"Barren" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was very lonely after a little part of the village had been gone through. It left the main street, then bid farewell to a few scattering distant houses and approached what was called Barley Point;—a barren piece of ground from which a beautiful view of the Sound and the ocean line, and perhaps porpoises, could be had. But at the foot of this field the road turned, round the end of that belt of woods spoken of; and getting on the other side of ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... lik a flock of ship just shared, dat come up from de ship-wash; every one of em bears tweens, an nare a one among em is barren. ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... mother in a gush of pride greater than any he had since experienced. She had never used it, but it always hung upon the one nail in the one place, as a symbol of his love and of hers. And there, higher up on the end of the shelf barren enough of ornaments, God wot, were a broken toy and a much-defaced primer, mementos likewise of his childhood; and farther along the wall, on a sort of raised bench, a keg, the spigot of which he was once guilty of turning ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... Christine and Lisa, who follow her about and ask questions to their hearts' content, which she is never tired of answering. The garden, we revelled in, and found it hard to believe that the terrace, which rises to a height of one hundred feet, was once a barren rock until Count Borromeo covered it with a luxuriant growth of orange, olive, and lemon trees, cedars, oleanders, roses, camellias, and every tree and plant that you can think of. It is really a bewilderingly lovely garden, and we wandered through its paths joyously until we came suddenly ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... placing him in his sack, proceeded upon his journey, and travelling for many days he at last reached a country so barren and rocky that not a single living thing grew upon it—everywhere reigned grim desolation. And in the midst of this dead region he ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various
... meet with another desert of eight days journey in extent, and terribly barren, having neither trees or water, except what is extremely bitter, insomuch, that beasts refuse to drink of it, except when mixed with meal, and travellers are therefore obliged to carry water along with them. After passing this desert, you come to the kingdom of Timochaim[6], in the north ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... "I have merely come to make your fortune; that is to say, I offer you a superb opportunity of making your entry into the artistic world. Art, you know, is a barren route, of which ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... lay down universal or eternal laws, and limits himself to the exploration of the phenomena appearing in a certain stage of historical development. We are not to have another abstract economic man with a world of abstractions all his own; lone, shipwrecked mariners upon barren islands, imaginary communities nicely adapted for demonstration purposes in college class rooms, and all the other stage properties of the political economists, are to be entirely discarded. Our author does not propose to give us a set of principles by which we shall be able to understand ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... verandah-post beside her with folded arms, looking down. "But that is what you won't see; how should you? You will only see dusty, upstart towns, with horrible corrugated-iron hotels, where you will swelter in heat and flies and eat abominable tinned stuffs. It is a barren, comfortless land at present, with a possibility of being useful some day. They want money, energy, brains to develop it thoroughly; and they won't accept them when they are offered, because a few stiff-necked Englishmen happen to be in power. It is absurd to go there at ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... as March, 1850, Daniel Webster said in the United States Senate: "California is Asiatic in formation and scenery; composed of vast mountains of enormous height, with broken ridges and deep valleys. The sides of these mountains are barren—entirely barren—their tops capped by ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... the beautiful and bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by their tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So omnipotent is art; which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced bright terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside at creation's final day. And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match that bloom of theirs, ye cannot, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... further than Raumur, and burned with the same fire as Fabre, for he also had the makings of a great poet. His curiosity had assembled enormous collections, but he considered, as Fabre considered, that collecting is "only the barren contemplation of a vast ossuary which speaks only to the eyes, and not to the mind or imagination," and that the true history of insects should be that of their habits, their industries, their battles, their ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... of her happy disposition might have borne their natural fruit. But at her father's death she found herself isolated, without friends and without amusements. She found herself marooned on the island of Eurasia, a flat and barren land of narrow confines and stunted vegetation. The Japanese have no use for the half-castes; and the Europeans look down upon them. They dwell apart in a limbo of which Baroness ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... for speculation, do the streets of London afford! We never were able to agree with Sterne in pitying the man who could travel from Dan to Beersheba, and say that all was barren; we have not the slightest commiseration for the man who can take up his hat and stick, and walk from Covent-garden to St. Paul's Churchyard, and back into the bargain, without deriving some amusement—we had almost said instruction—from his perambulation. And yet there are such beings: we meet ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... southward and joins the Rio Grande. There is verdure along these streams, and gardens and fruit orchards repay the rude irrigation. In spite of these watercourses the aspect of the landscape is wild and desert-like—low barren hills and ragged ledges, wide sweeps of sand and dry gray bushes, with mountains and long lines of horizontal ledges in the distance. Laguna is built upon a rounded elevation of rock. Its appearance is exactly that ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... deformities, such as toads, spiders, or that most loathsome of nature's excrements, the bat, are not indifferent or insignificant: their very existence is directly at enmity and wages war with his. In truth, one might smile at the unbelievers whose imagination is too barren for ghosts and fearful spectres, and those births of night which we see in sickness, to take root therein, or who stare and marvel at Dante's descriptions, when the commonest every-day life brings before our eyes such frightful distorted master-pieces ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... on the snow, now seem even brighter than they were—the blue violet rises among the sheltered moss by the old tree roots, and the broad-leaved adder tongue gives out its orange and purple blossoms to gladden the brown earth, while the trees are yet all black and barren, save the various species of pine and spruce, which now wear a fringe of softer green. The May flowers of New Brunswick seldom blossom till June, which is rather an Irish thing of them to do, and although the weather has been fine, and recalls to the memory the balmy breath ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... the numbers of animals grouped around each type. No attempt was made to see connection between type and type, for where these had been separately created there was nothing to connect them except possibly some idea in the mind of the Creator. This apparently barren attitude to nature was stronger in men's minds because it had inspired the colossal achievements of Cuvier, a genius who, under whatever misconceptions he had worked, would have added greatly to knowledge. As we have seen in the first chapter, Huxley, through ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... asked the impertinent question, not for Farquhart, whose honor he, apparently, doubted. "Lord Farquhart's not to blame, as you know well enough. The mess is of Lord Gordon's making, for Lord Gordon holds in trust even the barren lands that came to Percy with ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... strange than the scene which he sketches, the deep blue light which turns the rocks into turquoise and emerald or the silvery look of the diver as he plunges into the waves. Twice in their course the cliffs reach a height of thirteen hundred feet above the sea, but their grandeur is never the barren grandeur of our Northern headlands; their sternest faces are softened with the vegetation of the South; the myrtle finds root in every cranny and the cactus clings to the bare rock front from summit to base. A cliff ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... the year growing ancient, Nor yet on summer's death, nor on the birth Of trembling winter, the fairest flowers o' the season Are our carnations, and streaked gilliflowers, Which some call nature's bastards: of that kind Our rustic garden's barren; and I care not To get ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... Kardelj in a daze, through a door to the rear of the desk, and into a somewhat bigger room, largely barren of furniture save for a massive table with a dozen chairs about it. At the table, looking some ten years older than in any photo Josip had ever seen, sat ...
— Expediter • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... would I giue a thousand furlongs of Sea, for an Acre of barren ground: Long heath, Browne firrs, any thing; the wills aboue be done, but I would faine dye a ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... that the Session of the Parliament up to this point, notwithstanding the great business of the Petition and Advice and the Kingship question, had by no means been barren in legislation, the House had gathered up all the Bills already passed, but not yet assented to, for presentation to his Highness in a body. On the 9th of June thirty-eight such Bills, "some of the public, and the others of a more private, ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... strange taste of the Spanish kings," he observed to Gerald Burke, "to plant their capital at Madrid in the centre of a barren country, when they might make such a splendid city as this their capital. I could see no charms whatever in Madrid. The climate was detestable, with its hot sun and bitter cold winds. Here the temperature is delightful; the air is soft ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... wide hall gleaming with its superb trophies of priceless arms, with a quick glance at the crowd of sable retainers, Major Hawke realized in all the barren splendors of the first story the absence of any womanly hand. As he followed the obsequious house butler into a vast ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... cargo of this second vessel consisted almost entirely of remarkably heavy cases marked "machinery." The two vessels, once out of English waters, showed great fondness for each other, and proceeded together to a deserted, barren island near Madeira. Here they anchored side by side; and the mysterious gentlemen, now resplendent in the gray and gold uniform of the Confederacy, stepped aboard the "Shenandoah." Then the cases were hoisted out of the hold of the smaller vessel; and, when the "machinery" was ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... wakened him, and now he lay staring into utter darkness and marveling that the dream was so much like the reality. He was traveling over barren wastes with a caravan; had been for three days. But the waste they crossed was a waste of snow. His companions were natives—who like the Arabs, lived a nomadic life. Their steeds the swift footed reindeer, their tents the igloos of walrus and reindeer skins, they roamed over a territory hundreds ...
— Triple Spies • Roy J. Snell
... passed no one. The road was surprisingly barren of shelters, and, strangely enough, of the two houses they saw one was temporarily deserted and the other unoccupied. The wind came with the breaking of the storm—that cold, piercing wind that often comes in June as a reminder that winter has not passed by so very long before. It whipped the rain ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... of Kensington Gardens," he said. "For some time past I have been living in a flat, ugly, barren, agricultural district. You can't think how pleasant I found the picture presented by the Gardens, as a contrast. The ladies in their rich winter dresses, the smart nursery maids, the lovely children, the ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... watch the path slipping along beneath his horse's hoofs, like the unwinding of coils of brown ribbon, "is like that witch-face slope that we saw awhile ago. It seems to occur at long intervals in patches. You see down that declivity how little grows, how barren." ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... believed that she would never bear a child." She remains at home till the symptoms have ceased, and during this time she may be fed by none but her mother. When the flux is over, her father and mother are bound to cohabit with each other, else it is believed that the girl would be barren all her life.[67] Similarly, among the Baganda, when a girl menstruated for the first time she was secluded and not allowed to handle food; and at the end of her seclusion the kinsman with whom she was staying (for among the Baganda young people did not reside with their parents) ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... France spoke, and every sentient being on this earth betook itself to reflection; the words sped into the obscurity, through space, at hazard, no matter where,—"It is only the wind, it is only a little noise," said the barren minds that live upon irony; but the next day, or three months, or a year later, something fell on the surface of the earth, or something rose. What had been the cause of that? The noise that had vanished, ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... silence; but let not thy faith Fail for a moment in God's boundless grace. But know, oh know, He has prepared a place Fairer for our dear dead than worlds beneath, Yet not beneath; for those entrancing spheres Surround our earth as seas a barren isle. Ours is the region of eternal fears; Theirs is the region where God's radiant smile Shines outward from the centre, and gives hope Even to those who in the shadows grope. They are not far from us. At first though long And lone may seem the paths that intervene, If ever on the staff of prayer ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Johnson exclaimed, 'he was a blockhead;' and upon my expressing my astonishment at so strange an assertion, he said, 'What I mean by his being a blockhead is that he was a barren rascal.' BOSWELL. 'Will you not allow, Sir, that he draws very natural pictures of human life?' JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, it is of very low life. Richardson used to say, that had he not known who Fielding was, he should have believed he was an ostler. Sir, there is more ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... Great Britain? and their independence does not at all prevent England from deriving all the advantage from them ever to be derived from colonies. The only good which England can derive from her extensive colonization is not to be gained by swaying a barren sceptre over distant colonies, but by spreading abroad her race, her language, her civilization, and thus enlarging the sphere of her commerce. Under a free system of intercourse England would not derive less benefit, at present, from the ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... the hostility of Chinese officials towards British merchants and the legitimate expansion of their trade, quarrels were frequent, culminating in the so-called Opium War of 1840-42, resulting in the acquisition by us of the small, barren island of Hongkong, and the opening to foreign trade of five ports, including Canton and Shanghai, at all of which small plots of land some half a mile square were set apart for the exclusive residence of foreigners generally but of Englishmen in particular. Disputes, however, did ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... stretching inland, with the rivers meandering through it, and the long sweep of shore which encompasses the Greve, with Avranches, and its groves and gardens, in the back ground. Close at hand, and almost beneath one's feet, as it were, is the barren rock called the Tombelaine, which, though somewhat larger than the Mont St. Michel, is not inhabited. Even this rock, however, was formerly fortified by the English; and several remains of the old towers are still found among the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 479, March 5, 1831 • Various
... noble and useful books to St. Albans' store. William of Trompington (1214) distinguished himself by giving to the abbey books he had taken from his prior. Abbot Roger was a better man, and gave many books and pieces; but John III and IV and Hugh are barren rocks in our fertile valley, for apparently they did nothing for the library. Richard of Wallingford did worse than nothing. He bribed Richard de Bury with four volumes, and sold to him thirty-two books for fifty pounds of silver, retaining one-half of this sum for himself, and devoting ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... knocked their dhows to pieces to save them; but the men who manned them, as well as the poor slaves with which the majority of them had been crammed, we found, on pulling inshore to examine them later on, had all got safely beyond our reach, far away amid the khors of the desert coast of the barren ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... formation of the land, occurred at every mile of their progress, the view was bounded, on two of the sides, by the gradual and low elevations, which gave name to the description of prairie we have mentioned; 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 ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... shouted again at the barren shoreline where the fire ate at the drift and nothing stirred, yet something very much alive and conscious lay hidden. This time there was more than simple challenge in Ross's demand—there was ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... Eskimo lives and loves after his kind and works out his own destiny. This diameter we are to follow. To what end? Not, we hope, to come back like him who went from Dan to Beersheba to say "All is barren," but to come near to the people, our fellow-Britons, in this transverse section of a country bigger than Europe. We want to see what they are doing, these Trail-Blazers of Commerce, who, a last vedette, are holding the ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... the interest of the story, to have filled, from these slight sketches, a number of pages, more considerable than those which have been already presented. But, in reality, these hints, simple as they are, are pregnant with passion and distress. It is the refuge of barren authors only, to crowd their fictions with so great a number of events, as to suffer no one of them to sink into the reader's mind. It is the province of true genius to develop events, to discover ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... falling from above. At the head of the bay is an extensive piece of low flat ground, intersected by numerous rivulets, which, uniting at a short distance from the beach, formed a deep and rapid stream, near the mouth of which we landed. This spot was, I think, the most barren I ever saw, the ground being almost entirely covered with small pieces of slaty limestone, among which no vegetation appeared for more than a mile, to which distance Mr. Ross and myself walked inland, following the banks of the stream. Among the fragments we picked up one piece ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... said the other man, "stand not to reason on it, but up and away. Lords' hests must be listened to with a quick ear. Thou hast had thy day, old dame, but thy sun has long been set. Thou art now the very emblem of an old war-horse turned out on the barren heath—thou hast had thy paces in thy time, but now a broken amble is the best of them—Come, amble off ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... of the spot. It really seemed to me as if our voices and laughter, so far from breaking the deep eternal silence, only brought it out into stronger relief. On either hand rose up, shear from the waters edge, a great, barren, shingly mountain; before us loomed a dark pine forest, whose black shadows crept up until they merged in the deep crevasses and fissures of the Snowy Range. Behind us stretched the winding gullies by which we had climbed to this mountain tarn, and Mr. K——'s little hut and scrap of a garden ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... She had sought for it, and never found it until now, and her senses doubted it. It was a paradise of love, to be sure; but one, too, of duty. Duty made it real. Work was there, and fulfilment of the purpose of life itself. And if his days hitherto had been useless, hers had in truth been barren. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... received arose from our travelling as we did, without speaking or understanding the language, with no servant and no carriage, taking the common conveyances of the country. Our fare, chiefly fish, black bread, and brandy. The country round Falkenborg is barren, with cultivated spots ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury
... His heart sank within him. He had been dreaming golden dreams of fortune for a week past, but now he was brought down to the cold and barren reality. All his money was gone except a dollar, on which he must live for two days and a half, till his ...
— Sam's Chance - And How He Improved It • Horatio Alger
... great and right fierce; that break ice and glass with their claws, and make many holes therein, and dive there-through into the sea, and take fish under the ice and glass, and draw them out through the same holes, and bring them to the cliff and live thereby. The land is barren, out-take a few places in the valleys, in the which places unneth grow oats. In the places that men dwell in, only grow herbs, grass, and trees. And in those places breed beasts, tame and wild. And so for the more part men of the land live by fish and by hunting ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... The bold soldier who stormed a battery felt his heart beat more proudly and more securely beneath the cordon of the Legion than behind a cuirass of steel; and to a people in whom the sense of duty alone would seem cold, barren, and inglorious, he had substituted a highly-wrought chivalrous enthusiasm; and by the prestige of his own name, the proud memory of his battles, and the glory of those mighty tournaments at which all Europe were the spectators, he had converted a ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... or may not remove mountains, but it has certainly made the Northland. No Christian martyr ever possessed greater faith than did the pioneers of Alaska. They never doubted the bleak and barren land. Those who came remained, and more ever came. They could not leave. They "knew" the gold was there, and they persisted. Somehow, the romance of the land and the quest entered into their blood, the spell of it gripped hold of them and ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... sterile, is now deemed fit to put some sort of live stock upon, though, of course, the more arid the soil, the greater the area required to feed one sheep. To the traveller who crosses its weary stretches in the train, the Karroo seems a barren waste; but it produces small succulent shrubs much relished by sheep, and every here and there a well or a stagnant pool may be found which supplies water enough to keep the creatures alive. Here six acres is the average allowed for one sheep. Tracts of rough ground, covered with patches of thick ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... a couple of chairs and a three-cornered washhand-stand. There was neither sofa nor writing-table. There was not an ornament on the high wooden mantelshelf, or a picture on the panelled walls. Vixen shivered as she surveyed the big barren room. ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... himself: Stay'd much at home, and when in luckless hour His state affairs would drag him from his tower, Left with his spouse a niece himself had bred, To be the partner of her board and bed; And one old priest, a barren lump of clay, To chant their mass, and serve them day by day. Her prison room was fair; from roof to floor With golden imageries pictur'd o'er; There Venus might be seen, in act to throw Down to the mimick fire that gleam'd below The 'Remedies of ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... in vain? It may be another form of westernways, from the A.Sax. wste, barren, empty; wstern, a desert place. Or is it connected with A.Sax. winstre, the left hand? 320 y corse in clot mot colder keue, Thy body in earth (clods) must colder plunge. 321 for-garte forfeited. 322 [gh]ore fader for form-fader, first-father. 323 drwry ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... house on the levee, with which Mr. Anderson had business influence. And Samuel warned him that he must do his best, for he could not come back home now without danger of arrest, and Norman made many promises of amendment; so many, that his future seemed to him barren of all delight. And, by way of encouraging himself in the austere life upon which he had resolved to enter, he attended the least reputable place of amusement in the city, the first night after his ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... writers say, on the sweat of the people, every time the sieve dips down into the taxation-pot by means of a machine called the budget. Adolphe, working early and late and earning little, soon found out the barren depths of his hole; and his thoughts busied themselves, as he trotted from township to township, spending his salary in shoe-leather and costs of travelling, with how to find a ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... with his sphere; but, alas! that sphere is microscopic; it is formed of minutiae, and he surrenders his genuine vision to the artist, in order to embrace it in his ken. His bodily senses grow acute, even to barren and inhuman pruriency; while his mental become proportionally obtuse. The reverse is the man of mind. He who is placed in the sphere of nature and of God, might be a mock at Tattersall's and Brookes's, ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... it not? He will give you a triumphant entrance into His kingdom, those of you who have gone out in loving solicitude and anxious sympathy to labor for the souls of your fellow-men. He will administer unto you an abundant entrance, and then—what? He will give you CHILDREN; and the barren woman shall have more children than she that ...
— Godliness • Catherine Booth
... there to be settled—the postmaster was to be paid off for his light but lonely services, and the "inhabitants" had to be furnished with another month's homely rations, as per agreement. And then Skyland would know J. Pinkney Bloom no more. The owners of these precipitous, barren, useless lots might come and view the scene of their invested credulity, or they might leave them to their fit tenants, the wild hog and the browsing deer. The work of the Skyland ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... flowed with milk and honey might then support a mighty empire, with independent resources sufficient for times of great emergencies, but now that land seems almost barren and supports a few wandering bands of marauding Arabs and ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... country so barren and uninteresting yesterday, that even a professional traveller could not have made a single page of it. It was, in every thing, a perfect contrast to the rich plains of Artois— unfertile, neglected ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... jealousy (the cause of shocking violences) would be heard of: and hypocrisy between man and wife be banished the bosoms of each. Nor, probably, would the reproach of barrenness rest, as it now too often does, where it is least deserved.—Nor would there possibly be such a person as a barren woman. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... reported this morning. We were sceptical, but this afternoon it showed up unmistakably to the west, and there can be no further doubt about it. It is Joinville Island, and its serrated mountain ranges, all snow- clad, are just visible on the horizon. This barren, inhospitable- looking land would be a haven of refuge to us if we could but reach it. It would be ridiculous to make the attempt though, with the ice all broken up as it is. It is too loose and broken to march over, yet not open enough to be able to launch the boats." For the next two or ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... behold, by the iniquity of fate, she had passed through her youth alone, and drew near to the confines of age, a childless woman. The tender ambitions that she had received at birth had been, by time and disappointment, diverted into a certain barren zeal of industry and fury of interference. She carried her thwarted ardours into housework, she washed floors with her empty heart. If she could not win the love of one with love, she must dominate all by her temper. Hasty, wordy, and wrathful, ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... has human knowledge been more extended in our time than in that of astronomy. Forty years ago astronomical research seemed quite barren of results of great interest or value to our race. The observers of the world were working on a traditional system, grinding out results in an endless course, without seeing any prospect of the great generalizations to which they might ultimately ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... this subject in THE CONTINENTAL, we concluded by considering the consequences of an early victory of the North over the entire South, followed by the restoration of the old Union upon precisely the old basis. We showed that, in such an event, the war would have been barren of results even to the extent of removing its own cause, or preventing its almost immediate and more desperate renewal; that the question at issue is a question of paramount governing power between two adverse theories of social existence; between two distinct ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... low barren cliff overhung the house in which he was born, fir and birch looked down on the roof, and wild-cherry strewed flowers over it. Upon this roof there walked about a little goat, which belonged to Oeyvind. He was kept there that he might not go astray, and Oeyvind ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... doesn't know, no one knows, but I think your mother would, how it cut me to turn 'em off just before winter set in. I lay awake many a night thinking of it, and I gave them what I had—I did, indeed. I hadn't got money to pay 'em, but I had three barren cows fattened, and gave every scrap of meat to the men, and I let 'em go into the woods and gather what was fallen, and I winked at their breaking off old branches, and now to have it cast up against me by that cur—that servant. But I'll go on with the ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... too far over their impulses to allow of their becoming partisans, is offensive alike to the aristocrat and the democrat. By the one he is denounced as a man who holds incendiary principles, by the other as a half-hearted "trimmer." He has no sympathy, as he says, with "that vague, barren pathos, that useless effervescence of enthusiasm, which plunges, with the spirit of a martyr, into an ocean of generalities, and which always reminds me of the American sailor, who had so fervent an enthusiasm for General Jackson, that he at last sprang from ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... great ceremony, and did it on the sixth day of the moon, with which day they began both their months and their years. They gave a name to this shrub, denoting that it had the virtue of curing all diseases. They sacrificed victims to it, believing that, by its virtue, the barren were made fruitful. They looked upon it likewise as a preservative against all poisons. Thus do several nations of the world place their religion ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... bind the stubborn will, Wound the callous breast, Make self-righteousness be still, Break earth's stupid rest. Strangers on a barren shore, Lab'ring long and lone, We would enter by the door, And Thou know'st ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... common sense, for instance, seems concrete and natural. The reaction of common sense to the world is direct and practical, it has few questions to ask, and philosophic speculations appear to it abstract and barren. But, upon analysis, it is the common sense view that stands revealed as abstract and barren. For an abstract object is one that does not fully correspond to the rich and manifold reality; it is ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... sandy plain in the heat of the midday sun and you return the same way the next morning after a rainy night—what has happened? The ground which yesterday looked so parched and barren is now covered with millions of tiny blades. Where has this sudden life come from? It was there all the time. There is always latent life beneath the surface, but it is invisible. And as soon as a fertilizing rain comes, it springs up, and everyone ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... allowed myself a good deal of licence and speculation in treating certain unwitnessed scenes in "The Barren Wooing." But the theory that I develop in it to account for the miscarriage of the matrimonial plans of Queen Elizabeth and Robert Dudley seems to me to be not only very fully warranted by de Quadra's correspondence, but the only theory that will convincingly explain the ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... the larch, that were once rose-red with the blood of Spring, but now rattle on the leafless branches, black and bare as they. No leaf remains on any bough of the forest, no scarlet streamer of brier flaunts from the steadfast rocks that underlie all verdure, and now stand out, bleak and barren, the truths and foundations of life, when its ornate glories are fled away. The river flows past, a languid stream of lead; a single crow, screaming for its mate, flaps heavily against the north-east gale, that enters here also and lifts the carpet in long waves across the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... Ilbrahim would derive enjoyment from the most trifling events, and from every object about him; he seemed to discover rich treasures of happiness, by a faculty analogous to that of the witch-hazel, which points to hidden gold where all is barren to the eye. His airy gayety, coming to him from a thousand sources, communicated itself to the family, and Ilbrahim was like a domesticated sunbeam, brightening moody countenances, and chasing away the gloom from the dark corners of ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... apt to be tiresome when we are not athirst for information; but, to be quite fair, we must admit that superior reticence is a good deal due to lack of matter. Speech is often barren, but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled nest-egg; and, when it takes to cackling, will have nothing to announce ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... hillside and out across a barren flat. Halfway across the flat the trail forked. Lorry had ceased to whistle. At the fork his pony stopped of its own accord. The man turned questioningly. Lorry gestured toward the right-hand trail. The man staggered on. The horses fretted at the slow pace. Keen to anticipate some trickery, ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... heroically fought and so victoriously ended shall pass into history a miserable failure, barren of permanent results,—a scandalous and shocking waste of blood and treasure,—a strife for empire, as Earl Russell characterized it, of no value to liberty or civilization,—an attempt to re-establish a Union by force, which must be the ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... and social sides are organically related, and that education cannot be regarded as a compromise between the two, or a superimposition of one upon the other. We are told that the psychological definition of education is barren and formal—that it gives us only the idea of a development of all the mental powers without giving us an idea of the use to which these powers are put. On the other hand, it is urged that the social definition ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and say, 'Tis all barren': and so it is: and so is all the world to him who will not cultivate the fruits it offers."—STERNE: ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... through a contracted valley, lying between the rocky wall which divided the island, and a chain of sandy hills, which hid the sea and sheltered the valley from the wind. Fritz and I ascended one of these hills, on which a few pines and broom were growing, and perceived beyond them a barren tract, stretching to the sea, where the coral reefs rose to the level of the water, and appeared to extend far into the sea. Any navigators, sailing along these shores, would pronounce the island inaccessible ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... barren desert of her vigil a man's voice, vital and passionate, rang and echoed in a maddening, ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... we belong To the wild olive wood; Grace took us from the barren tree, And grafts ...
— Hymns and Spiritual Songs • Isaac Watts
... in Lady Hamilton's behalf, stating the important service which she had rendered to the fleet at Syracuse; and Mr. Addington, it is said, acknowledged that she had a just claim upon the gratitude of the country. This barren acknowledgment was all that was obtained; but a sum, equal to the pension which her husband had enjoyed, was settled on her by Nelson, and paid in monthly payments during his life. A few weeks after this event, the war was renewed; and the ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... Upon the barren sands they bow. What tongue of joy e'er woke such prayer, As bursts in desolation there? What arm of strength e'er wrought such power, As waits to crown that feeble hour? There into life an infant empire springs! There falls the iron from the soul; There liberty's young accents roll, ...
— An Ode Pronounced Before the Inhabitants of Boston, September the Seventeenth, 1830, • Charles Sprague
... the air, who were nevertheless very ill qualified to win admiration for the caste to which they belonged. To state the simple truth, most of them were very ordinary commonplace personages, respectable, sapless, idealess—what Dr. Johnson would have characterized as exceedingly barren rascals. Some were of obscure origin, and would have been hard put to it if required to trace their ancestry beyond a single generation. Of these latter, a few, as has already been seen, had amassed wealth by trade or speculation, and had made their way into the exclusive ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... for teaching by the eye and hand and by real things, and in his aversion to the barren and erroneous method of teaching from books alone, Rousseau, constantly carried away by the passionate ardor of his nature, rushes into an opposite extreme, and exclaims, "I hate books; they only teach us to talk about what we do not understand." Then, checked ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... valley, across the low hills that encircled it, sometimes spanning or running parallel to the bright stream that had been the delight of Eric's innocent childhood. There was something enjoyable at first to the poor boy's eyes, so long accustomed to the barren sea, in resting once more on the soft undulating green of the summer fields, which were intertissued with white and yellow flowers, like a broidery of pearls and gold. The whole scene was bathed in the exquisite light, and rich ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... Agriculture, and the International Boundary and Water Commission, United States and Mexico. A number of these projects are multiple-purpose projects, providing not only for reclamation and irrigation of barren land and flood control, but also for the production of power needed for industrial development of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... know the connection between Beauty and Truth, and the place of Beauty in the moral and intellectual order of the Kosmos. The problems of idealism and realism, as he sets them forth, may seem to many to be somewhat barren of result in the metaphysical sphere of abstract being in which he places them, but transfer them to the sphere of art, and you will find that they are still vital and full of meaning. It may be that it is as a critic of Beauty that Plato ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... his usual simplicity, he gives some account of the island and of Christianity therein: "Our Lord has been well served this year in the island of Bohol, with the fruits gathered from the conversion of those pagans, for in this barren waste we have set out a beautiful garden of new plants which our Lord has planted. Many people have been brought together and induced to settle in villages, wherein they are instructed. At the time when I am writing this, we are in a village on the coast, whither there came down to us yesterday ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, - Volume XIII., 1604-1605 • Ed. by Blair and Robertson
... and he went away glad and brought his young bride. This first great picture of Raphael's represented this marriage taking place at the foot of the Temple steps. The disappointed lovers are present and, I am sorry to say, one of them is showing his anger by breaking his barren rod even while ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... much and acts too little," he said to the Duke of Chevreuse; "his most solid occupations are confined to vague applications of his mind and barren resolutions; he must see society, study it, mix in it, without becoming a slave to it, learn to express himself forcibly, and acquire a gentle authority. If he do not feel the need of possessing firmness and nerve, he will not make any real progress; ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... of human life. A lean and threadbare scarecrow flapped his ragged coat-sleeves in the wind that swept across the barren garden patch farther up the slope,—this was the nearest approach to human life that came within the range of vision. And as if to invite jovial companionship, this pathetic gentleman wore his ancient straw hat cocked rakishly over what would ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... mean time, the inhabitants of the barren island of Nantucket had taken up this fishery, invited to it by the whales presenting themselves on their own shore. To them, therefore, the English relinquished it, continuing to them, as British subjects, the importation of their oils into England, duty free, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... 578-534.—Servius thus succeeded to the throne without being elected by the Senate and the Assembly of the Curiae. The reign of this king is almost as barren of military exploits as that of Numa. His great deeds were those of peace; and he was regarded by posterity as the author of the later Roman constitution, just as Romulus was of the earlier. Three important acts are assigned to Servius by universal ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... Winkle, instead of seeking his repose upon the cold and barren acclivities of the Kaatskills—as we are veritably informed by Irving—but betaken himself to a comfortable bed at Morrison's or the Bilton, not only would he have enjoyed a more agreeable siesta, but, what the event showed of ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... Investigations of this kind would not be unrewarded, nor devoid of a certain amount of interest; and I think that in the present subject we can, by perseverance, penetrate a little distance into an almost untrodden and apparently barren region, and if we cannot reach the source from whence the bright waters spring, can at least obtain some more accurate information ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... elbow-room. It was an irregular little bunch of buildings gathered along an arterial street which, after a run of three hundred yards or so, broke to pieces and scattered its dispersed shanties about a high, barren plain. It stood on the steep bank of a little river, and over against it, on a naked hill, was Uncle Sam's military village,—a fort by courtesy,—where, when not sleeping, black soldiers and white strolled about in the warm sun. When the little street was fairly awake, it presented ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... and barren sand-bank, after all, offered but a feeble chance for life. Even if he did reach it, which was doubtful, what could he do? Starvation instead of drowning would be his fate. More than once it occurred to him that it would be better then and ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... route, he did much to dispel the popular idea created by Long that the plains were barren, and the American Desert began to shrink. In 1843 Fremont was sent out again. Making his way westward through the South Pass, where his work ended in 1842, he turned southward to visit Great Salt Lake, and then pushed on to Walla Walla on the Columbia ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... birth-rate, the future of the race would be the gloomiest possible. An inexorable law would determine that there could be no mental evolution, for the best of the race would cease to propagate their kind. All who would arrive at this standard of mental growth would become barren. And against this there could be ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... faith, And whispered in the maiden's heart, "Rise up and look from where thou art, And scatter with unselfish hands Thy freshness on the barren sands ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... barren hills—the highest near to where the Australians were camped being Mt. Therma, which attained to 1,130 feet. In wandering about the valleys and villages, the West Australians noted the quiet demeanour of the inhabitants. The males had a somewhat brigandish appearance in their dress of top ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... on record; they seem to have had no other object than the gratification of her love of popular applause, and her taste for magnificent entertainments which cost her nothing; and the trivial details of her reception at the different towns or mansions which she honored with her presence, are equally barren of amusement and instruction. But her visit to the university of Cambridge in the summer of 1564 presents too many characteristic traits to be passed ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... trying to tell Nicholas how he can make some money, and have submitted a brilliant plan to him, but my seed, as usual, has fallen on barren soil. Look what a sight he is now: ...
— Ivanoff - A Play • Anton Checkov
... of attention that these charges of aggressive designs on the part of other powers are made by Germany, who, since 1906, has established an elaborate network of strategical railways leading from the Rhine to the Belgian frontier through a barren, thinly populated tract, deliberately constructed to permit of the sudden attack upon Belgium, which was carried out ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... can conceive the beauty, sublimity and inspiration of that scene, especially to one who had for weary months been traversing dusty, treeless and barren plains. The contrast was overwhelming. Tears filled my eyes as I gazed upon the fairy scene. I recall the entrancing picture to-day, in all its splendid detail, so vividly was ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... his doctrines, containing not a few elements of sublimity and beauty, exercised a better influence, it must be admitted, after all, that they constituted a most unsatisfactory system of cold and barren mysticism. The ancient philosophers delivered many excellent moral precepts; but, as they wanted the light of revelation, their arguments in support of duty were essentially defective, and the lessons which they taught had often very little influence either on themselves ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... even here; and no man, how prejudiced soever, can compare with the standing at a deer-path all day long waiting till a great timid beast is driven up within ten yards of your muzzle, with that extraordinary sport on bald and barren mountains, where nothing but vast and muscular exertion, the eye of the eagle, and the cunning of the serpent, can bring you within range of the wild ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... of Borodino was to leave Moscow at the mercy of the invaders, and a barren prize indeed it proved to them. In the horror of the fearful retreat from the ruined city the fame of Ney reached its highest point. Nothing in all history surpasses the record of his indomitable courage and cheerfulness in the most hopeless ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... breeze seems to sparkle and effervesce like the waves that beat upon the rocky shore, and from whose crests it bears off the health-giving ozone to mix with the fragrant scent of the wild thyme and heather of the hills and barren moors. The sea never looks two days alike: now it is glistening like frosted silver, now it is as liquid gold. At one time it is ruddy like wine, at another time rich orange or amber, and a few hours after intensely blue, as if the sky had fallen or joined it then and there. ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... necessity, he would doubtless have descended some distance, at least, to a more warm and sheltered position before seeking repose. A more gloomy and desolate resting-place than the summit of an Alpine pass can scarcely be found. The bare and barren rocks are entirely destitute of vegetation, and they have lost, besides, the sublime and picturesque forms which they assume further below. They spread in vast, naked fields in every direction around ...
— Hannibal - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... is an unhappy one, but, from the way in which they speak of it, it is clear that for them it promises nothing desirable. It is a monotonous, never ending, and altogether unsatisfying existence,—a life as barren and desolate as the country which the ghosts inhabit. These people are as much attached to life as we are. Notwithstanding the unhappy days which have befallen them of late years,—days of privation and hunger,—they ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... fettered me, my flesh the irons tore— Scourged, mocked, and worse than buried me upon a lifeless shore, Where human foot had never trod—upon a barren rock, Whose caves ne'er echoed to a sound save billows as ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... many coasts, sand-hills both protect the shores from erosion by the waves and currents, and shelter valuable grounds from blasting sea-winds. Man, therefore, must sometimes resist, sometimes promote, the formation and growth of dunes, and subject the barren and flying sands to the same obedience to his will to which he has reduced ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... And if anybody can get an untruthful word out of me, I'll pay his score till the Day of Judgment. I'll begin the story at the commencement. First you must cross the horrible Alps. There you see barren, dreary rocks, cold snow, wild glacier torrents on which no boat can be used. Instead of watering meadows, the mad waves fling stones on their banks. Then we reach the plains, where it is true many kinds of plants grow. I was there in June, and made my jokes about the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Cartier, searching for an Eldorado, found Labrador, and in disgust called it the 'Land of Cain.' A century and a half afterward Lieutenant Roger Curtis wrote of it as a 'country formed of frightful mountains, and unfruitful valleys, a prodigious heap of barren rock'; and George Cartwright, in his gossipy journal, summed up his impressions after five and twenty years on the coast. He said, 'God created this country last of all, and threw together there the refuse of his materials as of no ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... Fleisham in 1904, and Gresham in 1907. Since the time of Gresham's disappearance we have lost sight of DeBar, and only recently, as you know, have we got trace of him again. He is somewhere up on the edge of the Barren Lands. I have private information which leads me to believe that the factor at Fond du Lac can ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... gap where the screen of bush broke off, leaving the barren shoulder overlooking the valley. It was where the hard-beaten, converging cattle-paths hurled themselves over the brink ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... we read is useful unless it calls up living things in the soul. To read a mystic book truly is to invoke the powers. If they do not rise up plumed and radiant, the apparitions of spiritual things, then is our labor barren. We only encumber the mind with useless symbols. They knew better ways long ago. "Master of the Green-waving Planisphere,... Lord of the Azure Expanse,... it is thus we invoke," ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... with his hands deep in his trousers pockets and his head down, and as General Ward was out organizing the farmers in a revolt against the dominant party in the state, Barclay was alone most of the time. The picture of that barren office, with its insurance chromos, with its white, cobweb-marked walls, with its dirty floor partly covered with an "X" of red-bordered hemp carpet reaching from the middle to the four corners, the picture of the four tall unwashed windows letting in the merciless afternoon ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... Not only would she have scorned such means of reaching the life of ample ease and rich benevolence, but they were impossible to her nature. A garden that one must crouch to enter was a prison. Better, far better, her barren, dusty, lonely life than such ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... martyr, and they would also transform Napoleon into a demi-god. No, we will not grant him such a triumph, such a glorious end—we will not allow him a speedy death. He shall ignominiously disappear; he shall die slowly on some barren island in the ocean; die amid the tortures of solitude, of weariness, of powerless rage. This must be the vengeance of Europe; this must be the end of the vampire who has ...
— A Conspiracy of the Carbonari • Louise Muhlbach
... tough enough—barren, desolate, forbidding; enough to stop the most adventurous and dedicated. But they had to run head-on against a mad genius who ...
— The Hunted Heroes • Robert Silverberg
... Hamilton contrasts it pointedly with physical science (of which he talks with a sort of supercilious condescension, in one of the worst passages of his writings, p. 401)—when all its apparent fruits were produced in the shape of ingenious but barren verbal technicalities—what hope could be entertained that Formal Logic could hold its ground in the estimation of the recent generation of scientific men? Mr Mill has divested it of that assumed demonstrative authority which Bacon called ...
— Review of the Work of Mr John Stuart Mill Entitled, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.' • George Grote
... smaller than it is at present. The best view of it is from the Mount of Olives; it commands the exact shape, and nearly every particular, namely, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Armenian Convent, the Mosque of Omar, St. Stephen's Gate, the round-topped houses, and the barren vacancies of the city. The Mosque of Omar is the St. Peter's of Turkey. The building itself has a light, pagoda appearance; the garden in which it stands occupies a considerable part of the city, and contrasted with the surrounding desert is beautiful; ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... business-man bears to his Monday life. To the ordinary business man, Christ's words are a seeing guide to be followed in church, but a blind enough guide, not to be followed on the street. Hence Pushkin's life is barren as a source of inspiration towards what life ought to be; but it is richly fruitful as a terrifying warning against what life ought not ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... the ship is worse than prison; but it is something that has to be gone through. Beyond it all lies the south, the land of his youthful dreams, tempting with its sunny smile. In time he arises, half dead. Does he find his south? How often it is but a barren desert he ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... to be illusion, cheat—itself the most cheated of races; lured on to a career of sacrifice and contempt. If he could only keep the hope that had hallowed its sufferings. But now it was a viper—not a divine hope—it had nourished in its bosom. He felt so lonely; a great stretch of blackness, a barren mere, a gaunt cliff on a frozen sea, a pine on a mountain. To be done with it all—the sighs and the sobs and the tears, the heart-sinking, the dull dragging days of wretchedness and the nights of pain. How often he had turned his face to the wall, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... {55} indeed a terrible year for mankind. Demeter no longer smiled on the earth she was wont to bless, and though the husbandman sowed the grain, and the groaning oxen ploughed the fields, no harvest rewarded their labour. All was barren, dreary desolation. The world was threatened with famine, and the gods with the loss of their accustomed honours and sacrifices; it became evident, therefore, to Zeus himself that some measures must be adopted to appease the anger ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... to Loch Scavaig, which in the bright afternoon looked scarcely less dreary than at night, especially now that the 'Diana' was no longer there to give some air of human occupation to the wild and barren surroundings. The sun was well inclined towards the western horizon when the 'Dream' reached her former moorings and noiselessly dropped anchor, and about twenty minutes later the electric launch belonging to the vessel was lowered and I entered it with Santoris, a couple of his men ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... old pit-frame on a barren moor, gaunt, against the yellow west. Gourlay saw bars of iron, left when the pit was abandoned, reddened by the rain; and the mounds of rubbish, and the scattered bricks, and the rusty clinkers from the furnace, and the melancholy shining pools. A four-wheeled old trolley had lost two ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... San Francisco Bay, at a point where the Golden Gate broadens into the Pacific, stands a bluff promontory. It affords shelter from the prevailing winds to a semicircular bay on the east. Around this bay the hillside is bleak and barren, but there are traces of former habitation in a weather-beaten cabin and deserted corral. It is said that these were originally built by an enterprising squatter, who for some unaccountable reason abandoned them shortly after. The "jumper" who succeeded him disappeared one day quite ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... The benefit. Consider, first, that great Or bright infers not excellence. The Earth, Though, in comparison of Heaven, so small, Nor glistering, may of solid good contain More plenty than the Sun that barren shines, Whose virtue on itself works no effect, But in the fruitful Earth; there first received, His beams, inactive else, their vigour find, Yet not to Earth are those bright luminaries Officious, but to thee, Earth's habitant. And, for ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... to Earth's weary voices, Louder every day, Bidding her no longer linger On her charmed way; But hasten to her task of beauty Scarcely yet begun; By the first bright day of summer It should all be done. She has yet to loose the fountain From its iron chain; And to make the barren mountain Green and bright again; She must clear the snow that lingers Round the stalks away And let the snowdrop's trembling whiteness See the light of day. She must watch, and warm, and cherish Every blade of green; Till the tender grass appearing From the earth is ...
— Legends and Lyrics: Second Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... is my verse so barren of new pride, So far from alteration and quick change? Why, with the time, do I not glance aside To new-found methods and to compounds strange? Why write I still all one, ever the same, And ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... affection. I sometimes feared it was too good to last. Mrs. Branard in particular, I shall ever remember with grateful and affectionate regard. She was more like a mother to me, than a mistress, and I shall ever look back to the time I spent with her, as a bright spot in the otherwise barren desert of my life. Better, far better would it have been for me had I never left her. But I became alarmed, and thought the convent people were after me. It was no idle whim, no imaginary terror. I had good cause to fear, for I had several ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... for some distance leaves the shore and ascends a range of barren hills containing slate, limestone and granite. Hardy trees become more abundant than the chestnut, and the mountains higher and more imposing, as we approach ...
— Itinerary through Corsica - by its Rail, Carriage & Forest Roads • Charles Bertram Black
... land at Storborg, it remained untouched for the present. Aronsen had no time for working on the soil—where was the sense of digging up a barren moor? But Aronsen had a garden, with a fence all round, and currant bushes and asters and rowans and planted trees—ay, a real garden. There was a broad path down it, where Aronsen could walk o' Sundays and smoke his pipe, and in the background was the verandah of the house, with panes of ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... in the hope that irate farmers might find them when, after our departure, they visited the scenes of our marauding. And to such an extent did this marauding obtain that, by the time we had reached the Mississippi River, I was almost wholly barren of further ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... he growled in Turkish. "Wherefore didst thou come? To cackle like a barren hen that sees another laying? Nichevo," he added, turning his back on me. And that was insolence in Russian, meaning that nobody and nothing could possibly be of less importance. He seemed to keep a separate language for each set of thoughts. ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... blazing sunshine had browned all to a monotonous tone in keeping with the monotonous life it represented. The only corn to be seen was of the variety called sod-corn, which, unwashed by rain for a full month now, had failed to mature, such stalks as had tasselled at all being as barren as the rest because the tender silks had dried too rapidly and could furnish no fertilizing moisture to the pollen which sifted down from the ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... pretty rapid, though it lay through an uninteresting country, in many parts uncultivated and barren-looking. Massillon is a very flourishing town, with some good stores and two or three hotels. As the captain was obliged to make a short stay here, I went into the town and, stepping into an hotel to procure a cigar, I found a company engaged in earnest conversation, ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... keeping at bay an army of thoughts that would leap upon him if he gave them an opportunity. But soon that would be all over—no more battle, no more struggle. He turned the corner and saw Scaw House standing amongst its dark trees, with its black palings in front of its garden and the deserted barren patch of field in front of that again. The sun was getting low and the sky above the house was flaming but the trees were sombre ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... around us—evolved in the reduction of copper, have not played so long on the surrounding atmosphere without doing their work. Everywhere within their influence, the perennial vegetation is meagre and stinted. The hills, particularly to the southeast of the copper-works, are barren in the extreme. Not one spark of green, not one solitary lichen, can withstand the ravages of the poison. Time was, we were told by an old inhabitant, when these hills produced the earliest and finest corn in the principality; but now they only resemble enormous piles of sandy gravel, unbroken ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... section of a garden-bed for our own; I cultivated mine so assiduously that it became quite a deep hole; but I do not recall that anything ever grew in it. The soil was a very rich loam, and ceaseless diligence must have been required in me to keep it barren. ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... not merely for the purpose of raising barren taxes, but taxes that are fertile taxes, taxes that will bring forth fruit—the security of the country which is paramount in the minds of all, provision for the aged and deserving poor. It was time it was done. It is rather a shame for a rich country like ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... is also much that is almost always overflown with waters, and is a perpetual swamp. There are extensive prairies in this Valley; and towards the Rocky mountains; on the upper waters of the Arkansas and Red rivers, there are vast barren steppes or plains of sand, dreary and barren, like the central steppes of Asia. On the east of the Mississippi, are extensive regions of the densest forests, which form a striking contrast with the prairies which stretch on the west of ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... and deaf One-third of Philip's effective navy was thus destroyed One could neither cry nor laugh within the Spanish dominions One of the most contemptible and mischievous of kings (James I) Only citadel against a tyrant and a conqueror was distrust Oration, fertile in rhetoric and barren in facts Others that do nothing, do all, and have all the thanks Passion is a bad schoolmistress for the memory Past was once the Present, and once the Future Patriotism seemed an unimaginable idea Pauper client ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... barren union. No child followed, with God's grace in its little hands, to create a mother's feelings and soften the callous heart of La Corriveau. She cursed her lot that it was so, and her dry bosom became an arid spot of desert, tenanted by satyrs ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... of the county Wicklow, that paradise of our country, a small white cottage, with a neat flower plot before, and a small orchard and garden behind. It stood on a little eminence, at the foot of one of those mountains, which, in some instances, abut from higher ranges. It was then bare and barren; but at present presents a very different aspect, a considerable portion of it having been since reclaimed and planted. Scattered around this rough district were a number of houses that could be classed with neither farm-house nor cabin, but as humble little buildings ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... barren of heroic figures, perhaps because the magnitude of the events has called forth such a multitude of individually heroic acts that no one can be placed before the rest; yet, when this greatest phase of history comes to be written down with historic perspective, one figure—that ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... empty pockets, and a sword which peered through the sheath. The meanest ruffler who, with broken feather and tarnished lace, swaggered at the heels of Turenne, was scarcely to be distinguished from me. I had still, it is true, a rock and a few barren acres in Brittany, the last remains of the family property; but the small small sums which the peasants could afford to pay were sent annually to Paris, to my mother, who had no other dower. And this I would not touch, being ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... the man still young but worn and grey, is she, his sister, who, of all the world, went over to him in his shame and put her hand in his, and with a sweet composure and determination, led him hopefully upon his barren way. ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... Though the Garden of thy Life be wholly waste, the sweet flowers withered, the fruit-trees barren, over its wall hang ever the rich dark clusters of the Vine of Death, within easy reach of thy hand, which may pluck of them when ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... Tethys his espoused, Mother of all. They kindly from the hands Of Rhea took, and with parental care 240 Sustain'd and cherish'd me, what time from heaven The Thunderer hurled down Saturn, and beneath The earth fast bound him and the barren Deep. Them go I now to visit, and their feuds Innumerable to compose; for long 245 They have from conjugal embrace abstain'd Through mutual wrath, whom by persuasive speech Might I restore into each other's arms, They would for ever love me and revere. Her, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... Am not surprised you find Berlin changed for the worse: such a train of calamities must, in the end, make itself felt in a poor and naturally barren Country, where continual industry is needed to second its fecundity and keep up production. However, I will do what I can to remedy this dearth (LA DISETTE), at least as far ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... a picture of light Where nothing abides, All things fade. In fading there is beauty, By shedding tears We bathe our hearts— Those crushed flowers full of smart— For a deity not far from our souls. Yet, no solace in prayer, Pain has no largess; Dark has stars, But no barren earth its flowers. All are dismal and fallow; Yet, from the mountain's stony heart Spring multitudinous rivers Sparkling at dawn, and Deepening night's gloom with mysterious murmurs; And who knows? These streams ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... very narrow island, extending east and west, Captain Marion, in about the latitude of 48 deg. south, and from 16 deg. to 30 deg. of longitude east of the Cape of Good Hope, discovered six islands, which were high and barren. These, together with some islands lying between the Line and the southern tropic in the Pacific Ocean, were the principal discoveries made in this voyage, the account of which, we were told, was ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... head they placed a fruitless crown, And put a barren sceptre in my gripe, Thence to be wrench'd by an unlineal hand, No son ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... may in a great degree command and procure. Experience has taught me that this is true. I had made many sea voyages before this, and therefore had repeated proofs of the observation of Lord Bacon, that, of all human progresses, nothing is so barren of all possibility of remark as a voyage by sea; nothing, therefore, is so irksome, to a mind of any vigour or activity. If a man, by long habit, has obtained the knack of retiring into himself—of putting all his faculties ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... of Nevada a playa lake spreads over an area fifty miles long and twenty miles wide. In summer it disappears; the Quinn River, which feeds it, shrinks back one hundred miles toward its source, leaving an absolutely barren floor of clay, ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... pluck the fragrant rose From the bare rock, or oozy beach, Who from each barren weed that grows, Expects the grape, or blushing peach. With equal faith may hope to find The truth of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... those that come here from India generally break into smaller companies, because in many parts of the route through Persia, a greater number would not find provisions, as all Persia, from hence to Ispahan, is extremely barren, so that sometimes not a green thing is to be seen in two or three days travel; and even water is scarce, and that which is to be got is often brackish, or stinking and abominable. We remained at this city ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr |
