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More "Dreary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... they were once more on the terrace where he had first joined Teresa, facing the wood, which was divided by a slight and low palisade from the spot where they stood. He ceased abruptly, for his eyes encountered a terrible and ominous apparition,—a form connected with dreary associations of fate and woe. The figure had raised itself upon a pile of firewood on the other side of the fence, and hence it seemed almost gigantic in its stature. It gazed upon the pair with eyes that burned with a preternatural blaze, and a voice which Maltravers too well remembered ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VIII • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... his regions hurl'd The wrecks, long crush'd, of time's anterior world; While nature mourn'd, in wild confusion tost, Her suns extinguisht and her systems lost; Light, life and instinct shared the dreary trance, And gravitation fled the field of chance; No laws remain'd of matter, motion, space; Time lost his count, the universe his place; Till Order came, in her cerulean robes, And launch'd and rein'd the renovated globes, Stock'd with ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... that he had got rid of an enemy who had it in his power to do him harm, for what Robert might suffer in his island prison, he cared little. He took it for granted that he would never get away, but would pass his life, be it longer or shorter, in dreary exile. Though the crew did not know all, they knew that the captain had heartlessly left Robert to his fate, and all were animated by a common feeling of dislike to their commander, who never under any circumstances ...
— Brave and Bold • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... dusk, after the lights were lighted. Through the long windows she looked into the empty room. Not so much as a cat or a dog was awaiting the master. In the swift glance with which she swept the interior she noted that the fireplace was boarded in. That seemed to Di indescribably dreary. Perhaps her grandfather did not sit here; perhaps he had a library somewhere, like their own. But, no; there was the portly footman entering with the evening paper, which he laid upon the table before ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... the fifth dreary day I have been imprisoned by the wind, with every outward object to disgust the senses, and unable to banish the remembrances that sadden ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... ice-floes, marked with their long, sinuous crawling where they had been slowly torn from the earth by the shovels. These embossings and canals formed a complicated and incalculable network, smudged near at hand by bodies and wreckage; dreary and planetary in the distance. One could make out the formal but hazy stakes and posts, aligned in the distance to the end of sight; and here and there the swellings and round ink-blots of the dugouts. In some sections ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... concert-rooms, and being still afraid to hazard alone into the whirlpool of London life, was almost compelled to stop at home. For the first few days the sojourn at Mr. Taylor's house in Fleet Street appeared to him somewhat dreary, though it was not long before he came to like it, and at last got into a real enjoyment of his new mode of existence. He spent the whole day, from early morn till dark, at a window on the ground floor, overlooking the street. The endless stream ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... reached the top some time between six and seven of the clock. Now mark me! For every five minutes that had fled since six of the clock when we stood on yonder peak, so many miles had we toiled upwards on the dreary mountainside!" ...
— A Tangled Tale • Lewis Carroll
... quite apply to Henrietta, for she was not sporting and jesting downstairs with anyone, but that verse was the greatest comfort to her of those dreary years. The writer must have been through it all, she thought; she knows what it is. Not to be alone, to have someone, though an unknown one, who could share it, lightened her burden, when she was in a mood that ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... as the result of our educational methods, that in training the observer we blight the poet; and the poet is, after all, the most important person in society. He keeps the soul of his fellows alive. Without him the modern world would become one vast, dreary, soul-destroying Coketown, and man would sink to the level of Gradgrind. The practical man develops the resources of the country, the man of vision discerns, formulates and directs its spiritual policy and growth; the mechanic builds the house, but ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... gendarmerie is stationed to operate against the brigands. Standing among bare rocks, with the precipices of Monte d'Oro frowning above it, the position is most dismal. Fancy that bleak barrack in the long, dreary winter of such an elevation, when ice and snow reign over the whole plateau! And what must have been the severity of the service when the bleak forest was the hiding-place, and Bocagnono, just under, the head-quarters, of ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... hills and vales her heart sank a little at the thought of those long lonely months, days and evenings that would be all alike, and which must be spent without sympathetic companionship. And there would be dreary days on which the weather would keep her a prisoner in her luxurious gaol, when the mountains, and the rugged paths beside the mountain streams, would be inaccessible, when she would be restricted to Fraeulein's phlegmatic society, that lady being stout and lazy, fond of her meals, ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... with its weight of sorrow,—up the red, muddy, turbid current, through the abrupt tortuous windings of the Red river; and sad eyes gazed wearily on the steep red-clay banks, as they glided by in dreary sameness. At last the boat stopped at a small town, and ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... neighbor held over the suffering woman an umbrella to shield her from the rain which poured through the dilapidated roof, and when the dreary light of that Sunday morning dawned, my frail bark was launched on the stormy, sullen ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... silently weeping, bemoaning her dead slain in the recent battle, or the national calamities, or perhaps the mere personal afflictions of fatigue and fear and hunger and suspense. Another crouched by the fire and gazed dolorously upon it with dreary tear-filled eyes, and swollen, reddened eyelids. The sorrowful aspect of a third was oddly incongruous with her gay attire, a garb of scarlet cloth trimmed with silver tinsel tassels, a fabric introduced among the Cherokees by an English trader of the name of Jeffreys, ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... 4th.—Out early, sketching at the Alcazar. After breakfast it set in a day of rain, and I was reduced to wander about the galleries overlooking the 'patio.' Nothing so dreary and out of character as a rainy day in Spain. Whilst occupied in moralising over the dripping water-spouts, I observed a tall, gentlemanly-looking man, dressed in a zamarra,[130] leaning over the balustrades, and apparently engaged in ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... soar, You have seen the loved nymph I deplore— You will know her, the fairest of damsels fair, By her large soft eye and her graceful air; Bird of the dark blue throat and eye of jet, Oh tell me, have you seen the lovely face Of my fair bride—lost in this dreary wilderness? ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... falling-off; and to be laughed at by Janey was the last step of all. Tears filled her eyes, she turned her shoulder to her companion, averting her head; and this was all poor Ursula had to look to. The dreary Carlingford street, papa finding fault, everything going wrong, and Janey laughing at her! To be Cousin Anne's maid, or governess to the little Indian children would be better than this. For five minutes ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... The tempest was over; Fair was the maiden, And fond was the lover; But the snow was so deep, That his heart it grew weary, And he sunk down to sleep, In the moorland so dreary. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... child of the other. Alice's old paleness and unearthly look began to reappear; and, strange to tell, my midnight temptation revived. After a time she ceased to dine with us again, and for days I never saw her. It was the old story of suffering with me, only more intense than before. The day was dreary, and the night stormy. "Call her," said my heart; but ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... autumn as lazily as even March could have wished. All over England the rain came down, sometimes in a dashing shower, but generally in an idle dreary dripping from eaves and ramparts. Nothing particular was happening to any body. At Cardiff all was extremely quiet. Constance had recovered as much brightness as she would ever recover, but never any more would she be the Constance ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... Dyke; it's wild and grand. You are tired and disappointed. Some days must be dark and dreary, boy. Come, ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... spot, teeming with animal life, and Nature, as it were, smiling around them? But the old sealer knows all that will soon be changed, experience reminding him that the brief bright summer will ere long be succeeded by dark dreary winter, with rain, sleet, and snow almost continuously. Then no food will be procurable, and to stay where they are would be to starve. Captain Gancy also recalls the attempts at colonising Tierra del Fuego, notably that made by Sarmiento at ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... foolish boy!" she cried, laughing. "That is the very reason I wanted you to come. I am always dreary after excitement, and I knew you would put me in good spirits. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... landmarks they lurched past. At any other time the knowledge that she was going to the minister's to stay—to live—would have filled her with staid joy. At any other time—but THIS time only a dull ache filled her little dreary world. Everything seemed to ache—the munching cows in the Trumbull pasture, the cats on the doorsteps, the dog loping along beside the stage, the stage driver's stooping old back. Aunt Olivia was going to the city—Rebecca Mary wasn't going to the city. There was no room in ...
— Rebecca Mary • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... string and he will amuse himself all evening making lashings and knots. A piece of rope calls up in his mind the stout lines which hold the masts steady and the yards true in the gale, the comfortable cable which moors the ship at the end of the dreary voyage, and a thousand ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... the rain falling on our old roof; the cicalas are mute; odors of wet earth reach us from the gardens and the mountain. I feel terribly dreary in this room to-night; the noise of the little pipe irritates me more than usual, and as Chrysantheme crouches in front of her smoking-box, I suddenly discover in her an air of low breeding, in the very worst ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... an heir, the two Left the still King, and passing forth to breathe, Then from the castle gateway by the chasm Descending through the dismal night—a night In which the bounds of heaven and earth were lost— Beheld, so high upon the dreary deeps It seemed in heaven, a ship, the shape thereof A dragon winged, and all from stern to stern Bright with a shining people on the decks, And gone as soon as seen. And then the two Dropt to the cove, and watched ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... fully developed. Sometimes the idea is rejected; sometimes it is fostered. At one time he is almost fixed on the 'Red Horse,' but the blazing fire and sedulous kindness of the landlady of the 'Dun Cow' shake him, and his soul labours! Heavy is the ploughed land, dark, dreary, and wet the day. His purpose is at last fixed for beer! Threepence is put down for the vigour of the ale, and one penny for the stupefaction of tobacco, and these are the joys and holidays of millions, the greatest pleasure and relaxation which it is in the power of ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... Island. On receiving his appeal Paul seemed to wish to investigate for himself, possibly to indulge in a little lofty romance or sentiment. At any rate he wanted me to go along for the sake of companionship, so one dreary November afternoon we went, saw the pantaloon, who did not impress me very much even in his age and misery for he still had a few of his theatrical manners and insincerities, and as we were coming away I said, "Paul, why should you be the goat in every case?" for ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... but conjugal and sisterly love kept vigil, a long, a bitter year, by that couch of suffering in the heart of multitudinous Paris and London; hundreds of sympathizing friends, in both hemispheres, listened and prayed and hoped through a dreary twelvemonth. With the ripe autumn closed the quiet struggle; and "in the bleak December" the mortal remains were followed from the temple where his youth worshipped, to the snow-clad knoll at Greenwood; garlands and tears, the ritual and the requiem, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... his uncle in New York, and to his father in Connaught. At about ten o'clock the party proceeded to the field. The moon was not up, the darkness was dense, the ground was unpleasantly moist, and the lights of the town, which gleamed in the distance, only made the scene more desolate and dreary. The ground was paced off and the men arranged. While this was being done, the surgeon, by the light of a dark lantern, arranged his instruments, which consisted of 1 common hand-saw, 1 hatchet, 1 butcher knife, a large variety of smaller knives, and a small mountain ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 3 • Charles Farrar Browne
... commission. When Count Zeppelin's company estimated the cost of further repairs it gave a sigh and abandoned the wreck. Thereupon the pertinacious inventor laid aside his tools, got into his old uniform, and went out again on the dreary task of ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... outside, Percy turned into a shadowy side street that was only partly built up, a dreary waste of derricks and foundation holes, but comparatively solitary. Stella liked Percy's steady, sympathetic silences; she was not a chatterbox herself. She often wondered why she was going to marry Bixby instead of Charley Greengay. ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... Bousquier's imagination, aided by the turnkey, with the utmost perfection. When he was about to describe the funeral train, however, the tortured man lost consciousness, and when, late in the evening, he was again conducted to the hearing—rarely did the night and the candle-light in the dreary room fail of their spectral effects—he unexpectedly denied everything, cried, screamed, and acted as if completely bereft of his senses. In order to encourage and calm him. Monsieur Jausion resorted to a measure as bold as it was simple; ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... never wrote a thing more true than this: "The man to whom in boyhood information came in dreary tasks, along with threats of punishment, is unlikely to be a student in after-years; while those to whom it came in natural forms, at the proper times, and who remember its facts as not only interesting in themselves, but ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... in a full-rigged ship from New York to California. At the latter place I visited the scenes of "Two Years Before the Mast.'' At the old town of San Diego I met Jack Stewart, my father's old shipmate, and as we were looking at the dreary landscape and the forlorn adobe houses and talking of California of the thirties, he burst out into an encomium of the accuracy and fidelity to details of my father's book. He said, "I have read it ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... the cliffs which overlooked the ocean were hung with thick and heavy mist, when the portals of the ancient and half-ruinous tower, in which Lord Ravenswood had spent the last and troubled years of his life, opened, that his mortal remains might pass forward to an abode yet more dreary and lonely. The pomp of attendance, to which the deceased had, in his latter years, been a stranger, was revived as he was about to be consigned to ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... the dreary winter? In a green and sunny land, By the warm sea-breezes fanned, Where orange trees with fruit are bent, There ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... is nothing desolate or dreary in the aspect of the Pontine Marshes. On the contrary the view on every side, in passing across them, is extremely beautiful. The road is wide, and smooth, and level, and is bordered on each side with a double row of very ancient and venerable trees, which give to it, for the whole distance, ...
— Rollo in Rome • Jacob Abbott
... A dreary journey on to Philippopolis and Svilengrad, with the wind lashing the train, lashing it all the way to the Chataldja lines and the zone of Allied control. Eight passport examinations, eight examinations ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... apologetically, as may be seen in the case of their editor and abridger Mr. Skelton. Like most other very original things they drew after them a flock of imbecile imitations; and up to the present day those who have lived in the remoter parts of Scotland must know, or recently remember, dreary compositions in corrupt following of the Noctes, with exaggerated attempts at Christopher's worst mannerisms, and invariably including a ghastly caricature of the Shepherd. Even in themselves they abound ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... the tent, and, being still ravenously hungry, crammed the remnants of supper into a capacious game-pocket. Then, all preparations being made, he looked for a moment down the road where his best friend had just gone out of his ken for ever. The thought was so dreary that he did not dare to delay longer, but with a bundle of ironmongery below his arms began to scramble up the glen to where the north star burned between ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... this raid was visited a long, cruel, wearisome imprisonment, there are few, I imagine, among them who ever regretted it. It was a sad infliction upon a soldier, especially upon one accustomed to the life the "Morgan men" had led, to eat his heart in the tedious, dreary prison existence, while the fight which he should have shared was daily growing deadlier. But to have, in our turn, been invaders, to have carried the war north of the Ohio, to have taught the people, who for long ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... such warm situations on a certain Zuleika to whom the note of Ali Baba is like the thrice-distilled strains of the bulbul on Bendemeer's stream. So let us electrify ourselves back to prose and propriety by thinking of the Political Agent; let us plunge into the cold waters of dreary reality by conjuring up a figure in tail-coat and gold buttons dispensing justice while H.H. the romantic and picturesque Raja, G.C.S.I., amuses himself. Yet we hear cries from the gallery of "Vive M. le Raja; vive ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... sack. "There's nobody else here and a wet evening's dreary. I hope you won't go before ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... his first real disaster. He swung—and he looked up. His ball, beaten downward into the hard clay tee, leaped forward with a sound as of a stone breaking in two and dove swiftly into the centre of the pond. The major spoke never a word. For the first time during the long dreary round his risibles were tickled and he wanted to laugh. Instead he concentrated all his faculties upon his ball ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... do nothing to carry life on. They are just vain repetitions—imperfect dreary, blurred repetitions of one common life. All that they feel has been felt, all that they do has been done better before. Because they are crowded and hurried and underfed and undereducated. And as for liking their lives, they need never have had ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... that these grey psychological histories of typical young persons, drearily revolting against dreary conventions, are, in a deep and inherent sense, false to the ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... features, etc. Arizona, of course, is a huge territory, some 400 by 350 miles. It embraces pure unadulterated desert regions in the west; a large forest tract in the centre; the rest has a semi-arid character, short, scattering grass all over it; to the eye of a stranger a dreary and desolate region! The east central part, where we were, has a general elevation of 4000 to 6000 feet above sea-level, so that the fierce summer heat is tempered to some extent, especially after sundown. In winter there were snowstorms and severe cold, but the snow did ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... away from the fury of the battle, become exhausted, and lay down by the roadside to die. Some were calling the names and numbers of their regiments, but many had become too weak to do this; by midnight the column had passed by. What must have been their agony, mental and physical, as they lay in the dreary woods, sensible that there was no one to comfort or to care for them, and that in a few hours more their career on ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... such another dreary day, in just such another December, and not so many years gone by, that the light had gone forever out ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... benevolence gleamed upon his aspect. He returned my salutation, and said, "Brother Arab, perchance thou hast missed thy way." I answered, "Yes, shew it, and may God requite thee!" upon which he replied, "My dwelling, brother Arab, is at present in this wild spot; but the night is dreary, and shouldst thou proceed there is no surety against wild beasts tearing thee in pieces. Lodge, then, at present with me in safety, and repose, and when day shall appear I will direct thee on thy way." I alighted, when he took my camel, picketted her, and gave her water ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... with other men I know not. For myself, I could not have come through that dreary winter unscathed without the influence of her, who would have been the first to disclaim such power. Among the velvet cushions of the east one may criticise the lapse of white man to barbarity; but in the wilderness human voice is ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... tradition. The gold discoveries drew off all men from the gathering or cure of hides, the inflowing population made an end of the great droves of cattle; and now not a vessel pursues the— I was about to say dear— the dreary, once hated business of gathering hides upon the coast, and the beach of San Diego is abandoned and its hide-houses have disappeared. Meeting a respectable-looking citizen on the wharf, I inquired of him how the hide-trade was carried on. "O,'' said he, "there is very little of it, and ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... are seldom rich, and my mother was no exception to the rule. She was left in very moderate circumstances, with six children to support; but the widow of an old campaigner, who had partaken the sufferings of many a long and dreary march with her husband, was neither disheartened by the calamity, nor at a loss for thrifty expedients to educate her younger offspring. Accordingly, I was kept at school, studying geography, arithmetic, history and the languages, until near twelve years old, when it was ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... done me, in my two winters' Alpine exile, much good; so much, that I hope to leave it now for ever, but would not be understood to boast. In my present unpardonably crazy state, any cold might send me skipping, either back to Davos, or further off. Let us hope not. It is dear; a little dreary; very far from many things that both my taste and my needs prompt me to seek; and altogether not the place that I should ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lightning, the crews, cool and determined, followed each other in awful silence, and when we arrived at the end we stood gazing at each other in silent gratification at our narrow escape from total destruction.... I scarcely ever saw anything so dreary and dangerous in any country (such precipices, mountains, and rapids), and I still seem to see, whichever way I turn my eyes, mountains upon mountains whose summits are covered ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... of the valley of the Chimbo, and find ourselves in a wilderness of crags and treeless mountains clothed with the long, dreary-looking paramo grass called paja. But we are face to face with "the monarch of the Andes," and we shall have its company the rest of the day. The snowy dome is flooded with the golden light of heaven; delicate clouds of softest ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... A.D. 388, after reigning a little more than five years. He was a man of simple tastes, and is said to have been fond of exchanging the magnificence and dreary etiquette of the court for the freedom and ease of a life under tents. On an occasion when he was thus enjoying himself, it happened that one of those violent hurricanes, to which Persia is subject, arose, and, falling in full force ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... talked throughout the whole of dinner,—turning sometimes indeed to Mrs. Leslie who sat at his left hand,—said very little that all the world might not have heard. But he did say one such word. "It has been so dreary to me, the last month!" Emily of course had no answer to make to this. She could not tell him that her desolation had been infinitely worse than his, and that she had sometimes felt as though her very ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions. ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 1: Thomas Jefferson • Edited by James D. Richardson
... I got through the day; and a long and dreary day it was to me. The evening came, bland, refreshing, bringing with it the softer light of a young moon. I was walking on the lawn, when the beauty of the night brought Grace and her tastes vividly to my mind, and, by a sudden impulse, I was ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... Beachy Head, gleaming white in a brilliant six-o'clock-in-the-morning sun. This fair daybreak, however, soon changed its aspect. A cold wind and a pale mist descended upon the sea, and seemed to threaten a dreary day. ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... over a talk had with Gertrude this afternoon. She was trying to persuade her to join them for a drive. It seems such a dreary life to lie here on the sofa when there is the wide, glowing ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... arrival at Kilrush, my life was one of the most dreary monotony. The rain, which had begun to fall as I left Limerick, continued to descend in torrents, and I found myself a close prisoner in the sanded parlour of "mine inn." At no time would such "durance vile" have ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... obtain, in a happier climate, a secure refuge, a new fortune adequate to his merit, the freedom of complaint, and perhaps the means of revenge. But the empire of the Romans filled the world, and when the empire fell into the hands of a single person, he wold became a safe and dreary prison for his enemies. The slave of Imperial despotism, whether he was condemned to drags his gilded chain in rome and the senate, or to were out a life of exile on the barren rock of Seriphus, or the frozen bank of the Danube, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... welcomed to the home of his fathers—for was she not a scion of the house of Fougereuse, and the sole heiress of all the property of that family? Louison's uncle, the Marquis Jean de Fougereuse, had ended his dreary life shortly after the Vicomte de Talizac's death, and it was not difficult for Arthur, with Pierre Labarre's assistance, to maintain Louison's claims as the daughter of Jules de Fougereuse and sole heiress of the legacy. Of course, the Society of Jesus was much put out ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... the Mar de Damas, the Ladies' Sea, which hardly knows a storm, with the blazing blue above, the blazing blue below, in an ever-warming climate, where every breath is life and joy; another to struggle against the fogs and icebergs, the rocks and currents of the dreary North Atlantic. No wonder, then, that the knowledge of Markland, and Vinland, and Whiteman's Land died away in a few generations, and became but fireside sagas ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... erected before the porch of Notre Dame. On one side appeared the two cardinals; on the other the four noble prisoners, in chains, under the custody of the Provost of Paris. Six years of dreary imprisonment had passed over their heads; of their valiant brethren the most valiant had been burned alive; the recreants had purchased their lives by confession; the Pope, in a full council, had ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... failure closely abide— Success has a palace fine, While failure dwells in a dreary hut, Like a herding place ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... life struck Mr. Twist with a sudden great impatience. After that large life over there in France, to come back to this dreary petticoat lying, this feeling one's way about among tender ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... earth. Anon there crept into her heart a feeling she could not define—a feverish longing to be where he was—a sense of desolation and terrible pain when she thought of his insanity, and the long, dreary years which might ensue when he would lose all knowledge of her. She did not care to talk so much of him now, but Miss Porter cared to have her, and caressingly winning the girl's confidence, learned almost everything—learned that there was an impediment to his marrying, and ...
— Rosamond - or, The Youthful Error • Mary J. Holmes
... form of grandeur on the lofty peaks of Arran. The view on the right hand is limited to the foot of a range of abrupt mean hills, and on the left it meets the sea—as we were obliged to keep the glasses up, our drive for several miles was objectless and dreary. When we had ascended a hill, leaving Kilbride on the left, we passed under the walls of an ancient tower. What delightful ideas are associated with the sight of such venerable remains ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... stealthy influences, are great changes wrought. These little snow-particles, which the storm-spirit flings by handfuls through the air, will bury the great earth under their accumulated mass, nor permit her to behold her sister sky again for dreary months. We, likewise, shall lose sight of our mother's familiar visage, and must content ourselves with looking ...
— Snow Flakes (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... empty chair, looked upon her, heard her speak; he felt again upon his arm the gentle pressure of the trembling hand; he strewed his costly rooms with the hundred silent tokens of feminine presence and occupation; he came back again to the cold fireside and the silent dreary splendour; and in that one glimpse of a better nature, born as it was in selfish thoughts, the rich man felt himself friendless, childless, and alone. Gold, for the instant, lost its lustre in his eyes, for ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... self-government has always grown. That is, if individual rights in the citizen, the town, the county, the State, shall not be vindicated as beyond all price, and defended with the utmost jealousy, at whatever cost, the spirit of liberty must have already died out, and the dreary process of centralization be already far advanced. It will thus be evident that the preservation of individual rights is the only possible preventative of centralization, and that free society has no interest to be compared for an instant in importance with that of preserving these ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... week Rupert bore his imprisonment with cheerfulness, but the absolute silence, the absence of anything to break the dreary monotony, the probability that he might remain a prisoner all his life, was crushing even to the ...
— The Cornet of Horse - A Tale of Marlborough's Wars • G. A. Henty
... row of many rows of women, who were prolonging the time of keeping their hats on till custom obliged them to take them off. He gave so much notice to the woman next him as to see that she was deeply veiled as well as widely hatted, and then he lapsed into a dreary muse, which was broken by the first strains of the overture. Then he diverted himself by looking round at all those ranks of women lifting their arms to take out them hat-pins and dropping them to pin their hats to the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... her encore from "La Traviata" when he went down the iron stairs. Elodie met him punctually, for they had agreed to avoid the dreary wait. As soon as the stage was set and the curtain up, he went on and was greeted by a round of applause. Somehow the word had been passed round the populace that formed the Olympia clientele. Thenceforward the performance went without a hitch, to the attentive gratification of ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... man on the hillside took up the irresistible rhythm in an undertone, and "Cracked" with the singer. In front of me was being created a folk-song. The bitterness and glory of their life were being told to them, and they were hearing the singer gladly. Their leader was lifting the dreary trench night and death itself into a ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... This long, dreary and, for heavy and continuous rains and high water, unprecedented winter was one of great hardship to all engaged about Vicksburg. The river was higher than its natural banks from December, 1862, to the following April. The war ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... leave the Pass of Killicrankie unseen; but this disturbed us little at a time when we had seven miles to travel in the dark, with a poor beast almost sinking with fatigue, for he had not rested once all day. We went on spiritless, and at a dreary pace. Passed by one house which we were half inclined to go up to and ask for a night's lodging; and soon after, being greeted by a gentle voice from a poor woman, whom, till she spoke, though we were close to her, we had not seen, we stopped, and asked if she could tell us where we might stay ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... eighty years, is a dreary record of constant battles and bloodshed. Out of this very barbarism a regenerating influence ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... the golden broom and the purple heather—flowers of the barren heights—are all that will flourish. There are, indeed, secluded valleys filled with muskmallows and bracken, but these are often visited by wild tempests, and sudden floods may make the whole region dreary and dangerous. ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow
... own heart was filled with joy, for the uncertain, lonely face of this homeless old woman had often haunted me. The rain-blackened little house did certainly look dreary, and a whole lifetime of patient toil had left few traces. The pucker-pear tree was in full bloom, however, and gave a welcome ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... sky a cold, opaque grey, overcast with a light drift of cloud. The park seemed very dark, very dreary; a searching breeze was sweeping inland from the Sound, soughing sadly in the tree-tops; a chill humidity permeated the air, precursor of rain. The young man shivered, both with chill and reaction from the tension ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... table. The chill of despair and hopeless renunciation was in the air, untempered by any glow from the sealed air-tight stove that seemed only to bring out a lukewarm exhalation of wet clothes and cheaply dyed umbrellas. Nor did the presence of the worshippers themselves impart any life to the dreary apartment. Scattered throughout the white pews, in dull, shapeless, neutral blotches, rigidly separated from each other, they seemed only to accent the colorless church and the emptiness of all things. A few children, who had huddled together for warmth in one of the back benches and who had ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... romance it as you please, Was (what he call'd it) but a "long Disease:" Think of his Lot,—his Pilgrimage of Pain, His "crazy Carcass" and his restless Brain; Think of his Night-Hours with their Feet of Lead, His dreary Vigil and his aching Head; Think of all this, and marvel then to find The "crooked Body with a crooked Mind!" Nay rather, marvel that, in Fate's Despite, You find so much to solace and delight,— So much of Courage, and of Purpose high In that unequal ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... trench sentry work to go and get back, possibly, doughnuts and chocolate stolen by Noddy Nixon. It was too trivial a matter from a military standpoint, though to Ned, Bob, and Jerry, forced to be on duty during the long, wet, dreary night, it meant ...
— Ned, Bob and Jerry on the Firing Line - The Motor Boys Fighting for Uncle Sam • Clarence Young
... are all gone and we have no amusements. Even old Value has deserted us, whose music, though an assemblage of "unharmonious sounds," is infinitely preferable to the harsh grating thunder of his brother. New Haven is, indeed, this winter a dreary place. I wrote you about a month since and did then what you wish me now to do,—I mentioned all that is worth mentioning, which, by the way, is very little, about New ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... the purity of many women. Susan had bought a copy of the first American edition and she carried it with her wherever she went. After a hard active day, she found inspiration and refreshment in its pages. No matter how dreary the hotel room or how unfriendly the town, she no longer felt lonely or discouraged, for Aurora Leigh was a companion ever at hand, giving her confidence in herself, strengthening her ambition, and helping her build a satisfying, constructive ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. "'Tis some visiter," I muttered, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... gleaner's bundle or a woodman's fagot, there is no change, no variety, no beauty anywhere; and he who has dwelt upon the mountains or amidst the forests feels oppressed as by imprisonment with the tedium and the endlessness of that vast and dreary level. But it is green and very fertile, and it has wide horizons that have a certain charm of their own even in their dulness and monotony; and amongst the rushes by the waterside the flowers grow, and the trees rise tall and fresh where the barges glide with their great hulks black ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... came the order to re-cross the river. It was a stormy and dreary night, and so, of course, favorable to our purpose. The maneuver was executed in silence, and with commendable expedition. The rebels appeared to have no suspicion of General Burnside's intentions. The measured beat of our double quick ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... train up the valley on his daily tour of inspection. He left behind him a new-fledged hero in the person of Jabez Rockwell, whose bold tactics had won him a powder-horn and given his comrades the rarest hour of the dreary winter at Valley Forge. ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... loved, and living sympathies went hand in hand. It was the sense of wasted labor that oppressed her; of two lives consumed in that ruthless process that uses generations of effort to build a single cell. There was a dreary parallel between her grandfather's fruitless toil and her own unprofitable sacrifice. Each in turn had ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... very late, at a little inn, called the Cross-Keys, between Edmonton and Ware. I remember nothing at all, either of the inn or the host or the food—nothing but the name of the inn, for the name struck me, with a dreary kind of wit, as reflective of the cross-purposes which we were at. We three dined together, in profound silence, except when Dolly addressed a word or two to her maid. As for me, she took the food which I carved, all ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... with her own hands turned up the soil in the valley below and raised all the corn and potatoes required for the support of the family; she had done the housework, and had made all the clothes for the family. Once when her husband was sick, she had ridden thirty miles for medicine. It was a dreary ride, she said, for the road, or rather trail, was very rough, and her husband was in a burning fever. She left him in charge of her oldest child, a girl of eleven years, but she was a bright, helpful little creature, able to wait upon the sick man and feed the other children ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... it unendurable," he told her firmly. "Whatever one has suffered, and however dreary the present, ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the attack in vain; then gave over the attempt, and lay quiet behind their barricade of trees. So also did their opponents. The morning was dark and stormy, and the driving snow that filled the air made the position doubly dreary. The English were starving. Their slender stock of provisions had been consumed or shared with the Indians, who, on their part, did not want food, having resources unknown to their white friends. A group of them squatted about a fire invited Schuyler to share their broth; ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... nothing can hold back from their errands of mercy. They find out the red-handed, gloveless undergraduate of bucolic antecedents, as he squirms in his corner, and distil their soft words upon him like dew upon the green herb. They reach even the poor relation, whose dreary apparition saddens the perfumed atmosphere of the sumptuous drawing-room. I have known one of these angels ask, of her own accord, that a desolate middle-aged man, whom nobody seemed to know, should be presented ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... Mr. Wilkes. English and Jewish history compared. Scotland composed of stone and water, and a little earth. Turkish Spy. Dreary ride to Lochbuy. Description ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... through the intervention of a house agent; for even that dreary and desolate cellar had its agent, who was eager to secure his rent. He was unwise enough to undertake to interview Mrs. Roberts as she descended from her carriage, not long after it had followed ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... Alison thought her capable of, inserted herself within the doorway, so as to prevent herself from being shut out as the girl took her message. The next moment the girl came back saying, "This way, ma'am," opened the door of a small dreary, dusty, cold parlour, where she shut them in, and disappeared before a word could ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... lower valley of the Orontes, first mountains and then a chalky desert had to be crossed in order to reach the Euphrates, which could only be passed in boats, or else by swimming. Beyond the Euphrates was another dreary and infertile region, the tract about Haran, where Crassus lost his army and ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... her wholesome, if not actually homely, Kate. How the mother's heart yearned over that sweet-natured, sallow-faced child! But after breakfast Blakely had wandered off again and was out on the mesa, peering through a pair of borrowed glasses over the dreary eastward landscape and up and down the deep valley. "How oddly are we constituted!" said Mrs. Sanders. "If I only had his money, I'd never be wearing my heart out in this desert land." She was ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... self thus duly consigned to America as if she had been ordinary merchandise, but a great many of her valuable possessions, jewels, clothes, etc., were also shipped to accompany her. In the course of time, and it must have been a dreary time to this poor girl, the ship moved out of the dock, and started on its voyage across the North Sea, and then over the Atlantic to the new country. Not until the vessel was well out of sight of land, and free from danger of being overhauled by a vessel of the Swedish ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton
... Mountains. Barbican was therefore in a condition singularly favorable to resolve the great question concerning the Moon's inhabitableness. Nevertheless, the solution still escaped him. He could discover nothing around him but a dreary waste of immense plains, and towards the north, beneath him, bare mountains of ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... shall see when we begin to write court reports, it is necessary to exercise every possible trick to put interest into the story. In the actual court room all that relieves the dreary monotony of legal proceedings is an occasional bit of interesting testimony. And when the reporter tries to report a case he sometimes finds that interesting testimony is all that will lighten up the dull monotony ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... archipelago of Chiloe: yet they dare not leave their wretched birth-place in the hope of bettering their fortunes. The small-pox is hitherto unknown among them, and those, who have attempted to go elsewhere have been cut off by that loathsome disease. In 1783, the entire population of this dreary province amounted to 23,477, of whom 11,985 were of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... disadvantages of being reared in a little heaven of domestic love. The outside world seems so hard, and black, and dreary afterwards, and the inhabitants ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... the skyscraper merges in its background. The occasional good bit of architecture steps out boldly from the surrounding shadows of daylight discouragement. City life does not seem to be such an exhausting struggle, and even the "misery wagons," as I always call ambulances to myself, look less dreary with the blinking light fore and aft, for you cannot go far in New York without feeling the pitying thrill ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... horn inverted, gave its sign of tears; And then, when wasted to a skeleton, It sank into a heaving sea of tears That caught its tumult from my sighing soul. My husband, who had spent whole months with me, Till he was wedded to my every thought, Left me through dreary hours,—nay, days,—alone! He pleaded business—business day and night; Leaving me with a formal kiss at morn, And meeting me with strange reserve at eve; And I could mark the sea of tenderness Upon whose beach I had sat down for life, Hoping to feel for ever, as at first, ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... an old man, with some lingering remains of respectability in his faded appearance, half ask an alms of a passer-by; and you have seen him, at a word of repulse, or even on finding no notice taken of his request, meekly turn away: too beaten and sick at heart for energy; drilled into a dreary resignation by the long custom of finding everything go against him in this world. You may have known a poor cripple, who sits all day by the side of the pavement of a certain street, with a little bundle of tracts in his hand, watching those who pass by, in the hope that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... began to keep better hours. On wet and stormy nights, in the thick of the folly and the fun, the thought would persist in coming to me of Otoo keeping his dreary vigil under the dripping mangoes. Truly, he made a better man of me. Yet he was not strait-laced. And he knew nothing of common Christian morality. All the people on Bora Bora were Christians; but he was a heathen, the only unbeliever on the island, a gross materialist, who believed that when ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... long, Stephen, instead of going to his work in the pit, had been rambling, without aim or purpose, over the dreary uplands; here and there stretching himself upon the wiry heath, where the sun had dried away the snow, and hiding his face from the light, while he gave way to an anguish of grief, and broke the deep silence with a loud and very bitter cry. It was death, sudden ...
— Fern's Hollow • Hesba Stretton
... imprest the imagination more than when approaching it by night on the top of a coach you saw its numberless lights flaring, as Tennyson says, "like a dreary dawn." The most impressive approach is now by the river through the infinitude of docks, quays, and shipping. London is not a city, but a province of brick and stone. Hardly even from the top of St. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... Teufelsdroeckh, isolated, shy, retiring as he was, had not altogether escaped notice: certain established men are aware of his existence; and, if stretching-out no helpful hand, have at least their eyes on him. He appears, though in dreary enough humour, to be addressing himself to the Profession of Law;—whereof, indeed, the world has since seen him a public graduate. But omitting these broken, unsatisfactory thrums of Economical relation, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... him. Acting a part! Is not all her life becoming one dreary drama, in which she acts a part from morning until night? Is there to be no rest for her? Oh, to escape from this man at any price! She rises to ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... forbade them to hurl bitter darts against Hector, lest any smiting him should gain renown, and he himself come second. But when the fourth time they had reached the springs, then the Father hung his golden balances, and set therein two lots of dreary death, one of Achilles, one of horse-taming Hector, and held them by the midst and poised. Then Hector's fated day sank down, and fell to the house of Hades, and Phoebus Apollo left him. But to ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... the men resolved to remain on this sand-bank, for dreary and uninhabited though it was, they preferred to take their chance of being picked up by a passing ship rather than run the risks of crossing the wide ocean in open boats, so their companions bade them a sorrowful farewell, and left them. But this ...
— Fighting the Whales • R. M. Ballantyne
... yet arrived," Washington writes to Jack Custis, "but ...expected every hour. [My aide] Meade set off yesterday (as soon as I got notice of her intention) to meet her. We are in a dreary kind of place, and uncomfortably provided." And of this reunion Mrs. Washington wrote: "I came to this place, some time about the first of February when I found the General very well, ... in camp in what is called ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... Georges was victor, and he assigned to his brothers and cousins the administration of the provinces of southern Russia. Still the ancient annals give us nothing but a dreary record of war. A very energetic prince arose, by the name of Mstislaf, who, for years, strode over subjugated provinces, desolating them with fire and sword. Another horrible famine commenced its ravages at this time, caused ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... he footed the fens so dreary and dern, While his brain, like the sky, was dark'ning; And with dread to the scream o' the startled hern And the bittern's boom he ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... my limbs grow old and weary, Trembling in the wintry air; And my life be dark and dreary— Still I feel that thou art near; Stripped of all my blossoms golden, 'Reft of stalwart forest pride— Sere and sallow, leafless, olden; Yet remain'st thou by my side. Time wings on: my strength ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... Prince Otto himself. The modest epigraph - 'Le rime n'est pas riche' - may be attributed, with a good show of likelihood, to the same collaborator. It is strikingly appropriate, and I have found the volume very dreary. Those pieces in which I seem to trace the hand of the Princess are particularly dull and conscientious. But the booklet had a fair success with that public for which it was designed; and I have come across some evidences of a second venture of the same sort, ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... counsel each young Danish swain who may ride in the forest so dreary, Ne'er to lay down upon lone Elvir Hill though he chance to be ever ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... and his grandfather had headed the deer: it was covered with hundreds of dirty, yellow tents now. Around there were hills like uncouth monsters, swathed in ice, holding up the soggy sky; shivering pine-forests; unmeaning, dreary flats; and the Cheat, coiled about the frozen sinews of the hills, limp and cold, like a cord tying a dead man's jaws. Whatever outlook of joy or worship this region had borne on its face in time gone, it turned to him to-day nothing but stagnation, a great death. He wondered idly, looking at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... road be rough and dreary, And its end far out of sight, Foot it bravely! strong or weary, Trust in God, and ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... who forgets that dreary hour When, as with misty eyes, To call the old familiar roll The solemn sergeant tries— One feels that thumping of the heart ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... at the end of the week, now that the boys are to leave," remarked the little hunchback to Miss Ann as he bent over her chair. "Life is dreary ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... in the flame, And near the centre took her post; From all sides to her ears there came The dreary anguish of the lost. ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... pausing, now scattering away as in fear, Go threading the soot-forest's tangled darks Like herds of startled deer. But the wind without was eager and sharp, 225 Of Sir Launfal's gray hair it makes a harp, And rattles and wrings The icy strings, Singing, in dreary monotone, A Christmas carol of its own, 230 Whose burden still, as he might guess, Was—"Shelterless, shelterless, shelterless!" The voice of the seneschal flared like a torch As he shouted the wanderer away from the porch, And he sat in the gateway and saw all night 235 The great hall-fire, ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... reached the house Mrs. Carey had died in—it was in a dreary, respectable street between Notting Hill Gate and High Street, Kensington—Emma led Philip into the drawing-room. His uncle was writing letters of thanks for the wreaths which had been sent. One of them, which had arrived too late for the funeral, ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... Woman in Universal Freemasonry" was hailed with acclamation in the columns of the Revue Mensuelle; it reviewed it by dreary instalments, and when reviewing was no longer possible, had recourse to tremendous citations; as a last effort, it supplied an exhaustive index to the whole work—a charitable and necessary action, for the twelve months' toil of the author ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... die; that he had been purposely placed on the most uninhabitable spot of that inhospitable island, and kept six years a close prisoner, and that Sir Hudson Lowe was his executioner. He concluded with these words: "You will end like the proud republic of Venice; and I, dying upon this dreary rock, away from those I hold dear, and deprived of everything, bequeath the opprobrium and horror of my death to the ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... Frequently, they rode slowly along the Appian Way, now almost impassable for heaps of rubbish, mounds, and broken fragments, temples, columns, pillars, and successive piles of neglected relics. The Campagna, in its dreary aspect, often tempted their stay. Sometimes her ladyship would have a feeling of vexation, knowing that it was utterly impossible to visit more of the sights of Rome. They might remain for years and leave many scenes unexplored. The palace of the Vatican formed a life-long study for Lady Rosamond. ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... sacred tie, which should only unite congenial spirits, be violated by two souls, distant as the poles, jarring as contending elements. My father may kill me. Alas, of what value is life to me! It is a long scene of unvaried misfortune. It is a dreary vista of despair. He may kill me, but never, never shall he force me to a deed my ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... wearied the ear of night with his incessant moanings. The mind, soothed into a hallowed melancholy, listened with pensive stillness to catch and distinguish each sound that vaguely echoed from the shore—now and then startled, perchance, by the whoop of some straggling savage, or by the dreary howl of a wolf, stealing forth ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... Sultan's Head. One, in old Fables, and the Pagan Strain, With Nymphs and Tritons, wafts him o'er the Main; Another draws fierce Lucifer in Arms, And fills th' Infernal Region with Alarms; A Third awakes some Druid, to foretel Each future Triumph from his dreary Cell. Exploded Fancies! that in vain deceive, While the Mind nauseates what she can't believe. My [Muse th' expected [1]] Hero shall pursue From Clime to Clime, and keep him still in View; His shining March describe in faithful Lays, Content to paint him, nor presume to ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... in the nest of my childhood. I had always looked on the Moat as my refuge at the last; now it seemed the only desirable thing—a lonely nook, in which to lie down and end the dream there begun—either, as it now seemed, in an eternal sleep, or the inburst of a dreary light. After the last refuge it could afford me it must pass from my hold; but I was yet able to determine whither. I rose ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... had been and what he had been doing with himself. But Mary noticed that every evening he spent at least an hour in the box-room; she was rather sorry at the waste of time involved in reading old papers about dead people. And one afternoon, as they were out together on a somewhat dreary walk towards Acton, Darnell stopped at a hopeless second-hand bookshop, and after scanning the rows of shabby books in the window, went in and purchased two volumes. They proved to be a Latin dictionary and grammar, and she was surprised to hear her husband declare his intention of acquiring ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... strange meanings enough, God knows, into faces that never owned them. We hear dreary hopelessness in the moaning of the wind; wild sorrow in the tossing of the trees; and read into the work-a-day cries of birds, content, humour, melancholy, and ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... without stopping the forty-five miles of dreary road which leads from the hot springs to Little Rock, and I arrived in that ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... courage of the individual who had the charge of their subterranean refuge. [352:4] The new curator seems to have signalised himself by the ability with which he discharged the duties of his appointment; he probably embellished and enlarged some of these dreary caves; and hence a portion of the catacombs was designated "The Cemetery of Callistus." Hippolytus, led astray by the ascetic spirit beginning so strongly to prevail in the commencement of the third century, was opposed to all second marriages, ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... me, I was never so embarrassed in my life. I felt as if he knew that I had expected to see him in London and Ely and Peterborough, though, of course, he couldn't know it, even if he looked for, and missed, me in those three dreary and over-estimated places. He had made a most beautiful drawing of the Jews' House, and completed his conquest of Aunt Celia by presenting it to her. I should like to know when my turn is coming; but, anyway, she asked him to luncheon, and he ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... making a little detour, Blake started forward, but hardly had he again taken up his progress when there came the sound of a slight explosion over toward the German lines, and almost instantly the dreary stretch of No ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the War Front - Or, The Hunt for the Stolen Army Films • Victor Appleton
... the top I saw that there were some mighty high hills covered with snow to the south-east, which might have been fifteen or twenty miles away. It was a dreary kind of country—rocky and desolate, with tufts of thin grass growing in the crevices of the rocks; and I saw that there was precious little chance of picking up a living there, and that if I was to get grub it was to the sea I must look for it. I thought the best thing ...
— A Chapter of Adventures • G. A. Henty
... belong to him. He possibly cherished a half-recognized idea that they might pass away. Youth, however eclipsed for a season, is undoubtedly the proper, permanent, and genuine condition of man; and if we look closely into this dreary delusion of growing old, we shall find that it never absolutely succeeds in laying hold of our innermost convictions. A sombre garment, woven of life's unrealities, has muffled us from our true self, but within it smiles the young man ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... every right to use me as you will," returned Malcolm in a low voice, "for I have done nothing to forfeit your friendship." And with a dreary attempt at a smile—"A friend is born for adversity." Then Elizabeth rose from her kneeling position, but she did not answer—perhaps she could not, for Malcolm's worn face and sad, kind eyes seemed to bring a sudden ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... unattainable! And with a heavy heart, indeed, he entered the great building, where, in a small room, companioned by the telephone, and surrounded by sheets of paper covered with figures, he passed his days. The war made everything seem dreary, hopeless. No wonder he had caught at any distraction which came along—caught at it, till it had ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... most perfectly dreary, dreadful way of living I ever heard of," said Mrs. Ferguson, with unwonted energy. "How I pity people who know so ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... romance, the feeling that strange things had happened to him in that great city, so strange and so intimate that they might not be spoken of. He spoke wistfully of a sudden leaving, a breaking of old ties, a flight into a strange world, ending in this dreary valley, and Ettie listened, her dark eyes gleaming with pity and with sympathy—those two qualities which may turn so rapidly and so ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... place, spends a great deal of time seated in railway stations or on the banks of the Nile, waiting for his train or his boat to arrive; and he has, therefore, a great deal of time for thinking. I often try to fill in these dreary periods by jotting down a few notes on some matter which has recently been discussed, or registering and elaborating arguments which have chanced lately to come into the thoughts. These notes are shaped and "written ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... Cappadocia and Lycaonia, with five hundred horse and two hundred foot soldiers, and dismissed from thence with kind speeches and embraces, all of his friends who wished to leave the fortress, dismayed by the prospect of the dreary imprisonment which awaited them during a long siege in such a place. Antigonus when he arrived summoned Eumenes to a conference before beginning the siege, to which he answered, that Antigonus had many friends and officers, while ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... the restoration of the aristocracy. These insurrections of the slaves swelling from revolts into wars— which had emerged just about 620 as one, and that perhaps the proximate, cause of the Gracchan revolution—were renewed and repeated with dreary uniformity. Again, as thirty years before, a ferment pervaded the body of slaves throughout the Roman empire. We have already mentioned the Italian conspiracies. The miners in the Attic silver-mines ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... have with us a chief, whose face is of the colour of the plucked pigeon; he listens. He has crossed the great waters in the season of storms, he has forded the shallow streams and swum the deeper, and threaded the dreary woods, and faced unaccustomed dangers, that he may learn our traditions, our customs, our laws, and our opinions of the Great Spirit. He has come, if he does not lie, from a far country, a land very beautiful to the eye, a ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... little piece of paper into my hand, as I made a hollow show of passing her the sandwiches, I came very near dropping the plate; and when I had a chance to open it unobserved, and read the words, "Are you mad with me?" I could not occupy my cold and dreary pinnacle a moment longer, but sought an early opportunity of squeezing her hand two seats behind the voluminous asylum of Briggs's toes, and whispering, slightly confused by intensity of feeling, that if I had done any thing I was sorry for, I was willing to be forgiven. From that ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... passed a pile of buildings that, in the summer, might be screened from sight by the foliage of a group of elms, too scanty at present to veil their desolation. Wide gaps in the roof proved that the vast and dreary stables were no longer used; there were empty granaries, whose doors had fallen from their hinges; the gate of the courtyard was prostrate on the ground; and the silent clock that once adorned the cupola over the ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... of all. They shut their eyes to beauty and their ears to music, that the light and music of the unknown shore might burst upon them as a sudden revelation. They looked not at the stars, lest perchance these should declare a glory which was reserved for other days. Dreary and harsh was the way they trod. But in its very dreariness they found safety. They sought no pleasure, they fought no battles, they wasted no time. In the pushing aside of all temptation, the scorn of all beauty and idleness, they found delight. Against the strength of ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... keep on repeating the song until the dreary woods rang again with the good news, and the wood-people learned to love the brave little bird that sets his face so cheerfully, to meet so hard ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... was new and interesting to Shad Trowbridge, and for a time he enjoyed it hugely. But presently it dropped into a dreary, monotonous routine. The vast, unbroken solitude, the endless tramping over endless snow, day after day, and the lack of adventure to which he had looked forward, served presently to ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... for people if approached in the right way, but nobody cared for him, unless it were his mother and Aunt Eunice. They seemed to like him, and he reckoned they did, but for the rest, who was there that ever thought of doing him a kindness? Poor Hugh! It was a dreary picture he drew as he sat alone that night, brooding over his troubles, and listening to the moan of the wintry wind—the only sound he heard, except the rattling of the shutters and the creaking of the timbers, as the old house rocked in ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... want the wretch await Who slumbers in an abject state— 'Midst rushing crowds, by toil and pain The meed of Honor we must gain; At Honor's call, the camel hastes Thro' trackless wilds and dreary wastes, Till in the glorious race she find The fleetest coursers left behind: By toils like these alone, he cries, Th' adventurous youths to greatness rise; If bloated indolence were fame, And pompous ease ...
— Oriental Literature - The Literature of Arabia • Anonymous
... "a dirty night." The barometer had been slowly but persistently falling during the two previous days; the dawn had been red and threatening, with a strong breeze from S.E.; and as the short dreary November day waxed and waned this strong breeze had steadily increased in strength until by nightfall it had become a regular "November gale," with frequent squalls of arrowy rain and sleet, which, impelled by the furious gusts, smote and stung like hail, and cleared ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... from striking upon the rocks; in any of these possible and not at all improbable cases, those who might thus have been left upon the rock had now something to lay hold of, and, though occupying this dreary habitation of the sea-gull and the cormorant, affording only bread and water, yet life would be preserved, and the mind would still be supported by the hope ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... done so, she flung herself down on the rushes [note 1], and bent her head forward on her knees. The longer she thought over her prospects, the more dreary and doleful they appeared. Her state of mind was one that has been touchingly described by a writer who lived three hundred years later—"Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother"—who, of all who have attempted and failed in the impossible task ...
— Mistress Margery • Emily Sarah Holt
... arguments nor prayers can reach, And nothing less than utter ruin teach. Hence, Ignorance!—hence to that depth of night Where thou wast born, where not one gleam of light 340 May wound thine eye—hence to some dreary cell Where monks with superstition love to dwell; Or in some college soothe thy lazy pride, And with the heads of colleges reside; Fit mate for Royalty thou canst not be, And if no mate for kings, no mate ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... three hours the Prince came upon a dreary-looking grey stone wall; this was the back of the building and did not attract him; but when he came upon the front of the house he found it even less inviting, for the old witch had surrounded her dwelling with a fence of spikes, on every one of which ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Various
... say I ever said such a thing!" interposed Miss Dabstreak, with a deprecating glance at Paul. "I only said the Russians were such a young and manly race, so interesting, so unlike the inhabitants of this dreary den of ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... the small group of watchers surrounded the bed. The slow minutes filed away in dreary procession. Another hour passed. Then the figure on the bed, hitherto so motionless, twitched and ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... And can it be that thou dost not discern That else we from the North do draw support, Our party will, as in the dreary past, From out the pale in vain with hungry eyes Behold our enemies safely entrenched Lapping with greedy tongue successe's broth From out the flesh-pets, which we, fool-like, placed Before them by our squabling ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... such my life since you have left; the rain Unheeded falls, the sun shines as of old, But lingers not in all the dreary rooms To touch your hair ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... Zaarah, without calling, or needing to call at one of those fountains, stages, or mansiones,[7] by which (according to our former explanation) Providence has relieved the continuity of arid soil, which else disfigures that long dreary level. This happens to all; but was dinner not dinner, and did supper become dinner, because Sir Isaac Newton ate nothing at the first, and threw the whole day's support upon the last? No, you will say, a rule is not defeated by one casual deviation, nor by one person's constant deviation. Everybody ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... but also in Latin and other translations. It is a bitter reflection, that discussion on this subject was (and—in a less degree—is still) evoked, not so much by critical and textual variations and difficulties, as by the exigencies of party spirit and theological animosity. A dreary, if necessary, page of ecclesiastical history has to be studied, when French Protestant and English Puritan turned passionately against the discovery of Ussher and Voss. It is small comfort to the charitably minded to be told that, had no Daille attacked[74] the Ignatian letters, Pearson would not ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... home, one dark and dreary day in late December, found him as usual in the best of spirits. He welcomed the visitors with a cordiality that would rival the meeting of two long lost friends. The front has no main entrance; the main door is around the back. ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration
... the shape of a Frankenstein-monster, whose mission it is to tyrannize perpetually over the guilty lordling or lady whose secret he holds; doing a steady trade of two assassinations or abductions weekly; and utterly inviolable by cord, shot, or steel, up to the final blue-fire tableau of the dreary drama. I believe that my mate is now prepared to admit, that a certain amount of piety and chastity is not incompatible with tenure of the highest dignities in the Anglican Church—that a youth need not necessarily be a savage Sybarite, because he ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... actually one who ended as the wife of the town's richest banker—that is, one who bagged the best catch in the whole community. This woman had begun as a domestic servant, and abandoned that harsh and dreary life to enter a brothel. Her experiences there polished and civilized her, and in her old age she was a grande dame of great dignity. Much of the sympathy wasted upon women of the ancient profession is grounded upon an error as to their ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... newspaper to read; but after vainly endeavouring to interest myself in its pages, and feeling painfully affected by the noisy hilarity of some gay young students in a neighbouring box, I drank off my sober beverage, and walked home to my solitary chambers. Oh, how dreary they appeared that night!—how desolate seemed the uncomfortable, dirty, cold staircase, and that remarkable want of all sorts of conveniences, for which the Temple has acquired so great a notoriety! In fine, I was fairly hipped; and being convinced of the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... more comfortably at anchor after many dreary days at sea of thick blowing weather* spent in sailing backwards and forwards, daily tantalised by the sight of land, which was approached only that we might stand off again for the night. Yesterday afternoon ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... means of defence, a bare country around, no mountain, glen, or cave in which they could take refuge, under a burning sun and on a glowing plain, distant two hundred miles from the abodes of civilised men, between which and them lay the dreary wilderness and the Orange River; such was their position, with the human lion in his lair, ready to rouse himself up to deeds of ...
— Robert Moffat - The Missionary Hero of Kuruman • David J. Deane
... longer held together. Small groups formed haphazard squadrons, keeping each other company, but many ships were isolated and ploughed their way alone over the dreary sea. Many, despite hard work at the pumps, settled lower and lower in the water each day, and at last sank in the ocean, their fate unknown and unrecorded till, as the months went by and there was no news of them, they were counted as hopelessly lost. Of others the ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... silence aroused them, startled both into a swift realization of that dreary waste in which they floated helplessly alone, a drifting chip on the face of the waters. Her eyes swept the crest of the waves, and she withdrew herself partially from ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... glimpses of a kind, placid face that he seemed to know—a face that bent over him lovingly and kissed him. These were subconscious memories of his mother, which lasted long after he had forgotten her. As he neared manhood, strange yearnings had come to him—a dreary loneliness and craving for company. In his sleep he had seen fleeting visions of forms and faces like his reflection in a pool—like, yet unlike; soft, curving outlines, tinted cheeks, eyes that beamed, and white, caressing hands appeared and disappeared—fragmentary ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... in the city, only that he might act against him; those false promises by which the little garrison, unconquerable by any force, was beguiled to give itself up to mere butchery; the long captivity of the few scores of women and children who survived the general slaughter, only, after many dreary days of painful suspense, to be murdered in their prison-house as Havelock drew near the gates of Cawnpore: all these circumstances of especial horror made men regard their chief instigator rather as one of the lower fiends masquerading in human guise than ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... it was necessary to march long distances without meeting water. One of these dreary stretches was eighty miles long. It was necessary to pass over it as rapidly as possible, day and night almost without resting. In accomplishing one of these arduous journeys across a desert almost as bare as that of Sahara, the party set out one afternoon at three o'clock. ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... him on the Eastern Shore. It was raw, and damp, and chill, with the presage of winter in its cold; the leaves were almost gone from the trees, the blackening hand of frost was on flower and shrubbery. As he passed up the dreary, deserted street, the wind was whistling through the branches over head, and moaning around the houses like spirits of ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... horseback rather unfashionable in winter, therefore I submitted, as I always do, to the custom of the country, took a single horse sledge, and drove briskly towards St. Petersburg. I do not exactly recollect whether it was in Eastland or Jugemanland, but I remember that in the midst of a dreary forest I spied a terrible wolf making after me, with all the speed of ravenous winter hunger. He soon overtook me. There was no possibility of escape. Mechanically I laid myself down flat in the sledge, and let my horse run for our ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... and as Albinia looked at his pensive brow, she was oppressed by the thought of his sufferings in that dreary convalescence. At night, when she looked from her window, the fog hung white, like mildew over the pond, and she could not reason herself out of a spectral haunting fancy that sickness lurked in the heavy, misty ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... up, and towards the end of the story we must be contented to see the hero and heroine living happily in an island of bliss on other people's troubles; and that after a long series of sham troubles (or mostly sham) of their own making, illustrated by dreary introspective nonsense about their feelings and aspirations, and all the rest of it; while the world must even then have gone on its way, and dug and sewed and baked and built and carpentered round about ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... she never would go home. But the cat was all she had, she used to say, and nobody knew the comfort it was to her. Yet, for all this, there were hours and seasons when, obliged to stay in the house, it was intolerably dreary there, and she longed for companionship. "Some one with an interest," she said. "Some one who loves the same things that I do, who cares for me, and for my pursuits. Some one like Sophia Maybury. Oh! how I should have liked to spend my last days with Sophia! ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... I complain? Did I tell this, who would believe me?" said Isabel, as she went toward the dreary prison where her brother was confined. When she arrived there her brother was in pious conversation with the duke, who in his friar's habit had also visited Juliet and brought both these guilty lovers to a proper sense of their fault; and unhappy Juliet with tears and a true remorse ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... excuse for disparaging Velasquez, and launches into a discourse upon the Higher Reality and the Inner Truth which leaves one with a very dreary feeling, and, by some ponderous application of spiritual ropes and pulleys, seems to jerk into empty space all that is most personal ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... Zephyr read the whole dreary life at a glance. A fleeting thought came to Zephyr. How would it have been with Madame had she years ago chosen him instead of Pierre? A smile, half pitying, half contemptuous, was suggested by an undecided quiver of the muscles of his face, more pronounced by the light in his expressive eyes. ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... a moment under a lamp-post. He put his hand on my arm and looked up at me with his queer ugly face, his sentimental dreary eyes, his red nose, and his hard, ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... dull and gray, the marsh that lay Out-stretched afar—a dreary waste Of tide lands low, where ebb and flow The waters, that with ...
— Within the Golden Gate - A Souvenir of San Fransisco Bay • Laura Young Pinney
... the sea-level, must be considered as determining in the negative the question of the possibility of such a cut, by any means now at the control of man; and both the sanguine expectations of benefits, and the dreary suggestions of danger, from the realization of this great dream, may now be dismissed as ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... consequence of the holiday. In doing so, I had to leap a ditch or canal, in which both I and my horse came near closing our pilgrimage in a quagmire; but in time we were again upon the road. It is a dreary place about the hill of Tepeyaca, or Guadalupe, and if the Virgin had not smiled upon the barren hill and made roses grow out of it, it would be as uninviting as one of the hills of the valley of Sodom. This hill is now called ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... she should never find the match-box; but she did at last, and lighted the lamp after several trials. It was dreary work, though, going down stairs with those sticks in her eyes, ...
— Dotty Dimple at Her Grandmother's • Sophie May
... arranged as on a chessboard, in straight and regular rows like ranks of soldiers, and this severe pedantic regularity, and the fact that all the trees were of the same size, and had tops and trunks all exactly alike, made them look monotonous and even dreary. Kovrin and Tanya walked along the rows where fires of dung, straw, and all sorts of refuse were smouldering, and from time to time they were met by labourers who wandered in the smoke like shadows. The only trees in flower ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... here an' there, or rubbed against one another. An' poor Micah's body under the blanket—they were all about it, an' I havin' to brush 'em away. Anybody would 'a' cried if they'd been in my place, such a dreary day was that—me an' baby all alone, with the village ten miles off, an' not a soul nearer than ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... over the north-west territory. Here and there, however, by the sides of streams, or pools, numerous aspens—the fastest growing trees in that region—had again sprung up, their stems being of considerable thickness, while their light foliage gave a cheerful aspect to the otherwise dreary scenery. When the ground allowed it, they occasionally put their horses into a gallop—a pace well suited to their tempers. At the same time, they knew that they must not run the risk of knocking up their ...
— The Frontier Fort - Stirring Times in the N-West Territory of British America • W. H. G. Kingston
... long as subordination in all countries is the rule of her being. Through suffering we have learned the open sesame to the hearts of each other. With the spirit forever in bondage, it is the same whether housed in golden cages with every want supplied, or wandering in the dreary deserts of life, friendless and forsaken. Long ago we of America heard the deep yearnings of the souls of women in foreign lands for freedom responsive to our own. Mary Wollstonecraft, Madame de Stael, Madam Roland, George ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... several degrees of frost by day were what Thrums began to accept as a revised order of nature. Vainly the Thrums doctor, whose practice extends into the glens, made repeated attempts to reach his distant patients, twice driving so far into the dreary waste that he could neither go on nor turn back. A ploughman who contrived to gallop ten miles for him did not get home for a week. Between the town, which is nowadays an agricultural centre of some importance, and the outlying farms communication was ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... her stories! There was nothing like them in all that countryside. It was rather a dreary country in outward aspect, having many bleak moorland hills, that lay about like slow-stiffened waves, of no great height but of much desolation; and as far as the imagination was concerned, it would seem that the minds of former generations had ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... surface of it was beautiful in a high degree. The universal face was clothed with living green. And every part was fertile as well as beautiful. It was no where deformed by rough or ragged rocks: it did not shock the view with horrid precipices, huge chasms, or dreary caverns: with deep, impassable morasses, or deserts of barren sands. We have not any authority to say, with some learned and ingenious authors, that there were no mountains on the original earth, no unevennesses on its surface, yet it is highly probable that they rose and fell, by ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... of Bielkin", is left to me. Do not deprive me of it, I pray you, but suffer me to keep it. It is not so much because I wish to read the book for its own sake, as because winter is coming on, when the evenings will be long and dreary, and one will want ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... emptily embracing him, walked slowly from behind the counter to the door, examined its fastenings, and gazed at the prospect. He was the owner of the store, and the view was a familiar one,—a long stretch of treeless waste before him meeting an equal stretch of dreary sky above, and night hovering somewhere between the two. This was indicated by splashes of darker shadow as if washed in with india ink, and a lighter low-lying streak that might have been the horizon, but was not. To the right, on a line with the front door of the store, were several scattered, ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... Sylvia was a bit breathless; "a cold, dreary afternoon outside—a warm, bright tea room with enchanting tables drawn close to an open fire, and someone—you, my lamb—singing a ballad, when there is a lull—in the offings! Why, Elspeth is as good as made if she has the wit to grab ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... That hushed the stormy main:{12} Brave Urien sleeps upon his craggy bed: Mountains, ye mourn in vain Modred, whose magic song Made huge Plinlimmon{13} bow his cloud-topt head. On dreary Arvon's shore{14} they lie, Smeared with gore, and ghastly pale: Far, far aloof th' affrighted ravens sail; The famished eagle{15} screams, and passes by. Dear lost companions of my tuneful art, Dear as the light that visits these sad eyes, Dear as the ruddy drops that warm ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... Maiden wedded To a groom she's never seen— Never, never, never seen! Groom about to be beheaded, In an hour on Tower Green! Tower, Tower, Tower Green! Groom in dreary dungeon lying, Groom as good as dead, or dying, For a pretty maiden sighing— Pretty maid of seventeen! Seven— ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... winter day closed in so fast, Scarce for his task would dreary daylight last; And in all weathers—driving sleet and snow— Home by that bare, bleak moor-track must he go, Darkling and lonely. Oh! the blessed sight (His pole-star) of that little twinkling light From one ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... day of which I write the rain had fallen incessantly, and Leo had been more than usually disturbed by it, for cold and dreary though it was, the servants had turned him out of the kitchen. They would not have ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... insist on the right to rule, freemen will protect their lives and their liberties.—And is not the peace and tranquility of the State of importance? We have been told with more truth than sincerity that "life itself is a dreary thing" without "harmony in social intercourse." Happy would it have been if the author of that just and pertinent remark had not contributed more than any other man in the United States to embitter parties, and to render life indeed ...
— Count The Cost • Jonathan Steadfast
... anything of him in a large party such as this, unless he specially sought her, and she thought now it was improbable he would do that. She bitterly regretted that she had not adhered to her original determination. Nothing can be more dreary than a gay party from which there is no escape when one's mind is out of tune for society of any description. The idea that for so many hours the conventional smile must be upon our brow, and the conventional nothings upon our lips, is depressing in the extreme. It may be injudicious, but it is ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... down at the front in Alabama, as was also the officer who had the authority to give them leave of absence. I was also informed that my only chance was to go to Alabama, or, in fact, into the field itself, as a civilian! This was a dreary prospect. However, I made up my mind to it, and was walking along the street in a very sombre state of mind, for I was going to a country like that ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... Yet, however dreary life is, it must go on. The brave-hearted cannot drop daily duty. On the second day the doctor went to his office again, and Antonia arranged the meals and received company, and did her best to bring the household into peaceful accord with the new elements encroaching ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... directions. While I had been asleep, a slight fog had come over, not the earth, but the sky; it stood high, the moon hung a whitish patch in it, as though in smoke. Everything had grown dim and blended together, though it was clearer near the ground. Around us flat, dreary country; fields, nothing but fields—here and there bushes and ravines—and again fields, mostly fallow, with scanty, dusty grass. A wilderness... deathlike! If only a quail ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... dead! Nest Gwynn is dead!" and, crazy with fear, it did not stop until it had hid its head in its mother's lap. The village was alarmed, and all who were able went in haste toward the well. Poor Nest had often thought she was dying in that dreary hour; had taken fainting for death, and struggled against it; and prayed that God would keep her alive till she could see her lover's face once more; and when she did see it, white with terror, bending over her, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... forehead, and with spreading horns, Whose taper tops refulgent gold adorns." The heroes pray'd, and Pallas from the skies Accords their vow, succeeds their enterprise. Now, like two lions panting for the prey, With dreadful thoughts they trace the dreary way, Through the black horrors of the ensanguined plain, Through dust, through blood, o'er arms, and hills ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... the women more than the men. The mind feels itself contracted on entering the circle of this well-to-do domestic life; such is the impression of Corinne when from liberal Italy she passes to rigid and dreary Scotland. And yet there is a certain picture, a large landscape by Rembrandt, which equals and surpasses all; a dark sky bursting with showers among flocks of screaming crows; beneath, is an infinite stretch of country as desolate as a cemetery; ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... lively, without the not less invidious faculty of wit. All the court officials crowded her apartments in the palace. Chesterfield, young Churchill, Lord Hervey, Lord Scarborough, all hurried to the tea-table of the well-bred bedchamber-woman, to escape the dreary duties and monotonous moping of attendance on the throne. Lady Walpole, Mrs Selwyn, Mary Lepell, and Mary Bellenden, formed a part of this coterie—all women of presumed character, yet all associating familiarly with women of none. Of Mrs Howard, Swift observed in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... fault of ours the die was cast We shall go forth and fight In death's despite And shall return victorious at the last; But how, ah how," they said, "Shall we and ours be fed And clothed and housed from dreary day to day, If, while our hearths grow cold, we ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 2nd, 1914 • Various
... him, on his shoulder, her little rosy face, smiling silently under the gold bands of her cap. To warm her hands she put them from time to time in his breast. How long ago it all was! Their son would have been thirty by now. Then he looked back and saw nothing on the road. He felt dreary as an empty house; and tender memories mingling with the sad thoughts in his brain, addled by the fumes of the feast, he felt inclined for a moment to take a turn towards the church. As he was afraid, however, that this sight would make him ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... beyond his wildest dreams and a treasure to which the cargoes of those Philippine galleons he had more or less successfully intercepted were trifles. Had the restless explorer been content to pace those dreary sands during three weeks of inactivity, with no thought of penetrating the inland forests behind the range, or of even entering the nobler bay beyond? Or was the location of the spot a mere tradition ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... winter days are dreary, And we're out of heart with life, Of its crowding cares aweary, And sick of its restless strife, We take a lesson in patience From the attic corner dim, Where the chest still holds its treasures, A ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... suppers were rather dreary. The cause may have been that the guest was handicapped by circumstances—to be good company without discarding the fatal air was extremely difficult; also the cause may have been that the daring spirits felt ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... while we thus firmly fix'd our eyes, That bled for ruth of such a dreary sight, Lo, suddenly she shriek'd in so huge wise As made hell-gates to shiver with the might; Wherewith, a dart we saw, how it did light Right on her breast, and, therewithal, pale Death Enthirling[2] it, to rieve her of ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... subject from a point of view commanding a wide horizon, it seems to be nothing less than a social demand, rising into a religious duty, to make every endeavour in the direction of supplying all possible compensating consolation for the routine of daily work, become so mechanical and dreary. When home is without charm, and country without attaching bonds, the existence of a nation is rudely shaken; dull discontent leading to sullen discontent, may readily become active animosity. There will not be men interested in the maintenance of law and order, who feel that law and ...
— Watts (1817-1904) • William Loftus Hare
... seen, with the exception of one solitary light hanging before the picture of the Virgin that was fastened against the wall. The plash of the water against the neighbouring rampart at the castle wharf could be plainly heard. Such evenings are long and dreary, unless people devise some employment for themselves. There is not always packing or unpacking to do, nor can the scales be polished or paper bags be made continually; and, failing these, people should devise other employment for themselves. ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... taught them; but when he spake to them of the destruction of the world by fire, and the resurrection of the body, they would not hear to it, for they pretend to hold that the spirit of the dead man goes forthwith, after death, to the happy hunting-grounds made for good Indians, or to the cold and dreary swamps and mountains, where the bad Indians do starve and freeze, and suffer all manner ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... was remarkable by its lack of any particular incidents. Always the same damp and swampy soil; the same dreary uniformity; the same sad and monotonous aspect of scenery. In the evening, having accomplished the half of our projected journey, we slept at the Annexia ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... am very sensible of your good wishes, and, indeed, I have need of them. My whole life has been at variance with propriety, not to say decency; my circumstances are become involved; my friends are dead or estranged, and my existence a dreary void. In Matthews I have lost my 'guide, philosopher, and friend;' in Wingfield a friend only, but one whom I could have wished to have preceded ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... To pass over the dreary time, I will tell you at once that the three patients recovered—only in poor little Edith's case Roman fever followed the gastric, and has persisted ever since in periodical recurrence. She is very pale and thin. Roman fever is not dangerous ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... pot-hooks, and when they have led the boys' intelligence up a few more steps of scholarship the end is achieved. The boy goes out into the world and refreshes his mind with new occupation; but the poor Brother remains chained to his dreary task, which is always the same and ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... founders of the Commonwealth, married to this Royalist of Royalists, the handsome young insurgent in the Second Civil War of 1648, the boon-companion of Charles II. for some time abroad, his boon-companion and buffoon all through his dreary year of Kingship among the Scots, his fellow-fugitive from the field of Worcester, and ever since, though less in Charles's company than before, and serving as a volunteer in the French army, yet a main trump-card in Charles's lists! How had it ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... rather dreary lounge. Esther passed a hand across her eyes. She must conquer this absurd weakness. She forced herself to remember that she was alone, but she felt as if ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... dreadful thing to wait and watch for the approach of death; to know that hope is gone, and recovery impossible; and to sit and count the dreary hours through long, long nights—such nights as only watchers by the bed of sickness know. It chills the blood to hear the dearest secrets of the heart—the pent-up, hidden secrets of many years—poured forth by the unconscious, helpless being before ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... end of the sixteen days no proof of their guilt had been found, their captors, recognising and appreciating their staunch fidelity and unswerving loyalty, removed them from their cells in the dreary jail to the Rest Camp, where they were able to enjoy the privileges of the ordinary prisoners of war, and refreshing intercourse with ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... day in dreary sameness. Regularly every evening Desmond was locked with his eight fellow prisoners in the shed, there to spend hours of weariness and discomfort until morning brought release and the common task. He had the same rations of rice and ragi {a cereal}, with ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... tears, and seemed to myself the most deserted, solitary lad in Scotland. With that I turned my back upon the sea and faced the sandhills. There was no light or sound of man; the sun shone on the wet sand and the dry, the wind blew in the bents, the gulls made a dreary piping. As I passed higher up the beach, the sand-lice were hopping nimbly about the stranded tangles. The devil any other sight or sound in that unchancy place. And yet I knew there were folk there, observing me, upon some secret purpose. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... known of it in Russia itself, not even by the members of the autocratic political family, beyond the fact of its being a dreary, frozen land of political exile, a region without light or hope ...
— The Boy Nihilist - or, Young America in Russia • Allan Arnold
... games, or dancing, then she must find out what she is good at and do that! If she is good for nothing but to look in the glass and put rouge on her lips and powder her nose and pat her hair, life is going to be a pretty dreary affair. In other days beauty was worshiped for itself alone, and it has votaries of sorts to-day. But the best type of modern youth does not care for beauty, as his father did; in fact, he doesn't care a bit for it, if it has nothing to "go with it," any more ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... to do. "No," she loyally said, "I am going with you," and although I knew that she was choosing a dreary alternative I was too weak, too selfishly weak, to prevent her self-sacrifice. We left that night at the usual hour and arrived in time to eat another farmer's breakfast with father and mother next morning. Aunt Susan was unable ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... possessed voice, which Maud hardly recognised as her own. It was easier to play a part than she had expected: the looking forward had been worse than the reality; and, as she met her mother's smile and Nan's approving glance, she even began to feel a dreary pride in her own composure. Lilias had seated herself between two of her sisters, an intentional revenge for the slight which she considered herself to have received, and Ned was therefore left free to devote himself to his ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... looked at him and could not understand why this queer man lived here. What could his money, his interesting appearance, his refined bearing do for him here, in this mud, in this God-forsaken, dreary place? He got no special advantages out of life, and here, like Semyon, was driving at a jog-trot on an appalling road and enduring the same discomforts. Why live here if one could live in Petersburg or abroad? And one would have thought it would be nothing for a rich man like him to make ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... their delights; but they have not turf, and the world without turf is a dreary desert. The original Garden of Eden could not have had such turf ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... fell upon me. She kept up a desultory conversation as we went along Piccadilly in the dreary gloom of that dull January afternoon, but I only replied in monosyllables, until ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... better of that. You are too young, too beautiful, too much made to be happy and to make others happy. If you are afraid of losing your freedom, I can assure you that this freedom here, this life you now lead, is a dreary bondage to what I will offer you. You shall do things that I don't think you have ever thought of. I will take you anywhere in the wide world that you propose. Are you unhappy? You give me a feeling that you are unhappy. You have no right ...
— The American • Henry James
... other times I rode alone, and my favorite route was an unfrequented lane called the "Quaker Road," that extended from Despatch Station, on the line of rail, to Daker's, on the New Bridge Road. Much of this way was shut in by thick woods and dreary pine barrens; but the road was hard and light, and a few quiet farms lay by the roadside. There was a mill, also, three miles from Daker's, where a turbulent creek crossed the route, and at an oak-wood, near by, I used to frighten the squirrels, so that they started up ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... of the room, taking our hearts with her. Our one desire now was to be gone; but it was easier wished than accomplished, for there remained the dreary process of bargaining. Mme. de Mayenne had set her heart on a pearl bracelet, Mme. de Brie wanted a vinaigrette, a third lady a pair of shoe-buckles. M. Etienne developed a recklessness about prices that ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... in reason; all the remainder of the world is dreary. The highest reason, however, is seen by me in the work of the artist, and he can feel it to be such: there may be something which, when it can be consciously brought forward, may afford an even greater feeling of reason and happiness: for example, the course of the solar ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... from this delightful valley of the Sind River and cross the Zoji-la Pass, we come upon a very different style of country—bare, dreary, desolate, monotonous, uninteresting. The forest has all disappeared, for the rainfall is here slight. The moisture-laden clouds have precipitated themselves upon the seaward-facing slopes of the mountains ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... is the most disagreeable state of existence, and both mind and body are continually making efforts to escape from it. It has been said that idleness is the parent of mischief, which is very true; but mischief itself is merely an attempt to escape from the dreary vacuum of idleness. There are many tasks and occupations which a man is unwilling to perform, but let no one think that he is therefore in love with idleness; he turns to something which is more agreeable to his inclination, and doubtless more suited to his nature; but he is not in love with idleness. ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... door. We observed that the latch was made of iron, and almost eaten away with rust. In the like condition were also the hinges, which creaked as the door swung back. On entering, we stood still and gazed around us, while we were much impressed with the dreary stillness of the room. But what we saw there surprised and shocked us not a little. There was no furniture in the apartment save a little wooden stool and an iron pot, the latter almost eaten through with rust. In the corner farthest from the door was a low bedstead, on ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... being more active in their own behalf. This breezy speech was often applauded, and good-natured criticism followed, putting the heaviest duty on the shoulders of men who have the power to free women, but still do not do it. The last speech of the evening was made by Lucy Stone, who showed the dreary helplessness implied in disfranchisement, and who sought to arouse women to a proper resentment against such degradation of position. Then was sung, "Praise God, from whom all blessings flow," and thus closed the tenth annual meeting of the American ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... bribe to war Are guilty of the blood, the widows left In want, the slave or led to suicide, Or murdered by the foul infected air Of his close dungeon, or more sad than all, His virtue lost, his very soul enslaved, And driven by woe to wickedness. These next, Whom thou beholdest in this dreary room, So sullen, and with such an eye of hate Each on the other scowling, these have been False friends. Tormented by their own dark thoughts Here they dwell: in the hollow of their hearts There is a worm that feeds, and tho' thou seest That skilful leech who willingly would heal The ill ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... Ivanhoe and Guy Mannering, Pendennis and The Virginians, Pecksniff and Micawber. In front of us stretch a never-ending series, a dreary vista of Foregone Conclusions, Counterfeit Presentments, and Undiscovered Countries. But the darkest watch of the night is the one before the dawn, and relief is often nearest us when we least expect it. All this gloomy nonsense was suddenly dispelled, and the fact that ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... it was they were with them on the long dreary marches, with a smile and a song and a word ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... where Jimmy lived, was quite as dreary as Rathbone Place: here and there, a few posters on the walls; some low-fronted shops, displaying sweets and candies, or else a dazzling case of oranges on the muddy pavement; ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... fellows, could make him, it availed not. So within six weeks after, Sir Launcelot fell sick, and lay in his bed; and then he sent for the Bishop that there was hermit, and all his true fellows. Then Sir Launcelot said with dreary steven: Sir Bishop, I pray you give to me all my rites that longeth to a Christian man. It shall not need you, said the hermit and all his fellows, it is but heaviness of your blood, ye shall be well mended by the grace ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume II (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... of the Bernina—what makes it a dreary pass enough in summer, but infinitely beautiful in winter—is its breadth; illimitable undulations of snow-drifts; immensity of open sky; unbroken lines of white, descending in smooth curves ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
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