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More "Dismal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the streets, London appeared a dismal, phantom city. The tall houses vanishing in darkness, the unending noise, the sudden and vague figures passing; some with unclean gaze, others in mysterious haste, the courtesans springing from hansoms and entering their ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... and mouth, and chin A dismal sight presented; And as the snuff got further in, Sincerely she repented. In vain she ran about for ease, She could do nothing ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... garden gate. She started to her feet, determined to execute her project; but she was too late for the appointed signal was heard through the chill gloom of the night. Unhappy woman! The light sound of George de Croisenois' palms striking one upon the other resounded in her ears like the dismal tolling of the funereal bell. She stooped to light a candle at the fire, but her hand trembled so that she could scarcely effect her object. She felt sure that George was still in the garden, though she had made no answer to his signal. She ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... was. The approach now, is one of the finest things in the country: you see the house in the most surprising manner. I declare, when I got back to Sotherton yesterday, it looked like a prison—quite a dismal old prison." ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... were all of us glad enough to get away. I know I sat silent, and motionless, just where he placed me, and stared back across the widening water at the desolate, dismal scene. How lonely, and heart-sickening it was, those few log houses against the hill, the blackened stumps littering the hillside, and the gloomy forest beyond. The figures of a few men were visible along the beach, ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... evening of my arrival!—a bleak dreary evening at the close of January, made still more dismal by a drizzling rain that had never ceased falling since I left my father's snug little house at Briarwood in Warwickshire. I had had to change trains three times, and to wait during a blank and miserable hour and a quarter, or so, at small obscure ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon
... has been your stay for long years. You remember how sad and dreary was the world yesterday. How dismal everything appeared, with not a glimpse of the blue sky. But look now at all this," and Douglas threw out his hand in an eloquent gesture. "See what a change has taken place in a short time. The greyness is gone, and look how blue is the sky, and how bright and warm the sun. Surely ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... right hand descended many times with a force that brought dismal howls from the unlucky culprit—so many times and with such force that the girl began to fear that Jimmy would be fatally injured. Jimmy likewise entertained that fear, for his howls grew more shrill, laden with mingled terror and pain, until the piercing ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... of its surface into the water that lay upon the ice and brought up a load of slush at every step; yet the going would have been still worse without them. The recollection of the six miles we trudged across that lake is a dismal recollection of utter fatigue, of mechanical lifting and falling of encumbered feet with the recurring feeling that it would be impossible to lift them any more. All across that lake I ate snow, and that and ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... through the casement and rustling the light leaves of the tall poplar as they rest against the window panes, and the great round tears as they fall with a dull, heavy drop, drop on his lonely pillow, are the only sounds that break the dismal stillness, excepting now and then, when a great sob, too mighty to be choked down, bursts from the little, overcharged heart. And then Harry fancies he feels, through the thin coverlet and torn night dress, the huge black paws of these same bears grasping the tender round shoulder, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... dismal rain Came down in slanting lines, And wind, that grand old harper, smote His thunder-harp of pines. A ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... listen to their dismal croakings and hurried after the Toads. Being able to make longer jumps than they could, he soon caught up with them, and they all journeyed on together. The Toads were so pleased that one of their cousins was brave enough to join them that they made him very welcome and treated him ...
— Mother West Wind "How" Stories • Thornton W. Burgess
... you have too many windows on the "cold side" of a house, give them double sashes (not double panes), and "weather-strip" them. Unpainted trimmings should be of hardwood. Yellow pine finishes up well. Butternut is brighter than walnut. Cherry makes a room cheerful. Walnut is dull and dismal. ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... a dull sense of oppression. What a dismal house it was! The flood of life seemed to roll past and leave it always just above high-water mark. Nothing in it ever changed—neither the people, nor the family portraits, nor the heavy furniture and ugly plate, nor the vulgar ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... hand, and it seems will continue so until it pleases the Lord to pour down his Spirit from on high, or else by some sharp awakening dispensation rouse up drowzy souls out of the lethargy wherein they are fallen, &c. It is many years since the sun fell low upon Scotland, many a dismal day hath it seen since 1649. At that time our reformation mounted towards its highest horizon, and since we left our building on that excellent foundation laid by our honoured forefathers, we have still moved from ill to worse, and is like still ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... a fire the Apostle Peter warmed himself," said the student, stretching out his hands to the fire, "so it must have been cold then, too. Ah, what a terrible night it must have been, granny! An utterly dismal long night!" ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... was a dismal, and for the most of the family, a sleepless one. The morning rose once more, but it brought no cheering sound of blessed rain-drops. The air was still hot ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... you, governor, why can't I sell 'em? Yet have I walked a mile and a half along this dismal place, offering these good and cheap 'uns; ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... wore gloves and top hats—a vanity no Mountjoy boy ever succumbed to, except under dire necessity. Yet it was clear they were not homeward bound, for no trunks encumbered the lobby, and no suggestion of Dulce Domum betrayed itself in their dismal features. Nor had they been expelled, for though their looks might favour the supposition, they talked about the hour they should get back that evening, and wondered if Mrs Ashford would have supper ready for them in her own parlour. And it was equally plain that, ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... Great Britain and that of Ireland during the last century—in the one case showing progress and prosperity, advancing, it is not too much to say, by leaps and bounds, and in the other a stagnation which was relatively, if not absolutely, retrograde—is one of the most dismal factors in English politics. Those who would explain it by natural, racial, or religious considerations are probing too deep for an explanation which is in reality much closer at hand. If the external forces in the two countries throughout that period had been the same it would ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... nerves, when there was another noise which produced a thoroughly different effect, for a donkey from somewhere out on the common suddenly gave vent to its doleful extraordinary bray, ending in a most dismal squeaking yell, suggestive of all the wind being out ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... fury of their wrath, is always exceedingly loath to pass the terrible gulf that divides reform from revolution. He knows how rarely it happens that genuine liberty is not disarmed in the passage, and what sufferings must be undergone by those who live by their labour during the dismal intervals between the sudden destruction of one form of society and the gradual settlement of another. Such a man, however, has no type in a Victor de Mauleon. The circumstances of his life had placed this strong nature at war with society, and corrupted into misanthropy ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... magnificently furnished; they then passed through several spacious rooms, in the same style of grandeur; but all appeared forsaken and desolate. A long gallery came next, it was very dark, just light enough to show that instead of a wall on one side, there was a grating of iron which parted off a dismal dungeon, from whence issued the groans of those victims whom the cruel giant reserved in confinement for his own ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... Tunis, my companion, a Russian, opened the window—to spit! On the first of these occasions, I got a glimpse of a large heap of immense stones, which were pointed out to me as the ruins of Carthage, and a grove of olives, looking dismal exceedingly in the drizzling rain. On the second occasion, I saw the lakes, and a solitary Tunisian sentinel. This soldier was dressed much in the Turkish costume, and I should scarcely have known him from an Osmanli, but that ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... a dismal tea at Colonel Carvel's house in Locust Street that evening Virginia did not touch a mouthful, and the Colonel merely made a pretence of eating. About six o'clock Mrs. Addison Colfax had driven in from Bellegarde, nor could it rain fast enough or hard enough to wash the foam from her panting ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... time to the cheese and butter, in a brief visit to London, where he had no means to walk the hospitals, and in an attempt to practise with little or no qualification at Aldborough itself, present a rather dismal history of apprenticeship which taught nothing. But Love was, for once, most truly and literally Crabbe's solace and his salvation, his master and his patron. When he was barely eighteen, still an apprentice, and ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... economy on the part of the agents sent out, the dissension and jealousy aroused by every such attempt, as well as the absence of the means of transport by land and sea through the methods supplied by science to-day, resulted in a series of dismal failures, which placed an undeserved stigma upon the character of the soil, climate, and resources of Assiniboia. It took more than fifty years of subsequent effort to remove ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... most unfilial disgust, "HIS OLD MAN." It appeared that, like most great actors, he was a very different personage before and behind the curtain. Kings, who are miserable and gloomy through the five acts of a dismal tragedy, and who must needs die at the end of it, are your merriest knaves over a tankard at the Shakspeare's Head. Your stage fool shall be the dullest dog that ever spoiled mirth with sour and discontented looks. Jabez Buster, his employment being over at Mr Clayton's theatre, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... kind to say so, my dear, but you can't keep on making delightful idiots go down with the public. That was what I was thinking when you came in and found me looking so dismal. I had stopped in the middle of a most exciting scene because I had discovered that I was poking ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... his garden with the dawn. Hard exercise is the best of opiates for dismal reflections. The General discomposed his daughter by offering to accompany her on her morning ride before breakfast. She considered that it would fatigue him. 'I am not a man of eighty!' he cried. He could have wished ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... did not show a bad taste; for though the other daughters were as ugly as their hideous ma, Mary Shum was a pretty little pink, modest creatur, with glossy black hair and tender blue eyes, and a neck as white as plaster of Parish. She wore a dismal old black gownd, which had grown too short for her, and too tight; but it only served to show her pretty angles and feet, and bewchus figger. Master, though he had looked rather low for the gal of his ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... A dismal dreary day. The fog had crept slowly over the city and enveloped every object within its reach. There was fog clinging to turrets, spires and towers, fog in the streets, fog in the alleys, fog in the ditches—all was ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... brave men in the kingdom of Hrothgar the Dane, and yet again did they strive to maintain the dignity of the great hall, Heorot, and to uphold the honour of their king. But through twelve dismal years the Grendel took its toll of the bravest in the realm, and to sleep in the place that Hrothgar had built as monument to his magnificent supremacy, ever meant, for the sleeper, shameful death. ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... the dismal place. "Go home, madame," he said, addressing Eve, "we will follow you.—Well, my dear friend" (turning to David), "so you allowed them to catch you! Why did you come out? How came you ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... to Florian's, where the assembled crowd were holding an eager and stormy discussion to which the tenor's arrival put an end. In one corner, near a window looking out on the colonnade, gloomy, with a fixed gaze and rigid attitude, Emilio was a dismal image of despair. ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... a vessel hurled, A dismal wreck, upon the rockbound shoal, Around its hulk th' encircling billows curled, Now thro' its splintered deck the wavelet stole, Then, issuing forth, it gurgled through a hole Staved by the tempest's fury in its side, Afar off did its shattered timbers roll, Its treasures ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... fail—" After leaving the elector, Antonio directed his steps toward the prison near the palace of the doge. The porter that stood near the grated door looked searchingly at the mask that presumed to tarry before those dismal gates whereof he ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... remember, too, being lifted—weak and miserable with toothache—in my father's arms to catch the first sight of English shores as we neared the mouth of the Thames; and then the dismal inn by the docks where we first took shelter. The dreary room where we children slept the first night, its dingy ugliness and its barred windows, still come back to me as a vision of horror. Next day, like angels of rescue, came an aunt ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... midst of all this bloodshed, at the most tragic moment of the dismal tragedy, behold the strangest of ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... observe the enemy; but were obliged to retire, and were pursued by the cossacks to the walls of the city. Between four and five o'clock next morning the poor inhabitants were roused from their sleep by the noise of the cannon, intermingled with the dismal shrieks and hideous yellings of the cossacks belonging to the Russian army. Alarmed at this horrid noise, I ascended the church-steeple, from whence I beheld the whole plain, extending from the little suburb to the forest, covered with the enemy's troops, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... we shall describe the dismal regions, where wicked spirits dwell, and over which they are reported to preside. The name commonly given to these regions is Hades or Tartarus, understood to signify hell. The passage leading thereto is a wide dark cave, through which one has to pass ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... cry, nothing but feel a desolate old woman whose life's been a failure, and now is nearly over, and age is so cruel? But Katharine said to me, 'I am happy. I'm very happy.' And then I thought, though it all seemed so desperately dismal at the time, Katharine had said she was happy, and I should have a son, and it would all turn out so much more wonderfully than I could possibly imagine, for though the sermons don't say so, I do believe the world is meant for us to be happy in. She told me that ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... was morning, about noon,—a wet and rather dismal spring day. The half-spread leaves seemed to tap at the window, with an appeal to be taken in; the primroses, that showed golden upon the grass at the roots of the trees, just beyond the smooth-shorn grass of the lawn, were ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... brief, matter-of-fact, and discouraging, as long as the half-year lasted, and there was not much to be gathered about him from Tom, on his return for the Easter holidays, but soon poor Hector wrote a long dismal letter to Margaret. ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... enticed away from English standards of conduct. [Footnote: Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation, ch. 4.] Mrs. Alice Morse Earle has emphasized wisely [Footnote: Two Centuries of Costume in America; N. Y., 1903.] that the "sad-colored" gowns and coats mentioned in wills were not "dismal"; the list of colors so described in England included (1638) "russet, purple, green, tawny, deere colour, orange colour, buffs and scarlet." The men wore doublets and jerkins of browns and greens, and cloaks with red and ...
— The Women Who Came in the Mayflower • Annie Russell Marble
... but she thought she had better stay. The lunch was so badly cooked and so meagre that Louise fancied they were beginning to starve themselves, and wanted to cry into her tea-cup. The woman who waited wore such dismal black, and went about with her eyes staring and her mouth tightly pursed, and smelt faintly of horses. It was Mrs. Newton; she had let Louise in when she came, and she was the only servant whom ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... and dreary, but not old enough to be quaint. As far as I could see most of them are let in lodgings, furnished and unfurnished, and almost every door has three bells to it. Here and there the ground floors have been made into shops of the commonest kind; it's a dismal street in every way. I found Number 20 was to let, and I went to the agent's and got the key. Of course I should have heard nothing of the Herberts in that quarter, but I asked the man, fair and square, how long they had left ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... the flames the word 'Jesus,' which she so often repeated. The executioner repaired in the evening to Brother Isambart, full of consternation, and confessed himself; he felt persuaded that God would never pardon him. One of the English King's secretaries said aloud, on returning from the dismal scene: 'We are lost; we have burned ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... look!" exclaimed Olivia, as she stood on the threshold of the warm firelit room; and then a swift transition of thought carried her back to the dismal little dining-room at Galvaston Terrace, with its black smouldering fire, and the damp clinging to the window-panes, and an involuntary shiver crossed her as she knelt ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... mind to remain in ignorance of who Babette was, for I could pretty well guess what she would be like. I pictured her to myself as a flower that had sprung up in a corner of these dull courtyards, like a ray of sun shining through the sepulchral gloom of these dismal passages. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... cycle of seven or eight thousand years, when our Western humanity, having left the primitive gods that we see here, to embrace the Christian conception, which, even yesterday, made it live, is in way of denying everything, and struggles before the enigma of death in an obscurity more dismal and more fearful than in the commencement of the ages. (More dismal and more fearful still in this, that plea of youth is gone.) From all parts of Europe curious and unquiet spirits, as well as mere idlers, turn their steps towards Thebes, the ancient ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... and therefore necessarily beyond the experience of an American—it is somewhat remarkable, that, while we stood gazing at this kitchen, I was haunted and perplexed by an idea that somewhere or other I had seen just this strange spectacle before. The height, the blackness, the dismal void, before my eyes, seemed as familiar as the decorous neatness of my grandmother's kitchen; only my unaccountable memory of the scene was lighted up with an image of lurid fires blazing all round the dim ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... such grace as patience in hell with him who has lost himself: here will also be wanting a bottom for patience, to wit, the providence of God; for a providence of God, though never so dismal, is a bottom for patience to the afflicted; but men go not to hell by ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... after a time, then Staines, and as the twilight came on the coach was going at a good pace, with the last rays of sunset to the left behind it, and the dark stretch of Hounslow Heath, with its dismal gallows, in front. Suddenly the coach stopped, and was surrounded by three men on horseback, armed with pistols, their faces hidden behind black crape masks. The ladies screamed, the men turned pale and trembled, the ...
— Golden Moments - Bright Stories for Young Folks • Anonymous
... fought as she crouched there in the dark corner. She pictured to herself the gloomy forest, the uncertainty of the way, and the struggle necessary before she could reach the mast-cutters. Cautiously she crept to the little window and peered out. How dismal and forbidding seemed the forest. She could see the tree-tops waving and the snow swirling before the wind. The prospect of going forth alone on such a night was ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... it, and throw it into a pool. Then the heaven melts with tenderness for the death of the bird; "it wails for it by raining, wailing a funeral wail." In Zululand women sometimes bury their children up to the neck in the ground, and then retiring to a distance keep up a dismal howl for a long time. The sky is supposed to melt with pity at the sight. Then the women dig the children out and feel sure that rain will soon follow. They say that they call to "the lord above" and ask him to send rain. If it comes they declare that "Usondo rains." In times of drought the Guanches ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... take Fieldhead on a lease (I thought it looked a dismal place, by-the-bye, to-night, as I passed it), and that it was your intention to settle a Miss Sykes there as mistress—to be married, in short, ha! ha! Now, which is it? Dora, I am sure. You said ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... composing his history, wrote several tracts against the measures of the covenanters, and those engaged in the opposition of Charles I. In a piece of his called Irene, he harangues the King, nobility, gentry, clergy and commons, about their mutual mistakes, jealousies and fears; he lays before them the dismal consequences of a civil war, from indisputable arguments, and the histories of past times. The great marquis of Montrose writ a letter to him, desiring him to print this Irene, as the best means to ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... weariness of life, surprise them on a sudden, and they can think of nothing else: continually suspecting, no sooner are their eyes open, but this infernal plague of melancholy seizeth on them, and terrifies their souls, representing some dismal object to their minds; which now, by no means, no labour, no persuasions they can avoid, they cannot be rid ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... sat, the numbers growing Less, each going To his fate— What a dismal occupation! My ...
— Punch Volume 102, May 28, 1892 - or the London Charivari • Various
... crime acquired during his experience in a penal settlement. Charles Reade has drawn the interior of a house of correction in England, and Victor Hugo has shown how a French convict fares after the fulfilment of his sentence. But no writer—so far as I am aware—has attempted to depict the dismal condition of a felon during his ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... many of these Musicians. Here you should have an affected Vallet, who Mimick'd the Behaviour of his Master, leaning carelessly against the Window, with his Head on one side, in a languishing Posture, whining, in a low, mournful Voice, some dismal Complaint; while, from his sympathizing Theorbo, issued a Base no less doleful to the Hearers. In Opposition to him was set up perhaps a Cobler, with the wretched Skeleton of a Gitarr, battered and waxed together by his own Industry, and who with three Strings out of Tune, and his ...
— Incognita - or, Love & Duty Reconcil'd. A Novel • William Congreve
... Night, O dearest, dearest Night; Spread now thy thickest, darkest Veil: And you great Deity of Dreams Succour a faithful Lover once With Silence and with deepest Shades; You never yet help'd with your dismal Black A Heart more true, ...
— Amadigi di Gaula - Amadis of Gaul • Nicola Francesco Haym
... roar, broken by an occasional cry of pain and a dismal groan of terror. There was a crash as if a mountain had been ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... Irving met one of his fellow-revellers, who told him that on the way borne, after draining the parting bumper, he bad fallen through a grating in the sidewalk, which had been carelessly left open, into the vault beneath. It was impossible to climb out, and at first the solitude was rather dismal, he said; but several of the other guests fell in, in the course of the evening, and, on the whole, they had quite ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... of New York and receives the fantastic impression that some giant architect has made for the city thousands of houses in replica. These dismal brownstone buildings are so like without, and alas! so like within, that one wonders how their owners know their homes from one another. I have had the pleasure of making over many of these gloomy barracks into homes for other people, and when we left the old Irving Place ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... look for no recompense—not even to be born in heaven—but seek ... the benefit of men, to bring back those who have gone astray, to enlighten those living in dismal error, to put away all sources of sorrow and pain ...
— The Essence of Buddhism • Various
... as of the physical, more than half take place in the period of teething. The more one thinks of the parallelism, the closer it looks, until the likeness seems as droll as dismal. Oh, the sweet, unquestioning infancy which takes its food from the nearest breast; which knows but three things,—hunger and food and sleep! There is only a little space for this delight. In our seventh ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... day for visiting the sepulchres in the churches. Turiddu took me to the cathedral, and we saw a procession moving slowly down the nave. It turned up one of the aisles and entered a sepulchre which had been prepared, passing between a double file of dismal creatures entirely shrouded in white except for two eye-holes, like those ghouls that issued stealthily from charnel-houses in German fairy tales, and used to pursue me in dreams when I was a boy. One by one the lights on the altar ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... was in keeping with the general dismal effect. La Cibot heard a heavy footstep, and the asthmatic wheezing of a virago within, and Mme. Sauvage presently showed herself. Adrien Brauwer might have painted just such a hag for his picture of Witches starting for the Sabbath; a stout, unwholesome slattern, five feet six inches ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... but deep stream, which flowed into the creek. This branch ran through a dense swamp—the only one I knew of in that part of the state. In the early spring its surface was overflowed with water. It was covered with a thick growth of trees, and the place was as dismal, dark, and disagreeable as ...
— Down The River - Buck Bradford and His Tyrants • Oliver Optic
... and he fancied the air grew purer as he advanced into the north, though there was hardly any perceptible change of elevation. The country grew drier, however, as he turned the head springs of the great cypress swamp—the counterbalance of the Dismal Swamp of Virginia—receded from the Chesapeake waters, and approached the tributaries of the Atlantic. At nine o'clock he entered the court-house cluster of Georgetown, a little place of a few hundred people, pitched nearly at the centre of the county one generation ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... none had fallen to Cicely's lot, and though, to an active girl, there was no real danger where the torchbearers lined the way, still there was so much difficulty that she was a laggard in reaching the likeness of Acheron, and could see no father near as she laid herself down in Charon's dismal boat, dimly rejoicing that this time it was to return to the realms of day, and yet feeling as if she should never reach them. A hand was given to assist her from the boat by one of the torchbearers, a voice strangely familiar ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... be near God in peace and love without fulfilling certain mental conditions—that he would not have her just as she was now, filled her with an undefined but terribly real misery, only the more distressing that it was vague with the vagueness of the dismal negation from which ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... walk quite a mile and a half, and at the end of that time she found herself in a much poorer part of the large suburb where Middleton School was situated. The houses here were of a humble description—not even semidetached, but standing in long, dismal rows, a good many of them backing on to a railway-cutting. These houses boasted of no small gardens, but ran flush with the road. They were built of the universal yellow brick, and were about as ugly as ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... opportunities afforded for its mutilation, and if it were to get through the House at all, it would be only in such a form as to render it wholly useless for the objects which its promoters desired it to accomplish. This dismal conviction was very speedily {174} verified. When the Bill got into committee, Lord Lyndhurst moved an amendment to the effect that the question of enfranchisement should precede that of disfranchisement. Now this ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... the clergy was something terrible. "These corruptions were mounted to the most enormous height in that dismal period of the Church which we have now before us. Both in the eastern and western provinces, the clergy were, for the most part, composed of a most worthless set of men, shamefully illiterate and stupid, ignorant, more especially in ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... what is gained in the other. In rice countries, where the crop not only requires a very moist soil, but where, in a certain period of its growing, it must be laid under water, the effects of a drought are much more dismal. Even in such countries, however, the drought is, perhaps, scarce ever so universal as necessarily to occasion a famine, if the government would allow a free trade. The drought in Bengal, a few years ago, might probably have occasioned a very great ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... room was no longer the smoky, dismal, miserable place which it was formerly. It was neatly papered; it was swept clean; there was a cheerful fire, which burnt quite clearly: the mulatto woman was cleanly dressed, and, rising from her work, she clasped her hands together with an ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... and the troops were landed about three miles below the fort, without opposition. Foreseeing that the works would be attacked the next morning on the land side, the garrison evacuated the fort in the night, and took refuge in a deep and extensive swamp, called the Dismal, which could not be penetrated without difficulty, even by ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
... like fate; it eludes, but cannot be eluded. The terror it inspires in the smaller creatures—rats, rabbits, chipmunks—is pitiful to behold. A rat pursued by a weasel has been known to rush into a room, uttering dismal cries, and seek the protection of a man in bed. A chipmunk will climb to the top of a tall tree to elude it, and then, when followed, let go its hold and drop with a cry of despair toward the ground. A friend of mine, walking along the road early one morning, saw a rat rush over the fence and ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... speak with conviction. The sea tumbled all around them, a mighty grey waste. And the shore seemed very far away. A dismal outlook in truth. Moreover ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the clouds, and illuminated some of the distant objects very vividly. The white sails of a ship caught it, and gleamed brilliant as sunny snow, the hull being scarcely visible, and the sea around dark; other smaller vessels too, so that they looked like heavenly-winged things just alighting on a dismal world. Shifting their sails, perhaps, or going on another tack, they almost disappear at once in the obscure distance. Islands are seen in summer sunshine and green glory; their rocks also sunny and their beaches white; while other islands, for no apparent reason, are in deep shade, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... all events sound decidedly dismal. That's what I call a genuine wedding march, just the same as ...
— Turandot, Princess of China - A Chinoiserie in Three Acts • Karl Gustav Vollmoeller
... eight clubs myself, and know that one year Fitz-Boodle, George Savage, Esq. (unless it should please fate to remove my brother and his six sons, when of course it would be Fitz-Boodle, Sir George Savage, Bart.), will appear in the dismal category. There is that list; down I must go in it:—the day will come, and I shan't be seen in the bow-window, someone else will be sitting in the vacant armchair: the rubber will begin as usual, and yet somehow ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Alas; alas! No angel! And the face you think so fair, 'Tis but the dismal frame-work of these rocks That makes it seem so; and the world I come from— Alas, alas, too many faces there Are but fair vizors to black hearts below, Or only serve to bring the wearer woe! But to yourself—If haply ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... loyal effort to follow her thought, but it led him into dismal regions where he found himself unnerved. "I don't know, upon my soul, where you get these notions of yours, my dear. I don't indeed. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... past! and now the distant bell (For deep and pensive thought had held her there) Toll'd midnight out, with long-resounding knell, While dismal echoes ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... blood.—Next night—a dreary night! Cast on the wildest of the Cyclad Isles, Where never human foot had mark'd the shore, These ruffians left me.—Yet believe me, Arcas, Such is the rooted love we bear mankind, All ruffians as they were, I never heard A sound so dismal as their parting oars.— Then horrid silence follow'd, broke alone By the low murmurs of the restless deep, Mixt with the doubtful breeze that now and then Sigh'd thro' the mournful woods. Beneath a shade I sat me down, more heavily oppress'd, More ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... Polly resumed his observations in the Wood Street warehouses once more, and had some dismal times. The shoal of fish waiting for the crumbs of employment ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... he went down to the London and St. Katherine Docks, passing under the shadow of the gaunt walls; and then along that dismal thoroughfare, Nightingale Lane, that looks like a passage between two great prisons; until at last, with moderate pace, and with a certain anxious, nervous look, as if he did not wish himself to be seen, he arrived at the entrance ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... on an autumn morning—a thick canopy of grey clouds overspread the heavens—and the dismal half-light which prevailed in the streets of Stockholm made it difficult to decide whether or not the sun had yet risen. A cold wind blew across from Lake Maeler, and caused the few persons who had as yet left their houses to hasten their steps along the deserted pavement. Suddenly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... cannot sleep. May I stay here? It is so dismal down there, and—and I was afraid. Where ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... desolate and deserted, as they made a circuit of the surroundings of the mill. It certainly offered no attractions to visitors, after nightfall. The crazy old structure, unpainted and blackened with age, made a dark, dismal picture against the dull sky. The water fell with a monotonous roar over the dam; the cold dripping of water sounded within the shell of the mill. The wind, by fits and starts, rattled loose boards and set stray shingles tattooing ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... It proved a dismal, crowded hole in which we were quartered like so many cattle, it being merely a small space forward, hastily boxed off by rough lumber, the sides and ends built up into tiers of bunks, the only ventilation and light furnished by the open hatch above. The place was clean enough, being newly ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... said, "that something disagreeable would happen to you there. I never will forget," she went on naively, "the dreary, dismal impression the place left on me the only time I was there—pouring rain and universal gloom and discomfort. We had to wait there a few hours to get one of the horses shod, once when I was driving with my ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... day becomes hopelessly rainy, and Shoemaker Schmidt is left alone at the dam, the rain that sounded so dismal at dawn proves to be a benefactor after all. There will be no woodsplitting today, no outdoor chores—for if it's too wet to go fishing, as mother insists, of course it's too wet to carry wood, or weed gardens or pick cucumbers for pickles. ...
— The Long Ago • Jacob William Wright
... February, and partly in respect of my own misfortunes, which you are going to read about. For I have often thought that January (which is mostly twelfth-cake and holiday time) is like the first four or five years of a little boy's life; then comes dismal February, and the working-days with it, when chaps begin to look out for themselves, after the Christmas and the New Year's heyday and merrymaking are over, which our infancy may well be said to be. Well can I recollect that bitter first of February, when I first launched out ...
— The Fatal Boots • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with the most peerless beauty which the city boasted. A new source of anguish added to the misery already sustained by the wretched Gonzago; his arm was paralyzed by the utter hopelessness of any attempt to emerge from the obscurity to which fate had condemned him; he brooded over the dismal futurity which opened before him; and, as a solace to these gloomy meditations, suffered his imagination to dwell upon the charms and graces of the lovely Giacinta, his kinsman's gentle bride. He saw ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various
... best crossing for the motor. I sent Meares and the dogs over with a can of petrol on arrival. After some twenty minutes he returned to tell me the motor had gone through. Soon after Campbell and Day arrived to confirm the dismal tidings. It appears that getting frightened of the state of affairs Campbell got out a line and attached it to the motor—then manning the line well he attempted to rush the machine across the weak place. A man on the ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... I began with saying, besought their mother to let them run out and play in the new snow; for, though it had looked so dreary and dismal, drifting downward out of the gray sky, it had a very cheerful aspect, now that the sun was shining on it. The children dwelt in a city, and had no wider play-place than a little garden before the house, divided by a white fence from the street, and with a pear-tree and two or three plum-trees ...
— The Snow-Image - A Childish Miracle • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... shall be ready to sail in three days, so it is not worth while writing to my father," said Cardo. "The thick fog which looked so dismal as I drove into Caer Madoc with him—how little I guessed it would culminate in the darkness which brought about the collision, and so unite me with my beloved wife. Valmai, if Providence ever arranged a marriage, it was ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... Charles to Lady Mary, with a dismal shake of his head, "how precarious is life! Here to-day, and in bed to-morrow. Support your aunt Mary, my dear Evelyn; she wishes to retire to rest. Indeed, we may as well all go to bed, for there will be ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... said Dorothea. "This funeral seems to me the most dismal thing I ever saw. It is a blot on the morning I cannot bear to think that any one should die and leave no ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... Cheops were squared and hewn; Think of the sea's dread monotone, Of the mournful wail from the pine-wood blown, Of the strange, vast splendors that lit the North, Of the troubled throes of the quaking earth, And the dismal tales the Indian told, Till the settler's heart at his hearth grew cold, And he shrank from the tawny wizard's boasts, And the hovering shadows seemed full of ghosts, And above, below, and on every side, The fear of his creed seemed verified;— And think, if his lot were now thine own, To grope ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... pictures, and for a fortnight enjoyed Venice grossly. One evening, coming back to his inn, he found Babcock waiting for him in the little garden beside it. The young man walked up to him, looking very dismal, thrust out his hand, and said with solemnity that he was afraid they must part. Newman expressed his surprise and regret, and asked why a parting had became necessary. "Don't be afraid I'm tired of you," ...
— The American • Henry James
... Piccadilly, and goes with her to one of the dens of sin that suffragettes see in their nightmares, and cross-examines her at length regarding her ancestry, her professional ethics and ideals, and her earnings at her dismal craft—and into the book goes a full report of the proceedings. He is entertained by an eminent Dutch jurist in Amsterdam—and upon the pages of the chronicle it appears that the gentleman is "waxy" and "a little pedantic," and that he is probably the sort of "thin, delicate, well ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... returned, however, after a short time, in safety, and reported the passage practicable, as the water was only three or four feet deep; so, taking Richard by the hand, he led him into the stream. It was a dismal and dangerous undertaking, wading thus through a deep and rapid current in darkness and cold, but they succeeded in ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... carried a rose in his mouth all the time of the dismal ceremony. It was a fairy rose, and he was told by his mother that he ought never to part with it. So he had kept it between his teeth, even when he laid his poor head upon the block, hoping vaguely that some chance would turn up in his favour. As ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... trace the tortuous course of popes and princes, duping one another with false hopes; saying what they did not mean, and meaning what they did not say. It is a very Slough of Despond, through which we must plunge desperately as we may; and we can cheer ourselves in this dismal region only by the knowledge that, although we are now approaching the spot where the mire is deepest, the hard ground ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... a man was born bad in his temper, 'twas Captain Bligh, that came from St. Tudy parish, and got himself known to all the world over that dismal business aboard the Bounty. Yes, Sir, that's the man—"Breadfruit Bligh," as they called him. They made an Admiral of him in the end, but they never cured his cussedness: and my grandfather, that followed his history (and good reason for why) from the ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... fur-capped divinities with sceptres of camel's hair, peering and poring in their one-windowed chambers over the minute preciousness of the labored canvas; how are they swept away and crushed into unnoticeable darkness! And in their stead, as the walls of the dismal rooms that enclosed them, and us, are struck by the four winds of Heaven, and rent away, and as the world opens to our sight, lo! far back into all the depths of time, and forth from all the fields that have been sown with human life, how the harvest ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... itself in orderly groups at the command of the superior, and Fra Antonio controlled himself with a supreme effort as a body of palace guards, in brilliant uniforms, scattered themselves among the black-robed friars. The heavy gates closed behind them, and the dismal tolling of the bell ended in a silence through which the heart-beats of Fra Antonio sounded in his ears louder and more ominous than the harsh tones of the summons ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... truths can be more advantageous to society than these here delivered, which represent virtue in all her genuine and most engaging charms, and make us approach her with ease, familiarity, and affection? The dismal dress falls off, with which many divines and some philosophers have covered her; and nothing appears but gentleness, humanity, beneficence, affability; nay, even at proper intervals, play, frolic, and gaiety. ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... torment them for ever. Can anything be greater blasphemy? But be it what it will, it is the natural consequence of all things being ordained from eternity, which are to come to pass in time. What a dismal picture of the blessed God! When I have read of some of the Popish massacres, I have been much shocked, and my very blood has run chill; much more so, when I have read of some religious rites of the heathens; such as their offering ...
— A Solemn Caution Against the Ten Horns of Calvinism • Thomas Taylor
... twenty-four hours. You will not have broken your bail; you'll have done nothing wrong. You can go to France, Germany or Siberia so long as you come back by the twentieth of May. Take it that I offer you a holiday in France for ten days. Surely it is better to spend a week with me than in that dismal house in Oakley Street, where the very door gives ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... sugar, and rusks. Not to be outdone he rejoined with ambergris, rosewater, a cut-work ruff, and a picture of the Magdalen. He was in the habit of taking pictures with him on his voyages. This interchange of courtesies was the one gleam of human kindness which lighted up for Ralegh his dismal journey. He dwells upon it gratefully in the journal he kept. The manuscript, in twenty large pages, is in the British Museum. It covers the period from August 19 to February 13. Off the Isle of Bravo, sickness ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... when super-refined as when ultra-bestial. He made a good stout effort to resist the pipe-smoke. Emilia's voice, her growing beauty, her simplicity, her peculiar charms of feature, were all conjured up to combat the dismal images suggested by that fatal, dragging-down smell. It was vain. Horrible pipe-smoke pervaded the memory of her. It seemed to his offended dainty fancy that he could never dissociate her from smoking-booths and abominably bad tobacco; and, let us ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Occasionally a night bird fluttered through the trees and a frog gave a dismal croak, but otherwise not a sound ...
— True to Himself • Edward Stratemeyer
... exclaim out," sighed Cordelia; "but it's just got to be done. I suppose I ought not to have told you, anyway, but I couldn't bear to go up to that dismal place ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... One dismal fact had become clear long before the Brownsville clinic was opened. The medical profession as a whole had ignored the tragic cry of womanhood for relief from forced maternity. The private practitioners, one after another, shook their heads and replied: "It cannot be done. It is against ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... of the system. They embittered the earlier part of his stay at Paris and instilled in him a deep, permanent aversion to abstinence and austerity. Had he come to Paris for this—to experience the dismal and depressing influences of his youth anew in ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... Glenuskie?' cried Ralf Percy. 'Look up; I verily thought you were sped by Death in bodily shape; but 'twas all an abominable grisly pageant got up by some dismal caitiffs.' ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... delicate child, he was starved on insufficient diet; and an eloquent passage in "Eothen" depicts his intellectual fall from the varied interests and expanding enthusiasm of liberal home teaching to the regulation gerund- grinding and Procrustean discipline of school. "The dismal change is ordained, and then—thin meagre Latin with small shreds and patches of Greek, is thrown like a pauper's pall over all your early lore; instead of sweet knowledge, vile, monkish, doggerel grammars and graduses, dictionaries ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... in circles, uttering dismal howls, and the pet bear was scrambling for the top of the ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders in the Great North Woods • Jessie Graham Flower
... course of his studies. "To poetry, like most infants, I devoted most of my time." From modern poetry he went back to the earlier sources, first with the idea of systematic reading and at last through Chaucer and Gower and early ballads, until he lost himself "in a dismal swamp of barbarous romances and lying Latin chronicles. I got hold of the Bibliotheca Monastica, containing a copious account of Anglo-Norman authors, with notices of their works, and set seriously to reading every one of them." One profit of his antiquarianism, however, was, as ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... carriage, brought me to the cathedral; an old haunt of mine. I had always venerated its lofty pillars, dim aisles, and mysterious arches. Last night they were more solemn than ever, and echoed no other sound than my steps. I strayed about the choir and chapels, till they grew so dark and dismal, that I was half inclined to be frightened; looked over my shoulder; thought of spectres that have an awkward trick of syllabling men's names in dreary places; and fancied a sepulchral voice exclaiming: "Worship my toe at Ghent; my ribs at ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... hours every day, that you may spend one with the prince, allow two hours to your dinner, and two hours in the projecting where to get one, you have still a fair time to yourself, and one half hour in a week, without question, to tell me that you are alive, and that in this dismal time of mutation, you are so far from change, that you continue even the ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... peonies, and the grate itself was aflame with yellow poppies. All this splendor and color, mingled with the sunshine falling through the honeysuckle vines at the windows in a leafy riot of dancing shadows over walls and floor, made of the usually dismal little room the veritable "bower" of Anne's imagination, and even extorted a tribute of admiration from Marilla, who came in to ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... translation, the last day will make but few graves; at least quick resurrections will anticipate lasting sepultures. Some graves will be opened before they be quite closed, and Lazarus be no wonder. When many that feared to die, shall groan that they can die but once, the dismal state is the second and living death, when life puts despair on the damned; when men shall wish the coverings of mountains, not of monuments, and annihilations shall ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... is actually all over! I was so low-spirited at the station yesterday, and this morning, when I woke, I couldn't seem to accept the dismal truth that you were really gone and the pleasant tramping and talking at an end. Ah, my boy! It has been such a rich holiday for me, and I feel under such deep and honest obligations to you for coming. I am putting out of my mind all memory of the time when I misbehaved toward you and ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... model had given the artist the horrors. This simulacrum rises out of the earth like an exhalation, and groups itself into shape above the spade with which all that is corporeal of its late owner has been interred. Please remark the uncomforted and dismal expression of the simulacrum. We must remember that the ghost or "Ka" is not the "soul," which has other destinies in the future world, good or evil, but is only a shadowy resemblance, condemned, as in the Egyptian creed, to dwell ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... an unlimited supply of pure soft water. Sometimes water from such ponds contains large amounts of vegetable matter, the result of decomposition of swampy or peaty material, as, for instance, from the ponds in the Dismal Swamp of Virginia, so that the water has a yellow, coffee-colored appearance. The appearance of such water is suspicious, but it need not be feared unless something more pernicious than the coloring matter ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... which, the coal having been worked out, the old engine, which had grown "dismal to look at," as one of the workmen described it, was pulled down; and then Robert, having obtained employment as a fireman at the Dewley Burn Colliery, removed with his family to that place. Dewley Burn, at this day, consists of a few old-fashioned low-roofed ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... found himself in a strange and truly foreign land, a queer, cold, dismal country inhabited by vast quantities of "second-class sahibs," as he termed the British lower middle-class and poor, a country of a strange greenness and orderedness, where there were white servants, ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... to an end for us a quarter of a year's captivity, and all the prisoners, at least, were glad when the dismal farce of Christmas under such ...
— Five Months on a German Raider - Being the Adventures of an Englishman Captured by the 'Wolf' • Frederic George Trayes
... ring, told an improbable story of a lady throwing it to him out of a window, and denied ever having seen Helena since the day of their marriage. The king, knowing Bertram's dislike to his wife, feared he had destroyed her; and he ordered his guards to seize Bertram, saying, "I am wrapt in dismal thinking, for I fear the life of Helena was foully snatched." At this moment Diana and her mother entered, and presented a petition to the king, wherein they begged his majesty to exert his royal power to compel Bertram to marry Diana, he having made her ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... ease whilst I was angry. Scorn and despite would have cured me in some reasonable time, which I despair of now. However, I am not displeased with it, and, if it may be of any advantage to you, I shall not consider myself in it; but let me beg, then, that you will leave off those dismal thoughts. I tremble at the desperate things you say in your letter; for the love of God, consider seriously with yourself what can enter into comparison with the safety of your soul. Are a thousand women, or ten thousand worlds, worth it? No, you cannot have so little reason left ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... which the sun could not evoke from its boundless fields of light comes out of the dark bosom of a cloud. A bright day promises so much, so builds our hopes, that our keenest disappointments seem to come on a radiant morning, but on a dismal day, when nothing has been promised, a straggling pleasure is accidentally found and is pressed the closer to the senses ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... of the Great Northern Terminus at King's Cross had not long been lighted, when a cab deposited a young lady and her luggage at the departure platform. It was an October twilight, cold and gray, and the place had a cheerless and dismal aspect to that solitary young traveller, to whom English life and an English ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... not yet risen. In the hollows the mists lay like lakes, and every stone and rock was wet and shining as though it had been washed in readiness for the coming day. The gravestones shone upon us like freshly scrubbed doorsteps. It was a most dismal spot, and I was so cold that I was afraid I would shiver, and Fiske might think I was nervous. So I moved briskly about among the graves, reading the inscriptions on the tombstones. Under the circumstances the occupation, to a less healthy mind, would have been depressing. My adversary, ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... long, dismal voyage that, in the face of the tempest—with short and tedious tacks that sometimes left us at the day's end little nearer our haven than at the beginning. And long before Margate was reached half of our company ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... rifle-shots snapped short his dismal revery. As he sprang to his feet he saw a squad of his own people, a dozen or so, galloping up the road, and a moment later four times as many men came out from behind the shoulder of the mountain in sharp pursuit. The pursued were bent low over the necks of their horses; from the crowd of ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... at present was indeed very dismal, even to those who preserved the blessing of health; to the sick, whose crippled limbs were tortured with excessive pain, it was insupportable. The ocean about us had a furious aspect, and seemed incensed at the presumption ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... illness. He had lived a lonely friendless life, holding himself aloof from his fellow-creatures; and there were neither neighbours nor friends to lament his ending. The vagabond boys of the neighbourhood had clustered round the door to witness the last dismal ceremony of Mr. Nowell's existence, and had hung about the shop-front for some time after the funeral cortege had departed, peering curiously down into the darksome area, and speculating upon the hoards of wealth which the old miser ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... the scene was bleak and dismal. Not a creature moved anywhere. Even the meadow, mice had already found the nights too chilly for their liking. Turkey Proudfoot was there alone, standing like a statue, as if he were waiting ...
— The Tale of Turkey Proudfoot - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... to be a sullen, melancholic, and disconsolate life, attended with many fears and sorrows. It is, alas! too evident, that many Christians are kept in bondage, almost all their lifetime, through fear of eternal death. How many dismal representations of sin and wrath, are in the souls of some Christians, which keep them in much thraldom? At least, who is it that is not once and often brought in bondage after conversion, and made to apprehend fearfully their own estate, who hath such constant ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... a chamber of death into which he was ushered, dismal—yet, of its sort, unique, marvelous. The room itself might have been the sleeping apartment of an empress—lofty, with white paneled walls, adorned simply with gilded lines; with high windows, closely curtained now, so that neither sound nor the light of day might penetrate ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... The sky was a dull gray, and a sickening drizzle was falling, mixed with a thick fog that made everything and everybody soggy and damp. It was a most dismal and disheartening Sunday, without a ray of cheerfulness in it, and Mr. and Mrs. Fenelby felt the burden of the day keenly. The house had the usual Sunday morning air of untidiness. It was a bad day on which to take up the ...
— The Cheerful Smugglers • Ellis Parker Butler
... to walk. She looked, to my ideas, so very young to be engaged in such an occupation as this, and her gloomy black frock appeared to be such an unnaturally grave garment for a mere child of her age, and looked so doubly dismal by contrast with the brilliant sunny lawn on which she stood, that I quite started when I first saw her, and eagerly asked my mother who she was. The answer informed me of the sad family story, which I have been just relating to you. Mrs. Welwyn had then been buried about three ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... is now approaching towards day. What is to be done must be done without a moment's delay. It is at length resolved to hazard the chance of passing it by canoe rather than encountering the untried perils of a dismal swamp. The daring leader puts his utmost strength to the test, striking the water right and left with excited vigor. His feeling is 'now or never'; for he knew this to be the most critical position of his whole ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... and, encasing the wicker-basket with the waterproof material, float down some favoring stream. On and on for hours in an unknown direction, over an unknown region, winged by the wind and ally of the storm, they went, until, in the dismal watches of the early morning, to darkness, uncertainty and the intensity of isolation a new horror was added. The murmur of plashing forest-streams, which had hitherto been the only sound greeting them from ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... shook her pillows, flashed a night- light on her watch. Quarter to three. It was a rather dismal hour, she thought, not near enough either midnight or morning. Tossing so long, she would be sleepless all ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... irremediable. The Indians had all stepped into the bark which was to carry them across, but their dogs remained upon the bank. As soon as these animals perceived that their masters were finally leaving the shore, they set up a dismal howl, and plunging all together into the icy waters of the Mississippi, they ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... north of Scotland, is covered with ice and snow the entire summer; and in the Island of South Georgia, which is in the same parallel as the center of England, the perpetual snow descends to the very sea-beach. The following is Captain Cook's description of this dismal place: 'We thought it very extraordinary,' he says, 'that an island between the latitudes of 54 and 55 should, in the very height of summer, be almost wholly covered with frozen snow, in some places many fathoms deep. . . . The head of the bay was terminated ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... have passed since that dismal storm in the spring of 1815, when Hamilton and I spent a long disconsolate night of enforced waiting, I still hear the roaring of the northern gale, driving round the house-corners as if it would wrench all eaves from the roof. It ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... the cracked plaster beneath. The whole place had a tone of yellowish-grey grime all over it, save where, in the centre of the room, on a rough double post, shaped like the guillotine, a scarlet cap of Liberty gave a note of lurid colour to the dismal surroundings. ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... intention, provident and wise; Which willed the fleet, from leaves of greenwood tree, Produced upon the beach in wondrous guise, That, bound for France, now ploughed the foaming sea, Should meet the king at night; that from surprise In that dark, dismal hour, amid his crew Worse panic and ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... first wife of Count Rodolphe illuminates the dismal story of his inglorious reign. Marguerite d'Alamandi has been confused in the tradition with Marguerite de Grandson, the second wife of Rodolphe. It is Marguerite d'Alamandi, and not the other Marguerite who is the heroine of the tale which has been elaborated into a moving little ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... (no) and his signature. The frightfulness of his intention stood like a spectre before me. I clapped one hand upon the other and wept. I made inquiries in the city and in the neighbouring places, but to no purpose. Oh, that dreadful, dismal day, when everywhither I went something seemed to whisper in my heart, 'Khalid is no more.' It was the first time in my life that I felt the pangs of separation, the sting of death and sorrow. The days and months passed, heartlessly ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... Margaret gathered that most of the junior members of the house were going down to the sea to bathe—but her own thoughts were of themselves sufficient to keep her awake. She had fallen asleep the night before with the dismal thought in her mind that though her long desired wish to stay in a house full of young people had been most unexpectedly realised, the very first thing she had done was to declare enmity with all of them, and the depressing fact ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... her gaze, flinching inwardly, as one sometimes does when credited with a feeling that one no longer fully deserves. A dismal perplexity came to her, a little pang of ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... was just rising. Three miles beyond the village the steppe spread out and nothing was visible except the dry, monotonous, sandy, dismal plain covered with the footmarks of cattle, and here and there with tufts of withered grass, with low reeds in the flats, and rare, little-trodden footpaths, and the camps of the nomad Nogay tribe just visible far away. The absence of shade and the austere aspect of the place were striking. The ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... In this dismal plight they continued till about six o'clock the following morning, when the ship parted from one of her largest anchors, and drifted on towards Dymchurch-wall, about three miles to the west of Hythe. This wall is formed by immense piles, and cross pieces of ...
— Thrilling Stories Of The Ocean • Marmaduke Park
... I'll bring Miss Ridge back in half an hour. You wouldn't have me wander about this dismal old boat alone, would you? Smoke a cigar, Hugh, and I'll take care of your sister while you count the stars." He ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... upon it, Sailed upon that sluggish water, Covered with its mould of ages, Black with rotting water-rushes, Rank with flags and leaves of lilies, Stagnant, lifeless, dreary, dismal, Lighted by the shimmering moonlight, And by will-o'-the-wisps illumined, Fires by ghosts of dead men kindled, In their ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... chamber of Duke William may be seen another recess in the thick walls, still smaller and more dismal, to which a ruined window now gives more light than in the days when poor young Arthur of Brittany looked sadly through its loop-holes over a wide extent of country, now all cultivation and beauty, but probably then bristling with forts and towers, all in the hands of his hard-hearted uncle John. ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... a suitable noun to each of the following adjectives, without repeating any word: good, great, tall, wise, strong, dark, dangerous, dismal, drowsy, twenty, true, difficult, pale, livid, ripe, delicious, stormy, rainy, convenient, heavy, disastrous, terrible, necessary. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... here. There's no other celebrity till you get to Boss Croker, the Tammany man, the other side of Ilsley Downs. Artists they don't count. The rumour was all round the place last week that you were here incognito in the person of a dismal-looking Johnny, staying at the 'Fisherman's Retreat,' who used to sit all day in a punt up the backwater drinking whisky. It made me rather mad when I saw him. I suppose it was the whisky that suggested the idea to them. They have got the notion ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... in the air, and packs of wolves appeared, howling with impatience for the banquet. The appearance of these animals in the distance is that of a flock of sheep, being generally perfectly white; but among some dozen or fifteen occupying a bluff in the course I was taking, and howling a most dismal chorus, I perceived a jet black member, whose skin I felt desirous of possessing. It is not, however, an easy task to get on close terms with a wolf, unless gorging himself, when so reluctant is he to quit his meal, that, craven-hearted as he is, he can scarcely be driven from it; but turning ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... other instances produced by him of the dismal condition we are in, he offers one which could not easily be guessed. It is this: That the little factious pamphlets written about the end of King Charles II's reign, "lie dead in shops, are looked on ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... were known to the performers, and over the same they were brooding that dismal rainy afternoon, awaiting ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... Hooker, over thirty acres was cut as close by the bullets as if it had been reaped with the sickle, and the dead lay piled in regular ranks along the whole Confederate front. Never, he added, had been seen a more bloody or dismal battle-field. To the east of the turnpike Lawton's division, strengthened at the critical moment by the brigade in second line, held Meade in check, and with a sharp counterstroke drove the Pennsylvanians back upon their guns. But Gibbon, fighting fiercely in the centre ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... of the care and effort. Alice never dreamed of growing impatient in her mother's service. She did not wait to be asked to help her, but watched for opportunities, and so proved a great blessing and treasure in the lowly cottage home, that would have been very dismal and sad without her ...
— Little Alice's Palace - or, The Sunny Heart • Anonymous
... judge took his seat, and the clerk of the crown sat beneath him ready to record the decision of the jury. A few lighted candles were stuck about in different parts of the court; but they were lost in the obscurity of the large, dark, dismal building. The foreman stood ready with a written and signed paper. The judge asked him if they had all come to a unanimous verdict, and he answered in the affirmative; and handed the paper to the clerk of the peace, who glancing his eye upon it, and half turning round to the judge ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... this dismal and inhuman pageant was going on age after age as a cure for crime—while crime, all the while, was increasing by percentages so astounding that we seek through immigration statistics and records of increase of population to account for ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... and Falloden was left to pace up and down the dismal room, his hands in his pockets—deep ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... troops should rise in mutiny, send for the ships, and escape from the ill-starred enterprise. This certainly indicates, under the circumstances, an unsound, if not a deranged, mind. For four days the troops toiled along through a dismal region, uninhabited, and encumbered with tangled forests and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... impossible for them to keep up. They would make the most desperate efforts to travel as fast as he did. When they realised the impossibility of doing this, hampered as they were by their heavy load, they would at times set up a most dismal cry that was a cross between a bark and a howl. At other times some of the dogs would think that one of the train was shirking his work, and then they would unmercifully pile on him and give him a ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... earlier career had been the due fruit of habit and education. As a dabbler in mines he had been out of his element. He lacked the necessary reticence, and arsenic had not availed him, though it had tempted Billy Wantage to forgery; and because Billy hid himself behind the dismal opportunity of silence, had ruined the name of a dead man called Charley Steele. Since Charley's death John Brown had never seen Billy: he had left the town one woful day an hour after Billy had told him of the discovery Charley had made. From a far corner of the country he had read ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... much I was astonished when I saw the sultan my uncle abuse his son thus after he was dead. "Sir," said I, "whatever grief this dismal sight has impressed upon me, I am forced to suspend it, to enquire of your majesty what crime the prince my cousin may have committed, that his corpse should deserve such indignant treatment?" "Nephew," replied the sultan, "I ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... guide-books and opera-glasses, and fell into raptures at every footstep, there are dismal ruins now. The Vendome Column is a stump, wreathed with a gigantic immortelle, and capped with the tri-color. The Hall of the Marshals is a black hole. Those noble rooms in which the first magistrate of the city of Boulevards ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... that I became a prey to dismal fear. That bravery which knows no ebb was never mine. Indeed, I am by nature timorous, for my fancy is quick, and I see with horrid clearness the incidents of a peril. Only a shamefaced conscience holds me true, so that, though I have often done temerarious deeds, it has always been ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... the next room and sat down before it. She had left the door of his room ajar, and a ray of light from his lamp fell across the dark carpet and dimly illuminated the room. The hours passed slowly. No one in the house was astir. No sound came from the outside save the dismal barking of a dog down the road. She was fatigued and almost asleep, when she was suddenly roused ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... If we were somewhat larger-minded people, we should know that he might be as wise as Socrates and as splendid as Bayard and yet be unfitted, perhaps one should say therefore be unfitted, for the dismal and dirty gambling of modern commerce. But whether we were snobbish enough to admire him for being an idler, or chivalrous enough to admire him for being an outlaw, in neither case should we ever really and in our ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... the wreck under the Sunland cliffs, which had sent up rocket-signals of distress on that same dismal night? ...
— The Thorogood Family • R.M. Ballantyne
... stately solitudes, towns are far between. Enterprise, Ind. (755 miles), is an unpainted village with a dismal view—back of and around it, wide bottom lands, with hills in the far distance; up and down the river, precipitous banks of clay, with willow fringes on that portion of the shore which is not being cut by the impinging current. Scuffletown, Ky. (767 miles), is uninviting. Newburgh, ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... the top of his desk and heard the lock click with a long sigh of satisfaction, for a glance at his large, old-fashioned hunting-case watch told him that it was nearly eleven o'clock. It was a dismal, dreary, rainy night; just the sort of a night to make a man thank God that he had a home; and those who had homes to go to were already there, except a few business men, who like Mr. Wicks, were obliged to be out on ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... some two dozen buildings—was very unlovely in slumber. It sprawled in the lap of the prairies, a grimy-faced urchin, with the lines of dismal sophistication writ deep. Yet where in all the "health resorts" of the East did air sweep from the clean hill-country with such revivifying power? It seemed a glad world of abiding youth. Surely "Town" was but a dreary illusion, a mirage that hung in the unmapped spaces ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... this of old, endeavoured to escape through the nearest door, but the Tato, cutting off his retreat, drove him into the nave, and, pretending to pursue him, drove him from chapel to chapel, finally rounding him up where he could give him some good sound whacks. The dismal howlings disturbed the singing of the canons, and the Tato laughed more than ever to see behind the iron railing of the choir, the angry gesture of the good Esteban threatening him ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Phemie rose to go. As Lady Augusta was under the impression that she was merely taking the dismal daily constitutional, which was one of her unavoidable penances, it would not do ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Servant lets him in, with dismal face, Long as a courtier's out of place— Portending some disaster; John's countenance as rueful look'd, and grim, As if th' Apothecary had physick'd him,— And ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger
... the sky, drove the rain in heavy patter overhead, the air was dismal and dark: now a brilliant sunshine flooded the imperial city with its radiance, the wet marble glistened in the dawn and a roseate hue tipped the seven hills of Rome with glory. But in Dea Flavia's heart there was sorrow darker than the blackest night, sleep forsook ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... thing concerning land or people would have been made known by the native inhabitants. Julius Caesar has saved from, oblivion the heroic savages who fought against his legions in defence of their dismal homes with ferocious but unfortunate patriotism; and the great poet of England, learning from the conqueror's Commentaries the name of the boldest tribe, has kept the Nervii, after almost twenty centuries, still fresh and familiar ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... humbler residence. She had to walk quite a mile and a half, and at the end of that time she found herself in a much poorer part of the large suburb where Middleton School was situated. The houses here were of a humble description—not even semidetached, but standing in long, dismal rows, a good many of them backing on to a railway-cutting. These houses boasted of no small gardens, but ran flush with the road. They were built of the universal yellow brick, and were about as ugly as ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... reservoirs of foetid odors, kept in by lofty, light-excluding walls. This building stood by itself, in the midst of an open square, as if it had been a palace or other show place. But all the more, indeed, by this fine setting was the dismal squalor of the grimy structure emphasized. It seemed to exhale an atmosphere of gloom and chill which all the bright sunshine of the breezy September afternoon was unable to dominate. One would not have been surprised, even at noonday, to see ghosts at the ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... seem to be A very dismal place; Your "auld acquaintance" all at once Is altered in the face; Their discords sting through Burns and Moore, Like ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... without cap, shoe, or stocking, accompanied by two naked and shivering children, whose artificial lamentations were now lost in those of nature, proceeded up the street, in the very teeth of the beating tempest, attempting to sing some dismal ditty, with a voice which resembled the imagined shriekings of a ghoul, more than the accents of a human being. These two were the only individuals who, in the true spirit of hardened imposture, braved all the fury of the ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... back his courage, and bursts into expressions of defiance as to the irresistible freedom of his awen, declaring that he would still in his dismal prison celebrate the praise of his countrymen, to the disparagement of his enemies at the ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... between the swirling wreaths. The dismal quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never been extinguished or had been kindled afresh to combat this mournful re-invasion of darkness, seemed, in the lawyer's eyes, like a district of some city in a nightmare. ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp —all others but liars! Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia's Dismal Swamp, nor Rome's accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... stupefaction grew sharp in me and scepticism triumphed, so vulgar, so barbarous, seemed the array of types, so extraordinarily provincial the note of every figure, so less than scant the claim of such physiognomies and such reputations. Rather dismal, everywhere, I admit, the histrionic image with the artificial lights turned off—the fatigued and disconnected face reduced to its mere self and resembling some closed and darkened inn with the sign still swung but the place blighted for want of custom. That consideration weighs; ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... This dismal state of things lasted nearly an hour, after which time nature seemed to recover herself by a sudden throe, for a brisk breeze, which was highly refreshing to our senses, and which was attended by the loud ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... forbear, and come reluctantly to the transactions of that dismal night, when in such quick succession, we felt the extremes of grief, astonishment and rage; when Heaven, in anger, for a dreadful moment suffered Hell to take the reins; when Satan with his chosen band opened the sluices of New England's blood, and sacrilegiously polluted our land with the ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... treading the waves, Wainamoinen swims about until an eagle—grateful because he left birch-trees for birds to perch upon—swoops down, invites him to climb upon its back, and swiftly bears him to the dismal northland Sariola. There Wainamoinen is discovered by the Maid of Beauty, who sends her mother, toothless Louhi, to invite him into the house, where she bountifully feeds him. Next Louhi promises to supply Wainamoinen with a steed to return home ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... had dwindled away to a mere nothing, and the sea had so far gone down that our torpedo craft could keep pace with the larger craft without being swept by seas from stem to stern; still, the weather continued to be very dismal and dreary, the sky still lowering and overcast, not a solitary gleam of sunshine, and the fog gathering so thickly that it was difficult to see anything beyond a two-mile radius. The heavy gun-firing had by this time ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... is a stronger temptation to princes than it is to others.—The being galled with importunities, pursued from one room to another with asking faces; the dismal sound of unreasonable complaints and ill-grounded pretences; the deformity of fraud ill-disguised:—all these would make any man run away from them, and I used to think it was the motive for making ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... hear, methinks I see Ghosts, goblins, fiends: my fantasy Presents a thousand ugly shapes; Headless bears, black men, and apes; Doleful outcries and fearful sights My sad and dismal soul affrights. All my griefs to this are jolly; None so damn'd ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... night, through all the time of King Philip's War. Here, with much labor, the settlers dug a deep well, fed by never-failing springs, to provide a sure supply of water, in case of siege, for all the garrison. And now, as if it were a monument raised to commemorate those dismal times, there stands, at a point where all the crossing footpaths meet, a huge town-pump, near ten feet high, carved and painted, with a great ball upon its top, and an iron ladle chained to its nose. In the torrid summer-days, from early ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... we feel that it would be better for us if they had more of that old childlike faith. And so I encourage my youngsters to read and listen to, over and over again, the same old stories that, when I was a boy, warmed my young imagination, and to eschew the dismal allegories with which well-meaning but short-sighted writers try to supply the places of Jack the Giant-killer and all his marvellous family. And so I was almost as pleased as the children, when I saw, from its quaint ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... Several long and dismal toots sent Lita galloping through the grassy path as the sound of the trumpet excites a war-horse, and "father and Bijah," alarmed by the signal at that hour, leaned on their rakes to survey with ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... faster than good, now brought the dismal story of his Juliet's death to Romeo, at Mantua, before the messenger could arrive who was sent from Friar Lawrence to apprise him that these were mock funerals only, and but the shadow and representation of death, and that his dear lady lay in the tomb but for a short while, expecting when Romeo ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... to pass by a perfumery store; but what a nose her ladyship's nose must be, since it is endowed with more wonderful faculties than her eyes, which possess such miraculous powers as to enable her to see things in France perceptible by no other mortal optics! But to proceed with our dismal story. Her ladyship's olfactory nerves, as we have already mentioned, having made her aware of the proximity of a perfumer's shop, she was induced to go into it by the desire of procuring something which ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... where the fingers of infrequent customers had left irregular prints. The upper story contained four or five guest-rooms which were rarely put to their destined use. Sometimes a fruit-grower, riding in from his plantation to confer with his agent, would pass a melancholy night in the dismal upper story; sometimes a minor native official on some trifling government quest would have his pomp and majesty awed by Madama's sepulchral hospitality. But Madama sat behind her bar content, not desiring to quarrel with Fate. If anyone required ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... off entirely the principal crop of the country. Again in the spring of 1875, in some of the river counties, the young had hatched in myriads, and devoured the growing crops ere winging their way to their mountain home. Gloom overspread the people at the prospect of renewed disaster, and the dismal forebodings were realized even as the delegates sat in council, for at this time occurred the final appearance of the locust. As the people gazed into the sky and watched the silver cloud floating in the sunshine resolve itself into a miniature army clad in burnished steel, women forgot ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
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