"Comfortless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... began with the first men of the East, who were before the first men of the West, and coming with it, it hath brought all comforts to the wild and comfortless. ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... a trifle as he recalled the agony of the march back through the snowy wilderness, and the weeks he had afterward spent, unable to set his foot to the ground, in the comfortless log hotel of a little ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... idleness, that parent of vice. It, moreover, becomes one of the most fruitful sources of happiness to the man whom God permits to come out of the crowd and take his place at the head of science and art. It is with ineffable delight that he looks behind, and says, in thinking of his cold and comfortless garret, "I came out of that place, single and unknown." George Cuvier, that pupil of poverty, loved to relate one of his first observations of natural history, which he had made while tutor to the children ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... while with his father, then he had gone, just as aimlessly, with a party of men who were emigrating to America. He had taken some money, had drifted about, living in the most comfortless, wretched fashion, then he had found a place somewhere in Pennsylvania, in a dry goods store. This was when he was seventeen ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... ask after his mother's welfare or to inquire as to her affairs from a stranger. On no other subject was it possible that he should now speak to the daily visitor and the only visitor at Orley Farm. All this Mrs. Orme understood, and saw that the young man was alone and comfortless. He passed his hours below, in his own room, and twice a day his mother found him in the parlour, and then they sat through their silent, miserable meals. She would then leave him, always saying some soft words of motherly love, and putting her hand either upon ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... The rules of the prison required that we should all rise at six, roll up the rugs, lay them at the heads of our beds, and sweep out the room. Weary and sore, I paced the prison while these things were done. Even the morning ablution was comfortless and distressing; a pocket-handkerchief serving ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... acquaintance of the high-road with strangely mingled feelings of compassion and distrust—of compassion that strengthened in spite of him; of distrust that persisted in diminishing, try as he might to encourage it to grow. There, perched comfortless on the edge of his chair, sat the poor broken-down, nervous wretch, in his worn black garments, with his watery eyes, his honest old outspoken wig, his miserable mohair stock, and his false teeth that were incapable of deceiving anybody—there he sat, politely ill at ease; now shrinking in the glare ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... all over at last, and the tired household was left to rest, and they awoke to a comfortless house next day. The boys helped to take out the boards and benches that had been used as seats, and to move back to their places the furniture that had been removed, and then the children went to school. Violet offered ...
— The Inglises - How the Way Opened • Margaret Murray Robertson
... believe; thy power I own, Thy word I would obey; I wander comfortless, and lone, When from thy truth ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... avoid him, and saw in that action further reason for his suspicion that her declaration of affection had been a mistake or perhaps a deliberate deception. 'I deceived them all. I lied to everybody,' she said. The young man stiffened himself with chill comfortless pride, and made no effort to seek her out. He loved her, he told himself, but was no whimpering fool to abase himself at the feet of a woman who was careless, ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... were pondered and considered, we would believe in him. Satan knows this, and therefore his great sleight and cunning is to hold our minds fixed on the consideration of our misery and desperate estate. He keeps the awakened conscience still upon that comfortless sight, and he labours to represent God by halves, and that it is a false representation of God. He represents him as clothed with justice and vengeance,—as a consuming fire, in which light a soul can see nothing but desperation written; and he labours to hold out the thoughts ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... self-reproach grew at once more insistent and more urgent He felt homesick, and the populous street was like a desert. All the people who had seemed so warmly near to him were aloof and cold. He would have welcomed any companionship. The ebbing forces of the wine left him comfortless. ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... speeding on thy way Homeward thou hastest light of heart along, If heavily creep on one little day The medley crew of travellers among, Think on thine absent friend: reflect that here On Life's sad journey comfortless he roves, Remote from every scene his heart holds dear, From him he values, and from her he loves. And when disgusted with the vain and dull Whom chance companions of thy way may doom, Thy mind, of each domestic comfort ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... collecting information as to the real state of affairs, and ascertaining in what quarter his own presence and money would be most available. During the six weeks that had elapsed since his arrival at Cephalonia, he had been living in the most comfortless manner, pent up with pigs and poultry, on board the vessel which brought him. Having now come, however, to the determination of prolonging his stay, he decided also upon fixing his abode on shore; and, for the sake of privacy, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... which men of sensibility have constantly treated as the dearest bond of human society. General conversation and society could not satisfy her. She felt herself alone, as it were, in the great mass of her species, and she repined when she reflected that the best years of her life were spent in this comfortless solitude. These ideas made the cordial intercourse of Mr. Fuseli, which had at first been one of her greatest pleasures, a source of perpetual torment to her. She conceived it necessary to snap the chain of ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... touched, everything that was in the least personal to him, she examined with lingering absorption. He had been gone from her for so long, she wanted to rediscover him, his position, what he was now. But there was not much in the room to help her. It only made her feel rather sad, it was so hard and comfortless. ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... for two days at the Waverley House, a most comfortless place, yet the best inn at Halifax. Three hours after we landed, the Canada fired her guns, and steamed off to Boston; and as I saw her coloured lights disappear round the heads of the harbour, I did not feel the slightest regret ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... squashed, suffocated him! He saw it all in the glass—and then an extraordinary thing happened. Mr. Vance suddenly became animated. He got up and peeped furtively round. Chairs, bed, wardrobe, had all disappeared—so had the bedroom—and he found himself in a small, bare, comfortless, queerly constructed apartment without a door, and with only a narrow slit of a window ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... digger is desolate enough; a box on a block of wood forms a table, and this is the only furniture; many dispense with that. The bedding, which is laid on the ground, serves to sit upon. Diogenes in his tub would not have looked more comfortless than any one else. Tin plates and pannicans, the same as are used for camping up, compose the breakfast, dinner, and tea service, which meals usually consist of the same dishes—mutton, damper, ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... forest of Epernay, rushes down the hills and mingles its waters with that of the Cubry, we soon reach Moussy, where the vineyards, spite of their long pedigree and southern aspect, also rank as a second cr. Still skirting the vine-clad slopes we come to Vinay, noted for an ancient grotto—the comfortless abode of some rheumatic anchorite—and a pretended miraculous spring to which fever-stricken pilgrims to-day credulously resort. The water may possibly merit its renown, but the wine here produced is very inferior, due no doubt to the class of vines, the meunier being the leading ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... prairie-flowers; and a range of wooded hills in whose depths the richest coal-deposits lie lends a picturesque aspect to the scene, and partly compensates for the dreary look of the town itself, the comfortless appearance of many of the miners' houses and the great heaps of slag and refuse coal at the mouth of the mines. Mules hitched to little cars serve to draw the coal out of several of the mines, but the largest one is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... own,—for at that time the match with Sir Florian was near its accomplishment, and the countess understood too well the value of such a disposition of her niece to risk it at the moment by any open rupture. The little house in Brook Street,—for the house was very small and very comfortless,—a house that had been squeezed in, as it were, between two others without any fitting space for it,—did not contain a happy family. One bedroom, and that the biggest, was appropriated to the Earl of Linlithgow, ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... bread of the worst quality afforded was almost the only support which could be had for seven weeks." "The sickness, deaths, and distress at French Mills excited much alarm. This great mortality had obvious causes for its existence." "Predispositions to sickness, the effects of obvious causes, the comfortless condition of men exposed to cold, wanting the common necessaries of life to support them in their exhausted states." Dr. Lovell adds: "It was impossible for the sick to be restored with nothing to subsist upon except damaged bread."[62] Among ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... poplars. I heard the man's footsteps coming up the crown of the arch, but I would not turn to greet him. I was in a selfish humour if ever I was; for surely if ever one man ought to greet another, it was upon such a comfortless afternoon. The footsteps stopped behind me, and I ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... the year 18—, was a wide and desolate common; a more dreary spot it is impossible to conceive—the herbage grew up in sickly patches from the midst of a black and stony soil. Not a tree was to be seen in the whole of the comfortless expanse. Nature herself had seemed to desert the solitude, as if scared by the ceaseless din of the neighbouring forges; and even Art, which presses all things into service, had disdained to cull use or beauty from these unpromising demesnes. There was something ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fumbles about the domains Which this comfortless oven environ, He cannot find out in what track he must crawl Now back to the tiles, and now back to the hall, And now on ...
— Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... like the discovery of some blazing fire in an empty house. Most of all, they were terrified eyes. Maggie went back to her chair. After that, she sat there during the slow evolution of Eternity; Eternity unrolled itself before her, on and on and on, grey limitless mist and space, comfortless, lifeless, hopeless. She had been for many weeks leading a thoroughly unwholesome life in that old house with those old women. She did not herself know how unhealthy it had been, but she knew that she missed the wide fields and downs of Glebeshire, the ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... before it was yet quite daybreak, they were on the road. All the houses in the neighbourhood looked asleep. Heavy dews lay upon the grass. The scene was chilly, and a little comfortless and suggestive ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... youth we get a flattering portrait in one of the charming 'Remains of the Late Mrs. Trench,' edited by her son, Archbishop of Dublin. Writing from Yarmouth in 1799, she says: 'I have been detained here since last Friday, waiting for a fair wind, and my imprisonment would have been comfortless enough had it not have been for the attention of Mr. Hudson Gurney, a young man on whom I had no claims except from a letter of Mr. Sanford's, who, without knowing him, or having any connection with him, recommended me to his care, feeling wretched that I should ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... The desolation at his heart was too great. His only consolation was the faith that was in him, a "very present help," as he found, "in time of trouble." This bitter trial brought home to him all the more intensely the need of such comfort for those who were comfortless. His heart went out in burning sympathy for those sitting in darkness like himself, but who had no faith on which to lean, nothing to bring healing and hope to a broken heart. Her death was a loss to the community as well as to her family. ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... placed; Yet hope I well that, when this storm is past, My Helice, the lodestar of my life, Will shine again, and look on me at last, With lovely light to clear my cloudy grief: Till then I wander care-full, comfortless, In secret sorrow, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... which followed was so prolonged that a mouse crept from its covert in some corner of the comfortless garret room, and nibbled at the fragments of bread scattered ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Great Western Hotel, not as yet knowing where to look for a home; and there we will leave him, eating his solitary mutton-chop at one of those tables which are so comfortable to the eye, but which are so comfortless in reality. I speak not now with reference to the excellent establishment which has been named, but to the nature of such tables in general. A solitary mutton-chop in an hotel coffee-room is not a banquet to be envied by any god; and if the mutton-chop be converted into soup, fish, little ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... a black woollen shawl over her head and shoulders. She seemed quite pleased to see us—was not at all put out at being caught in such very simple attire—begged us to come in and ushered us through a long, narrow hall and several cold, comfortless rooms, the shutters not open and no fire anywhere, into her bedroom. All the furniture—chairs, tables and bed—was covered with linen. She explained that it was her "lessive" (general wash) she had just made, that all the linen was ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... and we hadn't enough to go round at a sip each. The cookers were tightly packed on a truck at the rear, and there was no hope from that quarter. And then once again, just as on other occasions where a chance of a hot mug of tea seemed hopeless, and where we were apparently doomed to a comfortless time, the Y.M. was at hand. There, as we glided into Calais station, we espied a long covered-in counter displaying the familiar sign of the red triangle. The order quickly came down, and was more quickly put into execution, that men could get out and go to the canteen. ...
— One Young Man • Sir John Ernest Hodder-Williams
... was a comfortless, tumble-down place. The outlines of the crazy huts and sheds which enclosed it on three sides showed clear in the starlight. A gaunt plough-horse stood motionless in the cold shelter of a skeleton haywagon; in one corner a drinking-trough gleamed, one solid mass ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... sailing vessels. The passage was a tedious one, and many of the troops were on shipboard over thirty days from the embarkation at the mouth of the Rio Grande to the time of debarkation south of Vera Cruz. The trip was a comfortless one for officers and men. The transports used were built for carrying freight and possessed but limited accommodations for passengers, and the climate added to ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... to God for his merciful preservation, and returned to our former post, first burying our dead companion in one of the subterraneous houses, which was filled up and levelled, that his body might not be discovered by the enemy. We passed the ensuing night in a most comfortless situation, not being able to procure even oil and salt, and exposed to excessive cold winds from ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... charity into one particular channel, and where, as he fancied, it was the least wanted, namely, to the child-bearing and child-getting part of his parish; reserving nothing for the impotent,—nothing for the aged,—nothing for the many comfortless scenes he was hourly called forth to visit, where poverty, and sickness and affliction ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... seems has place Not only in our wiser race; Cats also feel, as well as we, That passion's force, and so did she. Her climbing, she began to find, Exposed her too much to the wind, And the old utensil of tin Was cold and comfortless within: She therefore wished, instead of those, Some place of more serene repose, Where neither cold might come, nor air Too rudely wanton in her hair, And sought it in the likeliest mode Within ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... a room, empty and comfortless, which was built on to the end of the oblong which comprised the store. Its walls were damp, and the news-papers, with which they had been covered, sagged down from the boards like monstrous goitres. It had one window, which looked riverwards, across whose panes, dust and cobweb ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... submit, and are joyful upon the occasion; though the flesh may rebel against the spirit, and hearken to the council of the old serpent, yet the truths of the gospel shall prevent such advice from being taken, and Christ shall bruise the serpent's head. We are not comfortless to confinement, for we have faith; we fear not affliction, for we have hope; and we forgive our enemies, for we have charity. Be not under apprehensions for us, we are happy in confinement through the promises of ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... next morning shook hands warmly, and promised a frequent renewal of their resumed intercourse. Nor was the bill for twenty dollars, which the minister found in his hand, at all an unacceptable addition to the pleasures of his visit; and though the November wind whistled keenly through a dull, comfortless sky, he turned his horse's head homeward with ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... nightfall. Listlessly enough she rose and trudged along the old familiar roads to her father's house, with miserable eyes she recognized the old landmarks, but without any pleasure, until at last she came to the poor little hut she called 'home.' It looked poorer, and meaner, and more comfortless than ever, after the luxuries she had grown accustomed to. Her mother and all the rest of them were sitting at dinner when Cherry opened the door. At the sound of the latch Mrs. Honey looked up, ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... road, one of the best in the kingdom, and that he actually lost himself between Doncaster and York. Pepys, travelling with his wife in his own carriage, lost his way twice in one short hour, and on the second occasion narrowly escaped passing a comfortless night on Salisbury Plain. So late indeed as the year 1770 no material improvement had been effected in road-making. The highways of Lancashire, the county which gave to the world the earliest important railroad, were peculiarly infamous. Within the space of eighteen miles a traveller passed ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... How it is possible for those who have once tasted this, the sweetest of all human delights, how it is possible for any rational mind afterwards to submit to be whirled round in the vortex of dissipation, to tolerate, to endure, the empty, vain, comfortless, nothingness of fashionable amusements, now appears to me to be almost inexplicable. The real felicity imparted and received in a happy domestic circle, in one evening, far, very far surpasses all the pleasures derived from the gaze and throng of crowded ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... Lancaster at half past nine, and reached Liverpool at twelve, over as flat and uninteresting a country as I ever travelled. I have betaken myself to the Rock Ferry Hotel, where I am as comfortable as I could be anywhere but at home; but it is rather comfortless to think of hone as three years off, and three thousand miles away. With what a sense of utter weariness, not fully realized till then, we shall sink down on our own threshold, when we reach it. The moral effect of being without a settled abode ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... gentle Nora, Thy tender youth as yet hath never mourn'd Love's fatal dart. Else wouldst thou know, that when The soul is sunk in comfortless despair, It cannot taste of merriment." Dang. That's certain. "Con. But see where your stern father comes It is not meet that he should find you thus." Puff. Hey, what the plague!—what a cut is here! Why, what is become of the description of her first meeting with Don Whiskerandos—his ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan
... with folded arms, looking down. "But that is what you won't see; how should you? You will only see dusty, upstart towns, with horrible corrugated-iron hotels, where you will swelter in heat and flies and eat abominable tinned stuffs. It is a barren, comfortless land at present, with a possibility of being useful some day. They want money, energy, brains to develop it thoroughly; and they won't accept them when they are offered, because a few stiff-necked Englishmen happen to be in power. It is absurd to go there ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... been passed in all the vicissitudes of war and peace. The camp and the bivouac—the reckless gaiety of the mess-table —the comfortless solitude of a French prison—the exciting turmoils of active service—the wearisome monotony of garrison duty, I have alike partaken of, and experienced. A career of this kind, with a temperament ever ready ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... was glad enough of any proposal of a change from the cold and comfortless room where he had thought uneasy, remorseful thoughts. He fancied that a change of place would banish the train of reflection that was troubling him; but the change he anticipated was to a well-warmed, cheerful sitting-room, with signs of life, and a bright fire therein; and he was on the last ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... the high-road," said the Moon, "is an inn, and opposite to it is a great waggon-shed, whose straw roof was just being re-thatched. I looked down between the bare rafters and through the open loft into the comfortless space below. The turkey-cock slept on the beam, and the saddle rested in the empty crib. In the middle of the shed stood a travelling carriage; the proprietor was inside, fast asleep, while the horses were being watered. The coachman ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... got up out of his own comfortless couch, and groped for the electric flash-light which sometimes may be seen in places such as his to-day. He tiptoed along the path through the willows, across the yard, and knocked timidly at the door. He heard no answer. A sudden fear came to ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... and suddenly "amok"? The wise adviser would be the first victim, no doubt, and death would be his reward. And underlying the horror of this situation there was the danger of those meddlesome fools, the white men. A vision of comfortless exile in far-off Madura rose up before Babalatchi. Wouldn't that be worse than death itself? And there was that half-white woman with threatening eyes. How could he tell what an incomprehensible creature of that sort would or would not do? She knew so ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... I descry, Gleaming vermilion, as if they from fire Had issu'd." He replied: "Eternal fire, That inward burns, shows them with ruddy flame Illum'd; as in this nether hell thou seest." We came within the fosses deep, that moat This region comfortless. The walls appear'd As they were fram'd of iron. We had made Wide circuit, ere a place we reach'd, where loud The mariner cried vehement: "Go forth! The' entrance is here!" Upon the gates I spied More than a thousand, who of old from heaven Were hurl'd. With ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... abbey, and sheltered from the storm, shared the all-pervading despondency. The refectory looked dull and comfortless, and the logs on the hearth hissed and sputtered, and would not burn. Green wood had been brought instead of dry fuel by the drowsy henchman. The viands on the board provoked not the appetite, and the men emptied their cups of ale, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Joseph, aggravated now by the banishment of her Benjamin; but hears too the promise that her travail shall be rewarded by their return. The childless old man has the soul of mother and father both—now weeping with the comfortless Rachel and now, in human touches unmatched outside the Parable of the Prodigal, reading into the heart of God the same instinctive affections, to which, in spite of himself, every earthly father is stirred by the mere mention of the name of ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... the tender mercies of the avaricious cotton manufacturers of the north. From the age of seven they were compelled to work in the mills at long hours, under unhealthful conditions, and without opportunity of education or proper recreation. When not at work they were huddled in comfortless barracks little better than slave-pens. No wonder they grew up to be hopeless and brutalized, if they were so unfortunate as to survive the arduous period of their industrial bondage—for it was no less than that. Peel's act of 1802, ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... all that Hamilton had done and said. He described the dreary and comfortless room in which Alice was confined, the miserable fare given her, and how she would be exposed to the leers and low remarks of the soldiers. She had already suffered these things, and now that she could no longer have any protection, what was to become of her? He did not attempt to overstate the ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... to enhance the gloom and solemnity of my feelings, as I silently followed my little guide, who with quick steps traversed the uneven pavement of the main street. After a walk of about five minutes she turned off into a narrow lane, of that obscure and comfortless class which are to be found in almost all small old fashioned towns, chill without ventilation, reeking with all manner of offensive effluviae, dingy, smoky, sickly and pent-up buildings, frequently not only in a wretched ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... retards it by all sorts of regulations and restrictions, and it is difficult to drive the Hindus out of the wretched hovels in which they live and thrive and breed like rats or rabbits. The more wretched and comfortless a home, the more attached the natives are to it. The less they have to leave the more reluctant they are to leave it, but the same rule applies to every race and every nation in the south of Europe and the Turkish Empire, in Syria, Egypt, the East India Islands, and wherever ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... I shivered comfortless, but cast No chill across the tablecloth; I, all-forgotten, shivered, sad To stay, and yet to part how loth: I passed from the familiar room, I who from love had passed away, 30 Like the remembrance of a guest That tarrieth but ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... life in those days, and the Poes were no exception. They died comfortless in Richmond; their three children were separated; and Edgar was adopted by John Allan, a wealthy tobacco merchant. It was in the luxurious Allan home that the boy began the drinking habits which were ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... comfortless night by the remains of my waggon, we started next morning on our long journey towards civilization. Now if I were to set to work to tell you all the troubles and incidents of that dreadful journey I should keep you listening here till midnight; ...
— Hunter Quatermain's Story • H. Rider Haggard
... mud, and utterly miserable, the party turned out of their comfortless bivouac, and, after a hasty meal of cold provisions, resumed their ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... mountains: hundreds of Italian laborers are putting down the shining rails in woods and glens where no sounds save the song of birds or the carol of the infrequent passer-by have heretofore been heard. For the present, however, the old-fashioned, comfortless diligence keeps the roads: the beribboned postilion winds his merry horn, and as the afternoon sun is getting low the dusty, antique vehicle rattles up to the court of the inn, the guard gets down, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... Russian noble lost in one evening a sum equal to a hundred thousand pounds. The Vienna Club is good in its own stiff German way; but, generally speaking, German Clubs are very ill arranged, dirty, and comfortless. The Italian are better. Turin, Naples, and Florence have reasonably good Clubs. Home has nothing but the thing called the English Club, a poorly-got-up establishment of small ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... shoulders, gossiping gloomily against barn walls, and ill-conditioned pigs grunting for admission at closed kitchen doors, all looked soaked through and through together. Nothing, in short, could be more dreary and comfortless than our walk for the first two hours. But, after that, as we approached "Lizard Town," the clouds began to part to seaward; layer after layer of mist drove past us, rolling before the wind; peeps of faint greenish-blue sky appeared and enlarged apace. ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... shook my head. I don't think my aunt likes me to smile and shake my head, for I saw a flicker in her eyes. "No, my dear aunt; emphatically no. It would be comfortless. If I kissed it, it would be cold. If I put my arms round it, it would be full of sharp edges which would hurt. If I tried to get any emotion out of it, ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... but how?... discontented, unsettled, upset, Bearing with you a comfortless twinge of regret. Preoccupied, sulky, and likely enough To make your betroth'd break off all in a huff. Three days, do you say? But in three days who knows What may happen? I don't, nor do ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... starry heavens. And what is the result of these long investigations? Simply this, that the life of man is nothing; that man himself is nothing; that he will never penetrate the mystery which surrounds the universe. With this comfortless conviction I descend into the grave, and console myself with the hope of speedy annihilation. The lamp goes out; and nothing, nothing can rekindle it. So, Nature, I return to thee, to be united ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... Thine, who didst shed first Thy tears, and then Thy blood for me! Mine are all deserved, and infinitely more than deserved. How different, O Spotless Lamb of God, those pangs which rent Thy guiltless bosom! How sweet those comforts Thou hast promised to the comfortless, when I think of them as flowing from an Almighty Fellow-Sufferer,—"A brother born for adversity,"—the "Friend that sticketh closer than any brother!"—one who can say, with all the refined sympathies of a holy exalted human nature, "I know ...
— The Faithful Promiser • John Ross Macduff
... his family sat in a corner apart, sad, sorry, and comfortless, with no friend to speak a consoling word, while the count was surrounded by a courtly throng, who assured him that with such a case he could not possibly lose; but that if the judges did deliver judgment against him he should ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... chamber to which the little window belonged. Small it must be, I knew, for in that quarter few were large even upon the first floor, and looking upon the street. Dirty, too, it should surely be, and comfortless, and tenanted by misery, or poverty, or sin, or, very likely, all together. Possibly some miserly old wretch lived there, needing only a little light to count up his hoard, and caring little for any intrusive wind, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... fire grate, empty save for a few dead ashes, seemed but a picture of his own misery, and instead of yielding him even a grain of comfort, its bars, appeared to grin upon him with solid defiance. Everything seemed comfortless in the extreme, and as the melancholy train of thought into which he had fallen was in no wise cheered by this manner of proceeding, he passed into the library, which seemed least cheerless of ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... reply, but took my Cremona, and sought to lift up all my soul to a level with hers, to that lofty realm where her spirit ever wandered, that so I might not be comfortless. She started at the first tone that I struck forth, and looked at me with her large, earnest eyes. I found my own gaze fixed on hers, rapt and entranced. Now there came at last the inspiration so longed for, ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... from speaking together in private through the whole evening. I can dwell on it no longer. Whatever future sorrows may be in store for me, I shall always look back on this twenty-first of December as the most comfortless and most miserable ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... reach the top of Mount St. Elias. He will have many hardships to endure before he can hope to reach his goal. His party will have to cross the glaciers and ice-clad mountains which lie in his path, and will have to camp many days on the ice, a cold and comfortless proceeding. ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 33, June 24, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... incidents of the expedition were not exactly propitious. The Dover Road was a byword for its charges; the Via Alba might have been paved with the silver wrung from reluctant and indignant passengers. Smollett characterized the chambers as cold and comfortless, the beds as "paultry" (with "frowsy," a favourite word), the cookery as execrable, wine poison, attendance bad, publicans insolent, and bills extortion, concluding with the grand climax that there was not a drop of tolerable malt liquor to be had from London to Dover. Smollett finds ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... Anna-Felicitas; but they decided, as they sat huddled together in a corner of the second-class deck of the American liner St. Luke, and watched the dirty water of the Mersey slipping past and the Liverpool landing-stage disappearing into mist, and felt that it was comfortless and cold, and knew they hadn't got a father or a mother, and remembered that they were aliens, and realized that in front of them lay a great deal of gray, uneasy, dreadfully wet sea, endless stretches of it, days ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... no addition to our scanty allowance, save a booby and a small dolphin that we caught, the former on Friday the 5th, and the latter on Monday the 8th. Many of us were ill, and the men complained heavily. On Wednesday the 10th, after a very comfortless night, there was a visible alteration for the worse in many of the people, which gave me great apprehensions. An extreme weakness, swelled legs, hollow and ghastly countenances, a more than common inclination to sleep, with an apparent debility of understanding, seemed ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... Fraeulein Muller, flaxen-haired, plump, and blue-eyed, sat knitting, and Larry's eyes grew a trifle wistful when he glanced at her. It was a very long while since any woman had crossed his threshold, and the red-cheeked fraeulein gave the comfortless bachelor dwelling a curiously homelike appearance. Nevertheless, it was not the recollection of its usual dreariness that called up the sigh, for Larry Grant had had his dreams like other men, and Miss Muller was not the woman he had now and then daringly pictured sitting there. Her ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... bread was frozen pretty hard and rattled sadly into the plates." Sadly down through the centuries is ringing in our ears the gloomy rattle of that frozen sacramental bread on the Church plate, telling to us the solemn story of the austere and comfortless church-life of our ancestors. Would that the sound could bring to our chilled hearts the same steadfast and pure Christian faith that made their gloomy, freezing services warm ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... ground in an utterly exhausted condition, moaning aloud in the despair of her misery. Her little daughter was screaming in terror at the plight of her mother, and we all set about to comfort them as best we could, but ah! God! how comfortless ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... upon their feet again when morning came, for of all the hard things the wanderer in rain-swept bush or frozen wilderness must bear there is none that tests his powers more than the bracing himself for another day of effort in the early dawn. Comfortless as the night's lair has been, the jaded body craves for such faint warmth as it afforded, and further rest, the brain is dull and heavy, and the aching limbs appear incapable of supporting the weight on them. Difficulties loom appallingly large ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... more moved to the river's bank and lay down. Here, during the whole of the succeeding day, the troops were kept shivering in the cold frosty air, without fires, without provisions, and exhausted with fatigue; nor was it till the return of night that any attempt to extricate them from their comfortless ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... Ludwig thought of her new place it would be difficult to say. She accepted her position as minister to the comforts of the hitherto comfortless without remark and entirely as a matter of course. She got up at hours exemplary in their earliness, and was about the house rattling a bunch of keys all day long. She was wholly practical, and as destitute of ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... pride, like so many raging furies, possessed her mind, and tortured her with disappointment and shame. Loss of reputation, which is generally irreparable, was to be her lot; loss of friends is of this the certain consequence; all on this side the grave appeared dreary and comfortless; and endless misery on the ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... melancholy, and, perhaps, inevitable decadence, rather than symbolizes his partnership with the white in the more palpable pursuits of a practical, enlightened, and energetic age, or co-activity with him on a theatre of enlarged and more vigorous action. It is in some respects more comfortless than even was his experience under his primitive style of living, and is usually composed of one room, answering all the purposes of life—eating-room, bed-room, reception-room, principally, however, for the snow and mud, which have been persuaded here to relax their hold, after ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... Johnnie, getting out through the back door, then by the untidy garden, and over the wall of the empty pig-stye, cut out into a stubble field. He was not afraid of his mother missing him till bedtime, as it was the wont of the youths—especially of those who had comfortless homes—to wander about in parties in the evening, bat-fowling sometimes, but often in an aimless sort of way, doing little bits of mischief, and seeking diversion, which they seldom found, unless there was any solitary ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... immorality, and while he cries, 'Help me, Lord, for there is not one godly man left, for the faithful fail from among the children of men'—to make answer to himself in words of noble hope and consolation, 'Now for the comfortless troubles' sake of the needy, and because of the deep sighing of the poor, I will up, saith the Lord, and will help every one from him that swelleth against him, and will set ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... us over the place, and explained all the processes of preparing coffee for the market. In one corner of a large, unpainted building was what he called the infirmary, and a comfortless looking place it was. He said there was no doctor employed, and that he dealt out medicine to the slaves himself. After being served with coffee we thanked him for our entertainment and returned to Rio by an ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... world. We have sampled rough dens in Spain, in Tetuan, and in Corsica—especially in Corsica, but then they are unpretentious inns in unfrequented villages, whereas in India you find in world-famous cities such as Agra or Delhi the most comfortless dens calling themselves hotels—hotels where you hardly dare eat half the food for fear of typhoid, and will not eat the rest because it ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... from the lower to the higher without break and without divine intervention, and of the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence, its denial of design and claim to explain everything by natural law, are also points of resemblance. Finally, the lesson he draws from this comfortless creed, not to sit with folded hands in silent despair, nor to "eat and drink for to-morrow we die," but to labour steadily for our greater good and to cultivate virtue in accordance with reason, equally free ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... becomes so solemn. The soul that we miss has gone so far beyond the reach of time! A cold, superstitious awe gradually stole over the young man. He shivered, and lifted his eyes with a start, half scornful, half defying. The moon was gone; the gray, comfortless dawn gleamed through the casement, and carried its raw, chilling light through the open doorway into the death-room. And there, near the extinguished fire, Leonard saw the solitary woman, weeping low; and watching still. He returned to say a word of comfort; ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Althea, and the mother love which had slept in her bosom was reawakened. Too late, also, the folk of Calydon remembered who it was that had saved them from slavery and death. Down into the comfortless halls of Hades, Althea hastened to seek her son's forgiveness. The loving heart of Cleopatra, surcharged with grief, was broken; and her gentle spirit fled to the world of shades to meet that of her hero-husband. Meleager's sisters would not be consoled, so great was the ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... and his father, Hector, would lie naked at the ships, unclad, unburned, unlamented. To be unburned and unburied was thought the greatest of misfortunes, because the dead man unburned could not go into the House of Hades, God of the Dead, but must always wander, alone and comfortless, in the dark borderland between the dead and ...
— Tales of Troy: Ulysses the Sacker of Cities • Andrew Lang
... had led him along toward the right way. For a time, during the first ecstasy of grief at her loss, she still sustained him. After a while, he tells us, his mind, which was endeavoring to heal itself, sought for comfort in the mode which other comfortless ones had accepted for their consolation. He read Boethius on the 'Consolations of Philosophy,' and the words of comfort in Cicero's 'Treatise on Friendship.' By these he was led to further studies of philosophy, and giving himself with ardor to its pursuit, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... cried the youth, "but of Moussul." "Then," exclaimed Hyjauje, "thou art of an unnatural and adulterous race, whose youths are catamites, and whose old men are obstinate as asses." "But I am from Yemen," said the boy. "If so," answered the tyrant, "thou belongest to a comfortless region, where the most honourable profession is robbery, where the middling ranks tan hides, and where a wretched poor spin wool and weave coarse mantles." "But I am from Mecca," said the boy. "Then," replied Hyjauje, ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... now, as I have heard others argue, that what I have told you are tricks of jugglery? Let me answer by recalling greater things which I have seen him do. Look first to that curse of God—comfortless, as you ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... huddled there in the pillows, restless, comfortless, neglected, wrung her heart. Hitherto her love for Martin had been singularly devoid of intimacy. They had kissed each other, they had eaten dinner and tea and supper together, they had explored the Three Marshes in each other's company, but she had scarcely ever been to his house, ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... Martin, laughing; "there are no such things as ghosts; at any rate I'm resolved to face them, for if we don't get some sticks the fire will go out and leave us very comfortless. Come, ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... this was kept up, while, on the floor of the schoolroom, all but the two or three older ones, with the completely exhausted teacher, slept in what comfortless attitude they might. ...
— Kristy's Rainy Day Picnic • Olive Thorne Miller
... and the Ford made its usual comfortless speed down the mountain. When they reached Huntersville the valley was bathed in early morning sunlight, and Huntersville, asleep, shared the evanescent charm of the dawn. It was a beautiful and a peaceful scene and Clavering, whose spirits had descended into utter gloom while enwrapped ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the passions also resemble fires, which are friendly and beneficial when under proper direction, but if suffered to blaze without restraint, they carry devastation along with them, and, if totally extinguished, leave the benighted mind in a state of cold and comfortless inanity. ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... bones, muscles, veins and nerves. Or it resembles the transformation of a shabby piece of suburban building-ground: it has to be dug up, drained, paved, fenced; and until traffic has poured into it, it remains a comfortless and dismal waste. ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... glow of words and personal magnetism induced a womanly soul into surroundings which you have taken no care to make attractive, so that she exchanged her father's house for the dismal swamp of married experience—treeless, flowerless, shelterless, comfortless and godless. I would not be half so much to blame in cheating you out of a farm as you in cheating a woman out of the happiness ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... a comfortless place, and the only pleasure I find in it, is in looking on to my departure. Three years ago I might have found a friend, Count Leopold Berchtold. This man (foster brother of the Emperor Joseph) is one of those rare characters, who spend their lives ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... how entirely confused she had become. She no longer knew which way to go, and in despair threw herself into the grass and wept. All her ambition was gone; she let the squirrel run away, and gave herself up to her own comfortless feelings. She thought now of the uneasiness and anxiety of her mother, and wept all the more at the thought of her own folly. But, however, consoling thoughts, before long, chased away these desponding ones. She dried her eyes with her dress—she ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... enough to drive a coach and four along the top; but the artillery of the Crimea would have shelled them into ruins in a very few hours. When we got back to the guard-house, he took us inside, and showed the dismal and comfortless rooms where soldiers are confined for drunkenness, and other offences against military laws, telling us that he himself had been confined there, and almost perished with cold. I should not much wonder if he were to get into durance again, through ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... sleep I was awakened by a strange murmur, which, mixing with my dreams, had given me the comfortless idea of hearing the roar of the multitude at some of the horrid displays of the guillotine; and as I half opened my unwilling eyes, still heavy with sleep, I saw a long procession of figures, in flowing mantles and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... they came— Valley-born, valley-nurtured— Came to the tideway, The jetties, the anchorage, The salt wind piping, Snoring in equinox, By ships at anchor, By quays tormented, Storm-bitten streets; Came to the Haven Crying, "Ah, shelter us, The strayed ambassadors! Lost legation of love On a comfortless coast!" ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Teutonic skill in her pronunciation. "Well, mamma, you have told me of that at least twenty times." Soon after that, the ladies took them to their own rooms, weary with the travelling of two days and a night, and Mr. Greene went fast asleep in the very comfortless chair in which ...
— The Man Who Kept His Money In A Box • Anthony Trollope
... losses, sad damage of character, and comfortless, the unhappy claimant and his witnesses were compelled to return to Maryland, wiser if not better men. The account of this interesting trial, we have condensed from a very careful and elaborate report of it published in the "Pennsylvania Freeman," ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... new institutions. But away from these institutions and out of touch with the life of the towns, we find a class of people whose condition in itself is a Macedonian cry. Their windowless, stoveless, comfortless log cabins; their so-called schools, in which on the roughest benches conceivable, and without a desk, a slate, or a blackboard, with a teacher with unkempt hair, ragged and dirty clothes, possibly bare feet, who perhaps can scarcely read, the children study ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 11, November, 1889 • Various
... The apartments were filled with straw; a machine for threshing or winnowing was in the parlor; and the room where he died was now converted into a stable, a horse standing where his bed had been. The position was naked and comfortless, being on the summit of a hill, perpetually swept by the trade-winds, which suffered no living thing to stand, except a few straggling, bare, shadeless trees, which contributed to the disconsolate character ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... and dangers of this service at best, even in peace times, seamanship is a comfortless and cheerless calling. But in war, to the ordinary perils of the sea are added unusual hardships which reach their maximum in the dangers and perils of the war zone—the attack without warning of the invisible foe whose presence is too frequently known only by ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... the war—dead sick of it. He is weary of the interminable procession of comfortless nights and days. He is weary of the sight of maimed and bleeding men—of the awful suspense of waiting for death. In the words of his pathetic little song, he does "want to go 'ome." But there is that within him which says, "Hold on!" He is a compound of cheery optimism and grim tenacity ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... and enduring all his abuses, excited the displeasure of her family, and they cast her from them to suffer and struggle on as best she might. She knew not as she had a relative in the world. She surely had no friend, save Willie, her little boy, with whom she dwelt in the comfortless abode we ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... subconscient she always tacked on fluide, magnetisme, or electricite lest he should be frightened, or she should lose her way. And of course she held to her belief that spirits produced the phenomena. A subconscious mind was a cold and comfortless idea. ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... I beseech thee, turn aside from this comfortless road leading, thou knowest whither, but not I. Let us turn our backs upon duty and abandon ourselves to the delights and advantages which beckon from every grove and call to us from every shining hill. Let us, ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... a semicircle, extending from the Shah Najaf to the barracks. The wounded were placed in the huts near the Sikandarbagh, where they passed a most comfortless night, for when the sun set it rapidly got cold, and the hospital arrangements were necessarily on ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... faces that were wont to smile upon them, and they saw but mirrors of their own sad lineaments—some laughed in mockery of their sorrows, as though they thought that mirth would come for asking; others, grown brutal by being caged, made up in noise what they lacked in peace. How comfortless they seemed! The only solace that the eye could trace ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 27, 1841 • Various
... philosophical writers to prove by analysis that, if they are not familiar with the thing itself, they at least know of what it should consist. Mr. Shorthouse's depressing views about "Don Quixote" are merely introduced as illustrating a very scholarly and comfortless paper on the subtle qualities of mirth. No one could deal more gracefully and less humorously with his topic than does Mr. Shorthouse, and we are compelled to pause every now and then and reassure ourselves as to the subject matter of his eloquence. ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... left comfortless. Even in the evolutionary philosophy engendered by Darwin and formulated by Herbert Spencer and the Germans, with all its mistaken assumptions and dubious methods, already there is visible a tendency to get away from ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... was neither deficient in zeal nor prudence. The place prepared for his ministry was, indeed, comfortless: the wind overpowered his voice, and his congregation shivered with cold; but to the men it was a new era. Having discoursed on the advantages of knowledge, forty-seven prisoners requested instruction; and, assisted by Mr. Commissary Lempriere, and countenanced by the commandant, ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... see Miss Cotton. Her room, which serves as sitting-room and bedroom, looked most comfortless. To add to the discomfort there were sixteen goslings hemmed in by boxes in a corner near the door. If they were allowed out on a day like this it would kill the greater part ...
— Three Years in Tristan da Cunha • K. M. Barrow
... around me for a moment. The room was outwardly comfortless and uninviting: the walls out of repair; the sloping roof somewhat shattered; the floor broken and uneven; no furniture but two tottering bedsteads, a three-legged stool, and an old oak chest; the window broken in many places, and mended with patches of paper. A little shelf ...
— The Annals of the Poor • Legh Richmond
... bosom of the billow, Borne on the breeze and modulated sweetly, Plaintive as music, rose the mother's tones of Comfortless anguish. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the bedside of her beloved doll family. They were lying serene and placid, exactly as she had placed and tucked them in at bedtime, with her own motherly hand, and the memory of Dick lying racked with pain on the comfortless bed where she had first seen him, almost decided her at once. But a doll that could walk and talk, ...
— What Two Children Did • Charlotte E. Chittenden
... in the world, more especially if he has to carve it with his sword, a boyhood passed amidst surroundings which boast of no luxury and demand much endurance, is the best probation. Von Moltke has recorded that the comfortless routine of the Military Academy at Copenhagen inured him to privation, and Jackson learned the great lesson of self-reliance in the rough life ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... induced so many of the later Romans, on Epicurean as well as Stoical principles, to put an end to their existence. It is not through any unmanly despondency that Ajax is unfaithful to his rude heroism. His delirium is over, as well as his first comfortless feelings upon awaking from it; and it is not till after the complete return of consciousness, and when he has had time to measure the depth of the abyss into which, by a divine destiny, his overweening haughtiness has plunged ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... month of January [blank], when Dora and I were walking from Town-End, Grasmere, across the vale, snow being on the ground, she espied in the thick though leafless hedge a bird's-nest half filled with snow. Out of this comfortless appearance arose this Sonnet, which was, in fact, written without the least reference to any individual object, but merely to prove to myself that I could, if I thought fit, write in a strain that poets have been fond of. On the 14th ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... mother, trickle still Into my coffin deep; It feels so comfortless and chill I cannot ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... had ceased raining, but the wind, as on that first night, was howling and whining about the eaves, the shutters rattled and the old house creaked and groaned rheumatically. It was not as cold as on that occasion, though by no means warm. He remembered how bare and comfortless he had thought the room. Now it looked almost luxurious. And he had been homesick, or fancied himself in that condition. Compared to the homesickness he had known during the past eighteen months that youthful seizure seemed contemptible ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... where wealth is to be acquired by commerce, men will readily settle, however barren and unfavourable the country, or however pestilential the climate. But Chiloe offers no incitements to avarice, and only a bare and comfortless subsistence to perpetual industry. Perhaps the principal part of the original settlers were people who escaped from the fury of the Araucanians, unable to remove to Peru, or to subsist if they got there, and who were therefore ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... I said, 'though this isn't just the kind of war I would have picked myself. It's a comfortless, bloody business. But we've got the measure of the old Boche now, and it's dogged as does it. I count on getting back to the front in a ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... pity for the thousands fatherless, The thousands childless like thyself, nay more, The thousands friendless, helpless, comfortless - Such thou wilt make them, little thinking so, Who now perhaps, round their first winter fire, Banish, to talk of thee, the tales of old, Shedding true honest tears for thee unknown: Precious be these, and sacred in thy sight, Mingle them not with blood from ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... greet the warm inhabited room with a little gasp of reassurance. Strangest of all, he found himself often in the old nursery at the top of the house. Very seldom did any one come there now, and it had the pathos of a room grown cold and comfortless. Most of the toys were put away or given to hospitals, but the rocking-horse with his Christmas-tree tail was there, and the doll's-house, and a railway with trains ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... for her own reasons, she would trust to no hands but her own,—conscious incapacity to be what all the women about her were, stirring, active, hardy housekeepers,—a vague sense of shame, and a great dread of the future,—her comfortless and motherless condition,—slowly, but surely, like frost, and wind, and rain, and snow, beat on this frail blossom, and it went with the rest. June roses were laid against her dark hair and in her fair hands, when she was carried ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... fury Passions tear, The vultures of the mind, Disdainful Anger, pallid Fear, And Shame that skulks behind; Or pining Love shall waste their youth, 65 Or Jealousy with rankling tooth, That inly gnaws the secret heart; And Envy wan, and faded Care, Grim-visag'd comfortless Despair, ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... strong gale from the north-east; so that I was exceedingly glad to reach an inn within four miles of Inverness, where I promised myself comfortable lodgings for the night. It was a rather large, but comfortless-looking house, evidently concentrating all its entertainment for travellers in the tap-room. After considerable hesitation, the landlady consented to give me bed and board; and directed "the lassie" to make a fire for me in a large ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt |
