"Bleak" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... we looked around, Waiting to hear the last trumpet sound. From living death in that desolate Bay, We had sprung to welcome the judgment day; Although in the pit should our lot be cast, So that this our great woe should end at last. The bleak spring came, the ice did part; Devils entered each sailor's heart; No blessed thoughts sweetened our wretched lives, Of the distant mother's, sweethearts, and wives; Of innocent pleasures we valued most, In ...
— Verses and Rhymes by the way • Nora Pembroke
... taunted me from afar with its lack of warmth and colour, for I cared not for either; but now it seems to me that the bright gleam of your golden hair, and the warm glow of your violet robe, are far more beautiful than my ice-diamonds and sparkling crystals, and that my palace will be very bleak and desolate when you have gone. Stay with us, gentle fairy, and ...
— How the Fairy Violet Lost and Won Her Wings • Marianne L. B. Ker
... the forest bare; Is it the wind that moaneth bleak? There is not wind enough in the air To move away the ringlet curl From the lovely lady's cheek— There is not wind enough to twirl The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, Hanging so light, ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... gorgeous asters of all shades of purple. In the less cultivated places, heather blooms luxuriantly and yellow gorse which attracted Miss Cassandra's trained botanist's eye, and she suddenly quoted the old Scotch saw, with about the same appropriateness as some of the remarks of "Mr. F's Aunt" in Bleak House: "'When gorse is out of season, kissing is out of fashion,'" and looking straight at Archie, she added encouragingly "you ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... land that lifts around it Threatening peaks, while stern seas bound it, With cold winters, summers bleak, Curtly smiling, never meek, 'Tis the giant we must master, Till he work our will the faster. He shall carry, though he clamor, He shall haul and saw and hammer, Turn to light the tumbling torrent,— All his din and rage ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... happened very often, but when it did, a nameless something seemed to cover us, and in passing, left a shadow which turned our happy evenings cold and bleak. ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... because much better preserved and because it is clearly derived, in part at least, from Batalha, is the cathedral of Guarda, begun by Joao I. Guarda is a small town, not far from the Spanish border, built on a hill rising high above the bleak surrounding tableland to a height of nearly four thousand feet, and was founded by Dom Sancho I. in 1197 to guard his frontier against the Spaniards and the Moors. Begun by Joao I. the plan and general ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... been looking at Zion all day, and my feet are sore and my legs are weary. I go back to the Salt Lake House and have a talk with landlord Townsend about the State of Maine. He came from that bleak region, having skinned his infantile eyes in York county. He was at Nauvoo, and was forced to sell his entire property there for 50 dollars. He has thrived in Utah, however, and is much thought of by the Church. He is an Elder, and preaches occasionally. ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... writes the traveller, "we visited the far-famed Niger or Quorra, which flows by the city about a mile from our residence, and were greatly disappointed at the appearance of this celebrated river. Bleak, rugged rocks rose abruptly from the centre of the stream, causing strong ripples and eddies on its surface. It is said that, a few miles above Boussa, the river is divided into three branches by two small, fertile islands, and that it flows from hence in one continued stream to Funda. The ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... Petit Nord and Labrador are so much alike in climate, people, and conditions that this part of the island is often designated locally as Labrador (never has it been my lot to see a more desolate, bleak, and barren spot). The traveller who described Newfoundland as a country composed chiefly of ponds with a little land to divide them from the sea, at least cannot be impeached for unveracity. In this northern part even that little is rendered ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... of sun, In winter bleak and summer brown, She'd steal across the little run, And shyly let the sliprails down. And listen there when darkness shut The nearer spur in silence deep; And when they called her from the hut Steal home and cry herself ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... pass a whole day without seeing one mammal, and perhaps not more than a dozen birds of any size. The weather at that time was cheerless, generally with a gray film of cloud spread over the sky, and a bleak wind, often cold enough to make my bridle-hand quite numb.... At a slow pace, which would have seemed intolerable under other circumstances, I would ride about for hours together at a stretch. On arriving at a hill, I would slowly ride to its summit, and stand there to survey the prospect. On ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... show me what she thought. But granting that our employer led a double and dubious life, who could she be, this mysterious woman who kept him company in the old tower? I knew from my own inspection how bleak and bare a room it was. She certainly did not live there. But in that case where did she come from? It could not be anyone of the household. They were all under the vigilant eyes of Mrs. Stevens. The visitor must come from without. ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Tregeagle is a household word in nearly every part of Cornwall. His wild spirit rages of nights along the rocky coasts, across the bleak moors and through the sheltered valleys. For Tregeagle is a Cornish "Wandering Jew"; his spirit can never rest, since in life he was the most evil man ...
— Legend Land, Vol. 1 • Various
... four years ago, America was bleak in spirit, depressed by the prospect of seemingly endless war abroad and of destructive conflict ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... over the bleak and barren mountain as we entered it. Darkness had long since overtaken us, when we saw at a distance a large clearing, in the middle of which lights shone from the windows of a large house whose dim and shadowy outline appeared to us surrounded ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... interest taken in thy fate. And oh, for thee, thou princely-fortuned man, A pale face from a northern window looks, Forever looks, with constancy sublime. At night, when spectral tints are in the North— By day, when winds blow down from that bleak source— That face peers from the window anxiously, As if the elements might come from thee Bearing some ...
— The Arctic Queen • Unknown
... Prince Consort that the most notable incident connected with my career as a reporter at Newcastle occurred. This was the terrible disaster at the Hartley New Pit, a colliery some fifteen miles from Newcastle, near the bleak Northumberland coast. The accident was of a peculiar character, and it excited an extraordinary amount of public interest. Up to that time it had been lawful to work coal mines with a single shaft, so that there was only one possible mode of egress for the men at work in the pit. ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... greatly from the cold. The north-west wind blowing over the bleak region of the Jura mountains, whistled through the door of the church, which could not be kept closed owing to the constant stream of penitents passing in and out. In summer, conditions were worse, if that were ...
— The Life of Blessed John B. Marie Vianney, Cur of Ars • Anonymous
... moment occurred until the Mermaid arrived off Staten Island, the eastern extremity of which she sighted at daylight on a cold, bleak morning some ten weeks after the date when Leslie and Miss Trevor had become members of her ship's company. The weather had, in the interim, been fine upon the whole, with occasional calms and contrary winds; but, taking ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... to reach the head of the long train. The halt was in a little depression of the bleak plain, and the train-men were in conference over a badly-derailed engine when Winton came up. A vast herd of cattle was lumbering away into the darkness, and a mangled carcass under the wheels of the locomotive ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde
... handkerchief, which was rapidly becoming so briny and inadequate that I passed her mine. From Cuthbert Vane alone there came a steadfast no—and the Scotchman put a hand on the boy's shoulder with a smile which was like sudden sunlight in a bleak sky. ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... Switzerland. It does me good to go there, to be iced and baked and washed clean with pure air. But the terrible mountains, so cold and unchanged, with their immemorial patience, their frozen tranquillity; the high hamlets, perched on their lonely shelves; the bleak pine-trees, with their indomitable strength—all these depress me. Of course there is much homely beauty among the lower slopes; the thickets, the falling streams, the flowers. But the grim black peaks look over everywhere; ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... beyond Higham towards the estuary of the Thames are more akin to the characteristics of Essex than of Kent. The hop gardens are dwarfed and stunted, and presently hops, corn, and pasture give place to fields of turnips, which show up like masses of jade on the chocolate-coloured soil. The bleak churchyard of Cooling, overgrown with nettles, lies amongst these desolate reaches, which resound at evening with the shrill, unearthly notes of sea-gulls, plovers, and herons. Beyond the churchyard are the marshes, "a dark, ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... the cedar is a healthy, cheap, democratic wood, streak'd red and white—an evergreen—that it is not a cultivated tree—that it keeps away moths—that it grows inland or seaboard, all climates, hot or cold, any soil—in fact rather prefers sand and bleak side spots—content if the plough, the fertilizer and the trimming-axe, will but keep away and let it alone. After a long rain, when everything looks bright, often have I stopt in my wood-saunters, south or north, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... tried. The services of so valuable an assistant were readily accepted. Lauzun gave his hand to Mary; Saint Victor wrapped up in his warm cloak the ill fated heir of so many Kings. The party stole down the back stairs, and embarked in an open skiff. It was a miserable voyage. The night was bleak: the rain fell: the wind roared: the waves were rough: at length the boat reached Lambeth; and the fugitives landed near an inn, where a coach and horses were in waiting. Some time elapsed before the horses could be harnessed. Mary, afraid that her face might be known, would not enter ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... they parted, the children looking on and slyly whispering among themselves. Radbourn looked back after awhile but the bare little hive had absorbed its little group, and was standing bleak as a tombstone and hot as a furnace on the naked plain in the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... second bleak year of their marriage Meredith accompanied Thornton to England—he was often obliged to go there on prolonged business—but she never repeated ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... asphalted and turned into a public playground. It was less than a quarter of an acre in extent. It is now built over by workmen's dwellings of the usual kind. It was an additional burial-ground to St. Mary's le Strand, and is mentioned by Dickens in "Bleak House." ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... Connaught; Lough Corrib (25 m. long) and Lough Mask (12 m. long), stretching N. and S., divide the county into East and West districts; the former is boggy, yet arable; the latter, including the picturesque district known as CONNEMARA, is wild and hilly, and chiefly consists of bleak morass and bogland; its rocky and indented coast affords excellent harbourage in many places; the Suck, Shannon, and Corrib are the chief rivers; the Slieve Boughta Mountains in the S. and in the W. the Twelve Pins (2395 ft.) are the principal mountains; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... gentle reader, is my bleak native home, and the birth-place of all the most celebrated critics. The latter fact is not generally known, and for the reason that the gentry composing that fraternity acknowledge her only with ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... hard, the stormy wind striking chill and bleak through the bending pines; it was raining in torrents; it was 5 P.M., and we were still some six miles from the haven where we would be; so, after a short and utterly ineffectual attempt to get the carriage ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... debatable ground, stretching between the sterile Landes and the fat, black loam of the banks of the Garonne. The soil is sand, gravel, and shingle, scorched by the sun, and would be incapable of yielding as much nourishment to a patch of oats as is found on 'the bare hillside of some cold, bleak, Highland croft.' On this unpromising ground, grow those grapes which produce the finest wine in the world. As for the vines themselves, they have about as much of the picturesque as our drills of potatoes at home. 'Fancy open and unfenced expanses of stunted-looking, scrubby ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... frequent nor sumptuous; "all the delicacies of the season" hardly found their way to her table; and in her bleak little nest, for it was now winter, a thin and scanty shawl but coldly did the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... weird, uncanny dances of their own. The evening was full of eerie sounds—the creaking of fir boughs, the whistle of the wind in the tree-tops, the vibrations of strips of dried bark on the rail fences. But we carried summer and sunshine in our hearts, and the bleak unloveliness of the outer world only intensified ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... succession of abandoned gun-positions, few horse-tracks, fewer trenches, and no barbed wire. The villages we went through had escaped obliterating shell fire. I learned that our attacks had been planned thus-wise. Near a bleak cross-roads I saw Collinge of B Battery, and got off the lorry ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... for the young people to be happy. Cold and bleak it is here on the Fife coast, but they are among roses and sunshine and so God bless them, I say, and keep us and every one from cutting short their turn of happiness. You had your bride time, Madame, and when Angus McAllister first took me to his cottage in Strathmoyer, I thought I was ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... three or four miles of our walk, he entertained me with abundance of songs echoed loud and long across the open mountain; but when we descended from it towards the sea, we both kept silence and a sharp look-out over the unequal and bleak country between. We now got among low clumpy hills and furzy gullies, and had to pick our steps through loose scattered lumps of rock, which were lying all round us white in the clear moonshine, like flocks of sheep upon the hill-side. The wind was off ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... moon, and the portion of light or rather "darkness visible" that feebly appeared on the sky and the landscape, was singularly sombre and impressive, if not actually appalling. The scene about them was wild and desolate in the extreme; and as the faint outlines of the bleak and barren moors appeared in the dim and melancholy distance, the feelings they inspired were those of discomfort and depression. On each side of them were a variety of lonely lakes, abrupt precipices, and extensive marshes; and as our travellers went along, ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... the Barrens, the bad lands of the Arctic, the deserts of the Circle, the bleak and bitter home of the musk-ox and the lean plains wolf. So Avery Van Brunt found them, treeless and cheerless, sparsely clothed with moss and lichens, and altogether uninviting. At least so he found them till he penetrated ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... greenroom in the Westervelt, the reading took place on the open stage, which was bleak and draughty. The company sat in a funereal semicircle, with the author, the star, and the manager in a short line facing them. All the men retained their overcoats, for the morning was miserably raw, and at Helen's positive command kept ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... more, As to one I have known and loved before; For every soul is akin to me That dwells in the land of mystery! I am the Lady Irmingard, Born of a noble race and name! Many a wandering Suabian bard, Whose life was dreary, and bleak, and hard, Has found through me the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... It was bleak and wild here. Even the shanties of the three little villages, with their fish-sheds, their racks with nets spread, the rickety wharves—all looked dismal. It seemed as though here must be one of the spots where only a scanty living is earned and only by the hardest ...
— The Submarine Boys for the Flag - Deeding Their Lives to Uncle Sam • Victor G. Durham
... the most lively. An activity has been here that has swept away all difficulties before it and clothed the very rocks with verdure. It would be a disgrace to common sense to ask the cause; the enjoyment of property must have done it. Give a man the sure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden." The italics are my own. When will Arthur Young have his tablet in Westminster ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... place in melancholy contrast to all they had just admired. A park of considerable extent, absolutely bereft of trees, except a few ragged firs on each side of a large dilapidated mansion, on the summit of a bleak hill: it seemed as if a great wood had ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... —on a bleak and cheerless morning in late October. It is not yet light; but a depressed party of about twenty-five are falling into line at the acrid invitation of two sergeants, who have apparently decided that the ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... the wild boars, lay near the foot of the mountains, and made frequent irruptions into the lower part of the valley, which in Douglas Dale bears no small resemblance to an oasis, surrounded by tangled woods, and broken moors, occasionally rocky, and showing large tracts of that bleak dominion to which wild creatures gladly escape when pressed by ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... artistic temper to suffer continually from their presence; Vernou was an actor by nature bound never to pardon the success of another, condemned to chronic discontent because he was never content with himself. Lucien began to understand the sour look which seemed to add to the bleak expression of envy on Vernou's face; the acerbity of the epigrams with which his conversation was sown, the journalist's pungent phrases, keen and elaborately wrought as a stiletto, were at ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... wind with the rhythmical motion of aquatic plants under moving water. I looked through the glass as we drove along, recognizing the well-known turns, the big trees, the occasional low stone cottages by the roadside. Everything was familiar to me, even in the bleak winter weather; only the landscape was inexpressibly wild in its leafless grayness, under the faint light of the waning moon. From time to time the Lala moved uneasily, but said nothing. We were ascending the hill which leads ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... ought more properly to be translated, at the beginning. At all events, the fact I conclude to be irresistible, that the Tartars and the Chinese have one common origin, and the question then is simply this, whether the fertile plains of China were abandoned for the bleak and barren heights of Tartary, or that the wandering and half-famished Scythians descended into regions whose temperature and productions were more congenial to the nature ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... he threw his window up and gazed out across the Park. Bleak and dark the January night; little sound of traffic; a frost coming; bare trees; a star or two. 'I'll see Polteed to-morrow,' he thought. 'By God! I'm mad, I think, to want her still. That fellow! If...? ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... soon may I follow When friendships decay, And from love's shining circle The gems drop away. When true hearts lie withered, And fond ones are flown, Oh! who would inhabit This bleak world alone?" ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... possessed but of which so few traces have been allowed to remain. The Dutch Protestants, as I remarked at Utrecht, have shown singular efficiency in denuding religion of its external graces and charm. There is no church so beautiful but they would reduce it to bleak and arid cheerlessness. Place even the cathedral of Chartres in a Dutch market-place, and it would be a whitewashed desert in a week, while little shops and houses would be built against its sacred walls. There is hardly a great church in Holland ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... We saw bleak desolation; We saw no unscathed tree. We shivered in our comfort And murmured: "Can ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... the bleak sea-beach, A fisherman stood aghast, To see the form of a maiden fair, Lashed close ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... snug, cozy barroom of the "Farmers' Inn," at Madisonville, sat six young men. It was a cold, bleak evening in December; and the wind that howled and drove without, drifting the snow and rattling the shutters, gave to the blazing fire and steaming kettle additional charms and comforts. There was Peter Hobbs, a youth of five ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... housie, too, in ruin! It's silly wa's the win's are strewin! An' naething, now, to big a new ane, O' foggage green! And bleak December's winds ensuin' Baith snell ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... men, taking northeast storms, bleak winds, thunder-showers, flies, mosquitoes, Canada thistles, hot sunshine, cold snows, weeds, briers, thorns, wild beasts, snakes, alligators, and such like things, which they don't happen to like, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... chidden as they impeded her work, and babbled questions about this or that. Beside the fire, in the chair that had once belonged to the master of the house, sat Micah Ward. He looked very old now and infirm. The months in a prison hulk in Belfast Lough and the long weariness of his confinement in bleak Fort George had set their mark upon him. On his knees lay a Greek lexicon, but he was pursuing no word through its pages. It was open at the fly-leaf inside the cover. He was reading lovingly for the hundredth ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... misery enacted, shifted like pictures in a panorama before my mind's eye. I saw far back in the distance an indomitable man, faint and discouraged, after the terrible sufferings of a winter at a bleak fort in the wilderness, drag his weary limbs to the spot where New Orleans now stands, and defiantly unfurling the flag of France, determined to establish the capital of Louisiana on the treacherous banks of the Mississippi. Such was Bienville, ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... a sky of grayest etching, A bare, bleak shed in blackest silhouette, Twelve years of platform, and before them stretching Twelve miles of prairie ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... wastland Ayr? Oh mon, it's unco bleak and bare! Ye daunder here, ye daunder there, And mak' your moan, They've rain and wund eneuch to tear The ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang
... rain, and keep out the wind in cold weather. We adopted this description of shelter in crossing the Rocky Mountains during the winter of 1857-8, and thus formed a very effectual protection against the bleak winds which sweep with great violence over those lofty and inhospitable sierras. We always selected a dense thicket for our encampment, and covered the lodges with a heavy coating of pine boughs, wattling them together as compactly as ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... chilly and empty afternoons in early winter, when the daylight is silver rather than gold and pewter rather than silver. If it was dreary in a hundred bleak offices and yawning drawing-rooms, it was drearier still along the edges of the flat Essex coast, where the monotony was the more inhuman for being broken at very long intervals by a lamp-post that looked less civilized than a tree, ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... score or so of those whose positions had brought them into personal acquaintance with the sovereign, accompanied the royal cortege as far as the Tuscan frontier between the grand ducal state and the dominions of the Church. Arrived at that spot—it is on the top of a high, bleak ridge among the Apennines—there was a general alighting from the carriages for the mutual saying of the last words of farewell. Of course an immense amount of bowing, with backward steps according to true courtly fashion, went to the due uttering of these adieux on that spot of the high-road ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... together jovial sit Careless, and crowned with mirth and wit, Where, though bleak winds confine us home Our fancies round the world ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... example. In that little hamlet on the bleak and barren hills of New England, far away from the great city or even the populous village, you will find a mother and daughter living in a humble dwelling. The husband and father has lain for many years 'neath the sod in the graveyard on the hill slope; ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... who shivers beneath the bleak skies, and starves among the inhospitable wilds of Tierra-del-Fuego, might indeed be made happier by civilization, for it would alleviate his physical wants. But the voluptuous Indian, with every desire supplied, whom Providence has bountifully provided ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... suspended following the April 1999 coup d'etat - for operating expenses and public investment. In 2000, the World Bank approved a structural adjustment loan of $35 million to help support fiscal reforms. However, reforms could prove difficult given the government's bleak ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... studies—a solicitude, some will think, only too well justified. "Cambridge at all times is full of ghosts," said Emerson. But no ghost from the past, flitting along the Old Road from Elmwood to the Yard, and haunting the bleak lecture-rooms where it had recited as a careless boy and taught wearily as a man, could wear a more quizzical and friendly aspect than Lowell's. He commonly spoke of his life as a professor with whimsical ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... over the bleak hill, and by-and-by came to a great slab called the Standing Stone, on which children often sit and muse until they see gay ladies riding by on palfreys—a kind of horse—and knights in glittering armour, and goblins, and fiery ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... When the garden patches grew bare and brown, and the bleak winds from across the Mississippi swept over the common, untoward tidings came like water dripping from a roof, bit by bit. And day by day Colonel Clark looked graver. The messengers he had sent to Vincennes ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... mother. There were enough of my flowers left by Dollar Mark to make a wreath, and that afternoon a piteous procession wended its way to the cemetery. And such a cemetery! Near the edge of the Canyon, a mile or so from Headquarters it lay, a bleak neglected spot in a sagebrush flat with nothing to mark the cattle-tramped graves, of which there were four. At the edge of the clearing, under a little pine, was the open grave, and while the coffin was lowered the men sang. I never heard a ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... the truth which I am fur from not wantin' to do, I should say that at first sight, it wuz rather of a bleak, lonesome lookin' spot, kinder wild and desolate lookin'. But as we went further along in it, we came to some little nooks and sheltered paths and spots, that seemed more collected together and pleasant. There wuz some ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... from the pits, and the dirty, rain-swept back streets where the shipping-offices were. Once or twice I tried to get quit of the ship and went inland by rail. I saw cathedrals and castles and temperance hotels. A bleak and unfriendly land! Somehow I could not find the key of it all. Those sullen people living in the quaint streets round a superb cathedral—they were no kin of the men who built it or the men who prayed and worshipped in it either. ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... world. Alas, in me is no such unfathomable mystery. I but trick myself. Yet I have my moments. These stones that I carry on the mountain, what of them? On what windy ridge do I build my castle? It is shrill and bleak, they say, on the topmost peaks of the Delectable Mountains, so lower down I have reared its walls. There is no storm in these upland valleys and the sun sits pleasantly on their southern slopes. But even if there be unfolded no broad prospect from the devil to the sunrise, ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... and popularity any lyric ever written. It is the most elaborate treatment of Poe's favorite theme, the death of a beautiful woman. The reveries of a bereaved lover, alone in his library at midnight in "the bleak December," vainly seeking to forget his sorrow for the "lost Lenore," are interrupted by a tapping, as of some one desirous to enter. After a time, he admits a "stately raven" and seeks to beguile his sad fancy by putting questions ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... very cold before we got thus far; but now we began to feel the utmost extremity of coldness. The bleak western winds had of themselves been sufficiently piercing; but these were always accompanied by snow or sleet, which beat continually on our sails and rigging, cased all our masts, yards, and ropes with ice, and rendered our sails almost useless. We had been so much accustomed to most ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... lord Timon the rich, lord Timon the delight of mankind, to Timon the naked, Timon the man-hater! Where were his flatterers now? Where were his attendants and retinue? Would the bleak air, that boisterous servitor, be his chamberlain, to put his shirt on warm? Would those stiff trees that had outlived the eagle, turn young and airy pages to him, to skip on his errands when he bade them? Would the cool brook, when it was iced with winter, administer to him his warm broths ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... their pains. He looked back upon it as he had unfolded it. He looked forward across it as, most stern and bleak, it awaited them. He cried with a sudden loudness, as though he protested, not before her, but before arbitrament in the high court of destiny, "But I cannot help you upward; I can only lead ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... to Newmarket, to Buckenham, back to Newmarket, to Cromer (fine, wild, bleak coast), Buckenham again, Newmarket, London, Norman Court, and here again; heard nothing, learnt nothing, altogether unprofitable, Durham's resignation[2] the only event, the denouement of which nobody can guess. The Ministers ought never to have sent him, knowing what he was, ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... live in the midst of abundance, isolated from neighbors and nature, confined by blighted cities and bleak suburbs, stunted by a poverty of learning and an emptiness ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Lyndon B. Johnson • Lyndon B. Johnson
... He wanted to be a money-maker and the totals at the foot of the pages in the soiled yellow bankbook were the milestones that marked the progress he had already made. They told him that the daily struggles with Fatty, the long tramps through Caxton's streets on bleak winter evenings, and the never-ending Saturday nights when crowds filled the stores, the sidewalks, and the drinking places, and he worked among them tirelessly and persistently were not ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... "Mysterious Man of Meteighan," a wild and untoward storm swept down the North Atlantic and over the seaboard far and near. In the Bay of Fundy that night the elements met in their grandest extremes. Tide-rips and mountain waves opposed each other with titanic force. All along the bleak and rock-ribbed coast the boiling waters lay churned into foam. Over the breakwaters the giant combers crashed and soared far up into the troubled sky; while out under the black clouds of the night the whirlpools and the tempests met. Was ever a night like ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... which I had mounted by many a weary path—up many a dark ravine. I was twelve or fourteen thousand feet above sea level, and although I had just parted from the land of the palm-tree and the orange, I was now in a region cold and sterile. Mountains were before and around me—some bleak and dark, others shining under a robe of snow, and still others of that greyish hue as if snow had freshly fallen upon them, but not enough to cover their stony surface. The plain before me was several miles in circumference. It was only part of a ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... Dorrit.' The elder Dickens had unquestionably some of the traits ascribed to the unpractical friend of Copperfield's youth, and something of the cruel self-indulgence and pompous deportment of the dancing-master in 'Bleak House.' And it was during his father's imprisonment for debt when the son was but a youth, that Dickens got his intimate knowledge of the Marshalsea, and of the heart-breaking existence of its inmates. Some years before 'Copperfield' was written, he described in a fragment of actual ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... instructions from the American Secretary at War, with the view of depriving the British army of comfortable winter quarters. He was indeed ordered to lay waste the country as he retreated, if retreat became necessary. It was on the 10th of December, a bleak, cold winter day, that McClure fulfilled his instructions. One hundred and fifty houses, composing the flourishing village of Newark, were reduced to ashes, and four hundred women and children were left to wander in the snow or seek the temporary shelter ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... morning, when I was fighting my way to school against the wind, I could n't see anything but the road in front of me; but in the late afternoon, when I was coming home, the town looked bleak and desolate to me. The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify—it was like the light of truth itself. When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy roofs and the blue drifts, then the wind sprang ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... Through the open window a keen draught of air blew in with dust and a scrap of shaving from the Lung' Arno down below; it circled round his workshop, fluttering the sketches and rags pinned to the walls. He looked out on a bleak landscape—San Miniato in heavy shade, and the white houses by the river staring like dead faces. A strong breeze was abroad; it whipped the brown water and raised little curling billows, ragged and white at the edges, and tossed about snaps of surf. It was cold. Sandro shivered as he shut to ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... him, for the "natives" were easily singled out by their lank longitude from the stockier foreign breed: it was the careless powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain. There was something bleak and unapproachable in his face, and he was so stiffened and grizzled that I took him for an old man and was surprised to hear that he was not more than fifty-two. I had this from Harmon Gow, who had driven the stage from Bettsbridge to Starkfield ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... and their varied, grand persistent labors during the late civil war in America. Not a class, or grade, or rank, of our countrywomen, but was represented in this work. The humble dweller in the fishing cabins on the bleak and desolate coast, the woman of the prairie, and of the cities, the wife and daughter of the mechanic, and the farmer, of the merchant, and the professional man, the lady from the mansion of wealth, ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... the northwest: the sharpest peak in the Judean range, crowned with a ragged, dusty village and a small mosque. We rode to it one morning over the steepest, stoniest bridle-paths that we had ever seen. The country was bleak and rocky, a skeleton of landscape; but between the stones and down the precipitous hillsides and along the hot gorges, the incredible multitude of spring ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... ago the day was cold and bleak. It drizzled through the dreary hours, freezing as it fell. But to many loving hearts, its sleet and rain were not its gloom. On this day was laid to rest in Mother Earth the loved remains of one numbered in the health-seeking ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... haunted house in broad daylight to one's fellow-clerks, in a large London office, is a very different thing from taking up one's residence in the same house, all alone, on a bleak winter's night, with never a soul within shouting distance. I had made up my mind to go through with the matter, and no amount of mental depression, no wintry blasts, no cheerless roads, no desolate goal, should daunt me; but still I did not like the adventure, and ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... those of Hindostan; but make a low grunting noise, scarcely audible, and that but seldom, when under some impression of uneasiness. These cattle are pastured in the coldest part of Tibet, upon short herbage, peculiar to the tops of mountains and bleak plains. That chain of lofty mountains situated between lat. 27 deg. and 28 deg., which divides Tibet from Bootan, and whose summits are most commonly covered with snow, is their favourite haunt. In this vicinity ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... day when these events took place, the hundreds of rocky bits of land that line the Maine coast stood out against the gray sea as bleak and desolate as at the world's beginning. Some were merely huge up-ended rocks that rose sheer out of the Atlantic a hundred feet high, and on whose tops the sea-birds nested by the million. The larger ones, however, had, through countless ages, accumulated a ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... in my notebook that it was a bleak and windy day towards the end of March in the year 1892. Holmes had received a telegram while we sat at our lunch, and he had scribbled a reply. He made no remark, but the matter remained in his thoughts, for he stood in front of the fire afterwards with a thoughtful face, smoking his ...
— The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge • Arthur Conan Doyle
... within there was a feast to prepare and a bride to adorn. In the early morning the sun-browned peasant women brought flowers, masses of goldenrod and asters. These we arranged in brass shells, empty husks of death, till the bleak spaciousness of our shattered house was gay. The rooms, still elegant in proportion, lent themselves naturally to adornment; and I found myself wondering what former festivities they had sheltered, what other brides had passed down this stately corridor before ...
— Where the Sabots Clatter Again • Katherine Shortall
... to give my titular makeshift, then, a wide interpretation; and are always to remember that in the bleak, florid age these tales commemorate this Chivalry was much the rarelier significant of any personal trait than of a world-wide code in consonance with which all estimable people lived and died. Its root was the assumption (uncontested then) that a gentleman will always serve his God, his honor ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... lay aside their private cares To mind the Kirk and State affairs: They'll talk o' patronage and priests, Wi' kindling fury in their breasts; Or tell what new taxation's comin', And ferlie at the folk in Lon'on. [wonder] As bleak-faced Hallowmas returns They get the jovial rantin' kirns, [harvest-homes] When rural life o' every station. Unite in common recreation; Love blinks, Wit slaps, and social Mirth Forgets there's Care upo' the earth. That merry day the year begins They bar the door on frosty win's; The nappy reeks ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... fire at any hour draws a crowd. At sea, in the bleak cold wastes of the water desert, even one other shipload of sympathizers is too often wished for vainly. Wind, cold, and breakdowns of machinery the sailor accepts with dull indifference; shipwrecks, strandings, and disease he looks forward to as part of an inevitable fate; but ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... graceful and exhilarating; but, to say nothing of the injury which not unfrequently attends the sudden change from the stagnant heat of our furnaced dwellings to the bleak winds of the icy lake, is it not true that the chest-muscles are so little moved that the finest skating may be done with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... comparison with the room below it seemed almost luxurious. Two windows gave a clear view above the little oak copse, the lines of empty freight cars on the siding, and a mile of low meadow that lay between the cottage and the fringe of settlement along the lake. Through another window at the north the bleak prospect of Stoney Island Avenue could be seen, flanked on one side by a huge sign over a saloon. Near this window on ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... what could we do to help him? We should be safe from immediate need and danger if we could reach the Prince's army, but where that was, and which way it was travelling, were unknown to us. Certain it was that between us and any real help ranged some thirty miles of cold, bleak country packed with enemies for miles ahead. And here we were, on foot, penniless and hungry. I had longed for a man's work; this ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... and make the tour of the chateau with him. The only sound to be heard was the crunching of the dead leaves beneath our feet. The silence was so intense that one might have thought the chateau had been abandoned. The old stones, the stagnant water of the ditch surrounding the donjon, the bleak ground strewn with the dead leaves, the dark, skeleton-like outlines of the trees, all contributed to give to the desolate place, now filled with its awful mystery, a most funereal aspect. As we passed round the donjon, we ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... goddess fair Who reignest where The weather's seldom bleak and snowy, This boon I urge: In anger scourge My old ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... an altogether picturesque sight, but to the Captain it was Marathon and Waterloo combined. No colonel prided himself on a crack regiment more than Winona on her team. Sometimes, of course, a practice was off color; the day might be bleak or drizzly, or players might be penalized for "sticks," or grumblers might express their dissatisfaction audibly, but whatever went wrong, Winona emerged cheerful from the fray, remonstrated with "off-sides" and "sticks," and reminded growlers that it is unsporting to murmur. By Kirsty's ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... piles of official dust—the forms of the illustrious Fleming and the bold Welsh colonel, seem to start, for a brief moment, out of the three hundred years of sleep which have succeeded their energetic existence upon earth. And so, with the bleak winds of December whistling over the breakers of the North Sea, the two discoursed together, as they ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... them the traces of blood. The goatsucker hath sung his song, the shades lower of eventide, So with the lotus hoe I return home and shut the double doors. Upon the wall the green lamp sheds its rays just as I go to sleep. The cover is yet cold; against the window patters the bleak rain. How strange! Why can it ever be that I feel so wounded at heart! Partly, because spring I regret; partly, because with spring I'm vexed! Regret for spring, because it sudden comes; vexed, for it sudden goes. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... the stiff folds of curtains stirred perpendicularly, rattling on brass rods, the covers of empty beds blew about noiselessly near the bare floor all along the line, and I shivered to the very marrow. The soft wind of the tropics played in that naked ward as bleak as a winter's gale in an old barn at home. "Don't you let him start his hollering, mister," hailed from afar the accident case in a distressed angry shout that came ringing between the walls like a quavering call down a ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... old memories and associations, and his thoughts flowed from the time he had stood with his wife at the top of Market Street to the present hour. He neither praised nor blamed himself. He accepted things as they were without criticism, and they appeared to him like a turgid dream swollen and bleak as the confused expanse of distance ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... the sky, And all of Nature's artists have their colors handy by; With a few days bright with sunshine and a few nights free from frost They will start to splash their colors quite regardless of the cost. There's an artist waiting ready at each bleak and dismal spot To paint the flashing ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... allusion is to a well-known proverb—mandâ hâl wâng Jatt jharî de— as miserable as a Jatt in a shower. Any one who has seen the appearance of the Panjâbî cultivator attempting to go to his fields on a wet, bleak February morning, with his scant clothing sticking to his limp and shivering figure, while the biting wind blows through him, will well understand the ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... second day we crossed "Death Valley," so called because two men were once found frozen in it; a bleak, barren expanse, five or six miles across, with a great gale blowing right down it, charged not only with particles of hard snow but with spicules of ice and grains of sand. Our course was south and the gale blew from the northwest, ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... reach, rippled under a gentle breeze. They had risen almost at the edge of a small, rocky islet, high in the middle, but gradually slanting down to the water. No trees or bushes or grass grew anywhere about; only rocks, gray and bleak, ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... however, he saw why his friend had suggested it as a likely lurking ground for Roger. It would be as impossible for any bibliophile to pass this famous second-hand bookstore as for a woman to go by a wedding party without trying to see the bride. Although it was a bleak day, and a snell wind blew down the street, the pavement counters were lined with people turning over disordered piles of volumes. Within, he could see a vista of white shelves, and the many-coloured tapestry of bindings stretching far away to the ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... dainty little chamber in Grey Street that to see her here so unexpectedly, without the least warning or anticipation, was like being suddenly confronted with a picture which had stepped out of its frame. And that she should be here, too, of all places, here in this bleak corner of the kingdom, where blustering winds swept bare the sullen moorland, and the sea was always grey and stormy. What strange fate could have brought her here, away from all the warmth and luxury of London, to this half-deserted old manor house on the verge of ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the North winds blow Bleak in the morning early, All the hills are covered with snow, And winter's ...
— The Only True Mother Goose Melodies • Anonymous
... in the morning; in the evening he started for Paris. His wound began to ache with its first fierceness, and during his long bleak journey the thought of Madame de Cintre's "life-time," passed within prison walls on whose outer side he might stand, kept him perpetual company. Now he would fix himself in Paris forever; he would extort ...
— The American • Henry James
... burning, and the temperature was exceedingly pleasant after the bleak air outside, where the raw wind blew ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... toward the horizon to windward; it showed but for a moment, and then was lost again. But presently a wider and more pronounced break appeared which did not vanish; on the contrary, it widened, until presently a fitful gleam of wan and watery sunshine pierced through it and lighted up the bleak, desolate expanse of raging ocean for a few seconds. And almost simultaneously with the welcome appearance of this transient but welcome gleam of pallid sunshine, we became aware of a slight but unmistakable diminution in the fury of the gale; a ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... the hall, which was bleak and desolate, and the hearthstone in the centre was thick with last year's leaves, as if it had been long since fire had flickered upon it. On the wall there hung rusty weapons and helms, and through the cracks there crept the ivy from the outer ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert |
