"Bleak" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a botanist after a rare plant. Day by day we perfect ourselves in the art of seeing nature more favourably. We learn to live with her, as people learn to live with fretful or violent spouses: we dwell lovingly on what is good, and shut our eyes against all that is bleak or inharmonious. We learn, also, to come to each place in the right spirit. The traveller, as Brantome quaintly tells us, 'fait des discours en soi pour se soutenir ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rather to compose it in type at the case, for that was what I did; and it was not altogether imitated from Ik Marvel either, for I drew upon the easier art of Dickens at times, and helped myself out with bald parodies of Bleak House in many places. It was all very well at the beginning, but I had not reckoned with the future sufficiently to have started with any clear ending in my mind, and as I went on I began to find myself more and more ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... presently became a haunter of the tree-clad valleys, of the prattling brooks with the meadowsweet drooping over them, and of the lone, bleak hills where the ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... wayside gardens heavy-laden with golden fruit. Tall accacias a mass of canary colored bloom. Opulent palms shivering against a gray sky. Close mountains green and dense with forest trees, their crests filagreed with redwoods. Far mountains lifting their bleak ridges above bare brown hills thirsting ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... of the saw-toothed peaks of El Diablo. Under the warmth of his gaze, the white-fleeced clouds wavered, shifting about uncertainly. As if loath to leave the devil-island they had guarded throughout the long night, they contracted slowly, niggardly exposing a line of rugged cliffs which shone bleak and gray in the ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... ten years. It was like a vision in a crystal—if such a thing could exist. I saw the whole past scene. The bare room—the old dead man—myself; the overwhelming wish to avenge my wrongs, and the sudden suggestion that turned the wish cold. I saw the long, bleak night in which I completed the colossal task of copying the Scitsym line for line; I saw the gray morning steal in across the room as I closed the book, returned it to its safe and replaced the key on my uncle's neck in preparation for the arrival of the Arch-Councillor. It all passed before ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... bosom of that exemplary female, so also in the maternal confidences volunteered by the same witness, there was an appreciable reminder of another lady who will be remembered as having been introduced at the Coroner's Inquest in Bleak House as "Anastasia Piper, gentlemen." Regarding that as a favourable opportunity for informing the court of her own domestic affairs, through the medium of a brief dissertation, Mrs. Cluppins was interrupted by the irascible Judge at the most interesting point ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... time there stood in the midst of a bleak moor, in the north country, a certain village. All its people were poor, for their fields were barren, and they had little trade; but the poorest of them all were two brothers called Scrub and Spare. They were cobblers, and had ...
— Granny's Wonderful Chair • Frances Browne
... 'Twas a bleak day in December when we sailed into Plymouth Sound. As soon as we had spoken the port a boat put off hearing a paper sealed with the seal of Prince George, the Lord High Admiral. And there fell to my captain a duty which sure no man could have performed ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... English prose he has left no adequate successor; [Footnote: The nearest being the now foremost prose writers of our time, Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Froude.] the throne that does not pass by primogeniture is vacant, and the bleak northern skies seem colder and grayer since that venerable head was laid to rest by the village churchyard, far from the smoke and din of the great city on whose streets his figure was long familiar and his name was ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... advised to call again on Sunday morning and drove to Heath's Hotel, where they had taken up their quarters. How quiet and deserted the Golden City looked! How bleak and desolate, with the first ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... that he was in Oban on 22nd October, Aberdeen on 5th November, Inverness on the 9th, and thence he went to Tain, Dornoch, Wick, John o'Groat's, and to the island towns, Stromness, Kirkwall, and Lerwick. He was in Shetland on the 1st of December—altogether a bleak, cheerless journey, we may believe, even for so hardy a tramp as Borrow, and the tone of the following extract from one of his rough notebooks in my possession may perhaps be explained by the circumstance. Borrow is on the way to Loch Laggan and visits ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... that savage musk, the rending, goring bison herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the prairies, which this instant they may be trampling into dust. Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings of the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt! Though neither knows where ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... bleak to view the hills at length recede, And, less luxuriant, smoother vales extend:[bq] Immense horizon-bounded plains succeed! Far as the eye discerns, withouten end, Spain's realms appear whereon her ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... This was all a bleak, desolate region—curiously so—and I think, one of the very few so desolate on Earth. As we advanced, the Siberian coast spread out before us. Mountains behind, and a strip of rocky lowland along the sea. There were patches of snow—the mountains were white with ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... follow them cautiously, until the enemies were all gathered on the desired spot, with the woods to their left and rugged, barren cliffs and peaks to their right. Then the trap would be sprung; and if the Queres took to those bleak fastnesses for defence it would be easy to surround them, cut them off from water, and thus exterminate ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... than we had looked for. The summits, which had hitherto been conical, with vines straggling up their sides, now became rounded, or ran off in serrated lines, with sides scarred with tempests and strewn with stones. The scenery was bleak and desolate, as that of the Grampian pass leading by Spittal of Glenshee to Dee-side. But as we continued our descent, the richly wooded glens returned; the clouds rose; and at one time I ventured ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... In the bleak weather of this spring, 1842, he was again abroad for a little while; partly from necessity, or at least utility; and partly, as I guess, because these circumstances favored, and he could with a good countenance indulge a little wish he had ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... paced the deck, and watched the bleak shores of Cork fading in the distance, his thoughts were full of the banished Costellos, and he wondered with what eyes those exiles had looked their last on the Old Head of Kinsale a quarter of a millennium ago. Those fierce old chieftains, ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... horizon for mountains, but there did not appear to be any. She received a vague, slow-dawning impression that was hard to define. She did not like the country, though that was not the impression which eluded her. Bare gray flats, low scrub-fringed hills, bleak cliffs, jumble after jumble of rocks, and occasionally a long vista down a valley, somehow compelling—these passed before her gaze until she tired of them. Where was the West Glenn had written about? One thing seemed sure, and it was that every mile of this crude country brought ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... and a wall. The wooden one-storied homestead, with its thatched roof, shaded by the "toft" of ash and elm and maple, was pulled down, and a square fortress with loopholes and battlement stood in solitary nakedness upon some bleak hill, ugly and defiant. There with a band of armed men—sometimes with a wife and children, and not unfrequently with an unhappy victim of his licentiousness—the baron lived in gloom and gluttony, till the love of excitement, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... with a slender black mustache was the first to voice a query, not from the fact that his curiosity was large—it was perhaps less than that of any other man in the room—but for the reason that he chose to satisfy it at once. Morrow's personality was cold and bleak, inviting no close friendships or intimacies; uncommunicative to a degree that had impressed itself on his companions of the last few days and they looked up, mildly surprised at his ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... to the dimity vallance that hung across the low window. In autumn and winter the bleak wind whistled through the chimneys and rattled the casements in a way that would have prevented a town-bred child from sleeping, and up in those bare rooms there was cold enough to pinch you black and blue; but Elsie and Duncan had never thought much of that, for they ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... of the year 1421 was bleak and dreary in that wild lonely vale, and large was the fire burning on the hearth in the castle hall, in the full warmth of which there sat, with a light blue cloth cloak drawn tightly round him, a tall old ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... walk was first across fields, by pleasant footpaths; and then up the valley of a little noisy stream, that obstinately refused to keep Scotch Sabbath, praising the Lord after its own fashion. They emerged into rather a bleak country before reaching the church, which was quite new, and perched on a barren eminence, that it might be as conspicuous by its position, as it was remarkable for its ugliness. One grand aim of the reformers of the Scottish ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... evening of a bleak, cold March day, in an early year of this century, a woman, scantily clad, led a boy about eight years old, along the high-road towards the old city of Exeter. They crept close to the hedge-side to shelter themselves from the clouds of dust, ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... at their room one bleak raw night, and had just left, except Rod, who had gone with the captain into the Anchorage for a parcel Mrs. Britt wished to send to the rectory. He had been there only a few minutes when several loud ...
— Rod of the Lone Patrol • H. A. Cody
... Pour forth their brown inhabitants. The hare, Though timorous of heart, and hard beset By death in various forms, dark snares and dogs, And more unpitying men, the garden seeks, Urg'd on by fearless want. The bleating kind [sic] Eye the bleak heav'n, and next, the glist'ning earth, With looks of dumb despair; then, sad dispers'd, Dig for the wither'd ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... was the room that it was filled by our little party of six; yet I felt there another presence which none of us could see—a grey ghost agonising for his sins, through a bleak eternity. ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... able either to talk or read, and Mr. Lanhearne, out of pure sympathy for the miserable young man, retired to his own apartment very early. This was always the signal for Roland's dismissal, and five minutes after it Mr. Lanhearne, looking from his window into the bleak, wind-swept street, saw Roland rapidly descend the steps and ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... since yesterday we have an unobstructed view. I dismount and look round. Backward stretches an endless expanse of bleak and stormy-swept billowy mountains; before us looms, in serried phalanx, the western Cordillera, dazzling white, all save one black-throated colossus, who vomits skyward thick clouds of ashes and smoke, and down whose ragged flanks course streams ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... found my ride from the north village this afternoon bleak enough. You know how the wind sweeps across the road near the Pond schoolhouse. I believe there is to be a Christmas-eve celebration in the Town Hall ...
— Phil the Fiddler • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... the peach, and the olive, we are in a region of scant fruitage, and only the hardiest crops, apple orchards sparsely mingled with fields of oats and rye. And yet again we seem to be traversing a Scotch or Yorkshire moor—so vast and lonely the heather-clad wastes, so bleak and wild ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... in Babbulkund, and one for the princesses of his own kith, whose brown cheeks blush with the blood of ancient Pharaohs and who exult with Babbulkund in her surpassing beauty, and who know nought of the desert or the jungle or the bleak hills to the north. Quite unadorned and clad in simple garments go all the kith of Nehemoth, for they know well that he grows weary of pomp. Unadorned all save one, the Princess Linderith, who weareth Ong Zwarba and the three lesser gems of the sea. ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... away, and Winter, cold, bleak, and cheerless, settled over the land. The bright and many-colored leaves that had flashed their myriad beauties in the full glare of the sunlight, had fallen from the trees, leaving their trunks, gnarled and bare, to the mercy of the sweeping winds. The streams were frozen, and the ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... exhilarating; but, to say nothing of the injury which not unfrequently attends the sudden change from the stagnant heat of our furnaced dwellings to the bleak winds of the icy lake, is it not true that the chest-muscles are so little moved that the finest skating may be done ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... and fenced with the bright two-edged blade of her wit, and tossed down the wines into her little throat like a trooper, she was thinking nothing at all of what was around her, and very little of what she said or she did. She was thinking of the starless night out yonder, of the bleak, arid country, of the great, dim, measureless plains; of one who was passing through them all, and ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... a clear view above the little oak copse, the lines of empty freight cars on the siding, and a mile of low meadow that lay between the cottage and the fringe of settlement along the lake. Through another window at the north the bleak prospect of Stoney Island Avenue could be seen, flanked on one side by a huge sign over a saloon. Near this window on a lounge ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... stage, it seems, was put too far behind the proscenium, "owing to the headstrong perversity of Dickens, who never forgave the Bath people." Charles Knight, it was said, remonstrated, but in vain. Boz, however, was not a man to indulge in such feelings. In "Bleak House" he calls ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... by the Dardale-road, I believe?" said the doctor (village folk are curious). "A dismal moss is Dardale Moss, sir; and a bleak clim' up the ...
— Madam Crowl's Ghost and The Dead Sexton • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... the forest bare; Is it the wind that moaneth bleak? There is not wind enough in the air 45 To move away the ringlet curl From the lovely lady's cheek— There is not wind enough to twirl The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, 50 Hanging so light, and hanging so high, On the topmost ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Instead of the mild and whispering breezes of southern skies, we have the wild winds rushing impetuously forth from their caves in the icy north, and the sun of the land of the Chepewyans, knowing his uselessness, and the inability of his beams to rend the fetters which ice has thrown around our bleak hills and verdureless plains, stays with us but for a little season, leaving us for many weary days to be lighted only by the glare of the moon and stars, on the field of ice and snow. Yet the Chepewyan is not without his pleasures, ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... trees for miles around. It is the oaks that suffer principally. The tops are nipped first, and then they gradually die downwards till the whole tree is decayed all through. The absence of trees makes the country bleak and desolate, and I cannot help thinking the unlovely surroundings affect us all. The people themselves are unlovely in thought, and word, and deed; but I have found a good deal of rough kindliness amongst them nevertheless. They did mob me on one occasion, and made most unkind ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... his wife, and brought her and her aged relative away from their bleak home and dangerous duties and settled them in a pretty rural cottage within easy walking distance of his own thriving place of business—the fashionable bazaar of "Bastiennello ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... as a support, but the prelate did not accept it. They arrived in this manner at the government house, Baisemeaux rubbing his hands and glancing at the horse from time to time, while Aramis was looking at the bleak bare walls. A tolerably handsome vestibule and a staircase of white stone led to the governor's apartments, who crossed the ante-chamber, the dining-room, where breakfast was being prepared, opened a small side door, and ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... hill-top, the shepherd and his sheep, a fowling-piece, a spade, a pipe, a dunghill, a crowing cock, the shining and the withdrawal of the sun. An occasional pathos of simple humanity, and frequent patches of big Biblical words, relieved the homely tissue. It was a poetry apart; bleak, austere, but genuine, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... qualification would exclude,—ploughmen, labourers, and country mechanics, who reside permanently in humble cottages, the property of the owner of the soil, and who, though their course through life lies on the bleak edge of poverty, are God-fearing, worthy men, at least morally qualified to give, in the election of a teacher, an honest and not unintelligent voice. And yet, hitherto at least, we have failed to see any ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... lady, who in a parabolical account of that time, has described both my conduct as she felt it, and that of such as herself. In a singularly graphic, amusing vision of pilgrims, who were making their way across a bleak common in great discomfort, and who were ever warned against, yet continually nearing, "the king's highway" on the right, she says, "All my fears and disquiets were speedily renewed by seeing the most daring of our leaders (the same who had first forced his way through the palisade, and in whose ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... greenroom in the Westervelt, the reading took place on the open stage, which was bleak and draughty. The company sat in a funereal semicircle, with the author, the star, and the manager in a short line facing them. All the men retained their overcoats, for the morning was miserably raw, and at Helen's positive command kept their heads covered; and the supernumerary ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... the streams again. A snowy mantle covered the hills and valleys, and the bleak winds moaned through the naked trees. The merry sleigh-bells jingled in the streets, and merrier lads and lasses filled the village school-house. The skating grounds never presented more attractions to Nat ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... altar this bleak sand; That Thou O God my life hast lighted, With ray of light, steady, ineffable, vouchsafed of Thee, Light rare untellable, lighting the very light, Beyond all signs, descriptions, languages; For that O God, be it my latest word, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... pounds. We marched from eight o'clock in the morning until nine at night, with a short interval for lunch, and that first day out we covered twenty miles and arrived on the Great Ice Barrier at the close of our march. The Barrier in its bleak loneliness is probably the most desolate portion of the earth's surface, with the possible exception of the high plateau which forms the ice cap of the great Antarctic mountain ranges. Although only twenty miles from our winter quarters at Cape Evans, the temperature ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... possibly happen!' he thought. 'I have ridden much too long in the bleak forest. This is only ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... unappeased. Sir Walter Raleigh had the materials, at the Tower, to write a history; Lafayette, at Olmutz, lived in perpetual expectancy of release; Moore and Byron, children, flowers, birds, and the Muses cheered Leigh Hunt's year of durance: but in this bleak fortress, innocent and magnanimous men beheld the seasons come and go, night succeed day, and year follow year, with no cognizance of kindred or the world's doings,—no works of bard or sage,—no element of life,—but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... were almost obliterated by the jumbled heap of stone, wood-work and bricks lying across them. Bodies in every inconceivable state of partial or whole dismemberment made a ghastly array in the bleak sunlight, blood from man and animal formed dark pools in the hollow sections of the shattered roadway. Progress could only be made by moving apprehensively close up to what walls were still standing, and to sprint wildly over the open. Wounded were streaming ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... storm clouds cleared away, and the bleak, uninviting face of Labrador was plainly visible. The ship had settled to an altitude of fifteen hundred feet, and was moving northeasterly at the rate of thirty miles ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... Islands in May, that is, three months after the same species had taken its autumal departure from the neighbouring mainland. Can it be believed that these late visitors to the Falklands were breeders in Patagonia, and had migrated east to winter in so bleak a region? It is far more probable that they came from the south. Officers of sailing ships beating round Cape Horn might be able to settle this question definitely by looking out, and listening at night, for flights of ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... a bleak and musty cellar, beneath an old stable of dingy, brick construction. The building had been modernized to the extent of one single decoration on the street front, an electric sign: "Garage." On the floor, level with the sidewalk, stood half a dozen automobiles of varied ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... the only house visible from the cove. As you turned the southern point, a village was seen down the coast; and about half way between that and the pines was a wooden house, brown and weather-beaten, standing unsheltered on the bleak shore. Back of this house, shutting out all prospect but that of the ocean, was a tall cliff, covered with ragged yellow pines and stunted cedars, from which on stormy nights many a quivering flame had shot upward, luring ships to their ruin. Still, with this grim ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... Scotland was a considerable change. Not a change for the better, in the opinion of the new arrival there. The Montrose household, ruled by Captain Craigie's elderly sisters, was a dour and strict one, informed by an atmosphere of bleak and chill Calvinism. All enjoyment was frowned upon; pleasure was "worldly" and had to be severely suppressed. No more petting and spoiling for the little girl. Instead, a regime of porridge and prayers and unending ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... wooded crest or timbered ravine. The withered ranks of wild oats gave a dull procession of uniform color to the hills, unbroken by any relief of shadow in their smooth, round curves. As far as the eye could reach, sea and shore met in one bleak monotony, flecked by no passing cloud, stirred by no sign of life or motion. Even sound was absent; the Angelus, rung from the invisible Mission tower far inland, was driven back again by the steady northwest trades, that for half the year ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... though they undoubtedly were, law and justice were more respected and more frequently appealed to in Norway than in almost any other country. Liberty, crushed elsewhere under the deadweight of feudalism, found a home in the bleak North, and a rough but loving welcome from the piratical, sea-roving! She did not, indeed, dwell altogether scathless among her demi-savage guardians, who, if their perceptions of right and wrong were somewhat confused, might have urged in excuse ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... thought of the past years, it seemed to him that they had been very bleak and barren. True, he had done many things; he had influenced many people, and accomplished some good work; but what had he got out of it for himself? He was an Individualist at heart, as most men are, and he felt conscious ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... thou art kind, Thou art standing in the room,— In a molten glory shrined, That rays off into the gloom! But thy smile is bright and bleak Like cold waves—I cannot speak; I sob in it, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... here," he rippled on; "and I need hardly say that it's a pleasure to meet on this bleak shore two gentlemen of your caliber. I told a friend of mine in Chicago that I was enormously fed up with cities and the general human pressure and wanted to go to the most God-forsaken spot in America. ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... Reservation is in above here, below the mouth of the Cheyenne River. From there the river takes a pretty straight shoot up into North Dakota. A great game country, a wild cow country, and now a quiet farming country. A bleak, snow-covered, wind-swept waste it then was. And it was winter that first stopped that long, slow, steady, tireless advance ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... in Topeka, a candidate for the mayoralty, supposed to represent the liquor element, speaking on the afternoon of election day—bleak, dismal and shoe-top deep in snow and mud—said: "I will lose 1,000 votes on account of the weather as the women are out and they are opposed to me. It is impossible to keep ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... shipwreck by drawing them often to the sheltered corner by the fireside! The poor artist; the wandering genius who has lost his way in this world, and stumbles like a child among hard realities; the many men and women who, while they have houses, have no homes, see from afar, in their distant, bleak life journey, the light of a true home fire, and, if made welcome there, warm their stiffened limbs, and go forth stronger to their pilgrimage. Let those who have accomplished this beautiful and perfect work of divine art be liberal of its influence. Let them not seek to bolt the doors ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach, A fisherman stood aghast, To see the form of a maiden fair, Lashed close ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... than elsewhere so often occur. Actually she was a simple and devout soul, loving husband and child and the poor people with whom they lived. Doubtless she had looked more appropriate to her surroundings in the tangled garden of her father's vicarage than in the bleak Mission House of Lima Street; but inasmuch as she never thought about her appearance it would have been a waste of time for anybody to try to romanticize her. The civilizing effect of her presence in the slum was quickly felt; and though Lidderdale continued ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... Mrs. Richie said, "one." Her voice was bleak; the gayety had dropped out of it; for an instant she looked old. ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... they loose the lengthing twine, Bait harmless hooks, and launch a leadless line! Their shadows on the stream, the sun behind— Egregious anglers! are the fishes blind? Gull'd by the sportings of the frisking bleak, That now assemble, now disperse, in freak; They see not deeper, where the quick-eyed trout, Has chang'd his route, and turned him quick about; See not those scudding shoals, that mend their pace, Of frighten'd bream, and silvery darting ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... a more distant, and a wilder scene. Near the bleak shores of Hudson's Straits there flows a river which forms an outlet to the superfluous waters of the almost unknown territory lying between the uninhabited parts of Labrador and that tract of desert land which borders Hudson's Bay on the east, and is known to the fur-traders by the appellation of ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... horizon we detected the heights of Mount Desert, our old familiar haunt. All the northern semicircle was lost to us by the fog. We lost also the view of the mountain itself. All the bleak, lonely, barren, ancient waste of the bare summit was shrouded in cold fog. The impressive gray ruin and Titanic havoc of a granite mountain top, the heaped boulders, the crumbling crags, the crater-like depression, the long stern ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... Gern guards snapped like whips around them as she and the other Rejects crowded and stumbled down the boarding ramp and out onto the rocky ground. There was the pull of a terrible gravity such as she had never experienced and they were in a bleak, barren valley, a cold wind moaning down it and whipping the alkali dust in bitter clouds. Around the valley stood ragged hills, their white tops laying out streamers of wind-driven snow, and the ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... twilight had given place to bleak night as two men cantered from the palace courtyard and turned their horses' heads northward toward Lutha's nearest boundary. All night they rode, stopping at daylight before a distant farm to feed and water their ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... just ended. Captain Butch Brewster's followers had trailed dejectedly from Bannister Field to the Gym, where Head Coach Corridan was flaying them with a tongue as keen as the two-edged sword that drove Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. A cold, bleak November afternoon, a leaden sky lowered overhead, and a chill wind swept athwart the field; in the concrete stands, the loyal "rooters" of the Gold and Green, or of the Gold and Blue, shivered, stamped, and swung ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... the room, his head between his hands. Speech lofty and ridiculous burst from him in a sort of splutter of fireworks, but the Englishman sat still in his chair, and a gray, bleak look came upon him, for he began to understand. He was more or less used to these outbursts, and he bore them as patiently as he could, but though seven times out of the ten they were no more than spasms of pure joy of living, and meant, "It's a fine spring day," or "I've just seen two ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... his band Came marching through the Holy Land, He had to lead, the way to seek, His noble force o'er mountains bleak. Of bread there rose a painful need, Though stones were plentiful indeed, And many a German rider fine Forgot the taste of mead and wine. The horses drooped from meagre fare, The rider had to hold his mare. There was a knight from Suabian land Of noble build and mighty hand; His ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... It was bleak and wild here. Even the shanties of the three little villages, with their fish-sheds, their racks with nets spread, the rickety wharves—all looked dismal. It seemed as though here must be one of the spots where only a scanty living is ...
— The Submarine Boys for the Flag - Deeding Their Lives to Uncle Sam • Victor G. Durham
... then, to turn their attention to the land, which is their chief source of wealth. Let them buy it up, or gain it by long leases, inch by inch and acre by acre, until not only the bleak bogs and wild mountains of Connaught are again their own, but the rich meadow-lands and smiling wheat-fields of Munster and Leinster. Let their brethren in America and Australia associate with them in this, and thus will they build up again a true Irish yeomanry and nobility—for ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... of Edelweiss is built along the side of the mountain, its narrow streets winding upward and past countless terraces to the very base of the rocky, jagged eminence at whose top, a full mile above the last sprinkling of houses, stands the isolated, bleak Monastery. The view from these upper streets, before one enters the circuitous and hidden Monastery road that winds afar in its climb, is never to be forgotten by the spectator, no matter how often he traverses the lofty thoroughfares. ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... their powers of perception, and have failed to grasp the truth that human nature is in most respects the same the world over, and that persons and places, apparently the most ordinary, have stories to tell. Before Mary E. Wilkins began to write her New England tales few thought to look to those bleak hills and commonplace people for literary material; and doubtless many New Englanders, feeling the impulse to write, viewed with scorn their unpoetic surroundings and longed for the glamour of some half-guessed clime; Miss Wilkins, appreciating ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... full hour and a half before his friend would return to business. What should he do? The Verein where he had once been entertained was deserted even by its waiters; the garden, with its ostentatious out-of-door tables, looked bleak and bare. Mr. Clinch was not artistic in his tastes; but even he was quick to detect the affront put upon Nature by this continental, theatrical gardening, and turned disgustedly away. Born near a "lake" larger than ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... of Franky's funeral had been the first to bring home the fact that summer was gone. The chapel had been cold and bleak, and while they stood around the grave it began to rain. In the drawing-room at Cashelthorpe the fire had been lit, and tea awaited the brother and sister. Consoling as these comforts were they could not dispel the sadness which oppressed the kind ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... They should always keep their warm wool coats until the cold spring winds are over. Some farmers are very thoughtless about this, and their sheep and lambs suffer and die from cold. It would make your heart ache to see, as I have often seen, the little dead lambs in the bleak pastures." ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... dreadful curse Of widowhood; the vigils, fasts, And penances; no life is worse Than hopeless life,—the while it lasts. Day follows day in one long round, Monotonous and blank and drear; Less painful were it to be bound On some bleak rock, for aye to hear— Without one chance of getting free— The ocean's melancholy voice! Mine be the sin,—if sin there be, But thou ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... immortal soul, the prince of the creatures, rises up and decrees that something shall happen, if it be only the slaughter of a policeman. But this is a digressive way of stating what I have said already—that the bleak sky awoke in me a hunger for some change of plans, that the monotonous weather seemed to render unbearable the use of the monotonous train, and that I set out into the country lanes, out of the town of Oxford. It was, perhaps, at that moment that a strange curse came ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... mumbling and mummery, and finding his "glory" incomprehensibly enhanced thereby:—just as on the other hand the formless spaciousness of pantheism appears quite empty to ritualistic natures, and the gaunt theism of evangelical sects seems intolerably bald and chalky and bleak. ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... those youthful hearts were bleak and bare, That not a germ had ever flourished there, Unless perchance the night-shade of despair, Which blooms amid the ...
— Heart Utterances at Various Periods of a Chequered Life. • Eliza Paul Kirkbride Gurney
... Lawrence from Lake Ontario with eight thousand men to join General Hampton coming by the way of Lake Champlain with another five thousand men in united attack against Montreal. November 5 Wilkinson's troops descended in three hundred flat-boats through the Thousand Islands, now bleak and leafless and somber in the gray autumn light. It seemed hardly possible that the few Canadian troops cooped up in Kingston would dare to pursue such a strong American force, but history is made up of impossibles. Feeling ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... taken all the snow from the hills. She had heard her elders say about her so many times that she could not stand the cold, that she shivered at the very thought of cold weather, and certainly nothing could look colder than that bleak country into which the train was now slowly making ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield
... winter's day; who shivered in insufficient rags and whose gaunt bodies never knew any nourishment save what could be got from "Indian meal stir-about" (a kind of weak and watery porridge made from maize). And it was not the children of the labourers alone who endured this bleak and starved and sunless childhood; the offspring of the smaller struggling farmers were often as badly off—they were all the progeny of the poor, kept poor and impoverished by landlordism. This further bond of blood and even class relationship also bound the farmers and labourers ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... with which they hope to cast a line over the wreck. But the swell is heavier than ever, the timbers nearer to parting. At last a flash of lurid light from the dim shore-line,—a great boom of sound, and a line goes spinning out like a spider's web up into the gray, bleak sky. Too far! too short! and the line tumbles, plashing into the water. A new and fearful lift of the sea shatters the wreck, the fore part of the ship still holding fast to the sands; but all abaft the mainmast lifts, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... Cove, as well as the only doctor. For a day or two after my arrival I accompanied the local parson, Mr. Barnett, on visits to people he considered to be in need of my ministrations. Now they are coming in droves, and many scattered dwellers on the bleak coast have heard of me. Little fishing-smacks meeting others from farther outports have spread the amazing news that there is a doctor ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... Hitherto, in that bleak and lonely household, there had been little comfort for the woman who knew no hour, no second, free from pain. But Masha, like many country-bred women, was skilled in the decoction of those herbs and simples that seem, at times, more efficacious than more ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... cordial meeting between the two, and when they sat down to luncheon in a peaceful corner where their talk would be uninterrupted, Mr. Osgood was more alert and cheerful than the veteran underwriter had been since the bleak day when O'Connor and the Eastern Conference moved on Boston; and as Smith went on, his companion's ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... to lumber along the edges of the town with its dense cargo of hats and parasols and lunch parcels. We were a most extraordinary litter of man and womankind. There was the severe New England type, improving each shining hour, and doing it in bleak costume and with a thoroughly northeast expression; there were pink sunbonnets from (I should imagine) Spartanburg, or Charlotte, or Greenville; there were masculine boots which yet bore incrusted upon their heels the red mud of ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... dear to us. The sunny plains and deep indigo transparent skies of Italy are all indifferent to the great sick heart of a Sir Walter Scott: on the back of the Apennines, in wild spring weather, the sight of bleak Scotch firs, and snow-spotted heath and desolation, brings tears ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... showed a fine sturdiness he had never seen exceeded elsewhere. He went on musing over the permanence of things and the mutability of mortal joy, wondering if, in this world He had made without remedies for its native ills, God could take pleasure in the bleak framework of it. And when he had nearly reached the top of the slope, the three firs, where a turn to the left would bring him to the log cabin door, suddenly he stopped as if his inner self heard ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... let thy music ring with tone That speaks the budding year; The Winter's blast too soon will moan Through the forest bleak ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... old place, Susie, waiting for you," he said. "It doesn't look so very bleak, does it, after all the fine city houses ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... day in the end of October I started from Guachochic bound for the upper part of the great Barranca de San Carlos and the country southward as far as there were Tarahumares. Everything seemed bleak and dreary. The corn was harvested, the grass looked grey, and there was a wintry feeling in the air. The sere and withered leaves rustled like paper, and as I made camp near an Indian ranch I saw loose stubble and dead leaves carried up in a whirlwind, two or three ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... to-day—it was an afternoon tea—Mary Alice had been more bitterly conscious than ever before of her lack of charms and the bleak prospect that lack entailed upon her. For the tea was given for a girl who was visiting in town, a girl of a sort Mary Alice had never seen before. She was pretty, that visiting girl, and she was sweet; ...
— Everybody's Lonesome - A True Fairy Story • Clara E. Laughlin
... to see those countries beyond the sea? I know I do. I am tired of this life, this continual struggle for a bare existence. The same thing day after day, year after year; nothing new happens. Why did M. Bois-le-Duc teach me of an outer world beyond the bleak Gulf of St. Lawrence? Why did he teach me to read Virgil and Plato? He did it for the best, no doubt; but I think he did wrong. He has stirred up within me a restless evil spirit of discontent. Oh! Marie, to think I am ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... to gabble him out a salutation, and having shook their feathers, they would sail in the same direction, so long as there was water, and then take leave of him with a loud gabbling. But this homage brought him no consolation: indeed, the bleak earth seemed sending a deeper chill to his heart; and the brown leaf that hung twirling and dripping from the almost naked tree by the roadside, invested his feelings with a deeper melancholy, for in it he read the sorrows of ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... North Hospital yesterday, to take the deposition of a dying man as to his ill treatment by the second and third mates of the ship Assyria, on the voyage from New Orleans. This hospital is a very gloomy place, with its wide bleak entries and staircases, which may be very good for summer weather, but which are most congenial at this bleak November season. I found the physicians of the house laughing and talking very cheerfully with Mr. Wilding, who had preceded me. We went forthwith, up two ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... rattled once more, and soon left the town behind us. The wild mountain tract which stretched on either side of the road presented one bleak and brown surface, unrelieved by any trace of tillage or habitation; an apparently endless succession of fern-clad hills lay on every side; above, the gloomy sky of leaden, lowering aspect, frowned darkly; the sad and wailing ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... Incidentally these storage reservoirs, by increasing the surface exposed to evaporation and the consequent rainfall, have a very beneficial effect on the dry regions in the interior of the continent, and in some cases have almost superseded irrigation. The windmill and dynamo thus utilize bleak mountain-tops that, till their discovery, seemed to be but indifferent successes in Dame Nature's domain. The electricity generated by these, in connection with that obtained by waterfalls, tidal dynamos, thunderstorms, chemical action, ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... went on horseback, as the most convenient manner of traveling; I was but lightly clothed, and of this I felt the inconvenience the more I advanced northeast. What must not a poor old man have suffered in that severe weather and climate, whom I saw on a bleak common in Poland, lying on the road, helpless, shivering, and hardly having wherewithal to cover his nakedness? I pitied the poor soul; though I felt the severity of the air myself, I threw my mantle over him, and immediately ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... but it was bleak: and there were times when Richard regretted his acceptance of the Prince's offer, and yearned after family ties, equality, and freedom. Simon and Guy had never been kind to him, but at least they were his brothers, and ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... longer able to derive a profit from it, hence their desire to abolish the revenue of the South. I assure you, sir, if the colored man could endure the climate of their bleak land there would be ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... and August—and even then the nights are always cool; while for six or eight weeks between December and February there may be a couple of feet of ice on the river. Canton, on the other hand, has a tropical climate, with a long damp enervating summer and a short bleak winter. The old story runs that snow has only been seen once in Canton, and then it was thought by the people to ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... impatience, fear, all mixed. What had he done, said, lost? It was that horrid feeling of when one has not been kind and not quite true, yet might have been kinder if one had been still less true. Ah! but it was all so mixed up. It felt all bleak, too, and wintry in him, as if he had suddenly lost everybody's love. Then he was ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... ridiculous; and I did think the convent gardens as I saw them from the chapter-house window were beautiful, and the hills around majestic and serious, with no intention of falling upon my prostrate spirit. Yes, and after a lifelong abhorrence of that bleak king who founded the Escorial, I will own that I am, through pity, beginning to feel an affection for Philip II.; perhaps I was finally wrought upon by hearing him so endearingly called Philly by ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... me my scarf. In all probability I may not be home to-night—perhaps not till late to-morrow. God bless you, Mary!" and away the doctor went on his cold bleak ride ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... Ted Holiday had to carry about with him all that bleak day and a half sleepless, uneasy night. And in the morning he was summoned home to the House on the ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... colonel, greatly delighted, 'you could provide us with a few of these crows, we should really feel very much obliged to you; for we have a long and cold campaign before us among the bleak hills of Nepal; and we are ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... over the land from north to south and from the bleak shores of the ocean even to the banks of the Mississippi River. Evangeline wandered from place to place looking for Gabriel Lajeunesse, and Gabriel sought Evangeline as earnestly. Sometimes they heard of one another but through long years they ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... No, nor your dainty lass, either; and so we are here again to levy taxation without representation on them all. 'T is to be hoped, Mrs. Meredith, that 't will be met more kindly than our Parliamentary attempt at the same game. Ah, Miss Janice, your face is a pleasant sight to look at after the bleak banks of the Delaware, at which we've been staring and cursing for the last ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... once before saved the squire's life. But he was alive. It would not take much to kill him; a little pressure on his wounded throat would be enough. Even to leave him there, uncared for, till morning in the bleak wind, lying upon the cold ground, would be almost certain to put an end to his life. But to the honour of Charles James Juxon be it said that such thoughts never crossed his mind. He pulled off his heavy ulster greatcoat, wrapped it about the ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford |
