"Dismal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Cheops were squared and hewn; Think of the sea's dread monotone, Of the mournful wail from the pine-wood blown, Of the strange, vast splendors that lit the North, Of the troubled throes of the quaking earth, And the dismal tales the Indian told, Till the settler's heart at his hearth grew cold, And he shrank from the tawny wizard's boasts, And the hovering shadows seemed full of ghosts, And above, below, and on every side, The fear of his creed seemed verified;— And think, if his lot were now thine own, To grope ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... pictures, and for a fortnight enjoyed Venice grossly. One evening, coming back to his inn, he found Babcock waiting for him in the little garden beside it. The young man walked up to him, looking very dismal, thrust out his hand, and said with solemnity that he was afraid they must part. Newman expressed his surprise and regret, and asked why a parting had became necessary. "Don't be afraid I'm tired of you," ...
— The American • Henry James
... Piccadilly, and goes with her to one of the dens of sin that suffragettes see in their nightmares, and cross-examines her at length regarding her ancestry, her professional ethics and ideals, and her earnings at her dismal craft—and into the book goes a full report of the proceedings. He is entertained by an eminent Dutch jurist in Amsterdam—and upon the pages of the chronicle it appears that the gentleman is "waxy" and "a little pedantic," and that he is probably the sort of "thin, delicate, well ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... returned, however, after a short time, in safety, and reported the passage practicable, as the water was only three or four feet deep; so, taking Richard by the hand, he led him into the stream. It was a dismal and dangerous undertaking, wading thus through a deep and rapid current in darkness and cold, but they succeeded in ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... carried a rose in his mouth all the time of the dismal ceremony. It was a fairy rose, and he was told by his mother that he ought never to part with it. So he had kept it between his teeth, even when he laid his poor head upon the block, hoping vaguely that some chance would turn up in his favour. As ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a dismal conviction that she was right. "We must hope for the best," he said drearily; "Fakrash may have some motive in all this we don't understand. Or he may relent. But part ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... trace the tortuous course of popes and princes, duping one another with false hopes; saying what they did not mean, and meaning what they did not say. It is a very Slough of Despond, through which we must plunge desperately as we may; and we can cheer ourselves in this dismal region only by the knowledge that, although we are now approaching the spot where the mire is deepest, the hard ground ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... a man was born bad in his temper, 'twas Captain Bligh, that came from St. Tudy parish, and got himself known to all the world over that dismal business aboard the Bounty. Yes, Sir, that's the man—"Breadfruit Bligh," as they called him. They made an Admiral of him in the end, but they never cured his cussedness: and my grandfather, that followed his history (and good reason for why) from the ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... fur-capped divinities with sceptres of camel's hair, peering and poring in their one-windowed chambers over the minute preciousness of the labored canvas; how are they swept away and crushed into unnoticeable darkness! And in their stead, as the walls of the dismal rooms that enclosed them, and us, are struck by the four winds of Heaven, and rent away, and as the world opens to our sight, lo! far back into all the depths of time, and forth from all the fields that have been sown with human life, how the harvest ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... itself in orderly groups at the command of the superior, and Fra Antonio controlled himself with a supreme effort as a body of palace guards, in brilliant uniforms, scattered themselves among the black-robed friars. The heavy gates closed behind them, and the dismal tolling of the bell ended in a silence through which the heart-beats of Fra Antonio sounded in his ears louder and more ominous than the harsh tones of the summons ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... truths can be more advantageous to society than these here delivered, which represent virtue in all her genuine and most engaging charms, and make us approach her with ease, familiarity, and affection? The dismal dress falls off, with which many divines and some philosophers have covered her; and nothing appears but gentleness, humanity, beneficence, affability; nay, even at proper intervals, play, frolic, and gaiety. ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... torment them for ever. Can anything be greater blasphemy? But be it what it will, it is the natural consequence of all things being ordained from eternity, which are to come to pass in time. What a dismal picture of the blessed God! When I have read of some of the Popish massacres, I have been much shocked, and my very blood has run chill; much more so, when I have read of some religious rites of the heathens; such as their offering ...
— A Solemn Caution Against the Ten Horns of Calvinism • Thomas Taylor
... twenty-four hours. You will not have broken your bail; you'll have done nothing wrong. You can go to France, Germany or Siberia so long as you come back by the twentieth of May. Take it that I offer you a holiday in France for ten days. Surely it is better to spend a week with me than in that dismal house in Oakley Street, where the very door gives ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... sugar, and rusks. Not to be outdone he rejoined with ambergris, rosewater, a cut-work ruff, and a picture of the Magdalen. He was in the habit of taking pictures with him on his voyages. This interchange of courtesies was the one gleam of human kindness which lighted up for Ralegh his dismal journey. He dwells upon it gratefully in the journal he kept. The manuscript, in twenty large pages, is in the British Museum. It covers the period from August 19 to February 13. Off the Isle of Bravo, sickness ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... when super-refined as when ultra-bestial. He made a good stout effort to resist the pipe-smoke. Emilia's voice, her growing beauty, her simplicity, her peculiar charms of feature, were all conjured up to combat the dismal images suggested by that fatal, dragging-down smell. It was vain. Horrible pipe-smoke pervaded the memory of her. It seemed to his offended dainty fancy that he could never dissociate her from smoking-booths and abominably bad tobacco; and, let us ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Occasionally a night bird fluttered through the trees and a frog gave a dismal croak, but otherwise not a sound ...
— True to Himself • Edward Stratemeyer
... exclaim out," sighed Cordelia; "but it's just got to be done. I suppose I ought not to have told you, anyway, but I couldn't bear to go up to that dismal place ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... One dismal fact had become clear long before the Brownsville clinic was opened. The medical profession as a whole had ignored the tragic cry of womanhood for relief from forced maternity. The private practitioners, one after another, shook their heads and replied: "It cannot be done. It is against ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... of the system. They embittered the earlier part of his stay at Paris and instilled in him a deep, permanent aversion to abstinence and austerity. Had he come to Paris for this—to experience the dismal and depressing influences of his youth anew in ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... Glenuskie?' cried Ralf Percy. 'Look up; I verily thought you were sped by Death in bodily shape; but 'twas all an abominable grisly pageant got up by some dismal caitiffs.' ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... delicate child, he was starved on insufficient diet; and an eloquent passage in "Eothen" depicts his intellectual fall from the varied interests and expanding enthusiasm of liberal home teaching to the regulation gerund- grinding and Procrustean discipline of school. "The dismal change is ordained, and then—thin meagre Latin with small shreds and patches of Greek, is thrown like a pauper's pall over all your early lore; instead of sweet knowledge, vile, monkish, doggerel grammars and graduses, dictionaries ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... in circles, uttering dismal howls, and the pet bear was scrambling for the top of the ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders in the Great North Woods • Jessie Graham Flower
... course of his studies. "To poetry, like most infants, I devoted most of my time." From modern poetry he went back to the earlier sources, first with the idea of systematic reading and at last through Chaucer and Gower and early ballads, until he lost himself "in a dismal swamp of barbarous romances and lying Latin chronicles. I got hold of the Bibliotheca Monastica, containing a copious account of Anglo-Norman authors, with notices of their works, and set seriously to reading every one of them." One profit of his antiquarianism, however, was, as ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... carriage, brought me to the cathedral; an old haunt of mine. I had always venerated its lofty pillars, dim aisles, and mysterious arches. Last night they were more solemn than ever, and echoed no other sound than my steps. I strayed about the choir and chapels, till they grew so dark and dismal, that I was half inclined to be frightened; looked over my shoulder; thought of spectres that have an awkward trick of syllabling men's names in dreary places; and fancied a sepulchral voice exclaiming: "Worship my toe at Ghent; my ribs at ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... hours every day, that you may spend one with the prince, allow two hours to your dinner, and two hours in the projecting where to get one, you have still a fair time to yourself, and one half hour in a week, without question, to tell me that you are alive, and that in this dismal time of mutation, you are so far from change, that you continue even the ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... peonies, and the grate itself was aflame with yellow poppies. All this splendor and color, mingled with the sunshine falling through the honeysuckle vines at the windows in a leafy riot of dancing shadows over walls and floor, made of the usually dismal little room the veritable "bower" of Anne's imagination, and even extorted a tribute of admiration from Marilla, who came in to ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... translation, the last day will make but few graves; at least quick resurrections will anticipate lasting sepultures. Some graves will be opened before they be quite closed, and Lazarus be no wonder. When many that feared to die, shall groan that they can die but once, the dismal state is the second and living death, when life puts despair on the damned; when men shall wish the coverings of mountains, not of monuments, and annihilations shall ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... dismal rain Came down in slanting lines, And wind, that grand old harper, smote His thunder-harp of pines. A ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... is actually all over! I was so low-spirited at the station yesterday, and this morning, when I woke, I couldn't seem to accept the dismal truth that you were really gone and the pleasant tramping and talking at an end. Ah, my boy! It has been such a rich holiday for me, and I feel under such deep and honest obligations to you for coming. I am putting out of my mind all memory of the time when I misbehaved toward you and ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... model had given the artist the horrors. This simulacrum rises out of the earth like an exhalation, and groups itself into shape above the spade with which all that is corporeal of its late owner has been interred. Please remark the uncomforted and dismal expression of the simulacrum. We must remember that the ghost or "Ka" is not the "soul," which has other destinies in the future world, good or evil, but is only a shadowy resemblance, condemned, as in the Egyptian creed, to dwell ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... an unlimited supply of pure soft water. Sometimes water from such ponds contains large amounts of vegetable matter, the result of decomposition of swampy or peaty material, as, for instance, from the ponds in the Dismal Swamp of Virginia, so that the water has a yellow, coffee-colored appearance. The appearance of such water is suspicious, but it need not be feared unless something more pernicious than the coloring matter ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... which, the coal having been worked out, the old engine, which had grown "dismal to look at," as one of the workmen described it, was pulled down; and then Robert, having obtained employment as a fireman at the Dewley Burn Colliery, removed with his family to that place. Dewley Burn, at this day, consists of a few old-fashioned low-roofed ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... found himself in a strange and truly foreign land, a queer, cold, dismal country inhabited by vast quantities of "second-class sahibs," as he termed the British lower middle-class and poor, a country of a strange greenness and orderedness, where there were white servants, ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... to an end for us a quarter of a year's captivity, and all the prisoners, at least, were glad when the dismal farce of Christmas under such ...
— Five Months on a German Raider - Being the Adventures of an Englishman Captured by the 'Wolf' • Frederic George Trayes
... ring, told an improbable story of a lady throwing it to him out of a window, and denied ever having seen Helena since the day of their marriage. The king, knowing Bertram's dislike to his wife, feared he had destroyed her; and he ordered his guards to seize Bertram, saying, "I am wrapt in dismal thinking, for I fear the life of Helena was foully snatched." At this moment Diana and her mother entered, and presented a petition to the king, wherein they begged his majesty to exert his royal power to compel Bertram to marry Diana, he having made her ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... ease whilst I was angry. Scorn and despite would have cured me in some reasonable time, which I despair of now. However, I am not displeased with it, and, if it may be of any advantage to you, I shall not consider myself in it; but let me beg, then, that you will leave off those dismal thoughts. I tremble at the desperate things you say in your letter; for the love of God, consider seriously with yourself what can enter into comparison with the safety of your soul. Are a thousand women, or ten thousand worlds, worth it? No, you cannot have so little reason left ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... which the sun could not evoke from its boundless fields of light comes out of the dark bosom of a cloud. A bright day promises so much, so builds our hopes, that our keenest disappointments seem to come on a radiant morning, but on a dismal day, when nothing has been promised, a straggling pleasure is accidentally found and is pressed the closer to the senses ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... of the Great Northern Terminus at King's Cross had not long been lighted, when a cab deposited a young lady and her luggage at the departure platform. It was an October twilight, cold and gray, and the place had a cheerless and dismal aspect to that solitary young traveller, to whom English life and an English ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... not yet risen. In the hollows the mists lay like lakes, and every stone and rock was wet and shining as though it had been washed in readiness for the coming day. The gravestones shone upon us like freshly scrubbed doorsteps. It was a most dismal spot, and I was so cold that I was afraid I would shiver, and Fiske might think I was nervous. So I moved briskly about among the graves, reading the inscriptions on the tombstones. Under the circumstances the occupation, to a less healthy mind, would have been depressing. My adversary, ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... long, dismal voyage that, in the face of the tempest—with short and tedious tacks that sometimes left us at the day's end little nearer our haven than at the beginning. And long before Margate was reached half of our company ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... rifle-shots snapped short his dismal revery. As he sprang to his feet he saw a squad of his own people, a dozen or so, galloping up the road, and a moment later four times as many men came out from behind the shoulder of the mountain in sharp pursuit. The pursued were bent low over the necks of their horses; from the crowd of ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... at present was indeed very dismal, even to those who preserved the blessing of health; to the sick, whose crippled limbs were tortured with excessive pain, it was insupportable. The ocean about us had a furious aspect, and seemed incensed at the presumption ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... illness. He had lived a lonely friendless life, holding himself aloof from his fellow-creatures; and there were neither neighbours nor friends to lament his ending. The vagabond boys of the neighbourhood had clustered round the door to witness the last dismal ceremony of Mr. Nowell's existence, and had hung about the shop-front for some time after the funeral cortege had departed, peering curiously down into the darksome area, and speculating upon the hoards of wealth which the old miser ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... the scene was bleak and dismal. Not a creature moved anywhere. Even the meadow, mice had already found the nights too chilly for their liking. Turkey Proudfoot was there alone, standing like a statue, as if he were waiting ...
— The Tale of Turkey Proudfoot - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... to be a sullen, melancholic, and disconsolate life, attended with many fears and sorrows. It is, alas! too evident, that many Christians are kept in bondage, almost all their lifetime, through fear of eternal death. How many dismal representations of sin and wrath, are in the souls of some Christians, which keep them in much thraldom? At least, who is it that is not once and often brought in bondage after conversion, and made to apprehend fearfully their own estate, who hath such constant ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... a chamber of death into which he was ushered, dismal—yet, of its sort, unique, marvelous. The room itself might have been the sleeping apartment of an empress—lofty, with white paneled walls, adorned simply with gilded lines; with high windows, closely curtained now, so that neither sound nor the light of day might penetrate ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... The sky was a dull gray, and a sickening drizzle was falling, mixed with a thick fog that made everything and everybody soggy and damp. It was a most dismal and disheartening Sunday, without a ray of cheerfulness in it, and Mr. and Mrs. Fenelby felt the burden of the day keenly. The house had the usual Sunday morning air of untidiness. It was a bad day on which to take up the ...
— The Cheerful Smugglers • Ellis Parker Butler
... to walk. She looked, to my ideas, so very young to be engaged in such an occupation as this, and her gloomy black frock appeared to be such an unnaturally grave garment for a mere child of her age, and looked so doubly dismal by contrast with the brilliant sunny lawn on which she stood, that I quite started when I first saw her, and eagerly asked my mother who she was. The answer informed me of the sad family story, which I have been just relating to you. Mrs. Welwyn had then been buried about three ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... is now approaching towards day. What is to be done must be done without a moment's delay. It is at length resolved to hazard the chance of passing it by canoe rather than encountering the untried perils of a dismal swamp. The daring leader puts his utmost strength to the test, striking the water right and left with excited vigor. His feeling is 'now or never'; for he knew this to be the most critical position of his whole ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... and, encasing the wicker-basket with the waterproof material, float down some favoring stream. On and on for hours in an unknown direction, over an unknown region, winged by the wind and ally of the storm, they went, until, in the dismal watches of the early morning, to darkness, uncertainty and the intensity of isolation a new horror was added. The murmur of plashing forest-streams, which had hitherto been the only sound greeting them from ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... shook her pillows, flashed a night- light on her watch. Quarter to three. It was a rather dismal hour, she thought, not near enough either midnight or morning. Tossing so long, she would be sleepless all ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... irremediable. The Indians had all stepped into the bark which was to carry them across, but their dogs remained upon the bank. As soon as these animals perceived that their masters were finally leaving the shore, they set up a dismal howl, and plunging all together into the icy waters of the Mississippi, they ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... north of Scotland, is covered with ice and snow the entire summer; and in the Island of South Georgia, which is in the same parallel as the center of England, the perpetual snow descends to the very sea-beach. The following is Captain Cook's description of this dismal place: 'We thought it very extraordinary,' he says, 'that an island between the latitudes of 54 and 55 should, in the very height of summer, be almost wholly covered with frozen snow, in some places many fathoms deep. . . . The head of the bay was terminated ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... have passed since that dismal storm in the spring of 1815, when Hamilton and I spent a long disconsolate night of enforced waiting, I still hear the roaring of the northern gale, driving round the house-corners as if it would wrench all eaves from the roof. It ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... the cracked plaster beneath. The whole place had a tone of yellowish-grey grime all over it, save where, in the centre of the room, on a rough double post, shaped like the guillotine, a scarlet cap of Liberty gave a note of lurid colour to the dismal surroundings. ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... intention, provident and wise; Which willed the fleet, from leaves of greenwood tree, Produced upon the beach in wondrous guise, That, bound for France, now ploughed the foaming sea, Should meet the king at night; that from surprise In that dark, dismal hour, amid his crew Worse panic and ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... first wife of Count Rodolphe illuminates the dismal story of his inglorious reign. Marguerite d'Alamandi has been confused in the tradition with Marguerite de Grandson, the second wife of Rodolphe. It is Marguerite d'Alamandi, and not the other Marguerite who is the heroine of the tale which has been elaborated into a moving little ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... (no) and his signature. The frightfulness of his intention stood like a spectre before me. I clapped one hand upon the other and wept. I made inquiries in the city and in the neighbouring places, but to no purpose. Oh, that dreadful, dismal day, when everywhither I went something seemed to whisper in my heart, 'Khalid is no more.' It was the first time in my life that I felt the pangs of separation, the sting of death and sorrow. The days and months passed, heartlessly ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... Margaret gathered that most of the junior members of the house were going down to the sea to bathe—but her own thoughts were of themselves sufficient to keep her awake. She had fallen asleep the night before with the dismal thought in her mind that though her long desired wish to stay in a house full of young people had been most unexpectedly realised, the very first thing she had done was to declare enmity with all of them, and the depressing fact ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... her gaze, flinching inwardly, as one sometimes does when credited with a feeling that one no longer fully deserves. A dismal perplexity came to her, a little pang of ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... was just rising. Three miles beyond the village the steppe spread out and nothing was visible except the dry, monotonous, sandy, dismal plain covered with the footmarks of cattle, and here and there with tufts of withered grass, with low reeds in the flats, and rare, little-trodden footpaths, and the camps of the nomad Nogay tribe just visible far away. The absence of shade and the austere aspect of the place were striking. The ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... In this dismal plight they continued till about six o'clock the following morning, when the ship parted from one of her largest anchors, and drifted on towards Dymchurch-wall, about three miles to the west of Hythe. This wall is formed by immense piles, and cross pieces of ...
— Thrilling Stories Of The Ocean • Marmaduke Park
... I'll bring Miss Ridge back in half an hour. You wouldn't have me wander about this dismal old boat alone, would you? Smoke a cigar, Hugh, and I'll take care of your sister while you count the stars." He ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... upon it, Sailed upon that sluggish water, Covered with its mould of ages, Black with rotting water-rushes, Rank with flags and leaves of lilies, Stagnant, lifeless, dreary, dismal, Lighted by the shimmering moonlight, And by will-o'-the-wisps illumined, Fires by ghosts of dead men kindled, In their ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... chamber of Duke William may be seen another recess in the thick walls, still smaller and more dismal, to which a ruined window now gives more light than in the days when poor young Arthur of Brittany looked sadly through its loop-holes over a wide extent of country, now all cultivation and beauty, but probably then bristling with forts and towers, all in the hands of his hard-hearted uncle John. ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... a suitable noun to each of the following adjectives, without repeating any word: good, great, tall, wise, strong, dark, dangerous, dismal, drowsy, twenty, true, difficult, pale, livid, ripe, delicious, stormy, rainy, convenient, heavy, disastrous, terrible, necessary. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... here. There's no other celebrity till you get to Boss Croker, the Tammany man, the other side of Ilsley Downs. Artists they don't count. The rumour was all round the place last week that you were here incognito in the person of a dismal-looking Johnny, staying at the 'Fisherman's Retreat,' who used to sit all day in a punt up the backwater drinking whisky. It made me rather mad when I saw him. I suppose it was the whisky that suggested the idea to them. They have got the notion ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... in the air, and packs of wolves appeared, howling with impatience for the banquet. The appearance of these animals in the distance is that of a flock of sheep, being generally perfectly white; but among some dozen or fifteen occupying a bluff in the course I was taking, and howling a most dismal chorus, I perceived a jet black member, whose skin I felt desirous of possessing. It is not, however, an easy task to get on close terms with a wolf, unless gorging himself, when so reluctant is he to quit his meal, that, craven-hearted as he is, he can scarcely be driven from it; but turning ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... other instances produced by him of the dismal condition we are in, he offers one which could not easily be guessed. It is this: That the little factious pamphlets written about the end of King Charles II's reign, "lie dead in shops, are looked on ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... were known to the performers, and over the same they were brooding that dismal rainy afternoon, awaiting ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... Hooker, over thirty acres was cut as close by the bullets as if it had been reaped with the sickle, and the dead lay piled in regular ranks along the whole Confederate front. Never, he added, had been seen a more bloody or dismal battle-field. To the east of the turnpike Lawton's division, strengthened at the critical moment by the brigade in second line, held Meade in check, and with a sharp counterstroke drove the Pennsylvanians back upon their guns. But Gibbon, fighting fiercely in the centre ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... of the care and effort. Alice never dreamed of growing impatient in her mother's service. She did not wait to be asked to help her, but watched for opportunities, and so proved a great blessing and treasure in the lowly cottage home, that would have been very dismal and sad without her ...
— Little Alice's Palace - or, The Sunny Heart • Anonymous
... judge took his seat, and the clerk of the crown sat beneath him ready to record the decision of the jury. A few lighted candles were stuck about in different parts of the court; but they were lost in the obscurity of the large, dark, dismal building. The foreman stood ready with a written and signed paper. The judge asked him if they had all come to a unanimous verdict, and he answered in the affirmative; and handed the paper to the clerk of the peace, who glancing his eye upon it, and half turning round to the judge ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... this dismal and inhuman pageant was going on age after age as a cure for crime—while crime, all the while, was increasing by percentages so astounding that we seek through immigration statistics and records of increase of population to account for ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... and Falloden was left to pace up and down the dismal room, his hands in his pockets—deep ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... troops should rise in mutiny, send for the ships, and escape from the ill-starred enterprise. This certainly indicates, under the circumstances, an unsound, if not a deranged, mind. For four days the troops toiled along through a dismal region, uninhabited, and encumbered with tangled forests and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... impossible for them to keep up. They would make the most desperate efforts to travel as fast as he did. When they realised the impossibility of doing this, hampered as they were by their heavy load, they would at times set up a most dismal cry that was a cross between a bark and a howl. At other times some of the dogs would think that one of the train was shirking his work, and then they would unmercifully pile on him and give him a ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... earlier career had been the due fruit of habit and education. As a dabbler in mines he had been out of his element. He lacked the necessary reticence, and arsenic had not availed him, though it had tempted Billy Wantage to forgery; and because Billy hid himself behind the dismal opportunity of silence, had ruined the name of a dead man called Charley Steele. Since Charley's death John Brown had never seen Billy: he had left the town one woful day an hour after Billy had told him of the discovery Charley had made. From a far corner of the country he had read ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... much I was astonished when I saw the sultan my uncle abuse his son thus after he was dead. "Sir," said I, "whatever grief this dismal sight has impressed upon me, I am forced to suspend it, to enquire of your majesty what crime the prince my cousin may have committed, that his corpse should deserve such indignant treatment?" "Nephew," replied the sultan, "I ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... guide-books and opera-glasses, and fell into raptures at every footstep, there are dismal ruins now. The Vendome Column is a stump, wreathed with a gigantic immortelle, and capped with the tri-color. The Hall of the Marshals is a black hole. Those noble rooms in which the first magistrate of the city of Boulevards ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... that I became a prey to dismal fear. That bravery which knows no ebb was never mine. Indeed, I am by nature timorous, for my fancy is quick, and I see with horrid clearness the incidents of a peril. Only a shamefaced conscience holds me true, so that, though I have often done temerarious deeds, it has always been ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... the next room and sat down before it. She had left the door of his room ajar, and a ray of light from his lamp fell across the dark carpet and dimly illuminated the room. The hours passed slowly. No one in the house was astir. No sound came from the outside save the dismal barking of a dog down the road. She was fatigued and almost asleep, when she was suddenly roused ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... If we were somewhat larger-minded people, we should know that he might be as wise as Socrates and as splendid as Bayard and yet be unfitted, perhaps one should say therefore be unfitted, for the dismal and dirty gambling of modern commerce. But whether we were snobbish enough to admire him for being an idler, or chivalrous enough to admire him for being an outlaw, in neither case should we ever really and in our ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... the wreck under the Sunland cliffs, which had sent up rocket-signals of distress on that same dismal night? ...
— The Thorogood Family • R.M. Ballantyne
... stately solitudes, towns are far between. Enterprise, Ind. (755 miles), is an unpainted village with a dismal view—back of and around it, wide bottom lands, with hills in the far distance; up and down the river, precipitous banks of clay, with willow fringes on that portion of the shore which is not being cut by the impinging current. Scuffletown, Ky. (767 miles), is uninviting. Newburgh, ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... the top of his desk and heard the lock click with a long sigh of satisfaction, for a glance at his large, old-fashioned hunting-case watch told him that it was nearly eleven o'clock. It was a dismal, dreary, rainy night; just the sort of a night to make a man thank God that he had a home; and those who had homes to go to were already there, except a few business men, who like Mr. Wicks, were obliged to be out on ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... some two dozen buildings—was very unlovely in slumber. It sprawled in the lap of the prairies, a grimy-faced urchin, with the lines of dismal sophistication writ deep. Yet where in all the "health resorts" of the East did air sweep from the clean hill-country with such revivifying power? It seemed a glad world of abiding youth. Surely "Town" was but a dreary illusion, a mirage that hung in the unmapped spaces ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... this of old, endeavoured to escape through the nearest door, but the Tato, cutting off his retreat, drove him into the nave, and, pretending to pursue him, drove him from chapel to chapel, finally rounding him up where he could give him some good sound whacks. The dismal howlings disturbed the singing of the canons, and the Tato laughed more than ever to see behind the iron railing of the choir, the angry gesture of the good Esteban threatening him ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Phemie rose to go. As Lady Augusta was under the impression that she was merely taking the dismal daily constitutional, which was one of her unavoidable penances, it would not do ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Servant lets him in, with dismal face, Long as a courtier's out of place— Portending some disaster; John's countenance as rueful look'd, and grim, As if th' Apothecary had physick'd him,— And ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger
... the sky, drove the rain in heavy patter overhead, the air was dismal and dark: now a brilliant sunshine flooded the imperial city with its radiance, the wet marble glistened in the dawn and a roseate hue tipped the seven hills of Rome with glory. But in Dea Flavia's heart there was sorrow darker than the blackest night, sleep forsook ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... thing concerning land or people would have been made known by the native inhabitants. Julius Caesar has saved from, oblivion the heroic savages who fought against his legions in defence of their dismal homes with ferocious but unfortunate patriotism; and the great poet of England, learning from the conqueror's Commentaries the name of the boldest tribe, has kept the Nervii, after almost twenty centuries, still fresh and familiar ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... humbler residence. She had to walk quite a mile and a half, and at the end of that time she found herself in a much poorer part of the large suburb where Middleton School was situated. The houses here were of a humble description—not even semidetached, but standing in long, dismal rows, a good many of them backing on to a railway-cutting. These houses boasted of no small gardens, but ran flush with the road. They were built of the universal yellow brick, and were about as ugly as ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... reservoirs of foetid odors, kept in by lofty, light-excluding walls. This building stood by itself, in the midst of an open square, as if it had been a palace or other show place. But all the more, indeed, by this fine setting was the dismal squalor of the grimy structure emphasized. It seemed to exhale an atmosphere of gloom and chill which all the bright sunshine of the breezy September afternoon was unable to dominate. One would not have been surprised, even at noonday, to see ghosts at the ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... seem to be A very dismal place; Your "auld acquaintance" all at once Is altered in the face; Their discords sting through Burns and Moore, Like ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... without cap, shoe, or stocking, accompanied by two naked and shivering children, whose artificial lamentations were now lost in those of nature, proceeded up the street, in the very teeth of the beating tempest, attempting to sing some dismal ditty, with a voice which resembled the imagined shriekings of a ghoul, more than the accents of a human being. These two were the only individuals who, in the true spirit of hardened imposture, braved all the fury of the ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... back his courage, and bursts into expressions of defiance as to the irresistible freedom of his awen, declaring that he would still in his dismal prison celebrate the praise of his countrymen, to the disparagement of his enemies at the ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... between the swirling wreaths. The dismal quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never been extinguished or had been kindled afresh to combat this mournful re-invasion of darkness, seemed, in the lawyer's eyes, like a district of some city in a nightmare. ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp —all others but liars! Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia's Dismal Swamp, nor Rome's accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... stupefaction grew sharp in me and scepticism triumphed, so vulgar, so barbarous, seemed the array of types, so extraordinarily provincial the note of every figure, so less than scant the claim of such physiognomies and such reputations. Rather dismal, everywhere, I admit, the histrionic image with the artificial lights turned off—the fatigued and disconnected face reduced to its mere self and resembling some closed and darkened inn with the sign still swung but the place blighted for want of custom. That consideration weighs; ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... This dismal state of things lasted nearly an hour, after which time nature seemed to recover herself by a sudden throe, for a brisk breeze, which was highly refreshing to our senses, and which was attended by the loud ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... forbear, and come reluctantly to the transactions of that dismal night, when in such quick succession, we felt the extremes of grief, astonishment and rage; when Heaven, in anger, for a dreadful moment suffered Hell to take the reins; when Satan with his chosen band opened the sluices of New England's blood, and sacrilegiously polluted our land with the ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... treading the waves, Wainamoinen swims about until an eagle—grateful because he left birch-trees for birds to perch upon—swoops down, invites him to climb upon its back, and swiftly bears him to the dismal northland Sariola. There Wainamoinen is discovered by the Maid of Beauty, who sends her mother, toothless Louhi, to invite him into the house, where she bountifully feeds him. Next Louhi promises to supply Wainamoinen with a steed to return home ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... had dwindled away to a mere nothing, and the sea had so far gone down that our torpedo craft could keep pace with the larger craft without being swept by seas from stem to stern; still, the weather continued to be very dismal and dreary, the sky still lowering and overcast, not a solitary gleam of sunshine, and the fog gathering so thickly that it was difficult to see anything beyond a two-mile radius. The heavy gun-firing had by this time ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... is a stronger temptation to princes than it is to others.—The being galled with importunities, pursued from one room to another with asking faces; the dismal sound of unreasonable complaints and ill-grounded pretences; the deformity of fraud ill-disguised:—all these would make any man run away from them, and I used to think it was the motive for making ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... hear, methinks I see Ghosts, goblins, fiends: my fantasy Presents a thousand ugly shapes; Headless bears, black men, and apes; Doleful outcries and fearful sights My sad and dismal soul affrights. All my griefs to this are jolly; None so damn'd ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... night, through all the time of King Philip's War. Here, with much labor, the settlers dug a deep well, fed by never-failing springs, to provide a sure supply of water, in case of siege, for all the garrison. And now, as if it were a monument raised to commemorate those dismal times, there stands, at a point where all the crossing footpaths meet, a huge town-pump, near ten feet high, carved and painted, with a great ball upon its top, and an iron ladle chained to its nose. In the torrid summer-days, from early ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... we feel that it would be better for us if they had more of that old childlike faith. And so I encourage my youngsters to read and listen to, over and over again, the same old stories that, when I was a boy, warmed my young imagination, and to eschew the dismal allegories with which well-meaning but short-sighted writers try to supply the places of Jack the Giant-killer and all his marvellous family. And so I was almost as pleased as the children, when I saw, from its quaint ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... the dismal room so doleful with her talk that aunt Corinne began to feel terribly about life, and Robert Day wished he had gone ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... A dismal prison covers the ground where the hero fell, and the monument stands on the spot where Wolfe breathed his last, on ground lower than the rest of the field; the friendly hollow that sheltered him from the fire of the French dwarfs his monument; yet it is sufficient, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Several long and dismal toots sent Lita galloping through the grassy path as the sound of the trumpet excites a war-horse, and "father and Bijah," alarmed by the signal at that hour, leaned on their rakes to survey with ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... faster than good, now brought the dismal story of his Juliet's death to Romeo, at Mantua, before the messenger could arrive who was sent from Friar Lawrence to apprise him that these were mock funerals only, and but the shadow and representation of death, and that his dear lady lay in the tomb but for a short while, expecting when Romeo ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... to pass by a perfumery store; but what a nose her ladyship's nose must be, since it is endowed with more wonderful faculties than her eyes, which possess such miraculous powers as to enable her to see things in France perceptible by no other mortal optics! But to proceed with our dismal story. Her ladyship's olfactory nerves, as we have already mentioned, having made her aware of the proximity of a perfumer's shop, she was induced to go into it by the desire of procuring something which ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... where the fingers of infrequent customers had left irregular prints. The upper story contained four or five guest-rooms which were rarely put to their destined use. Sometimes a fruit-grower, riding in from his plantation to confer with his agent, would pass a melancholy night in the dismal upper story; sometimes a minor native official on some trifling government quest would have his pomp and majesty awed by Madama's sepulchral hospitality. But Madama sat behind her bar content, not desiring to quarrel with Fate. If anyone required ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... off entirely the principal crop of the country. Again in the spring of 1875, in some of the river counties, the young had hatched in myriads, and devoured the growing crops ere winging their way to their mountain home. Gloom overspread the people at the prospect of renewed disaster, and the dismal forebodings were realized even as the delegates sat in council, for at this time occurred the final appearance of the locust. As the people gazed into the sky and watched the silver cloud floating in the sunshine resolve itself into a miniature army clad in burnished steel, women forgot ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various |
