"Dismal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Constantine the Great must be referred the commencement of those dark and dismal times which oppressed Europe for a thousand years. It is the true close of the Roman empire, the beginning of the Greek. The transition from one to the other is emphatically and abruptly marked by a new metropolis, a new religion, a new code, ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... home, soon after our engagement, for his annual visit. He was succeeding rather better than his dismal fancies had once prognosticated. He was very often at our house,—very much my friend. I saw through all that clearly enough; I knew he loved me a hundred-fold more passionately than in our earlier days; and the knowledge was to me as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... the drifts, the snowy clifts[32-8] Did send a dismal sheen: Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken— The ice ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... was inhuman and isolating whether there were room on my carts. Then the body would be lifted up; there would be muttered directions, the wounded man would cry, then the other wounded would also cry—after that, there would be the dismal silence again, silence broken only by the shrapnel and the heavy plopping smothers of the rain. But it was myself upon whom my eyes were fixed, myself, a miserable figure, the rain dripping from me, slipping down my neck, squelching under my boots. And as I stood there ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... Holls to Delft, five miles, and attended service at the "New Church." The building was noble, but the service seemed very crude and dismal, nearly the whole of it consisting of two long sermons separated by hymns, ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... in the streets, London appeared a dismal, phantom city. The tall houses vanishing in darkness, the unending noise, the sudden and vague figures passing; some with unclean gaze, others in mysterious haste, the courtesans springing from hansoms and entering their ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... and mouth, and chin A dismal sight presented; And as the snuff got further in, Sincerely she repented. In vain she ran about for ease, She could do nothing ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... garden gate. She started to her feet, determined to execute her project; but she was too late for the appointed signal was heard through the chill gloom of the night. Unhappy woman! The light sound of George de Croisenois' palms striking one upon the other resounded in her ears like the dismal tolling of the funereal bell. She stooped to light a candle at the fire, but her hand trembled so that she could scarcely effect her object. She felt sure that George was still in the garden, though she had made no answer to his signal. She ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... was. The approach now, is one of the finest things in the country: you see the house in the most surprising manner. I declare, when I got back to Sotherton yesterday, it looked like a prison—quite a dismal old prison." ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... were all of us glad enough to get away. I know I sat silent, and motionless, just where he placed me, and stared back across the widening water at the desolate, dismal scene. How lonely, and heart-sickening it was, those few log houses against the hill, the blackened stumps littering the hillside, and the gloomy forest beyond. The figures of a few men were visible along the beach, ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... evening of my arrival!—a bleak dreary evening at the close of January, made still more dismal by a drizzling rain that had never ceased falling since I left my father's snug little house at Briarwood in Warwickshire. I had had to change trains three times, and to wait during a blank and miserable hour and a quarter, or so, at small obscure ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon
... has been your stay for long years. You remember how sad and dreary was the world yesterday. How dismal everything appeared, with not a glimpse of the blue sky. But look now at all this," and Douglas threw out his hand in an eloquent gesture. "See what a change has taken place in a short time. The greyness is gone, and look how blue is the sky, and how bright and warm the sun. Surely ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... right hand descended many times with a force that brought dismal howls from the unlucky culprit—so many times and with such force that the girl began to fear that Jimmy would be fatally injured. Jimmy likewise entertained that fear, for his howls grew more shrill, laden with mingled terror and pain, until the piercing ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... of its surface into the water that lay upon the ice and brought up a load of slush at every step; yet the going would have been still worse without them. The recollection of the six miles we trudged across that lake is a dismal recollection of utter fatigue, of mechanical lifting and falling of encumbered feet with the recurring feeling that it would be impossible to lift them any more. All across that lake I ate snow, and that and ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... through the casement and rustling the light leaves of the tall poplar as they rest against the window panes, and the great round tears as they fall with a dull, heavy drop, drop on his lonely pillow, are the only sounds that break the dismal stillness, excepting now and then, when a great sob, too mighty to be choked down, bursts from the little, overcharged heart. And then Harry fancies he feels, through the thin coverlet and torn night dress, the huge black paws of these same bears grasping the tender round shoulder, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... dismal rain Came down in slanting lines, And wind, that grand old harper, smote His thunder-harp of pines. A ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... listen to their dismal croakings and hurried after the Toads. Being able to make longer jumps than they could, he soon caught up with them, and they all journeyed on together. The Toads were so pleased that one of their cousins was brave enough to join them that they made him very welcome and treated him ...
— Mother West Wind "How" Stories • Thornton W. Burgess
... dismal story Of the fall of my design, Yet I'll come again in glory, If I live till eighty-nine: For I'll have a stronger army And ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... you have too many windows on the "cold side" of a house, give them double sashes (not double panes), and "weather-strip" them. Unpainted trimmings should be of hardwood. Yellow pine finishes up well. Butternut is brighter than walnut. Cherry makes a room cheerful. Walnut is dull and dismal. ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... a dull sense of oppression. What a dismal house it was! The flood of life seemed to roll past and leave it always just above high-water mark. Nothing in it ever changed—neither the people, nor the family portraits, nor the heavy furniture and ugly plate, nor the vulgar ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... hand, and it seems will continue so until it pleases the Lord to pour down his Spirit from on high, or else by some sharp awakening dispensation rouse up drowzy souls out of the lethargy wherein they are fallen, &c. It is many years since the sun fell low upon Scotland, many a dismal day hath it seen since 1649. At that time our reformation mounted towards its highest horizon, and since we left our building on that excellent foundation laid by our honoured forefathers, we have still moved from ill to worse, and is like still ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... a fire the Apostle Peter warmed himself," said the student, stretching out his hands to the fire, "so it must have been cold then, too. Ah, what a terrible night it must have been, granny! An utterly dismal long night!" ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... was a dismal, and for the most of the family, a sleepless one. The morning rose once more, but it brought no cheering sound of blessed rain-drops. The air was still hot ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... you, governor, why can't I sell 'em? Yet have I walked a mile and a half along this dismal place, offering these good and cheap 'uns; ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... wore gloves and top hats—a vanity no Mountjoy boy ever succumbed to, except under dire necessity. Yet it was clear they were not homeward bound, for no trunks encumbered the lobby, and no suggestion of Dulce Domum betrayed itself in their dismal features. Nor had they been expelled, for though their looks might favour the supposition, they talked about the hour they should get back that evening, and wondered if Mrs Ashford would have supper ready for them in her own parlour. And it was equally plain that, ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... Great Britain and that of Ireland during the last century—in the one case showing progress and prosperity, advancing, it is not too much to say, by leaps and bounds, and in the other a stagnation which was relatively, if not absolutely, retrograde—is one of the most dismal factors in English politics. Those who would explain it by natural, racial, or religious considerations are probing too deep for an explanation which is in reality much closer at hand. If the external forces in the two countries throughout that period had been the same it would ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... nerves, when there was another noise which produced a thoroughly different effect, for a donkey from somewhere out on the common suddenly gave vent to its doleful extraordinary bray, ending in a most dismal squeaking yell, suggestive of all the wind being out ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... fury of their wrath, is always exceedingly loath to pass the terrible gulf that divides reform from revolution. He knows how rarely it happens that genuine liberty is not disarmed in the passage, and what sufferings must be undergone by those who live by their labour during the dismal intervals between the sudden destruction of one form of society and the gradual settlement of another. Such a man, however, has no type in a Victor de Mauleon. The circumstances of his life had placed this strong nature at war with society, and corrupted into misanthropy ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... magnificently furnished; they then passed through several spacious rooms, in the same style of grandeur; but all appeared forsaken and desolate. A long gallery came next, it was very dark, just light enough to show that instead of a wall on one side, there was a grating of iron which parted off a dismal dungeon, from whence issued the groans of those victims whom the cruel giant reserved in confinement for his own ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... Tunis, my companion, a Russian, opened the window—to spit! On the first of these occasions, I got a glimpse of a large heap of immense stones, which were pointed out to me as the ruins of Carthage, and a grove of olives, looking dismal exceedingly in the drizzling rain. On the second occasion, I saw the lakes, and a solitary Tunisian sentinel. This soldier was dressed much in the Turkish costume, and I should scarcely have known him from an Osmanli, but that ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... a dismal tea at Colonel Carvel's house in Locust Street that evening Virginia did not touch a mouthful, and the Colonel merely made a pretence of eating. About six o'clock Mrs. Addison Colfax had driven in from Bellegarde, nor could it rain fast enough or hard enough to wash the foam from her panting ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... time to the cheese and butter, in a brief visit to London, where he had no means to walk the hospitals, and in an attempt to practise with little or no qualification at Aldborough itself, present a rather dismal history of apprenticeship which taught nothing. But Love was, for once, most truly and literally Crabbe's solace and his salvation, his master and his patron. When he was barely eighteen, still an apprentice, and ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... economy on the part of the agents sent out, the dissension and jealousy aroused by every such attempt, as well as the absence of the means of transport by land and sea through the methods supplied by science to-day, resulted in a series of dismal failures, which placed an undeserved stigma upon the character of the soil, climate, and resources of Assiniboia. It took more than fifty years of subsequent effort to remove ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... most unfilial disgust, "HIS OLD MAN." It appeared that, like most great actors, he was a very different personage before and behind the curtain. Kings, who are miserable and gloomy through the five acts of a dismal tragedy, and who must needs die at the end of it, are your merriest knaves over a tankard at the Shakspeare's Head. Your stage fool shall be the dullest dog that ever spoiled mirth with sour and discontented looks. Jabez Buster, his employment being over at Mr Clayton's theatre, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... kind to say so, my dear, but you can't keep on making delightful idiots go down with the public. That was what I was thinking when you came in and found me looking so dismal. I had stopped in the middle of a most exciting scene because I had discovered that I was poking ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... dismal scene, too, after the riot and disorder of the night. Sleepy servants were cleaning up, but Fox vowed that they should bring us yet another bottle before going home. So down we sat about the famous old round ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... his garden with the dawn. Hard exercise is the best of opiates for dismal reflections. The General discomposed his daughter by offering to accompany her on her morning ride before breakfast. She considered that it would fatigue him. 'I am not a man of eighty!' he cried. He could have wished ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... did not show a bad taste; for though the other daughters were as ugly as their hideous ma, Mary Shum was a pretty little pink, modest creatur, with glossy black hair and tender blue eyes, and a neck as white as plaster of Parish. She wore a dismal old black gownd, which had grown too short for her, and too tight; but it only served to show her pretty angles and feet, and bewchus figger. Master, though he had looked rather low for the gal of his ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... A dismal dreary day. The fog had crept slowly over the city and enveloped every object within its reach. There was fog clinging to turrets, spires and towers, fog in the streets, fog in the alleys, fog in the ditches—all was ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... brave men in the kingdom of Hrothgar the Dane, and yet again did they strive to maintain the dignity of the great hall, Heorot, and to uphold the honour of their king. But through twelve dismal years the Grendel took its toll of the bravest in the realm, and to sleep in the place that Hrothgar had built as monument to his magnificent supremacy, ever meant, for the sleeper, shameful death. ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... the dismal place. "Go home, madame," he said, addressing Eve, "we will follow you.—Well, my dear friend" (turning to David), "so you allowed them to catch you! Why did you come out? How came you ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... to Florian's, where the assembled crowd were holding an eager and stormy discussion to which the tenor's arrival put an end. In one corner, near a window looking out on the colonnade, gloomy, with a fixed gaze and rigid attitude, Emilio was a dismal image of despair. ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... a vessel hurled, A dismal wreck, upon the rockbound shoal, Around its hulk th' encircling billows curled, Now thro' its splintered deck the wavelet stole, Then, issuing forth, it gurgled through a hole Staved by the tempest's fury in its side, Afar off did its shattered timbers roll, Its treasures ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... dismal February rain was falling, a rain to wet the soul. The reek of damp clothes pervaded the gallery where he sat surrounded by clerks and shop girls, and he pictured to himself the dreary rooms from which they had emerged, drawn ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... fail—" After leaving the elector, Antonio directed his steps toward the prison near the palace of the doge. The porter that stood near the grated door looked searchingly at the mask that presumed to tarry before those dismal gates whereof he ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... remember, too, being lifted—weak and miserable with toothache—in my father's arms to catch the first sight of English shores as we neared the mouth of the Thames; and then the dismal inn by the docks where we first took shelter. The dreary room where we children slept the first night, its dingy ugliness and its barred windows, still come back to me as a vision of horror. Next day, like angels of rescue, came an aunt ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... midst of all this bloodshed, at the most tragic moment of the dismal tragedy, behold the strangest of ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... observe the enemy; but were obliged to retire, and were pursued by the cossacks to the walls of the city. Between four and five o'clock next morning the poor inhabitants were roused from their sleep by the noise of the cannon, intermingled with the dismal shrieks and hideous yellings of the cossacks belonging to the Russian army. Alarmed at this horrid noise, I ascended the church-steeple, from whence I beheld the whole plain, extending from the little suburb to the forest, covered with the enemy's troops, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... we shall describe the dismal regions, where wicked spirits dwell, and over which they are reported to preside. The name commonly given to these regions is Hades or Tartarus, understood to signify hell. The passage leading thereto is a wide dark cave, through which one has to pass ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... cry, nothing but feel a desolate old woman whose life's been a failure, and now is nearly over, and age is so cruel? But Katharine said to me, 'I am happy. I'm very happy.' And then I thought, though it all seemed so desperately dismal at the time, Katharine had said she was happy, and I should have a son, and it would all turn out so much more wonderfully than I could possibly imagine, for though the sermons don't say so, I do believe the world is meant for us to be happy in. She told me that ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... was morning, about noon,—a wet and rather dismal spring day. The half-spread leaves seemed to tap at the window, with an appeal to be taken in; the primroses, that showed golden upon the grass at the roots of the trees, just beyond the smooth-shorn grass of the lawn, were ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... brief, matter-of-fact, and discouraging, as long as the half-year lasted, and there was not much to be gathered about him from Tom, on his return for the Easter holidays, but soon poor Hector wrote a long dismal letter to Margaret. ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... enticed away from English standards of conduct. [Footnote: Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation, ch. 4.] Mrs. Alice Morse Earle has emphasized wisely [Footnote: Two Centuries of Costume in America; N. Y., 1903.] that the "sad-colored" gowns and coats mentioned in wills were not "dismal"; the list of colors so described in England included (1638) "russet, purple, green, tawny, deere colour, orange colour, buffs and scarlet." The men wore doublets and jerkins of browns and greens, and cloaks with red and ...
— The Women Who Came in the Mayflower • Annie Russell Marble
... but she thought she had better stay. The lunch was so badly cooked and so meagre that Louise fancied they were beginning to starve themselves, and wanted to cry into her tea-cup. The woman who waited wore such dismal black, and went about with her eyes staring and her mouth tightly pursed, and smelt faintly of horses. It was Mrs. Newton; she had let Louise in when she came, and she was the only servant whom ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... and dreary, but not old enough to be quaint. As far as I could see most of them are let in lodgings, furnished and unfurnished, and almost every door has three bells to it. Here and there the ground floors have been made into shops of the commonest kind; it's a dismal street in every way. I found Number 20 was to let, and I went to the agent's and got the key. Of course I should have heard nothing of the Herberts in that quarter, but I asked the man, fair and square, how long they had left ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... the flames the word 'Jesus,' which she so often repeated. The executioner repaired in the evening to Brother Isambart, full of consternation, and confessed himself; he felt persuaded that God would never pardon him. One of the English King's secretaries said aloud, on returning from the dismal scene: 'We are lost; we have burned ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... look!" exclaimed Olivia, as she stood on the threshold of the warm firelit room; and then a swift transition of thought carried her back to the dismal little dining-room at Galvaston Terrace, with its black smouldering fire, and the damp clinging to the window-panes, and an involuntary shiver crossed her as she knelt ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... mind to remain in ignorance of who Babette was, for I could pretty well guess what she would be like. I pictured her to myself as a flower that had sprung up in a corner of these dull courtyards, like a ray of sun shining through the sepulchral gloom of these dismal passages. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... cycle of seven or eight thousand years, when our Western humanity, having left the primitive gods that we see here, to embrace the Christian conception, which, even yesterday, made it live, is in way of denying everything, and struggles before the enigma of death in an obscurity more dismal and more fearful than in the commencement of the ages. (More dismal and more fearful still in this, that plea of youth is gone.) From all parts of Europe curious and unquiet spirits, as well as mere idlers, turn their steps towards Thebes, the ancient ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... and therefore necessarily beyond the experience of an American—it is somewhat remarkable, that, while we stood gazing at this kitchen, I was haunted and perplexed by an idea that somewhere or other I had seen just this strange spectacle before. The height, the blackness, the dismal void, before my eyes, seemed as familiar as the decorous neatness of my grandmother's kitchen; only my unaccountable memory of the scene was lighted up with an image of lurid fires blazing all round the dim ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... such grace as patience in hell with him who has lost himself: here will also be wanting a bottom for patience, to wit, the providence of God; for a providence of God, though never so dismal, is a bottom for patience to the afflicted; but men go not to hell by ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... after a time, then Staines, and as the twilight came on the coach was going at a good pace, with the last rays of sunset to the left behind it, and the dark stretch of Hounslow Heath, with its dismal gallows, in front. Suddenly the coach stopped, and was surrounded by three men on horseback, armed with pistols, their faces hidden behind black crape masks. The ladies screamed, the men turned pale and trembled, the ...
— Golden Moments - Bright Stories for Young Folks • Anonymous
... fought as she crouched there in the dark corner. She pictured to herself the gloomy forest, the uncertainty of the way, and the struggle necessary before she could reach the mast-cutters. Cautiously she crept to the little window and peered out. How dismal and forbidding seemed the forest. She could see the tree-tops waving and the snow swirling before the wind. The prospect of going forth alone on such a night was ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... it, and throw it into a pool. Then the heaven melts with tenderness for the death of the bird; "it wails for it by raining, wailing a funeral wail." In Zululand women sometimes bury their children up to the neck in the ground, and then retiring to a distance keep up a dismal howl for a long time. The sky is supposed to melt with pity at the sight. Then the women dig the children out and feel sure that rain will soon follow. They say that they call to "the lord above" and ask him to send rain. If it comes they declare that "Usondo rains." In times of drought the Guanches ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... take Fieldhead on a lease (I thought it looked a dismal place, by-the-bye, to-night, as I passed it), and that it was your intention to settle a Miss Sykes there as mistress—to be married, in short, ha! ha! Now, which is it? Dora, I am sure. You said ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... composing his history, wrote several tracts against the measures of the covenanters, and those engaged in the opposition of Charles I. In a piece of his called Irene, he harangues the King, nobility, gentry, clergy and commons, about their mutual mistakes, jealousies and fears; he lays before them the dismal consequences of a civil war, from indisputable arguments, and the histories of past times. The great marquis of Montrose writ a letter to him, desiring him to print this Irene, as the best means to ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... weariness of life, surprise them on a sudden, and they can think of nothing else: continually suspecting, no sooner are their eyes open, but this infernal plague of melancholy seizeth on them, and terrifies their souls, representing some dismal object to their minds; which now, by no means, no labour, no persuasions they can avoid, they cannot be rid ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... sat, the numbers growing Less, each going To his fate— What a dismal occupation! My ...
— Punch Volume 102, May 28, 1892 - or the London Charivari • Various
... crime acquired during his experience in a penal settlement. Charles Reade has drawn the interior of a house of correction in England, and Victor Hugo has shown how a French convict fares after the fulfilment of his sentence. But no writer—so far as I am aware—has attempted to depict the dismal condition of a felon during his ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... many of these Musicians. Here you should have an affected Vallet, who Mimick'd the Behaviour of his Master, leaning carelessly against the Window, with his Head on one side, in a languishing Posture, whining, in a low, mournful Voice, some dismal Complaint; while, from his sympathizing Theorbo, issued a Base no less doleful to the Hearers. In Opposition to him was set up perhaps a Cobler, with the wretched Skeleton of a Gitarr, battered and waxed together by his own Industry, and who with three Strings out of Tune, and his ...
— Incognita - or, Love & Duty Reconcil'd. A Novel • William Congreve
... Night, O dearest, dearest Night; Spread now thy thickest, darkest Veil: And you great Deity of Dreams Succour a faithful Lover once With Silence and with deepest Shades; You never yet help'd with your dismal Black A Heart more true, ...
— Amadigi di Gaula - Amadis of Gaul • Nicola Francesco Haym
... roar, broken by an occasional cry of pain and a dismal groan of terror. There was a crash as if a mountain had been ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... Irving met one of his fellow-revellers, who told him that on the way borne, after draining the parting bumper, he bad fallen through a grating in the sidewalk, which had been carelessly left open, into the vault beneath. It was impossible to climb out, and at first the solitude was rather dismal, he said; but several of the other guests fell in, in the course of the evening, and, on the whole, they had quite ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... of New York and receives the fantastic impression that some giant architect has made for the city thousands of houses in replica. These dismal brownstone buildings are so like without, and alas! so like within, that one wonders how their owners know their homes from one another. I have had the pleasure of making over many of these gloomy barracks into homes for other people, and when we left the old Irving Place ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... look for no recompense—not even to be born in heaven—but seek ... the benefit of men, to bring back those who have gone astray, to enlighten those living in dismal error, to put away all sources of sorrow and pain ...
— The Essence of Buddhism • Various
... as of the physical, more than half take place in the period of teething. The more one thinks of the parallelism, the closer it looks, until the likeness seems as droll as dismal. Oh, the sweet, unquestioning infancy which takes its food from the nearest breast; which knows but three things,—hunger and food and sleep! There is only a little space for this delight. In our seventh ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... day for visiting the sepulchres in the churches. Turiddu took me to the cathedral, and we saw a procession moving slowly down the nave. It turned up one of the aisles and entered a sepulchre which had been prepared, passing between a double file of dismal creatures entirely shrouded in white except for two eye-holes, like those ghouls that issued stealthily from charnel-houses in German fairy tales, and used to pursue me in dreams when I was a boy. One by one the lights on the altar ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... was in keeping with the general dismal effect. La Cibot heard a heavy footstep, and the asthmatic wheezing of a virago within, and Mme. Sauvage presently showed herself. Adrien Brauwer might have painted just such a hag for his picture of Witches starting for the Sabbath; a stout, unwholesome slattern, five feet six inches ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... but deep stream, which flowed into the creek. This branch ran through a dense swamp—the only one I knew of in that part of the state. In the early spring its surface was overflowed with water. It was covered with a thick growth of trees, and the place was as dismal, dark, and disagreeable as ...
— Down The River - Buck Bradford and His Tyrants • Oliver Optic
... and he fancied the air grew purer as he advanced into the north, though there was hardly any perceptible change of elevation. The country grew drier, however, as he turned the head springs of the great cypress swamp—the counterbalance of the Dismal Swamp of Virginia—receded from the Chesapeake waters, and approached the tributaries of the Atlantic. At nine o'clock he entered the court-house cluster of Georgetown, a little place of a few hundred people, pitched nearly at the centre of the county one generation ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... none had fallen to Cicely's lot, and though, to an active girl, there was no real danger where the torchbearers lined the way, still there was so much difficulty that she was a laggard in reaching the likeness of Acheron, and could see no father near as she laid herself down in Charon's dismal boat, dimly rejoicing that this time it was to return to the realms of day, and yet feeling as if she should never reach them. A hand was given to assist her from the boat by one of the torchbearers, a voice strangely familiar ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... be near God in peace and love without fulfilling certain mental conditions—that he would not have her just as she was now, filled her with an undefined but terribly real misery, only the more distressing that it was vague with the vagueness of the dismal negation from which ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... walk quite a mile and a half, and at the end of that time she found herself in a much poorer part of the large suburb where Middleton School was situated. The houses here were of a humble description—not even semidetached, but standing in long, dismal rows, a good many of them backing on to a railway-cutting. These houses boasted of no small gardens, but ran flush with the road. They were built of the universal yellow brick, and were about as ugly as ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... opportunities afforded for its mutilation, and if it were to get through the House at all, it would be only in such a form as to render it wholly useless for the objects which its promoters desired it to accomplish. This dismal conviction was very speedily {174} verified. When the Bill got into committee, Lord Lyndhurst moved an amendment to the effect that the question of enfranchisement should precede that of disfranchisement. Now this ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... a dismal strain. Everything had gone against him. His wife had died, he was out of work and penniless, and racked with rheumatism—oh, it was "a crewl climat"! Did he stop in England, only "the house" remained to him; he'd end in a pauper's grave. But ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... the clergy was something terrible. "These corruptions were mounted to the most enormous height in that dismal period of the Church which we have now before us. Both in the eastern and western provinces, the clergy were, for the most part, composed of a most worthless set of men, shamefully illiterate and stupid, ignorant, more especially in ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... what is gained in the other. In rice countries, where the crop not only requires a very moist soil, but where, in a certain period of its growing, it must be laid under water, the effects of a drought are much more dismal. Even in such countries, however, the drought is, perhaps, scarce ever so universal as necessarily to occasion a famine, if the government would allow a free trade. The drought in Bengal, a few years ago, might probably have occasioned a very great ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... room was no longer the smoky, dismal, miserable place which it was formerly. It was neatly papered; it was swept clean; there was a cheerful fire, which burnt quite clearly: the mulatto woman was cleanly dressed, and, rising from her work, she clasped her hands together with an ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... and the troops were landed about three miles below the fort, without opposition. Foreseeing that the works would be attacked the next morning on the land side, the garrison evacuated the fort in the night, and took refuge in a deep and extensive swamp, called the Dismal, which could not be penetrated without difficulty, even by ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
... like fate; it eludes, but cannot be eluded. The terror it inspires in the smaller creatures—rats, rabbits, chipmunks—is pitiful to behold. A rat pursued by a weasel has been known to rush into a room, uttering dismal cries, and seek the protection of a man in bed. A chipmunk will climb to the top of a tall tree to elude it, and then, when followed, let go its hold and drop with a cry of despair toward the ground. A friend of mine, walking along the road early one morning, saw a rat rush over the fence and ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... speak with conviction. The sea tumbled all around them, a mighty grey waste. And the shore seemed very far away. A dismal outlook in truth. Moreover ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the clouds, and illuminated some of the distant objects very vividly. The white sails of a ship caught it, and gleamed brilliant as sunny snow, the hull being scarcely visible, and the sea around dark; other smaller vessels too, so that they looked like heavenly-winged things just alighting on a dismal world. Shifting their sails, perhaps, or going on another tack, they almost disappear at once in the obscure distance. Islands are seen in summer sunshine and green glory; their rocks also sunny and their beaches white; while other islands, for no apparent reason, are in deep shade, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... all events sound decidedly dismal. That's what I call a genuine wedding march, just the same as ...
— Turandot, Princess of China - A Chinoiserie in Three Acts • Karl Gustav Vollmoeller
... eight clubs myself, and know that one year Fitz-Boodle, George Savage, Esq. (unless it should please fate to remove my brother and his six sons, when of course it would be Fitz-Boodle, Sir George Savage, Bart.), will appear in the dismal category. There is that list; down I must go in it:—the day will come, and I shan't be seen in the bow-window, someone else will be sitting in the vacant armchair: the rubber will begin as usual, and yet somehow ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Alas; alas! No angel! And the face you think so fair, 'Tis but the dismal frame-work of these rocks That makes it seem so; and the world I come from— Alas, alas, too many faces there Are but fair vizors to black hearts below, Or only serve to bring the wearer woe! But to yourself—If haply ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... loyal effort to follow her thought, but it led him into dismal regions where he found himself unnerved. "I don't know, upon my soul, where you get these notions of yours, my dear. I don't indeed. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... past! and now the distant bell (For deep and pensive thought had held her there) Toll'd midnight out, with long-resounding knell, While dismal echoes ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... blood.—Next night—a dreary night! Cast on the wildest of the Cyclad Isles, Where never human foot had mark'd the shore, These ruffians left me.—Yet believe me, Arcas, Such is the rooted love we bear mankind, All ruffians as they were, I never heard A sound so dismal as their parting oars.— Then horrid silence follow'd, broke alone By the low murmurs of the restless deep, Mixt with the doubtful breeze that now and then Sigh'd thro' the mournful woods. Beneath a shade I sat me down, more heavily oppress'd, More ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... Polly resumed his observations in the Wood Street warehouses once more, and had some dismal times. The shoal of fish waiting for the crumbs of employment ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... he went down to the London and St. Katherine Docks, passing under the shadow of the gaunt walls; and then along that dismal thoroughfare, Nightingale Lane, that looks like a passage between two great prisons; until at last, with moderate pace, and with a certain anxious, nervous look, as if he did not wish himself to be seen, he arrived at the entrance ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... on an autumn morning—a thick canopy of grey clouds overspread the heavens—and the dismal half-light which prevailed in the streets of Stockholm made it difficult to decide whether or not the sun had yet risen. A cold wind blew across from Lake Maeler, and caused the few persons who had as yet left their houses to hasten their steps along the deserted pavement. Suddenly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... cannot sleep. May I stay here? It is so dismal down there, and—and I was afraid. Where ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... desolate and deserted, as they made a circuit of the surroundings of the mill. It certainly offered no attractions to visitors, after nightfall. The crazy old structure, unpainted and blackened with age, made a dark, dismal picture against the dull sky. The water fell with a monotonous roar over the dam; the cold dripping of water sounded within the shell of the mill. The wind, by fits and starts, rattled loose boards and set stray shingles tattooing ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... It proved a dismal, crowded hole in which we were quartered like so many cattle, it being merely a small space forward, hastily boxed off by rough lumber, the sides and ends built up into tiers of bunks, the only ventilation and light furnished by the open hatch above. The place was clean enough, being newly ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... said, "that something disagreeable would happen to you there. I never will forget," she went on naively, "the dreary, dismal impression the place left on me the only time I was there—pouring rain and universal gloom and discomfort. We had to wait there a few hours to get one of the horses shod, once when I was driving with my ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... day becomes hopelessly rainy, and Shoemaker Schmidt is left alone at the dam, the rain that sounded so dismal at dawn proves to be a benefactor after all. There will be no woodsplitting today, no outdoor chores—for if it's too wet to go fishing, as mother insists, of course it's too wet to carry wood, or weed gardens or pick cucumbers for pickles. ...
— The Long Ago • Jacob William Wright
... February, and partly in respect of my own misfortunes, which you are going to read about. For I have often thought that January (which is mostly twelfth-cake and holiday time) is like the first four or five years of a little boy's life; then comes dismal February, and the working-days with it, when chaps begin to look out for themselves, after the Christmas and the New Year's heyday and merrymaking are over, which our infancy may well be said to be. Well can I recollect that bitter first of February, when I first launched out ...
— The Fatal Boots • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with the most peerless beauty which the city boasted. A new source of anguish added to the misery already sustained by the wretched Gonzago; his arm was paralyzed by the utter hopelessness of any attempt to emerge from the obscurity to which fate had condemned him; he brooded over the dismal futurity which opened before him; and, as a solace to these gloomy meditations, suffered his imagination to dwell upon the charms and graces of the lovely Giacinta, his kinsman's gentle bride. He saw ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various
... best crossing for the motor. I sent Meares and the dogs over with a can of petrol on arrival. After some twenty minutes he returned to tell me the motor had gone through. Soon after Campbell and Day arrived to confirm the dismal tidings. It appears that getting frightened of the state of affairs Campbell got out a line and attached it to the motor—then manning the line well he attempted to rush the machine across the weak place. A man on the ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... I began with saying, besought their mother to let them run out and play in the new snow; for, though it had looked so dreary and dismal, drifting downward out of the gray sky, it had a very cheerful aspect, now that the sun was shining on it. The children dwelt in a city, and had no wider play-place than a little garden before the house, divided by a white fence from the street, and with a pear-tree and two or three plum-trees ...
— The Snow-Image - A Childish Miracle • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... shall be ready to sail in three days, so it is not worth while writing to my father," said Cardo. "The thick fog which looked so dismal as I drove into Caer Madoc with him—how little I guessed it would culminate in the darkness which brought about the collision, and so unite me with my beloved wife. Valmai, if Providence ever arranged a marriage, it was ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... Charles to Lady Mary, with a dismal shake of his head, "how precarious is life! Here to-day, and in bed to-morrow. Support your aunt Mary, my dear Evelyn; she wishes to retire to rest. Indeed, we may as well all go to bed, for there will be ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... said Dorothea. "This funeral seems to me the most dismal thing I ever saw. It is a blot on the morning I cannot bear to think that any one should die and leave no ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot |
