"Desolate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mislead him: if we can suppose that real angels were sent to minister to the Jews and to punish them; but no angels, or only mocking spectra of angels, or even devils in the shapes of angels, to lead Lycurgus and Leonidas from desolate cradle to hopeless grave:—and if we can think that it was only the influence of specters, or the teaching of demons, which issued in the making of mothers like Cornelia, and of sons like Cleobis and Bito, we may, of course, reject the heathen Mythology ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... tumultuous scene of labour and contest, disappointment and defeat? If we view past ages in the reflection of history, what do they offer to our meditation but crimes and calamities? One year is distinguished by a famine, another by an earthquake; kingdoms are made desolate, sometimes by wars, and sometimes by pestilence; the peace of the world is interrupted at one time by the caprices of a tyrant, at another by the rage of the conqueror. The memory is stored only with vicissitudes of evil; and the happiness, such as it is, of one part of mankind, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... shall come! I tell him he shall come, Valerie! All my life I perish, thou knowest it, for a companion of my sex, of my age. Thou art my angel, Valerie, but thou art a woman, and soon, too, thou wilt leave me. Alone, a hermit in my chateau, my heart desolate, how to support life? It is for this that I cry to the friend of my house to return to his country, the country of his race; to bring here his respected father, to plant a vineyard, a little corn, a little fruit,—briefly, to live. Observe!" ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... high as ever, as fine in sharp outline against the sky, as savage, as tawny; no other mountains in the world of their height so well keep, on acquaintance, the respect of mankind. There is a quality of refinement in their granite robustness; their desolate, bare heights and sky-scraping ridges are rosy in the dawn and violet at sunset, and their profound green gulfs are still mysterious. Powerful as man is, and pushing, he cannot wholly vulgarize ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... The world had been very beautiful during their travels in England, and although the weather was beginning to be warm, the world was very beautiful in Paris. In fact, to these two it would have been beautiful almost anywhere. Even the desolate and arid coast of Peru would have been to them as though it were green with herbage and bright ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... George Herbert was entitled to an estate in the parish, and it was no doubt a portion of the increase of this property that he devoted to the repairing and beautifying of the House of God, then "lying desolate," and unfit for the celebration of divine service. Good Izaak Walton, writing evidently upon hearsay information, and not of his own personal knowledge, was in error if he supposed, as from his language he appears to have done, that George Herbert almost ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 71, March 8, 1851 • Various
... but given intensity to the fervor of a mother's love. Though but twenty-three years of age, she had drained every cup of pleasure to its dregs. And now she began to enter upon a path every year more dark, dreary, and desolate. ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... seaweed. At that the men stared into each other's face, a very strange startled look coming into their eyes. And no wonder! For long, long months, running to years, they had been cruising in those lonely desolate seas, thousands of miles from home, seeing no land nor any green thing, nor dear face of woman or child: and now by some strange chance a child had come to them, and even while they were making all haste to rescue it, putting their arms out to take it from the sea, its life had seemingly ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.
... and desolate. The bright sun had gone behind a cloud and a sharp breeze had sprung up. There was not a soul in sight and the station was at least a five minutes' walk distant. As she hurried off, the man picked up the bag, from the top of which ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... War has cost us to date, if you count pensions for the wrecks it left—mental and physical—nearly twenty billions of dollars. And that doesn't include property losses, nor destruction of trade, nor broken hearts and desolate homes—that's just cold hard cash that we have actually paid out. You can't even think it. There have been only about one billion minutes since Christ was born. Now if there had been four million slaves and we had bought every ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... fountain in my dream, Where shady pathways to a valley led; A weeping willow lay upon that stream, And all around the fountain brink were spread Wide branching trees, with dark green leaf rich clad, Forming a doubtful twilight desolate and sad. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... during those hours of oblivion? He seemed to have slept, and to have had terrible dreams. Could he have remembered these dreams, it seemed to him that the whole mystery of his removal to this desolate spot would be explained. And he knew that it required but an effort of his will to remember them. But his soul was too weak: he could ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... Europe. Come from whence they will, it is plain, from the fearless disregard that they show for men or guns, that they have been little accustomed to places of much resort. Navigators mention that in the Isle of Ascension, and other such desolate districts, birds are so little acquainted with the human form that they settle on men's shoulders, and have no more dread of a sailor than they would have of a goat that was grazing. A young man at Lewes, in Sussex, assured me that about seven years ago ring-ousels abounded so about that ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... Joshua sent thirty thousand men against Ai, which they took with great ease. All its inhabitants, from the oldest man to the youngest babe, were massacred. The city itself was burnt into a desolate heap. The King of Ai was reserved to furnish the Jews with a little extra sport, by way of dessert to the bloody feast. He was hanged on a tree until eventide, when his carcass was taken down and "buried under a heap of stones." Joshua "then ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... respect. He shall keep it. It will be my glory now to show him what a son's love and pardon may be. If it be true as I understand, that he is attacked by a disease which needs must be fatal, his last hours will not be desolate! It may be that I shall give him more comfort than Churches,—more confidence than Creeds! It may be that the clasp of my hand in his may be a better preparation for his meeting with God,—and my mother,—than the touch of the ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... is sweet Of things beneath the Sun; This, that a man should earn his bread and eat, Rejoicing in his work which he hath done. What shall be sung or said Of desolate deceit. When others take his bread; His and his children's bread?— And the laborer hath none. This, for his portion now, of all that he hath done. He earns; and others eat. He starves;—they sit at meat Who have ...
— The Singing Man • Josephine Preston Peabody
... beneath which was a wicker-cradle covered with a shawl. She drew back the shawl, and Anne saw lying on one cheek on the pillow, the tiny, fuzzy, misshapen head and creased purple fist of a new baby. The confidence of that tiny breathing creature lying asleep seemed strange to Anne, who knew how desolate it was. It had already, as it were, taken possession of its place in the world, and had no intention of ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... you with blooming cheeks and star-lit eyes peeping out from under a sun-bonnet, enshrined in all the glories of the mountain redwoods, and I long to be with you if only to get some of the freshness and joy of the California mountains into my rather desolate soul. ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... short-cut, stretched down through the stiff white woods to her own home; she hastened along it a little way, then she stopped and faced back and stood irresolute. The icy wind stiffened her face, but she did not note it. She looked back at the road with its blue snow-furrows stretching between the desolate woods, at the spires and roofs of the village beyond. If one followed that road to the village and took the first one upon the right, and travelled ten miles, one would come ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... would come back before dark, and sit up that night, in one of the empty bedrooms, so as to be within call in case I wanted him. He understood readily enough my unwillingness to be left alone all night in the most desolate part of that desolate house, and we arranged that he should come in between ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... In Dr. Shaw's eloquent response to the greetings she said: "Nothing has given me greater hope for women and has made me prouder of women than the splendid reserve power shown by southern womanhood for the last twenty-five years. When your hearthstones were left desolate and your bravest and strongest had gone forth never to come back, your women, who had been cared for as no other women ever were cared for, who were uneducated to toil, unacquainted with business requirements, averse to them by instinct and tradition—when they had to face the world they ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... not by inches, but by yards. Sometimes, not often, a pale orb struggles through the clouds and glimmers faintly upon the grimy town—some poor relation of the sun, maybe, but not the godlike creature himself. For six months, in this cold desolate spot, among a people strangely unlike the English of Devon, though they are of kindred race, I laboured for six months in the Torpedo Factory. I lived meanly in one room, for my Austrian pay and allowance had stopped when War cut the channels ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... so desolate, and he may be so far off, and we couldn't get to him if any thing happened, and we ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope
... disengages from things that have fallen into disuse is infinite. In the attic of this house whose inhabitants I did not know, a little girl's dress and her doll lie desolate. And here is an iron-pointed staff which once bit into the earth of the green hills, and a sunbonnet now barely visible in the dim light from the garret-window. They have been abandoned since many years, and I am wholly certain that they would be happy again to enjoy, the one the freshness of ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... be frequented by lunatics, nobody can pretend to ascertain any rational cause, and yet no one truth is more firmly credited here by the common people than this impertinent fable." He, however, says that having regard to the awful appearance of these desolate glens and mountains, none but madmen would enter them! Recurring to the meaning of the word galt, a gentleman in Ireland, a professor of Irish, states that geilt is a mad person, one living in the woods, and that gealt is the genitive plural. It is interesting ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... moored close to a tiny island. Arnold pulled up alongside and paused to reconnoiter. To all appearance, it was a derelict. There were no awnings, no carpets, no baskets of flowers. The outside was grievously in need of paint. It had an entirely uninhabited and desolate appearance. Arnold beached his boat upon the little island and swung himself up onto the deck. There was still no sign of any human occupancy. He descended into the saloon. The furniture there was ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... but poor Celandine did not hear or heed her; she wandered out into the desolate country to think over her sad fate. However, the good Fairy of the Beech-Woods did not want her to be starved, so she sent her an unlooked for relief in the shape of a beautiful white cow, which followed her back to the tiny house. When ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... I was fighting my way to school against the wind, I couldn't see anything but the road in front of me; but in the late afternoon, when I was coming home, the town looked bleak and desolate to me. The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify—it was like the light of truth itself. When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy roofs ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... Davy's grave," he says, and goes into a region which seems still more cold, more desolate, ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... strain of humanity, pathos, or reverence in that diary, save that reflected from Keseberg's last act before being hurried away from that desolate cabin? Or could there be a falser, crueler, or more heartless account brought to bereaved children than Fallon's purported description of the father's body found ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... battered old spruces had a flourishing colony of young trees growing up all around and under the shade of their wings, and some day when a great wind breaks off the decayed old ones, there will be several vigorous half-grown young, to take their place, so the place will not be left desolate a day. If man would only take this hint in his own treatment of trees, leave the young ones to take the place of those he removes, we should not have to dread the wasteful destruction ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... felt desolate when he left his uncle's side, it was not otherwise with Sir Eustace as he lost sight of the child, who had so long been his charge, and who repaid his anxiety with such confiding affection. The coveted fame, favour, and ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge
... shamelessly deceived? If it were decided that I should remain here, for what imaginable reason had I been sent so far on my journey to France? Why had I been conveyed back with such mystery? Why was I removed to this uncomfortable and desolate room, on the same floor with the apartment in which Charke had met his death, and with no window commanding the front of the house, and no view but the deep and weed-choked court, that looked like a deserted churchyard in ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... in gloomy silence. The Push had scattered—some to the two-up school, some to the dance-room. The butcher's flare of lights shone with a desolate air on piles of bones and scraps of meat—the debris of battle. The greengrocer's was stripped bare to the shelves, as if an army of locusts had marched through ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... expert in medicine, as not only to cure the sick, but even to raise the dead. Ovid says he did this by Hippol{)i}tus, and Julian says the same of Tynd{)a}rus: that Pluto cited him before the tribunal of Jupiter, and complained that his empire was considerably diminished and in danger of becoming desolate, from the cures AEsculapius performed; so that Jupiter in wrath slew AEsculapius with a thunder-bolt; to which they added that Apollo, enraged at the death of his son, killed the Cyclops who forged Jupiter's thunder-bolts: a fiction which obviously signifies ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... slowly down the tree-darkened lane that led to the main street of the village. Beneath a forest oak, where the desolate town cow and the stray sheep had come to seek freedom from the annoyances of the day, he halted and looked back. The few remaining lanterns were like fire-flies in a growth of giant grass. The members of the "string-band" were singing a negro melody. The notes ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... morning, a young man, named Harry Monk, was riding along a desolate stretch of seashore on the coast of North Queensland, looking for strayed cattle. He had slept, the previous evening, on the grassy summit of a headland which overlooked the surrounding low-lying country for many ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... died away as from somewhere amid the chill and ghostly vapour there stole a long-drawn, wailing cry, so woful, so desolate, and so unearthly here in this vasty solitude that I caught my breath and stared upon this eddying mist with gaze of ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... the next set of suitors. This of course is only the case with the younger women; the older women for one thing do not nag so much, and moreover they have usually children willing and able to support them. If they have not, their state is, like that of all old childless women in Africa, a very desolate one. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... deep mine shaft in the clouds, the hidden sun was making a silent glory. It was a dead sea, if you will. No gleam of sail, near or afar, lit up its loneliness. No flash of sea bird, poised for its prey, or beating slowly over the desolate waste, broke the heavy dulness that lay upon the breast of the deep. The sky stooped down and blackened the still waters; and anear, beneath the cliff on which we were standing, a faint fringe of foam alone was proof that the sea still lived, though its face was rigid and its voice ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... to settle here on Friday, being drowned out of Twickenham. I find the town desolate, and no news in it, but that the ministry give up the Irish -tax-some say, because it will not pass in Ireland; others, because the city of London would have petitioned against it; and some, because there were factions ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... Scott wrote, 'that it would be possible to conceive a more cheerless prospect than that which faced us at this time, when on this lofty, desolate plateau we turned our backs upon the last mountain peak that could remind us of habitable lands. Yet before us lay the unknown. What fascination lies in that word! Could anyone wonder that we determined to push on, be ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... bear to go back to the close, ill-smelling cabin, which had been shut up all night. I stayed on deck in the biting wind, leaning over the wet bulwarks and gazing across the desolate sea till my spirits sank like lead. The reaction upon the violent strain on my nerves was coming, and I had no power to resist its influence. I could feel the tears rolling down my cheeks and falling on my hands without caring ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... the most curious, the most dreary, the least visited. Walls of sharp rocks rise up over eight hundred feet high round some of its sunken lakes—one is called the Powder Lake—and the level above this abyss stretches out in moors and desolate downs, peopled with herds of lean sheep, and marked here and there by sepulchral, gibbet-looking signposts, shaped like a rough T and set in a heap of loose stones. It is a great contrast to turn aside ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... this house a month ago; for two months before that it had stood desolate, wisps of paper and straw blowing about it, its "To let" notice creaking and screaming in every wind. The Hon. Mrs. Pentecoste, an eccentric old lady, had lived there for many years, and had died in the middle of a game of patience; ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... now, like the spendthrift forsaken, By those whom his bounty had blest, All empty, and cold, and despairing, It shrinks in my desolate breast. ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... his family can make a green land desolate," returned the Lizard. "Small things can do much mischief, as you will learn when you grow older. There is nothing safe from Locusts. They have even been known in the Strait of Ormuz to settle on a ship, and, by devouring the sails and cordage, ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... left Cassel, my Prussian friend came to me with an open smiling countenance, and said he, too, was bound for Dusseldorf, whither I said my route lay; and so laying our horses' heads together we jogged on. The country was desolate beyond description. The prince in whose dominions we were was known to be the most ruthless seller of men in Germany. He would sell to any bidder, and during the five years which the war (afterwards called the Seven Years' War) had now lasted, ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... moody place; such a one as only apathetic or healthy natures (I wonder if that is tautology!) can healthfully yield to. The bank sloped steeply; a fringe of stunted aspens and willows sprang from the frozen sand: it was a sickening, airless place in summer,—it was damp and desolate now. There was a sluggish wash of water under foot, and a stretch of dreary flats behind. Belated locomotives shrieked to each other across the river, and the wind bore down the current the roar and rage of the dam. Shadows ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... of fine forest trees, however, and detested Brighthelmstone Downs, "because it was a country so truly desolate," he said, "that if one had a mind to hang one's self for desperation at being obliged to live there, it would be difficult to find a tree on which to fasten the rope." Walking in a wood when it rained was, I think, the only rural image he pleased ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... events of every day, more and more confirmed the belief, that the "unconditional submission" of the colonies, was the object of the parent state; and that to accomplish this, she was [140] prepared to desolate the country by a civil war, and imbrue her hands in the blood of its citizens. This state of things the Indians knew, would favor the consummation of their hopes. Virginia, having to apply her physical strength to the repulsion of other enemies, could not be ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... good," sighed Limping Jim. "He's lost his head, an' reason just goes into one ear and out at t'other. When he was scrapin' aroun' the front door t'other day, an' I asked him what he wuz a-layin' the ground all bare an' desolate for, he said he was done keepin' pig-pen. Now everybody but him knows he never had a pig. His head's gone, just mark ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... require some time for the eye to become accustomed to the style of building adopted in the Spanish colonies. There is something at first sight exceedingly desolate-looking in these great wooden doors, like those of immense barns, the great iron-barred windows, the ill-paved courtyards, even the flat roofs; and then the streets, where, though this is a fte-day, we see nothing but groups of peasants or of beggars—the ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... mounted upon a spirited horse provided by devoted accessories for the severe journey, and accompanied by a guide who knew the forest ways, he set out, a fugitive from justice. Both he and his pilot carried pistols in holster and provisions in saddle-bags. Their route lay through a desolate region sparsely settled by pioneers, and not yet relinquished by wandering aborigines, nor by the bear and the catamount. The month of February was spent before they reached the valley of the Tombigbee, a distance of two hundred ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... distress firmly supported, dangers resolutely encountered, and opposition artfully defeated. AEneas properly comforts his companions, when, after the horrours of a storm, they have landed on an unknown and desolate country, with the hope that their miseries will be at some distant time recounted with delight. There are few higher gratifications, than that of reflection on surmounted evils, when they are not ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... two walked on until they reached the southern limit of the houses, and entered on a little wilderness of shingle and withered grass—the desolate end of Aldborough, the ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... the end had come. That swift, scarce tangible dream of peace, which had flitted through her mind during the past few weeks, had vanished with the dawn, and she was left desolate, alone with her great sin and ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... got from the Emperor was that, when the other Mexicans were made slaves, they were left at least nominally free, but their republic soon fell into decay and the city in which they had so proudly maintained themselves in their independence, became a desolate ruin. A dirty and squalid village to-day marks ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... window, hollow in the centre, Shorn of its glass of thousand colourings, Through which the deepen'd glories once could enter, Streaming from off the sun like seraph's wings, Now yawns all desolate."-E. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... people known in that region as the piny-woods "Tackies." Within a stone's throw of Azalia there was a scattering settlement of these Tackies. They had settled there before the Revolution, and had remained there ever since, unchanged and unchangeable, steeped in poverty of the most desolate description, and living the narrowest lives possible in this great Republic. They had attracted the attention of the Rev. Arthur Hill, an Episcopalian minister, who conceived an idea that the squalid settlement near Azalia afforded a fine field for missionary labor. Mr. Hill established ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... in question forms an area of about sixty miles in diameter, where nothing meets the eye but a desolate and awful waste; where no grass grows nor water runs, and where nothing is to be seen but lava. Ranges of mountains skirt this plain, and, in Captain Bonneville's opinion, were formerly connected, until rent asunder by some convulsion of nature. Far to the east the Three Tetons ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... not doubt, he could not doubt, after Ravengar's threats, that she had been murdered. And yet he was not angry then. He did not feel a great grief. He was conscious of no sensation save a numbed and desolate awe. He had not begun to feel. Ledging the lid crossways on the coffin, he placed his hand gently upon Camilla's brow. It was colder than he had expected, and it had the peculiar hard, inelastic touch of incipient decay—that touch ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... into the country, to the house where he had left Charlotte. It was desolate. After much enquiry he at length found the servant girl who had lived with her. From her he learnt the misery Charlotte had endured from the complicated evils of illness, poverty, and a broken heart, and that she had set out on foot for New-York, on a cold ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... distinct, so that our traveller experienced no further difficulty in pursuing his way. He hurried forward at a rapid pace, yet could not resist the temptation to pause frequently and gaze in admiration on the scene of desolate grandeur around him. On such occasions he found it difficult to believe that the stirring events of the last few hours were real. Indeed, if it had not been that there were certain uneasy portions of his frame—the result of his recent ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... is ridiculous to maintain seriously that Byron's love of the desolate and inhuman in nature was the mark of vital scepticism and depression. When a young man can elect deliberately to walk alone in winter by the side of the shattering sea, when he takes pleasure in storms and stricken ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... compels his clipped fancy to the conventional discipline of prose, (Maid Marian turned nun,) and waters his poetic wine with doctrinal eloquence. Milton is saved from making total shipwreck of his large-utteranced genius on the desolate Noman's Land of a religious epic only by the lucky help of Satan and his colleagues, with whom, as foiled rebels and republicans, he cannot conceal his sympathy. As purely poet, Shakspeare would have come too late, had his lot fallen in that generation. In mind and temperament too ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... my party had gone. The tembe, so lately a busy scene, had already assumed a naked, desolate appearance. I turned towards the Arabs, lifted my hat, and said again, "Farewell," then faced about for the south, followed by my four young gun-bearers, Selim, Kalulu, Majwara, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... the Devil's Canon is obtained from one of these desolate hills. At our very feet, fully two thousand feet below, seemingly a sheer descent, rises a little column of smoke or vapor, and the opposing hills, which rise abruptly to the height of a thousand feet, seem ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... men who were gathering blueberries at Sabbath Day Point. Whereupon Colonel Gansevoort immediately marched for Canajoharie with his regiment, which had but just arrived; and in consequence Betty Bleecker and Angelina are desolate. ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... lonely place; there was no village, and no house, save a rough shanty for the use of the "track-walker" on the railroad. It was not an attractive place for rest, yet here they were forced to pass the night, and to sit down to such supper as might be provided in so desolate a spot. The unprepossessing look of everything was completed when the host came in and took his seat at the head of the table. A bear out of the woods could hardly have been rougher, with his unshaven hair and unkempt beard. He answered to the type of border ruffian, and his appearance ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... Oh! do not desert your poor friend in his bitter affliction!... Ask Mr. —— to come, as I must deliver a message to him from my poor Eddie.... I need not ask you to notice his death and to speak well of him. I know you will. But say what an affectionate son he was to me, his poor desolate mother..." ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... inch beyond the surface, like the soft, thin foam that enamels yonder tract of ocean, belongs to it, is a part of it, yet is, after all, but a bequest of tempests, and covers only a dark abyss of crossing currents and desolate tangles of rootless kelp. Everybody was drawn to her, yet not a soul took any comfort in her. Her very voice had in it a despairing sweetness, that seemed far in advance of her actual history; it was an anticipated miserere, a perpetual dirge, where nothing had yet gone down. So ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... the little refrain of the "good, good story;" to accomplish this I had to make my voice very flute-like; and as I sang, the porch of Bories appeared to me more vividly than ever, as it stood, sunny but desolate, under the dazzling light of the September noon. This association was a little like the one that later established itself for me between the sad falsetto of the Arab songs, the snowy splendor of their mosques and the winding-sheet whiteness of their ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... Blackfeet do not especially say that this future life is an unhappy one, but, from the way in which they speak of it, it is clear that for them it promises nothing desirable. It is a monotonous, never ending, and altogether unsatisfying existence,—a life as barren and desolate as the country which the ghosts inhabit. These people are as much attached to life as we are. Notwithstanding the unhappy days which have befallen them of late years,—days of privation and hunger,—they cling to life. Yet they seem to have no fear of death. ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... Datchet, which was occupied from 1782 till 1785, was a source of despair to CAROLINA HERSCHEL, who looked upon its desolate and isolated condition with a housekeeper's eyes. This was nothing to her brother, who gayly consented to live upon "eggs and bacon," now that he was free at last to mind the heavens. The ruinous state of the place had no terrors in his eyes, for was there not a laundry which ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... who took the dangerous road came to no city at all but to a far-off desolate place without houses or highways or farms. Wild creatures hid in the brush and snakes glided in and out among the rocks. One day he came upon a wild woman who was combing her hair with a ...
— The Laughing Prince - Jugoslav Folk and Fairy Tales • Parker Fillmore
... large meeting I ever attended without dear sister, and I wonder I did not feel desolate, for I knew not a creature there. Nevertheless, the Lord strengthened me, and I spoke with ease for an ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... just got home from Killaloe, and mean to remain here all through the summer. After leaving your sisters this house seems so desolate; but I shall have the more time to think of you. I have been reading Tennyson, as you told me, and I fancy that I could in truth be a Mariana here, if it were not that I am so quite certain that ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... and the darkness that is peopled by Mimir's brood, from the ultimate silent fastness of the desolate deep-sea gloom, and the peace of that ageless gloom, blind Oriander came, from Mimir, to be at war with the sea and to jeer at the sea's desire. When tempests are seething and roaring from the Aesir's inverted bowl all seamen have heard ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... of Jahangir, passing through some of the old capital cities of Western India, then deserted and in ruins, writes to the Archbishop of Canterbury: 'I know not by what policy the Emperors seek the ruin of all the ancient cities which were nobly built, but now be desolate and in rubbish. It must arise from a wish to destroy all the ancient cities in order that there might appear nothing great to have existed before their time.'[4] But these cities, like all which are supported ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... having bracelets at the tips for my ankles and wrists. It kept me a foot short of my full stretch. I could get my eye to the edge of the window and no farther, and then I saw much sky and a little desolate moorland running up into a gauntly-wooded ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... Bert from his low spirits, and as Mr. Lloyd told him about those Sable Island ponies he grew more and more interested. They certainly have a curious history. To begin with, nobody knows just how they got on that strange, wild, desolate, sand bank that rises from the ocean about a hundred miles to the east of Nova Scotia. Had they the power of speech, and were they asked to give an account of themselves, they would probably reply with Topsy that "they didn't know—they 'spects they grow'd." ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... vision,—none the less The benediction bides, old skies return, And that unreal thing, preeminent, Makes air and dream of all we see and feel? Shall he divine no strength unmade of votes, Inward, impregnable, found soon as sought, 620 Not cognizable of sense, o'er sense supreme? Else were he desolate as none before. His holy places may not be of stone, Nor made with hands, yet fairer far than aught By artist feigned or pious ardor reared, Fit altars for who guards inviolate God's chosen seat, the sacred form of man. Doubtless his church will be no hospital For superannuate forms ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... letter of introduction to her, which she honored. I was much pleased to be remembered by such a person. How such a kind hearted woman must have grieved, with a view constantly present from her home, of our suffering soldiers on desolate Belle Island! ...
— Between the Lines - Secret Service Stories Told Fifty Years After • Henry Bascom Smith
... a wild and desolate gorge, barren, rocky and windswept; the tinkle of clear water ran down over the grey boulders out of sight and dropped down the face of the cliff into the sea; brown and grey lay the hillsides and rocks under the glaring noonday sun; there was no living ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... at the pang of it! Other poets have wasted pity on the dead-and-gone maids, but his is for the fields they leave desolate." ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... wandered above the desolate plains of the Somme, no longer on earth but in the sky, mounted on winged steeds, who started up with a "heavy sound" from south or north, will be immortal like those of the ancient epics. It will be said that it was Dorme or Heurtaux, or ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... Moses, with its grapes, its vast forests of cedar, fir, and oak, its treasures of wheat, olive-oil, and other rich agricultural products. Now all are gone. The entire country seen by the traveler in the Holy Land to-day is one of the most desolate regions on the globe, where the few inhabitants are scarcely able to ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... a higher instance, here is an exquisite little painted poem, by Edward Frere; a cottage interior, one of the thousands which within the last two months[25] have been laid desolate in unhappy France. Every accessory in the painting is of value—the fireside, the tiled floor, the vegetables lying upon it, and the basket hanging from the roof. But not one of these accessories would have been admissible in sculpture. You must carve nothing but what ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... officer said he was desolate. Steps would be taken—later in the week—the result of which would probably be to render that young hairdresser prematurely bald. But, meanwhile, beyond skating round and round them, for which they did not even feel they wanted to thank him, the German officer could ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... and already life seemed a little less desolate. But the new-comer continued to yelp with pain, and Dan examined the ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... him wanly, murmured a desolate response—she had "sewing to do"—and left the room; while Amberson shook his head ruefully at his sister. "I've often thought that humor was not my forte," he sighed. "Lord! She doesn't 'cheer ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... helpful love of a helpmate Who flies me with pliant oars, flies overbounding the sea-depths? Nay, an this Coast I quit, this lone isle lends me no roof-tree, Nor aught issue allows begirt by billows of Ocean: 185 Nowhere is path for flight: none hope shows: all things are silent: All be a desolate waste: all makes display of destruction. Yet never close these eyne in latest languor of dying, Ne'er from my wearied frame go forth slow-ebbing my senses, Ere from the Gods just doom implore I, treason-betrayed, 190 And with my breath supreme firm faith of Celestials ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... dark, leaden, lowering,— Grey purple shadows fading on the hills; Dreary and desolate the far expanse And gloomy sameness of the open plain. A peasant woman, in white wimpled hood, White vest, and scarlet petticoat, surveys The meadow, with rough hands crossed ...
— Poems • Sophia M. Almon
... Darrell has already done for me,—me who have no claim on him,—it seems to me as if I must hate the man who insinuates, 'Fear lest your benefactor find a smile at his own hearth, a child of his own blood; for you may be richer at his death in proportion as his life is desolate.'" ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... round its shores. The Steep Holme is a lofty and barren rock, tenanted alone by the cormorant and the sea-mew: it is smaller than the Flat Holme. The following lines are so beautifully descriptive of this lonely and desolate spot, that we cannot resist ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 472 - Vol. XVII. No. 472., Saturday, January 22, 1831 • Various
... different subjects all the way to Moss Paul. The road runs along the course of the Ewes, between a double range of mountains, quite green, and covered with sheep; but there is very little variety in the scenery; and, altogether, from scarcely a cottage being to be seen, it has a very desolate appearance. Moss Paul, where they were obliged to stop, is one of the poorest small inns that are to be met with in Scotland. The contrast was so great from the richly wooded cheerful dale which Helen had always lived in, that she told her father the very ...
— The Eskdale Herd-boy • Mrs Blackford
... seeing the name of a village on the map that touches his imagination, he takes the train, feeling convinced he will find there an Arcadian simplicity. But the village he catches sight of from the carriage window is a morose and lonely village, in the midst of desolate plains. And worse than Nature are the human beings he sees at the station; they lurk in corners, they scrutinise his luggage, and gradually he believes them all ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... Mitchell), growing on them. Their soil is a tenacious clay, blistered and rotten. These flats extend to uncertain distances from the river, and vary in breadth from a quarter of a mile to two miles or more. Beyond them the country is sandy, desolate, and scrubby. Pine ridges, generally lying parallel to the stream, render travelling almost impracticable where they exist, whilst the deep fissures and holes on the flats, into which it is impossible to prevent the drays from falling, give but little room for selection. Our ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... mere trifle. But automobile trifles demand minutes, and nature did not postpone the resistless march of its storm battalions. As I toiled with wrench and screw-driver I cursed the folly which induced me to plunge into that desolate stretch of ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... tyrannous need to attach themselves to some one thing or being which they single out from among the beings and things around them; this need is felt most keenly by a man of quick sympathies, and all the more pressingly if his life has been made desolate. So, trust me, it is a favorable sign if a man is strongly attached to his dog or his horse! Among the suffering flock which chance has given into my care, this poor little sufferer has come to be for me like the pet lamb that the shepherd lasses deck ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... Weary and desolate, he haunted restaurants and hotels, in the vague hope that chance might some day yield him a glimpse of her, as a gambler clings to a faint prospect of redeeming his fortunes through some wonderful and unexpected revulsion of luck. But the ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson
... march through a wild and desolate country, he arrived with his exhausted troops at Treves on the 29th, one day before the arrival of 10,000 French, who were advancing to occupy it. The garrison of 600 men in the citadel evacuated it at his approach. He immediately collected and set to work 6000 peasants to ...
— The Cornet of Horse - A Tale of Marlborough's Wars • G. A. Henty
... little hill like a pest of grasshoppers, mowing down the soldiers with the very newest and best weapons of warfare, and leaving nothing at last but the robbed and mutilated bodies lying naked in the desolate land of ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... in profligate waste, Lest no Comforts Life's evening to cheer; He must only it's bitterness taste, No Friend, no kind relative near. His Children by want forc'd to roam, Are aliens wherever they are: They have long left his desolate home; Have left him ...
— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield
... and I left the party in search of an antelope; until at the distance of a mile or two on the right, the tall white wagons and the little black specks of horsemen were just visible, so slowly advancing that they seemed motionless; and far on the left rose the broken line of scorched, desolate sand-hills. The vast plain waved with tall rank grass that swept our horses' bellies; it swayed to and fro in billows with the light breeze, and far and near antelope and wolves were moving through it, the hairy backs of the latter alternately appearing ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... and weeks he wooed her to bring the smile to her lips, but always she grew whiter and more desolate; so that when she walked the terraces above the boiling surf, she seemed like a white flower torn of its petals and tossed up by the ...
— The Faery Tales of Weir • Anna McClure Sholl
... her standing at prayer utterly alone, waited till she had made an end of her orisons, when he went up to her and saluted her with the salam, saying, "Who art thou?" Quoth she, "I am a hand-maid of the Almighty." He asked, "What doest thou in this desolate place?" and she answered, "I serve Allah the Most High." When he saw her beauty and loveliness, he fell in love with her, and said to her, "Harkye! Do thou take me to mate and I will be tender to thee and use thee ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... They reached the desolate home, and Bob broke the news to the old man. As Mary poured forth her story of the discovery in Trubus' office, her father's face lighted ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... with a note-book and pencil—by taking long walks. She avoided as far as possible the small area which had once made up the whole of London for her, but even so she was not always successful in escaping from old acquaintances. Once, cutting through Lennox Gardens on her way to that vast, desolate King's Road which stretches its length out into regions unknown to those whose London is the West End, she happened upon Freddie Rooke, who had been paying a call in his best hat and a pair of white spats which would have cut ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... I must have some minutes to myself if I was to bear the burden of that afternoon; and I knelt down with as heavy a heart, almost, as I ever knew. In all my life I had never felt so castaway and desolate. When my father and mother first went from me, I was at least among the places where they had been; June was with me still, and I knew not Miss Pinshon. The journey had had its excitements and its interest. Now I was alone; for ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... of the father still insulted the Merovingian race; the power of the son might excite the jealous ambition of the king of the Franks. Syagrius inherited, as a patrimonial estate, the city and diocese of Soissons: the desolate remnant of the second Belgic, Rheims and Troyes, Beauvais and Amiens, would naturally submit to the count or patrician: [14] and after the dissolution of the Western empire, he might reign with the title, or ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... lapse of time and the wear of memory, and the natural and accidental catastrophies that impair the human record. Such are the "Dragon-Slayer" stories. In one type of these the hero (Frithlaf) is cast on a desolate island, and warned by a dream to attack and slay a dragon guarding treasure. He wakes, sees the dragon arise out of the waves, apparently, to come ashore and go back to the cavern or mound wherein the treasure lay. ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... imitated the example of the governor. But Mariana his mother, in transports of grief, ran to the monastery, crying out at the gates: "Faustus! restore to me my son; to the people, their governor: the church always protects widows; why then rob you me, a desolate widow, of my son?" She persisted several days in the same tears and cries. Nothing that Faustus could urge was sufficient to calm her, or prevail with her to depart without her son. This was certainly as great a trial of Fulgentius's resolution as it could well be put to; but the ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... confusion, but she did not reply, nor make any further offer of support. There was something in the old man's voice which forbade familiarities. He was no longer merely cross and unamiable; she had caught a glimpse into the secret of a desolate heart, and the sight sobered ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... gravelly soil; each farm with its picturesque little buildings, consisting of small, honey-suckled, rose-entwined brick houses, with small, flat, pan-tiled roofs, and lattice-windows; and, hard by, a large hay-stack, three times the size of the house, or a desolate barn, half as big as all the rest of the buildings. From the smallness of the holdings, the farmhouses are dotted about as thickly, and at such varying distances from the roads, as to look like inferior 'villas,' falling out of rank; most ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... the ocean waste, is a world of true sublimity,—a minute infinite,—an ever fertile garden of poetic images, the roots of which are in the unfathomable and the eternal, as truly as any phenomenon which astonishes and awes the eye. The descriptions of the desolate pools and creeks where the dying swan floated, the hint of the silvery marsh mosses by Mariana's moat, came to me like revelations. I always knew there was something beautiful, wonderful, sublime, in those flowery dykes of Battersea Fields; in the long gravelly sweeps of that lone tidal shore; ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... thwart and bring to naught the will of Him that giveth not a castle a direction from a place except it pleaseth Him, and if it please Him not, will the rather that even all castles and all directions thereunto vanish out of the earth, leaving the places wherein they tarried desolate and vacant, so warning His creatures that where He will He will, and where He will ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... look them over, and see how there is hardly any notice, however short and clumsily-worded, in any obscure provincial paper, but what has been cut out and carefully ticketed with its date by the poor, bereaved father,—so proud when he first read them—so desolate now. For one and all are full of praise of this great, unknown genius, which suddenly appeared amongst us. Conjecture as to the authorship ran about like wild-fire. People in London, smooth and polished as the Athenians ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... streets of Tyre were already light, but empty: as though they had got up early to meet some one who had not arrived. I sped through them like a seagull that has the harbour to itself, and was not long in reaching the theatre. How desolate the playbills looked that had been so companionable but two or three hours before. And there was her photograph! Surely it was an omen. Ah, my angel! See, I am bringing you my heart in a song 'All my heart ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... and its shores just as beautiful as during the previous summer. To be sure, the portion that had been burnt down during the great forest fire looked black and desolate but only a small portion of this territory was to be seen from the boat. They passed along the shore opposite and put in at a little cove that looked ...
— Young Hunters of the Lake • Ralph Bonehill
... It meant something for a man of Hollis's years and training to bury himself in this desolate sink-hole of iniquity; to elect to carry on an unequal war with interests that controlled the law machinery of the county and Territory—whose power extended to Washington. No doubt the young man was even now brooding over the future, ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... passage in the 'Agamemnon', 404-5, describing Menelaus pining in his desolate palace for the ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... my settlement in this desolate and far-off region, that I date the commencement of a change for the better in the state of my mind. I do not say that my opinions began to change, but the state of my feelings got better, which rendered possible a change for the better in ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... of my Oneida, I walked my horse across the lawn and up to the desolate row of windows. The shutters had been ripped off their hinges; all within was bare and dark; dimly I made out the shadowy walls of a hallway which divided the house into halves. By the light which filtered through the soiled windows I examined room after room from the outside, then, noiselessly, ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... confounded for your own ways, O house of Israel. 33. Thus saith the Lord God; In the day that I shall have cleansed you from all your iniquities I will also cause you to dwell in the cities, and the wastes shall be builded. 34. And the desolate land shall be tilled, whereat; it lay desolate in the sight of all that passed by. 35. And they shall say, This land that was desolate is become like the garden of Eden; and the waste and desolate and ruined cities are become fenced, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Rollant great loss of his men sees, His companion Olivier calls, and speaks: "Sir and comrade, in God's Name, That you keeps, Such good vassals you see lie here in heaps; For France the Douce, fair country, may we weep, Of such barons long desolate she'll be. Ah! King and friend, wherefore are you not here? How, Oliver, brother, can we achieve? And by what means our news to him repeat?" Says Oliver: "I know not how to seek; Rather I'ld die than shame come of this ...
— The Song of Roland • Anonymous
... tanks said to have been constructed thousands of years ago. It rains only once in every year or two, and a supply of water is obtained by storing the torrents which then flow from the hills. A more desolate desert than that which surrounds the city surely does not exist. Aden itself illustrates how the whirligig of time revolves. Before the discovery of the passage round the Cape of Good Hope it was the chief entrepot for the trade between ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... stood on the fringe of a desolate tract of downs, high above the coast. Over the hedge to the right appeared a long narrow strip of sea. On the three remaining sides nothing was visible but undulating stretches of brown turf, except where, to northward, ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... natives of the contrie. The Ile of Cuba, which is as farr in lengthe as from Valladolid untill Rome, ys at this day, as it were, all waste. St John's Ile, and that of Jammaica, bothe of them very greate, very fertile, and very faire, are desolate. Likewise the Iles of Lucayos nere to the Ile of Hispaniola, and of the north side unto that of Cuba, in nomber beinge above three score ilandes, together with those which they call the Iles of Geant, one with another greate and little, whereof the very worste is fertiler then the kinges garden ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... felt for that desolate-hearted child, and loved him with a mother's tenderness. This was his aunt, Miss Huntingdon, his father's unmarried and only sister. Half his holidays would be spent at her house; and oh, what happy days they were for ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson |
