"Barren" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... place, the fact is equally certain that descendants of one and the same species which, according to the dogma of the old schools, could always effect a fertile union under certain circumstances, either cannot effect such a union or produce only barren hybrids (the Porto-Santo rabbit, the different races of horses, dogs, roses, hyacinths, &c.; see "History of Creation," vol. ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... cries out, "All, do you say? No—not all. This vulture cannot touch the heather field! My hope,—it is my only hope, and it will save me in the end. Ha, ha! These wise ones! They did not think the barren mountain of those days worth naming in their deed. But now that mountain is a great green field worth more than all they can seize, (with a strange intensity) ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... 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 by the state and by individual philosophers, to unite the monarchy ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... interpenetration of ideas than a barren interchange of courtesies, or a bush-fighting argument, in which each man tries to cover as much of himself and expose as much of his opponent as the tangled thicket of the disputed ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the classes and the masses, so-called, and that erected in self-defence by the exploited is the higher and more difficult to climb. On the one side is a disciplined, fortified Gibraltar, held by the gentry; then comes a singularly barren and unstable neutral zone; and on the other side is the vast chaotic mass. In Under Town, I notice, a gentleman is always gen'leman, a workman or tramp is man, but the fringers, the inhabitants of the neutral zone, are called persons. ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... store for him? ... Quickly life came flooding back. Indifference fell from him. In one blinding flash his new condition was revealed. His life had been a futile compromise. He had sowed passivity and he had reaped a barren harvest of negative virtues. He would compromise again, and he would be passive again, and he would bow his neck to authority ... but from this moment on he would wither the cold fruits of such enforced planting in a steadily ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... a twig, on which to tie his handkerchief and erect it above the clump of mesquite as a signal to the searchers in case they should be overcome by fatigue or sleep, he would have been happy. But the plain was barren of brush or timber; he did not dream that this omission and the very unobtrusiveness of his hiding-place would be his salvation ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... spanning or running parallel to the bright stream that had been the delight of Eric's innocent childhood. There was something enjoyable at first to the poor boy's eyes, so long accustomed to the barren sea, in resting once more on the soft undulating green of the summer fields, which were intertissued with white and yellow flowers, like a broidery of pearls and gold. The whole scene was bathed in the exquisite light, and rich with the ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... man of grit, and a hero of the faith. He wanted a quiet base of supplies from which he could send out expeditions into the heart of China. He had no means of any account. But he saw the possibilities in these steep and barren hillsides opposite Swatow, and for six hundred dollars he bought a tract which he gradually turned into a garden, with twenty mission buildings and residences so thrust into the rocks and so overhanging ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... are very numerous, were content to reside in their castles and houses, in that bleak and barren climate; and although some of them made frequent journeys to London, yet I do not remember any of their greatest families, till very lately, to have made England their constant habitation, before the Union: Or, if they did, I am sure ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... landing. She flung open a door, and the new governess found herself stepping forth into utter darkness, where Nan herself was groping about for matches. The air of the place was cold and damp. It had the feel of a room that was unused. It was barren and cheerless. But in the second preceding Nan's discovery of the matches Miss Blake hoped that when the gas was lit it would seem more inviting. But it did not. It was bare and undecorated, and presented ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... barren being do we reap? Our senses narrow, and our reason frail, Life short, and truth a gem which loves the deep, And all things weighed in custom's falsest scale; Opinion an omnipotence, whose veil Mantles the earth with darkness, until right ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... torn to pieces by wind and storm; the only glimpse of peace is derived from the view on either side of the sea, which sometimes shows itself on the horizon, a misty line, half silver, half ether. This barren wilderness again softens into gracefully-swelling hills turned towards Florence. The fair olive tree and the dark cypress mingle their foliage with the luxuriant chestnut boughs, and the frequent marble villa flashes a white gleam from amid its surrounding laurel bowers. The ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 394, October 17, 1829 • Various
... present claimants that he would have been a subtle lawyer who could have pronounced upon the rightful owner. The demesne around the castle contained some well-grown and handsome timber, and as the soil was undulating and fertile, presented many features of beauty; beyond it, all was sterile, bleak, and barren. Long tracts of brown heath-clad mountain or not less unprofitable valleys of tall and waving fern were all that the eye could discern, except where the broad Shannon, expanding into a tranquil and glassy lake, lay still and motionless beneath the dark mountains, a few islands, with ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... history, had run from south to north, or vice versa. Or rather, to be honest, it was the observant Hans who made this discovery from various indications which had escaped my notice. I need not stop to detail them, but one of these was that at certain places the water-holes on a high, rather barren land had been dug out, and in one or more instances, lined with stones after the fashion of an ancient well. Evidently we were following an old trade route made, perhaps, in forgotten ages when Africa was more ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... above all, it presents frequent occasions of embarrassment. The writing of history is a strongly selective operation, the outcome being valuable just in so far as the choice what to reject and what to include has been judicious; and the task is no light one of discriminating between barren speculations and ideas pregnant with coming truth. To the possession of such prescience of the future as would be needed to do this effectually I can lay no claim; but diligence and sobriety of thought are ordinarily within reach, and these I shall have exercised to good purpose if I ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... I do know. And the poor children, too! They ought to have places where they can be jolly and make a noise besides in these barren streets. ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... 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 lie, shoulder to shoulder, an army of brothers, ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... gloomily at her, for it was very present to his mind that their earlier meetings had, for him, been barren of joy; ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... a sudden turn ahead. "Around that bend," I said aloud, "lies Goodale." We went faster. We rounded the bend, only to see the dusky, heartachy, barren stretch. ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... future retribution. Plato had still a goodly number of disciples; and though his doctrines, containing not a few elements of sublimity and beauty, exercised a better influence, it must be admitted, after all, that they constituted a most unsatisfactory system of cold and barren mysticism. The ancient philosophers delivered many excellent moral precepts; but, as they wanted the light of revelation, their arguments in support of duty were essentially defective, and the lessons which they taught had often very little ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... formed hills about Dunedin are not mere barren rocks,—they have their suggestiveness, speaking of volcanic eruptions, of wild upheavals, dating back for thousands of years. Scientists tell us that these islands are of the earliest rock formations. The ground ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... rudeness of climate which had so impressed the Portuguese adventurer was the source of their success. Cold and poverty and storm are the nurses of the qualities which make for empire. It is the men from the bleak and barren lands who master the children of the light and the heat. And so the Dutchmen at the Cape prospered and grew stronger in that robust climate. They did not penetrate far inland, for they were few in number and all they wanted was to be found close at hand. But they built themselves ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Called the Saintes' Legend of Cupid: There may he see the large woundes wide Of Lucrece, and of Babylon Thisbe; The sword of Dido for the false Enee; The tree of Phillis for her Demophon; The plaint of Diane, and of Hermion, Of Ariadne, and Hypsipile; The barren isle standing in the sea; The drown'd Leander for his fair Hero; The teares of Helene, and eke the woe Of Briseis, and Laodamia; The cruelty of thee, Queen Medea, Thy little children hanging by the halse*, *neck For thy ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... their silvery light, and something in the surroundings touched a sympathetic cord in the men. "Oh that I were young again," said Cortlandt, "and had life before me! I should like to remain here and grow up with this planet, in which we already perceive the next New World. The beauties of earth are barren compared with the scenes we have here." "You remember," replied Bearwarden, "how Cicero defends old age in his De Senectute, and shows that while it has almost everything that youth has, it has also a sense of calm and many ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... and the few sheep that Simon Wallace attended were nibbling earnestly the stunted grass, having spent the greater part of the day in the shade of a small knoll, listless from the heat which oppressed them. In the midst stood Simon, enjoying the scene around him, which, barren and desolate as it might be in the eyes of a stranger, was to him the loveliest spot in the universe; nor would he have bade it farewell to dwell in the most fertile vale in the Lothians. Here he had been born sixty summers before, and here he had enjoyed as much of happiness as falls ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... sustenance, the bare means of a livelihood, would be a hindrance to human progress, a hindrance not to be removed by all of the maxims of the philosopher or the theories of the doctrinaire. Promise without fulfillment is barren, but when you can place before the mechanic the assured fact that the performance of his duty means success in life, and that his non-performance means failure; when you can show him that this law is immutable, you have made of him a useful citizen and have instilled into his mind a firm belief ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... was insignificance or remoteness alone that protected the libeler. The leading newspapers of the state, however much they might abuse his writings, learned to be very cautious of what they said of him personally. But it was a barren victory he had won. He had lost far more than he had gained. That such would be the result, he knew, while (p. 198) he was engaged in the controversy. It affected, at the time, his literary reputation, and, as ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... For the moment I was so utterly taken aback that I could decide upon no new plan of action. I sat there helplessly staring at the poor creature, so full of grief and remorse that I was quite unable to rise to the occasion. I had counted so securely upon tricking Lord Blackadder into a barren pursuit that my disappointment was overwhelming and paralyzed ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... are, in Park Lane, and the park neighborhood of Piccadilly, and the larger and lesser streets of Mayfair, and the different squares and gardens and places; and certain of them may be visited at certain times on application by the tourist. But that is a barren pleasure which one easily denies oneself in behalf of the simpler and more real satisfactions of London. The charm of the vast friendly old place is not in such great houses, as its grandeur is not in its monuments. Now and then such a house gave evidence of high ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... severance of friends, about mere logical abstractions in our remote island, as would have sufficed for the great dogmatic battles of the Continent. It would be difficult to exaggerate the pity that fills the heart at such a reflection; at the thought of how this neck of barren hills between two inclement seaways has echoed for three centuries with the uproar of sectarian battle; of how the east wind has carried out the sound of our shrill disputations into the desolate Atlantic, and the west wind has ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Sundown. Hunger and thirst and a burning sun may not be immediately conducive to poetry or romantic imaginings. But the 'dobe in the distance shaded by a clump of trees, the gleam of the drying chiles, the glow of flowers, offered an acceptable antithesis to the barren roadway and the empty mesas. Sundown quickened his pace. Eden, though circumscribed by a barb-wire fence enclosing scant territory, invited him to rest and refresh himself. And all unexpected the immemorial Eve stood in the doorway of the 'dobe, gazing down the road and doubtless wondering why this ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... but clear, an ideal one for a ride, and mile after mile was passed, between the now almost barren fields, and through long groves of leafless trees. The horses from Riverlawn had always been boasted of as being the best in that section of the country, and now they were proving ...
— An Undivided Union • Oliver Optic
... went home—took hold. Between the feeling in her heart which might have reached and touched this despair, and the woman before her, there seemed to be a barrier she could not break. Or was it that she was really barren and poor in soul, and had never realised it before? A strange misery rose in her too, as she still knelt, tending and consoling, ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... before us, with a few rugged and barren heights scattered over it. As we proceeded vegetation grew more and more scanty, till after we had marched scarcely half a mile, it ceased altogether. We had slept, we found, on the borders of a desert. The ground was at first composed ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... buoyant, loveable type of the self-reliant American. Her philosophy is one of love and kindness towards all things; her hope is never dimmed. And by the sheer beauty of her soul, and the purity of her vision, she wins from barren and unpromising surroundings those ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... deed is never lost. He who sows courtesy reaps benefit; and he who gathers kindness gathers love. Pleasure bestowed on a grateful mind was never barren, but always brings a good recompense; and that is the moral of the story I ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... very Pole. Geographical lines may confine our bodies; but nature is an untamed wild, where the spirit roams at will. If I am here hemmed in by barren hills, and live in a desert waste, yet, as one of your sweetest poets ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... his life, so barren, so void. He recalled the days gone by, the days of his infancy, the house, the house of his parents; his college days, his follies, the time of his probation in Paris, the illness of his father, his death. He then returned to live with his ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... but an abrupt transition from Marino to Chiabrera would be impossible. It is like passing from some luxurious grove of oranges and roses to a barren hill-top without prospect over sea or champaign. We are fortunate in possessing a few pages of autobiography, from which all that is needful to remember of Gabriello Chiabrera's personal history may be extracted. He was born in ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... as he would there was not a soul in sight. All about him stretched the barren frowning mountains sleeping ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... in land of stony dearth Like barren rock thou sit, Round which the phantom-waters flit Of heart- and brain-mirage That can no thirst assuage, Yet be thou still, and wait, wait long; A right sea comes to drown the wrong; God's glory comes to fill the earth, And thou, no more a scathed rock, Shalt start alive with ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... more, and I said to myself, "He who took thy father will not spare thee." Now the night I wedded thee, thou madest me swear that I would never take a second wife nor a concubine, Abyssinian or Greek or other, nor would lie a night from thee: and behold, thou art barren, and swiving thee is like boring into the rock.' 'God is my witness,' rejoined she, 'that the fault lies with thee, for that thy seed is thin.' 'And how is it with him whose seed is thin?' asked he, and she, 'He cannot get women with child nor beget children.' 'What thickens seed?' ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... over, cannot you look at us, even should you return to the manor? The two girls followed you to the stagehouse, saw you seated and drive off. Frederick's tooth prevented his attendance. My heart is full of affection, my head too barren to express it. I am impatient for evening; for the receipt of your dear letter; for those delightful sensations which your expressions of tenderness alone can excite. Dejected, distracted with out them; elated, giddy even to folly with them; ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... a barren tree before, I blew a quenched coal, I could not, on their midnight shore, The ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The Blackfeet do not especially say that this future life is an unhappy one, but, from the way in which they speak of it, it is clear that for them it promises nothing desirable. It is a monotonous, never ending, and altogether unsatisfying existence,—a life as barren and desolate as the country which the ghosts inhabit. These people are as much attached to life as we are. Notwithstanding the unhappy days which have befallen them of late years,—days of privation and hunger,—they cling to life. Yet they seem to have no fear of death. ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... him of one of Mr. Burke's playful sallies upon Dean Marlay: 'I don't like the Deanery of Ferns, it sounds so like a BARREN title.'—'Dr. HEATH should have it;' said I. Johnson laughed, and condescending to trifle in the same mode of conceit, suggested ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... pouring from our own? Does the general grief of our fellow-creatures lessen our own private and particular woe? No, no, each suffers on his own account, each struggles with his own grief, each sheds his own tears. And besides," he went on, "what has my life been up to the present moment? A cold, barren, sterile arena, in which I have always fought for others, never for myself. Sometimes for a king, sometimes for a woman. The king has betrayed, the woman disdained me. Miserable, unlucky wretch that I am! Women! Can I not make all expiate the crime ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... finds our poor array Like drift upon a barren shore, Perchance we gaze on it and say With vigor, "We will roam no more." But when the year its course hath run, And May completes the rhythmic span, Again, I wot, we'll call upon The ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... much frequented by pilgrims, was situate on a lake called Logh Derg, in the Southern part of the county of Donegal, near the borders of Tyrone and Fermanagh. It was surrounded with wild and barren mountains, and was almost inaccessible by horsemen even in summer time, on account of great bogs, rocks, and precipices which environed it. The popular tradition concerning it is as ridiculous as is to be found in any legend of the Romish ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... fish that might be caught during hurried nightly launch or morning landing. Sometimes they hid in a berry patch, when the fruit was gathered and boiled, but camp-fires were stamped out and covered. Turning westward, they crossed the barren region of iron-capped rocks and dwarf growth between the Upper Ottawa and the Great Lakes. Now they were farther from the Iroquois, and staved off famine by shooting an occasional bear in the berry patches. For a thousand miles they had travelled against stream, carrying their boats across ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... concreteness. When not challenged, the point of view of common sense, for instance, seems concrete and natural. The reaction of common sense to the world is direct and practical, it has few questions to ask, and philosophic speculations appear to it abstract and barren. But, upon analysis, it is the common sense view that stands revealed as abstract and barren. For an abstract object is one that does not fully correspond to the rich and manifold reality; it is ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... delicacy,—the mental improvement resulting from such calm discussions as the Tarbolton and Mauchline clubs indulged in, was not injurious to men engaged in the barn and at the plough. A well-ordered mind will be strengthened, as well as embellished, by elegant knowledge, while over those naturally barren and ungenial all that is refined or noble will pass as a sunny shower scuds over lumps of granite, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... by man, Had fall'n in Lyonnesse about their lord, King Arthur. Then, because his wound was deep, The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him, And bore him to a chapel nigh the field, A broken chancel by a broken cross, That stood in a dark strait of barren land: On one side lay the Ocean, and on one Lay a great water, ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... reduction of copper, have not played so long on the surrounding atmosphere without doing their work. Everywhere within their influence, the perennial vegetation is meagre and stinted. The hills, particularly to the southeast of the copper-works, are barren in the extreme. Not one spark of green, not one solitary lichen, can withstand the ravages of the poison. Time was, we were told by an old inhabitant, when these hills produced the earliest and finest corn in the principality; but now they only ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... the wilderness," continued the minister. "You have fed with the swine and the goats. You have found no nourishment there. All was bleak, and barren, and desolate there. The living waters were dried up, and the bread of life was denied to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... passed Abilene, Texas, in safety, but no word had reached our employer since, and it was believed that they had turned eastward and would come up the Chisholm Trail. Bob reported the country between Abilene and Doan's Crossing as cut into dust and barren of sustenance, many weak cattle having died in crossing the dry belt. But the most startling news, seriously disturbing us both, was that Archie Tolleston was stationed at Doan's Crossing on Red River as ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... dust or all mud. The river is the meanest apology for a frog-pond that I ever saw. It is a queer country, you would like to see it, but you would not like to live here long. The hills are mostly of clay, the sides of some very steep and barren of all vegetation. You would think cattle would starve there, but all the cattle that have wintered here are fat now and they say here that cattle brought from any other part will improve in size and quality. Theodore ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... good Master, you shall not sow your seed in barren ground, for I hope to return you an increase answerable to your hopes; but however, you shal find me obedient, and thankful, and serviceable to my ...
— The Compleat Angler - Facsimile of the First Edition • Izaak Walton
... extension of the mountains of central Colorado, standing more than five thousand feet above the valleys of the Colorado and the Gunnison rivers. To certain montane mammals the mesa is a peninsula of cool, moist, forest surrounded by inhospitable, hot, dry, barren lowland. ...
— Mammals of the Grand Mesa, Colorado • Sydney Anderson
... those shoes! By special request I rubbed the soles on the gravel paths, so that they might not look too newly married. Quite certainly Kathie will be throwing an occasional thought to the girl she left behind her, a "poor old Evelyn!" with a dim, pitiful little ache at the thought of my barren lot. Quite certainly, too, for one moment when she remembers, there will be twenty when she forgets. Quite right, of course! Quite natural, and wife-like, and just as it should be, and only a selfish, ungenerous wretch ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... hours' journey they came clean out of the pine-wood, and before them lay the black wilderness of the bare mountains, and beyond them, looking quite near now, the great ice- peaks, the wall of the world. It was but an hour short of noon by this time, and the high sun shone down on a barren boggy moss which lay betwixt them and the rocky waste. Sure-foot made no stay, but threaded the ways that went betwixt the quagmires, and in another hour led Face-of-god into a winding valley blinded by great rocks, ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... Philip in armour, mounted on an Andalusian charger, the king was so pleased, that he permitted the picture to be publicly exhibited, amidst the plaudits of the spectators, in front of the church of San Felipe el Real in Madrid. Nor was the exhibition a barren honour to the painter, for the king not only 'talked of collecting and in future Velasquez should have the monopoly of the royal countenance,' he paid three hundred ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... several deep ravines, and going round the heads of others, over a barren country for an hour, the land grew better, and was tolerable, till one o'clock, when it again grew bad and rocky. The natives informed them that this part of the country was inhabited by the Bidjigals, but that most of the tribe were dead of the small-pox. Though the country they passed over ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter
... Du Camp, an eminent member of the French Academy, travelling from the Red Sea to the Nile through the Desert of Kosseir, came to a barren slope covered with boulders, rounded ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Mount Vesuvius, which has ever since been celebrated for its volcano. Before this time, Vesuvius is spoken of, by ancient writers, as being covered with orchards and vineyards, and of which the middle was dry and barren. The eruption was accompanied by an earthquake, which destroyed several cities of Campania, particularly Pompeii and Herculaneum; while the lava, pouring down the mountain in torrents, overwhelmed, in various directions, the adjacent ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... reason," said Buzzford. "'Tis barren ignorance that leads to such words. He's a simple home-spun man, that never was fit for good company—think nothing of ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... other barren dreams formed to promote universal felicity. The extreme facility of the means which you recommend is quite sufficient to expose its hollowness. Do you believe that if it were merely needful to print bank-notes in order to satisfy all our ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... have seen in this position, though she succeeded to it after the custom of the country. I imagine she must have had a worthless husband, since every sultan can have as many wives as he pleases, and the whole could never have been barren. I rallied the porters for pulling up after so short a march, but could not induce them to go on. They declared that forests of such vast extent lay on ahead that it would be quite impossible to cross them before ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... City, which covered the slopes above the plateau at the three-thousand-foot level like a checker-board of shimmering, silken circles, would spring to febrile life as the spider monsters went streaking and leaping across the barren, distorted granite on the day's business, the hunt for food in the lowlands, and the opening of the trap-doors to gather in the heat of the day in the silken tunnel homes set in the gorges and among the boulders. At sunset the ...
— Loot of the Void • Edwin K. Sloat
... sacredness of color. "Since he loves beauty so, why does he not love me?" I asked myself; and perhaps the feverish hope and suspense only lit up that beauty and fed it with fresh fires. Ah, the July days! Did you ever wander over barren, parched stubble-fields, and suddenly front a knot of red Turk's-cap lilies, flaring as if they had drawn all the heat and brilliance from the land into their tissues? Such were they. And if I were to grow old and gray, they would light down all my life, and I could be willing to lead a dull, grave ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... terrorism of the pro-King komitadjis. If he had been in Montenegro during the years after the War he would possibly agree that komitadji is the proper name for the many lawless elements who have found the traditional fighting life more congenial than the thankless task of tilling their very barren land. The moral effect of opposing to these the Montenegrin Omladina instead of Serbian troops was to destroy all pretence of the movement being a national Montenegrin insurrection against the union, and the cessation of assistance from ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... described in the Word; in that when the children of Israel lived according to the commandments, the earth yielded its increase, likewise the flocks and herds; but when they lived contrary to the commandments the ground was barren, and as it is said, accursed; instead of harvests it yielded thorns and briars, the flocks and herds miscarried, and wild beasts broke in. The same may be inferred from the locusts, frogs, and lice ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... how that knowledge had been gained: some of it from the experience of early explorers,—how to avoid the dreaded scurvy, how to build a ship that could withstand the tremendous pressure of the floes; and some from the Eskimos,—how to live in that barren region, and how to travel with dogs and sledges;—and some, too, from Peary's own early experiences,—how he had struggled for twenty years to reach the goal, and had added this experience to that until finally the prize was his. We may differ as to ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... remarked, "which I admire most—the gift of directness. Now I would speak to you of myself. When I was young, I was penniless, with no inheritance save a grim castle, a barren island, and a great name. The titular head of my family was a Cardinal of Rome, my father's own brother. I went to him, and I demanded the means of support. He answered me with an epigram which I will not repeat, besides which it is untranslatable. I will only ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Wall of old. There was a region of desolation and death, extending from the Sierra Nevadas to the border lines of Nebraska, and from the Yellowstone to the Colorado Rivers. A profane writer once suggested that the same Creator could hardly have brought into existence this arid, barren and inhospitable region and the fertile plains and beautiful mountains which surrounded it ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... notion got hold of me, I surveyed with anxious scrutiny the open spaces before me; but no living creature appeared upon the barren strand. ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... reluctant gaze Upon the path of duty; Its barren, uninviting ways Are void of bloom and beauty. Yet in that road, though dark and cold, It seems as we begin it, As we press on—lo! we ...
— Poems of Sentiment • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... After an hour's journey, on a dry, not high elevation, they chanced upon gigantic thistles having stems as thick as the trunk of a tree and flowers the size of a man's head. On the sides of some mountains which from a distance appeared barren they saw furze-bushes about twenty-six feet high. Other plants which in Europe belong to the smallest varieties assumed here proportions corresponding to the thistles and furze-bushes; and gigantic, isolated trees rose ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... division was within easy support of this wing. Thus the whole army was in good position and in good condition. We had largely subsisted on the country; our wagons were full of forage and provisions; but, as we approached the sea-coast, the country became more sandy and barren, and food became more scarce; still, with little or no loss, we had traveled two-thirds of our distance, and I concluded to push on for Savannah. At Millen I learned that General Bragg was in Augusta, and ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... of interest to observe in the somewhat barren-looking country through which the railroad ran; and voting France (Paris excepted) a very slow place indeed, Will buried himself for the rest of the afternoon in a boy's book of travels. Nevertheless, the journey proved a very tedious one, and after ...
— Harper's Young People, March 9, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... of sin, as of trouble. No matter." Then, with an awful solemnity, he added: "My soul is barren. It is already given over to the undying worm. I shall die to-morrow ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... under the houses, at two sides of the square, or again by narrow alleys. Nor is the same level always preserved. Small flights of time-worn steps continually surprise us in our pilgrimage. The aggregate—barren courts, narrow passages, and winding lanes—forms a perfect labyrinth, very trying to a stranger or to one possessing a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... of thee, When we have ta'en these arms? Have we not Teucer, Skilled in this mystery? Yea, I may boast Myself thine equal both in strength and aim To wield them. Fare thee well, then! Thou art free To roam thy barren isle. We need thee not. Let us be going! And perchance thy gift May bring thy destined ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... proved to be Chatham Island, one of the Galapagos, a group of volcanic islands almost under the line, some hundred miles away from the coast of Peru. We brought up in a fine bay, but the shore as far as we could see looked black and barren. There were, however, thick, low bushes of a peculiar kind, covering the ground at some distance from the beach. As Dr Cockle was going on shore with one of the mates and a party of the men, he to botanise and they to obtain fresh provisions, I went up to ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... is a terrible place, barren and desolate, for it is avoided as a spot accursed. No living thing moves upon it; the earth is streaked with patches of dark moss and drifts of ghastly skulls, like a scattered harvest of death. Once, says the legend, a wayfarer, surprised ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... mountain in whose heart lies the poet's solitude now rose before us at the foot of the lofty Mount Ventoux, whose summit of snows extended beyond. We left the river and walked over a barren plain across which the wind blew most drearily. The sky was rainy and dark, and completed the desolateness of the scene, which in nowise heightened our anticipations of the renowned glen. At length we rejoined ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... are also furnished by the bands of Snake Indians from the Yellowstone. The pearl ornaments which they esteem so highly come from other bands, whom they represent as their friends and relations, living to the southwest beyond the barren plains on the other side of the mountains: these relations they say inhabit a good country, abounding with elk, deer, bear, and antelope, where horses and mules are much more abundant than they ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... islands, but they are mostly barren uninhabited rocks. Archangel, a port on this sea, is famous for the manufacture of linen sheeting. Now quit we these dreary regions for the bright and enlivening southern climes; and, if all parties are agreeable, ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... a soothing and agreeable spectacle, so on the other hand it is not less true that its immediate tendency is, to clip the wings of the thinking principle within us, and plunge the members of the community in which we live into a barren and ungratifying mediocrity. Hence it should be the aim of those persons, who from their situation have more or less the means of looking through the vast assemblage of their countrymen, of penetrating "into the seeds" of character, and determining "which grain will grow, ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... played without stopping, in a way which is seen and heard only on a battle-field or during a tornado in the desert. It sounded as if the pent-up fury of a thousand years had suddenly been let loose upon that little collection of houses on the vast barren plain. ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, though the soil is much less alkaline, and the so-called "sage-brush" plants characteristic of an alkaline district are mostly absent. To the north of the Karroo and of the mountains which bound it, a similar district, equally arid, dreary, and barren, stretches away to the banks of the Orange River, which here in its lower course has less water than in its upper course, because, like the Nile, it receives no affluents and is wasted by the terrible sun. In fact, one may ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... exhiliarated by the wit of Fielding and humour of Smollett, I yet presume not to attempt pursuing the same ground which they have tracked; whence, though they may have cleared the weeds, they have also culled the flowers; and, though they have rendered the path plain, they have left it barren. ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... with the flesh of the whale, it was none the less obvious that members of the party were starting out for home, perhaps disposed to this by the discomfort of life in rough weather with no better shelter than they could find on this somewhat barren coast. These natives nearly always hunt in districts where they know there can be found a barabbara or so, and such huts are used as common property by all who find them, although the loose title of ownership probably rests in the man or family who first erected them. When ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough
... crisp afternoon in late October. The road leading west from Clayton ran the gantlet of fiery maples and sumac until it reached the barren hillside below "Who'd 'a' Thought It." The little cabin clung to the side of the steep slope like a bit of fungus to the trunk ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... threefold union with Reality, as your attention is focussed now on one aspect, now on another, of its rich simplicity, will be actualised by you in many different ways: for you are not to suppose that an unchanging barren ecstasy is now to characterise your inner life. Though the sense of your own dwelling within the Eternal transfuses and illuminates it, the sense of your own necessary efforts, a perpetual renewal of contact with the Spiritual World, a perpetual ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... the mission of the seventy, several miracles, some striking lessons of instruction from passing incidents, and no less than twelve parables: the good Samaritan, the unfortunate friend, the unclean spirit, the rich fool, the barren fig-tree, the lost sheep, the lost pieces of silver, the prodigal son, the unfaithful steward, the rich man and Lazarus, the unjust judge, the Pharisee and publican. While the attentive reader perceives ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... was not to be deterred. With his own hands he unmoored a vessel and sailed across to Oberwoerth. Having landed at that part of the island furthest from the convent, he was obliged to pass the haunted spot on his way thither. The circular patch of barren earth was said to be a spot accursed, by reason of sacrilege and suicide committed there. But such things were far from the thoughts of the ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... country, or who improvise satires or panegyrics. This last class are dreaded, though despised. They are richly rewarded in their lifetime, but after death they are not even given a decent burial. If they were buried in the ground, it would become barren; if in the river, the water would be poisoned, and the fish would die: so they are buried in ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... seen, but all communicated, and by that very circumstance, and by the necessity of perpetually classifying them, transmuted into words and generalities; pride, flattery, irritation, artificial power; these, and circumstances resembling these, necessarily render the heights of office barren heights, which command, indeed, a vast and extensive prospect, but attract so many clouds and vapors, that most often all prospect is precluded. Still, however, Mr. Pitt's situation, however inauspicious for his real being, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... barred, would not all progress, all conquest of knowledge, be totally arrested? Rome herself is nowadays a terrible example of such a disastrous experiment—Rome with her congealed soil, her dead sap, killed by centuries of papal government, Rome which has become so barren that not a man, not a work has sprung from her midst even after five and twenty years of awakening and liberty! And who would accept such a state of things, not among people of revolutionary mind, but among those of religious mind that might possess any culture and breadth of view? Plainly enough ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... in the time of Abraham (xxi. 22-34, J and E). Beersheba, which figures in both, is celebrated by the planting of a sacred tree and (like Bethel) by the invocation of the name of Yahweh. This district is the scene of the birth of Ishmael and Isaac. As Sarai was barren (cf. xi. 30)2 the promise that his seed should possess the land seemed incapable of fulfilment. According to one rather obscure narrative, Abram's sole heir was the servant, who was over his household, apparently a certain Eliezer of Damascus3 (xv. 2, the text is corrupt). ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... ascetic Church itself. The intellectual life, also, nearly restricted to priests and monks, had been formalized and conventionalized, until in spite of the keenness of its methods and the brilliancy of many of its scholars, it had become largely barren and unprofitable. The whole sphere of knowledge had been subjected to the mere authority of the Bible and of a few great minds of the past, such as Aristotle. All questions were argued and decided on the basis of their assertions, which had often become wholly inadequate ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... most beloved! The conviction that it is to ensure the peace of my now only friend on earth, my faithful Pembroke, that I resign the hope of ever beholding thee again in this life, will bring me one comfort, at least, in my barren exile!" ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... mother's? 4. There is nobody here but me. 5. The fine arts were all but proscribed. 6. There's not a breeze but whispers of thy name. 7. The longest life is but a day. 8. What if the bee love not these barren boughs? 9. That life is long which answers life's great end. 10. What! I the weaker vessel? 11. Whom should I obey but thee? 12 What by industry and what by economy, he had amassed a fortune. 13. I long ago found that out. 14. One should not always eat ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... other female souls, mainly French, among whom the incipient Fritz now was, appear to have done their part as well as could be looked for. Respectable Edict-of-Nantes French ladies, with high head-gear, wide hoops; a clear, correct, but somewhat barren and meagre species, tight-laced and high-frizzled in mind and body. It is not a very fertile element for a young soul: not very much of silent piety in it; and perhaps of vocal piety more than enough in proportion. An element founding on what they call "enlightened Protestantism," "freedom of thought," ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... other men, in other critical situations, where women are concerned. I know, now, that I should have questioned myself from the first. I should have asked why any room in the house was better than home to me when she entered it, and barren as a desert when she went out again—why I always noticed and remembered the little changes in her dress that I had noticed and remembered in no other woman's before—why I saw her, heard her, and touched ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... the three great butts at which Hosea Biglow and Parson Wilbur shoot, at point-blank range, and with shafts drawn well to the ear. The fringe of its seaboard (itself consisting chiefly of unapproachable swamp or barren sand wastes), surrounded by weak neighbours or thin wandering hordes, only too easy to bully, to subdue, to eat up; from which bands of pirates, under the name of liberators, swarm forth year after ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... hand, as the eyes of faith are lifted, there shines into view, and in the closest spiritual proximity (for the believing company has actually "come unto it," ver. 22), the hill eternal, the true Mount Sion, where shines the city of the living God, the Jerusalem of heaven. No barren rocks are there, nor do menaces of articulate thunder sound from and around that height. All is light, and all is life. Yes, above all things all is life. Behold the countless thousands ([Greek: myriasin]) of radiant denizens, the angelic friends of man; and then beatified men besides (ver. 23), ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... of July General Bonaparte left Alexandria for Damanhour. In the vast plains of Bohahire'h the mirage every moment presented to the eye wide sheets of water, while, as we advanced, we found nothing but barren ground full of deep cracks. Villages, which at a distance appear to be surrounded with water, are, on a nearer approach, discovered to be situated on heights, mostly artificial, by which they are raised above the inundations of the Nile. This illusion continually recurs; ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... but when he found that the English were victorious, he muttered a great oath and refused to hear more. To him the English were fiends incarnate. Had they not slowly murdered his Emperor on their barren ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... went to Vera Cruz for a newspaper syndicate, and after the first sharp engagement in the Mexican seaport there was nothing for the correspondent to do but kill time on that barren, low lying strip of Gulf coast, hemmed in on all sides by Mexicans and the sea, and time is hard to kill there. Yet there was a story to be got, but it required nerve to go ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... black beetles and rats. Her face might have been a dead, blank wall, or cut out of cold, white stone, for all it expressed; and as she lightly held up her rich robes in one hand, and in the other bore the light, the dark, shining eyes were fixed on his face, and were as barren of interest, eagerness, compassion, tenderness, or any other feeling, as the shining, black glass ones of a wax doll. So they stood looking at each other for some ten seconds or so, and then, still looking full at ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... often stirred in monstrous wrath, welcomed us with a spread of dazzling silk. The clumsy junks that appeared to have come down from the days of Confucius, were languid on the gentle ripples. The outstanding Asian islands, small and grim, are singularly desolate, barren as if splintered by fire, gaunt and forbidding. Hongkong is an island that prospers under the paws of the British lion, and it is a city displayed on a mountain side, that by day is not much more imposing than the town of ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... on the contrary regarded mathematics as a useful exercise for the mind, apart from any immediate practical object, and he considered that the general command of mathematics gained by handling abstruse mathematical investigations (though barren in themselves) would be valuable for whatever purpose mathematics might be required: he also thought it likely that his researches and advances in the field of Pure Mathematics might facilitate the solution of physical problems and tend to the progress of the practical sciences. ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... totter, and give way. The baby was in the front room, but was under the windward wall. In the teeth of the gale the old man crawled out of the hole, extended his length on the ground, and began to drag his stiff and trembling frame, with hands, elbows and knees, across the fifty feet or so of barren soil that lay between the hole and the cottage. He heard the crash of bricks before he had accomplished half the distance; without pausing to look he crawled rapidly on till he crossed the threshold, and saw the babe still sleeping safely in its wooden cradle. There were two large ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... adventures, some Russian chiefs might allow themselves to be sprinkled with the waters of baptism; and a Greek bishop, with the name of metropolitan, might administer the sacraments in the church of Kiow, to a congregation of slaves and natives. But the seed of the gospel was sown on a barren soil: many were the apostates, the converts were few; and the baptism of Olga may be fixed as the aera of Russian Christianity. [74] A female, perhaps of the basest origin, who could revenge the death, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... for, although he knew that he bore a charmed life, yet he shrank with a loathing from the idea of having to battle with such a horrible serpent. Starting from the ground, he rushed—flew, rather than ran, higher up the acclivity, and speedily entered on a wild scene of rugged and barren rocks: but he cared not whither the windings of the natural path which he now pursued might lead him, since he had escaped from the view of the hideous boa-constrictor gamboling in ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... on the barren heath—a girl sat alone on the grass before the gipsy camp, braiding her hair in the ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... that look upon it; when once this Gorgon claims acquaintance with us, the phantom of friendship, that before courted our notice, will vanish into unsubstantial air, and the whole world before us appear a barren waste. Pardon me, ye dear spirits of benevolence, whose benign smiles and cheerful-giving hand have strewed sweet flowers on many a thorny path through which my wayward fate forced me to pass; think not, that, in condemning the unfeeling texture of ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... Province'—such expressions as these abound in the journals and diaries of the settlers. There were complaints that deception had been practised. 'All our golden promises,' wrote a Long Island Loyalist, 'are vanished in smoke. We were taught to believe this place was not barren and foggy as had been represented, but we find it ten times worse. We have nothing but his Majesty's rotten pork and unbaked flour to subsist on... It is the most inhospitable clime that ever mortal set foot on.' At first there was great distress among the refugees. ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... to speak, to think, to love, his thought seeks another thought to reveal and quicken itself; his speech is lost sorrowfully in the air, or only awakens an echo which reverberates it, but cannot reply; his love knows not where to fix itself, and falling back on itself, threatens to become a barren egotism; in short, fill his being aspires to another self, but his other self does not exist. At this time, when the desire for communion was stifling him, he slept, and from his side God took a rib and made woman, and brought her to him. Behold Adam. ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... than its construction was its situation. This particular spot was a corner of real "bad lands," and lumpy ridges, hogbacks, and barren buttes arose on all sides like waves in a sea. So numerous were they that unless riders passed directly by the sheepmen's hiding place the chances of discovery were almost nil. At one spot only was it visible, and that was a place where the ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... me wonder more than all the rest, that at this time of the year, when every tree is barren of his fruit, from whence you had these ripe ...
— Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... Covan the Brown-haired they walked onwards, Covan following ever behind them, and looking neither to the right nor to the left. All that day they walked, and when night fell they were in a barren plain, ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... boat-ride from France he would have said so if it had been Barren Island, or any other place-just so long as it was free from earthquakes and didn't roll none," Abe agreed. "Also, Mawruss," he continued, "some day the President is going to begin a speech with, 'May I not,' and the chairman of the meeting will take him at his word and put it to ...
— Potash and Perlmutter Settle Things • Montague Glass
... subscribe to the disgraceful capitulation whereby Field-marshal Jellachich had promised to hand over to the French, the flags and the arms of the Austrian troops, and had fled into the Tyrol; where he too would have led the brigade were it not for the fact that he feared that in that barren mountain country, there would not be enough fodder for so many horses. But now they had open country in front of them and having, by a ruse of which he was proud, gained a lead of six leagues over the French troops, he invited ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... will become covetous. And opposed to one another, men will, at such a time, seek one another's lives; and divested of Yuga, people will become atheists and thieves. And they will even dig the banks of streams with their spades and sow grains thereon. And even those places will prove barren for them at such a time. And those men who are devoted to ceremonial rites in honour of the deceased and of the gods, will be avaricious and will also appropriate and enjoy what belongs to others. The father will enjoy what belongs ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... and multiply, he can justify the large celibate class created by positive command of the Catholic church, not only by the ordination of priests, but by the constant urging of the church that women should become the barren brides of Christ by taking on ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... discoveries I could. When we came to land, we saw no river, or spring, nor any sign of inhabitants. Our men therefore wandered on the shore to find out some fresh water near the sea, and I walked alone about a mile on the other side, where I observed the country all barren and rocky. I now began to be weary, and seeing nothing to entertain my curiosity, I returned gently down toward the creek; and the sea being full in my view, I saw our men already got into the boat, and rowing for life to the ship. I was going to holla after them, although it had been to little ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... last, an hour or more before the sunset, just as the spurs of Cithaeron, the long mountain over against Attica, began to thrust their bald summits up before the runner's ken, far ahead upon the way approached a cloud of dust. The Athenian paused in his run, dashed into the barren field, and flung himself flat between the furrows. He heard the hoof-beats of the wiry steppe horses, the clatter of targets and scabbards, the shrill shouts of the raiders. He lifted his head enough to see the red streamers on their lance tips flutter past. He let the noise die away before ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... route to the sea the road is lined with gardens. Nothing could be more unpromising in appearance than this soil before it is ploughed and pulverized by the cultivator. It looks like a barren waste. We passed a tract that was offered three years ago for twelve dollars an acre. Some of it now is rented to Chinamen at thirty dollars an acre; and I saw one field of two acres off which a Chinaman has sold in one season $750 worth ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... may reckon that, of the space lying between the summits of the Alps and the low country on either side, one-quarter is available for cultivation, of which about one-half may be vineyards and corn-fields, while the remainder produces forage and grass. About another quarter is utterly barren, consisting of snow-fields, glaciers, bare rock, lakes and the beds of streams. There remains about one-half, which is divided between forest and pasture, and it is the produce of this half which mainly supports the relatively large population. For a quarter of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of brown and barren earth that screened the camp from view there came, at the very moment that the ramrods were drawn out with a shrill, sharp ring from the carbine-barrels, a single figure—tall, stalwart, lithe, with the spring of the deerstalker in its rapid step, and the sinew of the ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... the deserted waste. A blade of grass or an insect finds no existence there. The shrivelled lichen alone, clinging to the weathered surface of the broken brick, seems to glory in its universal dominion over those barren walls. Of all the desolate pictures I have ever seen that of Warka incomparably surpasses all." Surely in this case it cannot be said that appearances are deceitful; for all that space, and much more, is a cemetery, and what a cemetery! "It is difficult," ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... took us on to the main Amiens road at Corbie, and turning East along it we jolted and bumped and splashed our way through Brie-sur-Somme to Tertry. The country—what we could see of it in the dark—seemed to consist of a barren waste of shell holes with here and there a shattered tree or the remains of some burnt-out Tank standing forlornly near some dark and stagnant swamp. Villages were practically non-existent, and Tertry was no exception, but we soon settled ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... an outpost of the trader Presbrey, of whom Shefford had heard at Flagstaff and Tuba. No living thing appeared in the limit of Shefford's vision. He gazed shudderingly at the unwelcoming habitation, at the dark eyelike windows, at the sweep of barren slope merging into the vast red valley, at the bold, bleak bluffs. Could any one live here? The nature of that sinister valley forbade a home there, and the spirit of the place hovered in the silence and space. Shefford thought irresistibly ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... the town and port of Suakin might afford a useful instance to a cynical politician. Most of the houses stand on a small barren island which is connected with the mainland by a narrow causeway. At a distance the tall buildings of white coral, often five storeys high, present an imposing appearance, and the prominent chimneys of the ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... dwindle. Only here and there did it leap forward with its old savage fury. Presently these sporadic plunges wore themselves out for lack of fuel. The devastated area became a smouldering, smoking char showing a few isolated blazes in the barren ruin. There were still possibilities of harm in them if the wind should shift again, but for the present they were subdued to a shadow of their former strength. It remained the business of the fire-fighters to keep a close watch on the red-hot embers to prevent them ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... high hill of great steepness. The hill has two peaks, with a sort of natural ditch some thirty feet in depth between them. The castle was built upon the seaward peak, and a narrow drawbridge crossed the gully to the other summit, which was barren and open to the sight. The river swept round the northern side of the hill with considerable force. To the south the hill was precipitous, and of such "infinite asperity," that no man could climb it. To the east was ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... Oh, not the dry, barren border country, but my Mexico, rich with jewels and gold, studded with magnificent cities, flowering with rare fruits and spices, a mellow, golden, matchless land, peopled by those who are skilled in arts and science, lovers of beauty, and—Ah, you do not know Mexico. You know only the half-breed ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... rising steeply from the sea, are rugged and mountainous; South Georgia is largely barren and has steep, glacier-covered mountains; the South Sandwich Islands are of volcanic origin with ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Germany, truthful and brave in England, must yet be moulded to a higher quality amid this varying climate and on these low shores. The regions of the world most garlanded with glory and romance, Attica, Provence, Scotland, were originally more barren than Massachusetts; and there is yet possible for us such an harmonious mingling of refinement and vigor, that we may more than fulfil the world's expectation, and may become ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... own with Anne. And it is probable that Richard, who, whatever his crimes, was far from inaccessible to affection, might have really loved his early playmate, even while his ambition calculated the wealth of the baronies that would swell the dower of the heiress and gild the barren coronet of his duchy. [Majerns, the Flemish chronicler, quoted by Bucke ("Life of Richard III"), mentions the early attachment of Richard to Anne. They were much together, ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... no more; But useless 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 nods. Waste sandy Vallies, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... heroically fought and so victoriously ended shall pass into history a miserable failure, barren of permanent results,—a scandalous and shocking waste of blood and treasure,—a strife for empire, as Earl Russell characterized it, of no value to liberty or civilization,—an attempt to re-establish a Union by force, which must be the merest ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... proud exclusiveness of Brahma, and even the zealous warmth of other northern faiths, are all emotions utterly unknown and foreign to the followers of Buddhism in Ceylon. Yet, strange to tell, under all the icy coldness of this barren system there burns below the unextinguished fires of another and a darker superstition, whose flames overtop the icy summits of the Buddhist philosophy, and excite a deeper and more reverential awe in the imagination of the Singhalese. As the Hindus in process ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston |
