"Dreariness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her father, and removed many cares which oppressed her mother. To her, Mary was all the world-daughter, comforter, friend, and nurse, unfailing in deeds of love or words of cheer, and removing all sense of dreariness and solitude. And Mary had found her mother all, and more than all she remembered, and admired and loved her with a deep, quiet glow of intense affection. There was so much call for Mary's actual exertion of ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and gathered what there was to tell of their daily life. Their neighbors were kind, and the women exercised a sort of motherly care over the little girl; but the very best there was to know seemed bad enough, and the singer shuddered as she imagined the dreariness ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... and depressing to not a few of the thousands come to Burcliff to enjoy a holiday which, whether of days or of weeks, had looked short to the labor weary when first they came, and was growing shorter and shorter, while the days that composed it grew longer and longer by the frightful vitality of dreariness. Especially to those of them who hated work, a day like this, wrapping them in a blanket of fog, whence the water was every now and then squeezed down upon them in the wettest of all rains, seemed a huge ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... otherwise in good condition. Glen took them to his hiding place and spent a great deal of the afternoon cleaning off the rust. Then he began work on a rough block of stone which lay near and was greatly gratified at the result of his labors. So the afternoon slipped away without the dreariness ...
— The Boy Scout Treasure Hunters - The Lost Treasure of Buffalo Hollow • Charles Henry Lerrigo
... Priscilla, however, knew better. To her unfortunately the life within the walls seemed of a quite blatant vulgarity; pervaded by lacqueys, by officials of every kind and degree, by too much food, too many clothes, by waste, by a feverish frittering away of time, by a hideous want of privacy, by a dreariness unutterable. To her it was a perpetual behaving according to the ideas officials had formed as to the conduct to be expected of princesses, a perpetual pretending not to see that the service offered was sheerest lip-service, a perpetual ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... massed palms, its wealth of flowers, its brilliant lights, and streams of gorgeously gowned women and prosperous-looking men, and then he wondered what had made him start anything of this sort again. To come had been a sudden decision. Long ago the dreariness of functions such as these had caused their giving-up, but a fancy to look once more upon one had possessed him ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... he, "it isna the dreariness o' the road that I am referring to. I would rather be sent across the hills from Cowdingham to Lander, blindfold, than I would be sent upon an errand like this. But is it not a dismal and a dreadfu' thought that Christian men should be roused out of their ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... their boat, instead of enduring such back-breaking toil. It struck him that he had never seen such dull, apathetic faces as these Culm people had. Such utter shiftlessness as everything about the cluster of tumble-downs betokened he had never imagined. Perhaps all this dreariness and desolation made itself more keenly felt because the boy was just from the city, which teemed with life and bustle and energy. In its poorest quarter he had never seen such a lack of tidiness ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... weak to enjoy anything, but lay all day long on his sofa, fidgeting his nurse extremely—while, in her intense terror lest he might die, she fidgeted him still more. At last, seeing he really was getting well, she left him to himself—which he was most glad of, in spite of his dullness and dreariness. There he ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... relieved when April opened with sunny showers and the long and severe winter seemed to be at an end. It had not made Bessie more in love with her life at Abbotsmead: there had, indeed, been times of inexpressible dreariness in it very trying to her fortitude. With the dawning of brighter days in spring she could not but think of the Forest with fresh longing, and she watched each morning's post for the arrival of that invitation to Fairfield which Lady Latimer had promised to send. At ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... the loss of those comforts in a child with which my cruel disappointment forbade my ever being blest—though, in the endeavour to soothe, I often only aggravated both his and my own misery at our irretrievable loss—when a ray of unexpected light burst upon my dreariness. It was amid this gloom of human agony, these heartrending scenes of real mourning, that the brilliant star shone to disperse the clouds which hovered over our drooping heads,—to dry the hot briny tears which were parching up our miserable vegetating existence—it was in this crisis that ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... can be scarcely described. At first, they were chaotic and wanting in coherence. But, later, as the ages came and went, my soul seemed to imbibe the very essence of the oppressive solitude and dreariness, ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... define it by its distance from Kant's; you must refute your rival's view by identifying it with Protagoras's. Thus does all spontaneity of thought, all freshness of conception, get destroyed. Everything you touch is shopworn. The over-technicality and consequent dreariness of the younger disciples at our american universities is appalling. It comes from too much following of german models and manners. Let me fervently express the hope that in this country you will hark back to the more ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... warming at Farmer Hare's were quite vanished. Watson, having showed by his mother-wit and presence of mind that he was a man to be relied upon, had now resumed his privilege of growling, and gave vent to many angry words at the roughness and unutterable dreariness of the way. ...
— Chasing an Iron Horse - Or, A Boy's Adventures in the Civil War • Edward Robins
... on the bank where Julien had first told her of his love and remained there, dreaming, scarcely thinking, depressed to the very soul, longing to lie down, to sleep, in order to escape the dreariness ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... emotion, unlike any other impression we have hitherto felt. Separated from the objects of our dearest affections, entering in some sort on a new state of existence, we are forced to fall back on our own thoughts, and we feel within ourselves a dreariness we have never known before. Among the letters which, at the time of our embarking, I wrote to friends in France and Germany, one had a considerable influence on the direction of our travels, and on our succeeding operations. When I left Paris ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... proclaimed itself in washed-out lettering—three tied horses circled uneasily until they were standing back to the storm, their bodies hunched together with the chill of it, their tails whipping between their legs. They accentuated the blank dreariness of the empty street. The snow was whitening their rumps and clinging, in tiny drifts, upon the saddle skirts behind ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... separates it from a large sand island, which we passed, and encamped, eight miles on the north, under a high point of land opposite a large creek to the south, on which we observe an unusual quantity of timber. The wind was from the northwest this afternoon, and high, the weather cold, and its dreariness increased by the howlings of a number of wolves ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... third act the motif for horns and violas gradually ascending and dying away, expresses the unspeakable dreariness and senselessness of material life, after its profound meaning, the re-creation of the world by love, has been lost. This feeling of absolute senselessness dominates the awakening sleeper; Tristan, interpreting it in the sense of Schopenhauer as the universal ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... while on the others, the meagre prospect ran off in long, narrow, barren perspectives, but slightly relieved by a pitiful show of coarse, though somewhat luxuriant vegetation. From the summits of the swells, the eye became fatigued with the sameness and chilling dreariness of the landscape. The earth was not unlike the Ocean, when its restless waters are heaving heavily, after the agitation and fury of the tempest have begun to lessen. There was the same waving and regular surface, the same absence of foreign ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... that the dreariness of the long hours had lessened. The imminent threat of the day before was no longer so vivid and racking, for the man kept on breathing with fair ease, and his pulse was perhaps a little stronger. She was wondering why Stefan had not returned as he had promised, ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... consolation and schoolboy surgery they had cheered him, and found he was Harry Collis, whom they had known as a school-fellow at Bexley; how they had helped him home to Marshlands Hall, and had been amazed at the dreariness and want of all home comfort at the place, so that they did not like to leave him till his father came home; and how Captain Collis had not only thanked them warmly, but had asked them over to come and shoot rabbits the ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is a pretty little place,—comfortable, cosy, bright, and deserving of its name;—in broad day, it is none of these things. A squalid dreariness seems to have settled upon it—it has a peculiar atmosphere of its own—an atmosphere dark, heavy, and strangely flavored with odors of escaping gas and crushed orange-peel. Behind the scenes, these odors mingle with a chronic, all-pervading smell of beer—beer, which the stranger's sensitive ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... directly eastward. It was two o'clock; the men, after shivering in the rain for two days, were now suffering from the intense heat. The road ascended, with long sweeping curves, through a region of utter desolation: not a house, not a living being, the only relief to the dreariness of the waste lands an occasional little somber wood; and the oppressive silence communicated itself to the men, who toiled onward with drooping heads, bathed in perspiration. At last Saint-Pierremont appeared before them, a few empty houses on ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... spite of them he were always sweet, then, no doubt, he would be a more or less unappreciated hero. He COULD be a Hero—he WILL be one if it's ever necessary. But it will be about something better than our dreariness. I know," the Princess declared, "where he's magnificent." And she rested a minute on that. She ended, however, as she had begun. "We're not, all the same, committed to anything stupid. If ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... make a faint effort to pick up and eat some of the dry brush that grew around the desolate camp. This camp is now known to be in the northern part of Death Valley, but then they knew no names for anything, but if dreariness and absence of life, and threatened danger all around were any indication, they might well have named it Death Valley as was afterwards done by the party ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... our comparative defeat with fashion in its most distinctive moments of pleasuring (for one thing I wished to see how the dreariness of Madrid gaiety in the Paseo de la Castellana would compare with that of Roman gaiety on the Pincian) which made us the more determined to see a bull-fight in the Spanish capital. We had vowed ourselves in ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... under date of July 2: "A beautiful day for Labrador. Drew another M. articus. Went on shore, and was most pleased with what I saw. The country, so wild and grand, is of itself enough to interest any one in its wonderful dreariness. Its mossy, grey-clothed rocks, heaped and thrown together as if by chance, in the most fantastical groups imaginable, huge masses hanging on minor ones as if about to roll themselves down from their doubtful-looking situations, into the ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs
... captured me at the time, I know not that madness of which I was not capable. Day broke at last, but slowly and sullenly; the gray clouds hurried past upon the storm, pouring down the rain in torrents as they went, and the desolation and dreariness on all sides was scarcely preferable to the darkness and gloom of night. My eyes were turned ever towards the plain, across which the winter wind bore the plashing rain in vast sheets of water; the thunder crashed ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... time to time and put on coal—but the very walls reflected a chill, blue glare. The roof was lofty and vaulted, and added to the hollow coldness of the hall. The whole apartment was clean to sanctity, and in its straitness and blank dreariness no unfit emblem of the ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... is none. But the dreariness was only in your own inconsistency. If He be the Father of all, He must be the Father of persons—He Himself therefore a Person. He must be the Father of all in whom dwell personal qualities, power, wisdom, creative energy, love, justice, pity. Can He be their Father, unless all these ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... Yorke, in that conscientiously constrained and solemnized voice of hers, which ever modulates itself to a funereal dreariness of tone, though the subject it is exercised upon be but to give orders for the making of a pudding in the kitchen, to bid the boys hang up their caps in the hall, or to call the girls to their sewing—"come in!" And in came ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... went down in a colourless silver glow, which prophesied winter and storms, and to Duncan the grey dreariness seemed in keeping with his feelings. For Donald had gone back to the city that day, and when he had bidden the boy farewell the old man had also parted with his great aspiration. Donald had come to him the week before, and ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... have been frugal and industrious, giving no scandal nor bad example; but the constant repression, the monotony, the dreariness of the religion often wrought havoc with the sensitive nerves of the women, and many of them needed, far more than prayers, godly counsel and church trials, the skilled services of a physician. Two incidents related by Winthrop should be sufficient to impress the pathos or the down-right ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... violet nor a gaudy flower of summer gave to the air the perfume, or to the earth the colour of sweet life, to soothe and lighten the dreariness of the dead: such thoughts in the Middle Ages would have been almost pagan. Then the darkness of death was like the darkness of night here in this necropolis hewn in the side of the ancient rock, whose ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... little furnished, and this was more luxurious than the dear old chamber at home, but the girl had never before slept alone, and she felt unspeakably lonely in the dreariness, longing more than ever for Betty's kiss—even for Betty's blame—or for a whine from Harriet; and she positively hungered for a hug from Eugene, as she gazed timidly at the corners beyond the influence of ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Forest' after a fall of snow, light then, but increasing in depth as they advanced up the country. They were finally obliged to quit the carriage and proceed on horseback. They arrived late at night, the fires were all out, and the servants had retired to their own houses for the night. The horrible dreariness of such a house, at the end of such a journey, I ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... did at length speak, it was in subdued whispers, as if we were surrounded by some awful or supernatural influence. Even Peterkin's voice, usually so quick and lively on all occasions, was hushed now; for there was a dreariness about this silent, lonely, uninhabited cottage—so strange in its appearance, so far away from the usual dwellings of man, so old, decayed, and deserted in its aspect—that fell upon our spirits like a thick ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... could be supplied from one source only. It might have been thought by any other than a sternly tentative philosopher, that the denial of their natural food to human feelings would have provoked a reactionary desire for it; and that the dreariness of the street would have been gilded by dreams of pastoral felicity. Experience has shown the fact to be otherwise; the thoroughly trained Londoner can enjoy no other excitement than that to which ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... its effect, and she gradually lost her hold on her new belief. But losing that, she lost all hope. "Wormwood and gall" were her portion, and, while she fulfilled the outward duties of religion, dreariness and settled despondency took possession ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... sounds of traffic, resound in it from morn to midnight; but the streets around are mean and close; poverty and debauchery lie festering in the crowded alleys; want and misfortune are pent up in the narrow prison; an air of gloom and dreariness seems, in my eyes at least, to hang about the scene, and to impart to it ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... there only was a wine, a poison which would numb his senses, bring him forgetfulness and sleep, and no awakening from that! Was there still any kind of filth, he had not soiled himself with, a sin or foolish act he had not committed, a dreariness of the soul he had not brought upon himself? Was it still at all possible to be alive? Was it possible, to breathe in again and again, to breathe out, to feel hunger, to eat again, to sleep again, to sleep with a woman again? ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... at supper over a good fire, kindled in a deep sand, which would afford a warm and soft bed—they were at supper while the widow was waiting for them in pain and anxiety—and, at last, in cold and dreariness. ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau
... had been the verdict of the woman who had given all, and who had received nothing. It was a hard philosophy, acquired after years of dreariness, and the child had listened and absorbed and believed. She had heard nothing of love's fulfilment, of the raptures of mutual tenderness. Hence she had been content with Anthony's somewhat somber wooing, until that moment when she had drifted with Justin through infinite space, and had learned the ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... and could you steel Your thoughts towards one who loved you so?— Solace she seeks in the whirling wheel, In duty and love that lighten woe; Striving with labor, not in vain, To drive away the dull day's dreariness,— Blessing the toil that blunts the pain Of a deeper grief ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... forgotten, through all the intervening years, the smell of the damp straw in which he was packed and forwarded like game, carriage-paid. "There was no other inside passenger, and I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and it rained hard all the way, and I thought life sloppier than I expected to ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... by a narrow path along the riverside and through a cleft in the rocks. The northern side of this narrow ravine, being in some measure exposed to the southern sun, is clothed with woods; the southern is a great wall of bare rock rising in terraces, or giant steps, that might well suggest the dreariness and desolation of a landscape in the moon. This barren expanse of naked rock is called the Szekler Stone, and was formerly surmounted by the castle of a Hungarian vice-voivode. Its ruins are still to be seen there. The lower slopes ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... Uncle Dan listened, highly diverted, to the chatter of the girls, and it never once occurred to him to remember the meagreness and paltriness of their condition. After they had left him, he turned to the window, feeling that the dreariness without and within was a very transitory and inconsequent thing. And lo! a change had come. The influx of youth would appear to have put to flight other clouds than those of a morbid mind. The rain had ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... speculation and audacity of discourse, were all as gall and wormwood. Rousseau found their atheistic sallies offensive beyond endurance. Their hard rationalism was odious to the great emotional dreamer, and after he had quarrelled with them all, he transformed his own impressions of the dreariness of atheism into the passionate complaint of Julie. "Conceive the torment of living in retirement with the man who shares our existence, and yet cannot share the hope that makes existence dear; of never being able with him either to bless ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... out of the house, and this left Kate four hours of lonely idleness staring her blankly in the face. Sometimes she practised a little music, but it wearied her. She had courage for nothing now, and brandy and water was the only thing that killed the dreariness that ached in heart and head. Many half-pint bottles had succeeded the first, and, ashamed to admit her secret drinking, she now paid the landlady regularly out of her own money. When funds were low, a little ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... Flora had been holding the ring, fighting off events, and yet all the while she had not wanted to lose the sight of him. Well, now, when she had made up her mind finally to resign herself to the dreariness of that, might he not at least have done his part of it and decently disappeared? So much he might have done for her. Instead of smiling at her across crowded tea-rooms, and obliquely glancing at her down decorous dinner-tables, and with the same fatal facility he had displayed ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... drink, Jed?" he asked dispiritedly. "I need it!" He picked up the glass and emptied it. "The history of that case would be interesting, if one could really get to the bottom of it! Come along!" His tone was dreariness itself. "I've got a jeep waiting ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... during the second of her visits home that Miss Lydia Vail died. There was no dreariness of illness or misery of suffering; she died exactly as she had lived, plumply and pleasantly, in the plump and pleasant faith that was hers, and Jane left the middle-aged maid in charge of the elm-shaded, green-shuttered house and went back to New York with a grief which was more pensive than ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... yellow-cotton blind shut out the prospect, and a cheery fire in the grate lighted up the little room brightly, casting a rich glow on the yellow-white table-cloth, which had been already spread, and creating a feeling of coziness in powerful contrast to the sensation of dreariness which had assailed him on his first entrance. When Mrs Butt had placed a paraffin lamp on the table, with a dark-brown teapot, a thick glass sugar-bowl, a cream-jug to match, and a plate of thick-buttered toast that scented ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... discomfort in the thick, solid moreen curtains, in the gaudy paper, in the bright-staring carpet, in the very looking-glass over the chimney-piece, where a strip of mirror lay imprisoned in an embrace of frame covered with yellow muslin. We may talk of the dreariness of winter; and winter, no doubt, is desolate: but what in the world is more dreary to eyes inured to the verdure ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... of the picturesque in the foreign colonies, which they have reproduced in painting, etching, and lithography. They find their classes filled not only by young people possessing facility and sometimes talent, but also by older people to whom the studio affords the one opportunity of escape from dreariness; a widow with four children who supplemented a very inadequate income by teaching the piano, for six years never missed her weekly painting lesson because it was "her one pleasure"; another woman, ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... were burning; the dust, and smoke, and drift of fiery particles, scorching and kindling all it fell upon; the hot unwholesome vapour, the blight on everything; the stars, and moon, and very sky, obliterated;—made up such a sum of dreariness and ruin, that it seemed as if the face of Heaven were blotted out, and night, in its rest and quiet, and softened light, never could look upon the ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... to Fort Charlotte that morning, and see the subterranean rooms and passage-ways, and all the underground dreariness of which we had heard so much. The fort was built about a hundred years ago, and has no soldiers in it. To go around and look at the old forts in this part of the world might make a person believe the millennium had come. ...
— A Jolly Fellowship • Frank R. Stockton
... mothers, daughters, and wives of soldiers. Their former stately grace had vanished from the women; they were weather-worn and bowed with labour too heavy for their strength, too long for their endurance; they were weak from lack of fit human food, from lack of hope, and the dreariness of the outlook, the ever gray spiritual horizon; they were numbed with the cold that has ceased to be felt, the deadening sense of life as a weight to be borne, not a strength to rejoice in. But they ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... shadow which passed through the body of the timid young novice—are surely very finely painted. "I rushed to the shutter, and flung it back: there was no one in the sacristy. I looked into the garden; it was deserted, and the mid-day wind was roaming among the flowers." The dreariness is wonderfully described: only the poor pale boy looking eagerly out from the window of the sacristy, and the hot mid-day wind walking in the solitary garden. How skilfully is each of these little strokes dashed in, and how well do all together combine to make a picture! But ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... dressed, and he did not notice that the daylight had not changed the dreariness of last night's weather; for a chill mist was falling outside, and if he had looked for the fields and hills near he would have found them all hidden ...
— Left at Home - or, The Heart's Resting Place • Mary L. Code
... have—yes, I see by others that it has—pleasures which surpass those of unthinking though lovely childhood: but have I experienced them? ... What makes the same sun seem one day to make all nature bright, and the next only to show more plainly the dreariness of the landscape? Oh wicked, sinful must be those feelings that make me miserable—selfish and sinful—and I cannot reason them away, for I do not understand them. Prayer has helped me before now, and I trust it will still do so. O Lord, forsake ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... seat near Felicita, with such a feeling of heart-sickness and heart-faintness as she had never experienced before. The dreariness and perplexity of the present stretched before her into the coming years. For almost the first time in her life she felt worn-out; physically weary and exhausted, as if her strength had been overtaxed. Her childhood on the fresh, breezy uplands, and her happy, ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... had been pitching like a ship at sea through the desert dreariness for about an hour, when Mary Carmichael suddenly became conscious that the prods she had been receiving from time to time in her back were not due either to their manner of locomotion or to the freight ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... hung heavy over the roof of Stone Farm. To many generations it had stood for prosperity or misfortune—these had been its foundations, and still it drew to itself the constant thoughts of many people. Dark things—terror, dreariness, vague suspicions of evil powers—gathered there naturally ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... portals of the Casino two red posters blazed under the electric lamps, with a cheap provincial effect.—and the emptiness of the quays, the desert aspect of the streets, had an air of hypocritical respectability and of inexpressible dreariness. ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... in what might ordinarily have been a light, cheerful room, but which was in all the dreariness of gray cinders, exhausted night-light, curtained windows, and fragments of the last meal. In each of two cane cribs was sitting up a forlorn child, with loose locks of dishevelled hair, pale thin cheeks ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and meat for supper: but the dreariness of our situation, together with the uncertainty under which we all labored, as to our future destiny, almost deprived us of the sense of hunger, and destroyed ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... Antarctic stream, setting from south to north, and striking the western coast about Cape St. Martin. It follows, therefore, that the climate and country become more genial and fertile the further they are removed from the desiccating influence emanating from the western seaboard. The dreariness of the solitudes between Little Namaqualand and Griqualand West, the latter slightly more smiling than the former, attests this fact. But the comparative inhospitality of the Boer States—comparative, that is, to what might be expected from their proximity to the warm Indian Ocean—demands ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... red and purple halo reflected from their own smoke, and beyond that again by a zone of darkness which magnified the extent of the chapel, while it rendered it impossible for the eye to ascertain its limits. Some injudicious ornaments, adopted in haste for the occasion, rather added to the dreariness of the scene. Old fragments of tapestry, torn from the walls of other apartments, had been hastily and partially disposed around those of the chapel, and mingled inconsistently with scutcheons and funeral emblems of the dead, which they elsewhere exhibited. On each ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... There was a large public house at that point, with much brass work and mahogany about its swing doors, and he turned in, not so much because he wanted anything to drink, but because it seemed the obvious alternative to the dreariness of his own rooms or the ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... something holy in this simplicity, which had been preserved to them by abstinence from all the joys of life? Ah! accursed be he who first had the bad courage to attach ridicule to that name of "old maid," which recalls so many images of grievous deception, of dreariness, and of abandonment! Accursed be he who can find a subject for sarcasm in involuntary misfortune, and who can crown gray hairs ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... experience only dispersed the chill when the tingle of the parson's big rod wrought a glow in him that was almost madness. Yet Reuben chafed not so much at the whippings—to which he was well used—as at the dreariness of the new home, the melancholy waste of common over which March winds blew all the year, the pinched faces that met him without other recognition than, "One o' Parson Brummem's b'ys." Nor indoors was the aspect more inviting: a big red table, around which sat six fellow-martyrs with their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... The dreariness of a ride through the desolate plains and rugged rocks of Palestine, was diversified with startling adventures; and the fact of several of the powers of Europe and many of the tribes of Asia having chosen that sterile region for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... at once, and Thorpe said he was amazed to find the girl so capable of achieving an easy success and bearing it so well. "Where," he pursued with his graceful air, "did she learn those enchanting prettinesses, those wonderful little caprices of manner? Could they have been acquired in the genteel dreariness of Belfield?" ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... ceremony. Each grave is marked by an upright bit of wood, somewhat larger than that by which gardeners mark their seeds, and on which is painted a number, nothing more. Apart from these, are stakes driven into the ground which mark as yet unappropriated spots. The indescribable dreariness of the scene is heightened by two monumental stones garlanded with wreaths and surrounded by flowers. The first records the memory of a young artisan, and was raised by his fellow-workmen; the second commemorates brotherly and sisterly affection. Both suicides were driven to self-murder ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... stepped from the chill and dreariness of a windy day, when it seems as if the very life of all things growing were shrunk to absolute desolation, into the welcome warmth and light and fragrance, the beauty and joy of a glass house full of green and blossoming plants? No matter how small it was, even though you had to stoop ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell
... after waiting on the platform at Euston Station until the long, crowded train for Liverpool and the Lusitania disappeared, went back to the lodgings in Half Moon Street with a sudden sense of the vastness of London, of its loneliness and dreariness, of its awkward inhospitality to the stranger under its pall of foggy smoke. Susan was thinking of ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... visit to Regina Trench, when I was on my way to place a cross over my son's grave in the cemetery at Tara Hill. By this time, the grass was green, the trenches were filling up and in the cloudless blue sky larks were singing. The impression of dreariness was passing away, and the wounds on the breast of ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... leader, "lower than the ground on which we stood; we had, therefore, a complete view of the whole expanse, and there was a dreariness and desolation pervading the scene which strengthened as we gazed ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... inseparable friend. Sir Charles's speech, which he counted to have been the best of his life, dealt briefly with the leading political topics of the day—Home Rule and the Radical programme—but soon passed to the personal issue. He recalled the change from the murky dreariness of March to the height of summer loveliness which reigned about them, and the change no less great in the moral atmosphere. He reviewed the history of the attacks that had been made, the avowed determination to prevent his being their member; and at the close he declared himself ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... the high flood of summer hours whose tide can rise no higher. A time to linger and dream under the beautiful breast of heaven, heaven brooding and descending in pure light upon man's handiwork. If the light shall thus come in, and of its mere loveliness overcome every aspect of dreariness, why shall not the light of thought, and hope—the light of the soul—overcome and sweep away ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... listening till the noise died away. Then she sank all limp in a chair and began to cry. There was wrath in her sobs, and bitter self-pity. She had made a fine tragedy scene, but the glory of it was short. She did not regret it, but an immense dreariness had followed on her heroics. Was there ever, she asked ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... does not happen often in much-abused London; but even heavy rain is not so depressing in spring as it is in winter, and when the Primadonna raised her eyes from her book and looked out of the big window, she was not thinking of the dreariness outside but of what she should wear in the evening. To tell the truth, she did not often trouble herself much about that matter when she was not going to sing, and all singers and actresses who habitually play 'costume parts' are conscious of looking upon ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... since that of 1818. Not more than two or three days occurred, during the months of July and August, in which that heavy fall of snow took place which so commonly converts the aspect of nature in these regions, in a single hour, from the cheerfulness of summer into the dreariness of winter. Indeed, we experienced very little either of snow, rain, or fog: vegetation, wherever the soil allowed any to spring up, was extremely luxuriant and forward; a great deal of the old snow, which had laid on the ground during the last season, ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... drowsing in misery over an unread book. Hugh, after observing me for a little, advised me to work quite deliberately, and to divide up my time among various occupations. It would have been useless to attempt it, for Nature was at work recuperating in her own way by an enforced listlessness and dreariness. But I have often since then thought how impossible it would have been for him to have endured such a condition. He had nothing passive about him; and I feel that he had every right to live his life on his own lines, to neglect ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 'Stand by' and on no account leave camp. This was horrible. The tents were too dark to play cards, we had no reading matter or letters to answer, and once more seemed doomed to an evening of deadly dreariness. However, we decided to patrol the camp, my chum and I. As we walked off together we little dreamed that exactly one month from that day he was to be called upon to pay the supreme sacrifice of all. ...
— One Young Man • Sir John Ernest Hodder-Williams
... followed on his entrance to be emptied, as if the woman he had always known—loving, satirical, clever, kind, observant—had been poured away. The effect upon him was one of indescribable, almost of horrible, dreariness. Omar Khayyam, his mother's black pug, was not in the room as usual, stretched out before ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... wonderful nights that impress the stranger most of all in Finland. There is something to make even the most prosaic feel poetical. There is a dull dreariness, a sombre sadness in the scene, and at the same time a rich warmth of colouring, a strength of Nature that makes even the least artistic feel the wonders of the picture spread out before them, and, withal, a peacefulness, for these vast tracts of ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... he borrowed from them on all hands in external details of organisation or in matters of ritual. But the origin of the germ which developed into Israel is not to be sought for in Egypt, and Jehovah has nothing in common with the colourless divinity of Penta-ur or with the God-forsaken dreariness of certain modern Egyptologists. That monotheism must have been a foreign importation, because it is contrary to that sexual dualism of Godhead which is the fundamental characteristic of Semitic religion, is an untenable exaggeration ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... factories, whence the hum of machinery issued; poor, mean dwellings, small and large, clustered here and there in the intermediate spaces, from which if any sounds came, they were less pleasant than the buzz of machines. Scarce any humanity was abroad; what there was deepened the impression of the dreariness ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... was an atmosphere laden with soot and redolent of many blended odors, but after the fusty smell of the shop it was almost health-giving. In the large public-house opposite, with its dirty windows and faded signboards, the gas was already being lit, which should change it from its daylight dreariness to a resort of ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... spoke of sins ancestral, born in him Impulses; of resistance fierce and wild; Of failure weak, and strength reviving dim; Self-hatred, dreariness no love beguiled; Of storm, and blasting light, and darkness grim; Of torrent paths, and tombs with mountains piled; Of gulfs in the unsunned bosom of the earth; Of dying ever into ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... could be distinguished from the surrounding ocean, and we discerned hills, shrubberies, and gardens in the vicinity of the town, the appearance of which is not calculated to delight the traveller, for a large desert region of sand girdles both city and gardens, giving an air of dreariness to the whole scene. ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... itself so plainly at the outbreak of the rebellion became, ere long, like one of those streams that, starting impetuously from its mountain source, flows on awhile clearly and rapidly, and then begins to wander and slacken its pace, till finally it is lost in the dreariness and desolation of some marshy wilderness, and so never reaches its destination, the open sea. There is no people in the world so abused and defrauded as the bulk of the Southern whites. If you pity the oppressed of another race, then pity ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... who find a sufficient delight in mere living. A few sharp commonplaces delivered with dry imperiousness by the old Squire; a little well-meaning babble from a couple of timid maiden aunts—such was the range of his converse with his kind from day to day. And this quiet dreariness had lasted for months past, and seemed likely to last as far into the future that young Ellington faced his prospect with a sort of pained confusion of mind, and began by slow degrees to understand the bovine apathy of the ploughmen. Old Mr. Ellington was a magnate who would have been ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... mind misgave her, not because the house was outwardly dreary, but in fear of the inward dreariness of the people—or in fear rather of their dreariness and pride combined. Old Lady Ball, though naturally ill-natured, was not ill-mannered, nor did she give herself any special airs; but she knew that she ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... The dreariness of the desert which had so oppressed her when they first arrived in Silver Bow slipped from her; she forgot the lack of trees and grass; the yuccas and Spanish bayonets lost their grimness; she grew to like the queer place with its queer vegetation; and the sunrises and sunsets were a source ...
— Tabitha at Ivy Hall • Ruth Alberta Brown
... aspect thus wild and desolate, when I could so much more pleasantly employ my reader's and my own mind's eye with that which next presented itself? I confess, so pleasant was the contrast then, that I still, in recalling that scene to memory, prepare myself, by the renewed vision of its dreariness and desolation, for the more grateful reception of an image than which earth contains none lovelier—it was a lovely girl. She fled thither for shelter: I did not see her until she was close by me; but never surely ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... monotonous footfall of the sentry pacing his watch; she had been fond of talking with her mates, but now there was no one to talk to; she had had an easy laugh, but it was gone dumb now; she had been born for comradeship, and blithe and busy work, and all manner of joyous activities, but here were only dreariness, and leaden hours, and weary inaction, and brooding stillness, and thoughts that travel by day and night and night and day round and round in the same circle, and wear the brain and break the heart with weariness. It was death in life; yes, death in life, that is what it must have ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... were many wet days? I believe a week of steady drizzle in summer is enough to make the stoutest heart depressed. It is to be borne in winter by the simple expedient of turning your face to the fire; but when you have no fire, and very long days, your cheerfulness slowly slips away, and the dreariness prevailing out of doors comes in and broods in the blank corners of your heart. I rather fancy, however, that it is a waste of energy to ponder over what I should do if we had a wet summer on such a radiant day as this. I prefer sitting ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... freed from all embarrassment, and being sought in marriage by many distinguished persons resolved to remain a widow no longer. The dreariness of her solitary life she might have borne, but her bodily infirmities had become intolerable. This chaste and saintly lady, after so many years of blameless widowhood, without even a breath of scandal, owing to her long absence from a husband's ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... anxiously, and any doubts he might have had, born of the dreariness, the odors of stale food and of the musty cellar below, of the shabby room she proceeded to show him, died in an impulse to somehow, some way, lift this small group of people out of the slough of despondency which seemed to be ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... screech or a scream, like that of the Hawk or the Peacock, but rather a sort of moaning melody, half music and half bewailment. This wailing song is far from disagreeable, though it has a cadence which is expressive of dreariness and melancholy. It might be performed on a small flute, by commencing with D octave and running down by semitones to a fifth below, and frequently repeating the notes, for the space of a minute, with occasional pauses and slight variations, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... catch for the first time the dreariness of his whole attitude—the dejection of his spare angular body and sparrowlike, ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... was perfunctory, and his eyes avoided her. When he had gone, she could only wonder what she had done to offend him; and a certain dreariness crept into the evening light. She was not the least in love with Philip—that she assured herself. But his sudden changes of mood were very trying to one who would like ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... children should so vindictively hate her. She could not have seen it as anything but hatred, being entirely ignorant of children and the strange forces to whose power they are subject, and she must have shivered in her bedroom at the dreariness and terror of the prospect before her. Many, many times she must have resolved not to be beaten, and many, many times she must have admitted herself beaten as badly as ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... library was open to me at all hours; and in it I often took refuge from the dreariness of unsympathetic society. I was never admitted within the magic circle of the family interests and enjoyments. If there was such a circle, Lady Alice and I certainly stood outside of it; but whether even then it had any real inside to it, I doubted much. Nevertheless, as I have said, our common exclusion ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... sledge travel would be impossible. So they must wait until the autumnal storms were over and winter had settled down in earnest. But, impatient as they were, time no longer hung heavily on their hands, nor did they now regard their place of abode as a prison. Its solitude and dreariness had fled before the advent of half a hundred Eskimo—short, squarely built men, moon-faced women, and roly-poly children, looking like animated balls of fur, all of whom had been brought from the mission to form a settlement on the beach. It was easier to bring them to the Heaven-sent ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... months ago he had been a strong walker, and the snow-bound paths of Swiss mountains had been a joy to him. He paused as he was slowly dragging himself on, and looked up at the wretched, desolate, comfortless abode which he called his home. Its dreariness was so odious to him that he was half-minded to lay himself down where he was, and let the night air come upon him and do its worst. In such case, however, some Italian doctor would be sent down who would say that he was mad. Above ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... herself in a narrow stone passage, and caught through an open door to the left a glimpse of a panelled room lighted up by a great glowing wood fire. It looked splendidly comfortable after the cold dreariness outside. Mrs Roy opened another door at the end ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton
... hours more would see him one of the wealthiest Princes in Europe. Strange, then, that, as he reflected on these things, there was no joy in his heart, but, rather, sensations of revolt and horror, flaming against a background of dreariness unspeakable: the combination forming an emotion the memory of which caused this day to stand out from its fellows draped in ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... the demeanour of his acquaintances there, that he positively had not been missed to any appreciable extent. He decided that the club was a dreary haunt, and could not understand why he had never before perceived its dreariness. The members seemed to be scarcely alive; and in particular they seemed to have conspired together to behave and talk as though humanity consisted of only one sex,—their own. Mr. Prohack, worried though ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... to throw possible pursuers off the scent. There was no disobeying the orders of the chief, so on he trudged, looking neither to right nor left, up one street, down another, now crossing an empty lot, now darting through a narrow alley, through the wastes and dreariness ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... great invisible fear became apparent, tangible, for all the sins, the woes, the miseries, the dreads, the dismal achings and throbbings, the dreariness and gloom of the lost star came together and like a huge geni took form and hideous shape—octopus-like—which slowly approached me, erstwhile happy—and hovered about my couch ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... thy little; do it well; Do what right and reason tell; Do what wrong and sorrow claim: Conquer sin and cover shame. Do thy little, though it be Dreariness and drudgery; They whom Christ apostles made ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... advertised situation. The number of incapables that thought themselves capable, and the number of capables who flatly declined the moment they heard they were to go down into the country, might have worn out the patience of a more patient man. And the capables willing to overlook the dreariness of the country in consideration of high wages rose up immediately and bid him good-day when informed the ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... of the little village had been like an enveloping anodyne to her weary body and mind. Removed from all her past, from the sights and the people that suggested those obsessing thoughts which had filled her waking hours with dreariness, she had sunk into the simple routine of Grosvenor as the tired body sinks into a soft bed. The daily sight of the snowy fields, the frozen hillsides black with forests, and the dry spirituous air, lifted ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... importance, the contributions of Mill to economic science are very much more than developments—even though we understand that term in its largest sense—of any previous writer. No one can have studied political economy in the works of its earlier cultivators without being struck with the dreariness of the outlook which, in the main, it discloses for the human race. It seems to have been Ricardo's deliberate opinion, that a substantial improvement in the condition of the mass of mankind was impossible. He considered it as the normal state of things that wages should be at the minimum ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... sweetly voluble; Some song of toil reclining from the heat, Or low of kine, or neigh of tethered steeds, Or honest clamor of some shepherd dog, Laughter, or cries, or any living breath, To make inroad upon this dreariness. Methinks no shape of savage insolence, No den unblest, nor hour inopportune, Could daunt me now, nor warn my maiden feet From friendly parle, that am distract of heart, With doubt, desertion, utter loneliness. Death would I seek to run from ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... sub-conscious to dawning consciousness, until at last we recognise ourselves again. And as it happens to most of us after the night's sleep, so it was with Graham at the end of his vast slumber. A dim cloud of sensation taking shape, a cloudy dreariness, and he found himself vaguely somewhere, recumbent, ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... for a belief that they all had been born on their backs, with their hands in their trousers pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence";—all these points, combined with the general dreariness of the landscape, the far-stretching marshes, and the distant sea-line, soon revealed to us that this was Pip's country, and we might momently expect to see the convict's head, or to hear the clank of his chain, over ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... pleasant look of the country. It was a lovely evening, and quiet as summer; not a breath stirring. The leaves were all off the trees; the hills were brown; but the soft, warm light that still lingered upon them forbade any look of harshness or dreariness. These hills lay towards the west, and at Thirlwall were not more than two miles distant, but sloping off more to the west as the range extended in a southerly direction. Between, the ground was beautifully broken. Rich fields and meadows lay on all ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... mother's house, resembling a stewardess of the olden time; when misfortune came, converted herself for my sake into maid of all work! Inspired by love for me, she patiently endured the hardships and dreariness of our sad situation; not a complaint, not a murmur, not a reproach. To see her so quietly resigned, you would have supposed that she had been both chamber-maid and cook all her life, that is if you never tasted her dishes! I shall always remember ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... be so easy, Senor Licurgo," returned the young man, just as they were entering a path bordered on either side by wheat-fields, whose luxuriance and early ripeness gladdened the eye. "This field appears to be better cultivated. I see that all is not dreariness and ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... splintering of little distant icefalls about one in the darkness. Now and again a cold arrow of wind would sing down from the frosty peaks above or jerk with a squiggle of laughter among the fallen slabs in the valley. And these were the only voices to prick me on through a dreariness lonely as death. ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... Prison, prison, prison; steel walls and gratings; the predestinate screechings and clangings of whistles and gongs; the endless filings to and fro, in and out; the stealthy insolence of guards, or their treacherous good-fellowship; the abstracted or menacing gaze of the higher officials; the dreariness, aimlessness, and sometimes the severity of the daily labor; the sullen threat of the loaded rifles; the hollow, echoing spaces that shut out hope; the thought of the stifling stench of the dungeons beneath the pavements, hidden from all save the victims, whose very existence ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... here give a little thought to the dark dreariness of their surroundings. This party was not so very far north of Cape Evans, and their winter was only about three weeks shorter if measured by the sun's absence below the horizon—the contrast between the "palace" at Cape Evans and the ice-cave at Campbell's ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... man was seated in the doorway. His figure had a despairing droop, his eyes were fixed on the forest of dead tree-trunks. There was something of a corresponding dreariness in his whole attitude, as though the waters of tribulation had gone over his life and left it a veritable Drowned Land, its hopes engulfed, ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... answered. "Why should we? It's just the same being here as being anywhere else." He looked at me with an infinity of dreariness in ...
— Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... fingers. Well, this was the end. She was to be thrust out of the new brightness, back into the drab dreariness, the emptiness that was her fate. She ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... engineer—how good it would be to say to any of them, 'Here, let us change places awhile. Here is my latch-key, my cheque-book, my joy and my leisure. Use them as long as you will. Quick, let us change clothes, and let me take my share of the world's dreariness and pain'! ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... now from sheer exhaustion he slept. But Erica, to whom the grief was more new, could not sleep. Every minute the pain of realization grew keener. Here she was in England once more, this was the journey she had so often thought of and planned. This was going home. Oh, the dreariness of the reality when compared with those bright expectations. And yet it was neither this thought nor the actual fact of her mother's death which first brought the tears ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... nothing on the walls to break the sombre monotony of those long vistas of shade. No carvings on the wainscoting, no moulded masks peering down from the simply severe cornices, no marble vases on the landings. There was an eminent dreariness and want of life—so rare in an American establishment—all over the abode. It was Hood's haunted house put in order and newly painted. The servants, too, were shadowy, and chary of their visits. Bells rang three times before the gloomy chambermaid could be induced to present ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... especially, that he makes love in some way a noble art, and, admiring it, knows all its divine value, makes it present in his mind, thus satisfying not his body merely, but his soul. More than once, when I think here of the emptiness, the uncertainty, the dreariness of life, it occurs to me that perhaps thou hast chosen better, and that not Caesar's court, but war and love, are the only objects for which it is worth while to be born ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... you, Mrs. Hooker, and the committee you represent, for your words of cordial approbation. Such a testimony will go far to redeem the ordinary drudgery and dreariness of public life, and I shall ever cherish it with real satisfaction and pride. I ought to say, however, that in performing the acts so handsomely commended by you I did nothing but my simple duty. Indeed, constituted as I am, and believing as I ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... completely terrified at this ride on a short-paced donkey, with a gipsy behind her, who considered that he was earning half a crown. Two low thatched cottages—the only houses they passed in this lane—seemed to add to the dreariness. They had no windows to speak of, and the doors were closed. It was probable that they were inhabited by witches, and it was a relief to find that the donkey did not ...
— Tom and Maggie Tulliver • Anonymous
... and dingy, and are better left without comment. Beyond the Treasury is a fine large white barn, with wide unhandsome grounds about it. The President lives there. It is ugly enough outside, but that is nothing to what it is inside. Dreariness, flimsiness, bad taste reduced to mathematical completeness is what the inside offers to the eye, if it remains yet what ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 3. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... the garden into the drawing-room, and you will perceive a change, too. Its dreariness has been softened by many a graceful adjunct of comfort and luxury. Half of it, by means of a crimson screen, is transformed into a painting-room. Olive would have it so; for several reasons, the chief of which was, that whether the young paintress was working or not, Mrs. Rothesay might never ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... the general aspect of the country on this side of the valley of Mexico, suffice it to say, that there is a universal air of dreariness, vastiness, and desolation. The country is flat, but always enlivened by the surrounding mountains, like an uninteresting painting in a diamond frame; and yet it is not wholly uninteresting. It has a character peculiar to itself, great plains ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... nook and on hill-side, are among the most picturesque and engaging in the whole country; the vale widens into spacious and noble meadow-grounds, on which might suitably stand the mansion of any nobleman in England—as you near its head, everything gets wild and broken, with a slight touch of dreariness, and by no very difficult ascent we might reach Easdale-tarn in less than an hour's walking from Grassmere—a lonely and impressive scene, and the haunt of the angler almost as frequently as ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... the soil beneath them, jungles of burnt-up, leafless bushes, tangled, and apparently neglected. The trees are olives and mulberries—the bushes, vines.' This is a picture that will not impress an Englishman with the due sensation of dreariness, unless he recollects that in France there are no enclosures—that the country lies spread out before him, in some parts and seasons, like a richly variegated carpet; in others, like an Arabian desert. The romantic, Eastern, Biblical olive!—what is it? 'The ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... upon the stack, And other birds all black, While bleak November's frowning wearily; And the black cloud's dropping rain, Till the floods hide half the plain, And everything is dreariness to me. ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... Oh, the dreariness, the heaviness of a country dinner party! It seems to last four times as long as any other—parish, horses, or crops the only topic of conversation. How can you be interested in old Jane Smith's rheumatism when you have ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... travelling was by sailing vessels and stage coaches. The latter were the surer—but not the more popular. In the wintry months, when the navigation of the river was unimpeded by ice, the condition of the roads was such that, in spite of the dreariness of water transit, at that season, the packets were able to maintain a fair rivalship with the coaches, while, in the summer, the latter stood but little chance in the competition, but were almost entirely deserted. To this result ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... chair, evolved out of the drifted accumulations of the place a wonderful romance. But that sort of eager freshness we most of us find to be impossible as we grow older; and we are confronted with the problem of how to keep care and dreariness away, how to avoid becoming mere trudging wayfarers, dully obsessed by all we have to do and bear. Can we not find some medicine to revive the fading emotion, to renew the same sort of delight in new thoughts and ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson |
