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More "Cheerless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... on a north course; at 8.5, finding the thicket almost impassable, I ascended a cypress-tree, where a most cheerless view met my sight to the north, east, and west; not a break was visible—nothing but thicket in all directions, with scarcely an undulation of any kind; the view to the north-west was most extensive—nearly ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory
... answered Platonov with a cheerless smile. "But nothing came of it. I started writing and at once became entangled in various 'whats,' 'which's,' 'was's.' The epithets prove flat. The words grow cold on the page. It's all a cud of some sort. Do ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... touch. No wonder he felt miserable. He opened a door. What room was this? A piano! The drawing-room. Ugh! No fire—what misery! He recoiled to the doorway and stood listening. Not a sound. Grey light in the cheerless room; almost dark already in the hall behind him. What a life these English lived—worse than the winter in his old country home in Sweden, where, at all events, they kept good fires. And, suddenly, all his being revolted. Stay here and face that father—and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the time the iron hand of the German Kaiser grasps more and more of the power. Cheerless prospect it is for the once gay Hungarians, the once happy Austrians, if to financial ruin and the killing of the flower of their youth is to be added the iron ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... extinction of so many summer days in so short a life by the hissing and spluttering rain. In such spells of weather,—and it is to be supposed such weather came,—Eve's bower in paradise must have been but a cheerless and aguish kind of shelter, nowise comparable to the old parsonage, which had resources of its own to beguile the week's imprisonment. The idea of sleeping on a couch of ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in bivouac spent the most cheerless Christmas Day within their memories. Not only in the storm-swept hills but on the Plain the day was bitterly cold, and the gale carried with it heavy rain clouds which passed over the tops of mountains ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... my memory brings to me makes me chill like that picture—the low log shack, now in cheerless disorder; the ghastly object upon the bed in the corner, with blood-smeared face and arms and mad terror in the eyes; the awful cursings and more awful psalm-singing, punctuated by the quick report of ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... the lifeless scene without as he ceased to speak. I could see a crimson beam glowing upon a crucifix that stood on the wayside by the hill-foot yonder; but the cheerless monotony of plough land and of pasture, stretching away leafless, treeless, without bud or flower, herd or herdsman, church or cottage, to the shadowed horizon, looming dark as the twilight deepened, was in sympathy with the gloom which had come upon me as Martin Hall ceased to speak. I ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... Gare de l'Est in Paris. Paul felt tired, cramped and unshaven, but of necessity entered a taxi called by one of his companions, and, accompanied by Pierrepont and the elder of his assistants, was driven along through the cheerless, deserted streets ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... any life AFTER death, and life WITHOUT death might have been, but has been forfeited, now the cherub guards the approach to the tree of life, of which man might have eaten when in Paradise but did not. This actual, cheerless lot of man upon the earth is the real problem of the story. It is felt to be the very opposite of our true destiny; at first, things must have been otherwise. Man's lot now is a perversion of what it was at first, it is the punishment of primeval ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... very pleasant job in summer, but in early spring one of the most cheerless occupations conceivable short of gathering Iceland moss. The men wear waterproof boots, reaching up the thighs, and thick stockings inside these. But the water is icy cold. The cress plants are then not tall, as they are later, but short and bushy. They need careful ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... wintering at a point five hundred and fifty miles from Lake Athabasca, which he called Fort Enterprise. Here there was prospect of plenty, for large herds of reindeer were grazing along the shores of the lake, and from their flesh "pemmican" was made; but the winter was long and cheerless, and Franklin soon realised that there was not enough food to last through it. So he dispatched the midshipman Back to Lake Athabasca for help. Back's journey was truly splendid, and we cannot omit his simple summary: ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... pursued our journey, a dreary one, for the most part, over bleak and barren plains, interspersed with silent and cheerless towns and villages, which stood at the distance of two or three leagues from each other. About midday we obtained a dim and distant view of an immense range of mountains, which are in fact those which bound Castile on the north. The day, however, became dim ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... and their smoke and drizzle and dirt, he could not help saying to himself, "My poor Sheila!" It was not a pleasant place surely to live in always, although it might be all very well for a visit. Indeed, this cheerless day added to the gloomy fore-bodings in his mind, and it needed all his resolve and his pride in his own diplomacy to carry out his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... could convince me that the matter itself was light—just then. "And in any case," tightening her grip on my arm as we passed into the bright enormous corridor and caught sight of Mrs. Franklyn waiting in the cheerless hall below, "I'm very glad you're here, Bill, and Mabel, I ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood
... short distance, from the straggling black pines and willow bushes that seemed thrust out into the waste from the ravines above and below the fort. But on a nearer approach, the fort assumed an air of greater importance; the influences, too, of the cold, cheerless scene we have described, were broken and dissipated by the sights of comfort and sounds of cheerfulness within. The shout of the water-drawer, as he roused the dogs and went forth with his empty cask, hauled on a little sledge, to draw from the bubbling spring behind ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... knack of putting himself in the place of other people. There's something cold and cheerless in his preaching—I don't say as if he didn't feel it all himself, but as if he hadn't yet caught the knack of imparting ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... comfort. My life is very solitary and very cheerless. Though it has pleased GOD wonderfully to deliver me from the dropsy, I am yet very weak, and have not passed the door since the 13th of December. I hope for some help from warm weather, which will surely ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... the primitive belief that after death all men, good and bad alike, suffered the same fate. The Babylonians supposed that the souls of the departed passed a cheerless existence in a gloomy and Hebrew underworld. The early Hebrew idea of Sheol, "the land of darkness and the shadow of death," [16] was very similar. Such thoughts of the future life left nothing for either fear or hope. In later times, however, the Hebrews came to believe ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... this life, at least," said Sedgwick; then added gravely, "and heaven itself would be a cold and cheerless place to me ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... day, which was Sunday, Francesco called me at five. There was no visible sunrise that cheerless damp October morning. Grey dawn stole somehow imperceptibly between the veil of clouds and leaden waters, as my friend and I, well sheltered by our felze, passed into the Giudecca, and took our station before the church of the Gesuati. A few women from the neighbouring ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... one having been thrown overboard at the mouth of Steel River, where it ceased to be useful. We left Sail Island with a fair wind and soon afterwards arrived at a depot situated on Swampy Lake where we received a supply of mouldy pemmican.* Mr. Calder and his attendant were the only tenants of this cheerless abode, and their only food was the wretched stuff with which they supplied us, the lake not yielding ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... Poland, on his solitary journey to Paris. There is a painting of this scene by the Slavic artist Kowalski, which represents the three black horses abreast, galloping with all speed with the Emperor's sledge across the cheerless world which he traversed. He came to his own capital unannounced. None knew of his arrival until the next day. At four o'clock in the morning of that day, some one entered his office at the Tuileries, and found him with his war-map of Europe ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... his clear-cut face with trim short black whiskers under a cap of curly iron-grey hair was the only warm spot in the dinginess of that room cooled by the cheerless tablecloth. We knew him already by sight as the owner of a little five-ton cutter, which he sailed alone apparently, a fellow yachtsman in the unpretending band of fanatics who cruise at the mouth of the Thames. But the first time he addressed ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... hawthorns shine the crimson haw, Where Spring brought may-day blossoms: Decay is Nature's cheerless law— Life's Winter in our bosoms. The fields are brown and naked all, The hedges still are green, But storms shall come at Autumn's fall, And not a leaf ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... hard-featured woman answered the knock and, seeming to expect me, ushered me in. I do not remember the room; I remember only a child leaning patiently against the window-sill looking out into the dark, and that the place was bare and cheerless. ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Over all this the clouds shed a uniform and purplish shadow, sad and somewhat menacing, exaggerating height and distance, and throwing into still higher relief the twisted ribbons of the highway. It was a cheerless prospect, but one stimulating to a traveller. For I was now upon the limit of Velay, and all that I beheld lay in another county—wild Gevaudan, mountainous, uncultivated, and but recently disforested from terror of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the little daughter with whom we saw him first. Most likely at this time George Fox was still a prisoner in the Castle. If so, one of the very first things Richard did, we may be sure, was to climb the many stone steps up to the Castle and seek his friend in his cheerless prison. The fire smoke and the rain would be forgotten by both men as they talked together, and George Fox's face would light up as he heard the story of the lashings that disappeared and the beatings that left no bruise. He was not a man who laughed easily, but doubtless he laughed ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... A dull, cheerless day in the early part of December was merging into a stormy night as the west-bound express over one of the transcontinental railways, swiftly winding its way along the tortuous course of a Rocky ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... and holy! Meet him in that place; Change his cheerless melancholy Into joy and grace; If thou hast forgiven, vex not; If thou lovest, go, Watching ever by the ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... early the next morning he was up to have a final look at the tree before Phoebe came down. A blizzard was blowing furiously; the windows were frosted; the house was cheerless. He built the fires in the grates and sat about with his shoulders hunched up till the merry crackle of the coals put warmth into his veins. The furnace! He thought of it in time, and hurried to the basement ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... the year sixteen hundred and — was cheerless and dark, as November has never failed to be within the foggy, smoky bounds of the great city of London. It was one of the worst days of the season; what light there was seemed an emanation from the dull earth, the heavens would scarce have ...
— The Lumley Autograph • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... the tramp of a procession became audible, and soon torches glared feebly through the damp, cheerless dawn. The monarch descended from his state elephant, and, prostrating himself before ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... of the "Mellish" dawned gray and cheerless. Light flurries of snow swept across the waves, and by noon a heavy snowstorm, driven by a violent north-east gale, darkened the air, and lashed the waves into fury. Jones stood dauntless at his post on deck, encouraging the sailors ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... different matter; though the sun still shone brilliantly, as of old, and the warm soft wind still roughened the sapphire sea and caused it to laugh and sparkle as joyously as ever, the whole world looked dark, cheerless, and gloomy to him, and he felt as though he had suddenly become the victim of some terrible calamity. In the endeavour to get rid of the horrible feeling of depression which had thus unaccountably ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... through the long hours of the night as they slowly passed. Then the dawn came. The side-lights showed fainter and fainter in the water; the light on the mast shed no rays on the deck, but twinkled uselessly behind its glass. Then the mate turned his gaze from the wet, cheerless deck and heaving seas to the figure in the boat dragging behind. The skipper, who returned his gaze with a fierce scowl, was holding his wet handkerchief to his temple. He removed it as the mate looked, ...
— Sea Urchins • W. W. Jacobs
... in which I had been so long was slowly passing away, now that the scene by the little grave that raw, cheerless morning had brought home remorselessly the truth that Marjory was indeed gone—lost to me ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... and sternly,—not like the light-hearted Florentines in song and laughter, or with the joyous abandon of the Neapolitans,—so there was no special manifestation on the part of the populace, and the day, cold, gloomy, and cheerless, did not inspire gayety. ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... robbed. "We only ask freedom of speech,—the right to exercise all the franchises conferred by the Constitution upon an American. Can you safely deny us these things?" Mingled also with pathetic appeals were joyless pictures of the ravages of war, and cheerless glimpses into the future of a Republic with its bulwarks of liberty torn away. "We stand to-day," he continued, "amid new made graves; we stand to-day in a land filled with mourning, and our soil is saturated with the blood of the fiercest ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... on the 27th, we set out on our return to the southward, and I can safely say that, dreary and cheerless as were the scenes we were about to leave, we never turned homeward with so little satisfaction as on this occasion. To afford a chance of determining the general set of the current from this latitude, we left upon ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... which most absorbed him. Finally, skim the collection of his official messages, as Commissioner, as Governor, or as President, and you will discover that he had the gift of infusing life and color into the usually drab and cheerless wastes ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... cheerless wilderness— A desert, pathless wild— Where verdure grew not by the streams, Where beauty never smiled; Where desolation brooded o'er A muirland lone and bare, And awe upon my spirit crept, For ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... the use of yellow and white, accented with touches of blue, which converts a dark and perfectly cheerless room into a glitter of light ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... Nielsen found a poor, miserable, little fox in a trap, where it had been for days, and was nearly dead. Edd found a dead skunk in another. He had to call the hounds in. We returned to camp. That night was really the only cheerless one the men spent around the fire. They did not know what to do. Manifestly with trappers in a locality there could be no more bear chasing. Disappointment perched upon the countenances of the Haughts and Copple and Nielsen. I let them all have their say. Finally Haught spoke up: "Wal, fellars, ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... I had a chill which was followed by a fever and there was much pain and swelling in the knee that was hit. A ranch house, if it happens to be a "stag camp" as ours was, is a cheerless place in which to be sick, but everything considered, I was fortunate in that it was not worse. By the liberal use of hot water and such other simples as the place afforded I was soon better; but not until after several months' ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... No outlook. No hope for the future. Day after day, year after year, to tread the rounds of the same gloomy monotony. He saw the grey stone walls, the iron doors; the flagging of the "yard" bare of grass or trees—the cell, narrow, bald, cheerless; the prison garb, the prison fare, and round all the grim granite of insuperable barriers, shutting out the world, shutting in the man with outcasts, with the pariah dogs of society, thieves, murderers, men below the beasts, lost ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... of John Stuart Mill's boyhood will wonder that Mill was a skeptic. And nobody who has read the story of Thomas Huxley's boyhood will wonder at his becoming an agnostic. As Edward Clodd, his biographer, says, 'his boyhood was a cheerless time. Reversing ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... Rhynsault for examination, in a cheerless hall of the Gravenhof, Danvelt's defence was a denial upon oath that he had ever taken or offered to take any part in the rebellion. Told of the letter found, and of the date it bore, he laughed. That letter made everything very simple and clear. At the date it bore ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... out for her amusement quacked of school and duty; she could not play games all by herself and Grandma was too busy; dolls long since had lost their charm; it was too stormy for callers; and altogether world seemed a dull and cheerless place. Even when the girls returned from school the atmosphere did not clear. Peace was plainly out of sorts, and it was with a sigh of thanksgiving that the household saw the dismal day ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... pass, joy is out of fashion, Honest fun that fooled a dog or knew a friendly gate, Now the craft are vagabonds, sick with modern passion, Riding up and down the shore, on an aching freight; Sullen are the battered looks, cheerless talk or tipsy, Sickly in the smoky air, starving in the day, Pining for a city's noise at Kingston or Po'keepsie, Eager more for Gotham and a great ...
— Ballads of Peace in War • Michael Earls
... Indians. They are discovered. A frightful encounter. Escape of Mahnewe. They pursue their journey in the night. Discovery of a river over which they cross. Come to a prairie. Approach a sandy desert. They provide themselves with ample provisions and set out over the cheerless waste. 231 ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... she sat in her cheerless drawing-room, hating its ugly shabbiness, and penetrated with the damp chill of the house, there swept through her a vision of the Piazza del Duomo, as she had last seen it on a hot September evening. A blaze of light—delicious all-prevailing ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... looked so dismal as in its dreary twilight. The windows broken, the rusty sashes rattling in their frames, the deserted house a dull barrier dividing the glaring lights and bustle of the street into two long lines, and standing in the midst, cold, dark, and empty—presented a cheerless spectacle which mingled harshly with the bright prospects the boy had been building up for its late inmates, and came like a disappointment or misfortune. Kit would have had a good fire roaring up the empty chimneys, ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... know, so little; avoiding the bright, crowded, and momentous fields of life where destiny awaits us. Upon the average book a writer may be silent; he may set it down to his ill-hap that when his own youth was in the acrid fermentation, he should have fallen and fed upon the cheerless fields of Obermann. Yet to Mr. Matthew Arnold, who led him to these pastures, he still bears a grudge. The day is perhaps not far off when people will begin to count "Moll Flanders," ay, or "The Country Wife," more wholesome and more pious diet than ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in the dark. I had done a wrong thing, and I was glad of it. And sitting there in the darkness, I went over my own life again. After all, it had been my own life; I had lived it; no one else had shaped it for me. And if it was cheerless and colorless now, it had had its big moments. Life ...
— The Case of Jennie Brice • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... approached the Hotel Kaiser-i-Hind (the best the place affords), a blaze of light showed us a large open veranda, furnished with chairs, sofas, and tables, and evidently the salon of the hotel. My room opened from the end of the balcony, and it was large and cheerless, so all hope of warmth vanished; a small, dark bathroom was at one side (with no light except when a door was opened), furnished with the regulation high round bathtub and a shaky washstand; neither of the outer doors would lock! The floors ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... the day dawned, lowering and dark and wet. No Indians were in sight; nothing was in sight but the sodden grass and the equally cheerless sky. George was dead; four out of their remaining five were so sore and stiffened ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... To be his spoiled and adored wife, knowing she was unworthy of his love and tenderness, was not happiness—it was grinding misery, bringing death into her soul. If he had blamed her for her incompetence; if he had scolded her for making his home cheerless; nay, if he had beaten her, she could have borne with life, and taken her outward ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... with his frosty beard, Thus once to Jove his prayer preferr'd,— What have I done of all the year, To bear this hated doom severe? My cheerless suns no pleasure know; Night's horrid car drags, dreary, slow: My dismal months no joys are crowning, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... little, ruined French village, with guns booming in the distance and the nearer sound of water running through tall reeds and over green stones and between great mossy trees. Indeed, my life would now be, comparatively speaking, a cheerless desert, because I should never have met the most beautiful—Well, all clouds have silver linings; some have golden ones with rainbow edges. No; I am not sorry I stopped at the St. ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... worried, and Philippa haunted the post-office, he was lying ill in his cheerless little bedroom, on the top floor of the cheap lodging-house. He had skated not only Thanksgiving afternoon, but again at night when the ice was illuminated by bonfires and lanterns. There was a danger-signal ...
— Flip's "Islands of Providence" • Annie Fellows Johnston
... was very tired, and now scarcely had his head pressed the pillow ere he was asleep, dreaming of 'Lena, whose presence was to shed such a halo of sunlight over his hitherto cheerless home. The ringing of the bell next morning failed to arouse him, but when Mrs. Aldergrass, noticing his absence from the table, inquired for him, Uncle Timothy answered, "Never mind, let him sleep—tuckered out, ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... prison gate; and a mist beginning to gather above North Hessary, as at this time of year it often does after a clear morning. My grandfather, looking out from under the tilt of the cart, felt as he'd never felt before what a cheerless place it must seem to a new-comer, and his heart melted a little bit further towards the lad he ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... window, he resisted the inclination to lay himself down again. He did not remember anything, but he did not think it strange to find himself on the sofa in his cloak and chilled to the bone. The light coming through the window seemed strangely cheerless, containing no promise as the light of each new day should for a young man. It was the awakening of a man mortally ill, or of a man ninety years old. He looked at the lamp which had burnt itself out. It stood there, ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... reeds. They had no windows, and, until the invention of the saw-mill, very few had wooden floors. The luxury of a carpet was unknown; some straw, scattered in the room, supplied its place. There were no chimneys; the smoke of the ill-fed, cheerless fire escaped through a hole in the roof. In such habitations there was scarcely any protection from the weather. No attempt was made at drainage, but the putrefying garbage and rubbish were simply thrown out of the door. ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... began. Henceforth Pat had a grievance, and when a sympathetic traveler passed by, he would pour out the story of his woes; for like the wretched man of old he meditated evil on his bed against his enemy. And yet, as I have said, the half-hours spent in listening to these tirades were not cheerless, and no bad effects followed. Pat never impressed me as being inclined to misanthropy; in fact, I think he might have been set down as one who loved his fellow men, always excepting the unlucky individual who lived next to him. ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... fraternal? They had come from, not only different stocks of population, but from different creeds in religion and politics. There could be no congeniality between the Puritan exiles who settled upon the cold, rugged and cheerless soil of New England, and the Cavaliers who sought the brighter climate of the south, and who, in their baronial halls, felt nothing in common with ...
— Historic Papers on the Causes of the Civil War • Mrs. Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... that wet, wild, cheerless night I stood at the wheel, tending the ship and helping her through the seas; and it was not until dawn was abroad that anyone came to relieve me; when Cockney Harry made his appearance, staggering and dodging his way aft ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... dislike, To block the way for her successor, then Woe to that daughter, and no peace for her Did she not, with an utter selfishness, Stand in her younger sister's light? imperil The poor child's welfare? doom her possibly To an old maid's forlorn and cheerless lot? ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... ninth, dawned gray and cheerless. He was up with the first ray of light, shaved and dressed, and went over, under the gray-green pergola, to his father's house. He was up, also, and stirring about, for he had not been able to sleep. His gray eyebrows ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... seas. With his hatchet he hacked foothold on the ladder, left his men in the dory, and notched his perilous way to the deck. The fore-hatch was open, just as the hastily departing salvagers had left it. He went below, down the frosted iron ladder. He was fronted with a cheerless aspect. Cargo and water hid what damage she had suffered. The fat man had secured most of the cargo that the water ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... a sharp white light on her face. The face was worn and very pale. Lines were plowed deep on it. She was kneeling, but she rose as Paul entered. He bent his head and kissed her forehead. There was a book before her; a rosary was in her hand. The room was without fire. It was chill and cheerless, and only sparsely furnished—sheep-skin rugs on the floor, texts on the walls, a carved oak clothes-chest in one corner, two square high-backed chairs and a small table, a bed, and ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... like the rugged little anemone, the wind flower that lifts its head from the cheerless prairie. No kind hand softens the heat or the cold, nor tempers the wind, and yet the very winds that blow upon it and the hot sun that beats upon it bring to it a grace, a hardiness, a fragrance of good cheer, that gladdens the hearts of ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... her room with a sick headache, but I got out of it. I would not, if I could, convert those poor people. You know, I often fancy—I mean fear—I often sympathize too much with your creed. It was only at service last Sunday I was thinking of it; our religion seems so cold, so cheerless compared to yours. You remember the convent-church at St. Leonard's—the incense, the vestments, the white-veiled congregation—oh, how beautiful it was; we shall never ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... of the Criminal Investigation Department, stood before the empty grate of his cheerless office in New Scotland Yard, one hand thrust into the pocket of his blue reefer jacket and the other twirling a malacca cane, which was heavily silver-mounted and which must have excited the envy of every sergeant-major beholding it. Chief Inspector Kerry wore a very narrow-brimmed ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... o'clock of that same morning, the young king and queen, with the whole court in retinue, left Versailles, in their carriages, for Choisy. The morning was cold, dark, and cheerless. The awful death of the king, and the succeeding excitements, had impressed the company with gloom. Maria Antoinette rode in the carriage with her husband, and with one or two other members of the royal family. ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... clock struck nine, and he started up with a guilty feeling, but his limbs were stiff and he sank back again, blew two or three breaths on to the squirrel inside his waistcoat, and fell into a doze. As he dropped off into unconsciousness he seemed to see the big, cheerless house, almost destitute of furniture, where he lived with thirty or forty other boys. They trooped in with their organs and accordions, counted out their coppers to a man with a clipped moustache, who was blowing whiffs of smoke ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... lead you wrong; follow me in the bleak waste, the blackened wilderness, as well as by the green pastures and the still waters. Do you ask why I have left the sunny side of the valley—carpeted with flowers, and bathed in sunshine—leading you to some high mountain apart, some cheerless spot of sorrow? Trust me, I will lead you by paths you have not known, but they are all known to me, and ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... interlaced with boughs and sticks, and then plastered over with mud and whitewashed. The better class of farm-houses are built of adobes, or unburnt bricks, and tiled over. The interior was as plain and cheerless as it well could be. The floor was formed of the soil, beaten down till it was as firm and hard as a piece of stone. The room set apart for our sleeping accommodation boasted as its sole ornaments a Dutch clock and a few gaudily-coloured ...
— California • J. Tyrwhitt Brooks
... her being drew, Which made these eyes, while Heaven was willing, shew Wishful, and gay; now sad, and never dry. O feeble hopes! O thoughts of vanity! Wither'd the grass, the rills of turbid hue; And void and cheerless is that dwelling too, In which I live, in which I wish'd to die; Hoping its mistress might at length afford Some respite to my woes by plaintive sighs, And sorrows pour'd from her once-burning eyes. I've served a cruel and ungrateful lord: While lived ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... Better is sorrow than laughter; For a cheerless face makes a blithesome heart. 4. The heart of the wise is in the mourning-house; The heart of fools in the house ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... into big bunches of troops at Abbeville—English, French and Belgian. I saw some of the Indian troops doing sentry duty and looking cold and uncomfortable, and did not blame them, for it was raw and cheerless. The Rolls-Royce is a beauty and sailed along ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... trail leads over a fearfully mountainous country. Nestling at the base of the mountains, a short distance to the northward, is the large village of Merriserriff, and not caring to tempt the fates into giving me another supper-less night in a cold, cheerless cave, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... within sight, but Dexter fancied that he had hidden, and was watching him, and he turned in the other direction, looking hopelessly about the garden, which seemed to be more beautiful and extensive than the doctor's; but, in spite of the wealth of greenery and flowers, everything looked cheerless and cold. ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... And being so—the absent are the dead, Who haunt us from tranquillity, and spread A dreary shroud around us, and invest With sad remembrancers our hours of rest. The absent are the dead—for they are cold, And ne'er can be what once we did behold; And they are changed, and cheerless,—or if yet The unforgotten do not all forget, Since thus divided—equal must it be If the deep barrier be of earth, or sea; 20 It may be both—but one day end it must In the dark union of insensate dust. The under-earth inhabitants—are they But mingled millions decomposed to clay? The ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... passed rapidly under the arched canopy of beeches, the leaves of which, just touched by the first frost, were already falling from the branches, and, stamping their muddy feet on the outer steps, advanced into the vestibule. The wide corridor, flagged with black-and-white pavement, presented a cheerless aspect of bare walls discolored by damp, and adorned alternately by stags' heads and family portraits in a crumbling state of decay. The floor was thus divided: on the right, the dining-room and the kitchen; ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... eyes round the room. "I think the Kennedys were mad to build this confounded barrack. I've always disliked it, and old Quentin hadn't any use for it either. Cold, cheerless, raw monstrosity! It hasn't been a very ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... were only those with which prodigal nature has carpeted the prairies; and you may see now in the west, many a cabin which has stood for thirty years, with not a tree, of shade or fruit, within a mile of its door! Everything is as bare and as cheerless about the door-yard, as it was the first winter of its enclosure. But, stretching away from it, in every direction, sometimes for miles, you will see extensive and productive fields of grain, in the highest state of cultivation. It is not personal comfort, or an elegant residence, ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... wherever one finds them in New England towns, are very apt to be cheerless and unsatisfactory. They have neither the luxury of the mansion-house nor the comfort of the farm-house. They are rarely kept at an agreeable temperature. The mansion-house has large fireplaces and generous chimneys, and is open to the sunshine. The farm-house makes no pretensions, but it ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... evergreens that covered the bluff behind the cabin; the rain and sleet, freezing as they fell, rattled harshly upon the bark roof over our heads; and the whole aspect of nature, as I caught a momentary glimpse of it when I went out to gather our evening's supply of fire-wood, was cheerless and desolate in the extreme. Our party consisted of three (or I should say four, for the Elam Storm whose name has so often been mentioned was to have shown up two days before)—Uncle Ezra Norton, who was a sheep-herder in a small way during the summer, and an ...
— Elam Storm, The Wolfer - The Lost Nugget • Harry Castlemon
... of Sage College was the establishment of Sage Chapel. From the first I had desired to have every working-day begun with a simple religious service at which attendance should be voluntary, and was glad to see that in the cheerless lecture-room where this service was held there usually assembled a goodly number of professors and students, in spite of the early hour and long walk from town. But for Sunday there was no provision; and one day, on my discussing the matter with ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... while all the year round birds and small animals pattered across his path to people the solitude in place of human companions. The boy had few comrades. He wandered about playing his lonesome little games, and when these were finished returned to the small and cheerless cabin. Once, when asked what he remembered about the War of 1812 with Great Britain, he replied: "Only this: I had been fishing one day and had caught a little fish, which I was taking home. I met a soldier in the road, and having always been told at home that we must be good to soldiers, I ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay
... reluctance that grim winter yields its claims and makes way for its gracious and all-conquering foe. Spring is upon everything with all the characteristic suddenness of the Canadian climate. A week—a little seven days—and where all before had been cheerless wastes of snow and ice, we have the promise of summer with us. The snow disappears as with the sweep of a "chinook" in winter. The brown, saturated grass is tinged with the bright emerald hue of new-born pasture. The bared trees don that yellowish tinge which tells of breaking leaves. ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... example, his men worked with a will at this cheerless task, and in spite of darkness, heat, thirst, and the suffocating atmosphere, never was a well sunk more quickly. At the same time it was not half completed when so serious a fire broke out on the roof that the entire remaining stock of water ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... holy ordinances, and each, secure and happy in the exclusive love of the father of her children, sheds the warm light of true womanhood, unperverted and unpolluted, upon all within her pure and wholesome family circle. These are not the cheerless, crushed, and unwomanly ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... wine-cup bright, In hours of revelry; It suits glad brows, and bosoms light, It is not meet for me: Oh! I can pledge the heart no more I pledged in days gone by; Sorrow hath touched my bosom's core, And I am left—to die! Give me to drink of Lethe's wave, Give me the cold and cheerless grave, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... powerful urge to add something new to the knowledge of mankind. And all this, not in the vain hope of being rewarded in another world, but from a pure sense of duty as a citizen of nature, as a patriot of the planet on which he dwells. This is no cold and cheerless philosophy; it is an elevating and ennobling ideal which may console him in his afflictions and teach him how to live and how to die. It is a self-reliant philosophy that makes a man intellectually free, and this mental emancipation allows him to face the world ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... also clean and orderly, though very meagerly furnished, but chill and cheerless, for there was not life enough in the smoldering embers within the stove to impart much warmth with the temperature outside almost down ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... to life to do honor to His death. Not by ointments and spices, however precious, nor at the rock-hewn tomb, could they best remember their Lord; but out in the world, which that morning had seemed so cold and cheerless, and in their lives, which then ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... chamber opened. I had a dreamy recollection of the vast apartment. But how pleasantly it was changed! There was the bare half of the room, it is true, looking as it had done on that first afternoon, sunless and cheerless, with the long, unoccupied table, and the necessary chairs for the possible visitors; but round the windows that opened on the garden a part of the room was enclosed by the household clothes'-horses hung with great pieces of the blue homespun ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... suffered from bodily ailments, but they were nothing compared to my mental trials. Grief, hatred, jealousy, and revenge had well-nigh bereft me of reason. I had lost a home of plenty, been reduced to almost abject poverty, and had become a cheerless woman,—could not smile without feeling ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... earth. What with this deep earth-covering, and with their grovelling toward the earth in such a flat and neighborly fashion, they had a dreadfully under-foot look, and seemed rather dens than houses. Many were ragged and rotten, all inconceivably cheerless. No outhouses, no inclosures, no vegetation, no relief of any kind. About and between them the swardless ground is all trodden into mud. Prick-eared Esquimaux dogs huddle, sneak, bark, and snarl around, with a free fight now and then, in which they all ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... the main Homeric, but one of his charms is the use of quaint allusive phrases derived, perhaps, from a pre-Hesiodic peasant poetry: thus the season when Boreas blows is the time when 'the Boneless One gnaws his foot by his fireless hearth in his cheerless house'; to cut one's nails is 'to sever the withered from the quick upon that which has five branches'; similarly the burglar is the 'day-sleeper', and the serpent is the 'hairless one'. Very similar is his reference to seasons through what happens or is done in that season: 'when the House-carrier, ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... with a message: would Miss Schlegel come shopping? Christmas was nearing, and Mrs. Wilcox felt behind-hand with the presents. She had taken some more days in bed, and must make up for lost time. Margaret accepted, and at eleven o'clock one cheerless morning they ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... hospitality which he was receiving might endanger the safety of his friend. He immediately resolved to withdraw from Bremgarten and to seek refuge in Hamburg. Here, finding his position very insecure, he resolved to hide himself in the cheerless climate of Northern Europe. Accustomed to the severest privations, he was enabled to recommence his wanderings with the slender funds at his disposal. Assuming the character of a Swiss traveller, he made arrangements to disappear from Southern Europe, and seek refuge in the wilds ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... away, he put them in his pocket, as if unwilling to trust them even to the chances of being reunited and deciphered; and instead of ringing, as usual, for little Paul, he sat solitary all the evening in his cheerless room." From the original MS. of ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... her face, and made an effort to powder away the evidence of her grief. Then she went bravely down and faced the silent crowd in the breakfast room. No one was eating anything. The very air smote chill and cheerless as she entered. As if he had been lying in wait for her, Fisher pounced upon ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... houses that are the most homelike, besides comparatively few persons have the means to gratify their love of pretty little ornaments with which to beautify their homes. It is really painful to visit some houses; there naked walls and cheerless rooms meet you yet there are many such, and children in them too. How much might these homes be brightened by careful forethought in making some little ornaments that are really of no expense, save ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... with a steady drone from a sky of unbroken, cheerless gray, and rivulets of water trickled from the drooping vegetation. Mosses and ferns, revived by the superabundance of moisture had sprung up on the decaying trunks and branches of the uprooted trees, pushing their feathery leaflets through the blanket ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... men of acute and patient thought; but their attempt to solve the problem of the divine and human natures, of human destiny and duty, has ended in total failure. Each system baseless, and all mutually conflicting; systems cold and cheerless, that frown on love and virtuous exertion, and speak of annihilation or its equivalent, absorption, as our highest hope: such is the poor result of infinite speculation. "The world by wisdom knew not God." O, that India would learn the much-needed lesson of humility which the experience ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... float, but after they got ashore, and she had a chance to reflect on the matter, and talk with the other girls, she concluded that his getting on the boat, which was nice and warm, and putting her aboard the ice cream freezer, which was so cold and cheerless, was a breach of etiquette that would stamp any man as being a selfish, heartless villain, and she refuses to speak to him, and has declared ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... was spring. Nothing can keep away the change in the season. In the mountain country the change comes swiftly, unheralded. One day it was bleak and cheerless; the next day brought with it the grace of sunshine and warmth; as if by magic, verdure began to deck the hillsides, and we heard again the cheerful murmur of waters in the gulch. The hollyhocks about ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... cold. Not for an instant did it suggest the full and passionate life which is the theme and the background of the play. Nor is this strange. A Midsummer Night's Dream is plainly beyond the powers of our theatre. Individual scenes were well done, but the whole was a cheerless piece ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... exclaimed the empress, who had already resumed her work. "Would that my Francis could open his arms to receive me, that I might rest by his side from the cares of life! Would that I were with him, who was my lover from earliest childhood; for cold and cheerless will be the life that is no longer lit ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... green For a coarse merino gown, And see her upon the scene Of her home, when coaxing down Her drunken father's frown, In his squalid cheerless den: ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... of the most populous in Paris, such houses as these, poor, cheerless, and unhealthy, are generally inhabited by the working classes. The house in question was of the number. A dyer occupied the ground floor; the deleterious vapors arising from his vats added to the stench of the whole ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... churls, The spinning Jenny houses in the mansion of our Earls. Sing not, sing not, my Angeline! in days so base and vile, 'Twere sinful to be happy, 'twere sacrilege to smile. I'll hie me to my lonely hall, and by its cheerless hob I'll muse on other days, and wish—and ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in Pittsburg, a Frenchman of the new style, whose silky sweetness of manner was the mask of a steely tenacity of purpose. He had a little devilish black moustache, waxed at the points, like an earl of melodrama, and with it a narrow cheerless smile that jeered into futility Raleigh's effort to handle the subject on a basis of easy good fellowship. The heart-to-heart talk degenerated into a keen business controversy, involving the consultation of letter-files; it took more ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... chilling despair? — Better ask as we float down a song-flood unchecked, If our Sky with no Iris be glory-bedecked? Through the gloom of eclipse as we wistfully steal If no darkling aureolar rays may reveal That the Future is haply not utterly cheerless: While the Present has joy and adventure as rare As ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... growing deeper, sad night-breezes sorrowing by, Sighing 'mid the leafless bushes bending o'er the sullen stream, Wailing 'mid the fire-stained ruins darkly rising 'gainst the gleam Of the wild unearthly twilight. In the shivering evening air Cheerless lie the gloomy meadows—blight and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... on the outer boulevard, not far from the tomb of Napoleon—a bench shaded at that date by a shabby tree, and commanding a view of muddy roadway and blank wall—I sat down to wrestle with my misery. The weather was cheerless and dark; in three days I had eaten but once; I had no tobacco; my shoes were soaked, my trousers horrid with mire; my humour and all the circumstances of the time and place lugubriously attuned. Here were two men ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is enough in an A-tent; but, if you prefer two, be sure that one at least is nicely fitted and well provided with tapes or buttons, or both: otherwise you will have a cheerless tent in windy and rainy weather. The door-flap is usually made of a strip of cloth six to nine inches wide, sewed to the selvage of the breadth that laps inside; the top of it is sewed across the inside of the other breadth, and reaches to the corner seam. Tent-makers usually determine ...
— How to Camp Out • John M. Gould
... On a wet and cheerless evening in September 1914, John Williams, tramp, sat in the bar of the Golden Lion and gazed regretfully at the tankard before him, which must of necessity remain empty, seeing that he had just spent his last penny. To him ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... graze, they wrapped themselves up in their wet blankets and laid down to sleep. The weather, however, was too cold to permit sleeping in comfort without a fire. That they dare not make, fearing it would prove a warning signal to the savages. Having worried through the remainder of this cold and cheerless night, they arose early in the morning and went to the bottom of a deep ravine where they kindled a small fire and succeeded in warming themselves. At daybreak they re-saddled their jaded horses and once more started upon the trail. Just as the sun was rising they discovered the Indians. ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... took his breath sharply and began to realize the situation. He stepped to the side and looked over; the harbour was only a little way astern, and Sunwich itself, looking cold and cheerless beyond the dirty, tumbling seas, little ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... lingering minutes of the night went by, loaded with a care that each moment rendered heavier, and which each successive freshening of the breeze had a tendency to render doubly anxious. The day came, only to bestow more distinctness on the cheerless prospect. The waves were looking green and angrily, while, here and there, large crests of foam were beginning to break on their summits—the certain evidence that a conflict betwixt the elements was at hand. Then came the ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... years of wretchedness and degradation, raised their voices to warn the aspirant who approached the charmed threshold. Some had wisdom enough to discover the truth early, and spirit enough to fly without looking back; others lingered on to a cheerless and unhonored old age. We have no hesitation in saying that the poorest author of that time in London, sleeping on a bulk, dining in a cellar, with a cravat of paper, and a skewer for a shirt-pin, was a happier ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... time had always been his own. The ready-to-hand food gave him leisure. His days were all dreams. Weary of crouching over the fire before the opening of his humpy, he began to wander in the flesh as he was wont to wander in mind. He was seen a mile away from the cheerless camp, where his companions, with ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... days late, which was a serious matter with military people, I learned. We willingly did this, for this soldier was a great story-teller, and made the time pass quickly. I met here a telegraph operator named Stanton, who took me to his boarding-house, the most cheerless I have ever been in. Nobody got enough to eat; the bedclothes were too short and too thin; it was 28 degrees below zero, and the wash-water was frozen solid. The board was cheap, being only ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... faint gleams of light which seemed burning at a distance. Thither they bent their steps: The rays proceeded from a small sepulchral Lamp which flamed unceasingly before the Statue of St. Clare. It tinged with dim and cheerless beams the massy Columns which supported the Roof, but was too feeble to dissipate the thick gloom in which the Vaults ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... said Jack. He observed with sickening distinctness that the night had begun to fall, the river's silver ribbon had become a black snake, and that the mountain range beyond loomed chill and dark and cheerless. "I guess I ought to be getting into my things," he said, moving ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... children had gone home I sat in the school-room with my face resting on my hands. There was her desk, the afternoon shadows falling across it. It never looked empty and cheerless before. I went and stood by the low chair, as I had stood hundreds of times. On the desk was a pile of books, ready to be taken away, and among the rest a small Latin grammar which we had studied together. What little ...
— Quite So • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... board once more, we spent our time basking in the sunshine, drinking it in as it were, for it seemed so delightful in spite of its heat after our dull, cheerless, hazy home in the ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... in the fondness of her nature she has committed herself to fortune's freaks, turns out a worthless churl, the dissolute, hard-hearted husband of low life; who, taking to the ale-house, leaves her to a cheerless home, ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... in the spring air. But when it began to get dark in the forest a cold, penetrating wind blew inappropriately from the east, and everything sank into silence. Needles of ice stretched across the pools, and it felt cheerless, remote, and lonely in the forest. There ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... done by the guards in charge of the camps to relieve the distress. Whenever covering could be had for the women and children it was taken advantage of. They were housed in the chill and cheerless churches, garages and barns, and those who had been fortunate enough to save their homes were called upon to take care of these unfortunates. With few exceptions these people responded readily to the new call made upon them and where they did not the ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... be alone. She wanted to be away from every eye. She was like some creature that after a long nightmare incubation is at last born into a clear, bleak day. She had to feel herself; she had to stretch her mind in this cheerless sunshine, this new world, where there was to be no more Teddy and no real revenge nor compensation for Teddy. ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... up, drew her round again and kissed her. 'I think you would fidget me,' she remarked as she released her. Then, as if this were too cheerless a leave-taking, she added in a gayer tone, as Laura had her hand on the door: 'Mind what I tell you, my dear; let her go!' It was to this that the girl's lesson in philosophy reduced itself, she reflected, as she walked back to Mellows in the ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... her home in Athens on the night when Balaustion learns that her adored Euripides is dead. She and her husband, Euthukles, are "sitting silent in the house, yet cheerless hardly," musing on the tidings, when suddenly there come torch-light and knocking at the door, and cries and laughter: "Open, open, Bacchos[94:1] bids!"—and, heralded by his chorus and the dancers, flute-boys, all the "banquet-band," there enters, ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... glories of a full term, in which it had so lately shone, and looking doubly cold, cheerless, and deserted, in all the sloppy dirtiness of half-melted snow, was that never-equalled, and never-to-be-forgotten street! which the stranger gazes on with somewhat of an envious admiration, the freshman ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... ages, can make their skin dark, and their hair crisp and curly, and their foreheads low? Or that sunshine and shadow, spring-time and autumn, summer's showers beating upon him and winter's snows falling about his path, can make him fair and free? Or that the dreary night and cheerless day of many changeless arctic years can make him short and fat and stolid as a seal? Surely not. These avail much; but other influences, indirect and obscure in their workings, but not the less essentially ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... marriage with me had been a hope abandoned by her years since. No woman looks forward willingly to a life of cheerless celibacy. In thinking of her future, Mary naturally thought of herself in the character of a wife. Could she fairly expect in the time to come to receive any more attractive proposal than the proposal now addressed ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... above, And burning wastes around, A lonely traveller journeyed on Through solitudes profound; No wandering bird's adventurous wing Paused o'er that cheerless waste, No tree across those dreary ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... Madam, no! a candle in the sun Is all but smoke—a star beside the moon Is all but lost; your people will not crown me— Your people are as cheerless as your clime; Hate me and mine: witness the brawls, the gibbets. Here swings a Spaniard—there an Englishman; The peoples are unlike as their complexion; Yet will I be your swallow and return— But ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... dead," and silently they prepare it for the cheerless tomb. The golden tresses they so oft have wound lovingly over their fingers, are gently smoothed for the last time, while one fairy curl is severed and placed next the mother's heart; oft will she gaze upon it, as the months of her ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... be preserved alive in the truth, and growing in the truth; but sometimes, through unwatchfulness, such a withering comes upon me, I lose all sense of good for days together, and this nether world is all I seek pleasure in. Then there is but a cold, cheerless, condemning feeling, when I look towards my Father's house; but when all life seems gone, and I am ready to conclude that I have suffered so many things in vain, how often does the gentle stirring of life bring my soul into contrition, into stillness! and He, who upbraideth not ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... Cheerless in its exterior, however, the season of the year was one—a mild afternoon in May—to mollify and sweeten the severe and sterile aspect of the scene. Sun and sky do their work of beauty upon earth, without heeding the ungracious return which she may ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... queerly dressed young man, with a parcel under his arm, who passed you just then, is an artist, and his home is in the attic of that tall house from which you saw him pass out. It is a cheerless place, indeed, and hardly the home for a devotee of the Muse; but the artist is a philosopher, and he flatters himself that if the world has not given him a share of its good things, it has at least freed him from its restraints, and so long as he has the necessaries of life and ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... frightful description of her cheerless future in case she persisted in her refusal, Gerda finally consented to become Frey's wife, and dismissed Skirnir, promising to meet her future spouse on the ninth night, in the land of Buri, the green grove, where she would dispel his sadness and ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... a frame of a downy black beard, set with large dark eyes—he raised his shoulders and confidently stepped forward through the parlour. Strange sounds of a string instrument were calmly floating to meet him; they seemed to burst into quiet, cheerless laughter, complaining of something, tenderly stirring the heart, as though imploring it for attention and having no hopes of getting it. Foma did not like to hear music—it always filled him with sadness. Even when the "machine" in the tavern played some sad tune, his heart filled with melancholy ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... sleep with a light heart. For Jerry Foster, as he faced his own certain death, had seen certain things. It was the end—that was one fact he couldn't evade. But he grinned cheerfully, all by himself in that strange cheerless room, as he thought of what else he ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... wants her as it has wanted, doubtless, many others. For yourself only you seek her. And what is it you ask then! That she should give up for you her father, mother, home, her own faith, her own people, her own country,—the poor little one!—for a cold, cheerless land among strangers, alone in the sorrows and pains that to all women come. Love! In God's name, what know you ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... then speeding away to the homes of said worthies, to proclaim the audacious deed through the key-hole, in the most impudent and incomprehensible manner possible. It was on such an evening as this, a few months after the arrival of the Laytons at Aberdeen, that the Misses Simpkins sat in their cheerless back-room, hovering over a small fire, busily plying their noisy knitting-needles, and meantime indulging in their usual dish of scandal, which, however, it is but justice to say, was not quite so highly seasoned with the spice of envy and malice as ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... was something kind of cold and cheerless about the muzzle of this rifle poked through the brush at 'em; so the agent starts in and makes a regular agent speech to Pete. He says the Great White Father at Washington, D.C., has wished his children to be give an English education and learnt to write ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... stern prompter! spells them out their parts. The tinselled hero whom we praise and pay Is twice an actor in a twofold play. We smile at children when a painted screen Seems to their simple eyes a real scene; Ask the poor hireling, who has left his throne To seek the cheerless home he calls his own, Which of his double lives most real seems, The world of solid fact or scenic dreams? Canvas, or clouds,—the footlights, or the spheres,— The play of two short hours, or seventy years? Dream on! Though Heaven may woo our ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... afternoon the blizzard died away. As far as she could see, Sheba looked out upon a waste of snow. Her eyes turned from the desolation without to the bare and cheerless room in which they had found shelter. In spite of herself a little shiver ran down the spine of the girl. Had she come into this Arctic ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... was a degree less cheerless, but still decidedly bleak. Mobilization there went forward, it is claimed, more smoothly than had been anticipated, but not rapidly enough to enable adequate forces to be dispatched in time against the German military flood. The organization of the railway system was ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... rule the night?" quoth I, and laughed. "The figure is more playful than exact, for whilst the moon is cold and cheerless, me you shall find ever warm and cordial. I could have wished, Monsieur de Chatellerault, that your gracing my board were due to a circumstance less ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... the blizzard died away. As far as she could see, Sheba looked out upon a waste of snow. Her eyes turned from the desolation without to the bare and cheerless room in which they had found shelter. In spite of herself a little shiver ran down the spine of the girl. Had she come into this Arctic solitude to ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... had been stripped of every superfluous article of furniture or embellishment. Curtains had been removed, all evidences of luxury disposed of. Temporarily the apartment had been transformed into a bare, cheerless place. Seated on a high chair, with his back to the wall, was Sirdeller. At his right hand was a small table, on which stood a glass of milk, a phial, a stethoscope. Behind his doctor. At his left hand a smooth-faced, silent young man—his secretary. Before him stood the Duchesse, Peter ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... thing that made it life,' said Lilian, fervently kissing her; 'sometimes the only thing that made me care to live so, Meg. Such work, such work! So many hours, so many days, so many long, long nights of hopeless, cheerless, never- ending work—not to heap up riches, not to live grandly or gaily, not to live upon enough, however coarse; but to earn bare bread; to scrape together just enough to toil upon, and want upon, and keep alive in us the ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... two or three men who were watching the athletes, and whispered his message in the other's ear. Then he went back with Father Anthony. "You have seen him," he repeated, when they sat once more in the cheerless ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... his frosty beard, Thus once to Jove his prayer preferr'd,— What have I done of all the year, To bear this hated doom severe? My cheerless suns no pleasure know; Night's horrid car drags, dreary, slow: My dismal months no joys are crowning, But ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... speaks at the Window'.—The first misgivings of her heart are expressed; and these misgivings are responded to by the outer world. Summer has stopped. Will the summer of her husband's love stop too, and be succeeded by cheerless winter? The revolt of her heart against such a thought is expressed ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... but she was conscious that she rather suffered this than derived any satisfaction from it. She strove to assure herself that she was jaded with the journey, which was, in fact, the case, and that the lowering sky, and the cheerless waste they were crossing, had occasioned the dejection she felt, which was also possible. There was not a tree upon the vast sweep of bleached grass which ran all round her to the horizon. It was inexpressibly lonely, a lifeless desolation, with only the ploughed-up trail to show ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... solemn requiem sung To the departed day, Upon whose bier The velvet pall of midnight lead been flung, And Nature mourned through one wide hemisphere Silence and darkness held their cheerless sway, Save in the haunts of riotous excess; And half the world in dreamy slumbers lay, Lost in the maze of sweet forgetfulness. When lo! upon the startled ear, There broke a sound so dread and drear,— As, like a sudden peal of thunder, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... vigilance was a sickness to my heart. For me there was no more freedom, no more of hilarity, of thoughtlessness, or of youth. Was this the life upon which I had entered with such warm and sanguine expectation? Were my days to be wasted in this cheerless gloom; a galley-slave in the hands of the system of nature, whom death only, the death of myself or my ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... addressed by Karna, king Duryodhana with cheerless heart, averted his face from his counsellors. Marking all this, Karna expanding his beautiful eyes, and vehemently gesticulating in anger, haughtily addressed Duryodhana and Dussasana and Suvala's son ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... rays being thus reflected from the jambs; and the aperture being thus the smallest possible outside, this is the favorite military form of inlet window, always found in magnificent development in the thick walls of mediaeval castles and convents. Its effect is tranquil, but cheerless and dungeon-like in its fullest development, owing to the limitation of the range of sight in the outlook, which, if the window be unapproachable, reduces it to a mere point of light. A modified condition of it, with some combination ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... long and was afraid of fore-stalling nature. So I went down to Quincey and took him into the breakfast room, where the blinds were not drawn down, and which was a little more cheerful, or rather less cheerless, than the ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... and Canea lies Kalepa, a suburb where most of the foreign consuls reside in summer, with many of the wealthier Khaniotes, and the only place in the vicinity where the summer can be passed in comfort. A few houses are fitted with European improvements, but the greater part are the simple and cheerless residences of the Cretan peasant, furnished with the merest necessities of existence. Even here, in the most prosperous of the villages I have been in, life is, for most of the people, only a struggle against poverty, thrift being impossible where every surplus ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... laboriously cut out for her amusement quacked of school and duty; she could not play games all by herself and Grandma was too busy; dolls long since had lost their charm; it was too stormy for callers; and altogether world seemed a dull and cheerless place. Even when the girls returned from school the atmosphere did not clear. Peace was plainly out of sorts, and it was with a sigh of thanksgiving that the household saw the dismal ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... was that dismal time when the phantom mists of night still cling to the earth, and low-lying clouds of fog cover the river, only to be dispersed by the coming day. Cold and cheerless as it was, it found us again launching the whale-boat, and, when the sail was trimmed aft and pipes lighted, we rushed into the fog and headed down the river ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... gale; the hills I spy So pleasant, whence my fair her being drew, Which made these eyes, while Heaven was willing, shew Wishful, and gay; now sad, and never dry. O feeble hopes! O thoughts of vanity! Wither'd the grass, the rills of turbid hue; And void and cheerless is that dwelling too, In which I live, in which I wish'd to die; Hoping its mistress might at length afford Some respite to my woes by plaintive sighs, And sorrows pour'd from her once-burning eyes. I've served a cruel and ungrateful lord: While lived my beauteous flame, my heart be fired; And o'er ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... holy Shepherd, leave Thy flock in this dark vale alone, In cheerless solitude to grieve, Whilst Thou to ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... with me had been a hope abandoned by her years since. No woman looks forward willingly to a life of cheerless celibacy. In thinking of her future, Mary naturally thought of herself in the character of a wife. Could she fairly expect in the time to come to receive any more attractive proposal than the proposal now addressed to her? Mr. Van Brandt had every personal ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... mud, and screaming like tortured wild animals,—this kind of shiftless, thriftless humanity, pictured against the background of ugly modern houses, such as one might find in a London back slum, made up a cheerless prospect, particularly as the blue sky was clouded and it was beginning to rain. One touch of colour brightened the scene for a moment, when a girl with a yellow handkerchief tied round her head passed ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... quarter. Besides, granting that we were still in the neighborhood of the island, why should not Augustus have visited me and informed me of the circumstance? Pondering in this manner upon the difficulties of my solitary and cheerless condition, I resolved to wait yet another twenty-four hours, when, if no relief were obtained, I would make my way to the trap, and endeavour either to hold a parley with my friend, or get at least a little fresh air through the opening, and a further supply of water from the stateroom. While occupied ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... old barrels, trunks, hats, boots and so forth. It originally had a window, but the glass had long been broken and its place supplied by a large board, which failed to keep out the wind and rain, so that during the winter season the closet was a cold, cheerless place. ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... away to the northward, as far as the eye could reach, when viewed from the farthest point attained by me in 1839, named by Colonel Gawler, Mount Eyre. Dreary as had been the view I then obtained, and cheerless as was the prospect from that elevation, there was one feature in the landscape, which still gave me hope that something might be done in that direction, and had in fact been my principal inducement ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... for these rooms had scarcely been entered since little Willie Denner's mother died, five years ago. She had kept house for her brother-in-law, and had brought some brightness into his life; but since her death, his one servant had had matters in her own hands, and the house grew more lonely and cheerless each year. Mr. Denner's office was in his garden, and was of brick, like his house, but nearer the road, and without the softening touch of ivy; it was damp and mildewed, and one felt instinctively that the ancient law ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... by, and the shot aimed at it rang out with a gay, resounding note in the spring air. But when it began to get dark in the forest a cold, penetrating wind blew inappropriately from the east, and everything sank into silence. Needles of ice stretched across the pools, and it felt cheerless, remote, and lonely in the forest. There ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the hotel. But St. Allwoods, in its dual capacity of health-and-pleasure resort, was a gilded shell, making a brave outward show, but capitalizing chiefly lake, mountains, and hot, mineral springs. Her room was a bare, cheerless place. She did not want to sit and ponder. Too much real grief hovered in the immediate background of her life. It is not always sufficient to be young and alive. To sit still and think—that way lay tears and despondency. ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... out of it—and here was he drinking out if like a visitor. In the evening his servants came; Lavretsky did not care to sleep in his aunt's bed; he directed them put him up a bed in the dining-room. After extinguishing his candle he stared for a long time about him and feel into cheerless reflection; he experienced that feeling which every man knows whose lot it is to pass the night in a place long uninhabited; it seemed to him that the darkness surrounding him on all sides could ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... "What have you to say to the way in which you treated your prisoners? You were never taken captive with your father— I mean your uncle, and shut up in a great cheerless building right out upon ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... wind howled amid the cracking wood, and mingled its moans with the ominous roaring of the rain. The heavy clouds, driving along toward the east, hung on the ground like rays of vapor, and deep, cheerless gloom intensified ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... an old man's love for a woman young enough to be his daughter. I was sitting by my cheerless fire-side, meditating very gloomily upon the events of the day, which had been a sad one for me, when your thrilling tones stole upon my ear, and roused me from my reverie. I listened to every note of that old ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... umbrellas, and their smoke and drizzle and dirt, he could not help saying to himself, "My poor Sheila!" It was not a pleasant place surely to live in always, although it might be all very well for a visit. Indeed, this cheerless day added to the gloomy fore-bodings in his mind, and it needed all his resolve and his pride in his own diplomacy to carry out his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... nearly knocked up myself, but ascended the range and had a very extensive view. Far to the north and east the horizon was as level and uniform as that of the sea; apparently spinifex everywhere; no hills or ranges could be seen for a distance of quite thirty miles. The prospect was very cheerless and disheartening. Windich went on the only horse not knocked up, in order to find water for the horses. I followed after his tracks, leading the two poor done-up horses. With difficulty I could get them to walk. Over and through ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest
... since we have been separated by events, that it was like a letter from the dead, and recalled to my memory very dear recollections. My subsequent journey through life has offered nothing which, in comparison with those, is not cheerless and dreary. It is a rich comfort sometimes to ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... the 27th, we set out on our return to the southward, and I can safely say that, dreary and cheerless as were the scenes we were about to leave, we never turned homeward with so little satisfaction as on this occasion. To afford a chance of determining the general set of the current from this latitude, we left ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... bare moorland waste, on the long ascent of a low hill,—very desolate, with not a tree or house within sight for two miles. A ditch, half full of dark water, bordered each side of the road, which went straight as a rod through a black peat moss lying cheerless and dreary on all sides—hardly less so where the sun gleamed from the surface of some stagnant pool filling a hole whence peats had been dug, or where a patch of cotton grass waved white and lonely in the midst of the waste expanse. At length, when he reached the ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... while to examine the ground of the late fight (tho' by now little was to be seen but a piece of earthwork left unfinish'd by the rebels, and the fresh mounds where the dead were laid); and so 'twas high noon—and a dull, cheerless day—before the hills broke and let me have sight of the sea. Nor, till the noise of the surf was in my ears, did I mark the chimneys and naked grey walls of the house ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... narrow margin for domestic expenses: with the result that often the only fire in the house blazed brightly in the study where Mr. Airlie and the reverend gentleman sat talking: while mother and children warmed themselves with sense of duty in the cheerless kitchen. And often, as Mr. Airlie, who was of an inquiring turn of mind, had convinced himself, the only evening meal that resources would permit was the satisfying supper for one brought by the youngest daughter to her father where he sat ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... key-hole, in the most impudent and incomprehensible manner possible. It was on such an evening as this, a few months after the arrival of the Laytons at Aberdeen, that the Misses Simpkins sat in their cheerless back-room, hovering over a small fire, busily plying their noisy knitting-needles, and meantime indulging in their usual dish of scandal, which, however, it is but justice to say, was not quite so highly seasoned with the spice of envy and malice as was its wont. Whether it was that the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... ship, he said, between Captain Dinks and Moody, he was about to slip forward to join Snowball in the galley to have a warm, for he found it cold in his pantry; and, besides, he had no one to speak to there, and he felt dull and cheerless. ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... the other day in a stuffy little room, the only window of which was shaded by a ground glass light. Before the gray void of this cheerless window a few flies darted hither and thither in consequential flurry, while I myself, for the time being a most blue and down-cast mortal, was battling with the thought that life, after all, was hardly worth the living, and the outlook for anything better ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... time set for his departure David set out on a round of farewell visits to the country folk. It was one of those cold, cheerless days that intervene between the first haze of autumn and the golden glow of October. He had never before realized how lonely the shiver of wind through the poplars could sound. Two innovations had been made that day in the country. The rural delivery carrier, ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... remember someone long since whispering in her ear that the world and life were cheerless and gray. The daily round, brightened only by a few unsatisfying, fleeting pleasures; the slow passage of unchanging years; the encounter with some young man, like other young men, whose patient and hopeful ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... drizzling, cheerless afternoon towards the end of summer that a hack drew up at the door of the Nutter House. The Captain and Miss Abigail hastened into the hall on hearing the carriage stop. In a moment more Miss Nelly Glentworth was seated in our ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... search Of crumbs, or shelter from the icy breath Of wild winds rushing from the Polar sea: For now November, with a brumal robe, Mantles the moist and desolated earth; Dim sullen clouds hang o'er the cheerless sky, And ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... spotless character, were transported by the company to Virginia; and in the subsequent year, they were followed by sixty of the same description. They were received by the young planters as a blessing which substituted domestic happiness for the cheerless gloom of solitude; and the face of the country was essentially changed.[34] The prospect of becoming parents was accompanied with the anxieties for the welfare of their children; and the education of youth soon became an object of attention. The necessity of seminaries of learning was felt, and ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... not sorry to be left alone. The father knew that only too well. The young man had occupations, ideas, associates, in whom the elder could take no interest. Sitting below in his blank, cheerless bedroom, Newcome could hear the lad and his friends talking, singing, and making merry overhead. Something would be said in Clive's well-known tones, and a roar of laughter would proceed from the youthful company. ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... think that the lighthouse is a poor cheerless place after all the grandeur that you ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... and his room cheerless, but anything, even a haymow, rather than walking back to the station. After he went to his bed, he rehearsed the day's doings from the three hours' ride in the train to the tower. How weary he was! Hark—some one played the piano! A Chopin mazourka! It was the princess. Mila! How lovely ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... he had gone, Herbert heard of his departure, and the letter containing the news arrived on a cheerless afternoon during which his doctor had visited him. After the doctor left, Herbert entered the room where his wife and Sylvia were, and took his place in an easy chair by a window. Outside, the lawn was covered with half-melted snow and the trees raised ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... with shadow, and must be relieved with light and color. The hasty conclusion should not be drawn that this is the philosophy of gloom. The tone of Horace is neither that of the cheerless skeptic nor that of the despairing pessimist. He does not rise from his contemplation with the words ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... as many others have done, but cheerless sexton's work, this digging up of boyish recollections. One by one, they come to light—the brave hopes and dreams and aspirations of youth; the ruddy life has gone out of them; they have shriveled into an alien, pathetic dignity. They might have ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... Butler, first of all the generals in the army of the Republic, and anticipating even Republican statesmen, had clearly pointed to the cause of the war. At Craney Island I met two accomplished women of the Society of Friends, who, on a most cheerless spot, and with every inconvenience, were teaching the children of the freedmen. Two good men, one at the fort and the other at Norfolk, were distributing the laborers on farms in the vicinity, and providing them with implements ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... bewildered head, in some suspicious den. Flashing through the shadow of the police lamp, in "Cow Bay," a forlorn female is seen, a bottle held tightly under her shawl. Sailing as it were into the bottomless pit of the house of the Nine Nations, then suddenly returning with the drug, seeking the cheerless garret of her dissolute partner, and there striving to blunt her feelings against ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... excellent father, whose death added heavily to her misfortunes; but she possessed that resource against human woes which can only be inspired by a reliance upon Him who never deserts the widow and the fatherless. Her life had been marked by extreme vicissitudes; and at its conclusion—dark and cheerless as it was—she wisely looked for consolation where she had so frequently found it, and where, it may be confidently said, it is ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... sat in her cheerless drawing-room, hating its ugly shabbiness, and penetrated with the damp chill of the house, there swept through her a vision of the Piazza del Duomo, as she had last seen it on a hot September evening. A blaze of light—delicious all-prevailing warmth—the moist ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Around its cheerless shore is a belt of stunted trees, that sends a long tail up the high valley, till it dwindles away to sticks and moss, as it also does some half-way up the granite hills that rise a thousand feet, encompassing the lake. This is the limit of trees, the end of the growth ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... December day Rose cheerless over hills of gray, And, darkly circled, gave at noon A sadder light than waning moon. Slow tracing down the thickening sky Its mute and ominous prophecy, A portent seeming less than threat, It sank from sight before it set. A chill no coat, however stout, Of homespun stuff ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... the army of all the Greeks, thou wast naught, but wast in stupefaction at the fortune which then befell us from the Gods, lacking a favorable breeze for the journey. But the Greeks demanded that you should dismiss the ships, and not toil vainly at Aulis. But how cheerless and distressed a countenance you wore, because you were not able to land your army at Priam's land, having a thousand ships under command.[23] And thou besoughtest me, "What shall I do?" "But what resource shall I find from whence?" so that thou mightest not lose an ill renown, being deprived ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... universal lot ordains We seek the black Cocytus' stream, That languid strays thro' dreary plains, Where cheerless fires perpetual gleam; Where the fell Brides their fruitless toil bemoan, And Sisyphus ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... to close her weary eyes, Those eyes still swim incessantly in tears— Hope in her cheerless bosom fading dies, Distracted by a thousand cruel fears, While banish'd from his love ...
— Holidays at Roselands • Martha Finley
... in the air of the cheerless room had suddenly accentuated itself, she arose, took a match-box from the mantel, and, ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... hence I come to the conclusion that in the unanimous consent of the entire human race lies the human criterion of truth—a criterion, in its turn, capable of increased precision with the diffusion of enlightenment and knowledge. For this reason, I do not look upon the prospects of humanity in so cheerless a light as they did of old. On the contrary, ever thing seems full of hope. Good auguries may be drawn for philosophy from the great mechanical and material inventions which multiply the means of intercommunication, and, it may be said, annihilate terrestrial distances. ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... all, it is a cheerless scene, and cheerless are the wanderers in it. Here comes one who has so long been familiar with tempestuous weather that he takes the bluster of the storm for a friendly greeting, as if it should say, "How fare ye, brother?" He is a retired ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... detained at the Customs. His valet was following with the rest of his luggage, and as soon as she had had a few hours' sleep, he would take her to different shops. She clung on to his arm. Paris seemed very cold and cheerless, and she did not like the tall, haggard houses, nor the slattern waiter arranging chairs in front of an early cafe, nor the humble servant clattering down the pavement in wooden shoes. She saw these things with tired eyes, and she was ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... thatched with straw or reeds. They had no windows, and, until the invention of the saw-mill, very few had wooden floors. The luxury of a carpet was unknown; some straw, scattered in the room, supplied its place. There were no chimneys; the smoke of the ill-fed, cheerless fire escaped through a hole in the roof. In such habitations there was scarcely any protection from the weather. No attempt was made at drainage, but the putrefying garbage and rubbish were simply thrown out of the door. Men, women, and children, ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... now-and loafers pass, joy is out of fashion, Honest fun that fooled a dog or knew a friendly gate, Now the craft are vagabonds, sick with modern passion, Riding up and down the shore, on an aching freight; Sullen are the battered looks, cheerless talk or tipsy, Sickly in the smoky air, starving in the day, Pining for a city's noise at Kingston or Po'keepsie, Eager more for Gotham and a great ...
— Ballads of Peace in War • Michael Earls
... have taken; and I now made no doubt that they had been attacked and killed on their return through the woods with the cow, and I wept and sobbed until the cold grey dawn peered in upon me through the small dim window. I have passed many a long cheerless night, when my dear husband was away from me during the rebellion, and I was left in my forest home with five little children, and only an old Irish woman to draw and cut wood for my fire, and attend to the wants of the ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... accustomed, and the few poorly furnished frontier dwellings she had entered since coming to the hinterlands of British Columbia. She had a vague impression that any dwelling occupied exclusively by a man must of necessity be dirty, disordered, and cheerless. But she had never seen a room such as the one she now found herself in. It conformed to none of her ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... fleeting, wav'ring sprite! Friend and associate of this clay, To what unknown region borne, Wilt thou now wing thy distant flight? No more with wonted humour gay, But pallid, cheerless, and forlorn. ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... the evenen blind, An' when the evenen light's a-tin'd, The cheerless vier do drow a gleaere O' light ageaen her empty chair; An' wordless gaps do now meaeke thin Their talk where woonce her vaice come in. Zoo lwonesome is her empty pleaece, An' blest the house that ha' the ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... acting on the mere cold knowledge. For feeling to knowledge, in young minds, is like the match to a fire laid in a grate; knowledge without feeling being as cheerless and ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... of a procession became audible, and soon torches glared feebly through the damp, cheerless dawn. The monarch descended from his state elephant, and, prostrating himself ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... Fretfully and sadly weeping; Dreading still, with anxious gaze, Icy fetters round thee creeping; O'er the cheerless, withered plain, Woefully and hoarsely calling; Pelting hail and drenching rain On thy scanty vestments falling. Sad and mournful are thy ways, Grieving, wailing, ...
— Farm Ballads • Will Carleton
... is old, and though she is not poor, she thinks she is, which is almost as bad. If I can brighten her cheerless life in any way, I am glad to ...
— Mark Mason's Victory • Horatio Alger
... spring. Nothing can keep away the change in the season. In the mountain country the change comes swiftly, unheralded. One day it was bleak and cheerless; the next day brought with it the grace of sunshine and warmth; as if by magic, verdure began to deck the hillsides, and we heard again the cheerful murmur of waters in the gulch. The hollyhocks about The Bower shot up once more and put forth their honest, rugged leaves. ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... was done by the guards in charge of the camps to relieve the distress. Whenever covering could be had for the women and children it was taken advantage of. They were housed in the chill and cheerless churches, garages and barns, and those who had been fortunate enough to save their homes were called upon to take care of these unfortunates. With few exceptions these people responded readily to the new call made upon them and where they did not the butt ends of Krag rifles quickly forced ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... was back in Esmeralda when the next letter was written, and we begin now to get pictures of that cheerless mining-camp, and to know something of the alternate hopes and discouragements of the hunt for gold—the miner one day soaring on wings of hope, on the next becoming excited, irritable, profane. The names of new mines appear constantly and vanish ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... stealthy step approached. It stopped, a wooden door swung back, and a band of greyish light showed a low room of rough beams without a window. At the door Wife Gougeon peered in, and behind her was the cheerless perspective of the shop, additionally cheerless in the grey ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... upwards with its beneficent coolness, and take possession of the shore. But it is a very different thing when there rises behind you a wall of frowning cliff, precipitous, inaccessible, affording no hope of refuge; and when, for the golden calm of summer eventide, you have the cheerless drawing-in of a loud and stormy February night; and when you have the furious hissing violence of rock-and-wind-struck breakers for the violet-coloured margin of rippling waves—knowing that the wind is wailing forth your requiem, and that, with the fall of every ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... all this, when the miserable little outcasts return to their cheerless quarters, they are required to deliver every cent which they have gathered during the day; and if the same be deemed insufficient, the children are carefully searched and ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... children went barefoot and bareheaded in all weathers, and shared the parents' toil and their anxiety over the rents. At thirteen Bobby, the eldest, was doing a peasant's full day's labor; at sixteen he was chief laborer on his father's farm; and he describes the life as "the cheerless gloom of a hermit, and the unceasing moil of a galley slave." In 1784 the father, after a lifetime of toil, was saved from a debtor's prison by consumption and death. To rescue something from the wreck of the home, and to win a poor chance of bread for the ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... mood of unsatisfied satisfaction my night fell, and shortly after the train rolled into the Zenkoji station, amid a darkness deepened by falling rain. The passengers bundled out. The station looked cheerless enough. But from across the open space in front shone a galaxy of light. A crowd of tea-houses posted on the farther side had garlanded themselves all over with lanterns, each trying to outvie its neighbor in apparent hospitality. The display was perceptibly ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... The place seemed very cheerless and empty after he had gone. The long windows gave little light on that gray winter afternoon, and the big fireplace with its glowing logs was at the far end of the room. There were shadows already on the shelves of heavy ledgers lining the walls, and on the ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... place! Even the vines look cheerless—and where have they put all the flowers? What a shame to send them away, and turn ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... inspiring to hear the drum and fife, the blast of the bugle, and the playing of the band. It was glorious to look upon the star-spangled banner, waving in the breeze; but the excitement soon wore away. There were rainy days, comfortless and cheerless. Sometimes the rations were not fit to be eaten, and there was grumbling in the camp. There were days of homesickness, when the soldiers longed to break away from the restraints of camp life, and be ...
— Winning His Way • Charles Carleton Coffin
... trail, travelling at times so swiftly that the Missioner commanded him to slacken his pace on David's account. Even David did not think of stopping. He had no desire to stop so long as their way was lighted ahead of them. It seemed to him that the world was becoming brighter and the forest gloom less cheerless as they dropped that evil valley of Tavish's farther and farther behind them. Then the moon began to fade, like a great lamp that had burned itself out of oil, and darkness swept over them like huge wings. It was two o'clock when they camped ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... sullen wind was soon awake, It tore the elm-tops down for spite, And did its worst to vex the lake: I listened with heart fit to break. When glided in Porphyria; straight She shut the cold out and the storm, And kneeled and made the cheerless grate Blaze up, and all the cottage warm; Which done, she rose, and from her form 10 Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl, And laid her soiled gloves by, untied Her hat and let the damp hair fall, And, last, she sat down by my side And called me. When ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... Gabriel. But the Romans take their pleasures rather sadly and sternly,—not like the light-hearted Florentines in song and laughter, or with the joyous abandon of the Neapolitans,—so there was no special manifestation on the part of the populace, and the day, cold, gloomy, and cheerless, did ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... and of course convinced, for she was easy of conviction, believing always the last person to whom she spoke. She sat down on one of the boxes that furnished that cheerless ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... bleak room echoed all day to the rumble and snorting down-stairs and the singing of the negro washers as they turned the hose on the cars outside. It was a cheerless square of a room, punctuated with a bed and a battered table on which lay half a dozen books—Joe Miller's "Slow Train thru Arkansas," "Lucille," in an old edition very much annotated in an old-fashioned hand; "The Eyes of the World," by Harold Bell Wright, and ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... all my bitterness in those days. Remember that, the next time you think I regret my exile. And however low the lights are, the stuff is true, and I believe the more effective; after all, what I wish to fight is the best fought by a rather cheerless presentation of the truth. The world must return some day to the word duty, and be done with the word reward. There are no rewards, and plenty duties. And the sooner a man sees that and acts upon it like a gentleman or a fine old ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... beam; they warmed themselves at a huge iron stove in the center of the room around which suspended wires and poles offered space for the drying of socks; they washed their clothes when the mood struck them. It was warm and comparatively clean. But it was dark, without ornament, cheerless. ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... raw and comfortless chill crept over the earth, and saddened the air in the death-chamber. Constance sat by her father's bed, her eyes fixed upon him, and her cheek more wan than ever by the pale light of that crude and cheerless dawn. When Vernon woke, his eyes, glazed with death, rolled faintly towards her, fixing and dimming in their sockets as they gazed;—his throat rattled. But for one moment his voice found vent; a ray shot across his countenance ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... her to the chair, and she sank into it, turning her face away from him. He glanced round the room quickly, took in its emptiness, the black, cheerless grate, her attitude of utter dejection; then, without a word, he went downstairs. To Celia, hours seemed to elapse after his departure, but it was only a few minutes before he came up again, with bread and other things; but ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... tearful eyes, "it makes my heart ache when I think of the cheerless youth of your good and noble father, and of the sufferings he had to undergo under his ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... here, then. I should make a miserable sick nurse. I will ask young Fenton, here, if it is reasonable to expect me to bury myself in such a cheerless place when it will do ...
— The Erie Train Boy • Horatio Alger
... how cheerless looked the earth when first I came above it, so dull and black, save where a few snowflakes had been drifted by the wintry winds; all else was bleak and bare. There was not a gleam of sunshine athwart the leaden sky to cheer us, ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... dates were to the family of Burness one long sore battle with untoward circumstances, ending in defeat. If the hardest toil and severe self-denial could have procured success, they would not have failed. It was this period of his life which Robert afterwards described, as combining "the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing moil of galley-slave." The family did their best, but a niggard soil and bad seasons were too much for them. At length, on the death of his landlord, who had always dealt generously by him, William Burness fell into the grip of a factor, ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... mountains, sinks the ev'ning star, And the changing moon forsakes this shadowy sphere, How cheerless would they be, tho' they fairies are, If I, with my pale light, came ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... all the available houses and tents were soon filled, the wounded who came in after midnight were laid in a row on the ground and covered with a long strip of canvas. Fortunately, the night was clear, still, and warm, and a nearly full moon made it almost as light as day, so that it was not so cheerless and uncomfortable to lie out on the ground without a blanket as it would have been if the night had been dark and cold, or rainy; ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... be expected, the excitement and fatigue of Catherine's journey to N—— had considerably accelerated the progress of disease. And when she reached home, and looked round the cheerless rooms all solitary, all hushed—Sidney gone, gone from her for ever, she felt, indeed, as if the last reed on which she had leaned was broken, and her business upon earth was done. Catherine was not condemned to absolute poverty—the poverty which grinds ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... soul, while its social function develops solidarity and unison of action between individuals. The dances, feasts, and games of primitive people, wherein they rehearse hunting and war and act and dance out their legends, bring individuals and tribes together.[25] Work is menial, cheerless, grinding, regular, and requires more precision and accuracy and, because attended with less ease and pleasure and economy of movement, is more liable to produce erratic habits. Antagonistic as the forms often are, it may be that, as Carr says, we may sometimes so suffuse work with the play spirit, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... to know the cause, he was too bashful to ask the reason, and as she retreated almost immediately, he, after waiting a few minutes in hopes the gentleman would re-appear, was compelled to retrace the way which led to his cheerless home. ...
— Watch—Work—Wait - Or, The Orphan's Victory • Sarah A. Myers
... to run with all her speed, and the lieutenant felt the deck quiver as though it was in danger of being shaken out of her. But she was not followed by the Bellevite, and things began to look dark and somewhat cheerless to Christy. The firing came to an end, for the distance was becoming too great for it to be ...
— Within The Enemy's Lines - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... and simply tied; the whole outward man, except for a pointed beard, tentatively clerical. There was a thinning on the top of Pitman's head, there were silver hairs at Pitman's temple. Poor gentleman, he was no longer young; and years, and poverty, and humble ambition thwarted, make a cheerless lot. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 308 Cheerless is the day, the light under frowning clouds is like a punished child with traces of tears on its pale cheeks, and the cry of the wind is like the cry of a wounded world. But I know I am travelling to ...
— Stray Birds • Rabindranath Tagore
... lowery, with driving showers running through it from time to time, and an atmosphere penetratingly damp and cheerless. On the beach two companies of volunteers were drilling in the rain, no doubt getting an appetite for breakfast. Without uniforms, their trousers tucked into their boots, and here and there a white blanket fastened shawl-like over the shoulders, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... she turned from the window to the cheerless room. The floor was dirty; unwashed dishes were piled upon the table. Here and there were scattered muddy boots and overalls, just as their owner, the prospector, had left them before he had gone to the nearest ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... waited at the mercy-seat, and their prayers were heard. Faith conquered. The Spirit came and touched these penitent hearts with the finger of love; and then sorrow was turned to joy—their night, dark and cheerless and gloomy, ...
— Children's Edition of Touching Incidents and Remarkable Answers to Prayer • S. B. Shaw
... it is always careful lest the mantle of its gravity should be disturbed in any of its folds; and rather than allow a privileged place to folly beside itself, it has unconsciously assumed the part of the ridiculous; but, alas! a heavy and cheerless ridicule. [Footnote: "Since the little wit that fools have was silenced, the little foolery that wise men have makes a greater show."—As You Like It. Act i., sc. 2.] It would be easy to make a collection of the excellent sallies and ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... all to come. Not yet (with us) have the kindly old bars, reverend in their attenuation, been restored to their time-honoured throne; not yet have the dingy festoons of pink and white paper disappeared from the garish mantel. Still desolate and cheerless shows the noble edifice. The gaunt chimney yawns still in sick anticipation of deferred smoke. The "irons," innocent of coal, and polished to the tip, skulk and cower sympathetically into the extreme corner of the fender. The very rug seems ghastly and grim, wanting the kindly play of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... quarters of town, shudder as they imagine the discomforts which these young wives of other days must have endured. "What! live in chambers?" they exclaim with astonishment and horror, recalling the smallness and cheerless aspect of their husbands' business chambers. But past usages must not be hastily condemned,—allowance must be made for the fact that our ancestors set no very high price on the luxuries of elbow-room and breathing-room. Families ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... brows, Were dark Omana waged the war of hell, Till, waked to wrath, the mighty spirit rose And pent the demons in their prison cell; Full on their head the uprooted mountain fell, Enclosing all within its horrid womb Straight from the teeming earth the waters swell, And pillared rocks arise in cheerless gloom Around the drear abode—their last ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake
... sharply stimulated imagination, rather than through being waited upon by a delegation of legal gentlemen commissioned with the duty of enlightening her. And the colossal set-piece of the evening having been duly exploded, no sequel whatever could expect anything better than relegation to the cheerless limbo ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... at the boarding-house where he had been taking his meals, a dingy cheerless establishment that had but the one merit of cheapness. He spent his evenings there alone, smoking too much, reading or working for Dick Holden. The cheap tobacco burned his tongue and the loneliness, more than ever, ate into his soul. ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... bare and cheerless, but two Tahitian girls of fourteen or fifteen years of age were in it. One was sitting on his bed, holding his hand, and the other was in a rocking-chair. They were very pretty and were dressed in their fete gowns. The girl on the bed was almost white, but her sister fairly brown. ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... messenger; and the employment of the man himself, detains him at some distance from his home from morning till night. Sunday is the only day on which they could all meet together, and enjoy a homely meal in social comfort; and now they sit down to a cold and cheerless dinner: the pious guardians of the man's salvation having, in their regard for the welfare of his precious soul, shut up the bakers' shops. The fire blazes high in the kitchen chimney of these well-fed hypocrites, and the rich steams ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... He observed with sickening distinctness that the night had begun to fall, the river's silver ribbon had become a black snake, and that the mountain range beyond loomed chill and dark and cheerless. "I guess I ought to be getting into my things," he said, ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... antidotes within myself, which are resolution and patience. Apprehension, which is particularly feared in this disease, does not much trouble me; and, if being alone, I should have been taken, it had been a less cheerless and more remote departure; 'tis a kind of death that I do not think of the worst sort; 'tis commonly short, stupid, without pain, and consoled by the public condition; without ceremony, without mourning, without a crowd. But as to the people about us, the hundredth ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... delayed by steep gradients and slippery tracks, it was not till the next morning that the supply waggons came up. The troops, hurried suddenly from comfortable winter quarters, suffered much. The bivouac was as cheerless as the march. Without rations and without covering, the men lay shivering round the camp fires. The third day out, even the commander of the Stonewall Brigade took it upon himself to halt his wearied men. Jackson became restive. Riding along the column he found his old regiments halted by ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... information, with a little forward movement of the muzzle, and walked off in a rather cheerless mood, while the bear wrung his little hands and moaned, preparatory to ascending the trunk of the giant red-gum upon whose younger leaves he meant to sup before retiring for the night in one of its hollow limbs. It was not for any pleasure in hunting, but because ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... sings, And swarms of bright and happy things Flit all about with sunlit wings, But I am cheerless, Rosaline! The violets in the hillock toss, The gravestone is o'ergrown with moss; For nature feels not any loss, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... snow was falling, as in that clime it only knows how to fall. The atmosphere was like the face of Sterne's monk, "calm, cold, and penetrating," and the faint tinkling of the sleigh bells came mournfully on the ear as a knell of sadness—so utterly cheerless was the scene. Another hour passed, and our journey was ended. The open door of the hospitable dwelling was ready to receive us, and in the light and heat of a happy home, toil ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... it only shows that society must be a failure under the influences which man's genius originates. This world is not destined to be a failure, although the empires of antiquity were. I fall in with the most cheerless philosophy of the infidel historians, if there is no other hope for man, as illustrated by the rise and fall of empires, than what the pagan intellect devised. But this induction is not sufficiently broad. They have too few facts upon which to build a theory. Yet the theory ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... the last weakly beams Of the departing sun, across the lawn Deep gild the top of the long sweepy ridge, And shed a scatter'd brightness, bright but cheerless, Between the op'nings of the rifted hills; Which like the farewell looks of some dear friend, That speaks him kind, yet sadden as they smile, But only serve to deepen the low vale, And make the shadows of the night more gloomy. The varied noises of the cheerful village By ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... which he grew up, was one of those cheerless, middle-class homes, across which never passes a breath of the great gladness, the ideal beauty of life; where thought never swings itself above the material interests of the day gone, the day to come, and existence grows as timid ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... fashion. The half-dozen little dark log or frame-houses, with their double windows and turf roofs, standing about at all sorts of angles to the road, as if they had rolled down the mountain like the great bowlders beyond them, looked dark and cheerless. I was weak enough to wish for a second that I had waited a few days for the rainy spell to be over, but two little bareheaded children, coming down the road laughing and chattering, recalled me to myself. They had ...
— Elsket - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page
... certainly made Wilton happy in return;—indeed, most happy. His fate had suddenly brightened from all that was dark and cheerless, from a situation in which the sweet, early dream of love itself but rendered everything that was sombre, painful, and distressing in his course, more gloomy, more bitter, more full of despair, it had changed, to the possession and the hope of all that the most sanguine imagination ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... patient thought; but their attempt to solve the problem of the divine and human natures, of human destiny and duty, has ended in total failure. Each system baseless, and all mutually conflicting; systems cold and cheerless, that frown on love and virtuous exertion, and speak of annihilation or its equivalent, absorption, as our highest hope: such is the poor result of infinite speculation. "The world by wisdom knew not God." O, that India would learn the much-needed lesson ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
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