, America was bleak in spirit, depressed by the prospect of seemingly endless war abroad and of destructive conflict ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... over the bleak and barren mountain as we entered it. Darkness had long since overtaken us, when we saw at a distance a large clearing, in the middle of which lights shone from the windows of a large house whose dim and shadowy outline appeared to us surrounded ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... interest taken in thy fate. And oh, for thee, thou princely-fortuned man, A pale face from a northern window looks, Forever looks, with constancy sublime. At night, when spectral tints are in the North— By day, when winds blow down from that bleak source— That face peers from the window anxiously, As if the elements might come from thee Bearing some ...
— The Arctic Queen • Unknown
... Prince Consort that the most notable incident connected with my career as a reporter at Newcastle occurred. This was the terrible disaster at the Hartley New Pit, a colliery some fifteen miles from Newcastle, near the bleak Northumberland coast. The accident was of a peculiar character, and it excited an extraordinary amount of public interest. Up to that time it had been lawful to work coal mines with a single shaft, so that there was only one possible mode of egress for the men at work in the pit. ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... greatly from the cold. The north-west wind blowing over the bleak region of the Jura mountains, whistled through the door of the church, which could not be kept closed owing to the constant stream of penitents passing in and out. In summer, conditions were worse, if that were ...
— The Life of Blessed John B. Marie Vianney, Cur of Ars • Anonymous
... moment occurred until the Mermaid arrived off Staten Island, the eastern extremity of which she sighted at daylight on a cold, bleak morning some ten weeks after the date when Leslie and Miss Trevor had become members of her ship's company. The weather had, in the interim, been fine upon the whole, with occasional calms and contrary winds; but, taking ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... to reach the head of the long train. The halt was in a little depression of the bleak plain, and the train-men were in conference over a badly-derailed engine when Winton came up. A vast herd of cattle was lumbering away into the darkness, and a mangled carcass under the wheels of the locomotive ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde
... handkerchief, which was rapidly becoming so briny and inadequate that I passed her mine. From Cuthbert Vane alone there came a steadfast no—and the Scotchman put a hand on the boy's shoulder with a smile which was like sudden sunlight in a bleak sky. ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... Switzerland. It does me good to go there, to be iced and baked and washed clean with pure air. But the terrible mountains, so cold and unchanged, with their immemorial patience, their frozen tranquillity; the high hamlets, perched on their lonely shelves; the bleak pine-trees, with their indomitable strength—all these depress me. Of course there is much homely beauty among the lower slopes; the thickets, the falling streams, the flowers. But the grim black peaks look over everywhere; ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... beyond Higham towards the estuary of the Thames are more akin to the characteristics of Essex than of Kent. The hop gardens are dwarfed and stunted, and presently hops, corn, and pasture give place to fields of turnips, which show up like masses of jade on the chocolate-coloured soil. The bleak churchyard of Cooling, overgrown with nettles, lies amongst these desolate reaches, which resound at evening with the shrill, unearthly notes of sea-gulls, plovers, and herons. Beyond the churchyard are the marshes, "a dark, ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... the cedar is a healthy, cheap, democratic wood, streak'd red and white—an evergreen—that it is not a cultivated tree—that it keeps away moths—that it grows inland or seaboard, all climates, hot or cold, any soil—in fact rather prefers sand and bleak side spots—content if the plough, the fertilizer and the trimming-axe, will but keep away and let it alone. After a long rain, when everything looks bright, often have I stopt in my wood-saunters, south or north, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... tried. The services of so valuable an assistant were readily accepted. Lauzun gave his hand to Mary; Saint Victor wrapped up in his warm cloak the ill fated heir of so many Kings. The party stole down the back stairs, and embarked in an open skiff. It was a miserable voyage. The night was bleak: the rain fell: the wind roared: the waves were rough: at length the boat reached Lambeth; and the fugitives landed near an inn, where a coach and horses were in waiting. Some time elapsed before the horses could be harnessed. Mary, afraid that her face might be known, would not enter ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... they parted, the children looking on and slyly whispering among themselves. Radbourn looked back after awhile but the bare little hive had absorbed its little group, and was standing bleak as a tombstone and hot as a furnace on the naked plain in the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... second bleak year of their marriage Meredith accompanied Thornton to England—he was often obliged to go there on prolonged business—but she never repeated ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... asphalted and turned into a public playground. It was less than a quarter of an acre in extent. It is now built over by workmen's dwellings of the usual kind. It was an additional burial-ground to St. Mary's le Strand, and is mentioned by Dickens in "Bleak House." ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... Connaught; Lough Corrib (25 m. long) and Lough Mask (12 m. long), stretching N. and S., divide the county into East and West districts; the former is boggy, yet arable; the latter, including the picturesque district known as CONNEMARA, is wild and hilly, and chiefly consists of bleak morass and bogland; its rocky and indented coast affords excellent harbourage in many places; the Suck, Shannon, and Corrib are the chief rivers; the Slieve Boughta Mountains in the S. and in the W. the Twelve Pins (2395 ft.) are the principal mountains; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... gentle reader, is my bleak native home, and the birth-place of all the most celebrated critics. The latter fact is not generally known, and for the reason that the gentry composing that fraternity acknowledge her only with ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... hard, the stormy wind striking chill and bleak through the bending pines; it was raining in torrents; it was 5 P.M., and we were still some six miles from the haven where we would be; so, after a short and utterly ineffectual attempt to get the carriage ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... debatable ground, stretching between the sterile Landes and the fat, black loam of the banks of the Garonne. The soil is sand, gravel, and shingle, scorched by the sun, and would be incapable of yielding as much nourishment to a patch of oats as is found on 'the bare hillside of some cold, bleak, Highland croft.' On this unpromising ground, grow those grapes which produce the finest wine in the world. As for the vines themselves, they have about as much of the picturesque as our drills of potatoes at home. 'Fancy open and unfenced expanses of stunted-looking, scrubby ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... frequent nor sumptuous; "all the delicacies of the season" hardly found their way to her table; and in her bleak little nest, for it was now winter, a thin and scanty shawl but coldly did the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... weird, uncanny dances of their own. The evening was full of eerie sounds—the creaking of fir boughs, the whistle of the wind in the tree-tops, the vibrations of strips of dried bark on the rail fences. But we carried summer and sunshine in our hearts, and the bleak unloveliness of the outer world only intensified ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... succession of abandoned gun-positions, few horse-tracks, fewer trenches, and no barbed wire. The villages we went through had escaped obliterating shell fire. I learned that our attacks had been planned thus-wise. Near a bleak cross-roads I saw Collinge of B Battery, and got off the lorry ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... for the young people to be happy. Cold and bleak it is here on the Fife coast, but they are among roses and sunshine and so God bless them, I say, and keep us and every one from cutting short their turn of happiness. You had your bride time, Madame, and when Angus McAllister first took me to his cottage in Strathmoyer, I thought I was ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... three or four miles of our walk, he entertained me with abundance of songs echoed loud and long across the open mountain; but when we descended from it towards the sea, we both kept silence and a sharp look-out over the unequal and bleak country between. We now got among low clumpy hills and furzy gullies, and had to pick our steps through loose scattered lumps of rock, which were lying all round us white in the clear moonshine, like flocks of sheep upon the hill-side. The wind was off ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... moon, and the portion of light or rather "darkness visible" that feebly appeared on the sky and the landscape, was singularly sombre and impressive, if not actually appalling. The scene about them was wild and desolate in the extreme; and as the faint outlines of the bleak and barren moors appeared in the dim and melancholy distance, the feelings they inspired were those of discomfort and depression. On each side of them were a variety of lonely lakes, abrupt precipices, and extensive marshes; and as our travellers went along, ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... the Barrens, the bad lands of the Arctic, the deserts of the Circle, the bleak and bitter home of the musk-ox and the lean plains wolf. So Avery Van Brunt found them, treeless and cheerless, sparsely clothed with moss and lichens, and altogether uninviting. At least so he found them till he penetrated ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... more, As to one I have known and loved before; For every soul is akin to me That dwells in the land of mystery! I am the Lady Irmingard, Born of a noble race and name! Many a wandering Suabian bard, Whose life was dreary, and bleak, and hard, Has found through me the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... the most lively. An activity has been here that has swept away all difficulties before it and clothed the very rocks with verdure. It would be a disgrace to common sense to ask the cause; the enjoyment of property must have done it. Give a man the sure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden." The italics are my own. When will Arthur Young have his tablet in Westminster ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... place in melancholy contrast to all they had just admired. A park of considerable extent, absolutely bereft of trees, except a few ragged firs on each side of a large dilapidated mansion, on the summit of a bleak hill: it seemed as if a great wood had ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... —on a bleak and cheerless morning in late October. It is not yet light; but a depressed party of about twenty-five are falling into line at the acrid invitation of two sergeants, who have apparently decided that the ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... the wild boars, lay near the foot of the mountains, and made frequent irruptions into the lower part of the valley, which in Douglas Dale bears no small resemblance to an oasis, surrounded by tangled woods, and broken moors, occasionally rocky, and showing large tracts of that bleak dominion to which wild creatures gladly escape when pressed by ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... artistic temper to suffer continually from their presence; Vernou was an actor by nature bound never to pardon the success of another, condemned to chronic discontent because he was never content with himself. Lucien began to understand the sour look which seemed to add to the bleak expression of envy on Vernou's face; the acerbity of the epigrams with which his conversation was sown, the journalist's pungent phrases, keen and elaborately wrought as a stiletto, were at ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... wind with the rhythmical motion of aquatic plants under moving water. I looked through the glass as we drove along, recognizing the well-known turns, the big trees, the occasional low stone cottages by the roadside. Everything was familiar to me, even in the bleak winter weather; only the landscape was inexpressibly wild in its leafless grayness, under the faint light of the waning moon. From time to time the Lala moved uneasily, but said nothing. We were ascending the hill which leads ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... ought more properly to be translated, at the beginning. At all events, the fact I conclude to be irresistible, that the Tartars and the Chinese have one common origin, and the question then is simply this, whether the fertile plains of China were abandoned for the bleak and barren heights of Tartary, or that the wandering and half-famished Scythians descended into regions whose temperature and productions were more congenial to the nature ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... he threw his window up and gazed out across the Park. Bleak and dark the January night; little sound of traffic; a frost coming; bare trees; a star or two. 'I'll see Polteed to-morrow,' he thought. 'By God! I'm mad, I think, to want her still. That fellow! If...? ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... soon may I follow When friendships decay, And from love's shining circle The gems drop away. When true hearts lie withered, And fond ones are flown, Oh! who would inhabit This bleak world alone?" ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... possessed but of which so few traces have been allowed to remain. The Dutch Protestants, as I remarked at Utrecht, have shown singular efficiency in denuding religion of its external graces and charm. There is no church so beautiful but they would reduce it to bleak and arid cheerlessness. Place even the cathedral of Chartres in a Dutch market-place, and it would be a whitewashed desert in a week, while little shops and houses would be built against its sacred walls. There is hardly a great church in Holland ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... We saw bleak desolation; We saw no unscathed tree. We shivered in our comfort And murmured: "Can ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... the bleak sea-beach, A fisherman stood aghast, To see the form of a maiden fair, Lashed close ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... snug, cozy barroom of the "Farmers' Inn," at Madisonville, sat six young men. It was a cold, bleak evening in December; and the wind that howled and drove without, drifting the snow and rattling the shutters, gave to the blazing fire and steaming kettle additional charms and comforts. There was Peter Hobbs, a youth of five ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... housie, too, in ruin! It's silly wa's the win's are strewin! An' naething, now, to big a new ane, O' foggage green! And bleak December's winds ensuin' Baith snell ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... men, taking northeast storms, bleak winds, thunder-showers, flies, mosquitoes, Canada thistles, hot sunshine, cold snows, weeds, briers, thorns, wild beasts, snakes, alligators, and such like things, which they don't happen to like, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... chidden as they impeded her work, and babbled questions about this or that. Beside the fire, in the chair that had once belonged to the master of the house, sat Micah Ward. He looked very old now and infirm. The months in a prison hulk in Belfast Lough and the long weariness of his confinement in bleak Fort George had set their mark upon him. On his knees lay a Greek lexicon, but he was pursuing no word through its pages. It was open at the fly-leaf inside the cover. He was reading lovingly for the hundredth ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... misery enacted, shifted like pictures in a panorama before my mind's eye. I saw far back in the distance an indomitable man, faint and discouraged, after the terrible sufferings of a winter at a bleak fort in the wilderness, drag his weary limbs to the spot where New Orleans now stands, and defiantly unfurling the flag of France, determined to establish the capital of Louisiana on the treacherous banks of the Mississippi. Such was Bienville, ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... a sky of grayest etching, A bare, bleak shed in blackest silhouette, Twelve years of platform, and before them stretching Twelve miles of prairie ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... wastland Ayr? Oh mon, it's unco bleak and bare! Ye daunder here, ye daunder there, And mak' your moan, They've rain and wund eneuch to tear The ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang
... rain, and keep out the wind in cold weather. We adopted this description of shelter in crossing the Rocky Mountains during the winter of 1857-8, and thus formed a very effectual protection against the bleak winds which sweep with great violence over those lofty and inhospitable sierras. We always selected a dense thicket for our encampment, and covered the lodges with a heavy coating of pine boughs, wattling them together as compactly as ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... chilly and empty afternoons in early winter, when the daylight is silver rather than gold and pewter rather than silver. If it was dreary in a hundred bleak offices and yawning drawing-rooms, it was drearier still along the edges of the flat Essex coast, where the monotony was the more inhuman for being broken at very long intervals by a lamp-post that looked less civilized than a tree, ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... score or so of those whose positions had brought them into personal acquaintance with the sovereign, accompanied the royal cortege as far as the Tuscan frontier between the grand ducal state and the dominions of the Church. Arrived at that spot—it is on the top of a high, bleak ridge among the Apennines—there was a general alighting from the carriages for the mutual saying of the last words of farewell. Of course an immense amount of bowing, with backward steps according to true courtly fashion, went to the due uttering of these adieux on that spot of the high-road ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... together jovial sit Careless, and crowned with mirth and wit, Where, though bleak winds confine us home Our fancies round the world ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... example. In that little hamlet on the bleak and barren hills of New England, far away from the great city or even the populous village, you will find a mother and daughter living in a humble dwelling. The husband and father has lain for many years 'neath the sod in the graveyard on the hill slope; ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... who shivers beneath the bleak skies, and starves among the inhospitable wilds of Tierra-del-Fuego, might indeed be made happier by civilization, for it would alleviate his physical wants. But the voluptuous Indian, with every desire supplied, whom Providence has bountifully provided ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... suspended following the April 1999 coup d'etat - for operating expenses and public investment. In 2000, the World Bank approved a structural adjustment loan of $35 million to help support fiscal reforms. However, reforms could prove difficult given the government's bleak ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... studies—a solicitude, some will think, only too well justified. "Cambridge at all times is full of ghosts," said Emerson. But no ghost from the past, flitting along the Old Road from Elmwood to the Yard, and haunting the bleak lecture-rooms where it had recited as a careless boy and taught wearily as a man, could wear a more quizzical and friendly aspect than Lowell's. He commonly spoke of his life as a professor with whimsical ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... When the garden patches grew bare and brown, and the bleak winds from across the Mississippi swept over the common, untoward tidings came like water dripping from a roof, bit by bit. And day by day Colonel Clark looked graver. The messengers he had sent to Vincennes ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... mother. There were enough of my flowers left by Dollar Mark to make a wreath, and that afternoon a piteous procession wended its way to the cemetery. And such a cemetery! Near the edge of the Canyon, a mile or so from Headquarters it lay, a bleak neglected spot in a sagebrush flat with nothing to mark the cattle-tramped graves, of which there were four. At the edge of the clearing, under a little pine, was the open grave, and while the coffin was lowered the men sang. I never heard a ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... the truth which I am fur from not wantin' to do, I should say that at first sight, it wuz rather of a bleak, lonesome lookin' spot, kinder wild and desolate lookin'. But as we went further along in it, we came to some little nooks and sheltered paths and spots, that seemed more collected together and pleasant. There wuz some ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... from the pits, and the dirty, rain-swept back streets where the shipping-offices were. Once or twice I tried to get quit of the ship and went inland by rail. I saw cathedrals and castles and temperance hotels. A bleak and unfriendly land! Somehow I could not find the key of it all. Those sullen people living in the quaint streets round a superb cathedral—they were no kin of the men who built it or the men who prayed and worshipped in it either. ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... world. Alas, in me is no such unfathomable mystery. I but trick myself. Yet I have my moments. These stones that I carry on the mountain, what of them? On what windy ridge do I build my castle? It is shrill and bleak, they say, on the topmost peaks of the Delectable Mountains, so lower down I have reared its walls. There is no storm in these upland valleys and the sun sits pleasantly on their southern slopes. But even if there be unfolded no broad prospect from the devil to the sunrise, ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... and popularity any lyric ever written. It is the most elaborate treatment of Poe's favorite theme, the death of a beautiful woman. The reveries of a bereaved lover, alone in his library at midnight in "the bleak December," vainly seeking to forget his sorrow for the "lost Lenore," are interrupted by a tapping, as of some one desirous to enter. After a time, he admits a "stately raven" and seeks to beguile his sad fancy by putting questions ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... very cold before we got thus far; but now we began to feel the utmost extremity of coldness. The bleak western winds had of themselves been sufficiently piercing; but these were always accompanied by snow or sleet, which beat continually on our sails and rigging, cased all our masts, yards, and ropes with ice, and rendered our sails almost useless. We had been so much accustomed to most ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... lord Timon the rich, lord Timon the delight of mankind, to Timon the naked, Timon the man-hater! Where were his flatterers now? Where were his attendants and retinue? Would the bleak air, that boisterous servitor, be his chamberlain, to put his shirt on warm? Would those stiff trees that had outlived the eagle, turn young and airy pages to him, to skip on his errands when he bade them? Would the cool brook, when it was iced with winter, administer to him his warm broths ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... their pains. He looked back upon it as he had unfolded it. He looked forward across it as, most stern and bleak, it awaited them. He cried with a sudden loudness, as though he protested, not before her, but before arbitrament in the high court of destiny, "But I cannot help you upward; I can only lead ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... to Newmarket, to Buckenham, back to Newmarket, to Cromer (fine, wild, bleak coast), Buckenham again, Newmarket, London, Norman Court, and here again; heard nothing, learnt nothing, altogether unprofitable, Durham's resignation[2] the only event, the denouement of which nobody can guess. The Ministers ought never to have sent him, knowing what he was, ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... live in the midst of abundance, isolated from neighbors and nature, confined by blighted cities and bleak suburbs, stunted by a poverty of learning and an emptiness ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Lyndon B. Johnson • Lyndon B. Johnson
... He wanted to be a money-maker and the totals at the foot of the pages in the soiled yellow bankbook were the milestones that marked the progress he had already made. They told him that the daily struggles with Fatty, the long tramps through Caxton's streets on bleak winter evenings, and the never-ending Saturday nights when crowds filled the stores, the sidewalks, and the drinking places, and he worked among them tirelessly and persistently were not ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... "Mysterious Man of Meteighan," a wild and untoward storm swept down the North Atlantic and over the seaboard far and near. In the Bay of Fundy that night the elements met in their grandest extremes. Tide-rips and mountain waves opposed each other with titanic force. All along the bleak and rock-ribbed coast the boiling waters lay churned into foam. Over the breakwaters the giant combers crashed and soared far up into the troubled sky; while out under the black clouds of the night the whirlpools and the tempests met. Was ever a night like ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... which I had mounted by many a weary path—up many a dark ravine. I was twelve or fourteen thousand feet above sea level, and although I had just parted from the land of the palm-tree and the orange, I was now in a region cold and sterile. Mountains were before and around me—some bleak and dark, others shining under a robe of snow, and still others of that greyish hue as if snow had freshly fallen upon them, but not enough to cover their stony surface. The plain before me was several miles in circumference. It was only part of a ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... Dorrit.' The elder Dickens had unquestionably some of the traits ascribed to the unpractical friend of Copperfield's youth, and something of the cruel self-indulgence and pompous deportment of the dancing-master in 'Bleak House.' And it was during his father's imprisonment for debt when the son was but a youth, that Dickens got his intimate knowledge of the Marshalsea, and of the heart-breaking existence of its inmates. Some years before 'Copperfield' was written, he described in a fragment of actual ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... instructions from the American Secretary at War, with the view of depriving the British army of comfortable winter quarters. He was indeed ordered to lay waste the country as he retreated, if retreat became necessary. It was on the 10th of December, a bleak, cold winter day, that McClure fulfilled his instructions. One hundred and fifty houses, composing the flourishing village of Newark, were reduced to ashes, and four hundred women and children were left to wander in the snow or seek the temporary shelter ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... morning, when I was fighting my way to school against the wind, I could n't see anything but the road in front of me; but in the late afternoon, when I was coming home, the town looked bleak and desolate to me. The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify—it was like the light of truth itself. When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy roofs and the blue drifts, then the wind sprang ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... Through the open window a keen draught of air blew in with dust and a scrap of shaving from the Lung' Arno down below; it circled round his workshop, fluttering the sketches and rags pinned to the walls. He looked out on a bleak landscape—San Miniato in heavy shade, and the white houses by the river staring like dead faces. A strong breeze was abroad; it whipped the brown water and raised little curling billows, ragged and white at the edges, and tossed about snaps of surf. It was cold. Sandro shivered as he shut to ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... him, for the "natives" were easily singled out by their lank longitude from the stockier foreign breed: it was the careless powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain. There was something bleak and unapproachable in his face, and he was so stiffened and grizzled that I took him for an old man and was surprised to hear that he was not more than fifty-two. I had this from Harmon Gow, who had driven the stage from Bettsbridge to Starkfield ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... and their varied, grand persistent labors during the late civil war in America. Not a class, or grade, or rank, of our countrywomen, but was represented in this work. The humble dweller in the fishing cabins on the bleak and desolate coast, the woman of the prairie, and of the cities, the wife and daughter of the mechanic, and the farmer, of the merchant, and the professional man, the lady from the mansion of wealth, ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... the northwest: the sharpest peak in the Judean range, crowned with a ragged, dusty village and a small mosque. We rode to it one morning over the steepest, stoniest bridle-paths that we had ever seen. The country was bleak and rocky, a skeleton of landscape; but between the stones and down the precipitous hillsides and along the hot gorges, the incredible multitude of spring ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... ago the day was cold and bleak. It drizzled through the dreary hours, freezing as it fell. But to many loving hearts, its sleet and rain were not its gloom. On this day was laid to rest in Mother Earth the loved remains of one numbered in the health-seeking ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... haunted house in broad daylight to one's fellow-clerks, in a large London office, is a very different thing from taking up one's residence in the same house, all alone, on a bleak winter's night, with never a soul within shouting distance. I had made up my mind to go through with the matter, and no amount of mental depression, no wintry blasts, no cheerless roads, no desolate goal, should daunt me; but still I did not like the adventure, and ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... those of Hindostan; but make a low grunting noise, scarcely audible, and that but seldom, when under some impression of uneasiness. These cattle are pastured in the coldest part of Tibet, upon short herbage, peculiar to the tops of mountains and bleak plains. That chain of lofty mountains situated between lat. 27 deg. and 28 deg., which divides Tibet from Bootan, and whose summits are most commonly covered with snow, is their favourite haunt. In this vicinity ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... day when these events took place, the hundreds of rocky bits of land that line the Maine coast stood out against the gray sea as bleak and desolate as at the world's beginning. Some were merely huge up-ended rocks that rose sheer out of the Atlantic a hundred feet high, and on whose tops the sea-birds nested by the million. The larger ones, however, had, through countless ages, accumulated a ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... in my notebook that it was a bleak and windy day towards the end of March in the year 1892. Holmes had received a telegram while we sat at our lunch, and he had scribbled a reply. He made no remark, but the matter remained in his thoughts, for he stood in front of the fire afterwards with a thoughtful face, smoking his ...
— The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge • Arthur Conan Doyle
... within there was a feast to prepare and a bride to adorn. In the early morning the sun-browned peasant women brought flowers, masses of goldenrod and asters. These we arranged in brass shells, empty husks of death, till the bleak spaciousness of our shattered house was gay. The rooms, still elegant in proportion, lent themselves naturally to adornment; and I found myself wondering what former festivities they had sheltered, what other brides had passed down this stately corridor before ...
— Where the Sabots Clatter Again • Katherine Shortall
... to give my titular makeshift, then, a wide interpretation; and are always to remember that in the bleak, florid age these tales commemorate this Chivalry was much the rarelier significant of any personal trait than of a world-wide code in consonance with which all estimable people lived and died. Its root was the assumption (uncontested then) that a gentleman will always serve his God, his honor ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... lay aside their private cares To mind the Kirk and State affairs: They'll talk o' patronage and priests, Wi' kindling fury in their breasts; Or tell what new taxation's comin', And ferlie at the folk in Lon'on. [wonder] As bleak-faced Hallowmas returns They get the jovial rantin' kirns, [harvest-homes] When rural life o' every station. Unite in common recreation; Love blinks, Wit slaps, and social Mirth Forgets there's Care upo' the earth. That merry day the year begins They bar the door on frosty win's; The nappy reeks ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... fire at any hour draws a crowd. At sea, in the bleak cold wastes of the water desert, even one other shipload of sympathizers is too often wished for vainly. Wind, cold, and breakdowns of machinery the sailor accepts with dull indifference; shipwrecks, strandings, and disease he looks forward to as part of an inevitable fate; but ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... graceful and exhilarating; but, to say nothing of the injury which not unfrequently attends the sudden change from the stagnant heat of our furnaced dwellings to the bleak winds of the icy lake, is it not true that the chest-muscles are so little moved that the finest skating may be done with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... comparison with the room below it seemed almost luxurious. Two windows gave a clear view above the little oak copse, the lines of empty freight cars on the siding, and a mile of low meadow that lay between the cottage and the fringe of settlement along the lake. Through another window at the north the bleak prospect of Stoney Island Avenue could be seen, flanked on one side by a huge sign over a saloon. Near this window on ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... what could we do to help him? We should be safe from immediate need and danger if we could reach the Prince's army, but where that was, and which way it was travelling, were unknown to us. Certain it was that between us and any real help ranged some thirty miles of cold, bleak country packed with enemies for miles ahead. And here we were, on foot, penniless and hungry. I had longed for a man's work; this ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... and make the tour of the chateau with him. The only sound to be heard was the crunching of the dead leaves beneath our feet. The silence was so intense that one might have thought the chateau had been abandoned. The old stones, the stagnant water of the ditch surrounding the donjon, the bleak ground strewn with the dead leaves, the dark, skeleton-like outlines of the trees, all contributed to give to the desolate place, now filled with its awful mystery, a most funereal aspect. As we passed round the donjon, we ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... goddess fair Who reignest where The weather's seldom bleak and snowy, This boon I urge: In anger scourge My old ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... an altogether picturesque sight, but to the Captain it was Marathon and Waterloo combined. No colonel prided himself on a crack regiment more than Winona on her team. Sometimes, of course, a practice was off color; the day might be bleak or drizzly, or players might be penalized for "sticks," or grumblers might express their dissatisfaction audibly, but whatever went wrong, Winona emerged cheerful from the fray, remonstrated with "off-sides" and "sticks," and reminded growlers that it is unsporting to murmur. By Kirsty's ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... piles of official dust—the forms of the illustrious Fleming and the bold Welsh colonel, seem to start, for a brief moment, out of the three hundred years of sleep which have succeeded their energetic existence upon earth. And so, with the bleak winds of December whistling over the breakers of the North Sea, the two discoursed together, as they ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... them the traces of blood. The goatsucker hath sung his song, the shades lower of eventide, So with the lotus hoe I return home and shut the double doors. Upon the wall the green lamp sheds its rays just as I go to sleep. The cover is yet cold; against the window patters the bleak rain. How strange! Why can it ever be that I feel so wounded at heart! Partly, because spring I regret; partly, because with spring I'm vexed! Regret for spring, because it sudden comes; vexed, for it sudden goes. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... the stiff folds of curtains stirred perpendicularly, rattling on brass rods, the covers of empty beds blew about noiselessly near the bare floor all along the line, and I shivered to the very marrow. The soft wind of the tropics played in that naked ward as bleak as a winter's gale in an old barn at home. "Don't you let him start his hollering, mister," hailed from afar the accident case in a distressed angry shout that came ringing between the walls like a quavering call down a ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... old memories and associations, and his thoughts flowed from the time he had stood with his wife at the top of Market Street to the present hour. He neither praised nor blamed himself. He accepted things as they were without criticism, and they appeared to him like a turgid dream swollen and bleak as the confused expanse of distance ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... the sky, And all of Nature's artists have their colors handy by; With a few days bright with sunshine and a few nights free from frost They will start to splash their colors quite regardless of the cost. There's an artist waiting ready at each bleak and dismal spot To paint the flashing ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... allusion is to a well-known proverb—mandâ hâl wâng Jatt jharî de— as miserable as a Jatt in a shower. Any one who has seen the appearance of the Panjâbî cultivator attempting to go to his fields on a wet, bleak February morning, with his scant clothing sticking to his limp and shivering figure, while the biting wind blows through him, will well understand the ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... second day we crossed "Death Valley," so called because two men were once found frozen in it; a bleak, barren expanse, five or six miles across, with a great gale blowing right down it, charged not only with particles of hard snow but with spicules of ice and grains of sand. Our course was south and the gale blew from the northwest, ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... reach, rippled under a gentle breeze. They had risen almost at the edge of a small, rocky islet, high in the middle, but gradually slanting down to the water. No trees or bushes or grass grew anywhere about; only rocks, gray and bleak, ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... however, he saw why his friend had suggested it as a likely lurking ground for Roger. It would be as impossible for any bibliophile to pass this famous second-hand bookstore as for a woman to go by a wedding party without trying to see the bride. Although it was a bleak day, and a snell wind blew down the street, the pavement counters were lined with people turning over disordered piles of volumes. Within, he could see a vista of white shelves, and the many-coloured tapestry of bindings stretching far away to the ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... dainty little chamber in Grey Street that to see her here so unexpectedly, without the least warning or anticipation, was like being suddenly confronted with a picture which had stepped out of its frame. And that she should be here, too, of all places, here in this bleak corner of the kingdom, where blustering winds swept bare the sullen moorland, and the sea was always grey and stormy. What strange fate could have brought her here, away from all the warmth and luxury of London, to this half-deserted old manor house on the verge of ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the North winds blow Bleak in the morning early, All the hills are covered with snow, And winter's ...
— The Only True Mother Goose Melodies • Anonymous
... in the morning; in the evening he started for Paris. His wound began to ache with its first fierceness, and during his long bleak journey the thought of Madame de Cintre's "life-time," passed within prison walls on whose outer side he might stand, kept him perpetual company. Now he would fix himself in Paris forever; he would extort ...
— The American • Henry James
... burning, and the temperature was exceedingly pleasant after the bleak air outside, where the raw wind blew ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... toward the horizon to windward; it showed but for a moment, and then was lost again. But presently a wider and more pronounced break appeared which did not vanish; on the contrary, it widened, until presently a fitful gleam of wan and watery sunshine pierced through it and lighted up the bleak, desolate expanse of raging ocean for a few seconds. And almost simultaneously with the welcome appearance of this transient but welcome gleam of pallid sunshine, we became aware of a slight but unmistakable diminution in the fury of the gale; a ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... the hall, which was bleak and desolate, and the hearthstone in the centre was thick with last year's leaves, as if it had been long since fire had flickered upon it. On the wall there hung rusty weapons and helms, and through the cracks there crept the ivy from the outer ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... another who continued indifferent to the personal estate of this father. This was Grandfather Delcher, who had never seen him since that bleak day when he had tried to bury the memory of his daughter. When the perfect father came to Edom the grandfather went to his room and kept there so closely that neither ever beheld the other. The little boy was much puzzled by this apparently intentional avoidance of each other by two ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... That the faint coming breeze would be fair for our flight, And shall steal us away, ere the falling of night. Dear Douglas! thou knowest, with thee by my side, With thy friendship to soothe me, thy courage to guide, There is not a bleak isle in those summerless seas, Where the day comes in darkness, or shines but to freeze, Not a tract of the line, not a barbarous shore, That I could not with patience, with pleasure explore! Oh think then how gladly I follow thee now, When Hope smooths the billowy path of our prow, And each ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... their feet. An observant person cannot fail to be struck—especially if he is returning from travel upon the State railways of Switzerland or Germany—by the shabby-looking porters on so many of our lines—they represent the standard of good clothing for the year 1848 or thereabouts—and by the bleak misery of many of the stations, the universal dirt that electricity might even now abolish. You dare not drop a parcel on any British railway cushion for fear of the cloud of horrible dust you would raise; you have to put it down softly. Consider, too, the congested infrequent suburban trains ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... array.... The best that the city afforded was at the disposal of the enemy, who seem to have spent their days in feasting and merry-making, while Washington and his army endured all the hardships of the severe winter of 1777-8 upon the bleak hill-sides of Valley Forge. Dancing assemblies, theatrical entertainments, and various gaieties marked the advent of the British in Philadelphia, all of which formed a fitting prelude to the full-blown ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... on him for the last few weeks! We should all be kindly and genial, if we had the same chance of being so. But if Dr. Longley had a living of a hundred pounds a year, a fretful, ailing wife, a number of half-fed and half-educated little children, a dirty, miserable house, a bleak country round, and a set of wrong-headed and insolent parishioners to keep straight, I venture to say he would have looked, and been, a very different man in that railway-carriage running up to London. Instead of the genial smiles that delighted his fellow-travellers, (according ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... floor is the coolest part of the room, and in the absence of the creeping pen, which is "built up" two feet above the floor, extra clothing should be put upon the child while on the floor. During the damp days of early spring and the cool days of late fall, as well as on the bleak days of winter, baby is better off if he is kept off the floor. It is a fine plan to put a number of table boards on top of the springs of the baby's bed; in this way a sort of pen is produced which is high above the cold floor and the baby is content to spend much of his time in this ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... pencil reflectively, tremendously impressed by the solitude and the solemn thunder of the surf, a thought occurred to me—how unpleasant it would be if I suddenly stumbled on a summer boarder. As this joyless impossibility flitted across my mind, I rounded a bleak sand-dune. ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... and down the jagged wall hung festoons of divided cables and twisted ends of lines and metallic rods. And amidst all the vast details moved little red specks, the red-clothed defenders of the Council. Every now and then faint flashes illuminated the bleak shadows. At the first sight it seemed to Graham that an attack upon this isolated white building was in progress, but then he perceived that the party of the revolt was not advancing, but sheltered amidst the colossal wreckage that encircled this ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... of the tap-room together, and mounted the stairs. On the landing Matthews paused a moment to glance out of the window on to the bleak and inhospitable fen which was almost obscured from view by a heavy ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... the hope of Hope Alas, how soon she flew, To bleak New England's rock-ribbed hills, Ere ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester
... kind that remains in the memory for a long time and is of a quality as moving in its sadness as anything MacDowell ever composed. Its suggested scene seems to be the bleak and icy winter ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... a magic window broad and high The light and glory of the morning shone Thro' it, however dark the day had grown, Or bleak the sky. ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... times when the weather was bad, and the whole settlement would sink into melancholia. These people were on the bleak hillside, facing the sea. Back of them, hedging them close, was the forest, dim, dark and mysterious. In this wood were bears, wolves, panthers, which in Winter, lured by the smell of food, would occasionally ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... ensued a long and disconsolate period of wandering from one bleak hillside to another, at the bidding of various informants, in search of apocryphal foxes, slaughterers of flocks of equally apocryphal geese and turkeys—such a day as is discreetly ignored in all hunting annals, and, like the easterly wind that is its parent, is ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... The bleak wind howled around the corners, the white flakes by millions and millions came with it, and hurled themselves upon that house. In fact, that poor little cabin alone on the wide prairie seemed to ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... removes, in order to temper it, than that it approaches to favour it with its beams. Its kind, beneficent aspect fertilises all it shines upon. This change produces that of the seasons, whose variety is so agreeable. The spring silences bleak frosty winds, brings forth blossoms and flowers, and promises fruits. The summer yields rich harvests. The autumn bestows the fruits promised by the spring. The winter, which is a kind of night wherein ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... another yesterday. Surely this time there would be something for her. Mary's eyes, as they strained down the lane, had lost some of their radiant youth. A stranger might have guessed her older than the twenty-six years she had just completed—she seemed grave and matronly— her face had a bleak look. Mary's last letter from France had come more than a month ago, and a face can change much in a month of waiting. She knew that last ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... wooded hills, the artistic Poutrincourt was charmed, and forthwith obtained from De Monts a private grant of the surrounding country. He established his demesne here, naming the place Port Royal, while Champlain and De Monts, continuing their way around the Bay of Fundy, came at length to the bleak island of St. Croix, where they ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... ale"; or, "as the storm grew fiercer, the captain ordered all hands to splice the main brace," i. e., to take a drink of rum; or, "as he gulped down the last drink of fiery whiskey, he reeled through the tavern door, and his swaying form drifted into the bleak, black night, as a roar of laughter drowned his repentant sobs." But the ladies of the novel confine themselves almost exclusively to tea—rarely allowing their heroes and heroines to indulge in even coffee, though they sometimes treat their heroes to wine; but ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray
... The evening before, the bleak north wind blew still; but on the Wednesday the south wind blew exactly as I had prayed. The weather was so mild that no fire ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... never been so happy in his life; Newberg was made up of hills, in the midst of grander mountains; it nestled in the western shadow of Keansarge; and King's Hill and Sunapee reared loftily around her their bold bleak fronts. A beautiful lake of the same name lay blue and clear at Sunapee's foot. "Pleasant Lake" lay in another direction, famous for its delicious ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... real un-understood life. At times it seemed impossible that it was the same world. Surely the sun that struck like a hammer in Jamaica could not be the gracious warm planet that gilded the gorse of the Antrim glens. And up the Baltic in mid-winter it was bleak as a candle, and even then in Antrim it had a great kindliness. Nor were the winds the same. The hot puffs of the Indian Ocean, the drunken, lurching flaws of Biscay Bay, the trades that worked steadily as ants, had not the human quality of the winds of the Nine ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... Barrens, the bad lands of the Arctic, the deserts of the Circle, the bleak and bitter home of the musk-ox and the lean plains wolf. So Avery Van Brunt found them, treeless and cheerless, sparsely clothed with moss and lichens, and altogether uninviting. At least so he found them till he penetrated to the white blank spaces on the map, and came upon undreamed-of ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... manner had ceased to be in any degree embarrassed, though a slight perplexity came into her expression. For just then she remembered, somehow, her pacings of the station platform at Culoz, the salutation of the bleak, pure, evening wind from out the fastnesses of the Alps, and all her conversation there with her faithful admirer, Ludovic Quayle. And it occurred to her what singular contrast in sentiment that bleak ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... taking northeast storms, bleak winds, thunder-showers, flies, mosquitoes, Canada thistles, hot sunshine, cold snows, weeds, briers, thorns, wild beasts, snakes, alligators, and such like things, which they don't happen to like, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... the still forest, and immediately the air was aflame with rushing autumn leaves. They fell across Howat's face and eddied about the horses' legs. The grey bank deepened in space, the sun vanished; the wind was bleak. It seemed to Howat Penny that the world had changed, its gold stricken to dun and gaunt branches, in an instant. The road descended to the clustered stone ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... that were placed between the rows for that purpose, while others were hauling the grain to their barns to store it away for the winter's use. The broad corn leaves rustling in the wind seemed to whisper, "Winter is coming with his cold, bleak storms to rob the earth of her summer splendor; but he will bring his beautiful coverlet of snow to protect her fields and to prepare ...
— How John Became a Man • Isabel C. Byrum
... (sad relief!) from the bleak coast that hears The German Ocean roar, deep-blooming, strong, And yellow hair'd, the blue-eyed ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... French and English "front" and away from Greece; we were in Bulgaria and Servia. It was at a place where the three boundaries met. We saw remarkable mountain ranges and deep snow, and some fine artillery. But throwing shells into that bleak, white jumble of snow and rocks—there was fifty miles of it—was like throwing a baseball at the Rocky Mountains. Still, it was seeing something. Now, I have a room, and a very wonderful one. I had to bribe everyone in the hotel ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... BLEAK. The Leuciscus alburnus of naturalists, and the fresh-water sprat of Isaak Walton. The name of this fish is from the Anglo-Saxon blican, owing to its shining whiteness—its lustrous scales having long been used in the manufacture ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... the smallest crowd of the series, the final game was played in Boston. Many Boston fans, disgruntled at the manner in which some of them had been seated, deliberately remained away. The air was cold and bleak and in addition to all the rest the enthusiasts of Boston had given up the fight. Which merely goes to show the uncertainty of Base Ball. The New York players unquestionably had the championship won for nine and one half innings ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... the maniac will seek; Cold and hunger awake not her care: Through her rags do the winds of the winter blow bleak On her poor wither'd bosom, half bare; and her cheek Has the ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... passed away, and the bleak fall came. Myles had long since accepted his position as one set apart from the others of his kind, and had resigned himself to the evident fact that he was never to serve in the household in waiting ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... when I was a boy!) in his first gale of wind. Still, through all this, I must ask her (who was she, I wonder!) for the fiftieth time, and without ever stopping, Does she not fear to stray, so lone and lovely through this bleak way, And are Erin's sons so good or so cold, As not to be tempted by more fellow-creatures at the paddle-box or gold? Sir Knight, I feel not the least alarm, No son of Erin will offer me harm, For though they love fellow creatures with umbrella down again and golden store, Sir Knight, ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... the Surrey Thames. The high road from the bridge over the Wey runs between double ribands of water; on one side lies the sunny, slow canal, edged with iris and forget-me-nots, and banked up higher than the road; on the other, a shady stream, dun and bleak-haunted. Before the road turns into Addlestone there is a field-path, breaking off at right angles, which leads to a wooden bridge crossing the clear, brown little Bourne, and beyond the bridge lies Chertsey Mead, ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... engendered here. Passing onward, a sudden change is wrought; the soft beauty melts gradually away, and the scene hardens into frowning rocks and steep acclivities, making a befitting vestibule to the bold and bleak precipices of "The Reeks," which form the western barrier of this upper lake, whose savage grandeur is rendered more striking by the scenes of fairy-like beauty left behind. But even here, in the midst of the mightiest ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... started off on her crack-brained expedition, the very next morning, on the six-thirty train. I happened to be looking out sleepily and saw her trudging wearily past our house in the bleak gray of our mountain dawn, the inadequate little, yellow flame of her old fashioned lantern like a glowworm at her side. It seemed somehow symbolical of something, I did not ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... we went. 'Where is the wood in which we are to pass the night?' I asked of the Delaware. 'It is yet far-off,' was his unsatisfactory answer. Evening was drawing on. I saw a bleak hill, but no wood capable of affording us shelter. Just then a snowflake settled on my face. It was a slight thing. How indifferent should I have been to it at other times! Now it made my heart sink lower than it had ever done before. Another and another fell; then down the snowflakes ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston
... along. It was now late autumn; the gorgeous leaves lay strewn along the ground, and the wind sighed up from the ocean chill and bleak, scattering thoughts of decay with each gust. With that gathering desolation, the coldness and the shadows had crept deeper and deeper ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... long night passed, and the slow day broke over the bleak, pitiless world. The dogs awoke, and clambered from their warm, snowy couches. The routine of the "long trail" obtained, and once more the song of the sled rang out at the ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... rags and whose gaunt bodies never knew any nourishment save what could be got from "Indian meal stir-about" (a kind of weak and watery porridge made from maize). And it was not the children of the labourers alone who endured this bleak and starved and sunless childhood; the offspring of the smaller struggling farmers were often as badly off—they were all the progeny of the poor, kept poor and impoverished by landlordism. This further ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... ridge he reined up and gazed at the desert below. The bleak flats wavered in the white light of noon. The farthest hills to the south seemed but a ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... through a cold, drizzling rain, the fleet sailed on, the transports still keeping in sight of each other, in a line extending for miles along the bleak, ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... was long minister of the moorland parish of Balweary, in the vale of Dule. A severe, bleak-faced old man, dreadful to his hearers, he dwelt in the last years of his life, without relative or servant or any human company, in the small and lonely manse under the Hanging Shaw. In spite of the iron composure of his features, his eye was wild, scared, and uncertain; and when he dwelt, ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... meadow to the river-side, where lay our boat, looking quite familiar and friendly to me. I walked up stream a little, watching the light mist curling up from the river till the sun gained power to draw it all away; saw the bleak speckling the water under the willow boughs, whence the tiny flies they fed on were falling in myriads; heard the great chub splashing here and there at some belated moth or other, and felt almost back again in ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... entirely blighted its normal characteristics. Here were shell-holes, but no long succession of abandoned gun-positions, few horse-tracks, fewer trenches, and no barbed wire. The villages we went through had escaped obliterating shell fire. I learned that our attacks had been planned thus-wise. Near a bleak cross-roads I saw Collinge of B Battery, and got off the lorry to talk ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... might have supposed, for some dissatisfied religious sect of the seventeenth century to secure a sanctuary and keep off all intruders. But at first no one of the various denominations seems to have fancied it or chanced upon it. The Puritans disembarked upon the bleak shores of New England well suited to the sternness of their religion. How different American history might have been if they had established themselves in the Jerseys! Could they, under those milder skies, have developed witchcraft, set up blue laws, and indulged in the killing ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... the valley of the Rhone," says Becquerel, "a simple hedge, two metres in height, is a sufficient protection for a distance of twenty-two metres." [Footnote: Ibid., p. 116. Becquerel's views have been amply confirmed by recent extensive experiments on the bleak, stony, and desolate plain of the Cran in the Department of the Bouches-du-Rhone, which had remained a naked waste from the earliest ages of history. Belts of trees prove a secure protection even against ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... Gowrie two year come Marti'mas, and afore that I herded some sheep on the hill yonder. We had a hut all to oursels. I slept wi' them a' night, and liked them terrible weel, a hantle better than the cattle," and his eye wandered regretfully to a bleak mountain slope, which had evidently pleasant associations for ...
— Geordie's Tryst - A Tale of Scottish Life • Mrs. Milne Rae
... the Far North is the scene of this story—Athabasca, one of the most beautiful countries in the world in summer, but a cold, bare land in winter. Yet even in winter it is not so bleak and bitter as the districts south-west of it, for the Chinook winds steal through from the Pacific and temper the fierceness of the frozen Rockies. Yet forty and fifty degrees below zero is cold after all, and July strawberries in this wild North land are hardly compensation for seven ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of all, December, The year's sands nearly run, Speeds on the shortest day, Curtails the sun; With its bleak raw wind Lays the last leaves low, Brings back the nightly ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... intelligent generosity. It was with grim Sarah then—Sarah grim for all her grace—that Waymarsh had begun at ten o'clock in the morning to save him. Well—if he COULD, poor dear man, with his big bleak kindness! The upshot of which crowded perception was that Strether, on his own side, still showed no more than he absolutely had to. He showed the least possible by saying to Mrs. Pocock after an interval much briefer than our glance at the picture reflected ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... what adventures, what adversities, what ignominies—yes, and what triumphs were to be mine in those back blocks of North America! I saw but a bleak wilderness, a distressing contact with people who never for a moment would do with us. ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... old-fashioned sort. Besides the sideboard, he perceived a dining-table, six chairs, and a dingy brown carpet. There were no curtains on the window, and no pictures or prints on the drab-coloured walls. The empty grate showed its bleak black cavity undisguised; and the mantelpiece had nothing on it but the doctor's dirty and strong-smelling pipe. Benjulia set down his watering-pot, as a sign that the paroxysm of pain had passed away. "A dull ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... and the temperature was exceedingly pleasant after the bleak air outside, where the raw wind blew ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... as they swung into the hospital area, but, seeing Quin's uniform, allowed them to enter. Past the long line of contagious wards, past the bleak two-story convalescent barracks, and up to the ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... was cold and bleak, but full of stars. He had already mastered the local topography, and he knew now exactly where all the bombs that had been showered upon the place had fallen. Here was the corner of blackened walls and roasted beams where three wounded horses had been burnt alive in a barn, ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... spray,— I quaff the fresh stream as it bursts from the hill,— I pluck the fresh flowers that spring by the rill,— I watch the gray clouds as they curl round the peak That rises high over them, barren and bleak; And I think how the worldling who courts fortune's smile, In his heart, like that peak, may be lonely the while; And then my own heart sings aloud in its joy, That Heaven has made me a ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... a terrible night," he mused, as he ran his eye along the row of green and gilt books, and "Bleak House" seems especially fit for the ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... thoughts were most about that Shepherd Saviour who seemed to be able to lead his flock away from bleak, scorching places to such a blessed land ...
— Geordie's Tryst - A Tale of Scottish Life • Mrs. Milne Rae
... our last Irish girl went with the last snow, and on one of those midsummer-like days that sometimes fall in early April to our yet bleak and desolate zone, our hearts sang of Africa and golden joys. A Libyan longing took us, and we would have chosen, if we could, to bear a strand of grotesque beads, or a handful of brazen gauds, and traffic them for some sable maid with crisped locks, whom, uncoffling from the captive train beside ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... and bleak, even though patches of sunlight were fighting the usual gloom. On the hearth-stone lay a scrap of white, doubtless Ricky's handkerchief. Val flung open the front door and stepped out on the terrace, drawing deep lungfuls of the ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... Timon the rich, Lord Timon the delight of mankind, to Timon the naked, Timon the man-hater! Where were his flatterers now? Where were his attendants and retinue? Would the bleak air, that boisterous servitor, be his chamberlain, to put his shirt on warm? Would those stiff trees that had outlived the eagle turn young and airy pages to him, to skip on his errands when he bade them? Would ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... train, Suddenly disengulphed below his feet, Roars forth into the sunlight, to its seat My soul was shaken with immediate pain Intolerable as the scanty breath Of that one word blew utterly away The fragile mist of fair deceit that lay O'er the bleak years that severed me from death. Yes, at the sight I quailed; but, not unwise Or not, O God, without some nervous thread Of that best valour, Patience, bowed my head, And with firm bosom and most steadfast eyes, Strong in ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... trainmen to bring the boxes of fruit to the office, Griffith led the way up the path formed by the bridge-service track. The rails had been kept shovelled clear from the February snowdrifts and ran straight out through the midst of the bleak unlovely buildings grouped near the edge of Michamac Strait, at the southern terminus of ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... stood on the first piece of level ground on the way to the mainland. There was no other building within sight; and with its bleak boulders and rocks of strangest form, in perpetual death-struggle with the mighty force of ocean, resounding night and day with the rush and tramp of the wild sea-horses, as they flung themselves in despair on their rocky adversary, and with the ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... views of the sea, the mountain-heights, and the valley-reaches, obtainable from Morne Rouge, the place has a somewhat bleak look. Perhaps this is largely owing to the universal slate-gray tint of the buildings,—very melancholy by comparison with the apricot and banana yellows tinting the walls of St. Pierre. But this cheerless gray is the only color which can resist the climate ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... animated scene; and one you only find in England. The stubble of the cornfields looked pale and bleak in the departing autumn, the wind was shaking down the withered leaves from the trees, whose thinning branches told unmistakably of the rapidly-advancing winter. But the day was bright after the night's frost, ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... hour and a half before his friend would return to business. What should he do? The Verein where he had once been entertained was deserted even by its waiters; the garden, with its ostentatious out-of-door tables, looked bleak and bare. Mr. Clinch was not artistic in his tastes; but even he was quick to detect the affront put upon Nature by this continental, theatrical gardening, and turned disgustedly away. Born near a "lake" larger than the German Ocean, he resented a pool of ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... division of Suffolk, England, the terminus of a branch of the Great Eastern railway, 99 1/2 m. N.E. by E. from London. Area, 1629 acres. Pop. (1901) 2405. The surrounding district is open and somewhat bleak, but a fine stretch of sand fringes the shallow inlet of the North Sea known as Aldeburgh Bay. To the W. the river Alde broadens as if into an estuary, but its outflow is here prevented by the sand, and it runs south for nearly ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... France. Then people saw, at last, where all the golden schemes that had flooded upon popular credulity had borne us;—not to the smiling and fertile shores of Prosperity and Confidence, as may be imagined; but to the bleak rocks and dangerous sands of Ruin and Mistrust, where dull clouds obscure the sky, and where there is no protection against ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... window beside the gate. The sands of the Desert of Candor stretched orange and bleak under the bronze sky. Somewhere out there to the south, across those sands, under that sky, lay the ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... but still the rain hissed down, making it no easy matter to boil our kettle and fry our bit of pork. Then we put out for the day's work on the river. How bleak and wretched it all was! After a while we found it was impossible to make head against the storm of wind and rain which swept the water, and we had to put back to the shelter of our miserable camp. About seven o'clock the wind fell, and we set out again. Soon the sun came forth ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... Lingard," he answered, very solemnly, "I can teach you nothing; I can but show you where I found what has changed my life from a bleak November to a sunny June—with its thunder-storms no doubt—but still June beside November. Perhaps I could help you a little if you were really set out to find Jesus, but you must yourself set out. It is you who must find him. Words of mine, as the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... many tinkling bells. All this the King saw as he pondered much, who had not pondered before. Westward the Agnid mountains frowned in the distance guarding the river Eidis; behind them the fierce people of Zeenar lived in a bleak land. ...
— Time and the Gods • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... solemnity and a heavier message as he painted. Through the open window a keen draught of air blew in with dust and a scrap of shaving from the Lung' Arno down below; it circled round his workshop, fluttering the sketches and rags pinned to the walls. He looked out on a bleak landscape—San Miniato in heavy shade, and the white houses by the river staring like dead faces. A strong breeze was abroad; it whipped the brown water and raised little curling billows, ragged and white at the edges, and tossed about snaps of surf. It was cold. Sandro shivered ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... in Warden's cheeks as his thoughts reverted to Lawler's return to Willets, after disposing of his cattle to the Red Rock buyer. And Warden's shoulders sagged a little, the smile faded and he glared malignantly at the bleak, gray clouds that sailed over town on the ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... his wedding roses still on her breast, and bore up as gallantly as he, resolved that his last impression of her should be a cheerful one. But when it was all over, and nothing remained but the trampled street, the hurrying crowd, the bleak November sky, when Mrs. Wilkins sat sobbing on the steps like Niobe with her children scattered about her, then Christie's heart gave way, and she hid her face on Mr. Power's shoulder for a moment, all her ardor quenched in tears as she cried ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... That the bleak air, thy boisterous chamberlain, Will put thy shirt on warm? will these moss'd trees, That have outliv'd the eagle, page thy heels, And skip where thou point'st out? will the cold brook. Candied with ice, caudle thy morning taste, To cure ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... elections. If the satire is merely local, it practically loses its point; just as the "Circumlocution Office" would lose its point if it were not supposed to be a true sketch of all Government offices; just as the Lord Chancellor in "Bleak House" would lose his point if he were not supposed to be symbolic and representative of all Lord Chancellors. The whole moral meaning would vanish if we supposed that Oliver Twist had got by accident ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... a glimpse of the bleak moorland and of the distant hills, wrapped in mist. The idea of vigorous exercise, however, appealed to him. He ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... there long enough to see the dull monotony of one season lapse into the dull monotony of the other. The bleak northwest trade-winds had brought him mornings of staring sunlight and nights of fog and silence. The warmer southwest trades had brought him clouds, rain, and the transient glories of quick grasses and odorous beach blossoms. But summer or winter, wet or dry season, on one side rose ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... our torches at the splendour of its light. We remember that He told us to feed His lambs. Dear Lord, help all the faithful shepherds who care for the ninety-and-nine that lie in the safe cover of the fold; help us, too, for we are the wandering shepherds whose part it is to go out over the bleak hills, up the mountain sides and rocky places, and gather in out of the storm and stress of things all the poor, unshepherded, wee bit lammies that have either wandered forlornly away from shelter, or have ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... apprentices' dormitory was a long bleak room with six beds, six chests of drawers and looking glasses and a number of boxes of wood or tin; it opened into a still longer and bleaker room of eight beds, and this into a third apartment with yellow grained paper ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... only the last rich dazzle of the sunset. Presently it would vanish. The owls would be hooting. The chill night would be settling down upon us, out there in the bleak country, sorrowful, alone. Fear would take hold of us. To keep up our courage a little, we would nibble at the figs which we had hoped to give to the pages, at the fougasso which we had hoped to present to the Kings. ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... a goodly portion of those stones landed by mischance in St. Antoine. Indeed, Le Petit Nord and Labrador are so much alike in climate, people, and conditions that this part of the island is often designated locally as Labrador (never has it been my lot to see a more desolate, bleak, and barren spot). The traveller who described Newfoundland as a country composed chiefly of ponds with a little land to divide them from the sea, at least cannot be impeached for unveracity. In this northern part even that little is rendered almost ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... had thinned considerably, but it was still so misty that he could only just see the edge of the bleak shore where the little waves rolled in idly, looking gray and greasy under the fog. He leaned his arms on the sill, but aside from the seal-roar, everything seemed peaceful and the lad was just about to turn away from the window in the feeling ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... the rain stopped, the wind rushed by and whistled and made strange sounds. The road went up and down, and several times the carriage passed over a little bridge beneath which water rushed very fast with a great deal of noise. Mary felt as if the drive would never come to an end and that the wide, bleak moor was a wide expanse of black ocean through which she was passing on ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... stretch of flat lands in Indiana where unagrarian Eastern travellers, glancing from car-windows, shudder and return their eyes to interior upholstery, preferring even the swaying caparisons of a Pullman to the monotony without. The landscape lies interminably level: bleak in winter, a desolate plain of mud and snow; hot and dusty in summer, in its flat lonesomeness, miles on miles with not one cool hill slope away from the sun. The persistent tourist who seeks for signs ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... more or less unfortunate—called "The Wager." Being a bad sailor, and heavily laden, she was blown from her company, and wrecked in the Straits of Magellan. The majority of the crew were cast on a bleak rock, which they christened Mount Misery. After encountering all the horrors of mutiny and famine, and being in various ways deserted, five of the survivors, among them Captain Cheap and Mr. Byron, were taken by some Patagonians to the Island ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... hours our route lay in the valley of Gasko, which looked green and fertile, though showing few signs of cultivation. The ruins of a church were the only antiquarian relics which I noticed on the march. At the extremity of the valley the pathway winds to the SE., having the rugged Piwa, looking bleak and bare, on the left, and the more wooded heights of Baniani on the right. The configuration of the hills, and the sharp outline of the country generally, combined with the indescribably wild and rocky character of some parts of the foreground, and ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... astonished the wayfarers. All through half the day they had seen the house, until it seemed part of the mountains; evil it seemed like their ridges, that were black and bleak and forbidding, and strange it seemed with a strangeness that moved no fears they could name, yet it seemed ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... fixed, when the workmen were to come, and all the necessary arrangements were made. The fire, of course, had to be let out while the repairs were going on. But now see. After the day was fixed for the repairs a bleak North wind set in. It began to blow either on Thursday or Friday before the Wednesday afternoon, when the fire was to be let out. Now came the first really cold weather, which we had in the beginning of that winter, during the first days of December. What was to be done? The repairs could not ...
— Answers to Prayer - From George Mueller's Narratives • George Mueller
... foods are all good in cold, bleak weather, but in summer these do harm, if used to any great extent, ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 354, October 9, 1886 • Various
... dear one, do you long to see those countries beyond the sea? I know I do. I am tired of this life, this continual struggle for a bare existence. The same thing day after day, year after year; nothing new happens. Why did M. Bois-le-Duc teach me of an outer world beyond the bleak Gulf of St. Lawrence? Why did he teach me to read Virgil and Plato? He did it for the best, no doubt; but I think he did wrong. He has stirred up within me a restless evil spirit of discontent. Oh! Marie, to think I am doomed ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... and we made a hearty meal, the canoe, urged by the soft brisk breeze, still gliding onwards till towards evening, when we were sufficiently near the land we approached to make out that it was very bleak and bare and sterile. There was a ridge of mountains in the central portion, but as we examined the place with the glass it looked as blank and uninviting ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... 'Tis a cold bleak night! with angry roar The north winds beat and clamour at the door; The drifted snow lies heaped along the street, Swept by a blinding storm of hail and sleet; The clouded heavens no guiding starlight lend, But o'er the earth in gloom and darkness ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... December came in bleak and dark. The snow did its poor best, laying day after day its white veil upon the dismal streets. But it was misunderstood. It was scraped into murky heaps. It melted and then froze, and then melted again. And London groaned and ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... friendship grows as we proceed. When we have slipped out of the Tyne one grey evening, when the lights of Shields and Sunderland die away, we are friends. For, as I prophesied, my whiskey would open hearts. It was on a cold, bleak morning, ere we left Newcastle, that I heard a stealthy step down the stairs to my room, and a husky whisper—had I a nip o' whiskey? Yes, I had a nip. The bottle is opened, and I fill two glasses. Evidently the First Officer is no believer in dilution. With ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... winter after the Horse-House was built, Mrs. Polly, Ann, Phineas, and Nabby went to meeting as usual. It was a very cold, bleak day; the wind blew in through the slight wooden walls of the old meeting-house, and the snow lay in little heaps here and there. There was no stove in the building, as every one knows. Some of the women had hot bricks and little foot-stoves, and that was all. Ann did not care for either. ...
— The Adventures of Ann - Stories of Colonial Times • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... from them; turn we to survey 165 Where rougher climes a nobler race display, Where the bleak Swiss their stormy mansions tread, And force a churlish soil for scanty bread; No product here the barren hills afford, But man and steel, the soldier and his sword; 170 No vernal blooms their torpid rocks array, But winter ling'ring chills the lap of May; No Zephyr fondly sues the mountain's ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... part pious. They went out into the summer meadows chanting aves, in seasons of drought to pray for rain on their parching orchards, in the same credulity with which they groped through the winter-fog bearing torches, and chanting dirges to gain a blessing at seed-time on their bleak, black fallows. ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... grey November weather, the time of suspense and melancholy before winter, a strange quietude, like a sense of apprehension in nature! And so on through the revolving year, in all places in all weathers, there is pleasure in the open air, except on these chalk hills because of their bleak nakedness. There the wind and driving rain are not for but against you, and may overcome you with misery. One feels their loneliness, monotony, and desolation on many days, sometimes even when it is not wet, and I here recall an amusing encounter with a bird-scarer during ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... Venere shines; and farther still, Lerici in the shadow of the hills washed by the sea, stained by the blood of the sunset, its great castle seeming like some splendid ship in the midst of the waters. From the bleak height of La Foce, whence all the woods seem to have run down to the shore, slowly one by one the lights of the city appear like great golden night flowers; soon they are answered from the bay, where the ships lie solemnly, sleepily at anchor, and at last the great light of the Pharos throws ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... clime, that lies In ten degrees of more indulgent skies, Nor at the coarseness of our heaven repine, Though o'er our heads the frozen Pleiads shine: 'Tis liberty that crowns Britannia's isle, And makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains smile. 140 Others with towering piles may please the sight, And in their proud aspiring domes delight; A nicer touch to the stretched canvas give, Or teach their animated rocks to live: 'Tis Britain's ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... choose whether he will go forth and put his fortune to the test "to win or lose it all" or settle down into the position of faithful legal hired man. He is getting a bit bald, he has had one or two tussles with his bank about accidental overdrafts. The world looks pretty bleak outside and the big machine of the law goes grinding on heartless, inevitable. Who is he to challenge the future? The old job is fairly easy; they can't get on without him, they say; here is where he belongs; he knows his business—give him his thirty-five ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... in Society's Park on a fine frosty Sunday afternoon of midwinter. The quips and jokes of Franko were lively, and he looked into the carriages passing, as if he knew that a cheerful countenance is not without charms for their inmates. Raikes' face, on the contrary, was barren and bleak. Being of that nature that when a pun was made he must perforce outstrip it, he fell into Franko's humour from time to time, but albeit aware that what he uttered was good, and by comparison transcendent, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to hear the wind roar over the rocks, at intervals when we waked, for it had grown quite cold and windy. The night was in its elements, simple even to majesty in that bleak place,—a bright moonlight and a piercing wind. It was at no time darker than twilight within the tent, and we could easily see the moon through its transparent roof as we lay; for there was the moon still above us, with Jupiter and Saturn on either hand, ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... the saw-toothed peaks of El Diablo. Under the warmth of his gaze, the white-fleeced clouds wavered, shifting about uncertainly. As if loath to leave the devil-island they had guarded throughout the long night, they contracted slowly, niggardly exposing a line of rugged cliffs which shone bleak and gray in the strengthening ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... disposed, sang to our hearts' content. Some of the songs were appropriate to the scene; others strikingly the reverse. Bastard doggrel of the music-hall, such as, "Around her splendid form, I weaved the magic circle," sounded bald, bleak, and pitifully silly. "We don't want to fight, but, by Jingo, if we do," was in some measure saved by the vigour and unanimity with which the chorus was thrown forth into the night. I observed a Platt-Deutsch mason, entirely innocent of English, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... out of the bleak, bright sunshine into cool twilight depths of clinging vapours; and the good green earth lifted its warm ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... harrowing self-examinations, and humiliating public confessions—this is what they gather on the narrow wooden benches to listen to hour after hour, searching their souls for sin with an almost frenzied eagerness. And yet, forlorn and tedious as the bleak service appears to us, there is no doubt that these stern-faced men and women wrenched an almost mystical inspiration from it; that a weird fascination emanated from this morbid dwelling on sin and punishment, appealing to the emotions quite as vividly—although through ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... to the North Hospital yesterday, to take the deposition of a dying man as to his ill treatment by the second and third mates of the ship Assyria, on the voyage from New Orleans. This hospital is a very gloomy place, with its wide bleak entries and staircases, which may be very good for summer weather, but which are most congenial at this bleak November season. I found the physicians of the house laughing and talking very cheerfully with Mr. Wilding, who had ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... start for his boat, which lay waiting by the shore. Night came on, however, and still the fond husband and father lingered. The snow was falling in the outer darkness, and the wind howled through the long avenue of the portico. No wonder the easy-going devotee of luxury shrank from stepping into the bleak night, to navigate a scow down the rough, icy current of the Ohio. Against his wife's protest he took up the violincello and began to tune up its three remaining strings. Touching the chords lightly with the bow, he attempted to ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... door, to show that a pawnbroker's business was carried on within. It was not the first visit she had made to this establishment, for the poor little household ornaments, the loss of which had left her home so bleak and bare, were now in the safekeeping of the proprietor; but still she shrank back as she approached a dim side entrance in a narrow street, and drawing her bonnet closer over her face, pushed open a baize door, and ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... author's treatment of his subject. He made a short story of it in the manner of Flaubert, minute, vivid and grim. He showed the weekly dances wearing thin at the end of the season, the daughters of the Levantine ship-chandlers, and Greek tobacco merchants, and Maltese petty officials, looking rather bleak at the prospect of another barren summer in Alexandria, when a new planet suddenly swims into their ken, young, rich, handsome, fascinating. They wake up again and the fight begins. You can see the Italian journalist, small, dark, with a pointed beard, pointed shoes, and sharp points of ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... women have the hardest time Who emigrate by land; For when they cook out in the wind They're sure to burn their hand. Then they scold their husbands round, Get mad and spill the tea,— I'd have thanked my stars if they'd not come out Upon this bleak prairie. ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... mountain and moorland are scenes of intense historic interest and natural beauty. It is a district bleak and bracing on the summits, warm and sheltered in the valleys, and as yet quite unspoiled by the crowd, as too is the charming town which is the centre of ...
— Legend Land, Vol. 1 • Various
... perfectly maintain their ancient reputation for irreproachable honesty. There have been no thieves in those three islands within the memory of man; and there are no serious quarrels, no fighting, nothing to make life miserable for anybody. Wild and bleak as the land is, all can manage to live comfortably enough; food is cheap and plenty, and manners and customs have ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... ice-covered, bleak and mountainous, dominated by a large massif (Big Ben) and an active volcano (Mawson Peak); McDonald ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... map, I pass a plate of the Town Hall, and come upon the Title Page, which, in the middle, is ornamented with a piece of landscape, representing a loosely clad lady in sandals, pensively seated upon a bleak rock on the sea shore, supporting her head with one hand, and with the other, exhibiting to the stranger an oval sort of salver, bearing the figure of a strange bird, with this motto elastically stretched for a ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... destiny. That perpetual half-night of his planet-mind—that shadowed side of his orbit-life—forever attracted and held in place by the force of Deity, but destined never to receive its light. Yet from that chill, bleak side what things have not reached round and caught the sun! And as of the earth's plants, some grow best and are sweetest in darkness, what strange blossoms of faith open and are fragrant in that eternal umbra! Sacred, sacred Doubt of Man. His agony, his searching! which has ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... any one—for these are feelings which one never does talk of—there is no language that I ever learned which will express them. But I have never heard any music that could reach my soul like that which God gives us in the blossom season—the summer, the fall of late fruit—and the bleak, hard winter, when the clash of ice against ice has a sound that no ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... still sufficiently familiar and intelligible, the question seems to be settled; and the French "auberge" for an inn has been used as an illustration, though the first syllable may be doubtful. The principal difficulty appears to consist in the prefix "Cold;" for why, it may be asked, should a bleak and "cold" situation be selected as a "harbour"? The fact probably is that this spelling, however common, is a corruption for "COL.". Colerna, in Wiltshire, fortunately retains the original orthography, and in Anglo-Saxon literally ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... the hillsides and through the vast plains. Brushwood and herbage, the dry grass, the tall reed, the twining parasite, or the giant of the forest, charred and blackened, but still proudly erect-alike attest and bewail the conquering fire's onward march; and the bleak desert, silent, waste, and lifeless, which it leaves behind, seems for ever doomed to desolation. Vain fear! The rain descends once more upon the dry and thirsty soil, and, from that very hour which ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... that she had accepted him in a misty state of mind when nothing had its right shape or size? that it was deplorable, but that with clearer eyesight marriage was out of the question? She did not want to marry any one. She wanted to go away by herself, preferably to some bleak northern moor, and there study mathematics and the science of astronomy. Twenty words would explain the whole situation to him. He had ceased to speak; he had told her once more how he loved her and why. She summoned her courage, fixed her eyes upon a lightning-splintered ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... a look and continued: "The wind whetted itself to keenness on a bleak knob and came down to shave its ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... offered his arm as a support, but the prelate did not accept it. They arrived in this manner at the government house, Baisemeaux rubbing his hands and glancing at the horse from time to time, while Aramis was looking at the bleak bare walls. A tolerably handsome vestibule and a staircase of white stone led to the governor's apartments, who crossed the ante-chamber, the dining-room, where breakfast was being prepared, opened a small side door, and closeted himself with his guest in a large cabinet, the windows ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... for we are more Than proud of all our mighty dead; Proud of the bleak and rock-bound shore A ...
— Ball's Bluff - An Episode and its Consequences to some of us • Charles Lawrence Peirson
... in 1875, having by a few months outlived his 70th birthday. I like to think that his genius, a continuing influence over a long generation, did more than anything else to convert the parents. The schools, always more royalist than the King, professionally bleak, professionally dull, professionally repressive rather than educative, held on to a tradition which, though it had to be on the sly, every intelligent mother and nurse had done her best to evade. The schools made a boy's life penitential on a system. They discovered athletics, as a safety-valve ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... close clasped in hand, Telling the thoughts tongue could not speak; Was it unmanly that our eyes O'erflowed with love upon the cheek? I hear thy cheery voice outspeak, 'Courage, the months will quickly fly, And ere November chill and bleak We meet at ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... "One bleak, cold winter morning, an ass and her foals were loitering upon the edge of a wild common; not a tree was to be seen, and scarcely a bit of herbage for their breakfast to be found. 'This is a comfortless life!' said the ass; 'the winds are chilly, the snow will soon ...
— The Boarding School • Unknown
... late to-night. She thought he had been detained over-time at the harbor, but she was not anxious. He would come straight home to her as soon as his business was completed—of that she felt sure. Her thoughts went out along the bleak harbor road to meet him. She could see him plainly, coming with his free stride through the sandy hollows and over the windy hills, in the harsh, cold light of that forbidding sunset, strong and handsome ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... gear to begin sailing his ship instead of keeping her hove to. One rope faulty, one light wrong, one hand out of his place at the critical time, and the bones of a pleasant ship's company would have been strewn on a bleak shore: but everything was right, and the tiny craft drew away like a seagull when she was made to sail. Of course the sea ran clean over her, but she forged quietly on until she was thirty miles clear of those foaming breakers that roared on the cliffs. During ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... the Cattegat, swung southward through the Skagerrack and the bleak North Sea. But the storm pursued her. The big waves snarled and bit at her, and the captain and the chief officer consulted with each other. They decided to run into the Thames, and the harried steamer nosed her way ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... within minutes. The terrain changed from the green, fertile, Nile Valley to the bleak Sahara as though cut by a giant knife. For the first time, Rick understood the phrase "Egypt, gift of the Nile." Where the yearly Nile overflow brought fertile silt and moisture, there was lush green land. Where the overflow ...
— The Egyptian Cat Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... the gloomy, open lot until they were come beneath a lamp at a certain bleak street corner. Here Soapy paused and held out his hand, open to ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... school-houses are sometimes situated in the middle of the highway, a portion of the travel being on each side of them. When the scholars are engaged in their recreations, they are exposed to bleak winds and the inclemency of the weather one portion of the year, and to the scorching rays of the meridian sun another portion. Moreover, their recreations must be conducted in the street, or they trespass ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... scene was bleak and dismal. Not a creature moved anywhere. Even the meadow, mice had already found the nights too chilly for their liking. Turkey Proudfoot was there alone, standing like a statue, as if he ...
— The Tale of Turkey Proudfoot - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... whether owing to the truth or ignorance of his attitude, that a sense of bleak loneliness spread through all his life, and more and more he turned from men ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... and autumn, and cased with the gray Aberdeen granite of the famous quarries near by. The surrounding country is as bare and uninviting as one could imagine; the road from Aberdeen (twenty miles) is bleak and stony; the young trees near the castle are stunted, and in many cases disfigured by the inroads of hungry cows among their lower branches, and a damp veil of mist hangs perpetually over the scene, softening the landscape, but sometimes depressing the spirits. As the hours pass the place ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... tell the difference. In the beautiful province of Ontario, between the three great lakes Ontario, Erie and Huron, is a region where it grows well and is universally prevalent, and it grows alike in the limestone flats of the South and on the bleak sandy prairies and ridges of our great central plain. In the Tennessee mountains and southward into Alabama is, however, the greatest red-cedar region and the place where the trees reach their finest growth. ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... sage hills and gave the country a bleak and desolate look. The Slash Lazy D riders wrapped up and went out over the wind-swept mesas to look after the cattle cowering in draws or drifting with the storm. When Bob could sleep snugly in the bunkhouse he was lucky. There were nights when ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... associations, and his thoughts flowed from the time he had stood with his wife at the top of Market Street to the present hour. He neither praised nor blamed himself. He accepted things as they were without criticism, and they appeared to him like a turgid dream swollen and bleak as the confused expanse ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... endurance of all three was most fully tried during that awful night. None of them flinched. Murray alone, however, never allowed himself for a moment to lose his consciousness. The rain and sleet came down with pitiless force; the bleak wind howled round them, the sea beat over them, the ceaseless breakers roared in their ears all the night through. Murray felt as if it would never come to an end. Every moment too the ship seemed as if she was about to break up, when he knew that death must be the lot of ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... dwelling-place, but the blacks assured me that we would find it uncomfortably cold and windy, to say nothing about the loneliness, which I could not but feel after so much intercourse with the friendly natives. I persisted, however, and we at length pitched our encampment, on the bleak headland, which I now know to be Cape Londonderry, the highest northern point of Western Australia. Occasionally some of our black friends would pay us a visit, but we could never induce them to ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... wondered at that in so bleak a wind I could possibly fall into reverie. But the habit was rooted deep in me; Rosinante was prosaic and trustworthy; the country for miles around familiar to me as the palm of my hand. Yet so deeply was I involved, and so steadily had we journeyed on, that when ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... him and grasping him by both arms to lead him to a chair. "You ran it too close that time. Here is the Superintendent to lecture you. Sit down, old man, sit down right here." The Inspector deposited him in the chair, and, striding hurriedly to the window, stood there looking out upon the bleak winter snow. ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... eye lighted up as might that of some Arctic voyager, which, having for bleak months rested only on the glittering scales of the ice-dragon coiled about him, is suddenly filled with the warm spread of the Polar Sea. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... sport early in the morning. It was a cold bleak February day, with occasional storms of sleet. We rode from cover to cover, but all in vain. "I am sorry, sir, that we are to have such a bad day, as you are a stranger here," said one gentleman ...
— The O'Conors of Castle Conor from Tales from all Countries • Anthony Trollope
... 1901, in Topeka, a candidate for the mayoralty, supposed to represent the liquor element, speaking on the afternoon of election day—bleak, dismal and shoe-top deep in snow and mud—said: "I will lose 1,000 votes on account of the weather as the women are out and they are opposed to me. It is impossible to keep ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... was discussed from cocktail to cocktail, and where, forgetting his arteries, he had befuddled himself at the generous fount, had guarded his tongue. To Clavering he had been unable to extend either hope or information. Mrs. Oglethorpe had turned a bleak and rigid countenance upon the friend of her youth when he had called with an eager ear, and forbidden him tartly ever to mention the ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
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