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More "Desolation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in his voice, the new fashion of his words, the new look of his eyes, startled her, confused her. She could scarcely believe he was the same man. The dumb desolation lifted a little, and a look of under standing seemed to pierce her tragic apathy. As if a current of thought had been suddenly sent through her, she drew herself up with a little shiver, and looked at him as if she were about to speak; but instead of doing so, a strange, unhappy smile passed ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... time in his life Howland now plunged into the heart of the wilderness, and as mile after mile slipped behind them and he sped deeper into the peopleless desolation of ice and snow and forest his blood leaped in swift excitement, in the new joy of life which he was finding up here under the far northern skies. Seated on the front of the car, with the four men pumping behind him, ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... or three places like that on this division the past two weeks," said Phil to break the silence. He nodded towards the disused station building that was receding down the track, its boarded windows and broken platform eloquent of desolation. "I've wondered why a perfectly good station like that should be built in the first place if it was to be abandoned later on without ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... of some one hundred and fifty new secretaries. The Gothas had played havoc with two blocks of buildings on a certain Paris street because of the fact that the bombs they dropped had severed the gas-mains. The result did have a look of desolation I'll have to admit. So far the new ...
— Soldier Silhouettes on our Front • William L. Stidger
... three weeks, the wind blowing a heavy gale, accompanied with torrents of rain that very soon swelled the river Hawkesbury, and the creeks in George's river, beyond their banks; laying all the adjacent flat country, with the corn on it, under water. Much damage, of course, followed the desolation which this ill-timed flood spread over the cultivated grounds; and, although fewer than could have been expected, some lives ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... flowed down the midst, on the banks of which numerous scattered and picturesque cottages appeared. On either side the ground was covered with the green carpet of Nature in the spring of the year. Everywhere, except in this smiling valley, we saw nothing but the aridity of summer, and the desolation caused by a scorching tropical sun. But here — how very different! How sudden, how magical was the change! Every species of vegetable grew here in finest luxuriance. Melons of every variety, pine-apples, sweet potatoes, plantains, and bananas, with their broad and drooping ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... was not averted or cast down, but looking full upon her, in its pride of youth and beauty. Some simple sense of the slightness of the barrier that interposed itself between the happy home and honoured love of the fair girl, and what might be the desolation of that home, and shipwreck of its dearest treasure, smote so keenly on the tender heart of Clemency, and so filled it to overflowing with sorrow and compassion, that, bursting into tears, she threw her arms ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens
... order to the keepers of the door, which caused them to speed from the scene as fast as their feet would carry them towards the village where they had been commanded to stay until sunrise, leaving the girl, a prey probably to that inexplicably sensuous feeling which the desolation, and beauty, and pity of this place arouses in some, alone with the man who loved her as men ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... break at the command of those who own them, and when she had moaned away the worst of her pain, she fell asleep. When she awoke it was already growing dark, and the knocking at her door, which roused her, was like a call from the peace of dreams to the desolation of reality. When she had turned on the light she received from the hands of the waiting servant that which had become a most rare visitant in the blankness of ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... to buy dear and to sell cheap. They insulted with impunity the tribunals, the police, and the fiscal authorities of the country. They covered with their protection a set of native dependants who ranged through the provinces, spreading desolation and terror wherever they appeared. Every servant of a British factor was armed with all the power of his master; and his master was armed with all the power of the Company. Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while thirty millions of human ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... drink all the liquors malted and take anything they can get for nothing. I mean the public rabble, the mob, not the individual. The only time you can trust the public is when their sympathies are aroused over some great public calamity that brings death and desolation. Then the public is of one mind, the public then shows to ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... with their backs to the wind, the moon rose. Far indeed from being visible, she yet shed a little glimmer of light over the plain, revealing a world as wild as ever the frozen north outspread—as wild as ever poet's despairing vision of desolation. I see it! I see it! but how shall I make my reader see it with me? It was ghastly. The only similitude of life was the perplexed and multitudinous motion of the drifting, falling flakes. No shape ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... tell you. In 1854 a Marabout of the Senegalese Fouta, Al-Hadji by name, declaring himself to be inspired like Mohammed, stirred up all the tribes to war against the infidels—that is to say, against the Europeans. He carried destruction and desolation over the regions between the Senegal River and its tributary, the Fateme. Three hordes of fanatics led on by him scoured the country, sparing neither a village nor a hut in their pillaging, massacring career. He advanced ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... abomination of desolation; and I rejoice to leave it again this evening. Even Pam has not a lev'ee above once or twice a week. Next winter, I suppose, it will be a fashion to remove into the city: for, since it is the mode to choose aldermen at this end of the town, the maccaronis will certainly adjourn to Bishopsgate-street, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... a kind of evil vision of desolation, and Kitty was asleep long before he had stopped his futile whisperings into ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... departing wagon with his eye, marvelling greatly as to the nature of its concealed contents, until it had also gained the summit of the eminence, and in its turn disappeared behind the swell of the land. Then he turned to gaze at the desolation of the scene around him. The absence of human forms would have scarce created a sensation in the bosom of one so long accustomed to solitude, had not the site of the deserted camp furnished such strong memorials of its recent ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... gum-trees, blown into odd shapes, distorted with fierce hot winds, or cramped with cold nights, when the Southern Cross freezes in a cloudless sky of icy blue. The phantasmagoria of that wild dream-land termed the Bush interprets itself, and the Poet of our desolation begins to comprehend why free Esau loved his heritage of desert sand better than all the bountiful richness ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... the darkened desert sweep? Or would it still remember, tho' it spanned A thousand heavens, while the planets fanned The vacant ether with their voices deep? Soul of my soul, no word shall be forgot, Nor yet alone, beloved, shall we see The desolation of extinguished suns, Nor fear the void wherethro' our planet runs, For still together shall we go and not Fare forth alone ...
— Helen of Troy and Other Poems • Sara Teasdale
... glorifying his country in these terms:—"These wretches, sir, in France and England, cannot march half a mile in any direction without finding a house where food can be had and lodging; whereas such is the noble desolation of our magnificent country that in many a direction for a thousand miles I will engage that a dog shall not find shelter from a snow-storm, nor a wren find an apology for breakfast."] miles— northwards for six hundred; and the sympathy of our Lombard Street friends at parting ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... to feel for a travelling stranger. They spoke of sitting up with him at night, giving him his medicine, and weeping for him, when there remained no room for active solicitude. The idea of dying amidst strangers in a foreign land, with no familiar face at the bed-side, is a desolation whose thought cannot pass over the spirit without beclouding its sunniness. And yet we may rely upon it, that amongst those most affectionately tended and most generously wept, have been they who have ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... such terrible devastation in the mountains and valleys that the Irish name and nation will long remain odious to the Vaudois. Six generations have since passed away, but neither time nor subsequent calamities have obliterated the impression made by the waste and desolation of this ...
— In the Irish Brigade - A Tale of War in Flanders and Spain • G. A. Henty
... their whole extent—not excluding the provinces most celebrated for the profusion and variety of their spontaneous and their cultivated products, and for the wealth and social advancement of their inhabitants—is either deserted by civilized man and surrendored to hopeless desolation, or at least greatly reduced in both productiveness and population. Vast forests have disappeared from mountain spurs and ridges; the vegetable earth accumulated beneath the trees by the decay of leaves and fallen trunks, the soil of the alpine pastures which skirted and indented the ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... left this province in the last century. On assuming it anew in the year one thousand eight hundred and thirty-six, the father provincial of the Recollects, Fray Blas de las Mercedes, attested that only ruins and desolation were found. Since that time they have labored without ceasing in the beautifying and adorning of the house of God, restoring the old ruins and building anew; until they have succeeded in making the churches worthy the majesty of the Catholic worship—already ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... with yielding oars, encurving 'midst whirling waters. If I turn from the beach there is no roof in this tenantless island, no way sheweth a passage, circled by waves of the sea; no way of flight, no hope; all denotes dumbness, desolation, and death. Natheless mine eyes shall not be dimmed in death, nor my senses secede from my spent frame, until I have besought from the gods a meet mulct for my betrayal, and implored the faith of the celestials with my latest breath. Wherefore ye requiters of ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... sisters there seemed a world of desolation in these words. They were always mourning for having no brother. Here was one who appeared to be entirely alone. From not knowing exactly what to say, Margaret opened the book Miss Young had laid aside. It was German—Schiller's Thirty Years' War. Every one ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... number and variety of the tracks contrast strongly with the rigid, frozen aspect of things. Warm jets of life still shoot and I play amid this snowy desolation. Fox-tracks are far less numerous than in the fields; but those of hares, skunks, partridges, squirrels, and mice abound. The mice tracks are very pretty, and look like a sort of fantastic stitching on the coverlid of ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... did not notice the desolation of the place. It was quite evident that he was beyond the influence of earthly surroundings for the moment. Going at once to the couch, he brought forth a roll of paper hidden away beneath the pillow. Carrying this over to the table, he sat down upon one of the benches and spread the paper out before ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... arrayed in angry terrors. Heaven is indeed sending down ruin, Afflicting us with famine, So that the people are all wandering fugitives. In the settled regions, and on the borders, all is desolation. ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... beard, is a yonger brothers reuennew) then your hose should be vngarter'd, your bonnet vnbanded, your sleeue vnbutton'd, your shoo vnti'de, and euerie thing about you, demonstrating a carelesse desolation: but you are no such man; you are rather point deuice in your accoustrements, as louing your selfe, then seeming ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... The desolation of the whole scene, save for that running stream, produced the effect of a world burnt out. The hills of shale might have been vast heaps of ashes. It was a waste place of terrible unfruitfulness. And yet, not very far below the surface, the precious metal lay buried in the rock—the secret of the ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... too. We no longer seek to find Him in our hours of happiness—the only hours when, long ago, we sought to feel His presence. We know that we shall only find Him in our hours of loneliness, in our hours of desolation, in our hours of black despair. Now at last we realise that God is not some Deity apart, but some spirit within us, within every man and woman whose "vision" is turned towards the stars. He is the "Dream" which is clearer to us than reality, none the less clear because it ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... the southward, Gordon reached the seat of his government, and the desolation of the Tropics closed over him, the agonising nature of his task stood fully revealed. For the next three years he struggled with enormous difficulties— with the confused and horrible country, the appalling climate, the maddening insects and the loathsome ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... for some time laboured upward and onward through the snow—which was now above their knees in the track, and of unknown depth elsewhere—and they were still labouring upward and onward through the most frightful part of that tremendous desolation, when snow begin to fall. At first, but a few flakes descended slowly and steadily. After a little while the fall grew much denser, and suddenly it began without apparent cause to whirl itself into spiral shapes. Instantly ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... for what appeared an interminable time, and wondered afterwards that she had borne the tension without a sign. The great stillness grew overwhelming now the team had stopped, and there was that in the utter cold and sense of desolation that weighed her courage down. She felt her insignificance in the face of that vast emptiness and destroying frost, and wondered at the rashness of herself and Hetty and Larry Grant who had ventured to believe they could make any change in ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... errors, is still a-gropin' after the light! Do you counsel me to set aside the sacred and time honored rules of our church, and allow the Sabbath to go by unregarded, have the sanctuary desecrated, the cause of religion languish—I cannot believe it. Think of the widespread desolation it would cause if, as the late lamented Mr. ...
— Samantha Among the Brethren, Complete • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... come thick and fast upon poor Scott, and the heaviest blow was yet to fall. In 1826 Lady Scott was taken from him, and about the same time a number of his old friends. He felt his desolation extremely, but kept up bravely for the most part, and worked prodigiously for many months. There is a grandeur about the way he bore his misfortunes which casts into shade all that was fine in his character during his prosperous years. Most men, even of brave and ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... once more as it was in the days of the Apostles. The New World was first offered to the holders of the old traditions. They were the husbandmen first chosen for the new vineyard, and blood and desolation were the only fruits which they reared upon it. In their hands it was becoming a kingdom, not of God, but of the devil, and a sentence of blight went out against them and against their works. How fatally it has worked, let modern Spain and Spanish America ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... others brought their fetishes and amulets; forgotten idols reappeared, while the mystic symbols had been taken from the very ships as though Carthage wished to concentrate herself wholly upon a single thought of death and desolation. ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... upon the city wall. And suddenly they heard the sound of a trumpet in heaven, and there came down angels bearing torches of fire in their hands, and alighted upon the four corners of the wall of the city. Then Jeremiah and Baruch perceived that the desolation of Jerusalem was indeed at hand; and Jeremiah cried out to the angels, "I beseech you, destroy not the city until I have spoken a word to the Most High." So the angels stayed their hand; and Jeremiah said, "Lord, now we know of a truth that the city will be delivered into the ...
— Old Testament Legends - being stories out of some of the less-known apochryphal - books of the old testament • M. R. James
... and plaster stare the beholder in the face at every turn. During the greater part of the day the solitude of the neighbourhood remains unbroken save by the tread of some chance wayfarer like myself, and a general atmosphere of the abomination of desolation reigns supreme. Passing along the unfrequented pavement, one finds it difficult to realize the fact that this was once a not unfashionable quarter of the capital of ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... father and her loss of him. But whenever they occurred, Mrs. Colwood found her own mind invincibly recalled to that name on the box of papers, which still haunted her, still brought with it a vague sense of something painful and harrowing—a breath of desolation, in strange harmony, it often seemed, with certain looks and moods of Diana. But Mrs. Colwood searched her memory in vain. And, indeed, after a little while, some imperious instinct even forbade her the search—so rapid and strong was the growth of sympathy with the young life which ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... know. I find support in the faith that I am doing my duty. He could not see it in that light, and had neither comfort for himself nor sympathy for me. I almost wish now, when I think of him in his desolation, that I could receive the worldly philosophy my old nurse offered me when, as Carl drove away, she came into my room and found me crying bitterly. She hushed me tenderly as she was used to do when I was a child; and when I said, 'Hannah, it is for him, not for myself, I feel'—'Oh! that's ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the better to check the sailing of partial divisions of the enemy, and thus prevent the immense number of pirates, inhabiting the interior of the island, from breaking the fortified line, and again covering these seas, and with redoubled fury carrying death and desolation along all ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... the plain, than, with a loud whirring sound, the locusts rose in the air. Notwithstanding the number which had been destroyed, the mass appeared in no way diminished in size. Onwards they flew to their unknown destination; but what a scene of desolation met our eyes across the country on which they had rested! For miles, as Donald had feared, not a blade of grass was to be seen. As far as the eye could reach, where the evening before the ground had been green and smiling, it now looked brown and parched ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... bodes small good when heaviness falls so deep. Hush, pretty boy, thy hopes might have been better. Tis lost at Dice what ancient honour won: Hard when the father plays away the son! No thing but misery serves in this house. Ruin and desolation, oh! ...
— A Yorkshire Tragedy • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... indeed marked by all the features of absurdity in the delusion, ferocity in the popular excitement, and destruction along the path of its progress, which belonged to the witchcraft proceedings here, and shows that any people, given over to the power of contagious passion, may be swept by desolation, and plunged into ruin. ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... adornat; the "rostral" palace; the mansion of the Pompeys; the Blenheims and the Strathfieldsays of the Scipios, the Marcelli, the Paulli, and the Csars; then perished the aged trophies from Carthage and from Gaul; and, in short, as the historian sums up the lamentable desolation, "quidquid visendum atque memorabile ex antiquitate duraverat." And this of itself might lead one to suspect the emperor's hand as the original agent; for by no one act was it possible so entirely and so ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... contravened. The rigor of espionage towards the imprisoned and their friends increased; the prosecution was insidiously prolonged; privation and solitude, vigilance and suspense were made instruments for subduing the resolution and invading the confidence of the captives; they pined in desolation, ignorant of their fate, uninformed of the welfare of those most dear to them, without resources of defence or consolation, except what the strength of individual character yields; physically weakened, morally isolated; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... was thinking. Yet he, too, had had his chance far back in the dim and dusty years, his chance of love and money with it. He had let it slip away for poverty and learning, and only six men in Europe cared whether he lived or died. The sense of his own loneliness smote him with a sudden aching desolation. His gaze grew humid; the face of the young student was covered with a veil of mist and seemed to shine with the radiance of an unstained soul. If he had been as other men he might have had such a son. At this moment Gabriel Hamburg was speaking ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... himself attractive to womankind, he turns his attention to the girl whom he particularly desires to win. He begins by filling her soul with a sense of desolation and loneliness. In the beautiful language of the formula, her path becomes blue and she is veiled in loneliness. He then asserts, and reiterates, that he is of the one only clan which was allotted for her when the ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... shopman with "savings," had delivered his soul to the local builders and built himself a house, and there it stood, ill-designed, mean-looking, isolated, ill-placed on a cheaply fenced plot, athwart which his domestic washing fluttered in the breeze amidst a bleak desolation of enterprise. Then presently our railway crossed a high road, and a row of mean yellow brick houses—workmen's cottages, and the filthy black sheds that made the "allotments" of that time a universal eyesore, marked our approach to the more central areas of—I quote ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... were like her in their circumstances, but she feared she was not like them in their strong endurance. She looked at the pines and hemlocks as she passed, as if they were curious preachers to her; and when she had a chance she prayed quietly that she might stand faithfully like them to cheer a desolation far worse and she feared far more abiding than snows could make or melt away. She thought of Hugh, alone in his mill-work that rough chilly day, when the wind stalked through the woods and over the country as if it had been the personification of March just come of ape and taking possession ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... quite analogous to certain phenomena of the order of grace. St. Ignatius almost invariably speaks, not, as we should, of thoughts that give rise to will-states of "consolation" or "desolation," but conversely, of these will-states giving rise to congruous thoughts. Indeed, nothing is more familiar to us than the way in which the mind is magnetized by even our physical states of elation or ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... in one of her gloomiest moods, the clouds were the color of burnt treacle, the sombre rain pelted the dismal streets; mud was everywhere, desolation, misery, wet boots, and ruined hats. In the midst of such a scene, Welter, Lord Ascot, died of apoplexy in the throat, caused by a rope. Who did the deed? Owls on the battlements answer me. Did he do it himself or was it done for him? Shrieking ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... were finally driven back, the Federals entered the town, and then the bummers came streaming through the country, leaving desolation behind them. Cattle, poultry, everything eatable was driven off or carried away in the great army wagons that came crashing along, regardless of all obstacles in their cruel course. Cut off from all news from the army, Sibyl and her mother dragged wearily through ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... truer proportion, discerning eternal beauty beyond and beneath apparent ruthlessness. It will educate them in a charity free from all taint of sentimentalism; it will confer on them an unconquerable hope; and assure them that still, even in the hour of greatest desolation, "There lives the dearest freshness deep down things." As a contribution, then, to these purposes, this little book is now published. It is addressed neither to the learned nor to the devout, who are already in possession of a wide literature dealing from many points ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... with a trembling lip; she could say nothing but a faint "Thank you, I shall be grateful"; and she walked back to her lodgings, through the driving rain, with a new sense of desolation. She must be a lonely wanderer; she must go out among fresh faces, that would look at her wonderingly, because the days did not seem joyful to her; she must begin a new life, in which she would have to rouse herself ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... enthusiasm if his situation had been less critical. Even as it was, an exclamation of surprise broke from him, for there, not five miles distant, was the coast of Greenland; desolate, indeed, and ice-bound—he had expected that—but inexpressibly grand even in its desolation. A mighty tongue of a great glacier protruded itself into the frozen sea. The tip of this tongue had been broken off, and the edge presented a gigantic wall of crystal several hundred feet high, on which the sun glittered in ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... ice, with three poplars mounting guard over it. Flights of rooks hung over the barren ground, and wheeled in the air with discordant clamor as we passed—the only living moving things in the utter desolation of the scene. As I looked there was an exclamation from one of the workmen, and the engine began to slacken. We ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... was, as I had thought, bare and deserted. There was a musty smell about it, as though it had not been opened for a long time, and dust and desolation lay heavy upon it. A dark stain on the floor near the window suggested to my fancy the idea of blood. Had some wayfarer less fortunate than I been inveigled to his death in this ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... the lake, have, in course of time, given birth to ample promontories of sweeping outline, that contrast boldly with the longitudinal base of the steeps on the opposite shore; while their flat or gently-sloping surfaces never fail to introduce, into the midst of desolation and barrenness, the elements of fertility, even where the habitations of men ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... with the smell of the burning, and as they passed along they saw that every cabin had been consumed. It was a scene of utter desolation. The horses' feet splashed in pools of clotted blood, while ever and anon they came to the mutilated remains of some victim of the massacre. In one place lay the form of a brawny pioneer, his broken rifle still clutched by the muzzle, while the ground ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... approaching his friend, and preparing to support him at the moment the archbishop blessed the married couple. In fact, the Prince of Conde was attentively scrutinizing these two images of desolation, standing like caryatides on either side of the nave of the church. The count, after that, kept a ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... yards, sent up by Sir W. Pen, there is a good stop given to it, as well at Marke-lane end, as ours; it having only burned the dyall of Barking Church, and part of the porch, and was there quenched. I up to the top of Barking steeple, and there saw the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw; every where great fires, oyle-cellars, and brimstone, and other things burning. I became afraid to stay there long, and therefore down again as fast as I could, the fire being spread as far as I could see ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... on the conqueror's arch thy beam is lingering! It lingers on the shattered porticoes that once shrouded from thy o'erpowering glory the lords of earth; it lingers upon the ruined temples that even in their desolation are yet sacred! 'Tis gone, as if in sorrow! Yet the woody lake still blushes with thy warm kiss; and still thy rosy light tinges the pine ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... five acres, enclosed by three lanes. "Pope had twisted and twirled and rhymed and harmonized this, till it appeared two or three sweet little lawns, opening and opening beyond one another, and the whole surrounded with impenetrable woods." These, it appears, were hacked and hewed into mere desolation by the next proprietor. Pope was, indeed, an ardent lover of the rising art of landscape gardening; he was familiar with Bridgeman and Kent, the great authorities of the time, and his example and precepts ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... that mysterious and dazzling apparition; but when we moved on, it was soon snatched from our view; for as we descended the hill, and plunged into the deep and profound valley which lay at its feet, we lost sight of the holy city, and were surrounded only by the solitude and desolation ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... said Mercedes, presenting the girl, "keeps me company in my desolation, and thus helps me to pass ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... the politics of Europe and because we had had no part either of action or of policy in the influences which brought on the present war, but also because it was manifestly our duty to prevent, if it were possible, the indefinite extension of the fires of hate and desolation kindled by that terrible conflict and seek to serve mankind by reserving our strength and our resources for the anxious and difficult days of restoration and healing which must follow, when peace will have to ...
— From Isolation to Leadership, Revised - A Review of American Foreign Policy • John Holladay Latane
... as if something had alarmed them. He wrung his hands in anguish, and was about to make another attempt to drag Patrick down from the already burning house, when suddenly a troop of horse was among the scene of desolation, and at their head King James himself. Malcolm flew to the King, cutting short his angry exclamation with the cry, 'Help! help! he will burn! Patrick! ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with the vigor of its resolutions. The necessary preparations were not made and the inhabitants of the frontiers remained without sufficient protection until the plans against them were matured and the storm which had been long gathering burst upon them with a fury which spread desolation ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... when the cry of battle and the sound of firing had ceased, the women and children ventured to creep forth from their forest shelter. The enemy had gone, but had left a scene of desolation behind. The village was a heap of smoking ruins, and the corn in the fields was laid waste. Bodies of dead warriors strewed the ground, many of them lying stretched before their own wigwams, which they had ...
— Tecumseh - A Chronicle of the Last Great Leader of His People; Vol. - 17 of Chronicles of Canada • Ethel T. Raymond
... hangs over the ship's side, and lamentably stares down as though to plumb the depths of ocean. Finally and lastly, the Fifth Position: at the back of a narrow state-room, in a box-bed so small it seemed one drawer in a nest of them, something shapeless rolled on the pillow with moans of desolation. This was the fez—the fez so defiant at the sailing, now reduced to the vulgar condition of a nightcap, and pulled down over the very ears of the head of a ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... much below the requirements of the situation. The panic came to an end in the fall of 1893, much as a great conflagration expires through having reached all the material on which it can feed, but leaving a scene of desolation behind it. Thirteen commercial houses out of every thousand doing business had failed. Within two years, nearly one fourth of the total railway capitalization of the country had gone into bankruptcy, involving an exposure of falsified accounts sufficient to shatter public ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... no class of men in Ireland who have a deeper interest in a prosperous and numerous community than the priests of the Catholic Church; and further, I believe that no men have suffered more—have suffered more, I mean, in mind and in feeling—from witnessing the miseries and the desolation which during the last century (to go no further back) have stricken and afflicted the ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... Steppe was crossed by Benedict Goes late in the autumn of 1603, and the narrative speaks of the great cold and desolation, and the difficulty of breathing. We have also an abstract of the journey of Abdul Mejid, a British Agent, who passed Pamir on his way to Kokan in 1861:—"Fourteen weary days were occupied in crossing the ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... and home in the Highlands did this disastrous, though glorious intelligence, bring desolation and mourning; and amongst those on whom it brought these dismal effects, ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... the towers, and we found that he was a very respectable amateur in painting. Some of his oil paintings were very creditable. An infant girl, of great beauty, his daughter, answered to the name of Blanche Castle May, and was the first-born child under that roof since its desolation. ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... Boer would have succeeded in finding the way back, but I soon lost my way altogether. I lost the traces of the horse's hoofs, and the dongas looked to me so different that in one place where a donga branched off I did not know which to follow. An intense feeling of desolation took possession of me. Lost in a wilderness without food or water! I thought of the twelve or thirteen men who got lost in this wood on a hunting expedition, and of whom only one was saved. A great fear came upon me. Gradually I became calmer, and tried to form some plan of action. I resolved ...
— On Commando • Dietlof Van Warmelo
... universal acknowledgment. Moreover, that "No" was in order to this "Yes;" gave way before it, yielded to it; and life reigned in spite of death. Vaguely Diana's mind felt and carried on the analogy, and the reasoning from analogy, and drew a chill, far-off hope from it. For it was the time of storm and desolation with her now, and the summer sun had not come yet. She sat musing while ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... paint the desolation which reigned between the Strand and the City in that fatal summer, now drawing to its melancholy close. More than once in her brief pilgrimage Angela drew back, shuddering, from the embrasure of a door, or the inlet to some narrow alley, ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... it clear that he had determined that no army worthy of the name should be left to the Confederacy when he finally closed in upon Lee, so that with his destruction or surrender there should be no excuse for prolonging the war. It was in furtherance of this plan that Sherman left ruin and desolation behind him as he blazed his way up from the South. The inhabitants of the region through which he was marching had, up to this time, been living in perfect security and Sherman intended to make war so hideous that they would have no desire to prolong the contest. He, ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... satisfy myself that the room was really as empty as it seemed, I took another step forward. This caused the light from the lantern I carried to spread beyond the point on which it had hitherto been so effectively concentrated; but the result was to emphasize rather than detract from the extreme desolation of the great room. The settle was a fixture, as I afterwards found, and was almost the only article of furniture to be seen on the wide expanse of uncarpeted floor. There was a table or two in hiding somewhere amid ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... day Alexandria beheld a funeral ceremony as solemn, as magnificent, and as crowded as though a conquering hero were being entombed; it was that of the monk whom the bull had gored; the Bishop had proclaimed that by this attack on the abomination of desolation—the blood-sacrifice of idolatry—he had won an ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... regards yourself, I approve altogether of your abandoning what you justly call vanities. I look upon you as a man, called by sorrow and anguish and a strange desolation of hopes into quietness, and a soul set apart and made peculiar to God; we cannot arrive at any portion of heavenly bliss without in some measure imitating Christ. And they arrive at the largest ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... the other arts, the death of Leo X (1521) and the sack of Rome (1527) mark the epoch of decadence. Giovio, but just escaped from the desolation of the eternal city, described, not impartially, but on the whole correctly, the causes of this decline: 'The plays of Plautus and Terence, once a school of Latin style for the educated Romans, are banished to make ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... players and the other train passengers found a scene of desolation awaiting them as they alighted. But it was not as bad as might have been expected, and no one had been killed. In fact, no one was hurt, save the fireman and engineer of the passenger train, and ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... Fred pointed to the trampled garden, the litter in the park, and the desolation visible at the Hall, where window casements had been either smashed or taken off, and rough barricades erected; so that where all had once been so trim and orderly, ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... scagliola floor was cold, the high battered casements shook in the storm, and the stately decay of the place was unrelieved by a particle of furniture. Pemberton's spirits were low, and it came over him that the fortune of the Moreens was now even lower. A blast of desolation, a portent of disgrace and disaster, seemed to draw through the comfortless hall. Mr. Moreen and Ulick were in the Piazza, looking out for something, strolling drearily, in mackintoshes, under the arcades; but still, in spite of mackintoshes, ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... some that had come to her from her mother, some that he had given her. He knew them all so well, had handled them so often. A spasm crossed his face. It had been the home of the enchanted princess, shut off from all the world—until he had come. And his coming had brought desolation. Near him a valuable vase, that she had prized, lay smashed on the floor, overturned by the old armah in the first frenzy of her grief. It was symbolical and Craven turned from it with quivering lips ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... Diabolonians remaining in the town of Mansoul, Diabolonians that are sturdy and implacable, and that do already while I am with you, and that will yet more when I am from you, study, plot, contrive, invent, and jointly attempt to bring you to desolation, and so to a state far worse than that of the Egyptian bondage; they are the avowed friends of Diabolus, therefore look about you. They used heretofore to lodge with their Prince in the Castle, when Incredulity was the Lord Mayor of this town; but since my coming hither, they lie ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... In all this desolation we looked in vain for any signs of life. It was not until we sought out the house of a captain of dragoons, a friend of my companion the Comte, that we found a human being in these solitudes. The house was, indeed, a melancholy ruin, but by the ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... idea, and that the more closely from the bishop having found it correct—"with all that, you give me no explanation about what can have happened to these unfortunate boats. I am assailed by cries and complaints whichever way I go. The children cry at seeing the desolation of the women, as if I could restore the absent husbands and fathers. What do you suppose, my friend, and what ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... military and police establishments. Those who resided in or saw the district at that time, describe it as a magnificent garden; and some few signs of that flourishing state are still to be seen amidst its present general desolation. ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... was nearly too dark to write. No doubt on the high ground the sky was aflame with brilliant colour, of which only a dim reflection tinged the dreary view of sward and leafless trees, to which, for some mysterious reason, a gig crawling down the carriage-drive gave the last touch of desolation. ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... accident at Burnham Shaft. They were summer months, full of sunshine and green landscapes and singing birds and blossoming flowers and all things beautiful. But in the house from which the body of Robert Burnham had been carried to the grave there were still tears and desolation. Not, indeed, as an outward show; Margaret Burnham was very brave, and hid her grief under a calm exterior, but there were times, in the quiet of her own chamber, when loneliness and sorrow came down upon her as a burden too great for her woman's heart to bear. Still, she had her daughter ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... its exclusive protection is attributable, is not, I believe correctly known. But though this spot of sacred seclusion, has escaped the final stroke of extermination, it has sustained an ample share of the general desolation. During the time of terrour, it was converted into the crowded prison of the female nobility, who were here confined, and afterwards dragged from its cloisters, and butchered by the guillotine, or the daggers of assassins. I ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... house-cleaning in the dome of the heavens one memorable night that flashed like a jewel from the murky desolation of a rainy spring. The little winds came in troops, some from the sea, some with loads of balsam from the great forests of the Olympic Peninsula, and some, quite tired out, from the stretching sage plains to the east, and they swept the sky of clouds as a housekeeper ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... and sent me away from the arms which a little before had been my sole possession. I could not understand it, and my little heart was filled with dismay. I would creep away by myself, sit down, and in the most pitiful manner repeat to myself, "Poor Sammy! poor Sammy!" The sense of desolation was very great; and in the whole course of my life I do not remember to have known a more distressing grief. When I grew to be a man, and disappointments came upon me; when I laid my wife and children in their graves, and knew there was not one left of my line but myself—a ...
— The Angel Children - or, Stories from Cloud-Land • Charlotte M. Higgins
... fishing places, with which this coast of America abounds. By degrees they went a-whaling to Newfoundland, to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, to the Straits of Belleisle, the coast of Labrador, Davis's Straits, even to Cape Desolation, in 70 degrees of latitude; where the Danes carry on some fisheries in spite of the perpetual severities of the inhospitable climate. In process of time they visited the western islands, the latitude of 34 degrees famous for that ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... generally regarded as the comforts and even necessaries of life. His father, ignorant, needy, and thriftless, content if he could keep soul and body together for himself and his family, was ever seeking, without success, to better his unhappy condition by moving on from one such scene of dreary desolation to another. The rude society which surrounded them was not much better. The struggle for existence was hard, and absorbed all their energies. They were fighting the forest, the wild beast, and the retreating savage. From the time when he could barely handle ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... Nietzschean "blond beast." The poor fauns and dryads of the free ancient world hesitate trembling and frightened on the very threshold of their liberty when this great Zarathustra offers them a choice between frozen Alpine peaks of heroic desolation and bloodstained jungles frequented by ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... these sinkings and these last recoveries are the trial flights of the animating and eternal principle—call it soul or what you will—before it trusts itself afar. Still more terrible is it under circumstances of physical and mental desolation such as those present to Leonard Outram ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... punished for disobedience of orders, but for having, by my disobedience, pointed out to you your duty—a duty which you were forced to perform afterwards by necessity. Then be it so; let me perish on these black rocks, as I shall, and my bones be whitened by the chilly blasts which howl over their desolation. But mark me, cruel and vindictive man! I shall not be the only one whose bones will bleach there. I prophesy that many others will share my fate, and even you, admiral, may be of the number,—if I mistake not, we shall lie ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... applied had been dismissed, the rest of the population were sold into slavery, and then the city was utterly and entirely destroyed. The number thus sold was about thirty thousand, and six thousand had been killed in the assault and storming of the city. Thus Thebes was made a ruin and a desolation, and it remained so, a monument of Alexander's terrible energy and ...
— Alexander the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... claimed him as its own. He wondered that he had been impatient with the men it bred. The wonder now was that human virtue of any temper could long withstand the blasting touch of so great and awful a desolation. ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... bushels on the ground, and with which we regaled ourselves. Enclosed maize fields overgrown with brambles, and cotton fields with the gins and apparatus for packing the produce in bales for the market, presented to the eye the very picture of desolation. ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... have strength of mind to care for science, amidst the awful events daily occurring in your country. I daily look at the "Times" with almost as much interest as an American could do. When will peace come? it is dreadful to think of the desolation of large parts of your magnificent country; and all the speechless misery suffered by many. I hope and think it not unlikely that we English are wrong in concluding that it will take a long time for prosperity to return to you. It is an awful ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... thou yon dreary plain, forlorn and wild, The seat of desolation, void of light, Save what the glimmering of these livid flames Casts pale and dreadful? Thither let us tend From off the tossing of these fiery waves, There rest, if any rest can harbor there, And, reassembling ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... inhabitants of the oasis were wont to confine prisoners. He came to a door. It opened readily to his touch, and he passed into what had once been a large dwelling-room. He stepped softly forward, noting the emptiness and desolation of the place. The peculiar odor of the air was more noticeable than before, but it was not till he had reached the middle of the darkened room, and stood gazing about him, that he perceived at the farther end, in the shadows, ...
— Out of the Triangle • Mary E. Bamford
... cultivation or inhabitants; that the capital, which but a very short time ago was distinguished as one of the most populous and opulent commercial cities in Hindostan, at present exhibits nothing but scenes of the most wretched poverty, desolation, and misery; and the Nabob himself, though in possession of a tract of country which with only common care is notoriously capable of yielding an annual revenue of between thirty and forty lacs [three or four hundred thousand pounds], with no military establishment to maintain, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... water-grasses, the sombre and silent flow of the fulvous water sliding and curling down out of the jungle, and the implacable fervour of the pallid, searching sunlight heightening every touch of ugliness and desolation, and you will understand why the Hebrew poets sang no praise of the Jordan, and why Naaman the Syrian thought scorn of it when he remembered the lovely and fruitful rivers ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... stepped from the chill and dreariness of a windy day, when it seems as if the very life of all things growing were shrunk to absolute desolation, into the welcome warmth and light and fragrance, the beauty and joy of a glass house full of green and blossoming plants? No matter how small it was, even though you had to stoop to enter the door, and mind your elbows as you went along, what a good, glad comfortable feeling flooded ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell
... school of sad experience the mortal agony of Love without Skill,—the power of perception, without the power of utterance. We know how dumb are the sweet melodies of our souls,—how fleeting their opulent and dreamy pageantries. But we have not fully learned the utter emptiness and desolation of Skill without Love. We accept its sounding brass and tinkling cymbals for immortal harmonies. We look reverently upon its tortured marbles and its canvases stained with academic knowledge as revelations of higher intelligence; forgetting, that, if we go down ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... stray dog or two sniffed suspiciously at the strangers. Round this spot near the river tambookie grass about six feet in height formed a screen. The officers made coffee, turned out their horses to graze, and lay for a short rest in the peaceful security of a complete, or seemingly complete, desolation. ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... mind, however, that a really clever and sensible woman is able to do many things excellently. Was Mrs. Fry less a good wife and able mother, because she visited prisons, and saved many of her sex from desolation and death? She had eight children, and no one doubts that each one had every care that a devoted mother could bestow upon him. Was Grace Darling less loving and obedient as a daughter, because she ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... of these interests, the sense of loneliness and desolation is always present. Her few letters give us occasional flashes of the old spirit, but the burden of them is inexpressibly sad. Her sympathies and associations led her toward a mild form of Jansenism, and as the evening shadows darkened, her thoughts turned to fresh speculations upon the ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... or atmosphere of its own, quite perceptible, however difficult to describe. The effect of this atmosphere is marked with unusual strength in Macbeth. It is due to a variety of influences which combine with those just noticed, so that, acting and reacting, they form a whole; and the desolation of the blasted heath, the design of the Witches, the guilt in the hero's soul, the darkness of the night, seem to emanate from one and the same source. This effect is strengthened by a multitude of small touches, which at the moment may be little noticed but still leave their mark on ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... behind overgrown rose bushes and heliotrope. The chateau was before them, the windows still reflecting the sunlight; but this borrowed glitter was all the brightness it had. Once beautiful, the old battlemented house had an air of proud desolation, as if scorning pity, since it ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... the desolation of having no one to grope with her, discovered that her Friend came now less frequently to see her. She was even beginning to wonder whether he had ever really come at all. She had perhaps imagined him just as on occasion she would imagine her doll, Jane, the Queen of England, or her ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... this characteristic of my condition which enlisted the sympathy of Lowell, who, even in his desolation, had a heart for any form of devotion, and who, with the love of nature which was one of his own most marked traits, had a side to which my enthusiasm appealed directly. The mere artist is, unless his nature is a radically religious one, an egotist, and his art necessarily ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... escape the ominous thought, which her woman's perception had sown in her, that he too chafed at a marriage no marriage: was true in fidelity, not true through infidelity, as she had come to be. The thought implied misery for both. She entered a black desolation, with the prayer that he might not be involved, for his own sake: partly also on behalf of the sustaining picture the young schoolmaster at his task, merry among his dear boys, to trim and point them body and mind for their business in the world, painted for her a weariful prospect of the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to him then, when the influence of the wilderness and its immensity and desolation were so strong, that he might have lived in some such time himself, ages and ages ago. It might have been the stories of Paul or it might have been some dim heritage from a dimmer past that made him, as he lay there under the ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Save the Famous Ferry Station, the Chief Inlet to and Egress from San Francisco—Fire Tugs and Vessels in the Bay Aid in Heroic Fight—Fort Mason, General Funston's Temporary Headquarters, has Narrow Escape—A Survey of the Scene of Desolation 69 ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... left the Sts. of Magellan in the middle of winter; she found her road out by a wild unfrequented channel; well might Sir J. Narborough call the west coast South Desolation, "because it is so desolate a land to behold." We were driven into Chiloe by some very bad weather. An Englishman gave me three specimens of that very fine Lucanoidal insect which is described in the "Camb. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... solitude, we came, almost in the dark, to the sea-side, weary and dejected, having met with nothing but waters falling from the mountains that could raise any image of delight.' Piozzi Letters, i. 170. 'It is natural, in traversing this gloom of desolation, to inquire, whether something may not be done to give nature a more cheerful face.' Johnson's Works, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... Byrne, of Trinity College, Dublin, in his lecture on 'The Influence of National Character on English Literature', remarks of Spenser: "After that dark period which separated him from Chaucer, after all the desolation of the Wars of the Roses, and all the deep trials of the Reformation, he rose on England as if, to use ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... accumulated by the people was marvellous. And, though it is held that slavery enriched the few at the general expense, Georgia and Carolina were the richest States, per capita, in the Union in 1800, saving Rhode Island. Some idea of the desolation of the war may be had from the fact that, in spite of their late remarkable recuperation, they are now, excepting Idaho, the poorest States, per capita, in the Union. So rich was the South in 1860, that Mr. Lincoln spoke but common sentiment when he ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... voracious, and easily caught, as it is neither cunning nor shy. As it lives in desolation, and has little to do with men, it knows nothing of trickery, nor dreams of the plots laid against its royal freedom. An interesting account is given of the capture of an albatross by an officer of a French ...
— Harper's Young People, April 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... natural one of making more visible the shadows which enveloped his path, as well as stimulating his instinctive efforts to pierce through them. After the rapturous joy which succeeded confession and absolution, a period of desolation and dryness heavier than he had ever known at once set in. Perhaps he had expected the very reverse of this. At all events, it was not many days before it drew from him the complaint that in leaving Concord he had also left behind him the great interior ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... which took hold of him then—smothered him. He went down before the vision of those unlived days, the grim vision of those relentless, inevitable days, standing there waiting to be lived. It was desolation. The surrender of a strong man who had tried to ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... climate, and single river. It was a narrow strip, inclosed between the Mediterranean Sea and the river Jordan, which runs due south down a steep wooded cleft into the Dead Sea, the lowest water in the world, in a sort of pit of its own, with barren desolation all round it, so as to keep in memory the ruin of the cities of the plain. In the north, rise the high mountains of Libanus, a spur from which goes the whole length of the land, and forms two slopes, whence the rivers flow, either westward into the Great Sea, or ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Whose bed?" Was he an Aladdin with a magic lamp, that could summon comfort in that desolation? "Monsieur," I choked, "I owe you a thousand apologies. I came near killing one of your nine decoys. I mistook ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... before my eyes. In the next stall was an American gentleman, who knew me. "Good heavens, sir," I thought, "is it decreed that you and I are to be authorized to murder each other next week; that my people shall be bombarding your cities, destroying your navies, making a hideous desolation of your coast; that our peaceful frontier shall be subject to fire, rapine, and murder?" "They will never give up the men," said the Englishman. "They will never give up the men," said the American. And the Christmas piece which the actors ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... French Government allow a considerable portion of their own population actually to starve, or be obliged to emigrate to other parts of France, there to live the life of nomads at the expense of England, while the deserted provinces are given over to desolation? ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... been so all through his childhood and youth. There was no trace in his memory of days when he of a time had been free. Not the faintest recollection existed of the time when he might have swung in the branches of equatorial forests. To him life was a desolation and a despair, and the poignancy of it all was sharpened by the clouds of dust which ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... with this ignoble fever, this war-madness which degrades the combatants far more than it exalts them, which senselessly destroys valuable property, scatters ruin broadcast, paralyses industry, robs the poor of all the bread of life, fills the land with mourning and desolation, with widows and orphans?—war, which we learnt from wild beasts, our ancestors, which cannot therefore determine a question of justice, which makes the wrong triumph as often as the right, which degrades all that touch it by isolating them for months, for years perhaps, from civilised life, ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... I, too, wearied of the scene of desolation. My errant steps took me in the direction of the sea. As I approached, I was aware of a figure standing in the moonlight, gazing silently out over the waters. Beside ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... knelt and prayed. Every now and then we could not help starting up, as a more fearful crash than usual sounded in our ears. Still the wished-for daylight did not appear. The truth was, that since the commencement of the storm but a short time only had elapsed, though in our desolation and solitude it had ...
— Mary Liddiard - The Missionary's Daughter • W.H.G. Kingston
... haue not: (but I pardon you for that, for simply your hauing in beard, is a yonger brothers reuennew) then your hose should be vngarter'd, your bonnet vnbanded, your sleeue vnbutton'd, your shoo vnti'de, and euerie thing about you, demonstrating a carelesse desolation: but you are no such man; you are rather point deuice in your accoustrements, as louing your selfe, then seeming the ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... present structure, appertains to a building which was consecrated in 1126, by the Archbishop of Rouen, in the presence of Henry Ist, but which was almost entirely destroyed by the cannonade in the fifteenth century. An inscription in gothic letters, near the entrance, relates, that after this desolation, a beginning was made towards the re-building of the church, "in 1438, a year of war, and death, and plague, and famine;" but it is certain that not much of the part now standing can be referred even to that period. The choir was not completed till the middle ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... touching—but they were also rather deliciously amusing—as they concentrated all their resources of solemnity and of worldly experience on the tragic case of the woman whom life had defeated. Hilda's memory rushed strangely to Victor Hugo. She was experiencing the same utter desolation—but somehow less noble—as had gripped her when she first realized the eternal picture, in Oceana Nox, of the pale-fronted widows who, tired of waiting for those whose barque had never returned out of the tempest, talked quietly among themselves of the lost—stirring the cinders in ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... his congener of the woods, has as yet been but partially able to substitute gunpowder for the bow. The advantage he has in the protection afforded him by the desolation of his waterless mesas and sage-covered hills is thus in great measure neutralized. What, when he does possess the modern firearm, he is capable of doing with it, the achievements of the Modocs in their volcanic stronghold will attest. But these were few, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... people in England to realize the condition of Northern France at the present time. Although the papers are full of accounts of desolation and destruction caused by the German invasion, it is only by an actual experience that a full realization of the horror comes. To return to England after visiting the French war zone is to come back to a land of perfect peace, where everything is normal and where it is not easy to believe ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... industries to such a pitch of development that she had the experience, as well as the initiative and the means, to do something for the Dalmatians who, and especially in the interior, knew no other trade than that of arms. Terrible was the desolation of those days; over large areas there was no drinking-water; the land was merely used to pasture the herds of almost wild cattle; instead of the superb forests were hundreds of miles of naked rock; and nowhere had the Venetian families, to whom ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... voice of the priest vibrated under the hammer-beam roof, and a loneliness unfelt before swamped their hearts, as they searched for places in the unfamiliar Church of England service. The Lord's Prayer "Our Father, which art"—set the seal on that desolation. Sophie found herself thinking how in other lands their purchase would long ere this have been discussed from every point of view in a dozen prints, forgetting that George for months had not been allowed to glance at those black and bellowing head-lines. ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... centered in the picturesque old building, originally built for a bank, which stands near the entrance of the Cooper Grounds in Cooperstown. The Cooper Grounds themselves were rescued from a condition of desolation in which they had lain for many years after the death of Fenimore Cooper, and are maintained by the Clark estates for the benefit of the public. The Village Club and Library across the way is a creation of the Clark estates. On the hills east and west of the village, and along the ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... insurgent States were conquered provinces to be shaped into a paradise for the freedman and a hell for the rebel. His eye shot over the blackened southern land; he saw the carnage, the desolation, the starvation, and the shame; and like a battered old warhorse, he flung up his frontlet, sniffed the tainted breeze, and snorted ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... both are brought to hopeless desolation, Till wolves troop round the cottage door in one and t'other nation, Till, worn and broken down, the South shall prove no more refractory, And rust eats up the silent ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... the Counts Egmont and Horn, organized a party to resist him, and a revolution was commenced which lasted for forty years, affording one of the blackest chapters in the history of Europe. The name of Alva stands at the head of the list of men who have wrought desolation and suffering in the name of religion. The other European states protested, and Elizabeth, in hot indignation, gave ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... like a map of the world with a haze on its edge. Lastly, whatever animal remains the moon may contain would probably be rather in the form of fossils than of skeletons. The skeleton is of course intended as an image of death and desolation. It is a matter of taste: but a skeleton, it seems to me, speaks too recently of life to be as appallingly weird and desolate as a blank stone or ice landscape, unshaded by atmosphere or by any trace of animal or ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... without fear or precaution; and courteously discoursed with the patriarch concerning its religious antiquities. [81] Sophronius bowed before his new master, and secretly muttered, in the words of Daniel, "The abomination of desolation is in the holy place." [82] At the hour of prayer they stood together in the church of the resurrection; but the caliph refused to perform his devotions, and contented himself with praying on the steps of the church of Constantine. To the patriarch he disclosed his prudent and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... surface, there was utter blackness. Also there was horrible frigidity. Elsewhere it was blindingly bright. The men were specks of humanity standing on a shining metal hull, and all about them there was the desolation of nothingness. ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... serve as the sacristia, or vestry. In the worm-eaten wardrobe within hung a few vestments, adorned with cheap finery, and heavily laden with dust, over which scampered vermin of many varieties. An air of desolation and abandon hung over the whole church, and to Jose seemed to symbolize the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... carried and bestowed upon the Gentile nations because Israel was scattered, how much, and what are the blessings in store for those nations when Israel and Judah be restored? Paul compares it to a resurrection—like as when the barrenness and desolation of a Winter is supplanted by the fruits and beauties of Summer. "If the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?" ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... from modern Europeans) are the Arabs. This is particularly the case in East Africa, where the systematic slave raids organized by them and carried out with the assistance of various warlike tribes reduced vast regions to a state of desolation. In the north and west of Africa, however, the Arab has had a less destructive but more extensive and permanent influence in spreading the Mahommedan religion throughout the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... permeating the atmosphere caused a shimmering in the air, the tremulous effect of which was trying to the eyes, and deceptive almost like a mirage. It was a relief even when a tall awkward necked camel came between one and the line of vision. A characteristic scene emphasized the surrounding desolation, on a neighboring sand-hill, where a flock of vultures were feeding upon the carcass of a mule. Disturbed for a moment they rose lazily, and circling about the spot settled again to their carrion feast. Though ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... Old Town closed the war. Jackson, feeling that the Indians had been thoroughly beaten, withdrew from Florida, leaving fire and desolation in his track. ...
— Four American Indians - King Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Osceola • Edson L. Whitney
... makes war. But in this war of hers she is wholly implacable. She has little notion of converting criminals. There is no faculty of mercy in her when she has been resisted. Her word is only, "I will mock when your fear cometh." Note the words that follow: "when your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction as a whirlwind;" for her wrath is of irresistible tempest: once roused, it is blind and deaf,—rabies—madness of anger— darkness of the ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... paddles had to be cleared of corpses, caught by the floats during the night. For scores of miles the entire population of the valley was swept away by this scourge Mariano, who is again, as he was before, the great Portuguese slave-agent. It made the heart ache to see the widespread desolation; the river-banks, once so populous, all silent; the villages burned down, and an oppressive stillness reigning where formerly crowds of eager sellers appeared with the various products of their industry. Here and there might be seen on the bank a small dreary ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... pumice, and ashes lay thick on everything around, and only a few blackened and twisted stumps of the larger trees remained to tell that an umbrageous forest had once flourished there. The whole scene might be fittingly described in the two words—grey desolation. ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... YOUR MAJESTY, "I am at a loss whether I shall congratulate or condole with you on your late victory; since the same success that has covered you with laurels has overspread the Couutry of MecklenburgH with desolation. I know, Sire, that it seems unbecoming my sex, in this age of vicious refinement, to feel for one's Country, to lament the horrors of war, or wish for the return of peace. I know you may think it ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... which had almost been a defeat and which left both armies so exhausted that months passed before either was in condition to resume the war. It was the month of June before the armies were again put in motion. Now the wintry desolation was replaced by a scene of green woodland, shining lakes and attractive villages, the conditions being far ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... lower country, and increased the general terror. In this state of things, he endeavoured to collect and arm the men who had abandoned their houses, and to remove their wives and children to a distance from this scene of desolation and carnage. Pressing orders were at the same time despatched to the newly appointed officers, to forward their recruits; and to the county lieutenants, east of the Blue Ridge, to hasten their militia to Winchester: but before these orders could ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... fierce excitement. The storm which burst with all its fury on the Continent, wrapping nations in the flames of civil war, prostrating, withering, and overwhelming civil institutions, and marking its path with desolation did but exert a salutary influence in England. The lightning was seen flashing in the distant horizon, the rolling thunder could be heard afar off, but the fury of the storm fell at a distance; the atmosphere was purified and the soil refreshed, and the rainbow ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... this silent road, without houses or lights, it seemed to him he was wandering amid the desolation of some lunar region. This part of Normandy recalled to him the least cultivated parts of Brittany. It was rustic and savage, with its dense shrubbery, tufted grass, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... almost cowed. But on the following morning he determined to make a still further effort, so that he might, if possible, return to the ways of the world, which were already becoming strange to him from the desolation of the life which he had been leading. He went out, and, taking the road by the church, up the creek, he came at about a distance of two miles from his own house to Coed, the farmstead of John Griffith, the farmer who held the largest number of acres on the property. ...
— Cousin Henry • Anthony Trollope
... was suddenly a terrific explosion, which threw him completely out of the machine! The car, without a driver, its engines whirring madly, dashed into a helpless corner fruit stand, scattering oranges, bananas, apples and desolation in its wake, as it vainly endeavored to climb to the second story with super-mechanical intelligence! Shirley, stunned and bruised, fell to the pavement where he lay until an excited ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... in these parts are so far from what I could wish them and myself to be, that I cannot but cry out, 'Lord, how long wilt Thou give Thine heritage to desolation and barrenness? How long shall the heathen say, Where is now their indwelling God?' I hope it is better with you in the north. What are your heart, your pen, your tongue doing? Are they receiving, sealing, spreading the truth everywhere within your ...
— Fletcher of Madeley • Brigadier Margaret Allen
... scolding, and of all scolds the pulpit scold is the most objectionable. Without a pitiful heart his exposure of human nature will become mere fault-finding, and a fault-finding ministry is a ministry of desolation. Again, without a pitiful heart the preacher's utterance of the divine judgment will be but more or less terrifying threats, and the pulpit is not set up to threaten but to pronounce. We have heard preaching of this order. ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... nearly so nice as American realities. We lament not so much what Babbitt is as what he is trying to be. What he is is a simple and kindly man . . . what he's trying to be is the abomination of desolation; the Man who made Salesmanship an Art; the Man Who Would Not Stay Down; the Man Who Got the Million Dollar Post After Taking Our Correspondence Course; the Man Who Learned Social Charm in ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... our age, and this dread spectacle of human nature red in tooth and claw brings it impressively before us. Is the work of God restricted to counting the hairs of the head, and not enlarged to check the murderous thoughts in the human brain? Nay, when we survey those horrid stretches of desolation in Belgium and Poland and Serbia, where the mutilated bodies of the innocent, of women and children, lie amidst the ashes of their homes; when we think of those peaceful sailors of our mercantile marine at the bottom ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... fear isn't easy to conquer. No man or woman can conquer it alone. Historians tell us that when the first passenger rocket started out for Mars, Space Fear took men by surprise in the same way your fear gripped you. The loneliness, the utter desolation of space, was too much for ...
— The Man from Time • Frank Belknap Long
... with this wonderful extension of steel ways through our wildness there is loss as well as gain. Nearly all railroads are bordered by belts of desolation. The finest wilderness perishes as if stricken with pestilence. Bird and beast people, if not the dryads, are frightened from the groves. Too often the groves also vanish, leaving nothing but ashes. Fortunately, ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... drenched With rain, made pale a misty place,— From which, as from a ghost, he blenched; He walking with averted face, And lips in desolation clenched. ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... heart-shaped citadel of Doulens and a jagged wood suggestive of a lion rampant, we followed the straight road to Arras. Arrived there, the leader turned south, for we were not yet high enough. As we moved along the brown band of shell-pocked desolation we continued to climb. Patches of smoke from the guns hovered over the ground at intervals. A score of lazy-looking kite ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... hut on the heath was the very picture of abject poverty and dreary desolation. The earthen floor was broken and rough; the sunlight came sifting through the chinks in the broken walls. A smoky fire of wet driftwood smoldered, under a pot on the crook. There was neither table nor chairs. A straw pallet with a wretched coverlet lay in one ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... ceased to harp upon the string of his desolation. Somehow Jan contrived to show him that she didn't believe in it, and yet she never said one word to which he ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... the evil. Thou seest no longer Jerusalem trodden by the heathen, nor the abomination of desolation set up in the sanctuary ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... Adirondacks, seen from the St. Regis mountain. It has been more equally paired with the line of the distant Alps seen from the platform at Berne. I may parallel it, too, again in Switzerland, with the view of the Valais peaks which bursts on one when, winding upward past the Daubensee and its desolation, he comes out suddenly upon the brink of the great wall of the Gemmi. But here there is a warmth in the view beyond that of Switzerland. Some one has said that "snow is regarded as the type of purity not because it is cold but because it is ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... Grenada, despite the dilapidation of her capital and the seeming desolation of its environs, is not the least prosperous of the Antilles. Other islands have been less fortunate: the era of depression has almost passed for Grenada; through the rapid development of her secondary cultures—coffee ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... game, and that in which its disjointed, horrible surfaces were being turned into abstractions, into ideas, poetry, rhetoric—was this middle ground through which we were now tramping, where one saw only its silence and ruin and desolation. ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... Death, and at last Agnes opened her languid eyes upon us, and was pronounced out of immediate danger. The sickening pallor that overspread her face an instant after her returning consciousness, I well understood; the thought of her heart's desolation came to her memory, and I fear life was any thing but a blessing to her then. Her health continued delicate; and at last it was deemed advisable to take her to a more genial climate—that change of scene and air ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... preceding chapter, form a singular feature in the physical aspect of the island of Sardinia. There are few travellers, I think, of much experience who, in traversing such tracts of country, have not been struck at one time by the desolation of their depths of solitude, or been pleased, at another, by the glimpses of nomade life, their occasional accompaniments; and who would not be willing to admit that, in their general impressions on the imagination, they sometimes rival even mountain scenery. For if grandeur be one main ingredient ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... France, M. Janssen takes these instantaneous photographs of the sun, thirty inches in diameter, and afterward enlarges them to ten feet; showing scenes of fiery desolation that appalls the human imagination. (See address of Vice President Langley, A. A. A. S., Proceedings Saratoga Meeting, p. 56.) This huge photograph can be viewed in detail with a small telescope and micrometer, and the crests of solar waves ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... grave composure, which said touchingly, that hope had long ago clasped hands with submission. And, perhaps, that if hope's anchor had not been well placed, ay, even where it could not be moved, the storms of life might have beaten even hope from her ground, and made a clean sweep of desolation over all she had left. Not the storms of the last few weeks. Mr. Carleton saw and understood their work in the perfectly colourless and thin cheek. But these other finer drawn characters had taken longer to write. He did not know the instrument, ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... and because the servant of God would not accept of peace, unless with safety to the honour of God, and the character of the Church, they departed in discord from each other. At length the supreme Pontiff, pitying the desolation of the Anglican Church, with difficulty at the last extorted by threatening measures, that peace should be restored to the Church. The realms indeed rejoiced, that the King had been reconciled to the Archbishop, whilst some believed that the affair was carried on ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... in the life of Solomon which the writer of Ecclesiastes took as the scene and subject of his story. With marvellous penetration and consummate power he penetrates the mind of Solomon and paints the blackness of desolation, the misery of satiety, the dreadful darkness of a soul which has given itself to this world as ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... some shopman with "savings," had delivered his soul to the local builders and built himself a house, and there it stood, ill-designed, mean-looking, isolated, ill-placed on a cheaply fenced plot, athwart which his domestic washing fluttered in the breeze amidst a bleak desolation of enterprise. Then presently our railway crossed a high road, and a row of mean yellow brick houses—workmen's cottages, and the filthy black sheds that made the "allotments" of that time a universal eyesore, ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... engravings gave tone to the walls; the piano lay open, as if saying, "Come, touch me"; the books, shining in gold and red and blue and purple, winked in the firelight; and, altogether, it was a picture of delight accentuated by the desolation outside. ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... proud Sevilla triumphs unsubdued: Yet is she free—the spoiler's wished-for prey! Soon, soon shall Conquest's fiery foot intrude, Blackening her lovely domes with traces rude. Inevitable hour! 'Gainst fate to strive Where Desolation plants her famished brood Is vain, or Ilion, Tyre, might yet survive, And Virtue vanquish all, and Murder ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... there is nothing but desolation in graveyards, the churches are crowded instead, and the bereaved survivors commend to God their departed friends and their own stricken hearts in the dim and perfumed aisles of temples made with hands. A taint of gloom thus rests upon the recollection and the prayer, far different from the ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... acres that ended in the hard black line of the lake, the vast blocks of open land to the south, which would go to make some new subdivision of the sprawling city. Absorbed, charmed, grimly content with the abominable desolation of it all, he stood and gazed. No evidence of any plan, of any continuity in building, appeared upon the waste: mere sporadic eruptions of dwellings, mere heaps of brick and mortar dumped at random ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... sea-bird claims that solitary spot, And around, loud screaming, wheels In undisturbed possession: other sounds, Save those of shrieking winds and battling cliffs. Are seldom heard in that deserted isle. The spirit of desolation seems to dwell Within it; and although the sun is high, And Nature is at holy peace, it has An aspect wild and dreary. But in the wint'ry storm, when all that sea— The terrible Atlantic—breasts its rocks In thund'ring conflict, the unearthly howl ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 472 - Vol. XVII. No. 472., Saturday, January 22, 1831 • Various
... which remained all through his life firmly fixed in David's memory, and which he never thought of without a sense of desolation, a shiver of sick dismay, such as belonged to no other association whatever. It was the sound of a long sigh, brought up, as it seemed, from the very depths of being, and often, often repeated. The thought of it brought with it a vision of a small bare room at night, with two iron bedsteads, one ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... instinctively glanced toward the window. The rain was still falling, changing the City of the Sun into a city of desolation. It looked as though it would never see the sun again—and her life ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... window and a balcony with a rusty iron balustrade—the one upon which Rienzi came out at the last, with the standard in his hand. The castle itself not high, but strong, brown and battered. Beyond it, the gallows, and the place of death. Below it, a desolation of tumbling rock and ruin, where wild flowers struggled for a holding in spring, and the sharp cactus sent out ever-green points between the stones. Far down, a confusion of low, brown houses, with many dark towers standing straight ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... believed, to say; and there was in fact a strange short interlude after this in which he scarce knew what had become of any one or of anything; in which he only seemed to himself to stand alone in a desolate place where even its desolation didn't save him from having to stare at the greyest of printed pages. Nothing here helped anything else, since the stamped greyness didn't even in itself make it impossible his eyes should follow such sentences as: "The loveliness ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... cherished desolation the supper was so inviting that he was tempted to partake of it heartily. Then incasing himself in his ample dressing-gown he placed his slippered feet on the fender before a cheery fire, lighted a choice Havana, and ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... and the yeomen who had risen at the first alarm hung on the flanks of Lord Howe's army, cutting off stragglers and scouting-parties, and confining the belt of desolation ...
— The Tory Maid • Herbert Baird Stimpson
... Molyneux," said the other and graver personage; "thou canst not even let the elements escape thy gibes. I marvel how far we are from our cousin Ireland's at Lydiate. My fears mislead me, or we have missed our way. This flat bosom of desolation hath no vantage-ground whence we may discern our path; and we have been winding about this interminable lake these ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... on their taking it. There have been instances where the delicate hand of woman hath kindled a young man's taste for strong drink, who after many years, when the attractions of that holiday scene were all forgotten, crouched in her rags, and her desolation, and her woe under the uplifted hand of the drunken monster who, on that Christmas morning so long ago, took the glass from her hand. And so, the woman stands on the abutment of the bridge, on the moon-lit ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... country, benefited by its healing balm, flourished, revived, invigorated and prosperous, Portsmouth and Gosport, and such like sea-ports, were almost deserted, and the active bustle and variety which but now reigned among their inhabitants had given way to desolation and abandonment: at least such was the account I had received from recent visitors. I was, therefore, anxious from observation to compare the present with the past; and, with this view, readily met the invitation of my friend Horace Eglantine. The voyage from ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... assured me, that having satisfied his curiosity, no earthly consideration should tempt him to undertake a second journey by land to the capital; for that he believed the whole world could not furnish a like picture of desolation and misery. What a contrast is here exhibited to the ease and convenience with which our journey was made! But the whole treatment of the Dutch embassy seems to have been proportioned to the degree of importance ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... that the earth's crust has undergone directly conflict with our author's theory, and afford the strongest presumption, that an extraneous cause has frequently interfered, at different periods, to repair the desolation produced by the unassisted working of natural laws, to bring order out of chaos, and to people the desert earth anew with animated tribes. The only general fact of much moment, which our author has drawn from the discoveries of geologists, for the confirmation of his ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... cannon shot and grape of all sizes from a 32-pounder downward, and looked like the old battle-field of some infernal region—rocks glowing with heat, not a vestige of vegetation, barren, withering desolation. The slow rocking step of the camels was most irksome, and, despite the heat, I dismounted to examine the Satanic bombs and cannon shot. Many of them were as perfectly round as though cast in a mould, ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... midst of a wild and tenantless landscape, Lost Cedars wore that air of lovely, though utter, desolation which might easily have suggested ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... lay. A light wind blowing down from the mountains moaned through the thin forest. Clouds came up from the west, blotting out the horizon and making the sky a curving dome of blackness. Young William Clarke felt that it was good to have comrades in the immense desolation, and it strengthened his spirit to see the soldiers rolled in their blankets, their feet ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... refuge did the inaccessible shore present. Again and again the lieutenant asked himself what would become of him and his comrades, even if they should survive the peril of shipwreck, and gain a footing upon the cliff. What resources could they expect to find upon that scene of desolation? What hope could they entertain that any portion of the old continent still existed beyond that ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... the war spirit of the Nez Perces, and prompt them to retaliation, was ardently seconded by Kosato. For several days he was incessantly devising schemes of vengeance, and endeavoring to set on foot an expedition that should carry dismay and desolation into the Blackfeet town. All his art was exerted to touch upon those springs of human action with which he was most familiar. He drew the listening savages round him by his nervous eloquence; taunted them with recitals of past wrongs and insults; drew glowing ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... her forlorn, unprotected youth, the more forlorn that in her father's lifetime it was under a certain hollow sham of protection; the total desolation afterward, exposed to every insult of the bitter world, or at least that bitter portion of it which is always ready to trample down a woman if she is helpless, and to hunt her down if she is strong enough to help herself—all this was gone by forever. ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... unsettled land in private hands as to afford room for an immense future population, although the crown not only withheld its grants, but annihilated its soil. If this be the case, then the only effect of this avarice of desolation, this hoarding of a royal wilderness, would be to raise the value of the possessions in the hands of the great private monopolists, without any adequate check to the growing ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... this, however, you would have a false idea of the military hospital if you thought of it as a place of mournful desolation. Doubtless our earlier patients regained their spirits more quickly, having no years of suffering behind them. But the quiet and serious resignation which reigns in the hospital of to-day does not exclude a certain sweetness; the wounded man appreciates the intelligent and devoted ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... beyond our sympathy," wailed Iris, uncovering her swimming eyes for a fleeting look at him. Even in the utter desolation of the moment she could not help marveling that this queer-mannered sailor, who spoke like a gentleman and tried to pose as her inferior, who had rescued her with the utmost gallantry, who carried his Quixotic zeal to the point of first supplying ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... thick as hail, of foes met in deadly fray, of shielding my darling's form with mine—there, where all was smoke and darkness and blood and horror—and dying gladly in his stead. Or the scene changed from horror to desolation, and, with a dreadful sense of isolation on me, alone in the darkness I wandered up and down, blindly searching for him I never found; or finding him, perhaps, covered with ghastly wounds, and dead, quite dead; and then starting broad awake with ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... unfortunately too feeble to bring vividly before my readers the picture such as I beheld it here, and to describe to them the desolation, the extent and height of these lava-masses. I seemed to stand in a crater, and the whole country appeared only a burnt-out fire. Here lava was piled up in steep inaccessible mountains; there stony rivers, whose ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... crushed by his great desolation, and Uri Bram seized the moment. He was not given to speech, this man, and that which followed was the longest in his life, save one long afterward ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... and in the Gold Parlour she found the Lady Lucy Raincy—Lady Lucy in tears, Lady Lucy in a pleasant fluffy desolation of woe. She flung her arms about the girl's neck and wept ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... war, however it might enrich the English soldiers, was ruinous to the king himself, who bore all the charges of the armament, without reaping any solid or durable advantage from it. That if the present disorders of France continued, that kingdom would soon be reduced to such a state of desolation, that it would afford no spoils to its ravagers, if it could establish a more steady government, it might turn the chance of war in its favor, and by its superior force and advantages be able to repel the present victors. That ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... whispered her name. Her eyes opened and gazed on him, and then at the desolation around her, and she closed them ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... size and isolation are more beautiful than young ones and are little likely to be injurious to health, and ends them by raising mounds and sticking into them dense belts of quick-growing trees like poplars to hide as speedily as possible the desolation of bricks and mortar he has created. It is this senseless outdoor work of the builder and his nurseryman which stands most in need of revision from time to time in suburban residences, but which rarely receives it from a silly notion, amounting to tree worship, which prohibits the cutting ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... phantasmal, something belonging to another world. There were times when all his journeying through steaming swamplands and forests of teak and satin-wood and over indigo lagoons and mountain-passes of moonlit desolation seemed utterly and unfathomably foolish. But he fought back such moods, as though they were a weakness. He let nothing deter him. He stuck to his ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... alliterative titles, such as "The Deepening of Desolation," "Elizabeth's Elopement," and "Tom Truxton's Trust." Had not the three elements mentioned in the title, "Sun, Sand and Solitude," practically made the story possible, it would never have been used; even so, it is really too alliterative. Usually, the ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... them. Little beads of perspiration sparkled on the bare neck, and the wind played among the streaming mass of his black hair. But she had no eyes for this. From the moment when he had unceremoniously forced her on this journey of horror and desolation her wounded pride had smothered every other emotion. Her soul hungered for one thing—escape. Thwarted though her other attempts had been, she meant to try again. To try, and try, until he grew sick of holding a woman against her will. The unexpected ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... usually begin among the inhabitants of close and dirty houses, who breathe unwholesome air, take little exercise, and wear dirty clothes. There the infection is generally hatched, and spreads its desolation far and wide. If dirty people cannot be removed as a common nuisance, they ought at least to be avoided as infectious, and all who regard their own health should keep at a distance from their habitations. Infectious diseases are often communicated ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... peace neglected by our fathers during that stirring period. While France was wasted by war, till she at length found in her own desolation a miserable defence against invaders, the English gathered in their harvests, adorned their cities, pleaded, traded, and studied in security. Many of our noblest architectural monuments belong to that age. Then rose the fair chapels of New College ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of what passed in the town, including the desolation wrought by the fearful tempest of hail, which, being in their cave, both he and the camel escaped without harm. On the next evening from his post of outlook up the tree, where he had now some difficulty in hiding himself because the hail had stripped off all its leaves, he saw Marut and myself brought ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... separation. He referred again to her agonized words, that a union was impossible, that she dared not wed him; it was sin even to love him; that in the tumultuary, yet delicious emotions she had experienced, she had forgotten, utterly forgotten in what it must end—the agony of desolation for herself, and, if he so loved her, for Stanley also—and again he conjured her to explain their meaning. They had been separated, after that fearful interview, by a hasty summons for him to rejoin his camp; and when he returned, she had vanished. He ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... window, and drank a bottle of ginger beer with a sacramental air. The little old lady asked him, a trifle archly, after his sister, and he promised to bring her again some day. "I'll certainly bring her," he said. Talking to the little old lady somehow blunted his sense of desolation. And then home through the white indistinctness in a state of melancholy that became at last so fine as ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... looking back to see how Louise bore his departure, and was shocked to observe that she had sunk upon a bank, with her arms resting on her knees and her head on her arms, in a situation expressive of the utmost desolation. ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... that her desolation found her most helpless. For then she thought of her dead child and of the husband whom she regarded as worse ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... She had the sense that she was vainly throwing away her last hope of happiness, yet she could do nothing, think of nothing, to save it. The conjecture flashed through her: "Should I be at peace if I gave him up?" and she remembered the desolation of the days after she had sent him away, and understood that that hope was vain. The tears welled through her lids and ran ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... lot of places," the Colonel concurred, while his view of her shining raiment had an invidious directness. Adela could read the tacit implication: "You're not in sorrow, in desolation." ...
— The Marriages • Henry James
... from general distress — robbery, freebooting, crime in its darkest and ugliest aspects; bands of hungry men, ruined and beggared, partly perhaps through misfortune, but partly through their own fault, wandering about the country ravaging and robbing, leaving desolation behind them, and too often, if opposed, committing acts of brutal cruelty upon defenceless victims, ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... he forgot the presence of the stern-faced man who was watching him and listening to him; he could see once more only the long months and years of that epic drama of one against one, of pursuit and flight, of hunger and cold, of the Long Nights filled with the desolation of madness and despair. He triumphed over himself, and it was Conniston who spoke from within him. It was the Englishman who told how terribly John Keith had been punished, and when he came to the final days in the lonely little cabin in the edge of ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... permit the suffering which this war daily entails. It's all of the earth, earthy. Alford," she added, in low, passionate utterance, "I could believe in a devil more easily than in a God; and yet my unbelief sinks me into the very depths of a hopeless desolation. What am I? A mere little atom among these mighty forces and passions which rock the world with their violence. Oh, I was so happy! and now I am crushed by some haphazard bullet ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... have got the letter that I wrote before I left Mistletoe, and which I directed to Mr. Surbiton's. There was not much in it,—except a word or two as to your going and as to my desolation, and just a reminiscence of the hunting. There was no reproach that you should have left me without any farewell, or that you should have gone so suddenly, after saying so much, without saying more. I wanted you to feel that you had made me very happy, and not to feel that ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
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