"Barren" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rather than cricket. Here and there a little dried-up grass occurred, but it collected in lonely tufts, between which extended great ravines and hillocks and boulders and patches of desolation. Upon a barren spot in the middle, the wickets had been pitched. When we arrived, they appeared to be an object of no little interest to sundry goats. These beasts evidently regarding the stumps as some strange new form of vegetation, sprang up in a single ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... was devoting all his attention to a matter which he had much at heart. So far Collingwood's great services to his country had been rewarded with the barren honour of a peerage which had made an unwelcome claim upon his slender means, and with regard to which his one petition had been refused—that since he had no son to succeed him the title should descend to one of his daughters. ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... to enslave a goodly number of the rebels. Such occasions rejoiced their hearts, over the profits they thus derived from the struggles of the unhappy natives to recover their freedom, and it may likewise without sin be supposed that their ingenuity was not barren in suggesting devices for provoking such ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... the other hand, Henry II of France prohibited the appearance of a single French prelate, and began to talk of a Gallican council. Thus the brief series of sessions held at Trent from May, 1551, to April, 1552, proved in the main, though not altogether, barren of results. Unless the assembled fathers were prepared to reconsider the decrees already passed, and to force the assent of the Pope to a religious policy of quite unprecedented breadth, another deadlock was at hand; and already, in the early months of 1552, the council, this time with the manifest ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... how knowledge was essential, and how that knowledge had been gained: some of it from the experience of early explorers,—how to avoid the dreaded scurvy, how to build a ship that could withstand the tremendous pressure of the floes; and some from the Eskimos,—how to live in that barren region, and how to travel with dogs and sledges;—and some, too, from Peary's own early experiences,—how he had struggled for twenty years to reach the goal, and had added this experience to that until finally the prize ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... barren, sterile place I plucked, and read the lesson they conveyed, That in our lives, albeit dark with shade And rough and hard with labour, yet may grow The flowers of Patience, ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of the murky, stagnant air. It was such a strange, sickly, wavering gleam as she had seen above decaying wood, fish, and other substances. All around was absolute stillness. Not a swallow waved his wing nor an insect hummed in that barren immensity. Nature was ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... joyous in Germany, truthful and brave in England, must yet be moulded to a higher quality amid this varying climate and on these low shores. The regions of the world most garlanded with glory and romance, Attica, Provence, Scotland, were originally more barren than Massachusetts; and there is yet possible for us such an harmonious mingling of refinement and vigor, that we may more than fulfil the world's expectation, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... It was rather barren of interest, to say the truth; and the greater part of it may be summed up in one word. Dollars. All their cares, hopes, joys, affections, virtues, and associations, seemed to be melted down into dollars. ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... trees were all about us. The earth wore a verdant coat of grass, ferns, and vines, so profuse and bright that by contrast a remembrance of the barren parts of America crossed my mind, with the fulsome praise of them by the pious thieves of that region who sell them. It would be impossible and cruel, I reflected, to convey to those extravagants in adjectives ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... did not think that any human being could improve it, but had no doubt of its having changed very considerably for the worse, since the days when the now barren rocks were covered with the immense forest of Snowdon, which must have contained a very fine race of wild men, not less than ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... of the vital quality of illusion which would make them wonder or speculate, else a religion might have grown up around these mysterious visitations. But the men of Fish were beyond all religion—the barest and most savage tenets of even Christianity could gain no foothold on that barren rock—so there was no altar, no priest, no sacrifice; only each night at seven the silent concourse by the shanty depot, a congregation who lifted up a prayer ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... both devoted to music. It was a substitute for happiness to me, and in the empire of harmony I tried to forget my barren life. A certain trouble happened to me; in a twinkling all the ties which bound me to home were broken, and I fled, with misery and desperation in my heart! Madame, I was then hardly twenty, but virtue, honesty and love were already to ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... literature so far back as the tenth century, only, however, to be ridiculed as an impossibility; the circulation of the blood is hinted at; added to which is the marvellous anticipation of anaesthetics as applied to surgery, to be mentioned later on, an idea which also remained barren of results for something like sixteen centuries, until Western science stepped in and secured the prize. Here it may be fairly argued that, considering the national repugnance to mutilation of the body in any form, it could hardly be ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... after ages took conspicuous part in the festival, renders it probable that the hymn was composed in the far off time when Eleusis was still a petty independent state, and before the stately procession of the Mysteries had begun to defile, in bright September days, over the low chain of barren rocky hills which divides the flat Eleusinian cornland from the more spacious olive-clad expanse of the Athenian plain. Be that as it may, the hymn reveals to us the conception which the writer entertained of the character and functions of the two goddesses; their natural shapes ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... From Hemlock Mountain's barren crest The roaring gale flies down the west And drifts the snow on Redmount's breast In ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... himself capable of. He was not made like other men; and he did not live, think, or feel like them. A singular organization was singularly and fatally deranged in its action before it could show its best quality. Marvelous analytical faculty he had; but it all oozed out in barren words. Charming eloquence he had; but it degenerated into egotistical garrulity, rendered tempting by the gilding of his genius. It is questionable whether, if he had never touched opium or wine, his real achievements would have been substantial, for he had no conception of a veritable ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... denizens as well as the water and the earth. But supposing that there were places without animals, these places might have uses necessary for other places which are inhabited. So for example the mountains, which render the surface of our globe unequal and sometimes desert and barren, are of use for the production of rivers and of winds; and we have no cause to complain of sands and marshes, since there are so many places still remaining to be cultivated. Moreover, it must not be supposed that all is made for man alone: ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... exist through the three years after the production of "Three Hours After Marriage" is one of the stumbling blocks for the biographer. Of literary achievement during this period his life was barren. It is true that when he was abroad or in the country he was a guest, but even with this his expenses must have amounted to something. As he earned nothing by his pen, unless his friends provided him with money as well as giving him ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... nursed her tenderly, to Berlin for a visit. Paul went through a great deal of worry and anxiety this summer. He had everything at stake in waiting for the results of his undertaking. All his money was in the buildings, the earth-works, and waterworks; if the barren swamp did not yield twice the sum intrusted to it he was a ruined man. But as July drew near, and Paul looked at the thick standing ears of barley and wheat, he felt the weight of his anxiety lifted, and in August he proclaimed in letters to his friends that the battle ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... thresh, and work with the bricklayers; the country women, as well as the ladies, wear veils to shade their faces from the glare of the snow in winter, and from the scorching rays of the sun reflected from the barren rocks ...
— The World's Fair • Anonymous
... of thy inland seas, The eternal forest girdling either shore, Its belt of dark pines sighing in the breeze, And rugged fields, with rude huts dotted o'er, Show cultivation unimproved by art, That sheds a barren chillness on ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... waste. A blade of grass or an insect finds no existence there. The shrivelled lichen alone, clinging to the weathered surface of the broken brick, seems to glory in its universal dominion over those barren walls. Of all the desolate pictures I have ever seen that of Warka incomparably surpasses all." Surely in this case it cannot be said that appearances are deceitful; for all that space, and much more, is a cemetery, and what ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... edge of the barren spot and began to circle around its edge, while Dick did likewise, following his example. They found a footprint at last and took the trail. It did not lead them far before they came to a path on top of the hill that was so well used that ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... Prince's Quest Mr. Watson exhibited a rather remarkable command of a barren technique. He had neither thoughts that breathe, nor words that burn. He had one or two unusual words—his only indication of immaturity in style—like "wox" and "himseemed." (Why is it that when "herseemed" as used by Rossetti, ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... aloof—not constrained (for then she would have been happy, at the profoundly affecting knowledge that she had carried the day), but unsympathetically and unlovingly at ease. She could not read his face: in his manner she read only a barren kindness that took all and gave nothing. If he didn't love her she need not have come. It would have been better to go on as she had been doing, dreaming of him until—until what? Jenny sighed at the grey vision. Only hunger had driven her to his side on this evening—the imperative ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... northern lands Had covered Italy with barren sands, Rome's Genius, smitten sore, Wail'd on the Danube, and was heard no more. Centuries twice seven had past And crush'd Etruria rais'd her head at last. A mightier Power she saw, Poet and prophet, give three worlds the law. When Dante's strength ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... trial in 1902; Fleisham in 1904, and Gresham in 1907. Since the time of Gresham's disappearance we have lost sight of DeBar, and only recently, as you know, have we got trace of him again. He is somewhere up on the edge of the Barren Lands. I have private information which leads me to believe that the factor at Fond du Lac can take ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... at that fruit tree in the orchard close,— No blossom on its barren branches blows. You should have seen last year with what brave airs It staggered underneath ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... selves, is "up to us." We can delay arrival at the goal of our desires; we can dally by the wayside if we will. Only our own loss, our own suffering, our own unsatisfied longing shall punish us. But who is so stupid that he would remain wandering in the bleak and barren desert, when he might by a turn of his hand enter fields Elysian and merge his soul into the boundless areas ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... however, to my own experiences I must say something further respecting the general position. The battle of Coulmiers (November 9) was followed by a period of inaction on the part of the Loire Army. Had D'Aurelle pursued Von der Tann he might have turned his barren victory to good account. But he had not much confidence in his troops, and the weather was bad—sleet and snow falling continually. Moreover, the French commander believed that the Bavarian retreat concealed a trap. At a conference held between him, Gambetta, Freyoinet, and the generals at the ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... The tribune of France spoke, and every sentient being on this earth betook itself to reflection; the words sped into the obscurity, through space, at hazard, no matter where,—"It is only the wind, it is only a little noise," said the barren minds that live upon irony; but the next day, or three months, or a year later, something fell on the surface of the earth, or something rose. What had been the cause of that? The noise that had vanished, the wind that had passed away. This noise, this ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... as they were very low, requiring an oriental squat at which I am not adept. I compromised by stretching out along a hard couch raised some six inches above the floor. There were no gadgets to tinker with, the place was to me barren of necessary appurtenances ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... the old house, hard as he would fight for it, acknowledged another man's will. But the patch of ground by the cliff was his own. He had claimed its virginity, chosen and tamed it, marked it off, fenced it about, broken the soil, trenched it, wrought it, taught the barren to bear. It lay remote, approachable only by a narrow cliff-track, overlooked by no human dwelling, doubly concealed—by a small twist of the coast-line and a dip of the ground—from the telescopes of the coastguard in their ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... hard, brown protective sheath; then the main body of the gall, of firm and dense tissue; and finally, at the heart, like the Queen's chamber in Cheops, the irregular little dwelling-place of the grub. This was not empty and barren; but the blackness and silence of this vegetable chamber, this architecture fashioned by the strangest of builders for the most remarkable of tenants, was filled with a nap of long, crystalline hairs or threads like the spun-glass ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... members of which they are composed, the wisdom of legislators, and the learning of philosophers, the earth seems to exhibit nothing to the eye of man but what is great and resplendent; nevertheless, in the eye of God it was equally barren and uncultivated, as at the first instant of the creation. "The earth was WITHOUT FORM AND VOID."(34) This is saying but little: it was wholly polluted and impure, (the reader will observe that I speak here of the heathens), and appeared to God only as ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... the trouble which Milton's words cost him, was his care in preserving them. His few Latin letters to his foreign friends are remarkably barren either of fact or sentiment. But Milton liked them well enough to have kept copies of them, and now allowed a publisher, Brabazon Aylmer, to issue them in print, adding to them, with a view to make out a volume, his college exercises, which he ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... Congress altogether barren of positive result; for it gave birth to that conception of a "Confederation of Europe," which, though never realised, has been one of the guiding ideas of nineteenth-century politics. As this solution of the world's problems is likely to be urged upon us with great insistency ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... that had glowed with ruddy light were naked now; mere black trunks and rigid arms pointing to heaven. An earthy smell filled the air; a hundred paces away a wall of mist closed the view. We plodded on sadly up hill and down hill, now fording brooks, already stained with flood-water, now crossing barren heaths. But up hill or down hill, whatever the outlook, I was never permitted to forget that I was the jailor, the ogre, the villain; that I, riding behind in my loneliness, was the blight on all—the death-spot. True, I was behind the others—I escaped their eyes. But there ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... the barren woman, the Drinker of Life, but she had at least drunken without ostentation, and if she murdered with her own large hands, or staked men and women from a sheer lust of cruelty, there were none alive to ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... immense baggage-train. Personally his habits were simple and careless, but he loved to display his riches and magnificence, and made his marches and encampments as much scenes of festival as of war. What this showy duke wanted from their poor cities and barren country the Swiss could not very well see. "The spurs and the horses' bits in his army are worth more money than the whole of us could pay in ransom if we were all ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... storks, these are blocks, have no sense of honor, or concern in the sufferings of others. But as the AEtolians, a state of the like fabric, were reproached by Philip of Macedon to prostitute themselves; by letting out their arms to the lusts of others, while they leave their own liberty barren and without legitimate issue; so I do not defame these people; the Switzer for valor has no superior, the Hollander for industry no equal; but themselves in the meantime shall so much the less excuse their governments, seeing that to the Switz it is well enough known that the ensigns of ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... the ground by fire during the carousal of a New Year's morning, and himself, impaired in purse, in spirits, and in character, returned to Lochlea to find misfortunes thickening round his family, and his father on his death-bed. For the old man, his long struggle with scanty means, barren soil, and bad seasons, was now near its close. Consumption had set in. Early in 1784, when his last hour drew on, the father said that there was one of his children of whose future he could not ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... crowded streets with the friend and monitor of his childhood, confiding the simple tale of his earlier trials,—when, amidst the wreck of fortune and in despair of fame, the Child-angel smiled by his side, like Hope,—all renown seemed to him so barren, all the future so dark! His voice trembled, and his countenance became so sad, that his benignant listener, divining that around the image of Helen there clung some passionate grief that overshadowed all worldly success, drew Leonard gently and gently on, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... dissolving and perfumed, as we find in the melons, gourds, cucumbers, vegetable-marrows, and squashes. But these are slightly laxative if partaken of largely. In tropical countries, this order furnishes the inhabitants with a large portion of their food, which, even in the most arid deserts and most barren islands, is of the finest quality. In China, Cashmere, and Persia, they are cultivated on the lakes on the floating collections of weeds common in these localities. In India they are everywhere abundant, either in a cultivated or wild state, and the seeds ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... "ropes and revolvers," Brann wrote for only three years, and wrote as Shakespeare wrote, unmindful alike of critics, binders and bookworms. Only by the doubtful faith that men are made by their adversity can we reconcile our charge against the Sower who cast the seed of genius to fall on such barren ground, amid the stones of a sterile time and the ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... make them accept present knowledge, and present things, as all that can be attained to. This is all— there is nothing more—is the iterated preaching of house-life. Remain; becontent; go round and round in one barren path, a little money, a little food and sleep, some ancient fables, old age and death. Of all the inventions of casuistry with man for ages has in various ways which manacled himself, and stayed his own advance, there is none equally potent ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... people, that they were deeply religious and patriotic, that they hated Napoleon bitterly, and that they could be trusted not to revolt. He likewise knew well the character of the 800 miles of comparatively barren steppes that intervened between the Niemen and Moscow, whereon small armies could be beaten and large ones starved. Against the Grande Armee therefore, Alexander directed that no decisive battle be risked, but that the Russian forces, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... year that Da Gama returned from India by a route around the south end of Africa, with his ships loaded with rich produce, Sebastian Cabot returned from a fruitless voyage to the strange, barren coast of North America. ...
— Discoverers and Explorers • Edward R. Shaw
... the mantel on which Tesuque still sat open-mouthed, with his bowl. The room had lost its former barren aspect. There was now a carpet, while muslin shades softened the glare of the Colorado sun and the view of the sterile hills. Geraniums bloomed on the window-sills, and some young cottonwoods grew greenly ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... low pitched with three windows; the walls whitewashed; no furniture. Before the house a barren plain; gradually sloping downwards, it stretches into the distance; a grey monotonous sky hangs over it, like the ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... that? The first archbishop fled, And York lay barren for a hundred years. Why, by this rule, Foliot may claim the ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We call aloud, and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word; but in the night of death, hope sees a star ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... uninhabited, barren, sub-Antarctic islands were transferred from the UK to Australia in 1947. Populated by large numbers of seal and bird species, the islands have ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... could have pronounced upon the rightful owner. The demesne around the castle contained some well-grown and handsome timber, and as the soil was undulating and fertile, presented many features of beauty; beyond it, all was sterile, bleak, and barren. Long tracts of brown heath-clad mountain or not less unprofitable valleys of tall and waving fern were all that the eye could discern, except where the broad Shannon, expanding into a tranquil and glassy lake, lay still and ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... barren hillsides with their gay serapes blazed,— Blazed and vanished in the dust-cloud that their flying hoofs ...
— California, Romantic and Resourceful • John F. Davis
... burning anxiety that I had felt for some months—ever since Dinah Shadd, the strong, the patient, and the infinitely tender, had of her own good love and free will washed a shirt for me, moving in a barren land where washing ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... on whose barren musical soil we have already descanted, and who has not hitherto disputed to the Old World her privilege of pouring out on our untutored continent the accumulated wealth of years of musical study and training, has at last gone far to redeem her reputation of artistic nullity, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... island, extending back for over one hundred miles. The native city across the bay is Kowloon, and is reached by a short ride on the new railroad which will eventually connect Hankow with Paris. On the barren shore, about a mile from Hongkong, has been founded the European settlement of Kowloon City. It comprises a row of large warehouses, or godowns, a big naval victualling station and coaling depot, large barracks ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... allowed myself a good deal of licence and speculation in treating certain unwitnessed scenes in "The Barren Wooing." But the theory that I develop in it to account for the miscarriage of the matrimonial plans of Queen Elizabeth and Robert Dudley seems to me to be not only very fully warranted by de Quadra's correspondence, but the only theory that will convincingly ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... last evening—came in R. Road cars from Baltimore, 39 miles, in two hours, over a barren and almost uncultivated tract of country. The public buildings and one street called Pennsylvania Avenue are all that are worth mention in this place.... As a specimen of some of the big finery in the ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... clamour that might have been heard for miles. One of these banks— the northernmost—showed traces of herbage, grey in colour and dull by contrast with the verdure of the Island. The rest were but barren sand. ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... the Kennebec, on approaching it from the sea, presents to the stranger a barren and uninviting picture. Hemmed in on either side by low, rocky isles, studded with scraggy pines that have long defied old Atlantic's blasts, it must have been a dreary and disappointing sight, indeed, to the little band of voyagers ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... strings of dried beef, called charqui, which was brought from the mainland in dirty canvas bags. This was often supplemented by boiled seaweed. Being accustomed to self- preservation, I was able to augment this diet with fish caught while sitting on the barren rocks of our sea-girt prison. Prison it certainly was, for sentries, armed with Remingtons, ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... acquisitions which geography has made since the boundaries of commerce have been extended, and the spirit of enterprise has carried our adventurous countrymen into countries which had never yet been indented by a European foot; and which, in the great map of the world, appeared as barren and uninhabitable places, destitute of all resources from which the traveller could derive a subsistence. It must, however, on the other hand, be admitted, that design has frequently had little to do in the discovery of those countries, however well it may have been conceived, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... fellows, built when the street was still a country lane, edging the marshes, strikes a strange note of individuality amid the surrounding harmony of hideousness. It is encompassed on two sides by what was once a garden, though now but a barren patch of stones and dust where clothes—it is odd any one should have thought of washing—hang in perpetuity; while about the door continue the remnants of a porch, which the stucco falling has left exposed in all its ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... The horse and the ass, for instance, if so crossed, give rise to the mule, and there is no certain evidence of offspring ever having been produced by a male and female mule. The unions of the rock-pigeon and the ring-pigeon appear to be equally barren of result. Here, then, says the physiologist, we have a means of distinguishing any two true species from any two varieties. If a male and a female, selected from each group, produce offspring, and that offspring is fertile ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... like my fastidious friend, who go through the world "from Dan to Beersheba, finding all barren,"—who have always some fault or other to find with Nature and Providence, seeming to consider themselves especially ill used because the one does not always coincide with their taste, nor the other with their narrow notions of personal convenience. In one of his ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... been intimate, how happy was I to meet with him. For years had I been in the habit of seeing him every day, when all was happiness, and now to be with him again, though my prospects were as gloomy as the barren moors around us! I felt how different was my regard for him to that for friends of later date. The truth is, we knew ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... laws, struggling for existence on the bleak brown bogs and moors, sowing a little barley and flax, feeding a few rough cattle, breeding a few great black horses; generation after generation fighting their way southward, as they exhausted the barren northern soils, or became too numerous for their marches, or found land left waste in front of them by the emigration of some Suevic, Vandal, or Burgund tribe. We know nothing about them, and never shall know, save ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... the old footing, without comprehensive plan, developing only the same spasmodic encounters, barren of strategic result, that had marked the course of the earlier ten years' rebellion as well as the present insurrection from its start. No alternative save physical exhaustion of either combatant, and therewithal the practical ruin of the island, ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • William McKinley
... truth I should have done even more than what your barren imagination has here depicted. Smith's figure, his ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... and uncultivated was always this good man's object. The Falkland Isles were dreary enough, but they were a paradise compared to the desolate fag-end of the American world,—a cluster of barren rocks, intersected by arms of the sea, which divide them into numerous islets, the larger ones bearing stunted forests of beech and birch, on the skirts of hills covered with perpetual snow, and sending down blue glaciers to the water's ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... circle, and the people busily employed in preparing their evening meal. Other evidences there were, however, to show that the toils of the desert were but too frequently fatal to the wretched beasts of burthen employed in traversing these barren wastes; the whitened bones of camels and donkeys occurred so frequently, as to ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... slide into one another by insensible gradations; and differences of accessibility, that is, of distance from markets do the same; and since there is land so barren that it could not pay for its cultivation at any price; it is evident that, whatever the price may be, there must in any extensive region be some land which at that price will just pay the wages of the cultivators, and yield to the capital employed the ordinary profit, and no more. Until, therefore, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... yet before a good many of these ones will be soldiers," he, observed, with a disrespectful wave of his thumb towards the awkward squad still manoeuvering its way about over the barren stretch of the parade ground. "They ride like tailors squatting on their press-boards, and they salute like a parrot scratching his head with his hind paw. A soldier is like a poet, born, ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... races, with its futilities, but to be hung up with its immortal beacon-light, to shew the track of a new learning, to shew to the contrivers of the chart of new ages, the breakers of that old ignorance, that old arrogant wordy barren speculation. For these men were men who would not fish up the chart of a drowned world for the purpose of seeing how nearly they could conduct another under different conditions of time and races to the same conclusion. And they were men of a different turn of mind entirely from ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... city somewhat as their own when they saw, appearing in the background of the bay, its forests of masts and its conglomeration of gray edifices upon which sparkled the Byzantian domes of the new cathedral. Around Marseilles there opened out a semi-circle of dry and barren heights brightly colored by the sun of Provence and spotted by white cottages and hamlets, and the pleasure villas of the merchants of the city. On beyond this semi-circle the horizon was bounded by an amphitheater of rugged and ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Where bowl the second charms like bowl the first; Say how, and why, the sparkling ill is shed, The heart which hardens, and which rules the head. When winter stern his gloomy front uprears, A sable void the barren earth appears; The meads no more their former verdure boast, Fast bound their streams, and all their beauty lost; The herds, the flocks, in icy garments mourn, And wildly murmur for the spring's return; From snow-topp'd hills the whirlwinds ...
— Inebriety and the Candidate • George Crabbe
... the shore—and then we'll have to do some nice work and lay the Ertak parallel to the edge of the water. The beach is narrow, but apparently the only barren portion. Will that ...
— Vampires of Space • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... privilege of looking over, it will be seen that his equanimity, admirable as it was, was not incapable of being disturbed, and that on rare occasions he could give way to the feeling which showed itself of old in the doom pronounced on the barren fig-tree. ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... behind the barren scrub-topped hills, the scows were beached at the mouth of a deep ravine, from whose depths sounded the trickle of a tiny cascade. Lapierre assisted the women from the scow, issued a few short commands, and, as if by magic, ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... Orlando Innamorato could hardly write, even upon the driest matters of government, with the aridity of a common clerk. Some little lurking well-head of character or circumstance, interesting to readers of a later age, would probably break through the barren ground. Perhaps the letters went counter to some of the ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... less intolerable than servitude under the victors. He even defeated them in a decisive action, which they fought under Galgacus, their leader; and having fixed a chain of garrisons between the firths of Clyde and Forth, he thereby cut off the ruder and more barren parts of the island, and secured the Roman province from the incursions of the barbarous inhabitants [n]. [FN ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... through the Highlands of the Hudson. The great garrison flag was still slowly fluttering earthward, veiled partially from the view of the throng of spectators by the snowy cloud of sulphur smoke drifting lazily away upon the wing of the breeze. Afar over beyond the barren level of the cavalry plain the gilded hands of the tower-clock on "the old Academic" were blended into one in proclaiming to all whom it might concern that it was five minutes past the half-hour 'twixt seven and eight, and there ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... led from Benton down across the barren desert toward Medicine Bow. The railroad track split it and narrowed to a mere thread upon the horizon. The crowd of watching, waiting men saw smoke rise over that horizon line, and a dark, flat, creeping object. Through the ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... been superseded in my heart by the divine Ossian. Through what a world does this angelic bard carry me! With him I wander over barren wastes and frightful wilds; surrounded by whirlwinds and hurricanes, trace by the feeble light of the moon the shades of our noble ancestors; hear from the mountainous heights, intermingled with the roaring of waves and cataracts, their plaintive ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... was slender enough. Unless he live by the ingenuity of his own manufactures, or by thieving or intimidating the people of the country, a French soldier has but barren fare and a hard struggle with hunger and poverty; and it was the one murmur against him, when he was lowest in the ranks, that he would never follow the fashion, in wringing out by force or threat the possessions of the native population. The one reproach, ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... To this barren war of the schools came a fact at last, and its bearer was a gorgeous figure of a man-at-arms (who, later, got into trouble by talking too much), who came swaggering down the road from the New Inn, blowing smoke into the air, with his hat on one side, and his breast-piece loose; ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... I enjoyed my stroll in among the trees, even barren as they are now of leaves, very much. It brought back to my ...
— The Erie Train Boy • Horatio Alger
... the past, the King of Saxony would have found himself master of one of the most extensive kingdoms of Europe; but fortune was hereafter to be always adverse, and even our victories brought us only a barren glory. ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... their assailants might be, and the fall of the man beside me created a hasty rumor that I was killed, so that it was on the whole an alarming experience for them. They kept together very tolerably, however, while our assailants, dividing, rode along on each side through the open pine-barren, firing into our ranks, but mostly over the heads of the men. My soldiers in turn fired rapidly,—too rapidly, being yet beginners,—and it was evident that, dim as it was, both sides had ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... the colonial eye, and the interest of their new labors might have extinguished the prevailing discontent. But while the governor waited for instructions the men were idle, or employed in useless attempts at cultivation on barren land, of which the produce rarely defrayed the ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... sprang, to detail the various acts of bribery and intimidation, cajolery and hostility, by which Alexius contrived to make each of the leaders in succession, as they arrived, take the oath of allegiance to him as their suzerain. One way or another he exacted from each the barren homage on which he had set his heart, and they were then allowed to proceed into Asia Minor. One only, Raymond de St. Gilles count of ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... He beheld the other vessel with her light ahead, still sailing on and leaving them. The day was now dawning, and there was sufficient light to make out the land. The Dort was on shore not fifty yards from the beach, and surrounded by the high and barren rocks; yet the vessel ahead was apparently sailing on over the land. The seamen crowded on the forecastle watching this strange phenomenon; at last it vanished ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the Field thou thoughtest barren, how great a glory hath the moon unveiled! "'And I beheld and was sore amazed, for I was no longer Myself, but Another "'And the sword of death was in that Other's soul,—and yet that Other was but Myself in pain "'And I knew not the things which were once familiar, and my ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... and I who write their history might also sink under it, but that I am supported by the fact that it is so typical, in this respect. I even imagine that ideal reader for whom one writes as yawning over these barren details with the life-like weariness of an actual travelling companion of theirs. Their own silence often sufficed my wedded lovers, or then, when there was absolutely nothing to engage them, they fell back upon the story of their love, which they were never ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... a young woman she didn't have no children, so her master thought sure she was barren. He sold her to Taylors. Here come 'long eleven children. Taylor sold them. After freedom she had another. He was her onliest boy. That was so funny to hear her tell it. I never could forgit it long as I ever know ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... Verdandi is, therefore, not merely a representative of present Being, but of the process of Growing, or of Evolution—which gives her figure a profounder aspect. Indeed, there is generally more significance in mythological tales than those imagine who look upon them chiefly as a barren play ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... florin; the fins, tail, and lips were blue. Another one, weighing less, had a differently-shaped head, with a curious, pipe-like mouth; this was a uniform dull blue. A similar upturning from the ocean's dark depths of strange fish occurred during a submarine earthquake near Rose Island, a barren spot to the south-west of Samoa. The disturbance threw up vast numbers of fish upon the reefs of Manua, the nearest island of the group, and the natives looked upon their great size and peculiar appearance ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... supposed to be connected, with religious belief, to the dogmas and decrees of the Church and the authority of the early Fathers, and wasting the understanding and intellect in dry formalism or subtle but barren controversies. This conception fails to appreciate the vast labour of thought bestowed by leading minds on the attempt to unravel the mass of ecclesiastical teaching which had twined round the innermost lives of themselves and their fellow-Christians, and ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... their extraordinary complexity at this period; and even more like the mountains when you are close to them, for then, losing sight of the whole, you become aware of the details, and are surprised at their wonderful diversity, at the heights and hollows, the barren wastes, fertile valleys, gentle slopes, and giddy precipices—heights and hollows of hope and despair, barren wastes of mis-spent time, fertile valleys of intellectual accomplishment, gentle slopes of aspiration undefined, and giddy precipices of passionate impulse and desperate revolt. ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... island will be preserved from utter destruction, or the stream will overrun the forests of the Far West, and not a tree or plant will remain on the surface of the soil. We shall have no prospect but that of starvation upon these barren rocks—a death which will probably be anticipated by the explosion of ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... first reading of those pregnant words, all the even and hopeless monotony, all the dull and barren plane of life had suddenly erupted into one towering and consuming passion for activity, for return to his old world with its gentle anaesthesia of ever-widening plans and its obliterating and absolving years of ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... soon found himself again on the barren desert. A side track of the railroad, named White Plains, gave him rest for the night. The spot is surrounded by a white alkali desert, covered in places with salt and alkali deposits. Hot Springs is another station in the midst of the desert, and ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... arrangements for "accommodations" and credit, their superior cleanliness, good mattresses, and coffee with a real taste, she did not find them preferable to others. In their rows of cuspidors and shouldering desks, and barren offices hung with insurance calendars, and dining-rooms ornamented with portraits of decomposed ducks, they were typical of all ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... the seeds have almost been cultivated out; in the best pine-apples, and in the small grapes known in the dried state as currants, they have quite disappeared; while in some varieties of pears they survive only in the form of shrivelled, barren, and useless pips. But the banana, more than any other plant we know of, has managed for many centuries to do without seeds altogether. The cultivated sort, especially in America, is quite seedless, and the plants are ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... fresh shoots that will not readily bind to the wall; for if any be twisted or bruised in the binding, they will in time decay, and the sap will issue from the place. Vines should not be cut too close to please the eye, as by that means they have sometimes been rendered barren of fruit. Two knots should generally be left on new shoots, which will produce two bunches of grapes, and which are to be cut off at the next pruning. New branches are to be left every year, and some of the old ones must be removed, which will ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... islands, rising steeply from the sea, are rugged and mountainous; South Georgia is largely barren and has steep, glacier-covered mountains; the South Sandwich Islands are of volcanic ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... magazine presented a graphic picture of the Horseshoe Falls as they were and the same Falls as they would be if more water was allowed to be taken for power: a barren coal-pile with a tiny rivulet of water trickling down its sides. The editorial asked whether the American women were going to allow this? If not, each, if an American, should write to the President, and, if a Canadian, ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... river, partly on a low range of rocks. With its suburbs it may contain about one hundred and sixty thousand inhabitants, a little more than half of whom are Hindoos, and the remainder nominally Mahometans, in creed. Around the wall stretches a wide, barren, irregular plain, covered, mile after mile, with the ruins of earlier Delhis, and the tombs of the great or the rich men of the Mahometan dynasty. There is no other such monumental plain as this in the world. It is as full of traditions and historic memories ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... could ascertain whether any of its more finished passages, e.g. the admirable conversation between the Miss Dashwoods and Willoughby in chapter x., were the result of those fallow and apparently barren years at Bath and Southampton, or whether they were already part of the second version of 1797-98. But upon this matter the records are mute. A careful examination of the correspondence published by Lord Brabourne in 1884 only reveals two definite references to Sense and Sensibility ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... himself of the time to submit to the most exhaustive examinations on the part of his own experts. The defendant's physicians came to court brimming with facts to which they could testify; while the State's experts had only the barren opportunity for determining the defendant's condition afforded by observing him daily in the court room and hearing what Thaw's own doctors claimed that they had discovered. There was no chance to rebut ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... the Eddystone at a short distance from us. Two attempts were ineffectually made to gain soundings, and the extreme density of the fog precluded us from any other means of ascertaining the direction in which we were driving until half past twelve, when we had the alarming view of a barren rugged shore within a few yards, towering over the mast heads. Almost instantly afterwards the ship struck violently on a point of rocks, projecting from the island; and the ship's side was brought so near to the ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... an army of natural pioneers whence men have learned cuniculos agere, the art of undermining. They thrive best on barren ground, and grow fattest in the hardest frosts. Their flesh is fine and wholesome. If Scottish men tax our language as improper, and smile at our wing of a rabbit, let us laugh at their ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... to escape the heavier yoke of the Athenians, who compelled them to: "Dig clay in the valleys, and carry it in leathern bags to the top of the highest mountains, and the most craggy rocks, in order to form a soil upon those barren places, and make them fruitful, and able to bear corn." That history should repeat itself is, of course, to be recognised as merely a commonplace fact; but a myth reproducing itself in the shape of events happening visibly before our ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... Division. If anyone ferreted him out way down here on the edge of civilization he had gambled with himself that it would be Cassidy. And Cassidy had come—Cassidy, who had hung like a wolf to his trails for three years, who had chased him across the Barren Lands, who had followed him up the Mackenzie, and back again—who had fought with him, and starved with him, and froze with him, yet had never brought him to prison. Deep down in his heart Jolly Roger loved Cassidy. They had played, and were still playing, a thrilling game, and ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... of him?" It would take the wind out of my sails, when I came to preach about Redemption, because I should be tempted to believe that, after all, human beings were only in the world on sufferance, and that the aching, frozen, barren earth, so inimical to life, was in even more urgent need of redemption. Day by day, among the heights, I grew to feel that I wanted some explanation of why the strange panorama of splintered crag and hanging ice-fall was there at all. It certainly is not there with any reference to man—at ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Death waits his hour, nor takes me now: But this sad thought augments my pain, That prayer and largess, fast and vow, And Heavenward service are in vain. Ah me, ah me! with fruitless toil Of rites austere a child I sought: Thus seed cast forth on barren soil Still lifeless lies and comes to naught. If ever wretch by anguish grieved Before his hour to death had fled, I mourning, like a cow bereaved, Had been this ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... her bow being repaired, there was nothing more to keep the Southern Cross and her escort in the dreary river, and with no regrets at leaving such a barren, inhospitable country behind them, the pole-seekers weighed anchor early the ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... the possessors of some barren mountain lands in North Carolina, and her description of their former life was wonderful indeed to the ears of the Parisian. She herself had been brought up with marvelous simplicity and hardihood, barely learning to read and write, and in absolute ignorance of society. ...
— Esmeralda • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... so neither do they conduce to any ultimate benefit for those treading them. How striking the contrast between the retrospect of a literary man, who has spent, perhaps, brilliant abilities in supporting every bad cause and every condemned error of his time, and necessarily found all barren at last, and the reflections of one like Francis Jeffrey, who, having embraced just views at first, continued temperately to advocate them until he saw them adopted as necessary for the good of his country, and had the glory of being almost universally ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... determined by no external circumstances, but depends solely on the mental characteristics of the tribes themselves. Environment does not exert any appreciable influence either. Both decimal and vigesimal numeration are found indifferently in warm and in cold countries; in fruitful and in barren lands; in maritime and in inland regions; and among highly civilized or ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant
... best nurse of talent has long been a most humiliating truism; and the fountain of the Muses, bursting from a barren rock, is but too apt an emblem of the hard source from which much of the genius of this world has issued. How strongly the young translators of Aristaenetus were under the influence of this sort of inspiration appears from every paragraph ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... we move. If this prophecy be right, and if the other forecasts to which I have alluded be right, then indeed it is true that we live in an interesting age; then indeed it is true that we may look forward to a time full of fruit for the human race—to an age which cannot be sterilised or rendered barren even by politics." ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... situation: "He that condemns himself to compose on a stated day, will often bring to his task an attention dissipated, a memory embarrassed, an imagination overwhelmed, a mind distracted with anxieties, a body languishing with disease: he will labour on a barren topick, till it is too late to change it; or, in the ardour of invention, diffuse his thoughts into wild exuberance, which the pressing hour of publication cannot suffer judgment to examine or reduce." ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... a road so barren of interesting scenes as that from Cracow to Warsaw—for the most part level, with little variation of surface; chiefly overspread with tracts of thick forest; where open, the distant horizon was always skirted with wood (chiefly pines and firs, intermixed with ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... portions of Burke's journey had to be made through rugged and barren regions, destitute of water, and with nothing that could serve as food for man or beast. Driven to extremities by hunger, the pioneers devoured the venomous reptiles they killed, and on one occasion Burke came near dying from the poison of a snake he had eaten. All their ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... too absorbed for conversation, I had tossed aside the barren paper, and leaning back in my chair, I fell into a brown study. Suddenly my companion's voice broke in upon ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... So much for the independence of Denmark. These two propositions having been made, the one disastrous to the integrity and the other to the independence of Denmark, the Conference, even with these sacrifices offered, was a barren failure. ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... martyrs shed their blood for Christianity? Where did it fulfil its lofty task of saturating the heart of mankind with love, softening the customs of rude pagans, clearing away forests, transforming barren wastes into cultivated fields, planting the cross on chapels and churches, summoning men with the consecrated voice of the bell to the sermon which proclaims love and peace? Where did it open the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the individuals who came under the ban of such a pessimism, we nevertheless can be glad of the fact that the consequences of such a separation from God are at least exposed so clearly, and return from wandering through such barren steppes with renewed thankfulness to our Christian view of the world, with ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... this to the whites, they point to the barren hillside, as evincing the truth of the story, affirming that one day the forest trees stood thick upon it, but was stripped of them by the great serpent as he rolled down its declivity. The round stones found there in great abundance, resembling in size and shape the human head, are taken as ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... to most English travellers, who have no hobbies to ride, the barren appearance of Syria and Palestine is a disenchantment. Accustomed to their own moist climate and green fields, they are not prepared for the dry and parched, and abandoned appearance of the greater part of the country. With us an abundance ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... Serb, the enmity of the Magyar is disconcerting. By crossing the Danube, Serbia has become genuinely part of Europe; she has turned her back on the Balkans and the eternal strife on barren empty hills. The new Serbia can afford to forget and forgive Bulgaria, now a remote sort of country. She can retort to Greece concerning Salonica—We have no need of that port now, for we no longer aspire to be a power on the Aegean, we are a Central-European people. Jugo-Slavia ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... of the round year God sends some day-doves of summer into the barren spring-time, to sing of coming joys and peck the buds into opening. One of His sending brooded over Redleaf when I walked forth in its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... deal about the good time that is coming to this world, when it is to be girded with salvation. Holiness on the bells of the horses. The lion's mane patted by the hand of a babe. Ships of Tarshish bringing cargoes for Jesus, and the hard, dry, barren, winter-bleached, storm-scarred, thunder-split rock breaking into floods of bright water. Deserts into which dromedaries thrust their nostrils, because they were afraid of the simoom—deserts blooming into carnation roses and ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... sailing upon the bayou and lakelet had been the children's greatest pleasure at Viamede, their greatest regret in leaving it. Knowing this, their ever indulgent parents had prepared a pleasant surprise for them, causing a small tract of barren land on the Ion estate to be turned into an artificial lake. It was this, shining in the golden beams of the morning sun, and a beautiful boat moored to the hither shore, that had called forth from the lips of the little girls those exclamations of almost incredulous ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... the rocks into turquoise and emerald or the silvery look of the diver as he plunges into the waves. Twice in their course the cliffs reach a height of thirteen hundred feet above the sea, but their grandeur is never the barren grandeur of our Northern headlands; their sternest faces are softened with the vegetation of the South; the myrtle finds root in every cranny and the cactus clings to the bare rock front from summit to base. A cliff wall hardly inferior in grandeur to that of the coast runs across the midst of ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... soil, dry climate, and single river. It was a narrow strip, inclosed between the Mediterranean Sea and the river Jordan, which runs due south down a steep wooded cleft into the Dead Sea, the lowest water in the world, in a sort of pit of its own, with barren desolation all round it, so as to keep in memory the ruin of the cities of the plain. In the north, rise the high mountains of Libanus, a spur from which goes the whole length of the land, and forms two slopes, ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge |
