"Desert" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... again farther south to Sohag, and a squadron carried on to Kilo 145 on the Sherika line to take up an outpost line. Camel patrols were also sent out into the desert. We had a scheme or two in the desert and a fire in the M.G. tent, at which the local fire brigade greatly distinguished itself by its masterly inactivity and futile energy. To the strains of "Kam leyal, Kam iyyam" ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie
... Except the birds and the wild beasts, not one soul appeared near the monastery. The nearest human habitation was far away, and to reach it from the monastery, or to reach the monastery from it, meant a journey of over seventy miles across the desert. Only men who despised life, who had renounced it, and who came to the monastery as to the grave, ventured ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... inferiority. Worse than all, he finds himself confounded with a still lower class, known at Bar Harbor as "the tourist"—elsewhere called the excursionist—who comes by the hundred on the steamers in linen dusters, and is compelled by force of circumstances to "do" Mount Desert in twenty-four hours, and therefore enters on his task without shame or scruple, roams over the cottager's lawn, stares into his windows, breaks his fences, and sometimes asks him for a free lunch. The boarder, of course, looks down on this man, ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... Shanghai and Japan ports, observed to his friend Cesare Domenico, a good British subject born at Malta. They sat on the coolest corner in Port Said, their table commanding both the cross-way of Chareh Sultan el Osman, and the short, glaring vista of desert dust and starved young acacias which led to the black hulks of shipping in the Canal. From the Bar la Poste came orchestral strains—"Ai nostri monti"—performed by a piano indoors and two violins on the pavement. The sounds contended with a thin, scattered strumming of cafe mandolins, the tinkle ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... pulling at his mustache and looking sometimes at a half-completed sketch, and sometimes at the blue stretch of water below the cliff. The conclusions were that he certainly should not become interested in Harriet and Mary, and, secondly, that Mount Desert made him paint rather ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... not know what to do with himself—whether to sit down and feign that she was well, or to remain standing in an attitude of respectful and grave anxiety. He thought he ought to depart; yet would it not be ungallant to desert her under the circumstances? She was alone. She had no ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... never even been named, stretches from the fifty-first to the sixtieth degree of latitude in one almost continuous ridge, and at last breaks off abruptly into the Okhotsk Sea, leaving to the northward a high level steppe called the "dole" or desert, which is the wandering ground of the Reindeer Koraks. The central and southern parts of the peninsula are broken up by the spurs and foot-hills of the great mountain range into deep sequestered valleys of the wildest and most picturesque character, and afford scenery which, for majestic and ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... the same city. The winter over, his own family home again, and his own house (of which he was very proud) reopened, he found himself in a dilemma between two conflicting duties of loyalty and gratitude. His old friends were not to be neglected, but it seemed hardly decent to desert the new. This was how he solved the problem. Every morning, as soon as the door was opened, off posted Coolin to his uncle's, visited the children in the nursery, saluted the whole family, and was back at home in time for breakfast and his bit of fish. Nor was this done without a sacrifice ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... when he saw this unwelcome addition to his crew. He threatened to throw him overboard, and on second thought vowed to leave him to starve on a desert island. The poor fellow fell on his knees and tearfully begged for mercy. Others joined him in entreaties, and Enciso at length softened and spared him his life. He was to pay bitterly for his kindness before ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... regret, and of admiration. His eyes followed her, and his soul followed them. He beheld the devoirs which the great and the noble paid to her, and his heart was heavy; for she was the fairest and the proudest flower among the French nobility —he an exotic weed of desert birth. And, while princes strove for her hand, he remembered, he felt, that he was an orphan of foreign and of obscure parentage—a scholar by accident, (but to be a scholar was no recommendation in those days, and it is but seldom that it is one ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... fallen back into the possession of the nations that had been scourged by Merimna's armies. Nothing now remained to Merimna's men save their inviolate city and the glory of the remembrance of their ancient fame. At night they would place sentinels far out in the desert, but these always slept at their posts dreaming of Rollory, and three times every night a guard would march around the city clad in purple, bearing lights and singing songs of Welleran. Always the guard went unarmed, but as the sound of their song went echoing across the plain towards the looming ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... affliction for the death of one brother, were conjured up in the powerful imagery of natural feeling, the fountains of which were opened in his heart, and his agonizing cry for life rose wildly from the mountain desert upon the voice of the tempest. Then, indeed, when the gulf of a twofold death yawned before him, did the struggling spirit send up its shrieking prayer to heaven with desperate impulse. These struggles, however, as well as those of the body, became gradually ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... moreover, on the authority of Sir G. Paul's Life of Whitgift, that Cartwright acknowledged the generosity of Whitgift, and admitted "his bond of duty to the Archbishop to be so much the straiter, as it was without any desert of his own."—Carwithen's History of the Church of ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 24. Saturday, April 13. 1850 • Various
... winds, or cramped with cold nights, when the Southern Cross freezes in a cloudless sky of icy blue. The phantasmagoria of that wild dreamland termed the Bush interprets itself, and the Poet of our desolation begins to comprehend why free Esau loved his heritage of desert sand better than all the ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... I wish most to see Beau Desert. Warwick Castle and Stowe I know by heart. The first I had rather possess than any seat upon earth: not that I think it the most beautiful of all., though charming, but because I am so intimate with all its proprietors for the last ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... circumstances, and a friend of all men—this is peace; and the path to such a blessed condition is shown us only by that Sun of Righteousness whom the loving heart of God has sent into the darkness and torpor of the benighted wanderers in the desert. The national reference has faded from the song, and though it still speaks of 'us' and 'our,' we cannot doubt that Zacharias both saw more deeply into the salvation which Christ would bring than to limit it to breaking an earthly yoke, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... a harp. At Venice another may be seen, in which is naturally formed the perfect figure of a man. At Pisa, in the church of St. John, there is a similar natural production, which represents an old hermit in a desert, seated by the side of a stream, and who holds in his hands a small bell, as St. Anthony is commonly painted. In the temple of St. Sophia, at Constantinople, there was formerly on a white marble the image of St. John the Baptist covered with the skin of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... and that little tentative: "Must I give you up?" was the only protest she had offered. But such was not our intention. Far from it! We do not forsake our friends in their bodily ailments, and we are poor, pitiful, egotistical creatures indeed when we desert them for their mental and moral maladies, leaving them to struggle against them and fight them out or succumb to them alone, according to their strength and circumstances. The world will forsake ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... damage that his reputation as a man of bravery and politeness would inevitably suffer should he desert Henriette in her time of trouble, and his disinclination to again face the iron hail on the Bazeilles road, Delaherche was certainly in a very unpleasant predicament. Just as they reached the Balan gate a bevy of mounted officers, returning to the city, suddenly ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... here yet as you might think. A great many of the cottages were closed. The few people we did talk to had their plans already made. Don't look so disappointed, Sahwah. If we were out in the middle of the desert or shipwrecked on a lonely island there wouldn't be any possibility of an audience, and yet we would be having a celebration for our own ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... world should task you to recite What merit lived in me, that you should love After my death, dear love, forget me quite, For you in me can nothing worthy prove; Unless you would devise some virtuous lie, To do more for me than mine own desert, And hang more praise upon deceased I Than niggard truth would ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... BURGE. Well, could we desert the country at such a crisis? The Hun was at the gate. Everyone has to make sacrifices for the sake of the country at such moments. We had to rise above party; and I am proud to say we never gave party a second thought. We ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... a monster; I had grown use to every thing but that—that I could not endure; it was a darkness of the mind—a coldness; it was as if the sun had gone out of the universe; it was more—it was worse—it was as if I was alone in the world. Home was a desert to me. I went out every evening; sometimes, but rarely, Clarendon accompanied me: he had become more retired; his spirits had declined with mine; and though he was glad I should go out and amuse myself, yet he was always exact as to the hours of my return. I was often late—later ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... fighting against the Moslem for the liberties of some sparkling city of God. He exists in his personage, under the precipice, above the fjord, like a rude mediaeval anchorite, who eats his locusts and wild honey in the desert. We cannot comprehend the action of Brand by any reference to accepted creeds and codes, because he is so remote from the religious conventions as hardly to seem objectively pious at all. He is violent and incoherent; he knows not clearly what it is he ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... origin of ill and end, And its own place and time: its innate sense, When stripped of this mortality, derives No colour from the fleeting things without: But is absorbed in sufferance of joy, Born from the knowledge of its own desert. ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... desert. He is broken down and deeply repents his folly, when, lo, the Queen appears once more, hoping to lure him with soft words and tears. But this time her beauty is lost upon him: he has at last recognized ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... day and the hour. They could not have done it in opposition to the manifest will of the nations. Public sentiment has seconded them. What is it then which rouses man from his repose, impels him to desert his gains, his home, the security of a regular life, and sends him in ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... body! He says he thinks that he lived a long time ago, and then a shorter time ago, and then now. He says that some days he sees it all come up in a kind of dark desert." ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... Wilkinson were sitting beneath the pyramid, with their faces toward the desert, enjoying the cool night air, when they first began to speak of Adela Gauntlet. Hitherto Arthur had hardly mentioned her name. They had spoken much of his mother, much of the house at Hurst Staple, and much also of Lady Harcourt, of whose separation from her husband they were ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... Tehuelhets call an evil spirit Atskanna Kanatz, the other Puelches denominate the same being Valichu. Huecuvu must be another name for the evil spirit; as the Chechehets give the name of Huecuvu-mapu or the devils-country to a great sandy desert, into which they never venture ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... dressed in the large room with the other male turns. There were no private dressing-rooms at the Magnum. Clarence sat down on a basket-trunk belonging to the Premier Troupe of Bounding Zouaves of the Desert, and waited. The four athletic young gentlemen who composed the troupe were dressing after their turn. They took no notice ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... He had married, in the far-away years, so young as to have missed the time natural in Boston for taking girls to the Museum; and it was absolutely true of hint that—even after the close of the period of conscious detachment occupying the centre of his life, the grey middle desert of the two deaths, that of his wife and that, ten years later, of his boy—he had never taken any one anywhere. It came over him in especial—though the monition had, as happened, already sounded, fitfully ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... many other colours of female birds seem to me exactly analogous to the colours of both sexes in such groups as the snipes, woodcocks, plovers, ptarmigan, desert birds, ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... not been deterred from undertaking the journey to Sinai. There was much dispute about the route they should follow. Some were for going by sea to Alexandria, others wished to march down the sea coast; but finally they made up their minds to go straight South across the desert. Starting from Gaza on 9 September they reached St. Catherine's on the 22nd. Five days of very hard work sufficed for them to see all the sacred sites and ascend the many towering peaks; and here again Fabri impressed upon his companions that the days of miracles were over, and that in these evil ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... at all? Some people ask that question, and for them the case may be hopeless. If the lyric sense is utterly lacking, then it is their sad lot to live in the desert of the practical world. Art is not for them: neither music nor poetry nor painting nor sculpture nor architecture; for something of the lyric impulse lives in all of these. But many ask that question who some day ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... Barbara's eyes, there would have been very little choice between the two places. Enville Court lay on the sea-coast, and Barbara abhorred the sea, on which her only brother and Walter Avery had died: it was in Lancashire, which she looked upon as a den of witches, and an arid desert bare of all the comforts of life; it was a long way from any large town, and Barbara had been used to live within an easy walk of one; she felt, in short, as though she were being ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... are desert now and bare, Where nourished once a forest fair; When these waste glens with copse were lined, And peopled ...
— Handbook to the Severn Valley Railway - Illustrative and Descriptive of Places along the Line from - Worcester to Shrewsbury • J. Randall
... and the orphans had quitted the Castle for Paris, not knowing that Djalma was left at Cardoville, being still too much injured to proceed on his journey. The half-caste, Faringhea, remained with the young prince, not wishing, he said, to desert a fellow countryman. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... die," he said, "and you are near, do not desert me. Go to the place where I fell, and if my body should have been destroyed look carefully around the place. If you can find even a shred of my flesh or a bit of my bone, it will be well. So said my dream. Here are four arrows, ...
— Blackfeet Indian Stories • George Bird Grinnell
... and that was badly stove, so that the water had run through her, and thereby prevented her being washed off the deck by the waves: and she eventually became the means, by God's blessing, of obtaining that assistance which saved the sufferers from perishing on a desert island. ...
— The Wreck on the Andamans • Joseph Darvall
... its gold, its ivory, its beautiful women, all rising like a mirage of inaccessible delight beyond the devouring sands. He spoke of Timbuctoo, the gate of the Sahara and the Western Soudan, the frontier town where life ended and met and mingled, whither the camel of the desert brought the weapons and merchandise of Europe as well as salt, that indispensable commodity, and where the pirogues of the Niger landed the precious ivory, the surface gold, the ostrich feathers, the gum, the crops, all the wealth of the fruitful valley. He spoke of ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... in search of men who could have dared the ghastly terrors of the North with Ross or Parry, or the scorching jungles of the Equator with Burckhardt and Park. Cut off for so long a time from actual contact with the outside world, I could better imagine the brooding stillness of the Great Desert, I could more easily picture the weird ice-palaces of the Pole, waiting, waiting forever in awful state, like the deserted halls of the Walhalla for their slain gods to return, than many of the common street-scenes in my own city, which I had only ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... princes to whom James had appealed replied by appealing, with many professions of good will and compassion, to himself. He was surely too just to blame them for thinking that it was their first duty to defend their own people against such outrages as had turned the Palatinate into a desert, or for calling in the aid of Protestants against an enemy who had not scrupled to call in the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... accordance also with their religion) abandoned the worship of all these idols and returned to the Biblical simplicity of four thousand years ago—having realized that they already possessed something better, namely, the glory of the sky and the earth, the sun and the desert sands, and the freedom of love and adventure. How strange, and yet how natural, that sundered only by a narrow strip of sea they even now should look back upon all the laborious, feverish, and overcrowded wealth of Europe and seeing the cost thereof should feel for it only contempt! For that, ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... He saw with a painter's eye, and he described what he saw clearly and vigorously, showing in his letters the same traits which he displayed in his pictures. Writing from his camping-ground on the edge of the Desert, he says,—"The Pyramids and Sphinxes, in ordinary daylight, are merely ugly, and do not look half as large as they ought to look from their real size; but in particular effects of light and shade, with a fine sunset behind them, for example, or when the sky lights up again, a quarter or ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... only applied to the narrow portion which is capable of cultivation), it extends in a thin, green, palm-fringed strip upon either side of the broad coffee-coloured river. Beyond it there stretches on the Libyan bank a savage and illimitable desert, extending to the whole breadth of Africa. On the other side an equally desolate wilderness is bounded only by the distant Red Sea. Between these two huge and barren expanses Nubia writhes like a green sandworm along the course of the river. Here and there it disappears ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... woman with her two children was seen to pass under the bridge at Bolivar clinging to the roof of a coal house. A rope was lowered to her, but she shook her head and refused to desert the children. It was rumored that all three were saved at Cokeville, a few miles below Bolivar. A later report from Lockport says that the residents succeeded in rescuing five people from the flood, two women and three men. One man succeeded in getting out of the water unaided. ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... Clarence was only one-and-twenty years of age, and seems to have possessed but a slender capacity; yet could he easily see the force of these reasons; and, upon the promise of forgiveness from his brother, he secretly engaged, on a favorable opportunity, to desert the Earl of Warwick and abandon the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... up his mind that he would not desert Lady Mason. He would not desert her; but how would he set about the fighting that would be necessary in her behalf? He was well aware of this, that if he fought at all, he must fight now. It would not do to let the matter go on till she ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... in the fact. Of riding armed; O traitorous overt act! With each of them an ancient Pistol sided, Against the statute in that case provided. But, why was such a host of swearers pressed? Their succour was ill husbandry at best. Bayes's crowned muse, by sovereign right of satire, Without desert, can dub a man a traitor; And tories, without troubling law or reason, By loyal instinct can ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... for restful death I cry— As, to behold desert a beggar born, And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity, And purest faith unhappily forsworn, And gilded honour shamefully misplac'd, And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted, And right perfection wrongfully disgrac'd, And strength by limping ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... such a rise she paused and studied the country carefully, but without avail. She felt dizzily for the desert bag swung from her shoulder, only to find it flat and dry; the galvanized mouthpiece burned her fingers. With a little shock she remembered that she had done this very thing several times before, and her repeated forgetting frightened ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... would flee from a maid in the pride of her purity," laughed Bertie. "But, Miss Leigh, must we positively go shivering across this bleak desert again?—isn't there some sheltered way through ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... better. For his father lived in a gloomy study with severe books, bound in divinity calf, all about him; and was no more conscious of the existence of the beautiful garden than if it had been the Desert ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... And wasted realms enfeebled despots sway; Even Nature's changed; without his fostering smile Ophir no gold, no plenty yields the Nile; The thirsty sand absorbs the useless rill, And spotted plagues from putrid fens distill. In desert solitudes then Tadmor sleeps, Stern Marius then o'er fallen Carthage weeps; Then with enthusiast love the pilgrim roves To seek his footsteps in forsaken groves, Explores the fractured arch, the ruined ...
— Eighteen Hundred and Eleven • Anna Laetitia Barbauld
... victual, and made for the open country. About mid-day, he reached the town of Belbeys, where he alighted and rested himself and the mule. Then he took out food and ate and fared on again in the direction of the desert, after having bought victual and fodder for the mule in the town. Towards nightfall, he came to a town called Saadiyeh, where he alighted and took out food and ate, then spread the carpet on the ground and laying the saddle bags ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... painful.—And, indeed, I soon did recollect it as such with agony, when his sudden death (for he had recourse to the most exhilarating cordials to keep up the convivial tone of his spirits) again threw me into the desert of human society. Had he had any time for reflection, I am certain he would have left the little property in his power to me: but, attacked by the fatal apoplexy in town, his heir, a man of rigid morals, brought his wife with him to take possession of the house and effects, before ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... a desert. Trees and bushes were leafless; from the workshop window one could look right through them, and over other gardens beyond, and as far as the backs of the houses in East Street. There were no more games in the garden; the paths were buried in ice ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... but followed your advice, beautiful Persian," he said, "all this would not have happened, but at least I have this consolation, that I have spent my fortune in the company of friends who will not desert me in an hour of need. To-morrow I will go to them, and amongst them they will lend me a sum sufficient to start in ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Andrew Lang.
... Russians, thus forsaken by Austria, also made peace with the Turks. They consented to demolish their fortress of Azof, to relinquish all pretensions to the right of navigating the Black sea, and to allow a vast extent of territory upon its northern shores to remain an uninhabited desert, as a barrier between Russia and Turkey. The treaty being definitively settled, both Marshal Wallis and Count Neuperg were arrested and sent to prison, where they were detained until the death of ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... sparkled never In that magic well, Of whose gift of life forever Ancient legends tell, In the lonely desert wasted, And ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Lemuel and I settled ourselves more comfortably, for there was nothing else to do. I cursed inwardly as I felt the minutes slip by and knew that half-past six had come and gone, but I was sure you would not like to have me desert those two poor lovers who were fighting to ward off the statistics, so I sat still and silent. So ...
— The Water Goats and Other Troubles • Ellis Parker Butler
... the transmutationists infer that the reason why these foreign types, so peculiarly fitted for these regions, have never before been developed there is simply that they were excluded by natural barriers. But these barriers of sea or desert or mountain could never have been of the least avail had the creative force acted independently of material laws or had it not pleased the Author of Nature that the origin of new species should be governed by some secondary ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... early proved itself the fittest for survival. The future is always with Isaac, not with Ishmael—with Jacob, not with Esau. In everything this is seen, in the struggle of races, or trade, or ideas. Even as a religious method to make an impact on the world, it is true. John of the Desert touched here a life, and there a life; Jesus of Nazareth, seeking disciples, founding a society, moved the world ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... to a boom, under a pile of white houses; it is Royan. Here already are the sea and the dunes; the right of the village is buried under a mass of sand; there are crumbling hills, little dreary valleys, where you are lost as if in the desert; no sound, no movement, no life; scanty, leafless vegetation dots moving soil, and its filaments fall like sickly hairs; small shells, white and empty, cling to these in chaplets, and, wherever the foot is set, they crack with a sound ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... he dares to be. He's the oasis in the desert of my life; but the counting-room simoom comes along and dries him up, every now and then. Suppose I began my article by a study of the ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... discovered to the eyes of Theodosius the extent and the extremity of his danger; but his apprehensions were soon dispelled, by a friendly message from the leaders of those troops who expressed their inclination to desert the standard of the tyrant. The honorable and lucrative rewards, which they stipulated as the price of their perfidy, were granted without hesitation; and as ink and paper could not easily be procured, the emperor subscribed, on his own tablets, the ratification ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... realms below To seek his lost one? Little daughter, I Would find that path and pass that ford whereby The grim-faced boatman ferries pallid shades And drives them forth to joyless cypress glades. But do thou not desert me, lovely lute! Be thou the furtherance of my mournful suit Before dread Pluto, till he shall give ear To our complaints and render up my dear. To his dim dwelling all men must repair, And so must she, her father's joy and heir; ...
— Laments • Jan Kochanowski
... thinker than Botticelli would have made her parched with thirst, and burnt with heat. But the voice of God, through nature, to the Arab or the Moor, is not in the thirst, but in the fountain—not in the desert, but in the grass of it. And this Libyan Sibyl is the spirit of wild grass and flowers, springing ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... up his loins and sets himself to write little essays on each of his characters. If he have the gift of the thing he may analyze motives with a subtlety which is more than their desert, and exhibit simple folk passing through the most dazzling rotations. If he be a novice, he is reduced to mere crude invention—the result in both cases is quite beyond the true purpose of Art. Art—when all is said and done—a suggestion, ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... though I were leaving the world, as I travelled on day after day through the desert marches. Then followed a sad and humiliating impression of Konigsberg, where, in one of the poorest-looking suburbs, Tragheim, near the theatre, and in a lane such as one would expect to find in a village, I found the ugly house in which Minna ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... and portions near the line With rocky soil and stunted spruce and pine, With scarce a wigwam or a ranger's hearth, We left untilled, and deemed of little worth; The petals of this desert rose unfold, When man ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... the cat's paw of the Hun in this enterprise. German officers and German guns were supplied to the Turks, but the terrible privations necessary in a long campaign that must be spent largely in the desert, and the inevitable great loss in human life, were both demanded ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... to absorb greedily the words which fell, one by one, from the mouth of Monk,—those words rare and precious as the dew in the desert. ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... these bricks; and like the starlings, they rear several broods, and some are nesting late in the autumn. By degrees as the summer advances they leave the houses for the corn, and gather in vast flocks, rivalling those of the starlings. At this time they desert the roofs, except those who still have nesting duties. In winter and in the beginning of the new year, they gradually return; migration thus goes on under the eyes of those who care to notice it. In London, some who fed sparrows ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... characteristic of Jimmy that it never even occurred to him to desert the fallen one, and depart alone. Spike was his brother-in-arms. He would as soon have thought of deserting him as a sea-captain ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... Rembrandt something that the world—I mean the artistic part of it—would be very sorry to do without. Now the meaning of this is, not that Rembrandt was ill-advised in deserting his patrons, or in suffering them to desert him, but that for the first time in the history of painting an artist had the personality—I will not say the conscious determination—to realize that his art was something quite apart from the affairs of this world, and that what he could express on canvas was not merely a representation ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... and guidance, as a sheep in the care of a shepherd, and trust Him utterly. No matter though you may seem to yourself to be in the very midst of a desert, with nothing green about you, inwardly or outwardly, and may think you will have to make a long journey before you can get into the green pastures. Our Shepherd will turn that very place where you are into green pastures, ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... news. What was to be done, he knew not. To desert Amenche was not to be thought of, and yet he saw no way of rejoining her, still less of rescuing her. In the present excited state of the Aztec population, it would be certain death to venture beyond the ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... that I might perhaps write a book on the geology of the various countries visited, and this made me thrill with delight. That was a memorable hour to me; and how distinctly I can call to mind the low cliff of lava, beneath which I rested, with the sun glaring hot, a few strange desert plants growing near, and with living corals in the tidal pools at ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... of an ordinary life. During all periods of pregnancy, childbearing, nursing, and the education and care of a family, every woman has a right to the sympathy, sustaining love, and constant aid of her husband. No man has a right to desert or leave helpless, or even dependent upon others, except in extraordinary cases, ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... subject. He brings before you the wild wastes and the dark woods of his native land, and its brave, simple, enduring people. You feel the wind blow fresh from the vast, dark woodlands; you follow the elk- hunters through the pine forests or along the shores of remote lakes; you lie in desert huts and hear the narratives of the struggles of the inhabitants with the ungenial elements, or their contentions with more ungenial men. Runeberg seizes on life wherever it presents itself in strong and touching forms,—in the ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Polanco, in the Darien expedition! Was not that absolute solitude? After being left to die alone by his companions, who were forced by starvation to desert him, think of his bones being found long after, stretched on the grave of his friend, who had been buried a day's march ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... some of the officers are on shore dining, &c., with the French naval officers. There is evidently great sympathy for us in the island. We have got on board all our "liberty-men," no one of them having shown a disposition to desert. At 9 P.M., a drunken fireman jumped overboard and swam ashore, in spite of the efforts of a boat to catch him. He thus braved the discipline of the ship solely for a glass of grog!—so strong upon him was the desire for ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... a room never lighted, James was standing with his duncoloured camel-hair shawl folded about him, so that his arms were not free and his silvered head looked cut off from his fashionably trousered legs as if by an expanse of desert. He stood, inimitably stork-like, with an expression as if he saw before him a frog too large ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... laying up for the future as a camel does for the desert. Food and drink passed from sight under Maggie's manipulation like a slight-of-hand performance, and through the effort, and above it, the girl's expressionless face ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... made it necessary, I would, after such an instance of the connivance of the women of the house, have run out into the street, and thrown myself into the next house I could have entered, or claim protection from the first person I had met—Women to desert the cause of a poor creature of their own sex, in such a situation, what must they be!—Then, such poor guilty sort of figures did they make in the morning after he was gone out—so earnest to get me up stairs, and ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... of thought a while, until it debouched into a desert. The Doctor then took down the works of Byron, and read aloud—touching the high spots in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," "Don Juan," "Childe Harold," "The Prisoner of Chillon"—pausing ever and anon to replenish ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... stepped back to the door. "Hurry, hurry," she said. The old iron resolve never to desert the shack was fusing in the heat of a panic. Her unfailing instinct was hardening a new one, ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... Port Royal, which he placed in charge of his son. In 1611 two Jesuit priests, Biard and Masse, came over, under the patronage of Madame de Guercheville, and in 1613 they planted a Jesuit station at Mount Desert Island, on the ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler
... of the things it is necessary to remember before we finally decide to desert a temporarily sick friend. If I were the ruler of a state I should pray the gods to preserve me from half-hearted Allies and over-cautious friends. If I wished to help a fallen state or lend an honest hand in a great cause, ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... responsive wheel, Her pennon stiffened like a swallow's wing; Yes, I was all her slope and speed and swing, Whether by yellow lemons and blue sea She dawdled through the isles off Thessaly, Or saw the palms like sheaves of scimitars On desert's verge below the sunset bars, Or passed the girdle of the planet where The Southern Cross looks over to the Bear, And strayed, cool Northerner beneath strange skies, Flouting the lure of tropic estuaries, Down that long coast, and saw ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... their engagements. They represented to the governor, that, if the conduct of their comrade was rash, it was at least in the service of the Crown, and in prosecuting the great work of discovery. Rios had been instructed, on his taking the government, to aid Pizarro in the enterprise; and to desert him now would be to throw away the remaining chance of success, and to incur the responsibility of his death and that of the brave men who adhered to him. These remonstrances, at length, so far operated on the mind of that functionary, ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... if you were in my place, would you desert a brave, true girl in misfortune? No; unlike me, you would never have ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... consequently to do it. In this manner it is that habits of hurtful excess continue to be practiced although they have ceased to be pleasurable; and in this manner also it is that the habit of willing to persevere in the course which he has chosen, does not desert the moral hero, even when the reward, however real, which he doubtless receives from the consciousness of well-doing, is any thing but an equivalent for the sufferings he undergoes, or the wishes which ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... what takes place. Secrecy is to blame. We have been unable to rely on any one. To have to run around and see this man and that man is not the way to do. Most all sympathize with you when alone and then they desert you when they get with others. This is the cause of much bitterness and distrust. Secret diplomacy is an utter failure. It is too hard to endure. Some men know only how to whisper. They are not to be trusted. I do ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... in her right hand, and, taking it, he read therein her story. And more than a month thereafter he abode in that ship and was nourished by the grace of Heaven, as Israel was fed with manna in the desert. ...
— The Legends Of King Arthur And His Knights • James Knowles
... of fortune. He would have been quite able to retire, and live at ease, but this he said at once and with decision he did not intend. His regiment was his hereditary home, and his father had expressed such strong wishes that he should not lightly desert his profession, that he felt bound to it by filial duty as well as by other motives. Moreover, he thought the change of life and occupation would be the best thing for Rachel, and Mrs. Curtis could not but acquiesce, little ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... presumed upon, Clito came to tell his friends that his soul could on occasion take in prayer and praise enough for a week in a single morning or afternoon, and, almost, for a whole year in a good holiday. As Christ Himself did when He said: Come away apart into a desert place and rest a while; for there are so many people coming and going here that we have no time ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... Reade retorted. "I want to be one of the big and active men of the world, who do big things. I want to map out the wilderness. I want to dam the raging flood and drive the new railroad across the desert. I want to construct. I want to work day and night when the big deeds are to be done. That's why I wouldn't care for the Army or Navy; it's ...
— The High School Boys' Training Hike • H. Irving Hancock
... will. The world of morals is as distinct from the world of science as a wine is from the cup that holds it; and to say that it does not exist because science can find no trace of it, is to say that a bird has not flown over a desert because it has left no footprints in the sand. And as with morals, so it is with religion. Science will allow us to deny or to affirm both. Reason will not allow us to ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... together an' tell 'em jest what you told me. Every man there is your friend an' they'll see you through. They've know'd you fer six years—an' they'll know the same as I know that there ain't no sense in throwin' you in jail fer what happened there on the edge of the desert. You done your time fer that when you was wanderin' through them mountains. You learnt your lesson then. An' it changed you from a fool kid that was headed straight to the devil into a square man. That's what the prisons are for—if they're any good—an' ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... d'ye mean by that? Do you suppose I was going to desert the principles of my family, and curry favour of the Whigs? No! leave that to them. They can ask the heir of the Hamleys fast enough when a ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Shakespeare is not pointing out, in 'The knave turns fool that runs away,' that the wise knave who runs away is really a 'fool with a circumbendibus,' 'moral miscalculator as well as moral coward.' The Fool is referring to his own words, 'I would have none but knaves follow [my advice to desert the King], since a fool gives it'; and the last two lines of his song mean, 'The knave who runs away follows the advice given by a fool; but I, the fool, shall not follow my own advice by ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... like molten ore In the intense full splendor of its rays. A half-hour hence all will be dull and grey; And Lucius only waits until the shade Sweeps down the plain then mounts and makes his way On through the blinding desert to the sea, And thence his galley bears him ...
— A Roman Lawyer in Jerusalem - First Century • W. W. Story
... 'to be many'; it thereupon sent forth the entire world, consisting of fire, water, &c.; introduced, in this world so sent forth, the whole mass of individual souls into different bodies divine, human, &c., corresponding to the desert of each soul—the souls thus constituting the Self of the bodies; and finally, itself entering according to its wish into these souls—so as to constitute their inner Self—evolved in all these aggregates, ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... eagle wakes, And the towers of Hunaudaye Gleam like three phantom forms In the morning's sunlight ray; When night her darksome wing Folds round this desert waste, Shun all this cursed ground— ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... desert the finer waste is continually swept to and fro by the ever-shifting wind. Even in quiet weather the air heated by contact with the hot sands rises in whirls, and the dust is lifted in stately columns, sometimes as much as one thousand feet in height, which march slowly across ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... had. If you was smart, you could do a lot for him. But you'll have to do your best. I want you to promise me faithfully that you'll stand by him and protect him—that you won't let people impose on him; that you'll never desert him as long as he needs you, no matter what comes. Eunice, ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... for the thousand ant-hills. Then suddenly the rainy season sets in. Torrents fill the rivers, and the sandy plain is a sheet of water. Almost as suddenly the rain ceases, the streams dry up, sucked in by the thirsty ground, and as though literally by magic a luxuriant vegetation bursts forth, the desert blossoms as a rose. Insects, lizards, frogs, birds, chirp, frisk and chatter. No plant or animal can live unless it live quickly. The struggle for existence is keen ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... a panorama of the mountains, mile after mile of snow-capped peaks and valleys ablaze with the flames of autumn foliage. The mountains faded away. There was desert now and then a city. Russ dropped the televisor set lower, down into a street. For half an hour they sat comfortably in their chairs and watched men and women walking, witnessed one dog fight, cruised slowly up and down, looking into windows of homes, window-shopping ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... avalanches That shivered hope and made the sturdiest reel. Yet peach-bloom bright as April saw Blushed there anew, in blood that flowed O'er faces white with death-dealt awe; And ruddy flowers of warfare grew, Though withering winds as of the desert blew, Far at the right while Ewell and Early, Plunging at Slocum and Wadsworth and Greene, Thundered in onslaught consummate and surly; Till trembling nightfall crept between And whispered of rest from the heat of the whelming ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... some ladies on this subject last night, they asserted that the infrequency of elopements in France proved the superiority of morals of the French, and that few examples ever occurred of a woman being so lost to virtue as to desert her children and abandon her home. "But if she should have rendered herself unworthy of any longer being the companion of her children, the partner of her home," asked one of the circle, "would it be more moral to remain under ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... my eternal gratitude for his behaviour last night. She was one of my bright faces. Her laughter was delicious; rain in the desert! It will tell you what the load on me was, when I assure you those two were merely a spectacle to me—points I scored in a lost game. And ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of Grafton, whose audacity and activity made him conspicuous among the natural children of Charles the Second. Grafton was colonel of the first regiment of Foot Guards. He seems to have been at this time completely under Churchill's influence, and was prepared to desert the royal standard as soon as the favourable moment should arrive. Two other traitors were in the circle, Kirke and Trelawney, who commanded those two fierce and lawless bands then known as the Tangier regiments. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... implied and required the occupation of the Mediterranean seaboard. No armies of any considerable size have ever attempted to traverse the almost waterless desert which separates the Lower Euphrates valley from the delta of the Nile. Light corps d'armee have no doubt occasionally passed from Circesium by way of Tadmor to Damascus, and vice versa;[14251] but the ordinary line of route pursued by conquerors follows ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... mounted the rostra in public meeting and called Pompey an "unofficial dictator." No one ever had a narrower escape of being killed. From this you may see the state of the whole Republic. People, however, shew no inclination to desert my cause. They make wonderful professions, offers of service, and promises: and, indeed, I have the highest hopes and even greater spirit—so that I hope to get the better in the struggle, and feel confident in my ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... deepening extension of Seal Island Ground is found about 65 miles SSE. from Mount Desert Rock and 60 miles W. from Seal Island. There seems to be no distinguishing name ...
— Fishing Grounds of the Gulf of Maine • Walter H. Rich
... caricatured condition to readers throughout the civilised world. But those who look only at Galland's picture, his effort to "transplant into European gardens the magic flowers of Eastern fancy," still compare his tales with the sudden prospect of magnificent mountains seen after a long desert-march: they arouse strange longings and indescribable desires; their marvellous imaginativeness produces an insensible brightening of mind and an increase of fancy-power, making one dream that behind them lies the new and unseen, the strange and unexpected—in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... something really unique. It is a pestilent swamp to which a mighty river brings bitter blasts and marrow-chilling fogs, while during the brief summer time the wind will bring you sand. In this way you will combine the disadvantages of the North Pole with those of the desert ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... Dasent's rheumatics. It will be hard, though, to give up the child." Nurse Branscome flushed again. "Oh, yes—you are a gentleman, Brother Copas, and will not misunderstand! I have taken a great liking for the child, and she will ask questions if I suddenly desert her. You see the fix? . . . Besides, Nurse Turner—I hope I am not becoming like one of these people, but I must say it—Nurse Turner has not a ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... mission," replied the Professor. "It does not seem likely that he has determined to desert us; but it may be he has grown tired of this existence. It is a curious phase of these matters, however, which, I believe, will apply in his case, that when he goes back he will find his old life a very disquieting one to him, and I predict he will ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... beginning to laugh rather grimly, "that a desert will spread all round our house! your friends will disappear before ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... rains. For them there is no hint "of the incommunicable dream" in the curve of the rising wave, no murmur of the oceanic undertone in the short leaping sounds, invisible things that laugh and clap their hands for joy and are no more. To them it is but a desert: obscure, imponderable, a weariness. The "profundity" of Browning, so dear a claim in the eyes of the poet's fanatical admirers, exists, in their sense, only in his inferior work. There is more profound insight in Blake's Song of Innocence, "Piping down the valleys wild," or ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... in width beyond the Wabash—seemed strangely contradictory, and no one had been able to patch these reports together and grasp the real proportions of the giant inland empire that had become a part of the United States. It was a pathless desert; it was a maze of trails, trodden out by deer, buffalo, and Indian. Its great riverways were broad avenues for voyagers and explorers; they were treacherous gorges filled with the plunder of a million floods. It was a rich soil, a land of plenty; the natives were seldom more ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... really nothing whatever to do. The sipahees and native officers of our army are little better with than they would be without the privilege; and a great many enlist or remain in the service solely with the view of better prosecuting their claims, and resign or desert as soon as they have effected their purpose, or find that the privilege is no longer necessary. They make a convenience in this way of our service, and are the most useless soldiers in our ranks. I am persuaded that we should have from Oude just as many and as good recruits for our ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... it, have a pleasant home of your own, and dwell there with the two little ones. Such has long been my scheme and purpose; but, during my sister's life, she will never consent to give you up; and you owe it to her not to desert her in the closing years, when she most urgently requires the solace of ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... "the actors at the Curtain"[137] gave serious offense by representing on the stage persons "of good desert and quality, that are yet alive, under obscure manner, but yet in such sort as all the hearers may take notice both of the matter and the persons that are meant thereby." The Privy Council ordered the Justices ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... boats to tow the ship to a less perilous position. As the best men of the crew had been sent away to capture the brig, the crews of the two boats were made up of the riff-raff of the crew. Many of them were Englishmen, mere mercenary sailors, who had shipped on the Richard, secretly intending to desert at the first opportunity. Therefore, when night fell, as they were still in the boats trying to pull the "Richard's" head around, they cut the ropes and made off ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... merely as a fact, and without any note of self-pity. But the bishops face grew very tender, and he looked away from Lin. Knowing his man—for had he not seen many of this kind in his desert diocese?—he forbore to make any text from that last sentence the cow-puncher had spoken. Lin talked cheerfully on about what he should now do. The round-up must be somewhere near Du Noir Creek. He would join it this season, ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... Arthur's side, comprehend his wishes by his face, and do more to relieve and sustain him than all the rest; and, though she looked wretchedly weak and worn, her power of doing all that was needed, and looking upon him with comforting refreshing smiles, did not desert her. The night watch she was forced to leave to be divided between his father and sister, with the assistance alternately of Sarah and the regular nurse, and she was too much exhausted when she went to bed, for Theodora to venture on disturbing ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... alone on a desert island, or out at sea in a little boat, or out on the prairies without a horse, so that they'd have ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... from his eyes turned back, and he exclaimed, "Am I deluded? O ye powers of hell, Suffer me—Oh, my fathers!—am I torn—" He spake, and would have spoken more, but flames Enwrapped him round and round intense; he turned, And stood held breathless in a ghost's embrace. "Gebir, my son, desert me not! I heard Thy calling voice, nor fate withheld me more: One moment yet remains; enough to know Soon will my torments, soon will thine, expire. Oh, that I e'er exacted such a vow! When dipping in the victim's ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... so long as he saw "Him who is invisible?" Secondly, it took away all his fear. What was "the wrath of the king" to him, when Jehovah was by his side? Of what should he be afraid? Thirdly, it enabled him to "endure," to wait patiently for forty years in the desert, and then to work patiently for forty years in the wilderness; and only think how strength-giving that sight of faith must be which enabled him to endure everything for ...
— Morning Bells • Frances Ridley Havergal |
