"Barrenness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... barrenness of the staircase made them very grave. An attendant, superbly attired in a red waistcoat and a coat trimmed with gold lace, who seemed to be awaiting them on the landing, increased their emotion. It was with great respect, and ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... but this does not lessen at all the disastrous influence of an ideal which holds up the renunciation of the natural rights of love and activities of women, and thus involves an irreparable loss to the race by the barrenness of many of its finest types. The significance of such Intellectuals must be limited, because for them the possibility of transmission by inheritance of their valuable qualities is cut off, and hence ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... repetition of contrition and compunction washes off the stains which we discover in our souls, and strongly incites us, by the fervor and fruitfulness of our following life, to repair the sloth and barrenness of the past. Prayer must be made our main assistant in every step of this spiritual progress. We must pray that God would enable us to search out and discover our own hearts, and reform whatever is amiss in them. If we do this sincerely, God will undoubtedly grant our requests; ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... the promotion of vegetable growth, should be found in a district utterly lacking the slightest traces of vegetation of any kind. Lest such a statement should seem to savour of irony, we hasten to explain that the singular barrenness of this part of the country is largely due to the character of its climate, the deposits occurring in the midst of sandy deserts,[205] on ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... thought equalise all states. Let him do with us as with the waves of the sea, and whether he takes us to his bosom, or casts us upon the sand, that is, leaves us to our own barrenness, all is well. ...
— Letters of Madam Guyon • P. L. Upham
... the decade immediately following Newton was one of comparative barrenness in scientific progress, the early years of the eighteenth century not being as productive of great astronomers as the later years of the seventeenth, or, for that matter, as the later years of the eighteenth century itself. Several of the prominent astronomers of the later seventeenth century ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... be thought of seriously by youths and maidens inclined to garrulousness. Those who have the habit of it will never change. The gods who lean over the rim of the world to laugh at us have marked them for their barrenness. ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... judges, and other persons of influence designated by the crown. It may be consulted on legislative proposals, disputes as to the spheres of the various ministries, and other important matters. In barrenness of function, however, as in structure, it bears a close resemblance to-day to the British ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... have looked into Jean's soul, he would have seen that it was seared with the fresh memory of iron bars and high walls and her dad who never saw any roses; and that the contrast between their beauty and the terrible barrenness that surrounded him was like a blow ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... burial-ground of Edgartown,—where the dead have lain so long that the soil, once enriched by their decay, has returned to its original barrenness,—in that ancient burial-ground I noticed much variety of monumental sculpture. The elder stones, dated a century back, or more, have borders elaborately carved with flowers, and are adorned with a multiplicity of death's-heads, cross-bones, scythes, hour-glasses, ...
— Chippings With A Chisel (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... waste I've wander'd o'er, Clomb many a crag, cross'd many a shore, But, by my halidome, A scene so rude, so wild as this, Yet so sublime in barrenness, Ne'er did my wandering footsteps press, Where'er ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... consideration whether space for a garden ground was to be had. No such thing as a real garden could be seen. No flowers bloomed anywhere; no token of life's comfort or pleasure hung about the poor dwellings. Poverty and dirt and barrenness; those three facts struck the visitor's eye and heart. A certain degree of neatness and order indeed was enforced about the road and the outside of the houses; nothing to give the feeling of the sweet reality within. The only person they saw to speak to was ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... selection of all that is great and noble in nature. The greatest natural genius cannot subsist on its own stock: he who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own will be soon reduced, from mere barrenness, to the poorest of all imitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what he has before often repeated. When we know the subject designed by such men, it will never be difficult to guess what kind of work is to ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... if the true love of God is not in us, we are like fruit-trees cursed with barrenness—only fit to be cast into the ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... to the knowledge of your Glory that a monastery of God's servants is too heavily oppressed with tribute, and we point out that this is owing to an inundation which has smitten their land with the curse of barrenness. However, we have given orders to the most eminent Senator[678] to appoint a careful inspector to visit the farm in question, weigh the matter carefully, and make such reasonable reduction as may leave a sufficient ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... almost unredeemed by a touch of colour, except that afforded by the late Tulips and a few other flowers which are relatively unimportant. The brilliance of the Crocuses, Hyacinths, and early Tulips serves to throw into relief the comparative barrenness which follows. And the contrast is rendered all the more striking by the cheerful spring days. It is at this juncture that annuals and biennials from summer or early autumn sowings light up the garden with welcome masses and bands of fresh and vivid ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... gravelly, sandy, and mixed with clay, Is naughty for hops, any manner of way; Or if it be mingled with rubbish and stone, For dryness and barrenness let it alone. ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... perhaps, to strike her without returning the blow. Wife-beating, however, is not common among the gipsies. It may possibly be the case that some of the fine qualities of the gipsy woman are the result of that very barrenness of fine qualities among the men of which we have been speaking. The lack of masculine chivalry among the men may in some measure account for the irresistible impulse among the women for taking their own ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... in order: a difficult task, which he accomplished so well as to gain the special commendation of the King, and even the goodwill of the Highlanders themselves. He was five years among these northern hills, battling with ill-health, and restless under the intellectual barrenness of his surroundings. He felt his position to be in no way salutary, and wrote to his mother: "The fear of becoming a mere ruffian and of imbibing the tyrannical principles of an absolute commander, or giving way insensibly to the temptations of power till I became proud, insolent, ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... almost seem to be some subtle connection between the barrenness and worthlessness of a surface and the value of the minerals which lie beneath it. The craggy mountains of Western America, the arid plains of West Australia, the ice-bound gorges of the Klondyke, and the bare slopes of the Witwatersrand ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... coal-pits; and the gentle murmur of the stream was subdued by the loud rattle of the loom. Sometimes M. —— and his friend halted amidst all that is delightful and soothing; and after a short advance, found themselves amidst barrenness, deformity, and confusion. The remoter scenery was not less impressive. Behind them were the rugged mountains of Puy de Dome; the lofty Tarare lifted its majestic head beside them, and far before appeared the brilliant summit of ...
— The Village in the Mountains; Conversion of Peter Bayssiere; and History of a Bible • Anonymous
... making matters clearer, not nobler, polished up with a certain subtle and compressed style of oratory; and in the same class there are others, shrewd, but unpolished, and designedly resembling rough and unskilful speakers; and some who, with the same barrenness and simplicity, are still more elegant, that is to say, are facetious, flowery, ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... publications among them—Domestic Cookery, Etiquette for Ladies, and Hints on the Breeding of Poultry. An ugly little clock, ticking noisily in a black case, and two candlesticks of base metal placed on either side of it, completed the ornaments on the chimney-piece. Neither pictures nor prints hid the barrenness of the walls. I saw no needlework and no flowers. The one object in the place which showed any pretensions to beauty was a looking-glass in an elegant gilt frame—sacred to vanity, and worthy of the office that it filled. Such was Helena Gracedieu's sitting-room. I really ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... asked General Feversham, as he rose briskly from his chair. He was a small wiry man, and, in spite of his white hairs, alert. But the alertness was of the body. A bony face, with a high narrow forehead and steel-blue inexpressive eyes, suggested a barrenness of mind. ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... the statesman add to the fires of youth? Let him only not smother it, and the effect is secure. Where we oppress or degrade mankind with one hand, it is vain, like Octavius, to hold out in the other, the baits of marriage, or the whip to barrenness. It is vain to invite new inhabitants from abroad, while those we already possess are made to hold their tenure with uncertainty; and to tremble, not only under the prospect of a numerous family, but even under that of a precarious and doubtful subsistence for themselves. The arbitrary ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... there groups of pine parasols above some ruined walls, were all the vegetation which met Alba Steno's eye. But the scene accorded so well with the moral devastation she bore within her that the barrenness around her in her last ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... over the road to the club, the bleak barrenness of the country struck me anew. Twenty-four hours before Jim had been alive. Twenty-four hours before we had been in our office discussing the proof of Woods' guilt, and Woods had telephoned to Jim, asking him to come to the country-club alone. My suspicions of the man stirred ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... by like lightning. Zillah passed them in a kind of dream. She only seemed awake when Windham came. When he left, all was barrenness and desolation. Time passed, but she thought nothing of Naples. Obed had explained to her the necessity of waiting at Marseilles till fresh news should come from Hilda, and had been surprised at the ease with which she had been persuaded to ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... gone, the tragedy progressed swiftly toward finality. The Englishman came from among women. For months he had been in a torment of desolation. Cummins' wife was to him like a flower suddenly come to relieve the tantalizing barrenness of a desert; and with the wiles and ways of civilization he sought to breathe ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... and their personal esteem for the character of Frederic. The enemy of the church is accused of maintaining with the miscreants an intercourse of hospitality and friendship unworthy of a Christian; of despising the barrenness of the land; and of indulging a profane thought, that if Jehovah had seen the kingdom of Naples he never would have selected Palestine for the inheritance of his chosen people. Yet Frederic obtained from the sultan the restitution of Jerusalem, of Bethlem ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... dark-haired young cousin of his. She rode 'Jolly well,' too, so that it had been all the more flattering that she had let him lead her where he would in the long gallops of Richmond Park, though she knew them so much better than he did. Looking back on it all, he was mystified by the barrenness of his speech; he felt that he could say 'an awful lot of fetching things' if he had but the chance again, and the thought that he must go back to Littlehampton on the morrow, and to Oxford on the twelfth—'to that beastly exam,' too—without the faintest chance of first seeing her ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Fear, Since Love, not perfected, gains strength from Fear, I bound to thee This nation. Parables I spake in; parables in act I wrought Because the people's mind was in the sense. At Imbher Dea they scoffed Thy word: I raised Thy staff, and smote with barrenness that flood: Then learned they that the world was Thine, not ruled By Sun or Moon, their famed "God-Elements:" Yea, like Thy Fig-tree cursed, that river banned Witnessed Thy Love's stern pureness. From the grass The little three-leaved herb, I stooped and plucked, And preached the ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... the singing Wolverine stream just where it greens the tiny valley and then slips between huge lava-rock ledges to join the larger stream. Jase would have stopped there and called home the sheltered little green spot in the gray barrenness. But Marthy went on, up the farther hill and across the upland, another full day's journey ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... nobler virtues which are chiefly produced in the fertile field of aristocracy do occasionally appear; but the whole surface is covered with a layer of democracy, which like the lava which the volcano continually belches forth, has gradually poured down, and reduced the country round it to barrenness ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... excessive reproduction was the Lord's mark of favor. In India there has been a special hell provided for childless women, and with Jewesses no curse was equal to barrenness. ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... to the southward of the temple in the rock, the mountains abruptly ceased, and we entered on a wide extended plain which, to the southward and on each side, was terminated only by the horizon. This sudden transition from barrenness to fertility, from the sublime to the beautiful, from irregularity to uniformity, could not fail to please, as all strong contrasts usually do. The country was now in a high state of tillage; the chief products were rice, sugar-canes, and ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... summon Nicuesa to take his place. Some influential members of the council who had been friends of Nicuesa and could not endure the insolence of Vasco Nunez thought they ought to scour the country in search of Nicuesa; for they had heard it reported that he had abandoned Uraba on account of the barrenness of the soil. Possibly he was wandering in unknown places like Enciso and other victims of wrecks; therefore they should not rest until they had discovered whether he and ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... she cried, eagerly. "Consider the loneliness, the barrenness, the want of all comfort and of all aid, should ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... it! You know that sick fear that gets you when you try to picture eternity to yourself? That's the way this barrenness and awful distance affects me. I ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... it. My friends, I have heard the vows which Paaker has poured out over our pure altars, like hogwash that men set before swine. Pestilence and boils has he called down on Mena, and barrenness and heartache on the poor sweet woman; and I really cannot blame her for preferring a battle-horse to a hippopotamus—a Mena to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... "there is still one door of freedom open—I can cease from action. If my life be an ill thing, I can lay it down. Though I be, as you say truly, at the beck of every small temptation, I can yet, by one decisive gesture, place myself beyond the reach of all. My love of good is damned to barrenness; it may, and let it be! But I have still my hatred of evil; and from that, to your galling disappointment, you shall see that I can draw ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... modest and retiring forms of private life and of the individual conscience.' With an energy not unworthy of Burke at his fiercest, he denounces the fallen and impotent regality of the popes as temporal sovereigns. 'A monarchy sustained by foreign armies, smitten with the curse of social barrenness, unable to strike root downward or bear fruit upward, the sun, the air, the rain soliciting in vain its sapless and rotten boughs—such a monarchy, even were it not a monarchy of priests, and tenfold more because it is one, stands out a foul blot upon the face of creation, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... Lee mentioned some Scotch who had taken possession of a barren part of America, and wondered why they should choose it. JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, all barrenness is comparative. The SCOTCH would not know it to be barren.' BOSWELL. 'Come, come, he is flattering the English. You have now been in Scotland, Sir, and say if you did not see meat and drink enough there.' JOHNSON. ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... wherever the overflow from the fountains permeated the sand, quite unseen in the broad sunshine, but showing its effect in a blush of green which gradually grew less and less, till at a few hundred yards from the rocks and pools it died right away and all was arid barrenness ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... the example of geographical writers, who, having described the places within their knowledge, tell you that all beyond them are sandy deserts, countries without inhabitants, or seas never navigated. Thus I might say that all prior to the commencement of these Memoirs was the barrenness of my infancy, when we can only be said to vegetate like plants, or live, like brutes, according to instinct, and not as human creatures, guided by reason. To those who had the direction of my earliest years I leave the task of relating the ...
— Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Complete • Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre
... appearance of Aden from the sea, though picturesque, is not inviting, giving one an idea of great barrenness. The mountains and rocks have a peaked aspect, like a spear pointed at one, as much as to say "Better keep off." People who land for the first time, however, are agreeably disappointed by finding that every opportunity for ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... an emblem of the Sun overcoming the winter darkness, and repairing the disorders of Nature, which every year was regenerated under these Signs, after the Scorpion and Serpent of Autumn had brought upon it barrenness, disaster, and darkness. Mithras was represented sitting on a Bull; and that animal was an image of Osiris: while the Greek Bacchus armed his front with its horns, and was pictured with its tail ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... millions of years to tame a mountain, to curb its rude, savage power, to soften its outlines, and bring fertility out of the elemental crudeness and barrenness. But time and the gentle rains of heaven will do it, as they have done it in the East, and as they are fast doing it in ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... view of the inner basis of his faith. With him, religion amounts to nothing without Christ. Nor must Christ be the mere subject of study; the soul and its manifold affections must embrace him. The barrenness of Judaism is done away in him, and the emptiness of Rationalistic criticism is successfully met by the fullness found in Christianity. Sin is not merely hurtful and prejudicial, but it induces guilt and danger. It can be pardoned only through ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... take my last views of the Moon. For ragged and jagged cliffs of almost total barrenness, and yawning chasms lined with intolerable precipices, the Moon outrivals the Earth. I took a passing glimpse of the famous crater-mountains, called by our astronomers Copernicus and Theophilus, the former situated in the eastern and the latter in the western hemisphere of the Moon. The largest ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... country around here," remarked Dave, as he looked at the general barrenness of the aspect. Here and there were clumps of trees and patches of rough ...
— Dave Porter in the Gold Fields - The Search for the Landslide Mine • Edward Stratemeyer
... section of the world seemingly unblessed with her bounty, and all ungarnished with her fruits and flowers, seemed desirous of redeeming it from the curse of barrenness, by storing its bosom with a product, which, only of use to the world in its conventional necessities, has become, in accordance with the self-creating wants of society, a necessity itself; and however the bloom and beauty of her summer decorations may refresh the eye of the enthusiast, it would ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... in common for a common end, which the German people have shown in such signal fashion during the last half-century. Moreover, the things of the spirit are even more important than the things of the body. We can well do without the hard intolerance and and barrenness of what was worst in the theological systems of the past, but there has never been greater need of a high and fine religious spirit than at the present time. So, while we can laugh good-humoredly at some of the pretensions of modern philosophy ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... barrenness of invention that the ingenious Goldoni has so well exposed in one of his plays, in the following speech, ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... l. 28, for 'absence of the detail of private life' read 'barrenness in Oldys's biography of ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... one of her boxes, and sought in it for the Bible which it was her custom to make use of every night. She read in the book for about half an hour, then covered her face with her hands and prayed silently. This was her refuge from the barrenness and ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... between these two towns spreads in a succession of beautiful valleys, through which glide clear and sparkling streams. But on the western coast, from the steeple-rocks of Cape Grim to the scrub-encircled barrenness of Sandy Cape, and the frowning entrance to Macquarie Harbour, the nature of the country entirely changes. Along that iron-bound shore, from Pyramid Island and the forest-backed solitude of Rocky Point, ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... shapely figure went far towards creating a charm which his personal grace and courtesy of manner completed; on the other, his delicate tact screened the heartlessness of his sensualism, whilst his surface sympathies hid the barrenness of his cynicism. ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... strives to climb the battlements of heaven, but because it is a flame of sulphur salt and bitumen, and was kindled in the dishonourable regions below, derived from Hell and contrary to God, it cannot pass forth to the element of love; but ends in barrenness and murmurs, fantastic expectations and trifling imaginative confidences; and they at last end in sorrows ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... not hard to find; But each man's secret standard in his mind, That casting-weight pride adds to emptiness, This, who can gratify for who can guess? The bard whom pilfer'd Pastorals renown, Who turns a Persian tale[102] for half-a-crown, 180 Just writes to make his barrenness appear, And strains from hard-bound brains eight lines a year; He who, still wanting, though he lives on theft, Steals much, spends little, yet has nothing left: And he who, now to sense, now nonsense leaning, Means not, but blunders round about ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... not say what he wished to say. "Mary, you're splendid," he concluded. She faced him as he spoke, and gave him her hand. She had suffered and relinquished, she had seen her future turned from one of infinite promise to one of barrenness, and yet, somehow, over what she scarcely knew, and with what results she could hardly foretell, she had conquered. With Ralph's eyes upon her, smiling straight back at him serenely and proudly, she knew, for the first time, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... the spring in a barren field, where barrenness and deadness fly away. As the spring comes on, the winter casts her coat and the summer is nigh. O, wait to see and read these things within. You that have been as barren and dead and dry without sap; unto ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... and such the tyrants, who, under the reigns of Valerian and Gallienus, dismembered the provinces, and reduced the empire to the lowest pitch of disgrace and ruin, from whence it seemed impossible that it should ever emerge. As far as the barrenness of materials would permit, we have attempted to trace, with order and perspicuity, the general events of that calamitous period. There still remain some particular facts; I. The disorders of Sicily; II. The tumults of Alexandria; and, III. The rebellion ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... it not only with delight, but with complete astonishment: having forgotten, as was too natural in all that long barrenness of ice and sea, that anything could be so ethereally fair: yet homely, too, human, familiar, and consoling. The air here was richly spiced with that peachy scent, and there was a Sabbath and a nepenthe ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... vastness, its mystery, its calm silence, may awe yet nothing sadden. But a vague foreboding enters when man enters. Where his corn grows amid the cinders of primeval things, his wanton gashes on tree and land, his beastly pollution of the wild, crystal waters, all the restlessness, and barrenness, and filth, and sordid deformity he calls his home—these sadden ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... and there was a patch of opening in the trees above. The grass was waving strangely in that area of moonlight. It moved, although there was no breeze to move it. And there was an almost sudden edge, beyond which the blades thinned out quickly to barrenness. ...
— Happy Ending • Fredric Brown
... until 1729 there was neither printing nor desire for printing in any general sense. The point where our literature began had become apparently its burial-place; the historians and poets and students of an earlier generation were not only unheeded but forgotten, and a hundred years of intellectual barrenness, with another hundred, before even partial recovery could be apparent, were the portion of Virginia and all the states she influenced or controlled. No power could have made it otherwise. "Had much literature been produced there, would it not have been a miracle? The units of the community ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... Church's hierarchy was founded on the ruins of the Empire, over which Attila had boasted that where his horse trod no grass grew; and truly the cultivated art of those splendid days had lapsed at once to a poverty of design and barrenness of ideas which would soon have dwindled into mere primitive forms, had not a fresh Oriental impulse arrived from Syria, Egypt, and Byzantium,—and then the arts were born anew.[480] The continuity was broken; yet, being devoted to the service of the Church, the new arts were by it moulded ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... along the Lower Road, in the direction of Quien Sabe, emerging from the grove of cypress and eucalyptus about the ranch house, and coming out upon the bare brown plain of the wheat land, stretching away from him in apparent barrenness ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... profundity would be confusing and that more play of mind might be dangerous. This is that "Scholasticism" and "Mediaevalism" against which the modernists inveigh or under which they groan; and to this intellectual barrenness may be added the offences against taste, verisimilitude, and justice which their more critical minds may discern in many an act and pronouncement of their official superiors. Thus both their sense for historical truth and their spontaneous mysticism drive the modernists to contrast with ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... exposed. Meanwhile the utmost of that wicked and calamitous suppression of faculty, which constitutes the essence and makes the tragedy of human slavery, is equally effected by the inevitable isolation and wakeful trampling and consequent barrenness of savage life. Liberty without law is not liberty; and the converse may be asserted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... by your home, but you have not been taken by mine. Come with me; you will not mind much." There was a shy pleading in the Other Girl's tone. On the instant of offering hospitality to this dainty new friend, and acute perception of the barrenness of it overswept and dismayed her. In a flash she saw the patch on the seat of Tim's trousers, and instantly an array of mismatched cups, nicked plates and cracked pitchers, passed before her vision. Had the dainty Glory in all her life eaten from a ...
— Glory and the Other Girl • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... just gilding the hilltops when we arose. Everything, even the barrenness, was beautiful. We have had frosts, and the quaking aspens were a trembling field of gold as far up the stream as we could see. We were 'way up above them and could look far across the valley. We could see the ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... a genteel livelihood by literature, which many of the sons of Parnassus, blessed with superior powers, curse as a very dry and unpleasing soil, but which proceeds more from want of culture, than native barrenness. ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... man's life is so strongly influenced as almost to be moulded by his environment; there was uneasiness in the thought that here one's existence might grow to resemble his habitat, taking on the gray tone and monotony and bleak barrenness ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... against poverty the reader has already been made acquainted. They were so perfect, that, in their wide extent of territory,—much of it smitten with the curse of barrenness,—no man, however humble, suffered from the want of food and clothing. Famine, so common a scourge in every other American nation, so common at that period in every country of civilized Europe, was an evil unknown in the dominions ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... in certain periods of time [14] for, in the first place, there were perpetual droughts, and for that reason the ground was barren, and did not bring forth the same quantity of fruits that it used to produce; and after this barrenness of the soil, that change of food which the want of corn occasioned produced distempers in the bodies of men, and a pestilential disease prevailed, one misery following upon the back of another; and these ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... the sitting-room, opened it and looked in. It was late in the afternoon, and there was just light enough for the dentist and his wife to see the results of that day of sale. Nothing was left, not even the carpet. It was a pillage, a devastation, the barrenness of a field after the passage of a swarm of locusts. The room had been picked and stripped till only the bare walls and floor remained. Here where they had been married, where the wedding supper had taken place, where Trina had bade farewell ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... to us the philosophy of this matter. If we are right, it is no more than a first furrow in the crust of a soil which hitherto the historians have been contented to leave in its barrenness. If they are conscientious enough not to trifle with the facts, as they look back on them from the luxurious self-indulgence of modern Christianity, they either revile the superstition or pity the ignorance ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... a great change from fertility to barrenness. From the moment we entered Bohemia we were oppressed by a sense of poverty, of sloth, or some worse curse resulting from Austrian domination, which seemed to have been enough to cripple even Nature herself ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... interior there was space to manoeuvre a division of all arms. There was a copious supply of water, and if the aspect of the great cantonment was grim because of the absence of trees and the utter barrenness of the enclosed space, this aesthetic consideration went for little against its manifest advantages as snug and defensible winter quarters. Shere Ali had indeed been all unconsciously a friend in need to the British force ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... latter times—would not have murdered his wife with a pillow—if he had murdered her at all—and would not have brought forward on the stage the bed-room of a jealous husband, with his wife expecting his approach. The barrenness of the stage in Shakspeare's time was an advantage in a scene like this;—when people were told to fancy that old bench was a bed, and that the close-shaved stripling reclining on it was a woman—the imagination was set down to a feast of its own: the scanty scenery became an accessory—not ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... is common, and may occur for a variety of reasons, such as adultery, barrenness, incompatibility of temperament, &c. The rule amongst the Khasis is that both parties must agree, but amongst the Wars, especially the people of Shella, the party who divorces the other without his or her consent must pay compensation, which ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... The bay that washed the sands was called Belle Amour. The cliff was huge, sombre; it had a terrible granite moroseness. If you travelled back from its edge until you stood within the very heart of Labrador, you would add step upon step of barrenness and austerity. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Gorman, "is poisoned, poisoned at its source by the influence of the great financial houses. Democracy is in shackles. Its leaders are gagged. Progress is stopped. Politics are barren——" He delivered this oration at dinner one night, and when he came to the barrenness of politics he knocked over Ascher's bottle of Perrier Water with a sweep of his hand "and it is the subtle influence of the financiers, the money kings, what the Americans used to call the Gold Bugs, which is responsible for ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... what would I give for more circumspection, that I might be more prepared to receive the word, and when command is given, publish the same. But, unworthy creature, I often deprive myself and others of seasons of good through my negligence and barrenness. When will the time come when I can say, all earthly things are under my feet, and the cause of religion and virtue rules predominant in my heart! Lord, hasten the day; and preserve my feet in thy path in the midst of many snares; and rather let me die than be suffered to do anything which ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... in their feathery elegance did he find a law of conformity; each tree was a law unto itself, tall and strong and slender, youthful and buoyant, opening fond arms to the blue sky. The absence of the sap-greens of England conveyed at first an impression of barrenness, but that wore off, and the artistic side of his nature fed upon the soft harmonies of faded grass and subdued green foliage nursing misty purples in its shade. The ground was his bed and chair and table; never had he been so intimate with Mother ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... away, but then we know the road, and are sure of water all the way." But Burke was not to be persuaded, and they set out for Mount Hopeless. Following Cooper's Creek for many miles, they entered a region of frightful barrenness. Here, as one of the camels became too weak to go farther, they were forced to kill it and to dry its flesh. Still they followed the creek, till at last it spread itself into marshy thickets and was lost; they then made a halt, ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... they travel abroad; they hire the dearest masters; they keep libraries among their furniture; and some of them buy works of art. But, for all that, their brains wither under luxury, often by their own vices or tomfooleries, and mental barrenness is the result. He who violates Nature's law must suffer the penalty, though he have millions. The fruits of intellect do not grow among the indolent rich. They are usually out of the republic of brains. Work or starve is Nature's motto; starve mentally, ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... carefully conceal from them all that you have told me; they will not be willing to sow the flowers of their love upon the rocks or lavish their caresses to soothe a sickened spirit. Women will discover the barrenness of your heart and you will be ever more and more unhappy. Few among them would be frank enough to tell you what I have told you, or sufficiently good-natured to leave you without rancor, offering their friendship, like the woman who ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... after Shakspeare yield to 'em in variety of genius? Massinger treads close on their heels; but you are most probably as well acquainted with his writings as your humble servant. My quotations, in that case, will only serve to expose my barrenness of matter. Southey in simplicity and tenderness, is excelled decidedly only, I think, by Beaumont and F. in his [their] "Maid's Tragedy" and some parts of "Philaster" in particular, and elsewhere occasionally; ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... without honor; smitten with eternal barrenness, inability to do or to be,—insincerity, unbelief. He who believes no thing, who believes only the shows of things, is not in relation with nature and fact ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... alike; hearth-stones and threshold-stones, and grave-stones all of the same material. It is curious and depressing. This volcanic region of the Rhine, however, has so many unexpected beauties strewn pell-mell in the midst of stony barrenness that it also bears some likeness to Naples and Ischia, where beauty of color, and even of vegetation, alternate surprisingly with tracts of parched and rocky wilderness pierced with holes whence gas and steam ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... claim to authority, such as the statement that he was 'matre natus diu sterili.' This, however, has been shown to rest on a wrong reading of Q. Serenus Sammonicus' Liber Medicinalis, xxxii., in a passage dealing with the barrenness of women, 'hoc poterit magni quartus [liber] monstrare Lucreti,' where partus, the reading of the oldest edition, was used. This, and other considerations, show that the vita does not rest on any ancient sources, beyond those ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... crib on the same page with the text, which helps me along and drives me mad. The French do not even try to translate. They try to be much more classical than the classics, with astounding results of barrenness and tedium. Tacitus, I fear, was too solid for me. I liked the war part; but the dreary intriguing at Rome ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of its inhabitants, and as yet the demand for exportation is limited to the simple requirements of a few thousand tributary nomads. The orchards and green areas about the villages render the whole scene, as usual, beautiful in comparison with the surrounding barrenness, but that is all. Compared with our own green hills and smiling valleys, the Valley of Herat would scarcely seem worth all the noise that has been made about it. There has been a great amount of sentiment wasted in eulogizing its alleged beauty. Of ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... were not broken. Toiling up hills, and dashing down on the other side,—crashing over fallen rocks, and shaving the edge of yawning gulfs and precipices,—thus they advanced till evening, through a country which was the picture of barrenness and desolation. ...
— Chasing the Sun • R.M. Ballantyne
... however, do not seem inclined to accept this as a sufficient reason for the phenomena observed.]. But we may safely conclude that during the third day the earth did not derive its heat from the sun. The second point, the barrenness of the geological records of this period, will be ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... opportunity for cruelty and injustice, without being exposed to the same risks: we will compel them to abjure vital clergymen by a public test, to deny that the said William Wilberforce has any power of working miracles, touching for barrenness or any other infirmity, or that he is endowed with any preternatural gift whatever. We will swear them to the doctrine of good works, compel them to preach common sense, and to hear it; to frequent Bishops, Deans, and other High Churchmen; and to appear, once in the quarter at ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... the diurnal motions of the sun, moon, and five planets. Posidonius calculated the circumference of the earth to be two hundred and forty thousand stadia by a different method from Eratosthenes. The barrenness of discovery, from Hipparchus to Ptolemy, in spite of the patronage of the Ptolemies, was owing to the want of instruments for the accurate measure of time, like our clocks, to the imperfection of astronomical tables, and to the want ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... are cold and desolate to me. A childless woman is a monstrosity of nature; we exist only to be mothers. Oh! my sage in woman's livery, how well you have conned the book of life! Everywhere, too, barrenness is a dismal thing. My life is a little too much like one of Gessner's or Florian's sheepfolds, which Rivarol longed to see invaded by a wolf. I too have it in me to make sacrifices! There are forces in me, I feel, which Felipe has no use for; and if I am not to be a mother, I must be allowed to ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... wickedness so great that I cannot pity; no folly that I cannot condone; patient to wait for the unravelling of the skein of life till the great Creator willeth, meanwhile looking at all things sub specie aeternitatis, and ever finding new food for humility in the barrenness of my own life. But it has been a singular intellectual revival for me to feel all my old principles and thoughts shadowing themselves clearer and clearer on the negatives of memory where the sunflames of youth imprinted ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... brave; The eye finds weakest spots in strongest walls, And meets no strength that can out-wear the grave. Nature, thy handmaid and imperial slave, The pomp of splendour's finery never heeds: Kings reign and die: pride may no respite crave; Nature in barrenness ne'er mourns thy deeds: Graves, poor and rich alike, ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... wives and children to famine and all the evils of poverty. We do not dispute the soundness of this conclusion neither—but we utterly deny that it has any application to the people of Liberia. Away with all the false notions that are circulating about the barrenness of this country. They are the observations of such ignorant or designing men, as would injure both it and you. A more fertile soil and a more productive country, so far as it is cultivated, there is not, we believe, on the face of the earth. Its hills and ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... indifference of the Middle Ages. "Each famous author of antiquity whom I recall," he indignantly exclaims, "places a new offense and another cause of dishonor to the charge of later generations, who, not satisfied with their own disgraceful barrenness, permitted the fruit of other minds and the writings that their ancestors had produced by toil and application, to perish through shameful neglect. Although they had nothing of their own to hand down to those who were to come after, they robbed ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... one case will preserve her in the other. There is one argument which I scarce know how to deliver before you, sir; but—if a woman hath lived with her first husband without having children, I think it unpardonable in her to carry barrenness into a second family. On the contrary, if she hath children by her first husband, to give them a second father is ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... p. 105. l. 21. —Sudra like. The lowest caste who are not privileged, and indeed have no disposition in the native barrenness of their minds to study the ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... Alfonso did not attend to his requisitions for supplies. The candid and good-natured poet intimates that the duke might have given him the appointment rather for the governor's sake than the people's; and the cold, the loneliness and barrenness of the place, and, above all, his absence from the object of his affections, oppressed him. He did not write a verse for twelve months: he says he felt like a bird moulting[22]. The best thing got out of it was an anecdote for posterity. The poet ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... suffered a very uncommon, and unexpected calamity. The sand of the shore was raised by a tempest in such quantities, and carried to such a distance, that an estate was overwhelmed and lost. Such and so hopeless was the barrenness superinduced, that the owner, when he was required to pay the usual tax, desired rather to ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... simplicity which (because it at once bears the stamp of truth, and forces the imagination of the reader to supply the omitted details of horror), is more effective to inspire sympathy than elaborate description. The very barrenness of the narration was hideously suggestive, and the girl felt her heart beat quicker as her poetic intellect rushed to complete the terrible picture sketched by the convict. She saw it all—the blue sea, the burning sun, the slowly moving ship, ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... arranged between husband and wife, Madame Bonaparte was delighted to go to the springs of Plombieres which she had desired to visit for a long time, knowing, like every one else, the reputation these waters enjoyed for curing barrenness in women. ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... who are the flower of their age in intellect, who pass beyond their fellows and tower over them, entering at last upon a fatal treadmill of thought, where they yield to the innate indolence of the soul and begin to delude themselves by the solace of repetition. Then comes the barrenness and lack of vitality,—that unhappy and disappointing state into which great men too often enter when middle life is just passed. The fire of youth, the vigor of the young intellect, conquers the inner inertia and makes the man scale heights of thought and fill his mental lungs with the free ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... plain, mountain and shore, temperature and rainfall, constitute the sole or the most important elements in human environment. Every one of these elements is doubtless important. Frost, drought, or barrenness of soil may make a region a desert, or dwarf the development of its inhabitants. Mountaineer, and the dweller on the plain, and the fisherman on the shore of the ocean develop different traits through the influence of their surroundings. In too warm a climate the human race loses ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... doth she weep for very wantonness? Or is it that she dimly doth foresee Across her youth the joys grow less and less The burden of the days that are to be: Autumn and withered leaves and vanity, And winter bringing end in barrenness. ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... machine, organized to its minutest details, and regulated through all its processes; these at first may lead the visitor from the New World to suppose that he has fallen upon some region of persevering formality, where all is frost and show, perpetual glitter and unmeaning barrenness. But pierce these formal barriers of etiquette, dissolve by the requisite appliances this superficial frost-work of the English circles, and none, it is believed, will have any just reason to complain of coldness and reserve. By the social barriers spoken of, are not ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... to finish a poem which I had begun, entitled "Christabel", for a second volume of the "Lyrical Ballads". I tried to perform my promise, but the deep unutterable disgust which I had suffered in the translation of the accursed "Wallenstein", seemed to have stricken me with barrenness; for I tried and tried, and nothing would come of it. I desisted with a deeper dejection than I am willing to remember. The wind from the Skiddaw and Borrowdale was often as loud as wind need be, ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... thou art barren; and knowing thee is like planing a rock." Cried she, "Allah's name upon thee. Indeed, I have worn out the mortars with beating wool and pounding drugs,[FN186] and I am not to blame; the barrenness is with thee, for that thou art a snub-nosed mule and thy sperm is weak and watery and impregnateth not neither getteth children." Said he, "When I return from my journey, I will take another wife;" and she, "My luck is with Allah!" Then he went out from her and both repented of the sharp ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... seas and drifted across by the snow. But because we must go, therefore it was hard to go. What cannot be done, cannot be had, cannot be reached—that is just what the boy wants. As we could not yet actually realise the desolateness and barrenness of winter there, but only remember the delights and beauties of summer and autumn, we lost cheerfulness over the boxes and trunks, and sighed because of the brick walls, narrow streets, and toilsome school-work that were ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... who as regards the world was honourable, as regards God devout, came to Malachy and complained to him concerning the barrenness of his soul,[698] praying that he would obtain for him from Almighty God the grace of tears. And Malachy, smiling because he was pleased that there should be spiritual desire from a man of the world, laid his cheek on the ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... make full amends for defect in the power and resources which are the natural property of size—of mass. Gibraltar, the synonym of intrinsic strength, is an illustration in point; its smallness, its isolation, and its barrenness of resource constitute limits to its offensive power, and even to its impregnability, which are well understood by military men. Jamaica, by its situation, flanks the route from Cuba to the Isthmus, as indeed it does all routes from the Atlantic and the Gulf to that point; ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... kinsman, Pope Clement the Seventh, had deceived the king; and Francis himself, disappointed in his ambitious designs by the pontiff's speedy death, looked upon her with little favor. For several years she had borne no children, and Henry was urged to put her away on the ground of barrenness. Nor was she more happy when her prayers had been answered, and a family of four sons and three daughters blessed her marriage. Her husband's infatuation respecting Diana of Poitiers embittered her life when dauphiness, and compelled her as queen to tolerate ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... lake, they planted a girdle of dark woods growing so near to the new house that the Hewishes, walking in their gardens, could almost fancy themselves in England and lose sight of the mountain slopes that swept up into the crags behind them. The house stood with its back to the hills and all western barrenness, looking over a level, terraced sward, past a river that had been tamed to the smoothness of a chalk stream, to homely woodlands of beech and elm that might well have been haunted by nightingales if only there ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... makes up for the barrenness of the country by having some of the richest fishing banks in the world. Hence, in addition to being farmers, the Icelanders have always been fishermen who brought means of sustenance from the sea—usually in ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... continuity of French literary history. From its beginning down to the actual moment, French literature has suffered no serious break in the course of its development. There have been periods of greater, and periods of less, prosperity and fruit; but wastes of marked suspension and barrenness, ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... to feed the monsters this side of the river?" I demanded, indignant at the barrenness of the south side of the valley ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... with here and there a few bushes and shrubs. Many also were the dried beds of rivers, and there were still wider and profounder depressions of land than these waterless wadys. But all is now burnt, scorched, dried up, and the nakedness of the Saharan ridges is responded to with a hideous barrenness from the intervening plains and valleys. Not a single living creature was visible or moving; not a wild or tame animal, not a bird nor an insect, if we except a tiny lizard, which seems to live as a salamander ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... to be set, no doubt, some formidable literary defects: an occasional mistiness of expression, like the summit of Katahdin, as he himself describes it,—one vast fog, with here and there a rock protruding; also, an occasional sandy barrenness, like his beloved Cape Cod. In truth, he never quite completed the transition from the observer to the artist. With the power of constructing sentences as perfectly graceful as a hemlock-bough, he yet ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... as Titus Livius[188] remarks. Caecilia was not the only wife that Sulla had. When he was a very young man he married Ilia, who bore him a daughter; his second wife was AElia; and his third wife was Cloelia, whom he divorced on the ground of barrenness, yet in a manner honourable to the lady, with an ample testimony to her virtues and with presents. But as he married Metella a few days after, it was believed that his alleged ground of divorce was merely a pretext. However, he always paid great respect to Metella, which induced the Romans, when ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... had entered into the simplicity of the monotonous desert, the most refined abundance for the intellect and the need of beauty appeared amid its barrenness. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... visioned in the silence that fell, Daughtry did not try to guess. He was too occupied with his own vision, and vividly burned before him the sordid barrenness of a poor-house ward, where an ancient, very like what he himself would become, maundered and gibbered and drooled for a crumb of tobacco for his old clay pipe, and where, of all horrors, no sip of beer ever obtained, much ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... not wish to offer any further contradictory evidence than that already elicited from the plaintiff's witnesses. I may say, however, that this decision on our part is due not so much to my own sense of the legal barrenness of our case as to my client's deep conviction that the boy Ralph is her son, and to her great desire that justice shall ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... and Norwich will be more remote from each other than Paris and Marseilles. In place of a railway station there will be a swamp, and instead of a turnpike gate, a wood. Mighty towns and spacious cities will shrink into obscure villages; smiling and fertile districts relapse into original barrenness; kinsfolk and acquaintance be put nearly out of sight. There are no mails; there is no penny post; the last new novel will not reach you. The Bishop of Exeter may become a cardinal, or Colonel Sibthorpe commander of the forces, six weeks before you hear of their promotion. ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... was rapidly drying up. Many of the trees shed their leaves in the dry season, just as they do with us in autumn. The barrenness of the landscape is relieved in March by several kinds of trees bursting into flower when they have shed their leaves, and presenting great domes of brilliant colour—some pink, others red, blue, yellow, or white, like single-coloured bouquets. One looked like ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... veneer; polish does wonders for the appearance of folks as well as of furniture. But while the beauty of "heart of oak" is enhanced by its "finish," its utility is not destroyed by a failure to polish it. Now, much of the so-called barrenness of country life is the oak minus the polish. We come to regard polish as essential; it is largely relative. And not only may we apply the wrong standard to the situation, but our eyes may deceive us. To the uninitiated a clod of dry earth is the most unpromising of objects—it ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... you will be tested with photographs and paragraphs, with lectures and public dinners.... Worst of all there will come to you terrible hours when you yourself know of a sure certainty that your work is worthless. In your middle age a great barrenness will come upon you. You have been a little teller of little tales, and on every side of you there will be others who have striven for other prizes and have won them. Sitting alone in your room with your poor strands of coloured silk that ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... grasp at one, you hold many. The hands go wandering over the moss as over the keys of a piano, and bring forth fragrance for melody. The lovely creatures twine and nestle and lay their glowing faces to the very earth beneath withered leaves, and what seemed mere barrenness becomes fresh and fragrant beauty. So great is the charm of the pursuit, that the epigaea is really the one wild-flower for which our country-people have a hearty passion. Every village child knows its best haunts, and watches for it eagerly in the spring; boys wreathe their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... Arcesilas and Carneades. Once he gives expression to a fear lest they should be the only true philosophers after all[100]. There was a kind of magnificence about the Stoic utterances on morality, more suited to a superhuman than a human world, which allured Cicero more than the barrenness of the Stoic dialectic repelled him[101]. On moral questions, therefore, we often find him going farther in the direction of Stoicism than even his teacher Antiochus. One great question which divided the philosophers of the time was, whether happiness was capable of degrees. The ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... of savage watchers, we could only conjecture. Seemingly the mass of Indian life, which only the day before had overflowed that vacant space, had vanished as if by some sorcerer's magic. To me, this unexpected silence and dreary barrenness were astounding; I gazed about me fairly bewildered, almost dreaming for the moment that our foes had lifted the long siege and departed while I slept. Heald no doubt read the thought in my eyes, for he laid a kindly hand upon my sleeve ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... the desert's sea Rose suddenly upon my sight at dawn, And terrible in an eternity Of death took silently the sunrise on. Purple funereal from rifted skies Swept down across their proud sterility, Only to die as here all glory dies, On barrenness I did not dream could be. O God, for a bird-song! or opening lips Of but one flower upon the fatal air, For but the voice of water as it drips, Or stir of leaves the day-wind makes aware! O God, for these, for life! or from the face Of the world ...
— Many Gods • Cale Young Rice |
