"Desolate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... road descends the Arno to a richly cultivated district, out of which emerges on its hill the prosperous little town of Bibbiena. High up to eastward springs the broken crest of La Vernia, a mass of hard millstone rock (macigno) jutting from desolate beds of lime and shale at the height of some 3500 feet above the sea. It was here, among the sombre groves of beech and pine which wave along the ridge, that S. Francis came to found his infant Order, ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... off, Duncombe in the front seat, the other three behind. The car gathered speed rapidly. In less than an hour they were half-way to Norwich. Then suddenly the driver took a sharp corner and turned down a long desolate lane. ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... down on her so fiercely. At length an empty car appeared, its yellow flank emblazoned with the name of Mrs. Hochmuller's suburb, and Ann Eliza was presently jolting past the narrow brick houses islanded between vacant lots like giant piles in a desolate lagoon. When the car reached the end of its journey she got out and stood for some time trying to remember which turn Mr. Ramy had taken. She had just made up her mind to ask the car-driver when he shook the reins on the backs of his lean horses, and the ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... with the tall trunks of dead trees and blackened stumps, shut out from one world by the waste of waters before it, shut in from another by dreary, verdureless hills. Surely nobody lived there; those could not be homes, those desolate frame houses where people were "staying" awhile. It seemed as if the whole town, like "Poor Joe," would soon be told by a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... he would never see again, of his father, heart-broken and desolate, of Dolores, whose grief he understood. His sadness increased in proportion as he approached the Pont du Gard. Yet the road was well-known to him; the trees seemed to smile upon their old companion as if in greeting, and the sun shone with more than its ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... she received a letter from Sarah Gailey. It was brought up to her room early in the morning by a half-dressed Alicia Orgreave, and she read it as she lay in bed. Sarah Gailey, struggling with the complexities of the Cedars, away in Hornsey, was unwell and gloomily desolate. She wrote that she suffered from terrible headaches on waking, and that she was often feverish, and that she had no energy whatever. "I am at a very trying age for a woman," she said. "I don't know whether you understand, but I've come to a time of life that really upsets ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... twice, since his majority, he had returned to America to prove that he was not an expatriate, though certainly he was one, the only tie existing between him and his native land being the bankers who regularly honored his drafts. And who shall condemn him for preferring Italy to the desolate center of New York state, where good servants and good weather are as ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... Why had I never known the sacred joy that seemed to vibrate through the frame, and sparkle in the eyes of this common sailor! Why must I be forever alone, with a curse of a woman's lie on my life, weighing me down to the dust and ashes of a desolate despair! Something in my face must have spoken my thoughts, for the ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... miles of merry woodland, by fields and orchards, whose every crop is a fresh conquest of man over Nature in this one of her most niggardly phases, by desolate cabins and lonely farms, until at a sudden turn the broad, beautiful sea swept up to glorify the scene. And while Miselle with flushed cheeks and tearful eyes drank in the ever-new delight of its presence, Monsieur began a story of how a man, almost a stranger to him, had come ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... There, beside the desolate hearth-stone, sat the widow and her children. She was a matronly woman of about thirty years, with a face faded by care, a deep, dark eye, and long, disheveled hair about her shoulder. On one side was a dark-haired ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... thankful to the Almighty for our preservation, Ready; but still there are feelings which I cannot get over. Here we are cast away upon a desolate island, which perhaps no ship may ever come near, so that there is little chance of our being taken off. It is a melancholy and cruel fate, Ready, and that ...
— Masterman Ready • Captain Marryat
... Tibet and events referred to. 2. Noise of burning bamboos. 3. Road retains its desolate character. 4. Persistence of eccentric manners illustrated. 5. Name of ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... out sometimes to the other end of the town, even when the sickness was chiefly there; and as the thing was new to me, as well as to everybody else, it was a most surprising thing to see those streets which were usually so thronged now grown desolate, and so few people to be seen in them, that if I had been a stranger and at a loss for my way, I might sometimes have gone the length of a whole street (I mean of the by-streets), and seen nobody to direct me except watchmen ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... old summer-house perched on a slope that overlooked the scene of Jeanie's accident in the winter. A cold wind drove down upon him as he ascended. The sky was grey with scurrying clouds. The bare downs looked indescribably desolate. ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... 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 himself ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... of Overton at nine o'clock to-night. I'm due to catch it. But I'm going to take you all to dinner at the Tourraine and we are going for a drive afterward which will end at the station, where you will all see me on my desolate way. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... the contrary, it is one of the most dismal and desolate parts of the whole march, with its burned forests and its steep grades. Besides, some of the worst muskeg in the country is on each side of this Athabasca divide—it just runs in terraces all up ...
— The Young Alaskans in the Rockies • Emerson Hough
... brightness of the Applegate road there emerged the large figure of a young man, who led a handsome grey mare by the halter. As he moved against the coloured screen of the leaves something of the beauty of the desolate landscape showed in his face—the look of almost autumnal sadness that one finds, occasionally, in the eyes of the imaginative rustic. He wore a pair of sheepskin leggins into which the ends of his corduroy trousers were stuffed slightly below the knees. ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... white sister and brothers, and was happy. The Bald Eagle's people came when my white brothers were at peace; they found a trembling fawn within the lodge; they led her away; they left tears and loneliness where joy and peace had been. The Mohawk squaw could not see the hearth of her white brothers desolate. She took the canoe; she came to the lodge of the great father of his tribe, and she says to him, Give back the white squaw to her home on the Rice Lake, and take in her stead the rebellious daughter of the Ojebwa's enemy, to die or be his servant; she ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... age he describes himself as "an idle, desolate, hanger on ... without an idea of a career or a profession or a trade," but he was tolerably happy because be could fancy himself in love with pretty girls and had been removed from the real misery of school, but had not a single aspiration regarding his future. Three of his household ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... adds sensibly to the brilliancy of the complexion of London. The flare of electricity in the region of the theatres made a midnight summer in the empty heart of September, and recalled the gayety of the season for the moment to the desolate metropolis. But this splendor was always so massed and so vivid that even in the height of the season it was one of the things that distinguished itself among the various immense impressions. The impressions were all, if I may so try to characterize them, transitory; ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... with him if he had been obliged to speak to anybody; but there was nobody to speak to. Few were abroad, at that late season and unlovely time. Comfort had probably retreated to the barns and farmhouses — to the homesteads, — for it was a desolate road that he travelled; the very wagons and horses that he met were going home, or would be. It was a long road, and mile after mile was plodded over, and evening began to say there was nothing so dark it might not be darker. ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... of tangle at my feet. Something at the same moment rang sharply, like a falling coin. I stooped, and there, sure enough, crusted with the red rust, there lay an iron shoe-buckle. The sight of this poor human relic thrilled me to the heart, but not with hope nor fear, only with a desolate melancholy. I held it in my hand, and the thought of its owner appeared before me like the presence of an actual man. His weather-beaten face, his sailor's hands, his sea-voice hoarse with singing at the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rule, the Indians vindicated their right, and before the close of the sixteenth century, the entire group of the Western Islands in the hands of the Spaniards, containing, when Columbus discovered them, many millions of inhabitants, were left literally desolate from suicide. Of the anecdotes of this terrible self-immolation, as they were then known in England, here are a ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... all his bellowing throng, Far, far was hurl'd the void abyss along; And all the bright angelic choir To loftiest raptures tune the heavenly lyre, Pour'd in loud symphony the impetuous strain; And every fiery orb and planet sung, And wide through night's dark desolate domain Rebounding long and deep the ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... dwelt in an Italian city, where there dwelt with me for a while, an Englishman of an amiable nature, great enthusiasm, and no discretion. This friend discovered a desolate stranger, mourning over the unexpected death of one very dear to him, in a solitary cottage among the vineyards of an outlying village. The circumstances of the bereavement were unusually distressing; and the survivor, new to the peasants and the country, sorely needed help, being alone ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... in the ballad had been wronged. Lo! it was the lady before him; and soft horns blew; he smelt the languid night-flowers; he saw the stars crowd large and close above the arid plain this lady leaning at her window desolate, pouring ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... ferocity that you would give worlds to encounter. That pair of proud Philadelphia sisters, statues sculptured in peach-pulp and wrapped in gauze, look somehow like twin Muses at the gates of a temple. Whole rows of unmatched girls stare at the sea, desolate but implacable, waiting for partners equal to them in social position. In such a dearth a Philadelphia girl will turn to her old music-teacher and flirt solemnly with him for a whole evening, sooner than involve herself with well-looking young chits from ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... in The Search after Happiness, but what they have never forgotten, what they never can forget, are the jessamine bells and the Wistaria petals, yellow and purple, blown about in the warm winds that visited their now desolate and forsaken Southern home. Less beautiful things than jessamine and Wistaria, if only they clustered round the house where you were born, are remembered when the lines of far better authors than Miss Hannah More have gone clean out of ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... worn out, comes from an early time: that is to say, so long ago as 1526; at which period a great part of the population on the banks of the Drot, and round La Reole and Marmande, was carried off by an epidemic; so that the country was completely desolate; and where all was once fertile and flourishing, nothing but ruin and misery was to be seen. Henry d'Albret, King of Navarre, anxious to save it from sterility, and to restore a happy state of things, re-peopled the lands with emigrants, whom he induced ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... Notre-Dame remained open, allowing a view of the empty desolate church, draped in mourning, without candles, and ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... doubt, he will apply the instruments when his time comes, and will not wait on their concurrence. You see now strange things done, you wonder at them how we are brought down from our excellency,—how our land is laid desolate by strangers,—how many instruments of the Lord's work are laid aside, how he lifts up a rod of indignation against us, and is like to overturn even the foundations of our land,—all(145) were not in our mind before, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... each other rarely now. The health of Camors did not admit of his taking regular meals. These two desolate existences offered then, in the midst of the almost royal state which surrounded ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... six months.... I betook myself to sawing and splitting wood; there being an inward unquietness which demanded active exercise, and I sawed, I think, more briskly than ever before. When I re-entered the house, it was with somewhat of a desolate feeling; yet not without an intermingled pleasure, as being the more conscious that all separation was temporary, and scarcely real, even for the little time that it may last. After my solitary dinner, I lay down, with the Dial in my hand, and attempted to sleep; but sleep ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... was a tragic world into which this boy Page had been born. He was ten years old when the Civil War came to an end, and his early life was therefore cast in a desolate country. Like all of his neighbours, Frank Page had been ruined by the war. Both the Southern and Northern armies had passed over the Page territory; compared with the military depredations with which Page became familiar in the last years of his life, the Federal ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... he somewhat indignantly. "She asked me to write for her to some maid of her acquaintance in Leyden, and when it came to telling of her orphanage and desolate estate her woman-heart gave way, and she was moved ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... could live without you? One cannot lose the habit of happiness. I was desolate. I thought I should die. I will tell you about all that and you will see. And you—you fled ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... tell us that, on the sixth day after his baptism, he made a donation of some lands to this monastery.—The details, however, of the circumstances connected with the first, diminish its credibility; and Jumieges, then desolate, could scarcely contain a community capable of accepting the donation. But under the reign of the son and successor of Rollo, the abbey of Jumieges once more rose from its ashes. Baldwin and Gundwin, two ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... account of its wonderful defenses. A group gathered in front of the little hotel, and questioned Anthony as to who the three boys in the uniform of scouts might be, and of the nature of their mission that tempted them to invade a region being made desolate by war. ...
— The Boy Scouts on Belgian Battlefields • Lieut. Howard Payson
... many fields they came to the village, and it looked a desolate place, even on this fine evening, and Bryden remarked that the county did not seem to be as much lived in as it used to be. It was at once strange and familiar to see the chickens in the kitchen; and, wishing to re-knit ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... would cross the dry country and come to the good hunting in a third of the time that it would take to go far to the north and circle back again. And so it was that he continued on toward the west, and crossing a range of low mountains came in sight of a broad plateau, rock strewn and desolate. Far in the distance he saw another range of mountains beyond which he felt must lie the hunting ground of the Mangani. There he would join them and remain for a while before continuing on toward the coast and the little cabin that his father had built ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... bade him play. Under the influence of the music he ordered the soldiers to dig trenches in the sandy bed of the waterless waddy through which lay the line of march. They did so, and next morning the trenches were full of the water that had drained down into them underground from the desolate, forbidding mountains on either hand. The prophet's success in striking water in the wilderness resembles the reported success of modern dowsers, though his mode of procedure was different. Incidentally he rendered another service to his countrymen. For the skulking Moabites from their ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... room was dimly lit by daylight tubes from above. The damage he, Carse, had wrought when besieged in it, a week before, had all been repaired. The place was deserted—it seemed even desolate—but in Carse's moment of memory it was peopled. There had been the tall, graceful shape in black silk; there the operating table and the frail old man bound on it; there the four other men, white men and gowned in the smocks of surgeons, but whose faces were lifeless and expressionless. Dr. Ku ...
— The Passing of Ku Sui • Anthony Gilmore
... prayers, their fasts, and their vigils, were less meritorious than the zeal which they expressed, and the dangers which they braved, in the defence of truth and innocence. [139] The monasteries of Egypt were seated in lonely and desolate places, on the summit of mountains, or in the islands of the Nile; and the sacred horn or trumpet of Tabenne was the well-known signal which assembled several thousand robust and determined monks, who, for the most part, had been the peasants of the adjacent country. When their ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... that lay at anchor before us. When we afterwards landed the air had that peculiar Mediterranean translucency which Southern islands wear; and the plantation we visited had the loveliest tropical garden, though tangled and desolate, which I have ever seen in the South. The deserted house was embowered In great blossoming shrubs, and filled with hyacinthine odors, among which predominated that of the little Chickasaw roses which everywhere bloomed and trailed around. There were fig-trees and date-palms, crape-myrtles and wax-myrtles, ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... to their camp. On their way, they passed through the desolate streets of the city; the mud cottages on each side were empty, and blood flowed between. The young officer, as he marched at the head of his company, was struck by seeing a row of his own fellow-soldiers lying dead upon the ground. They had been placed there ready ...
— Far Off • Favell Lee Mortimer
... the boat not able to rise, and scarcely one of us could move a limb, a vessel hove in sight. We were taken on board, and treated with extreme kindness. The second last boat was also picked up at sea, and the survivors saved. A ship afterwards sailed in search of our companions on the desolate island, ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... fly away; he turned round over our heads continually, and continued his cries. Never have any groans of suffering pained me so much as that desolate appeal, as that lamentable reproach of this poor bird ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... the professor learned how to reach the strange place. It was in the midst of a desolate country where none of the giants ever went, so afraid were ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood
... day two ships came sailing up the James River and anchored in the harbour. From their decks bronzed men in patched and ragged garments looked with astonished eyes upon the desolate scene. ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... silent again in the humble house; not a human sound interrupted the stillness reigning in the desolate room. Only the hum of a few flies, rushing with their heads against the window-panes, was heard. Once a rustling noise was heard in a corner, and a mouse glided across the floor, its piercing, glittering eyes looked searchingly around, and the sight of the bloody, motionless form, lying prostrate ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... lost in the forest, and what had been a playground was become a vast and desolate land for me, and all the things that I had ever heard of what dangers lurked within it, came back to my mind. I remembered that the grey wolf's skin on which I slept had come hence, and I minded the calf ...
— A Prince of Cornwall - A Story of Glastonbury and the West in the Days of Ina of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... in strait and need, Agnes; the sun does not shine on a more desolate man than I am,—one more utterly alone in the world; there is no one left to love me. Agnes, can you not love me a little?—let it be ever so little, it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... from his pocket, and applied it to the lock; but the door was swollen with the damp, and stiff with age, and it required all his strength to open it. The courtyard was overgrown with moss, the steps crumbling away; all looked desolate and deserted. He entered the hall, and lighted a lamp which he had brought with him. He felt a strange agitation as he approached the door which he had so often entered to visit Lorenza. A slight noise ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... this desolate part of the country was to capture turtles. Here is the ground of the green and loggerhead turtles, and, according to Sandy, the hawksbill, from which the shell of commerce is taken, is also ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... land, flat and desolate, dank and dirty-looking. The flat, dull, dirty marsh country seemed to be without life; the very grass seemed blighted. And we were drifting ashore to it, fast drifting ashore to the tune of the ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... and that other Indians had taken fifteen or seventeen of our 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
... rode, and when it was near the end of the afternoon Florian found himself at the edge of a wild and desolate moor. Within the great circle of the horizon, under the pale sky, not a tree, not a house, not a shepherd's hut even was to be seen—nothing but the great barren waste rolling, rising and falling to the very edge of the world. Lower and lower sank the sun; it grew cold, and a blue mist fell. Twilight ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston
... he came not to the help of the Lord against the mighty. Up, then, and be doing; the blood of martyrs, reeking upon scaffolds, is crying for vengeance; the bones of saints, which lie whitening in the highways, are pleading for retribution; the groans of innocent captives from desolate isles of the sea, and from the dungeons of the tyrants' high places, cry for deliverance; the prayers of persecuted Christians, sheltering themselves in dens and deserts from the sword of their persecutors, famished ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... was old, with here and there a worn-out and neglected field. A creek wound its way among the hills, deep and dark in places, but babbling out into a broad and shiny ford where we crossed. One moment the scene was desolate, with gullied hill-sides, but further on and off to the right I could see poetic strips of meadow land, and further yet, upon a hill-top, stood a grim old house of brick and stone. We turned off ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... these conflicts with the militia and regulars, the ravages of the Indians over the whole country are stated to have been most fearful. Women and children were murdered, and the hearth made desolate in every portion of the country. In the more settled parts near St Augustine, the sugar-cane plantations, with the expensive works attached to them, were destroyed, and in many cases the slaves who were on ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... wells and springs disappeared and lost their beauty in consequence of that order of things which the gods brought about. Water having become scarce, the places set up by charity for its distribution became desolate.[427] The Brahmanas abstained from sacrifices and recitation of the Vedas. They no longer uttered Vashats and performed other propitiatory rites. Agriculture and keep of cattle were given up. Markets and shops were abandoned. Stakes for tethering sacrificial animals disappeared. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... of town, Lady Halifax, and I am rather desolate without her—we see so much of her, you know. But she will be back soon—I dare say I will be able to bring her next Thursday. How delicious this coffee is! I shall have another cup, if it keeps me awake for a week. Oh, you got my note about ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... Then, over the desolate waste, through the heavy gloom, a voice seemed borne faint on the cold air, "Occupy till I come!" He sank to his knees. His straining eyes caught the feeble glint of a light, but at an immeasurable distance. Again he called; and again the same response, but nearer. A glow began to suffuse ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... to carry something heavier than that silly little whip, and now it's all over. She will never be able to control him again. Hephaestus will have to be killed, and I will be desolate. Ach, ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... 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
... his people's sins atoning, Him she saw in torments groaning, Given to the scourger's rod; Saw her darling offspring dying, Desolate, forsaken, crying. Yield his spirit ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... or their effects overcome. If disastrous war should sweep our commerce from the ocean, another generation may renew it; if it exhaust our treasury, future industry may replenish it; if it desolate and lay waste our fields, still, under a new cultivation, they will grow green again, and ripen to future harvests. It were but a trifle even if the walls of yonder Capitol were to crumble, if its lofty pillars should fall, and its gorgeous decorations be all covered by the dust of the valley. ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... dark. The channel was choked with charred debris that had fallen into it when the forest had burned, and its shores were soft and muddy. After a time, when Baree stopped and looked about him, he could no longer see the green timber he had left. He was alone in that desolate wilderness of charred tree corpses. It was as still as death, too. Not the chirp of a bird broke the silence. In the soft ash he could not hear the fall of his own feet. But he was not frightened. There was the assurance ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... country which was one continual rise and fall, with stony beds of wadis to check progress, without a tree to lend a few moments' grateful relief from a burning sun, and nothing but the rare sight of a squalid native hut to relieve the monotony of a sun-dried desolate land. ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... in astonishment. "Who pleads for mercy on behalf of these white men? Surely not you, Insipa, whose only son they have done to death, leaving you desolate in ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... desolate in the extreme, the mountains on either hand looking as if they had been swept by a tornado of stone. Stone avalanches hung suspended on their sides, or had shot down into the chasm below. It was a kind of Alpine scenery, where crushed ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... whole island—an honest English yeoman; and tore him from his farm, from his house hard by his mother's grave, from the joy of his heart, his Susan, and sent him who had never traveled a hundred miles in his life across a world of waters to keep sheep at the Antipodes. A bereaved and desolate heart went with Farmer Dodd in the gig to Newborough; sad, desolate and stricken hearts remained behind. When two loving hearts are torn bleeding asunder it is a shade better to be the one that is driven away into action, than the bereaved twin that ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... died on the 16th July, at the age of eighteen, from the want of medical aid, when surveying, in winter, the Australian Alps. His grave, trodden by cattle hoofs, is in a desolate unconsecrated spot. He had served the public, gratis, upwards of two years, ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... would not make me unhappy. It would make me very happy, Patty, to see you married to a man you would love;—very, very happy; though my days would be desolate ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... 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 with ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... a whitish, desolate sky, stretched the white, empty leagues of snow, unbroken by rock or tree or hill, to the straight, menacing horizon. Green-black, and splotched with snow that clung here and there upon their branches, along ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Northumberland has been enriched by some of the best blood that ever flowed through mortal veins. That part with which we have most to do is the group of islands lying off its coast, but Lindisfarne and the Farne Islands are interesting, not so much because of the wild and desolate grandeur of their rocks, as because two persons have lived and wrought there. St. Cuthbert and Grace Darling—two widely different persons indeed—the man, the dreamer and the saint, and the simple strong-hearted maiden, living at long distances from each other, but both ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... City in the Sea, Eulalie, and Israfel. Rarely has so large a fame rested on so small a number of poems, and rested so securely. His range of themes, it will be noticed, is very narrow. As in his tales, he dwells in a weird, fantastic, or desolate region—usually under the shadow of death. He conjures up unearthly landscapes as a setting for his gloomy and morbid fancies. In The City in the Sea, ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... looked in as he usually did, since Mr. Audley, sleeping out of the house, never came in till after early church. The nurse, who still slept in the room, was gone to dress; there was only a flickering night-light, and the room looked very desolate and forlorn, still more so the voice that called out to him, 'Felix! ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... disasters; though one of my horses was lamed in shoeing by a smith, who came home drunk from a funeral; and though the back pannel of my carriage was broken by the pole of a chaise; and though one day I went without my dinner at a large desolate inn, where nothing was to be had but whiskey; and though one night I lay in a little smoky den, in which the meanest of my servants in England would have thought it impossible to sleep; and though I complained bitterly, and swore it was impracticable for a gentleman to travel ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... I have not yet arrived physically," she answered with a faint smile, "at this degree of old age, but if you could read to the bottom of my heart, you would see it as gloomy and as desolate as these chambers with their want of light ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... and when I located it I joyously proclaimed it a 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 forest ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... arm-in-arm, paced up and down plotting their weird stories. She walked through the same old gate, on the same single stone pavement and over the same stile out into the same heather fields, gazing on the same dreary sky above and the same desolate earth on every side. She dined in the same old "Black Bull"; sat in poor Branwell's chair and was served by the same person who dealt out the drinks to that poor unfortunate—then a young bar-maid, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... men to the changeless face of Nature, I renewed my old-time acquaintance with the natural wonders of the earth—the thundering cataracts, the stormy ocean shores, the lonely mountain tops, the great rivers, the glittering splendors of the polar regions, and the desolate places of ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... plead your father's words,—words written twelve years before,—and as if that were your reason for being indifferent to my dislike to the alliance. But you requested her to marry you,—and she refused you with insolent contempt; and now you are ready to leave me,—leave me desolate in a ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... secret of its popularity. In spite of glaring faults, and almost a cruel disregard of the family's welfare, Rip Van Winkle has the audience with him from the very beginning. His ineffably sad but quiet realization of his desolate condition when his wife turns him out into the storm, leaves scarcely a dry eye in the theatre. His living in others and not in himself makes him feel the changes of his absence all the more keenly. His return after his twenty years' sleep is painful to witness; and when he asks, with ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... should quench the laughter and the lights. Beneath the gas flare stolid faces passed, Too dull for sin; old loosened lips set hard To drain the stale lees from the cup of sense; Or if a young face yearned from out the mist Made by its own bright hair, the eyes were wan With desolate fore-knowledge of the end. My life lay waste about me: as I walked, From the gross dark of unfrequented streets The face of my own youth peered forth at me, Struck white with pity at the thing I was; And globed in ghostly fire, thrice-virginal, ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... proud—a nobleman to whom we must hope that Ireland will yet raise some monument of enduring fame. The O'Connell sept were driven from their ancestral homes, in 1172, by Raymond, Strongbow's son-in-law. Their territory lay along the Shannon. They were now compelled to take refuge in a wild and desolate part of Kerry, too wild and too desolate to attract English cupidity. A MS. is still preserved in the British Museum, written by one of the O'Connell family; it is in the Irish language, and bears date 1245. In this document mention is made ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... good-bye, the tears filled her eyes again, and oh, how lonely and desolate the poor girl felt, as she shivered in the sharp air, and how hopelessly she again took up her fight against ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... and so doing he will fulfil the duties that are especially his; but let the knight-errant explore the corners of the earth and penetrate the most intricate labyrinths, at each step let him attempt impossibilities, on desolate heaths let him endure the burning rays of the midsummer sun, and the bitter inclemency of the winter winds and frosts; let no lions daunt him, no monsters terrify him, no dragons make him quail; ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... day that Caroline had spent entirely alone (her uncle being at Whinbury), and whose long, bright, noiseless, breezeless, cloudless hours (how many they seemed since sunrise!) had been to her as desolate as if they had gone over her head in the shadowless and trackless wastes of Sahara, instead of in the blooming garden of an English home, she was sitting in the alcove—her task of work on her knee, her fingers assiduously plying the needle, her eyes following and ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... and lank as rods, Stark as the toddy trees, Swarming as when from the bursting pods Scatter the ripened peas, Flaming pupil and naked claw, Gaunt and desolate, maimed and raw, Cats by courtesy, but, ye gods! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... were cold through and through, and on the other side of the road, on a slope, shone the sad little light of the watchman's tower. There, in the darkness, lived a whole family. Through the shadows the little red fire seemed to be as desolate as the family. The children were scrofulous and suffered; the mother was thin and sickly. To procreate and to bury! Such was the life of the father, probably the most unfortunate of all, because the household depended wholly upon him, and he saw no gleam of hope anywhere. ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... looked out with veiled eyes upon the lake chequered with the blue and white of its inverted sky. Nelly guessed—trembling—at the procession of images that was passing through them; and felt for a moment strangely separated from him—separated and desolate. ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Pardon me; I want to see your eye beam again with contentment. The loss of your late companion has left you desolate, more desolate than you have been willing to ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... wide curtains, as though he had come to his art to find something in which he could envelop himself completely, and blot out sun and moon and stars, and sink into oblivion. For such a healer Tristan, lying dying on the desolate, rockbound coast, cries through the immortal longing of the music. For such a divine messenger the wound of Amfortas gapes; for such a redeemer Kundry, driven through the world by scorching winds, yearns. His lovers come toward each other, seeking in each other the night, the descent into the fathomless ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... monastery; but just as we were congratulating ourselves on getting rid of him, we would hear that he had recently inflicted some terrible mortifications on himself in sackcloth and ashes; or else that he had gone barefooted on a pilgrimage into some of the wildest and most desolate parts of Varenne. People went so far as to say that he could work miracles. If the prior had not been cured of his gout, that was because, in a spirit of true penitence, he did not wish to ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... render us desirous of spending the night there. The squalid, dispiriting appearance of the town itself, indeed, forms a strong contrast both to the fine country in which it stands, and the capital letters which decorate its name in the map of France. Instead of loitering in its smoky, desolate streets, while horses are changing, I should recommend the traveller to walk on and await their arrival at the Aiguille, an old Roman monument so called, which stands close to the road on the right, within about a mile of the town. This singular pyramidical ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... Geographer. But the problems of France were intricate, and what most appealed to the judgment of Henry was the need of domestic reorganization after a {11} generation of slaughter which had left the land desolate. Hence, despite momentary impulses to vie with Spain and England in oversea expansion, he kept to the path of caution, avoiding any expenditure for colonies which could be made a drain upon the treasury, ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby
... his paper window-curtain and softly raised the window. The moon made the landscape look more vast and desolate than it was in the light of day. Under the horizon it revealed a strip of sea which shone as if it were the portal of another world whose light was reflected thereon. Osgood felt that he was an imprisoned soul this ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... 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
... objections you did remove that afternoon we spent together. After that I was not as unhappy as I had been. I felt, nevertheless, that my views were very indistinct and contradictory, and feared that if you left me thus I might return to the same dark, desolate state in which I had been all summer. I felt that my immortal interest, my happiness for both worlds, was depending on the turn my feelings might take. In my disappointment and distress I called upon God, and it seemed as if I was heard. I felt that He could supply ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... seemed to him a dream of inexpressible sorrow. His father and mother both gone, he felt that he was indeed left alone in the world. No thought of the future had yet entered his mind. He was wholly occupied with his present sorrow. Desolate at heart he slipped away from the graveyard after the funeral ceremony was over, and took his way back again to the lonely dwelling which ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... at 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 ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... red-hot scythe. All this occurs above the surface. What happens beneath is worse. It gnaws with the tenacity of a cancer deep into the ground, lingering hidden until suspicion has passed; then it asserts itself in a new outbreak in places least suspected. When it is all over the region lies desolate for years. It becomes a waste, a tangle of briers—pitiful upstarts of trees ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... the phoebe-bird, builds an exquisite nest of moss on the side of some shelving cliff or overhanging rock. The other day, passing by a ledge, near the top of a mountain in a singularly desolate locality, my eye rested upon one of these structures, looking precisely as if it grew there, so in keeping was it with the mossy character of the rock, and I have had a growing affection for the bird ever since. The ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... the Dauphin," says this chronicler, "King Charles and his Queen were full of such desolate grief that the doctors, fearing the weakness and feeble constitution of the King, were of opinion that excess of sorrow might be prejudicial to his health; they therefore advised as many distractions as possible, and suggested that the princes at court should invent new pastimes, dances, ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... she said with sincere sympathy, pouncing on the desolate and very limp Marjorie. "What's the matter? Did Francis have to go away from you? Look here, honey, you can ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... to fulfill the most degrading services, in the hope of procuring a little learning, and escaping from 'those filthy hogs.' How incredulously would the friar have listened to anyone who could have suggested that this desolate, tattered, dirty boy, might and would fill a greater than an imperial throne! Yet, eventually that swine-herd was clothed in purple and fine linen, and, under the title of Pope Sixtus V., became one of those mighty ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... picturing to himself the many places, lovely and desolate, the hill sides and farm yards and tree-tops and meadows, over which it had blown on its way to "The Mound." As he danced he grew more and more delighted with the motion and the wind. His feet grew stronger and his body lighter. At length, it seemed as if he were borne ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • Elizabeth Lewis and George MacDonald
... to the imagination. It is enough to explain that the tribes of the Makalas, Mashonas, and others that happened to be in the way, were speedily wiped out. The Matabele, reigning in this vast now almost desolate region, soon became the terror of other tribes. The ravagers continued their fiendish operations, and finally set up military kraals and installed their chief in the principal ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... for decades with energy and unflinching consistency, at a moment when she is sure of being supported by England, merely because she has from opportunist considerations come to terms with us about a desolate corner of Africa. No importance can be attached to this idea, in spite of the views expounded by the Imperial Chancellor, v. Bethmann-Hollweg, in his speech of November 9, 1911. We need not, therefore, regard this convention as definitive. It ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... by the result of that persuasive movement. The hand he had taken into his trembled, and she would not yield to the pressure of his arm. She hung her head as if desolate memories were crowding between him and her, and he saw that moisture ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... the edge of the wood, and glanced across the moonlit garden to the house. It seemed dark, deserted and desolate. There was no sign of a light in any of the windows facing ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson |
