"Barren" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you've fallen into everybody's mistake, as a matter of course. Those fine long shoots will grow into big branches; those little twigs with the points, as you call them, are fruit spurs, covered with blossom buds. If I cut them out I should have no plums next year, but a bigger and a more barren tree. No, my boy, I don't want to grow wood, ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... their picture. Of course I forgot to roll the film, and a little later Friend Husband decided to photograph the enormous pillar that gives the name to Monument Creek. The result was rather amazing when we developed the film a week later. The wild burros were grazing placidly on the summit of a barren rock, a couple of hundred feet in the air, without visible means of ascent or descent. The Chief made a few sarcastic remarks about this picture, but I firmly reminded him my burros were there first! ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... a little pool of light in what I felt to be a large room. I was prepared for a disclosure of barren ugliness, and waited, in heartsick foreboding, for the silent guide to reveal ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... saw him crushing the one, and bringing the other into jeopardy, with a quietness and composure on his part that I could not recollect without horror. I knew not what were his plans respecting me. I knew not whether he troubled himself so much as to form a barren wish for the preservation of one whose future prospects he had so iniquitously tarnished. I had hitherto been silent as to my principal topic of recrimination. But I was by no means certain, that I should consent to go out of the world in ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... endured it. My soul was sick of all this secrecy, sick at the injustice of mankind. In spite of worldly success, my life was cold and barren in the strange land to which I had fled. My home called to me and I came back ...
— The Case of the Registered Letter • Augusta Groner
... still, you will become a known man. The booksellers will remember you, and one day when you reach home from a long and barren ramble, you will find a postcard awaiting you, announcing the discovery of some book for ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... were so nearly gone that, by spring, they were living partly on roots, dug from the ground. All their lives now depended on the crops of grain and vegetables which they could raise in the valley. They made the barren land good by spreading water from the little streams over it,—what we call "irrigating;" and they planted enough corn and grain and vegetables for all the people. Every one helped, and every one watched for the sprouting, with hopes, and ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant
... been a pirate for three years and had, by his industry, won for himself a fortune worth L150,000, but his Scotch partner, Morrison, being a frugal soul, had in the meantime saved an even larger sum. Eventually their ship was wrecked in a fog on a small barren island near Prince Edward Island, and Morrison and most of the crew were drowned, but Nelson and a few others were saved. At last he reached New York, where he lived the rest of his life in peaceful happiness with ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... laugh at the pedantry of our fathers, who complained of the times in which they lived; they are at pains to persuade us how much those were deceived; they pride themselves in defending things as they find them, and in exploding the barren sounds which had been reared into motives for action. To this their style is suited; and the manly tone of reason is exchanged for perpetual efforts at sneer and ridicule. This I hold to be an alarming crisis in the corruption of a state; when not only is virtue declined, and ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... Spirits Vital, and helps all inward Diseases that come of cold, it is good against the shaking of the Palsie; it cures the contraction of the Sinews, helps the conception of Women if they be Barren, it kills the Worms in the Belly and Stomach; it cures the cold Dropsie, and helps the Stone in the Bladder, and in the Reins of the back; it helps shortly the stinking breath, and whosoever useth this Water morning and evening, (and not too often) ...
— A Queens Delight • Anonymous
... Lances into Scythes shall bend, And the broad Falchion in a Plow-share end. Then Palaces shall rise; the joyful Son [6] Shall finish what his short-liv'd Sire begun; Their Vines a Shadow to their Race shall yield, And the same Hand that sow'd shall reap the Field. The Swain in barren Desarts with Surprize [7] Sees Lillies spring, and sudden Verdure rise; And Starts, amidst the thirsty Wilds, to hear, New Falls of Water murmuring in his Ear: On rifted Rocks, the Dragon's late Abodes, The green Reed trembles, and the Bulrush ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... old man when we first met him. He died before we left that part of the country. His last illness was preceded by a drunken spree, during which some rougish boys painted a barren fig-tree on his bald head. He died soon afterward. Notwithstanding the efforts of those who prepared the body for burial, his head went to its last resting-place still marked by some of the paint that portrayed him as ...
— Trials and Triumphs of Faith • Mary Cole
... was their intercourse, viewed in Opdyke's eyes, to Scott it filled the whole horizon, the one near and vital fact which broke in upon its emptiness and cut away the barren wastes about him. He lived alternately upon the memory of Opdyke as he had seen him last, and upon the anticipations of their next meeting. His hours of table service, ceasing to be wearisome, had become veritable social functions, for was there ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... simplicity, and, consequently, with real fear and delight. She was, so to speak, shy before the multitude of the stars, and in this she had possessed herself of the only force which can prevent enjoyment being as black and barren as routine. The faculty of being shy is the first and the most delicate of the powers of enjoyment. The fear of the Lord ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... strangest countries in the world; and yet one which can be most simply described. One long straight strip of rich flat land, many hundred miles long, but only a very few miles broad. On either side of it, barren rocks and deserts of sand, and running through it from end to end, the great river Nile—'The River' of which the Bible speaks. This river the Egyptians looked on as divine: they worshipped it as a god; for on ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... inviting enough, but when the people came close, they were again disappointed; there were not more than three score and ten palm tress, and there were of stunted growth owing to a lack of water, for in spite of the presence of twelve wells of water, the soil was so barren and sandy that the wells were not sufficient to water it. [85] Here again the marvelous intercession of God in favor of the fate of Israel is shown, for the scant supply of water at Elim, which had hardly sufficed for seventy palm ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... the Smith residence was the farm of Alonzo Sanders, now owned by William T. Sampson, commander in the United States Navy. This farm is four miles south of Palmyra, on the road toward Canandaigua. It includes a barren hill which rises abruptly to the height of one hundred and fifty feet. The ridge runs almost due north and south, and from the summit there are beautiful views of the hills surrounding Canandaigua and Seneca Lakes. It is known to the present ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... of awe, wonder, and delight, he stood watching the line of light descending and making the beauties of the volcanic island start out of the gloom. The bands of cloud which hung round the sharp slope became roseate, golden, orange, and purple, and soon after the lad was gazing below the barren, glowing rocks at patches of golden green, then at the beginning of billows and deep valleys running down, the former of wonderful shades of green, the latter of deep dark velvety purple, across which silvery films of vapour ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... this anniversary of American independence to assess the dimensions of a kind deed. Nearly four score years ago the master of a whaling vessel sailing from this port rescued from a barren rock in the China Sea some Japanese fishermen. Among them was a young boy whom he brought home with him to Fairhaven, where he was given the advantages of New England life and sent to school with the boys and girls of the neighborhood, where he excelled in ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... confronted the person of a lad who might, judging from his size, be some seventeen years of age. His form was beautiful in its outline, and his step light and graceful; but the face, alas! that throne of the intellect was a barren waste, and his vacant eye and lolling lip showed at once that the poor boy was little less than an idiot. And yet, as he looked upon the slave, and saw the tear glistening in her eye, there seemed to be a flash ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray
... upon the globe, as we see it, is the result of this blind groping and putting forth of Nature in every direction, with failure of some of her ventures and the success of others, the circumstances, the environments, supplying the checks and supplying the stimulus, the seed falling upon the barren places just the same as upon the fertile. No discrimination on the part of Nature that we can express in the terms of our own consciousness, but ceaseless experiments in every possible direction. The only thing inexplicable is the inherent impulse to experiment, the original push, the ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... with my brethren in our prison-chamber, they expected that, according to our custom, something should be spoken out of the Word for our mutual edification. I felt myself, it being my turn to speak, so empty, spiritless, and barren, that I thought I should not have been able to speak among them so much as five words of truth with life and evidence. At last I cast mine eye upon this prophecy, when, after considering awhile, methought I perceived something of that jasper in whose light you find this holy ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... thousand feet high—indeed, the range of the Andes is one of the highest in the world. It now appeared at the hour the master said it would, standing up rocky and broken, from the very margin of the ocean. As the frigate drew nearer, the land looked very dry and barren, and utterly unworthy ...
— Ben Hadden - or, Do Right Whatever Comes Of It • W.H.G. Kingston
... into their method of life, and conform to their rules, and this proves a happiness to both nations: for according to their constitution, such care is taken of the soil, that it becomes fruitful enough for both, though it might be otherwise too narrow and barren for any one of them. But if the natives refuse to conform themselves to their laws, they drive them out of those bounds which they mark out for themselves, and use force if they resist. For they account it a very just cause of war, for a nation to hinder others from possessing a part of that soil, ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... between the sun and earth seem figured in his mind as so many elastic strings; indeed he accepts the assumed instantaneity of gravity as the expression of the enormous elasticity of the 'lines of weight.' Such views, fruitful in the case of magnetism, barren, as yet, in the case of gravity, explain his efforts to transform this latter force. When he goes into the open air and permits his helices to fall, to his mind's eye they are tearing through the lines of gravitating power, ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... Gazette,' Horace once wrote to a fine and titled lady, 'is very barren of weeds.' Such, however, was rarely the case. Peers, and still better, peeresses,—politicians, actors, actresses,—the poor poet who knew not where to dine, the Maecenas who was 'fed with dedications'—the belle of the season, the demirep ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... Trevor Clarke informs me that he crossed two members of the Pine class (Myatt's B. Queen and Keen's Seedling), with the wood and hautbois, and that in each case he raised only a single seedling; one of these fruited, but was almost barren. Mr. W. Smith, of York, has raised similar hybrids with equally poor success.[719] We thus see[720] that the European and American species can with some difficulty be crossed; but it is improbable that hybrids sufficiently ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... awakening of the faculties in the manner described. There is no doubt of the value of manual training as an aid in giving definiteness, directness, exactness to the mind, but mere technical training alone will be barren of those results, in general discriminating culture, which we ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... yellow with age; but the fatal Cui bono? disheartened me, and I flung it aside. Even my love for the sea had vanished, and I had begun to hate it. During the first few years of my ministry I spent hours by the cliffs and shores, or out on the heaving waters. Then the loneliness of the desert and barren wastes repelled me, and I had begun to loathe it. Altogether I was soured and discontented, and I had a dread consciousness that my life was a failure. All its possibilities had passed without being seized and utilized. I was the barren fig tree, fit only to be cut down. May I escape the ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... face of the cliff, the huge table-rock and flagstaff, the many quaint blocks, pillars and wild escarpments, and the numerous domestic animals, such as mastiffs, pigs, ravens, and goats, all congregated together in a small bay, and literally separated from the world by the barren waste land above, and the huge cliffs and restless sea below, would be beyond the scope of "N. & Q.," though it is worth a note in passing, that for the tourist a visit to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 218, December 31, 1853 • Various
... gazed gloomily at her, for it was very present to his mind that their earlier meetings had, for him, been barren of ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... think such operations held any interest, even for the hungry, when there seemed to be nothing to cook. A few sticks blazing tamely in the dust, a frying-pan, half a tin bucket of lard, some water, and barren plates and knives and forks, and three silent men attending to them—that was all. But the travellers came to see. These waifs drew near us, and stood, a sad, lone, shifting fringe of audience; four to ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... fancy takes wing, Restless am I, ill at ease. Pleasures the city can bring Lose now their power to please. Barren, all barren, are these, Town life's a tedious tale; That cup is drained to the lees— Ho, for ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... a sickness full of woes, All remedies refusing; A plant that with most cutting grows, Most barren with best using. Why so? More we enjoy it, more it dies; If not enjoyed, it sighing ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... To rattle on the ever barren boughs, And friendlier sound was heard. Beside his door Wayworn the messengers of Patrick stood, And showed the gifts, and held his missive forth. Then learned that lost one all the truth. That sage Confessed by miracles, that prophet vouched ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... and fair, Clad in colors of the air Which to those who journey near Barren, brown and rough appear, Still we tread the same coarse way, The ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... as on Captain Falkenberg's land; the ground was stony and barren, covered with heather and pine needles for miles round. They had felled too freely here; the sawmills had taken over much, leaving next to no young wood. It was a melancholy ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... name and influence on the side of the malcontents, increase the difficulties of the government, and prolong the fatal want of moral and political unity, without which the mere material fact of union is barren, and unproductive of benefit to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... circled the house, denuded of undergrowth, seeming always to be edging forlornly closer to the upstanding edifice for comfort because it was barren and unfriendly, too, the new-fallen snow lay shadowy and soft, clothing the barrenness with grace. Giant pine and spruce that had survived his invasion stood up proud and green under the crown of ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... close and small the hedges lie! What streaks of meadows cross the eye! A step methinks may pass the stream, So little distant dangers seem; So we mistake the future's face, Eyed through Hope's deluding glass; As yon summits soft and fair Clad in colours of the air, Which to those who journey near, Barren, brown, and rough appear; Still we tread the same coarse way; The ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... mine to such fine limitations of width, or exclusion of unpayable patches, as would appear practicable when sampling, that is by the inclusion when mining of a certain amount of barren rock. Even in deposits of about normal stoping width, it is impossible to prevent the breaking of a certain amount of waste, even if the ore occurrence is ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... and shamefaced about the hut. It shrank and drooped and faded in its barren field, and seemed to cling only by sufferance to the edge of ...
— The Mansion • Henry Van Dyke
... fat priests, and wandering minstrels, and crusades and tournaments; England in rush-strewn bowers and under green boughs; the England in which Wamba jested and Blondel sung. To enter into that realm is to leave the barren world of prose; to feel again the cool, sweet winds of summer upon the brow of youth; to catch, in fitful glimpses, the shimmer of the Lincoln green in the sunlit, golden glades of the forest, and to hear the merry note of the huntsman commingled, ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... to the 31st of October Maurice was more than usually a victim to this malady of distrust and barren speculation. He listened now approvingly to crude fancies that would formerly have brought a smile of contempt to his lips. Why should he not? Were not imbecility and crime abroad in the land? Was it unreasonable ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... and broken board, How can it bear the painter's dye! The harp of strained and tuneless chord, How to the minstrel's skill reply! To aching eyes each landscape lowers, To feverish pulse each gale blows chill, And Araby's or Eden's bowers Were barren as this ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... mine eyes to close, Dig my grave 'mid the vines on the hill's fair side; For though deep in earth may my bones repose, The juice of the grape shall their food provide. Ah, bury me not in a barren land, Or Death will appear to me dread and drear! While fearless I'll wait what he hath in hand I An the scent of the vineyard ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... sang above the vineyards of the world. And after him the vines with woven hands Clambered and clung, and everywhere unfurled Triumphing green above the barren lands; Till high as gardens grow, he climbed, he stood, Sun-crowned with life and strength, and singing toil, And looked upon his work; and it was good: The corn, ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... an old Corycian swain to know, Lord of few acres, and those barren too, Unfit for sheep or vines, and more unfit to sow: Yet, lab'ring well his little spot of ground, Some scatt'ring pot-herbs here and there he found, Which, cultivated with his daily care And bruis'd with vervain, ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... were routed out, and all saw the rugged outline of the great island—a continent itself, as large as the United States and much the same shape—stretching away to the southward and slowly dwindling into low, sandy, barren shores ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... sands to Calais. Our first care was to procure horses, and although wearied by our night of watching and toil, some of our party immediately went in quest of these in the wide fields of the unenclosed and now barren plain round Calais. We divided ourselves, like seamen, into watches, and some reposed, while others prepared the morning's repast. Our foragers returned at noon with only six horses—on these, Adrian and I, and four others, proceeded on our journey towards the great ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... contact with the "world" (plan of the founding of Platonopolis). Political affairs are at bottom as much a matter of indifference to Neoplatonism as material things in general. The idealism of the new philosophy was too high to admit of its being naturalised in the despiritualised, tyrannical and barren creation of the Byzantine Empire, and this Empire itself needed unscrupulous and despotic police officials, not noble philosophers. Important and instructive, therefore, as the experiments are, which were made from time to time ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... knoll, if there was anything tall, it would spoil the Fairacres' view. So Jacob built this 'Spite House.' He made it as ugly as he could, and he did everything outrageous to make great-grandfather disgusted. He named this rocky barren 'Bareacre,' and that little gully yonder he called 'Glenpolly,' because his enemy had named the beautiful ravine we know as 'Glenellen.' Polly and Ellen were the wives' names, and I've heard they grieved greatly over ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... trim parterres, with the finest turf, to improve fruit trees, to seek out and perfect edible roots and herbs at once for man and cattle. We owe to the Dutch that scurvy and leprosy have been banished from England, that continuous crops have taken the place of barren fallows, that the true rotation of crops has been discovered and perfected, that the population of these islands has been increased and that the cattle and sheep in England are ten times what they were in numbers and three times what they were ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... the third hour, out of the pass through which, skirting the base of Mount Gilead, they had journeyed since leaving Ramoth, the party came upon the barren steppe east of the sacred river. Opposite them they saw the upper limit of the old palm lands of Jericho, stretching off to the hill-country of Judea. Ben-Hur's blood ran quickly, for he knew the ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... Scott exhibits a wonderful knowledge of human nature as well as surprising skill in embodying his perceptions so as to enable others to become participators in that knowledge. Excuse the want of news in this very barren epistle, for I really have none to communicate. Emily and Anne beg to be kindly remembered to you. Give my best love to your mother and sisters, and as it is very late permit me to conclude with the assurance of my unchanged, unchanging, and unchangeable affection for you.—Adieu, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... views may be, it was not for such discoveries as these that astronomers examined the surface of the moon. The examination of mere peculiarities of physical condition is, after all, but barren labour, if it lead to no discovery of physical variation. The principal charm of astronomy, as indeed of all observational science, lies in the study of change—of progress, development, and decay, and specially of systematic variations taking place in regularly-recurring cycles. And it is ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor
... seventy-five miles from the seacoast on the south. If Your Majesty will look into the middle distance when the second picture is again thrown on the screen you will see some small, dark objects; these are one of those immense herds of caribou, which happen to be moving south over this vast barren at the time of year that these pictures were taken—that is, ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... Poetry like this in the earliest ages of the world!" Of Elihu's contentions in chapter xxxiv., "A good many truths, but served up with bitter herbs, not with love": on chapter xxxvii., "Beautiful poetry, but a very bleak and barren picture of God; hard, arbitrary, selfish, self-centred, striking terror into His works, and compelling obedience and service. Nature cannot reveal Him, Elihu!" On the next chapter, "The God of nature turns the picture, and behold it is no more destruction and blind force, but beneficence and gracious ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... without considering that nothing is beautiful that is displaced. Hence we see so many edifices raised that the raisers can never inhabit, being too large for their fortunes. Vistas are laid open over barren heaths, and apartments contrived for a coolness very agreeable in Italy, but killing in the north of Britain: thus every woman endeavours to breed her daughter a fine lady, qualifying her for a station in which she will never appear, ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... great tribulation, shall some day be where they are. While man in this world will meet with sorrow, he can by the grace of God always rejoice. Alum thrown into muddy water will clarify it. The grace of God thrown into a cup of sorrow will turn it to joy. Sorrows are needful. It is only a barren waste where ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... affection. I sometimes feared it was too good to last. Mrs. Branard in particular, I shall ever remember with grateful and affectionate regard. She was more like a mother to me, than a mistress, and I shall ever look back to the time I spent with her, as a bright spot in the otherwise barren desert of my life. Better, far better would it have been for me had I never left her. But I became alarmed, and thought the convent people were after me. It was no idle whim, no imaginary terror. I had good cause to fear, for I had several times seen a priest ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... passage round "The Horn," or by the more uncertain, and at the same time imperfected route, across the Isthmus. But as California was on this continent, he knew that there was a way thither, though it might lead through trackless deserts and barren wastes. These were not enough to daunt his determined spirit. He bent his way to the "Father of Waters," and worked his way as he could, till he found himself at "Independence," in health, and with no less strength, and with 150 dollars in his purse. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... Aldgate proving barren, he turned up into the quieter Minories, skilfully dodging the mechanical cuff of the constable at the corner as he passed, and watching with some interest the efforts of a stray mongrel to get itself adopted. Its victim had sworn at ...
— Light Freights • W. W. Jacobs
... barren and unfertile, the olive groves bear little fruit. I wandered through the lonely country, towards the mountains; the day was overcast and the clouds hung sluggishly overhead. As I walked, suddenly I heard a melancholy ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... of his political campaign in the North, upon the barren banks of the Neva, which, in causing much entertainment to the inhabitants of the fertile banks of the Seine, has not a little ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... endless instant, time seemed to stop. The barren moat and green weeds floated beneath him, and the only reminder of his rapid drop was the air, which whistled past his ears. Suddenly, motion was restored again, and they lit with a jarring crash, just at ...
— Millennium • Everett B. Cole
... the Elizabethan period, so rich in genius of every other type, seems to have been almost wholly barren of liturgical power. Men had not ceased to write prayers, as a stout volume in the Parker Society's Library abundantly evidences; but they had ceased to write them with the terseness and melody that give to the ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... thy path shines bright and clear; Daily thou breath'st the mountain air; But mine is in the barren wild, Where naught looks bright to ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... to spread a cheerful feast, And then thrust in our faces These barren scraps (to say the least) Of ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... to the most insignificant minutiae, and reduced to questions of casuistry, was the only study. This exclusively theological and canonical culture contributed in no respect to refine the intellect. It was something analogous to the barren doctrine of the Mussulman fakir, to that empty science discussed round about the mosques, and which is a great expenditure of time and useless argumentation, by no means calculated to advance the right discipline of the mind. The theological education of the modern ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... conscious of failure and disappointment in life? Are there those of us whose sorrow lies deeper than that which is personal—sorrow over our failure in Christ's work, pain over a life's ministry for Christ that has known no victorious evangel? Turn your eyes from that barren sea to Him who stands upon the shore; He shall yet make you a fisher of men. Turn your eyes from that bleak, dark sea of wasted effort where you have fared so ill; it is always dark till Jesus comes, it is always light when He has come. There is a new day breaking for the ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... motive,—not in feeding him, but in involving her name and fortune in an affair so strangely flavored?... This opened up a desert waste of barren speculation. "What's anybody's motive, who figures in this thundering dime-novel?" demanded the American, almost contemptuously. And—for the hundredth time—gave it up; the day should declare it, if so hap he lived to see that ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... Palma is about a hundred and forty miles; so the morning found us skirting the southwestern extremity of Majorca,—a barren coast, thrusting low headlands, of gray rock into the sea, and hills covered with parched and stunted chaparral in the rear. The twelfth century, in the shape of a crumbling Moorish watch-tower, alone greeted us. As we advanced eastward into ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... other nations. As yet the plains of Pisa had not been reduced to marsh-lands by the combined negligence and jealousy of the Florentine Republic, neither had the rich country that lay around Rome been converted into a barren desert by the wars of the Colonna and Orsini families; not yet had the Marquis of Marignan razed to the ground a hundred and twenty villages in the republic of Siena alone; and though the Maremma ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... rays of the sun which gilded the dew-drops that hung upon leaf and blossom, and, while giving a brighter beauty to each rare flower, brought everything within the limits of ordinary experience. The young man rejoiced that, in the heart of the barren city, he had the privilege of overlooking this spot of lovely and luxuriant vegetation. It would serve, he said to himself, as a symbolic language to keep him in communion with Nature. Neither the sickly and thoughtworn Dr. Giacomo Rappaccini, it ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... you get there by dawn!" he called; and Douglas saw the two figures, dim in the starlight, move upward on the barren shoulder of the mountain. He allowed the Moose to circle for a moment, then he drove the rowells deep. The snorting horse leaped up the steep incline, at a pace that shortly left him groaning for breath. But ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... a flat and uninviting plain—poor and barren, as the uncultivated border-land of the two kingdoms—Guines and its castle offered little attraction, and if possible less accommodation, to the gay throng now to be gathered within its walls. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... sorry, Gentlemen, the Road was so barren of Money. When my Friends are in Difficulties, I am always glad that my Fortune can be serviceable to them. [Gives them Money.] You see, Gentlemen, I am not a mere Court Friend, who professes every thing ...
— The Beggar's Opera • John Gay
... the close of earthly life meant actual night. No new dawn, no mysterious after-life shone upon her with magical gleams of an unknown light upon the other side of the dark river. She had accepted the Materialist's bitter and barren creed, and had taught herself that this little life was all. She had learned to scorn the idea of a great Artificer outside the universe, a mighty spirit riding amidst the clouds, and ruling the course of nature and the fate of man. She had schooled herself ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... only a few hundred feet away? Perhaps it was really a wagon. He stared stupidly, not moving. There were no dream-horses to this ghost-wagon. There was no sign of life. If captured by the Indians, it would not have been left intact. But how came a wagon into this barren world? ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... later when Number 208 left the Orphan Asylum on ——nd Street, they passed quietly out of the child's actual life and entered the fitfully lighted chambers of her childish memory wherein, at times, they paced with noiseless footsteps as once in the barren halls of her ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... and perhaps brain, with little or no soul. Sugar-coat the grim truth as we may, and ward off with outward plausible words, denials, explanations, to the mental inward perception of the land this blank is plain; a barren void exists. For the meanings and maturer purposes of these States are not the constructing of a new world of politics merely, and physical comforts for the million, but even more determinedly, in range with science and the modern, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Tools to pursue our voyage, and the next day stood in for the island of Sharping, the true image of Fontainebleau, for the land is so very lean that the bones, that is, the rocks, shoot through its skin. Besides, 'tis sandy, barren, unhealthy, and unpleasant. Our pilot showed us there two little square rocks which had eight equal points in the shape of a cube. They were so white that I might have mistaken them for alabaster or snow, had he not assured us they were made ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... the story of a man asleep and dreaming, instead of the plain, honest, and straightforward narrative of fact. I will therefore postpone the Story of the Hungry Student till I get into the plains of Italy, or into the barren hills of that peninsula, or among the over-well-known towns of Tuscany, or in some other place where a little padding will do neither you nor me ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... a common joke at an old English feast. These animated pies were often introduced "to set on," as Hamlet says, "a quantity of barren spectators to laugh;" there is an instance of a dwarf undergoing such an incrustation. About the year 1630, king Charles and his queen were entertained by the duke and dutchess of Buckingham, at Burleigh on the Hill, on which occasion JEFFERY HUDSON, the dwarf, was served ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... acquaintance with botanical science might almost be said to consist in the conventional application of a number of arbitrary terms, or in the recollection of a number of names, teratology was regarded as a chaos whose meaningless confusion it were vain to attempt to render intelligible,—as a barren field not ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... change of counsel charges the Most High. What hence infers Lorenzo? Can it be? Matter immortal? And shall spirit die? Above the nobler, shall less noble rise? Shall man alone, for whom all else revives, No resurrection know? Shall man alone, Imperial man! be sown in barren ground, Less privileged than grain, ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... Rhoda with her first conscious delight in it. She gazed round on the farm, under a quick new impulse of affection for her old home. And whose hand was it that could alone sustain the working of the farm, and had done so, without reward? Her eyes travelled up to Wrexby Hall, perfectly barren of any feeling that she was to enter the place, aware only that it was full of pain for her. She accused herself, but could not accept the charge of her having ever hoped for transforming events that should twist and throw the dear old ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... long errors of the way In which our wandering predecessors went, And like th' old Hebrews many years did stray In desarts but of small extent, Bacon like Moses led us forth at last, The barren Wilderness he past, Did on the very Border stand Of the blest promised land, And from the Mountain Top of his Exalted Wit Saw it himself and shew'd us it. But Life did never to one Man allow Time to discover Worlds and conquer too; ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... expository illustrative garment of Fact, or else is of no value to him. Romantic readers of his Literature are much disappointed in consequence, and pronounce it bad Literature;—and sure enough, in several senses, it is not to be called good! Bad Literature, they say; shallow, barren, most unsatisfactory to a reader of romantic appetites. Which is a correct verdict, as to the romantic appetites and it. But to the man himself, this quality of mind is of immense moment and advantage; and forms truly the basis of all he was good for in life. Once for ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... the energy, whatever it is, that pushes through the crust of life, as the flower pushes through the mould. Our dulness, our acquiescence in monotonous ways, arise from our not realising how infinitely important that force is, how much it has done for man, how barren life is without it. Here in England many of us have a dark suspicion of all that is joyful, inherited perhaps from our Puritan ancestry, a fear of yielding ourselves to its influence, a terror of being grimly repaid for indulgence, an old superstitious dread of somehow ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... lay down and began preparing fresh pieces of betel-nut to chew; but Murray's rest was short, and jumping up again, he took a geological hammer from his belt, and began to crack and chip the stones and masses of rock which peered from the barren-looking ground, the two boys, one of whom carried ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... vacant as their heads, will answer, Where are they? The tree shall be known by its fruit: and seeing that this great tree, with all its specious seeming, brings forth no fruit, I do denounce it as a barren fig. ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... predominate too far over their impulses to allow of their becoming partisans, is offensive alike to the aristocrat and the democrat. By the one he is denounced as a man who holds incendiary principles, by the other as a half-hearted "trimmer." He has no sympathy, as he says, with "that vague, barren pathos, that useless effervescence of enthusiasm, which plunges, with the spirit of a martyr, into an ocean of generalities, and which always reminds me of the American sailor, who had so fervent an enthusiasm for General ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... cause of shame; the moment I denied my faith, and put on a visage of brass, great possibilities opened before me. Of course I understand the moralist's position. It behoved me, though I knew that a barren and solitary track would be my only treading to the end, to keep courageously onward. If I can't believe that any such duty is imposed upon me, where is the obligation to persevere, the morality of doing so? That is the worst ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... Malemute Kid. Before him alone did the priest cast off the sacerdotal garb and stand naked. And why not? These two men knew each other. Had they not shared the last morsel of fish, the last pinch of tobacco, the last and inmost thought, on the barren stretches of Bering Sea, in the heartbreaking mazes of the Great Delta, on the terrible winter journey from Point Barrow to the Porcupine? Father Roubeau puffed heavily at his trail-worn pipe, and gazed on the ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... neighbourhood by the nickname of Skin-flint, in illusion to her keen business habits (her real name is lost in oblivion), but has of late years been the property of a German from Petersburg. The village lies on the slope of a barren hill, which is cut in half from top to bottom by a tremendous ravine. It is a yawning chasm, with shelving sides hollowed out by the action of rain and snow, and it winds along the very centre of the village street; it separates the two sides of the unlucky ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... won, How sweet to feel your festal fame, In woman's glance instinctive thrown: Repose is yours—your deed is known, It musks the amber wine; It lives, and sheds a litle from storied days Rich as October sunsets brown, Which make the barren place to shine. ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... learning anything under heaven? Did He say one word about intellectual liberty? Did he say one word about reason or about justice? Did He make the slightest effort to improve them? All that He did in the world was to give them one poor little miserable, barren command, "Thou shalt not eat of a certain fruit." That's all that amounted to anything; and, when they sinned, did this great God take them in the arms of His love and endeavor to reform them? No; He simply put upon them a curse. When they were expelled He said to the woman: "I will greatly multiply ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... range it was very pleasant to find, as one constantly did, by the side of some "motte" (Texan for a considerable cluster of scrub growth), or beneath the shade of a great live-oak, or on the barren face of a divide, the little canvas A-tents of the herders, nestled cosily to circular pens for the sheep, and generally surrounded by brush to prevent the intrusion of inquisitive cattle. Within the tent a sheepskin or so, stretched on the ground or on a lattice of branches, for his bed, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... present fame as a Spa. It was a hedge alehouse, where the Border farmers of either country often stopped to refresh themselves and their nags, in their way to and from the fairs and trysts in Cumberland, and especially those who came from or went to Scotland, through a barren and lonely district, without either road or pathway, emphatically called the Waste of Bewcastle. At the period when the adventures described in the novel are supposed to have taken place, there were many instances of attacks by freebooters ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the reverse of that presented by many high mountains on land. For these are white with snow at the top, while their bases are clothed with an abundant and gaudily-coloured vegetation. But the coral cones would look grey and barren below, while their summits would be gay with a richly-coloured parterre ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... journey leaves one more and more at a loss to discover the sources of the wealth of this enormous country. The soil, for miles and miles a dead flat, is now barren as a desert, and we meet hardly a sign of active traffic. During the night we certainly did encounter a long train of heavily-laden bullock-waggons; but the merchandize was gunpowder, and its destination was up, ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... in conversation some years ago, till past midnight, with an old man. He had been for years wandering on the barren mountains of sin. That night he wanted to get back. We prayed, and prayed, and prayed, till light broke in upon him; and he went away rejoicing. The next night he sat in front of me when I was preaching, and I think that I never saw any one look so sad and wretched in all my life. ...
— The Way to God and How to Find It • Dwight Moody
... essential, and how that knowledge had been gained: some of it from the experience of early explorers,—how to avoid the dreaded scurvy, how to build a ship that could withstand the tremendous pressure of the floes; and some from the Eskimos,—how to live in that barren region, and how to travel with dogs and sledges;—and some, too, from Peary's own early experiences,—how he had struggled for twenty years to reach the goal, and had added this experience to that until ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... reflect upon the vast barren wilderness of human intellect which on every side stretches around us—to know that thousands of powerful minds are condemned by the hopeless degradation of their circumstances to struggle on in obscurity, without ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... the slumbering city the rising moon shines over a wide expanse of glistening water. It silvers the snow upon a barren heath between two shores, and shortens with each passing minute the shadows of countless headstones that bear no names, only numbers. The breakers that beat against the bluff wake not those who sleep there. In the deep trenches they ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... Stone was left to the right, for there was this time no party of allies to meet; and very soon the great heavy mass of barren rocky hill loomed up before them, higher and higher, till the party were out from among the trees which had so far concealed their march, and proof was soon ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... wrote to a trusted servant that all his thoughts were bent on thwarting Philip.[10] While the Christian navies were fighting at Lepanto, the King of France was treating with the Turks. His menacing attitude in the following year kept Don Juan in Sicilian waters, and made his victory barren for Christendom. Encouraged by French protection, Venice withdrew from the League. Even in Corsica there was a movement which men interpreted as a prelude to the storm that France was raising against the empire of Spain. Rome trembled in expectation ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... blooms beside another, and when the wind rises, the delicate white petals flutter through the air and fall among the bright blossoms in the grass, and on the clear surface of the river. There are also numerous barren cliffs on the higher portions of the mountains, and where they towered in the most rugged, inaccessible ridges, our ancestors built their fastnesses, to secure themselves from the attacks of their enemies. Our castle stands on a mountain-ridge in the midst of the valley of the Saale. There ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... exhausted from want of supplies, but the enemy had been much encouraged by our long inaction. Of Wellington we had no great fear. We had found him to be brave and cautious, but with little enterprise. Besides, in that barren country his ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... thought of her as he set his traps; he thought of her, as, hard on the trail of moose, or deer, or wolf, or bear, he scoured the valleys and hills; in the shadow of the trees at twilight, in fancy he saw her lurking; even amidst the black, barren tree-trunks down by the river banks. His eyes and ears were ever alert with the half-dread expectation of seeing her or hearing her voice. The scene Victor had described of the white huntress leaning upon ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... principal European Powers appeared to be willing and even eager to become mandatories over territories possessing natural resources which could be profitably developed and showed an unwillingness to accept mandates for territories which, barren of mineral or agricultural wealth, would be continuing liabilities rather than assets. This is not stated by way of criticism, but only in explanation of what ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... swan flew away. The prince looked after her for a long time, and then continued his journey. He travelled on and on and on, over high mountains, through dark forests, across barren deserts, and so to the middle of a vast plain where every green thing had been burnt up by the rays of the sun. Not a single tree, not even a bush or a plant of any kind was to be seen. No bird was heard to sing, no insect to hum, no breath of air to stir the stillness of this land ...
— Fairy Tales of the Slav Peasants and Herdsmen • Alexander Chodsko
... been above described—an uninterrupted succession of rich landscape, in which every thing is united which constitutes the picturesque. The country sometimes rises into hills, and even mountains; none of which are so barren but to have vineyards, or gardens, to their very summits. In many of them, where the surface is common property, the peasantry, in order to make the most of its superficial area, have dug it into terraces, on which each of them has his vineyard, or garden for herbs, corn, and fruits. ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... hill-sides. The farm-house of Dalemore, twelve miles from Thurso as the crow flies, and rather more than thirteen miles from Wick, occupies, as nearly as may be, the centre of the county; and yet there, as on the sea-shore, the boulder-clay is charged with its fragments of marine shells. Though so barren elsewhere on the east coast of Scotland, the clay is everywhere in Caithness a shell-bearing deposit; and no sooner had Mr. Dick determined the fact for himself, at the expense of many a fatiguing ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... a party of slaves, hidden in the long grasses, trap and catch birds. Higher still, boat-making, rope-making, and fish-curing are going on. Finally, in the highest register of all, next the ceiling, are depicted the barren hills and undulating plains of the desert, where greyhounds chase the gazelle, and hunters trammel big game with the lasso. Each longitudinal section corresponds, in fact, with a plane of the landscape; but the artist, instead of placing his planes in perspective, ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... relic of the past, to be reverently enshrined but not seriously accepted? Far from it. The glory of the Genesis story lies in its wonderful power to grow. It strengthened the minds of a persecuted tribe wandering in the desert who finally settled in a small and barren country. It brought the truth to them so clearly that they have persuaded much of the world of that truth and bid fair to persuade the rest. The story has grown with the mind of man. As it served the Hebrew in his time it has grown to serve others to this day. ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... thing is true of all Crusaders, they are not necessarily Christians. And there is that about Chesterton which sometimes makes me wonder whether, after all, he is not "a child of the French Revolution" in a sense he himself does not suspect. He has cursed the barren fig-tree of modern religious movements. But there comes a suspicion that he denies too much; that from between those supple sentences and those too plausible arguments one may catch a glimpse of the features ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... their money wages depend on the productiveness of the least fertile land, or least productive agricultural capital: on the point which cultivation has reached in its downward progress—in its encroachments on the barren lands, and its gradually increased strain upon the powers of the more fertile. Now, the force which urges cultivation in this downward course is the increase of people; while the counter-force, which checks the descent, is the improvement of agricultural science and practice, enabling the same soil ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... has been singularly barren of heroic figures, perhaps because the magnitude of the events has called forth such a multitude of individually heroic acts that no one can be placed before the rest; yet, when this greatest phase of history ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... institution would shortly possess many agents in Spain, who, with far more power and better opportunities than I myself could ever expect to possess, would scatter abroad the seed of the gospel, and make of a barren and thirsty wilderness ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... over a large town which could be none other than Antioch. Half-an-hour more brought him within sight of another city, doubtless Aleppo. He still steered almost due east, though a point or two southward would be more direct, because he wished to avoid the Syrian desert; a breakdown in such a barren tract of country would mean a fatal delay. Soon afterwards he reached a broad full river, ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... view. Tributaries join. Nicholls's Fish ponds. Characteristics of watering places. Red hill. Another spring. Unvarying scene. Frost, thermometer 28 degrees. A bluff hill. Gibson's Desert again. Remarks upon the Ashburton. The desert's edge. Barren and wretched region. Low ridges and spinifex. Deep native well. Thermometer 18 degrees. Salt bush and Acacia flats. A rocky cleft. Sandhills in sight. Enter the desert. The solitary caravan. Severe ridges ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... and the freed slaves sang hymns of joy to God. I saw the roads, five miles wide, level, barren, and crossed with ruts, where Northern and Southern armies had marched, and where villages and plantations had once been. I saw countless friends or acquaintances, who had once smiled with pitying ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... that the matter of most consequence was the grip with which they held their convictions and their willingness to sacrifice the interests on which they could lay their hands, in loyalty to some nobler faith. He taught that beliefs by hearsay are not only barren but ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... Guelder roses, all large and disorderly for want of trimming; there were leafy walls of scarlet beans and late peas; there was a row of bushy filberts in one direction, and in another a huge apple-tree making a barren circle under its low-spreading boughs. But what signified a barren patch or two? The garden was so large. There was always a superfluity of broad beans—it took nine or ten of Adam's strides to get to the ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... view of beautiful Siout standing in the midst of a loop of the Nile was ravishing. A green deeper and brighter than England, graceful minarets in crowds, a picturesque bridge, gardens, palm-trees, then the river beyond it, the barren yellow cliffs as a frame all around that. At our feet a woman was being carried to the grave, and the boys' voices rang out the Koran full and clear as the long procession—first white turbans and then ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and say, 'Tis all barren': and so it is: and so is all the world to him who will not cultivate the fruits ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... February 15, 1609, Shakespeare, who was apparently represented by his solicitor and kinsman, Thomas Greene, obtained judgment from a jury against Addenbroke for the payment of L6 and L1 5s. costs, but Addenbroke left the town, and the triumph proved barren. Shakespeare avenged himself by proceeding against one Thomas Horneby, who had acted ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... man's search for comfort and security in an alien and hostile world. The simple demand of the human heart is to be recognized and to be loved. Love is the magic touch that transforms all that is barren and cold into all that is rich and warm and fruitful. But man is neither loved nor recognized by the immensities of the universe. And in face of the illimitable stretches of time and space even the stoutest heart involuntarily quakes. We cannot consider the vast power of the universe ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... version of the "Poetics" of Aristotle, with illustrations drawn liberally from recent authors, was perhaps begotten of a natural wish to satisfy the public that qualifications for the laurel were not wholly wanting. A barren devotion to the drama was always his foible. It was freely indulged. With few exceptions, his plays were affairs of partnership with Samuel James Arnold, a writer of ephemeral popularity, whose tale of "The Haunted Island" was wildly admired by readers of the intensely romantic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... and Lord Foppington, Western and Tom Jones, my Father and my Uncle Toby, Millament and Sir Sampson Legend, Don Quixote and Sancho, Gil Blas and Guzman d'Alfarache, Count Fathom and Joseph Surface—have all met and exchanged commonplaces on the barren plains of the haute litterature—toil slowly on to the Temple of Science, seen a long way off upon a level, and end in one dull compound of ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... journals, Mr. O. P. Q. Philander Smiff, and again, in a lower social scale, Mr. Alfred Sloper, became recognised by a later generation. This unfortunate gentleman of the Bar—a gentleman always, in spite of his weakness of intellect and character—was shown in all the difficulties germane to his barren profession, and in all the ludicrous situations that came natural to the man. Many of his quaint aphorisms are still remembered, such as that, elsewhere recorded—"As my laundress makes my bed, so I must lie upon it," and "The clerk brings down his master's grey horsehair ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... of affection—is painfully indicated by the circumstance that wives were, among many races, valued (apart from grossly utilitarian and sensual motives) as mothers only, and that the men had a right, of which they commonly availed themselves, of repudiating a wife if she proved barren. On the lower Congo, says Dupont (96), a wife is not respected unless she has at least three children. Among the Somali, barren women are dieted and dosed, and if that proves unavailing they are usually chased away. (Paulitschke, B.E.A.S., 30.) If a Greenlander's wife did not bear ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... had been accustomed, each day at noon, to eat his salame and drink his Calabrian wine, and seated himself against a column. Here he could enjoy a view from both ends of the ruin. In the one direction it was only a narrow strip of sea, with the barren coast below, and the cloudless sky above it; in the other, a purple valley, rising far away on the flank of the Apennines; both pictures set between Doric pillars. He lit a cigar, and with a smile of contented thought abandoned ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... distance,—some delicious landscape! My road conducted me through countries where 110 The war has not yet reached. Life, life, my father— My venerable father, life has charms Which we have ne'er experienced. We have been But voyaging along its barren coasts, Like some poor ever-roaming horde of pirates, 115 That, crowded in the rank and narrow ship, House on the wild sea with wild usages, Nor know aught of the main land, but the bays Where safeliest they may venture a thieves' landing. Whate'er in the inland dales ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... narrow and irregular sea,** are the countries of Europe, rich in meadows and cultivated fields. On its right, from the Caspian Sea, extend the snowy and naked plains of Tartary. Returning in this direction that white space is the vast and barren desert of Cobi, which separates China from the rest of the world. You see that empire in the furrowed plain which obliquely rounds itself off from our sight. On yonder coasts, those ragged tongues of land and scattered points are the peninsulas and islands of the ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... the bottom of a hill and started up another, and I found myself walking ahead of the 'mobile. I turned around to look for the little girl, and instead of her I found a kitten capering beside me, and when we reached the top of the hill we were looking out over a most barren and desolate waste of sand-heaps without a speck of vegetation anywhere, and the kitten said, 'This view beggars all admiration.' Then all at once we were in a great group of people and I undertook to repeat to them the kitten's remark, but ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... line, eight or nine miles; and the country about two miles to the southward of Port Jackson abounds with high trees, and little or no underwood; but between that and Botany-Bay, it is all thick, low woods or shrubberies, barren heaths, and swamps; the land near the sea, although covered in many places with wood, is rocky from the water-side to the ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter
... abed with fresh morning smiling in through the open window, for the first time he looked forward, following the face he had pursued through his dreams, into the future. Its chambers he found ghastly barren. He visualised it as a vast unfurnished house. To the merry eye with which two days ago he had looked upon the world, the picture, had he then conjured it, would have given him no gloom. He would have thought ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... her on the barren moor, And call her on the hill, 'T is nothing but the heron's cry, And plover's answer shrill; My child is flown on wilder wings, Than they have ever spread, And I may even walk a waste That widened ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... them, but they did not come. The situation was the reverse of pleasant, the soil about was barren, and there were no shade or fruit trees. It was a crazy idea, selecting such a spot for a summer boarding-house, ...
— The Young Musician - or, Fighting His Way • Horatio Alger
... Fame smooth and accessible for you. Never, too, while you aspire to honour, shall you steel your heart to tranquillity. For you, my child, shall be the joys of home and love, and a mind that does not sicken at the past, and strain, through mere forgetfulness, towards a solitary and barren distinction for the future. Not only what your father gains you shall enjoy, but what has cursed him his vigilance shall ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the location of the smoke toward which he sought to go, so that he would not miss it. Nature aided him, making the spot distinctive. Everywhere the cliffs were barren, just rock and more rock, a jumble of great boulders strewn along sheer precipices, everywhere save alone in this one spot. But there was a scant table land, and from it a small grove of pines rose high in the blue of the brightening sky, their gnarled ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... even what has already been said relating to the crops produced has been enough to cause disbelief in those who have not visited Babylonia[29]." To-day great tracts of undulating moorland, which aforetime yielded two and three crops a year, are in summer partly barren wastes and partly jungle and reedy swamp. Bedouins camp beside sandy heaps which were once populous and thriving cities, and here and there the shrunken remnants of a people once great and influential eke out precarious livings under the ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... about for half an hour they suddenly broke through the trees and found themselves on a shore, the like of which they had never seen before. It was wild and rocky and barren, and some of the rocks were of very curious shapes. A few were high and conical, like caves, and had ...
— The Enchanted Island • Fannie Louise Apjohn |
