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More "Barrenness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... good to report. Years of sick idleness and barrenness have grown wearisome to me. I do nothing. I waver and hover, and painfully speculate even now as to health, and where I shall spend the summer out of London! I am a very poor fellow;—but hope to grow ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... old man 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 less six ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... certain inseparability is of the nature of marriage," but that "absolute indissolubility does not attach to marriage by the law of nature." He adds: "if we consider marriage as it is an office of nature for the propagation of the race, it is hard to render a reason why for the wife's barrenness the husband should not be allowed to put her away, or marry another." (De Matrimonio, I. ii., d. 13, n. 7.) We proceed to prove that "a certain inseparability is of the nature of marriage," so that marriage may truly be said to be indissoluble ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... manifold provisions 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
... accepts 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
... the fading stars when she mounted a long ridge, the quick striding of her horse indicating that there was something ahead at last, and came upon the camp fire, the coffee, and the cook, all beside a splintered gray rock that rose as high as a house out of the barrenness ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... will take its stand upon a much more adequate basis than heretofore. On the view of 'furfural-yielding' being co-extensive with 'pentose or pentosane,' not only were a number of important facts obscured or misinterpreted, but there was a barrenness of suggestion of genetic relationships. As the group has been widened very much beyond these limits, it is clear that if any group term or designation is to be retained that of 'furfuroid' is 'neutral' in character, ...
— Researches on Cellulose - 1895-1900 • C. F. Cross
... but singularly silly. I tackled some Tacitus too. I got them with a dreadful French 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 ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... SCHOOLS.—In contrast to the barrenness of the last period, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries present us with a brilliant constellation of writers in every department of letters, whose works form an era in the intellectual development of Germany unsurpassed in many respects by any other ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... join the Society, impelled thereto, we are forced to believe, more by love and consideration for Sarah than by religious conviction. But she constantly complains of her "leanness and barrenness of spirit," of "doubts and distressing fears" as to the Lord's remembrance of her for good, and grieves that she is such a useless member of the Church, the "activity of nature," she says, "finding it very hard to stand ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... from the sea, though picturesque, is not inviting, giving one an idea of great barrenness. The mountains and rocks have a peaked appearance, like a spear pointed at one, as much as to say, "better keep off." People who land, however, for the first time, are agreeably disappointed by finding that ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... of the settlement altogether, as the enormous expense of supplying us by sea precluded the idea of any profit being ever realised; while it was quite evident the Company's benevolent views toward the Esquimaux could not be carried into effect. The extreme poverty and barrenness of their country, and their pertinacious adherence to their seal-skin dresses, which no argument of ours could induce them to exchange for the less comfortable articles of European clothing, were insurmountable obstacles. The Honourable Company, while they wished to supply the wants ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... 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 ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... 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 ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... every hotel and hospital with his sick soldiers, and having left one-third of his numbers behind him. He had manifested his own military skill in the adroit and successful manner in which he had accomplished the relief of Paris, while the barrenness of the result from the whole expedition vindicated the political sagacity with which he had ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... as happy as can be,' put in Miss Amabel briskly. 'I don't think the children were prepared for the barrenness and dreariness of an English winter. They have come from the land of brilliant flowers and sunshine, and ...
— Bulbs and Blossoms • Amy Le Feuvre
... the Manitoo dictated to them by some of their oldest Sagamees, or principal women, and more frequently by some celebrated Juggler of the village, that they may obtain the blessing of fruitfulness. For it is with them, as amongst the Jews, that barrenness is accounted opprobrious. A woman is not looked upon as a woman, till she has proved it, by her fulfilling what they consider as one of the great ends of her creation. Failing in that, she is divorced from her husband, and may then prostitute herself ...
— An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton • Antoine Simon Maillard
... the south was spotted by great strips of sandy barrenness, torn by winds that swept the grains of sand into the troopers' eyes and crept into the chinks of their armor. Underfoot, the sand made a treacherous pathway; carriers and men alike found it ...
— Despoilers of the Golden Empire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... of popular prejudices, between the lovers of forsaken Canary, and the terrors of our females at the barrenness of an Arabian desert, which lasted for twenty years, at length the custom was universally established; nor were there wanting some reflecting minds desirous of introducing the use of this liquid among the labouring classes ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... engaged, nor the least preparation made for so long a voyage, still the delights and wide-spreading advantages of Pantisocracy formed one of their everlasting themes of conversation; and, considering the barrenness of the subject, it was in no common degree amusing, to hear these young enthusiasts repel every objection to the practicability of their scheme, and magnify the condition to which it was to introduce them; where thorns and briars ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... as if paralyzed under his awful eyes. Oh! thought I, can two orbs picture such infinite depth of remorse; such absence of tenderness; such barrenness of sympathy, far beyond the most care-worn look of earth? Then, pervading all these lineaments of despair were the positive characteristics of his nature—malice, envy, and hatred. These lent their ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... understand your case, and we think that a word or two is misplaced. I wish some time you would consider the case under the following point of view. If sterility is caused or accumulated through Natural Selection, then, as every degree exists up to absolute barrenness, Natural Selection must have the power of increasing it. Now take two species, A and B, and assume that they are (by any means) half-sterile, i.e. produce half the full number of offspring. Now try and make (by Natural Selection) A and B absolutely sterile ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... sickly, what speculations on his demise! The worldly stake is so enormous, that the ties of nature are dissolved, and a brother rejoices at a brother's death! One generation is not sufficient to remove these feelings; the barrenness of his marriage bed, or the weakly state of his children, are successively speculated upon by the presumptive heir. Let it not be supposed that I would infer this always to be the fact. I have put ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... said Markham, 'is the master of the earth, turning barrenness into fruitfulness, whereby all commonwealths are maintained and upheld. His labour giveth liberty to all vocations, arts, and trades to follow their several functions with peace and industrie. What can we say in this world is profitable where husbandry is wanting, it being the great nerve and ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... and Malta in a Series of Letters to William Beckford, Esquire, of Somerly, in Suffolk, from Patrick Brydone, F.R.S. Near Catania he saw some lava covered with a scanty soil, incapable of producing either corn or vines; he imagined from its barrenness that ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... have done! You have clothed the barrenness of the dreary plain with gardens, orchards and forests. You have been at work with God and glorified a vast empire, and now he has blessed the work of your hands. Instead of the air sodden with tears and tremulous with the wail of widows and orphans, ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... occasions sultry to oppressiveness—as for instance on the morning of the tempest. They were now in the first days of the last week of that month, and every where a quick and luxuriant vegetation had succeeded to the stubborn barrenness and monotony of winter. Not a vestige of that dense mass of ice which, three months previously, had borne them over lake and river, was now to be seen. The sun danced joyously and sportively on the golden wave, and where recently towered the rugged surface of the tiny iceberg, the still, calm, ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... these discussions, had become wild and open, as soon as we had left Glasgow a mile or two behind us, and was growing more dreary as we advanced. Huge continuous heaths spread before, behind, and around us, in hopeless barrenness—now level and interspersed with swamps, green with treacherous verdure, or sable with turf, or, as they call them in Scotland, peat-bogs,—and now swelling into huge heavy ascents, which wanted the dignity and form of hills, while they were still more toilsome to the passenger. There ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Hindostan. In this foreign narrative I may not consume a page; and a volume would scarcely suffice to recapitulate the battles and sieges of his twelve expeditions. Never was the Mussulman hero dismayed by the inclemency of the seasons, the height of the mountains, the breadth of the rivers, the barrenness of the desert, the multitudes of the enemy, or the formidable array of their elephants of war. [5] The sultan of Gazna surpassed the limits of the conquests of Alexander: after a march of three months, over the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... cultivation; and above and below the city the villas of the rich; giving you altogether as delicious a nucleus for a broad circle of scenery as art and nature could create, and one sufficiently in contrast with the barrenness of the rocky circumference to enhance the charm, and content you with your position. Half way down the hill lies an old monastery, with a lovely garden walled ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... city,—glittering robe and golden hair; to each he will give its lustre and loveliness; and then, so far as with his poor human lips he may declare it, far beyond all these, he proclaims that "heaven is bright." But Gaspar, and such other landscapists, painting all Nature's flowery ground as one barrenness, and all her fair foliage as one blackness, and all her exquisite forms as one bluntness; when, in this sluggard gloom and sullen treachery of heart, they mutter their miserable attestation to what others had long ago discerned for them,—the sky's brightness,—we do not thank them; or thank them ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... sent down to Alexandria to go to you, was in her room when a neighbour of hers, who had never had a child, saw it, and at once conceived. The old image worship survives in the belief, which is all over Egypt, that the 'Anteeks' (antiques) can cure barrenness. Mabrookah was of course very smartly dressed, and the reckless way in which Eastern women treat their fine clothes gives them a grand air, which no Parisian Duchess could hope to imitate—not that I think it a virtue mind you, but some ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... 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!" ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... its destruction, was sown with salt, as a sign of the barrenness and desolation that its enemies wished to see come ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... intercepted by this range, and the greater portion of their moisture is taken away. The little moisture that remains falls upon the highlands of the Great Basin, and so relieves its surface from utter barrenness. The adjacent slopes of the Sierra Nevada and Wasatch ranges furnish numerous perennial streams which feed the lakes about the borders of the Basin, such as Great Salt Lake, Pyramid, Walker, Mono, Honey, and Owens lakes. The wet weather streams, ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... the discovery and 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
... escorted Rose into it, was a terribly impressive place. The spirit of a barren sterile efficiency brooded everywhere. And this appearance of barrenness obtained despite the presence of an enormous number of articles; a pair of scales, a perfect battery of electric heaters of various sorts; rows of vacuum jars for keeping things cold or hot; a small sterilizing oven; instruments and appliances that Rose couldn't guess the uses or the ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... ruled, glazed paper that is sold alongside plug tobacco and pearl buttons and safety pins in the Indian traders' stores. Staring from under her straight brows at that folded letter, Annie-Many-Ponies had a swift, clear vision of the little store set down in the midst of barrenness and dust, and of the squaws sitting wrapped in bright shawls upon the platform while their lords gravely purchased small luxuries within. As a slim, barefooted papoose, proud of her shapeless red calico slip buttoned unevenly up the back with huge white buttons, and of her hair braided in two ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... "reproductive organs, when of different length, behave to one another like different species of the same genus in regard both to direct productiveness and the character of the offspring; and that consequently mutual barrenness, which was once thought conclusive proof of difference of species, is worthless as such, and the last barrier that was raised between species and ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... waves of sound and light. Even in the grayest days, when the clouds are bursting into tears and the whole landscape is desolate as the barrenest and bleakest of mountain sides, these infinite gradations of color permeate and redeem its barrenness, and to the true painter fill it with joy ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... bodies and the earth, and from whom came all good to man and everlasting happiness. Angro-Mainyus means the black or dark intelligence, the creator of all that is evil, both moral and physical. He had power to blast the earth with barrenness, to produce earthquakes and storms, to inflict disease and death, destroy flocks and the fruits of the earth, excite wars and tumults; in short, to send every form of evil on mankind. Ahura-Mazda ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... done. It had lifted up an art which through inflation or barrenness Brussels had let train on the ground like a fallen flag, and it had given to France the glory of acquiring the ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... a solution! It is beside the matter to call the book ungodly, immoral, base. Le Sage would have answered: "Of course it is; for so is the world of which it is a picture." No; the most notable thing about the book is its intense stupidity; its dreariness, barrenness, shallowness, ignorance of the human heart, want of any human interest. If it be an epos, the actors in it are not men and women, but ferrets—with here and there, of course, a stray rabbit, on whose ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... 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
... the Canadian thorn—a great improvement on the old snake fence of rough split timber which prevails all through the colony. What a difference it would make in the aspect of the country if these green hedgerows were in general use! It would take from the savage barrenness given to it by these crooked wooden lines, that cross and recross the country in all directions: no object can be less picturesque or more unpleasing to the eye. A new clearing reminds one of a large turnip field, divided by hurdles into different compartments for the feeding of ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... here find no regions cursed with irremediable barrenness, or blessed with spontaneous fecundity; no perpetual gloom, or unceasing sunshine; nor are the nations here described either devoid of all sense of humanity, or consummate in all private or social virtues. Here ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... toasted himself up to such a pitch of vigour, I confess I once gave up Amanda for gone; and am since, with all due respect to Mrs. Rogers, very sorry she escaped; for I am confident a certain lady (let no one take it to herself that is handsome) who highly blames the play, for the barrenness of the conclusion, would then have allowed it a very natural close." It should be added that the Mrs. Rogers herein mentioned as playing Amanda was a capable tragic actress whose ambition it was to enact none but virtuous women. Her own virtue—but ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... expressive features and 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 ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... from the visitor driving up the winding road from the outer gate to the portico. The trees, I must repeat, should be so divided as to give them a free growth and admit sufficient light and air beneath them to allow the grass to flourish. Grassless ground under park trees has a look of barrenness, discomfort and neglect, and is out of keeping with the ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... "you are an angel! I have told you so before, and it may be a proof of the barrenness of my resources to tell you so again, but it is true. God forgive me, my precious! I should like to see the man whose heart could harden while ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... 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. 'Why yes, Sir; meat and drink enough to give ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... a rock where her gay blanket made a picturesque splotch of color against the gray barrenness of the hill behind her. She, too, heard what Ramon said, and she, too, thought that he had made the praise sound terribly sincere. He had not spoken to her at all after the first careless nod of recognition when he rode up. And although her reason had approved of his caution, ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... province of Canton, in China, the souls of unborn children are kept in the garden of two deities called "Flower-Grandfather" and "Flower-Grandmother," and when to these have been made by a priest sacrifices of hens or swine, the children are let out and thus appear among men. As a charm against barrenness, these people put white paper into a basket and have the priest make an invocation. The white paper represents the deities, and the ceremony is called kau ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... his duty to keep 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 ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... wintering there. Magellan, perceiving that the voyage would be a long one, in order that the provisions might last longer, ordered the rations to be diminished. The Spaniards endured this with patience for some days, but alarmed at the length of the winter and the barrenness of the land, at last petitioned their admiral Magellan, saying that it was evident that this continent extended an indefinite distance south-wards, and that there was no hope of discovering the end of it, or of discovering ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... settle by the stove, while the regular quiet breathing assured him that the child had not yet waked from sleep. As he softly tiptoed around, seeking the outfit he needed for his great adventure, the barrenness of the house, the poverty of it, struck him for the first time. God knows he had never thought of "things," except as he had needed them for himself or others; and now he wished suddenly that he had ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... the Treaty was termed the death-sentence of Germany, not only as an empire, but as an independent political community. Henceforward her economic efforts, beyond a certain limit, will be struck with barrenness, her industry will be hindered from outstripping or overtaking that of the neighboring countries, and her population will be indirectly kept within definite bounds. For, instead of exporting manufactures, she ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... the nations of the North. Like a gale sweeping across a forest of trees in blossom, and bearing their fertilizing pollen, after it has broken and deflowered their branches, to far-distant trees that hitherto have bloomed in barrenness, the storm of Charles's army carried far and wide through Europe thought-dust, imperceptible, but potent to enrich the nations. The French alone, says Michelet, understood Italy. How terrible would have been a conquest by ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... glaring boulders of naked rock. Here and there tufts of grass grew beside the stony track, but they were brown and scorched, and served only to emphasise the barrenness of ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... alone reproduce the miracle worked in Brie during the last two centuries. Here, however, not only is a town lacking, but also the great residences which sometimes give life to these hopeless deserts, where civilization languishes, where the agriculturist sees only barrenness, and the traveller finds not a single inn, nor that which, perchance, he is there to ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... and—except the strong paved Highway that now runs through it (to Reppen, Meseritz and the Polish Frontier, and is strongly paved till it get through Kunersdorf)—chaotic wholly; a scene of heaped barrenness and horror, not to be matched but in Sahara; the features of the Battle quite blown away, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 you the Sun of ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... sheathed to keep it warm and tight, and to conceal its barrenness on the walls had been tacked a few gaily colored prints. On one side of the room were several well-filled bookshelves, while on the opposite wall were racks for pipes and guns. From over the fireplace an elk's head peered forth, catching ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... whether it was the barrenness of the room, or Milt's carefulness, that caught her. The uncarpeted boards of the floor were well swept. He had only one plate, one spoon, but they were scoured, and put away on newspaper-covered shelves in a cupboard made ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... when the sun had reassumed some of its genial power, I walked in the forest with my family. It was one of those lovely winter-days which assert the capacity of nature to bestow beauty on barrenness. The leafless trees spread their fibrous branches against the pure sky; their intricate and pervious tracery resembled delicate sea-weed; the deer were turning up the snow in search of the hidden grass; the white was made intensely dazzling by the sun, and trunks of the trees, ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... Nile; and Egypt's one great period of expansion saw this eastern coast of the Mediterranean as far as the Euphrates united to the dominion of the Pharaohs. Here is a one-sided geographical location in an exaggerated form, emphasized by the physical and political barrenness of the adjacent regions of Africa and the strategic importance of the isthmian district between ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... With him barren waste—but for her did there not grow in the field of life some things which were everlasting? With the quickness with which he saw everything he saw that it was the picture of his own barrenness could show her most surely the things which for ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... his anger resolved to leave the office. He was sure that the case was one which would just have suited him. He would have got up the evidence as to the fertility of the land, the enormous promise of crop, and the ultimate absolute barrenness, to a marvel. He would have proved clouds of pheasants. And then Goarly's humble position, futile industry, and general poverty might have been contrasted beautifully with Lord Rufford's wealth, idleness, and devotion to sport. Anything above the 7s. 6d. an acre ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... brought her renovatingly to earth, and the saving naturalness of the woman recreated her childlike, with shrouded recollections of her strange taste of life behind her; with a tempered fresh blood to enjoy aimlessly, and what would erewhile have been a barrenness to her sensibilities. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... be unreasonable with him; I will expect English no where from the barrenness of his Country: but if he can make sense of his Unnatural War of Expediency, I will forgive him two false Grammars, and three Barbarisms, in every Period of his Pamphlet; and yet leave him enow of each to ...
— His Majesties Declaration Defended • John Dryden
... by John Martin (1789-1854), had been exhibited for some years and had created an immense impression. Lamb subjected Martin's work to a minute analysis a few years later (see the Elia essay on the "Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art," Vol. II.). Barton did not give up Martin in consequence of this letter. The frontispiece to his New Year's Eve, 1828, is by that painter, and the volume contains eulogistic poems upon ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... and meagre food, and with the coarsest clothing, offer himself a holy and living sacrifice, acceptable unto God; nor suffered he the enemy to touch in him the walls of Jerusalem, but he inflicted on his own flesh the penance of perpetual barrenness; and that he should not bring forth children which might hereafter be worthy of death, made he his ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... Warwick. I said to the good man who lived in it, "Can you see the castle?" and he replied, "We can see it best in the winter when the leaves are off the trees. In the summer time it is apt to be hid!" The summer bounty hid the castle; the winter barrenness revealed it! And so it is in life. In the season of fulness we are prone to be blind to "the house of many mansions," and we forget the Master of the house, the Lord our God. Our material wealth ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... walks through the 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, crossbones, scythes, hour-glasses, and other ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... time and glory! When in the coldness of a frigid school, Upon the barrenness of a hard bench, My teacher's graceless hands placed thee before me, O peerless book, what I had thought would be A lesson, proved ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... 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 ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... complexions from black to pale white. Many of these homeless half-breeds are farmed out with relatives, by their mothers, when single, thus leaving them free to go and come without incumbrance. Barrenness, disease and early death are the fruits of such promiscuous intercourse, to such an extent that their utter extinction from these causes is inevitable, unless they are speedily removed. Their only hope of long surviving lies in the careful training of the young children ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... covers the eastern slopes of these mountains, and looks down over the province of Abra, he sees an exceedingly broken land (Plates I and II), the subordinate ranges succeeding one another like the waves of the sea. The first impression is one of barrenness. The forest vanishes, and in its place are long grassy slopes, broken here and there by scattered pines and lower down by dense growths of the graceful, feathery bamboo. But this lack of trees is more fancied than real, for as ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... sweep opposite this archway, and a few tall pines twisted and gnarled in bough and stem, as though the full force of many storm winds had battered and bent them out of their natural shapes, were the only relief to the barrenness of the ground. An iron chain with a massive ring at the end suggested itself as the possible means of pulling a bell or otherwise attracting attention; but for some minutes I had not the ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... awkward and ill at ease. None are at a greater disadvantage than the suddenly-grown-rich who attempt late in life to surround themselves with articles of art and luxury, though their habits were all formed amid barrenness and want ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... imprisonment, disgrace, repulse, [1796] contumely, calumny, abuse, injury, contempt, ingratitude, unkindness, scoffs, flouts, unfortunate marriage, single life, too many children, no children, false servants, unhappy children, barrenness, banishment, oppression, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... you; let this 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
... was also there, conversing about domestic matters and the crops. The Senora was in a detestable humor; she found fault with every thing, and scolded them harshly for the drought of the heavens and the barrenness of the earth, phenomena for which they, poor men! were in no wise to blame. The Penitentiary was also present. When Caballuco entered, the good canon saluted him affectionately and motioned him to a seat ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... 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
... lingering in the shadow of cold disdain! In our self-centered century, what inspiration do we offer them? The past may well look with pity at the poverty of our civilisation; the future will laugh at the barrenness of our art. We are destroying the beautiful in life. Would that some great wizard might from the stem of society shape a mighty harp whose strings would resound to the ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... spring-god's proffers of adornment and fruitfulness (the apples and ring), defies the flashing sunbeams (Frey's sword), and only consents to receive his kiss when it learns that it will else be doomed to perpetual barrenness, or given over entirely into the power of the giants (ice and snow). The nine nights of waiting are typical of the nine winter months, at the end of which the earth becomes the bride of the sun, in the groves where the trees are budding forth ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... during the seven years which had elapsed she had never once had the slightest hint of pregnancy, she believed, according to the statement of a clever physician whom she sent for from Paris, that this barrenness proceeded from the fact, that both she and her husband, always more lovers than spouses, allowed pleasure to interfere with business, and by this means engendering was prevented. Then she endeavoured to restrain her impetuosity, and to take things coolly, ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... true love of God is not in us, we are like fruit-trees cursed with barrenness—only fit to be cast into ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... 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 ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... river, should exist, it is hardly possible to imagine how the extensive tracts of inland country can ever become civilized or inhabited by Europeans. And of that portion which has been visited a considerable extent of country appears to be shut out by the natural barrenness of its soil and sandstone-rocks from any prospect of ever supplying food to the colonies of civilized man. So that, while the whole of New Holland is an interesting country from its natural peculiarities, and even the desolate portion of it adds, by its very desolation, a deep interest ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... no nails. But the colored blacksmith, who appreciated the plight we were in, offered to make a shoe, and to crib four nails from those he had laid aside for a couple of mules; and after a good deal of delay, we were enabled to go on. The incident shows, as well as anything, the barrenness and shiftlessness of the region. A horseman with whom we rode in the morning gave us a very low estimate of the trustworthiness of the inhabitants. The valley is wild and very pretty all the way down to Colonel Long's,—twelve ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... apparently an imagination as boundless as the range of Nature in the scenes he recorded; whereas, whoever trusted to his imagination would soon find his own mind circumscribed and contracted to a few images, and the repetition of these would sooner or later produce that very monotony and barrenness which had always haunted descriptive poetry in the hands of any but ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... fancied murderer, as a woman who deals in poisons. And yet she has small taste for such things, is far from murderous in her desires. Devoid of goodness, she yet loves life, loves to work cures, to prolong others' lives. She is dangerous in two ways: on the one hand by selling receipts for barrenness, and even for abortion; while on the other, her headlong libertine fancy leads her to compass a woman's fall with her cursed potions, to triumph in the ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... 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. ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... 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 with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... would make all things easy, safe, and cheap; None for himself would either sow or reap; Our ready help, and mutual love, would yield A nobler harvest than the richest field. Famine and death, confined to certain parts, Extended are by barrenness of hearts. Some pine for want where others surfeit now; But then we should the use of plenty know. Love would betwixt the rich and needy stand, And spread heaven's bounty with an equal hand; 210 At ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... cheapness; no luxuries were there, and necessaries not enough. It was bleak and bare; the ceiling cracked, the wall-paper discoloured, and those books—prim, shining books, fat-backed, with arms stamped on them—glared in the surrounding barrenness. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... bands about the cleft pillars still indicate the green withes that tied them. No one can walk in a road cut through pine woods, without being struck with the architectural appearance of the grove, especially in winter, when the barrenness of all other trees shows the low arch of the Saxons. In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which the Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... it all up together. Hence, also, they carry in procession an olive branch bound about with wool (such as they then made use of in their supplications), which they call Eiresione, crowned with all sorts of fruits, to signify that scarcity and barrenness was ceased, singing in their ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... inclosed and cultivated; a few houses, and some movables. The genius, the industry of the inhabitants would accompany them; and it is those alone which constitute the sole wealth of their island. Its present fame would perish, and in a few years it would return to its pristine state of barrenness and poverty: they might perhaps be allowed to transport themselves in their own vessels to some other spot or island, which they would soon fertilise by the same means with which they ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... anything like accuracy. Ranges, buttes, pinnacles, monumental crags, gullies, shadowy chasms, the beds of perished rivers, the stony wrecks left by unrecorded deluges, diversified this monstrous, sublime, and savage picture. Only here and there, separated by vast intervals of barrenness, could be seen minute streaks of verdure. In general the landscape was one of inhospitable sterility. It could not be imagined by men accustomed only to fertile regions. It seemed to have been taken from some planet not yet prepared ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... by Licence from the Pope, which, if it could have been converted into a Prohibition, might have sav'd that Duke's Life: In regard their Country is wholly inland, and the River Tagus famous for its Poverty, or rather Barrenness; their Holy Father indulges the Natives with the Liberty, in lieu of that dangerous Eatable, of eating all Lent time the Inwards of Cattle. When I first heard this related, I imagin'd, that the Garbidge had been intended, but ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe
... 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
... same Sister tells us, is synonymous with agitation, barrenness and dryness of the spirit, and neglect of duty; brown; which being composed of black and red—smoke darkening the ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... prayer, not only to enjoy God, but to be as He wills: this will keep you equal in times of barrenness and in times of abundance; and you will not be dismayed by the repulses of God, ...
— A Short Method Of Prayer And Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon
... children, will you maintain that it is their business to have few children? And what would become of your towns if the remote country districts, with their simpler and purer women, did not make up for the barrenness of your fine ladies? There are plenty of country places where women with only four or five children are reckoned unfruitful. In conclusion, although here and there a woman may have few children, ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... landscape was gratifying to the eyes of the traveller—such a fine country in the midst of so much barrenness; for he knew that most of the surrounding region was little better than a wild karoo. The whole of it to the north for hundreds of miles was a famous desert—the desert of Kalihari—and these cliffs were a part of its southern border. The "vee-boer" ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... be only moderate, and, whatever they were, came too late in his life to be any explanation of his earlier expenditure. He received many valuable legacies, at different times, from personal friends or grateful clients who died childless (be it remembered how the barrenness of the marriage union had become then, at Rome, as it is said to be in some countries now, the reproach of a sensual and effete aristocracy); he boasts himself, in one of his 'Philippics', that he had received ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... have covered it. At the same time, a daily 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 ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... 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 ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... productions of the dry (we cannot call them high) grounds: the swamps, with which this coast abounds, are still more fruitful, and abundantly compensate the avidity and barrenness of the soil around them. They bear rice in such plenty, especially the marsh about New Orleans, "That the inhabitants reap the greatest advantage from it, and reckon it the manna of the land." [Footnote: Dumont, I. 15.] It was such marshes on the Nile, in the ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... its manifold completeness we have, if not an oasis in the desert, more truly the rich verge of the fertile country which bounds that desert, and which opens a more beautiful road to the literary traveller as he comes down the great highway: wearied and worn with the factions and barrenness of the fifteenth century, he fairly revels with delight in the fertility and ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... Aden from the sea, though picturesque, is not inviting, giving one an idea of great barrenness. The mountains and rocks have a peaked appearance, like a spear pointed at one, as much as to say, "better keep off." People who land, however, for the first time, are agreeably disappointed by finding that every opportunity ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... ought to know that a child's mind does not want everything explained. They think that simplicity demands this lengthy discussion of every trivial matter. There is such a thing as a conceited simplicity, and there is a technical simplicity, that in its barrenness and insipidity is worthy only of a simpleton. In Jacob Abbott's "Juveniles" especially, by means of this minuteness, a very scanty stock of ideas is made to go a great way. Does simplicity ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... done! You have clothed the barrenness of the dreary plain with gardens, orchards and forests. You have been at work with God and glorified a vast empire, and now he has blessed the work of your hands. Instead of the air sodden with tears and tremulous with the ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... outran them for fifty yards, and, when about to be overtaken, snapped a small pistol which he had concealed at his nearest pursuer. He knocked down the second with his handcuffs, then fell and was retaken. The poverty, barrenness, unevenness of this part of the country perhaps was never surpassed. But few homes on the road. Met a number of travelers and overtook some. About 4 o'clock it commenced raining. Unpleasant traveling. Wet to the skin. Arrived at the crossing at dark on the old road two ...
— Narrative of Richard Lee Mason in the Pioneer West, 1819 • Richard Lee Mason
... Bob looks as happy as can be,' put in Miss Amabel briskly. 'I don't think the children were prepared for the barrenness and dreariness of an English winter. They have come from the land of brilliant flowers and sunshine, ...
— Bulbs and Blossoms • Amy Le Feuvre
... wife of Joachim mourns her barrenness, 6 is reproached with it by Judith her maid, 9 sits under a laurel tree and ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... but your labors have been much more remarkably blessed than mine. May God send you hither with the like blessing as He has sent you to some other places, and may your coming be a means to humble me for my barrenness and unprofitableness, and a means of my instruction and enlivening. I want an opportunity to concert measures with you, for the advancement of the kingdom and glory of ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... it until they boarded the limited in Chicago and were well on their way, speeding eastward. There was no sign of snow as yet, but the land seemed to lie locked in a frosty grip of barrenness. The Dean seemed to smile perpetually now. He occupied the lower part of the section across the aisle, and Kit loved to watch him as he sat by the window, his little black skullcap making him look like a portrait of an old-time French savant. Every now and then he would glance up and meet ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester
... are an angel! I have told you so before, and it may be a proof of the barrenness of my resources to tell you so again, but it is true. God forgive me, my precious! I should like to see the man whose heart could harden while such a woman ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... when he discovers that "Gay Bacchus" is translated from Augurellus, he ought to have remarked that the latter part is purely Parnell's. Another poem, "When Spring Comes On," is, he says, taken from the French. I would add that the description of "Barrenness," in his verses to Pope, was borrowed from Secundus; but lately searching for the passage which I had formerly read, I could not find it. "The Night Piece on Death" is indirectly preferred by Goldsmith ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... bastards and cannot inherit my name. And I must live in sin against my church, as—God help me—I can't against my nature. What are men to do when this is how women use the freedom we have given them? Is the curse of barrenness to be nothing to a man? And that's the death in life to which you gentlemen with your fine civilisation are bringing us. I think we are brothers ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... new world government dined at three long tables on trestles, and down the middle of these tables Leblanc, in spite of the barrenness of his menu, had contrived to have a great multitude of beautiful roses. There was similar accommodation for the secretaries and attendants at a lower level down the mountain. The assembly dined as it had debated, in the open air, and over the dark crags to the west the glowing June sunset shone ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... night, and week to week, and month to month, but not a stiver[1] did he find. On the contrary, the more he digged the poorer he grew. The rich soil of his garden was digged away, and the sand and gravel from beneath was thrown to the surface, until the whole field presented an aspect of sandy barrenness. ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... despised. Again 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 had once been intended ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... of the Canadian thorn—a great improvement on the old snake fence of rough split timber which prevails all through the colony. What a difference it would make in the aspect of the country if these green hedgerows were in general use! It would take from the savage barrenness given to it by these crooked wooden lines, that cross and recross the country in all directions: no object can be less picturesque or more unpleasing to the eye. A new clearing reminds one of a large turnip field, divided by hurdles into different compartments ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... did not appear. We were two thousand feet above the Mediterranean, whose blue we could dimly see far to the west, through notches in the chain of hills. To the north, the mountains were gray, desolate, and awful. Not a shrub or a tree relieved their frightful barrenness. An upland tract, covered with white volcanic rock, lay before us. We met peasants with asses, who looked (to my eyes) as if they had just left Jerusalem. Still forward we urged our horses, and reached ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... have either fallen into the enemy's hands, or have been destroyed. From the time of Dr Franklin's sailing, until we arrived at this place, the ships of war at the mouth of the Delaware, and the interruption given the post, added to the barrenness of events, prevented us from writing when we had no particular commands from Congress ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various
... the seven years which had elapsed she had never once had the slightest hint of pregnancy, she believed, according to the statement of a clever physician whom she sent for from Paris, that this barrenness proceeded from the fact, that both she and her husband, always more lovers than spouses, allowed pleasure to interfere with business, and by this means engendering was prevented. Then she endeavoured to restrain her impetuosity, and to take things coolly, because the physician had ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... her renovatingly to earth, and the saving naturalness of the woman recreated her childlike, with shrouded recollections of her strange taste of life behind her; with a tempered fresh blood to enjoy aimlessly, and what would erewhile have been a barrenness to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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 ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... value of the turnip crop annually grown in this country at fourteen millions; but when we further recollect that it enables the agriculturist to reclaim and cultivate land which, without its aid, would remain in a hopeless state of natural barrenness; that it leaves the land so clean and in such fine condition, as almost to insure a good crop of barley and a kind plant of clover, and that this clover is found a most excellent preparative for wheat, it will appear that the subsequent ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction - Vol. X, No. 289., Saturday, December 22, 1827 • Various
... portions of space having variable temperatures. Geologists, 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 ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... 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 ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... charming. The account of the visit of the respectable Confucius to the great Robber Che is most vivid and brilliant, and it is impossible not to laugh over the ultimate discomfiture of the sage, the barrenness of whose moral platitudes is ruthlessly exposed by the successful brigand. Even in his metaphysics, Chuang Tzu is intensely humorous. He personifies his abstractions, and makes them act plays before us. The Spirit of the Clouds, when passing eastward through the expanse of air, ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... entirely draw off their attention, not only from the government, but from their governors; that the stream of public vigilance, far from clearing and enriching the prospect of society, would by its stagnation consign it to barrenness, and by its putrefaction infect it with death. You have aimed an arrow at liberty and philosophy, the eyes of the human race; why, like the inveterate enemy of Philip, in putting your name to the shaft, did you ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... But oh, the emptiness of the morrow! Life without a crime, without a single noble sentiment to brighten it!—no comic uncles, no creamy angels! Oh, the barrenness and dreariness of life! Even my mother at moments was ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... brilliant, though waste, whiteness of the land gave to the sea by contrast a dark and livid tinge. A landscape covered with snow, though abstractedly it may be called beautiful, has, both from the association of cold and barrenness and from its comparative infrequency, a wild, strange, and desolate appearance. Objects well known to us in their common state have either disappeared, or are so strangely varied and disguised that we seem gazing on an unknown world. But it was not with such reflections that ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... requisites. When superfluousness of words is not occasioned by overflowing animal spirits, as in Beaumont and Fletcher, or by the very genius of luxury, as in Spenser (in which cases it is enrichment as well as overflow), there is no worse sign for a poet altogether, except pure barrenness. Every word that could be taken away from a poem, unreferable to either of the above reasons for it, is a damage; and many such are death; for there is nothing that posterity seems so determined to resent as this want of respect for its time and trouble. The world is too rich in ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... native huts, made of poles and bark, and back of these loomed fine groves of cocoanut trees and other tropical vegetation in the richest profusion. Even the elevations of this volcanic island had their barrenness alleviated by growths of greenery which ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... a treat—his birthday. Because of it, they had given him actual food for the first time in years: a cake, conspicuous in its barrenness of candles; a glass of real vegetable juices; a dab of potato; an indescribable green that might have been anything at all; and a little steak. A succulent, savory-looking ...
— Life Sentence • James McConnell
... extraordinary migration by any want of subsistence at home; for it appears that they raised without difficulty as much corn in one year as supported them for two; they could not complain of the barrenness of ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... desolation, and to hear the howlings of the tiger and the wolf silence forever the voice of human gladness? Shall the fields and the valleys, which a beneficent God has formed to teem with the life of innumerable multitudes, be condemned to everlasting barrenness? Shall the mighty rivers, poured out by the hand of nature, as channels of communication between numerous nations, roll their waters in sullen silence and eternal solitude to the deep? Have hundreds of commodious harbors, a thousand leagues of coast, and a boundless ocean, been spread ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... dark trees nestling under its grey walls. The town was almost hidden by a glowing canopy of smoke gleaming in the bright sunset—towards the north the bare bleak hills, undulating in sterile loneliness, and associating only with images of barrenness and desolation. Easterly, a long, level burst of light swept across meadow, wood, and pasture; green slopes dotted with bright homesteads, to the very base apparently of, though at some distance from, Blackstonedge, now of the deepest, the most intense ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... Evil associates have corrupted our good manners, and we are irreverent, sensuous, even in the house of God. To illustrate our impiety: suppose you, by some accident, had been cast away on some lone island, barrenness reigned around you; cold winds beat against you; alone and desolate you stood exposed to every element without and a prey to every want within. The sea in its wild fury roared around you. No living being heard your cries; no heart beat in sympathy with yours. Now, suppose in ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... meaning to "piggy," which was also known to the dames du temps jadis, to Archipiada and Thais, qui fut la belle Romaine,—and this inner meaning makes of it a type of birth or creation. Now all that symbolizes fertility, birth, pleasure, warmth, light, and love is opposed to barrenness, cold, death, and evil; whence it follows that the very sight of a shell, and especially of a cowrie, frightens away the devils as well as a horse-shoe, which by the way has also its cryptic meaning. Hence it was selected to cast ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... of the ovaries, their tubes, the womb, the testicles and their excretory ducts, as referred to under "Excess of venereal desire," are causes of barrenness. In this connection it may be said that the discharges consequent on calving are fatal to the vitality of semen introduced before these have ceased to flow; hence service too soon after calving, or that of a cow which has had the womb or genital passages ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... 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
... Sterility or barrenness is a condition of inability to have children. In former years the opinion prevailed generally, whenever a couple was childless, that the fault was exclusively the woman's. It wasn't even thought that the man could be ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... of the Baluchis, the barrenness of their country, and consequent absence of manufactures and commerce, permanent settlements are ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... and it ceases to be science. 'Ratio desinit esse pura ratio et fit discursus, stat subter et fit [Greek: hypothetikon]:—non superstat'. The 'Nous' is bound to a rock, the immovable firmness of which is indissolubly connected with its barrenness, its non-productivity. Were it productive it would be 'Nomos'; but it is 'Nous', ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... enthusiasm, real or affected, for mountain scenery had not yet dawned. Neither of the travellers, as Boswell remarks, cared much for "rural beauties." Johnson says quaintly on the shores of Loch Ness, "It will very readily occur that this uniformity of barrenness can afford very little amusement to the traveller; that it is easy to sit at home and conceive rocks and heath and waterfalls; and that these journeys are useless labours, which neither impregnate the imagination nor enlarge the understanding." ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... doubt pollen will occasionally be placed by insects or fall on the stigma of the same flower; and if cross-fertilisation fails, such self-fertilisation will be advantageous to the plant, as it will thus be saved from complete barrenness. But the advantage is not so great as might at first be thought, for the seedlings from illegitimate unions do not generally consist of both forms, but all belong to the parent form; they are, moreover, in ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... the double cabin, which was again transferred to the settlement, in order to give greater seclusion to the fair guests. It was a long, roomy, one-storied villa, with a not unpicturesque combination of deep veranda and trellis work, which relieved the flat monotony of the interior and the barrenness of the freshly-cleared ground. An upright piano, brought from Sacramento, occupied the corner of the parlor. A suite of gorgeous furniture, whose pronounced and extravagant glories the young girls instinctively hid under home-made linen covers, had also been spoils from ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... of the nature of marriage," but that "absolute indissolubility does not attach to marriage by the law of nature." He adds: "if we consider marriage as it is an office of nature for the propagation of the race, it is hard to render a reason why for the wife's barrenness the husband should not be allowed to put her away, or marry another." (De Matrimonio, I. ii., d. 13, n. 7.) We proceed to prove that "a certain inseparability is of the nature of marriage," so that marriage may truly be said to be indissoluble by the law of nature. ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... value had been lost by the shameful 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
... many previous years had not so affected the place but that it still "yielded a harvest of extraordinary good and sound knowledge in all parts of learning." He attributed this to the inherent virtues of the academic soil itself, which could choke bad seeds, cherish the good, and even defy barrenness by finding its own seeds; but it may be more reasonable to suppose that the superintendence of the Universities under the "tyrannical governments," and especially under Cromwell's as the latest of them, had not been barbaric.—The University Commissioners, ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... 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. The union between ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... say? The girl's rashness angered me, but I admired her pluck and courage. I had never loved her so much as I loved her that instant—never so fully realized what the barrenness of my life would be without her. And she was ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... mingled with the gusts of wind and rain which swept over the city, and which lashed the fair southern sea into a dark semblance of such angry waves as wear away northern coasts into bleak and rocky barrenness. It was disappointing weather to multitudes, for it was the feast-day of one of the numerous saints whose names fill the calendar of the Roman Church,—and a great religious procession had been organized ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... deep gorges filled with broken rocks, everywhere meet the eye. To the east, the mountains gradually smooth away into high spurs and broken ground, till they join the wide-spreading plains, generally stretching far as the eye can reach, and hundreds of miles beyond—a sea of barrenness, vast and dismal. A hurricane blows clouds of white snowy dust across the desert, resembling the smoke of bonfires, roaring and raving through the pines on the mountain-top, filling the air with snow and broken branches, and piling it in huge drifts ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... California, from the forty-second degree of north latitude down to the thirty-second. We propose to take ten degrees along the coast of the Pacific. Scattered along the coast for that great distance are settlements and villages and ports; and in the rear all is wilderness and barrenness, and Indian country. But if, just about San Francisco, and perhaps Monterey, emigrants enough should settle to make up one State, then the people five hundred miles off would have another State. And so this disproportion of the Senate to the people will ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... woman, who had no children, came forward very eagerly out of the crowd, to smear herself with it,—the application of criminals' blood being considered a very favourable medicine for women afflicted with barrenness,—so she ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... supplying us by sea precluded the idea of any profit being ever realised; while it was quite evident the Company's benevolent views toward the Esquimaux could not be carried into effect. The extreme poverty and barrenness of their country, and their pertinacious adherence to their seal-skin dresses, which no argument of ours could induce them to exchange for the less comfortable articles of European clothing, were insurmountable obstacles. The Honourable Company, while they ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... the race should be continued without dividing with women and men the allegiance the individual owes to God within him. This raises the practical problem of how we are to secure the spiritual freedom and integrity of the priest and the nun without their barrenness and uncompleted experience. Luther the priest did not solve the problem by marrying a nun: he only testified in the most convincing and practical way to the fact that celibacy was ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... from a tainted space of sky came, noisome on men's bodies and pitiable on trees and crops, pestilence and a year of death. They left their sweet lives or dragged themselves on in misery; Sirius scorched the fields into barrenness; the herbage grew dry, and the sickly harvest denied sustenance. My father counsels to remeasure the sea and go again to Phoebus in his Ortygian oracle, to pray for grace and ask what issue he ordains to our exhausted state; ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... cuckold. It is not always an aversion to, or a dread of this distinction, which preserves us from it: of this her husband was very sensible; therefore, under the pretence of a pilgrimage to Saint Winifred, the virgin and martyr, who was said to cure women of barrenness, he did not rest, until the highest mountains in Wales were between his wife and the person who had designed to perform this miracle in London, after ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... matter of twenty miles or so. Across the mouth of San Diego bay, on the inner shore of which sits the town, North Island stretches itself like a huge alligator lying with its back above water; a long, low, sandy expanse of barrenness that leaves only a narrow inlet between its westernmost tip and the long rocky finger of ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... 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 and ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... Kate chose one that looked over the Midway, and her young strength made nothing of the two flights of stairs which she had to climb to get to it. At first the severity of the apartment repelled her, but she had no money with which to make it more to her taste, and after a few hours its very barrenness made an appeal to her. It seemed to be like her own life, in need of decoration, and she was content to let things take their course. It seemed probable that roses ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... gratifying to the eyes of the traveller—such a fine country in the midst of so much barrenness; for he knew that most of the surrounding region was little better than a wild karoo. The whole of it to the north for hundreds of miles was a famous desert—the desert of Kalihari—and these cliffs ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... Greatness, whom it especially behoves to take thought for such matters, cause that this be put right by speediest rebuke: lest the famine, which will otherwise ensue, be deemed to be the child of negligence rather than of the barrenness of the land". ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... barrenness of Hinduism. The Golden Threshold; its authoress—her poetry; the four kinds of religion; her motherly instincts; her letters; her father; her search for beauty; her portrait. Rarity of happy Hindu faces. The picture ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... put to a continual labour upon this farm, to a continual study of the whole complexion and constitution of our body. In the distempers and diseases of soils, sourness, dryness, weeping, any kind of barrenness, the remedy and the physic is, for a great part, sometimes in themselves; sometimes the very situation relieves them; the hanger of a hill will purge and vent his own malignant moisture, and the burning of the upper turf of some ground (as health from cauterizing) puts a new and a vigorous ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... Of Ceylon, with an Italian climate, be rescued from their state of barrenness? Why should not the plains be drained, the forests felled, and cultivation take the place of the rank pasturage, and supplies be produced to make Ceylon independent of other countries? Why should not schools be established, a comfortable ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... saw this eastern coast of the Mediterranean as far as the Euphrates united to the dominion of the Pharaohs. Here is a one-sided geographical location in an exaggerated form, emphasized by the physical and political barrenness of the adjacent regions of Africa and the strategic importance of the isthmian district between ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... 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
... France, amulets formed of mistletoe were much worn; and in Sweden, a finger-ring made of its wood is an antidote against sickness. The mandrake, as a mystic plant, was extensively sold for medicinal purposes, and in Kent may be occasionally found kept to cure barrenness; [12] and it may be remembered that La Fontaine's fable, La Mandragore, turns upon its supposed power of producing children. How potent its effects were formerly held may be gathered from the very many allusions to its mystic properties in the literature of bygone ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... the subtilty of our enemy and the lusts of our heart have covered it. At the same time, a daily 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 ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... of English particles; and the fruit of the devoted study of Hegel was an intimate knowledge of metaphysical verbiage: being, substance, essence, and absolute. But of life-giving nourishment there was none to be had. The barrenness of all this, Turgenef indeed soon did perceive, but when the disenchantment came, his blood was already poisoned; his very being was eaten into by doubt, and almost to the very end of his days Turgenef ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... nature in the scenes he recorded; whereas, whoever trusted to imagination would soon find his own mind circumscribed and contracted to a few favourite images, and the repetition of these would sooner or later produce that very monotony and barrenness which had always haunted descriptive poetry in the hands of any but the patient worshippers of truth."[443] Wordsworth disapproved of Scott's method in description. He is quoted as having said: "Nature does not permit an inventory to be made of her charms! He should have left his pencil and note-book ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... for the discovery and 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 ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... weaknesses, much of the strength of Germany are artificial. They have not grown, they have been forced. The very barrenness of the soil, the ring of enemies, the soft moral and social texture of the population, have, so their little knot of rulers think, made necessary these harsh, artificial ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... lay between great, glaring boulders of naked rock. Here and there tufts of grass grew beside the stony track, but they were brown and scorched, and served only to emphasise the barrenness of the land. ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... SWISS SCHOOLS.—In contrast to the barrenness of the last period, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries present us with a brilliant constellation of writers in every department of letters, whose works form an era in the intellectual development of Germany unsurpassed in many respects by any other in the ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... and broke the most filthy idol, and burnt it at the brook Kedron. Dr. Cumberland inserts, that the import of the word Peor, or Baal Pheor, is he that shews boastingly or publicly, his nakedness. Women to avoid barrenness, were to sit on this filthy image, as the source of fruitfulness; for which Lactantius and ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... of desolation, radiant in its barrenness. For every rock, every foot of ground, was made of crystal. Nearby hills were visions of loveliness where the colors of a million rainbows quivered and flashed. Veins of metal showed the rich blues and greens of peacock coloring. Others were scarlet, topaz, green, and all of them took ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... feel utterly helpless before that lovely life of His. Given the conditions—the hidden power within, and the old outlets of growth shut off—the sun will do the rest; out of the midst of apparent lifelessness, of barrenness, of difficulty, the blossoms will be drawn forth. Do not let us "limit the Holy One of Israel" by putting off His power to work this miracle into a distant future. How hopeless the naked wood of a fruit tree would look to us in February if we had never seen the marvel of springtime! Yet ...
— Parables of the Cross • I. Lilias Trotter
... illumined Zion radiant with splendor? Across the river, lighted by the evening's after-glow of fire, rose a celestial city, with towers, spires, and battlements glittering as if sheathed in burnished gold. Sunshine and distance had dispelled all traces of the region's barrenness, and for a few memorable moments, while we watched it breathlessly, its sparkling bastions seemed to beckon us alluringly to its magnificence; then, fading like an exquisite mirage created by the genii of the desert, it swiftly sank ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... the 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; ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... December, filling every hotel and hospital with his sick soldiers, and having left one-third of his numbers behind him. He had manifested his own military skill in the adroit and successful manner in which he had accomplished the relief of Paris, while the barrenness of the result from the whole expedition vindicated the political sagacity with which he had remonstrated ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... what her winnings have cost in lovely and desirable things. They must know that the unrest which drove her to the attempt is not necessarily satisfied by her triumph, that it is merely stifled and may break out at any time in vagaries and follies. They must be made to realize the essential barrenness of her triumph, its lack of the savor and tang of life, the multitude of makeshifts she must practice to recompense her for the lack of the ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... his thought. He had not risen yet to the conception of the real barrenness and squalor of ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... next to looking on the sea when its waves dance to the music of a hurricane, I loved to gaze on the heath-covered wilderness, where the blue horizon only girded its purple bosom. It was no season to look upon the heath in the beauty of barrenness, yet I purposely diverged from the main road. About an hour, therefore, after I had descended from the region on the Lammermoors, and entered the Lothians, I became sensible I was pursuing a path which was not forwarding my footsteps to Edinburgh. It was December; the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... They go to college; 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 ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... century. "From the early part of the fifth century, when the Greek and Roman writers cease to notice the affairs of Britain, his narrative, on whatever authority it may have been founded, has been adopted without question by Bede and succeeding authors, and accepted, notwithstanding its barrenness of facts and pompous obscurity, by all but general consent, as the basis of early English history." Gibbon has justly pointed out his inconsistencies, his florid descriptions of the flourishing condition of agriculture and commerce after the departure ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... makes the seed abound, and restores the exhaustion of nature that the faculties may freely operate, and remove impediments obstructing the procreating of children. Then, since diet alters the evil state of the body to a better, those subject to barrenness must eat such meats as are juicy and nourish well, making the body lively and full of sap; of which faculty are all hot moist meats. For, according to Galen, seed is made of pure concocted and windy ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... not tell whether it was the barrenness of the room, or Milt's carefulness, that caught her. The uncarpeted boards of the floor were well swept. He had only one plate, one spoon, but they were scoured, and put away on newspaper-covered shelves in a cupboard made of a soap-box. ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... and bestowed upon the Gentile nations because Israel was scattered, how much, and what are the blessings in store for those nations when Israel and Judah be restored? Paul compares it to a resurrection—like as when the barrenness and desolation of a Winter is supplanted by the fruits and beauties of Summer. "If the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?" (Rom. ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... herbe maie be compared therewith," says one of the oldest Herbals, "for his singular virtue to help the sicknesse or grief of the splene." Pliny ordered: "It should not be given to women, because it bringeth barrenness." Vitruvius alleged that in Crete the flocks and herds were found to be without spleens, because they browsed on this fern. The plant was supposed when given medicinally to diminish the size of the enlarged spleen ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... 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
... remark will apply equally to the fine arts. The laws on which depend the progress and decline of poetry, painting, and sculpture, operate with little less certainty than those which regulate the periodical returns of heat and cold, of fertility and barrenness. Those who seem to lead the public taste are, in general, merely outrunning it in the direction which it is spontaneously pursuing. Without a just apprehension of the laws to which we have alluded the merits and defects of Dryden can be but imperfectly understood. We will, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... John Martin (1789-1854), had been exhibited for some years and had created an immense impression. Lamb subjected Martin's work to a minute analysis a few years later (see the Elia essay on the "Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art," Vol. II.). Barton did not give up Martin in consequence of this letter. The frontispiece to his New Year's Eve, 1828, is by that painter, and the volume contains eulogistic poems upon ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... 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 Stoics ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... structures of the inner quad were increased to 13, for the church, provided for in the original scheme, but not begun until 1899, was added. Those inclosed—to quote statistics from the register—a court 586 feet long by 246 feet wide—31/4 acres—relieved from barrenness by big circular plots in which flourished palms, bamboos and a medley of other tropical translations. Penetrate 10 feet into one of these plots, which are always damp from much watering, and it takes little imagining ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... unyielding, resists the spring-god's proffers of adornment and fruitfulness (the apples and ring), defies the flashing sunbeams (Frey's sword), and only consents to receive his kiss when it learns that it will else be doomed to perpetual barrenness, or given over entirely into the power of the giants (ice and snow). The nine nights of waiting are typical of the nine winter months, at the end of which the earth becomes the bride of the sun, in the groves where the trees are budding forth into ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... desire to make all instruction interesting to the child, and on the other to introduce the child prematurely to a knowledge of the real conditions of life, before he can have any intelligent understanding of these conditions. From the barrenness and formalism of the earlier period, we now have the demand made that the school should throughout take into account the real and practical necessities ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... another, "a great want of that spirituality of mind which New Zealand is so very unfavourable for; because of the continual scenes of evil that there is before our eyes, and for want of Christian society. So that you must excuse my barrenness of writing, and give me all the Christian ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... was a very picturesque, broken country, fresh covered with snow; and at that hour, late in the day, the lights and shadows were a constantly varying charm to the eye. Clumps of evergreens stood out in full disclosure against the white ground; the bare branches of neighbouring trees in all their barrenness, had a wild prospective or retrospective beauty peculiar to themselves. On the wavy white surface of the meadow land, or the steep hill- sides, lay every variety of shadow in blue and neutral tint; where they lay not, the snow was too brilliant to be borne. And afar off, through a heaven, bright ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... "The poor ye have always with you," he did not refer to dollars and cents only, but to that poverty of intellect, that barrenness of the moral nature which makes a human being a reproach and a terror to his kind. These we shall always have to deal with, to educate if we can, to constrain from overt acts of evil, and to protect ourselves from in all the ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... value, the absolute want of political discernment in the orations on constitutional questions and of juristic deduction in the forensic addresses, the egotism forgetful of its duty and constantly losing sight of the cause while thinking of the advocate, the dreadful barrenness of thought in the Ciceronian orations must revolt every reader of ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... is prettier than it ever was at the old place; isn't it Sabina? It's full and perfect; and that was always a great barrenness of glass. The street can't stare in now. I think mother will be able to forget that there is even a ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... but the tender age of the bridegroom, who was then but eighteen, was the cause of his taking a tour in Italy, whence he returned after two years. The marriage was a very happy one but for one circumstance—it produced no issue. The countess could not endure a barrenness which threatened the end of a great name, the extinction of a noble race. She made vows, pilgrimages; she consulted doctors and quacks; ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Tellisinda, who to avoid the reproach of barrenness imposes an adopted child upon her husband, but later bearing a son, is obliged to see a spurious heir inherit her own child's estate, was borrowed with slight changes from La Belle Assemblee, I, Day 5, and used in Mrs. ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... turn against the work that was brought to you— your teaching, and house, and mother, and Dot, and even Jack—all that came first, and you knew it; you have worked in the corner of the vineyard that was appointed to you, and never murmured over its barrenness and narrow space, and so you are ripe and ready for any great work that may be waiting for you in the future. 'Faithful in little, faithful in much'—how often have I applied ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... district because of the irreligion of its people. Piran, the patron saint of tinners, would hardly have called down such a curse, though he might have done so if greatly provoked. But if not metalliferous, much of the parish is exceptionally fertile and verdant, in contrast to the barrenness of the Goonhilly Downs. Without attempting to decide authoritatively as to the personality of Keverne, we may at least be amused by the curious story told about him, which brings a strong touch of human nature into the record of one who is otherwise so hazy. It is said that he was ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... the carefully cultivated mowing-field, in front of an old red homestead,—such patches of land wear a beautiful and tender green, which no other season will equal; because, let the grass be green as it may hereafter, it will not be so set off by surrounding barrenness. The trees in our orchard, and elsewhere, have as yet no leaves; yet to the most careless eye they appear full of life and vegetable blood. It seems as if, by one magic touch, they might instantaneously put ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... "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
... 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 Earth. Here she ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... the other, looking proudly down upon the humbler dwellings of the village. On the side of the house, where ran the broad road from Rouen to Darnetal, a high rugged wall surrounded a wide yard, guarded at the entrance by two massive doors, studded with enormous spikes. The naked barrenness of this yard was, to say the least, forbidding in the extreme; but the fertile fields on the other side of the house spread themselves like a vast and beautiful green carpet, dotted here and there with little villages, crowned with church spires and their corresponding belfries, from which ...
— Paula the Waldensian • Eva Lecomte
... splintering into irregular and grisly islands amidst the northern seas, beaten by storm, and chilled by ice-drift, and tormented by furious pulses of contending tide, until the roots of the last forests fail from among the hill ravines, and the hunger of the north wind bites their peaks into barrenness; and, at last, the wall of ice, durable like iron, sets, deathlike, its white teeth against us out of the polar twilight. And, having once traversed in thought this gradation of the zoned iris of the earth in ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... be reduced to slavery and degradation. Babylonia to utter barrenness and desolation; but a different and still more incredible doom is pronounced in the Bible upon Judea and its people. The land was to be emptied of its people, and remain uncultivated, retaining all its former ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... flourish as I see them fall! But he, who once was growing with the grass, And blooming with the flowers, my little son, Fell, withered—dead, nor has revived again! Perfect and lovely, needful to my sight, Why comes he not to ornament my days? The barren fields forget their barrenness, The soulless earth mates with these soulless things, Why should I not obtain my recompense? The budding spring should bring, or summer's prime, At least a vision of the vanished child, And let his heart commune with mine again, Though in a dream—his life was but a dream; Then might I wait with ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... open that grim mouth of his yet again, and speak even more to the purpose. To these mothers who did not wish to be mothers, who threw the gift of Heaven back in the face of Heaven, preferring artificial barrenness to natural fecundity, and who made of their bodies, that should have brought forth healthy, wholesome sons and daughters of their race, tombs and sepulchres—to these he told the truth, in swift, sharp, trenchant ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... sterility in women can arise from the womb; for if it be after any ways thus affected, there will be a barrenness,—if it be more condensed, or more thin, or more hardened, or more callous, or more carneous; or it may be from languor, or from an atrophy or vicious condition of body; or, lastly, it may arise from a twisted or distorted position. Diocles holds that ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... prayeing to the Divell for the fruit of that land, and that thistles and brieris might grow ther'.[668] Here the ploughing-ceremony was to induce fertility for the benefit of the witches, while the draught animals and all the parts of the plough connoted barrenness for the owner ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... stress has been laid on the savage custom of exposing the children whom their parents could not maintain; whilst the man of sensibility, who thus, perhaps, complains, by his promiscuous amours produces a most destructive barrenness and contagious flagitiousness of manners. Surely nature never intended that women, by satisfying an appetite, should frustrate the very purpose for ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... memorials of its prosperity remain; no ruined temples or broken columns attest the magnificence or the taste of an earlier generation. Its only hope of opulence must be dated from its first possession by the British. But the barrenness of the soil forbids substantial wealth; and though the native merchants, relying on the honour of British laws and the security of British arms, are flocking into it by hundreds, and will soon flock into it by thousands, it must be at best but a warehouse and a fortress, though ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... 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 ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... foundations have been withdrawn by the continued activity of a long volcanic chain which traverses the Archipelago from end to end. And therefore, strange as it may seem at first sight, the fertile island of Java, with its rich plains and abundant vegetation—so unlike the traditional barrenness of a volcanic region—is the work of this ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... it seem impossible? Let us find out. It appears that when the man traveled the state before, he looked out of the car windows upon a scene of barrenness and desolation. [As you speak, draw Fig. 68 with brown crayon. Be sure to leave the mountain peaks white, but, in order to secure an impressive pastel effect use the broad side of your brown and your yellow crayons lightly over the entire area of desert and ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... said—Alas! a prophet's voice is silenced. What a pity that in a moment of passion the tyrant took his life! Let him sleep! Rest will be sweet to one who expended his young strength with such spendthrift extravagance! Such men are rare! Ages flower thus but once, and then years of barrenness! But as we turn to the death of Jesus, other feelings than those of pity or regret master us. We are neither surprised, nor altogether sorry. We do not recognise that there is in any sense an end ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... hearing praise Gods whom we may not; for to these they give Life of their children, flower of all their seed, 310 For all their travail fruit, for all their hopes Harvest; but we for all our good things, we Have at their hands which fill all these folk full Death, barrenness, child-slaughter, curses, cares, Sea-leaguer and land-shipwreck; which of these, Which wilt thou first give thanks for? ...
— Erechtheus - A Tragedy (New Edition) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of coloring fascinating in its repelling truth. Every tint and shade have been cunningly and caressingly laid in, so that the features, living and animated, are yet filled with suggestions of the spiritual barrenness in the originals. Very human they are, and yet they are without those gracious qualities which link humanity with what we feel to be divine. There is the touch of nature here, but it is not the touch which makes the whole ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... olive, I forgot both heat and cold, happy in heavenly meditation. That cloister made abundant returns in its season to these granaries of the Lord; but so idle has it become now, that it is fit the world should know its barrenness. The days of my mortal life were drawing to a close, when I was besought and drawn into wearing the hat which descends every day from bad head to worse.[32] St. Peter and St. Paul came lean and barefoot, getting their bread where they could; but pastors now-a-days must be lifted from the ground, ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... and no secrets of love in his heart. And if your faith also is little, and your spending money also is run low, try this way of love and imagination. If you have a better way, then go on with it and be happy yourself and helpful to others; but if your faith is at a standstill and is stricken with barrenness, try my counsel of putting more heart and more inward eye, more holy love and more heavenly joy, into your ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... to the attributed barrenness of great part of the territory, so peremptorily insisted on by many, there is some excuse for the earlier travellers from whom that opinion is derived. Ignorant of the best routes, and frequently famishing in the immediate neighbourhood ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... acts as if it felt that more 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 ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... but sleep was impossible. Through the panelled transparent floor, I watched the country changing as we advanced; vegetation dwindling; the soil changing to rocky barrenness at the border of the Cold Country. And then the snow-plains, the mute frozen rivers of ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... The relative barrenness of our faith during past centuries in India was largely, if not entirely, due to its foreign ecclesiastical forms and its shibboleths pronounced in foreign tongues. The Christianity of the future in India must breathe of the spirit, and speak forth in the language ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... biting winds had gradually been left behind, and Nature, coy and uncertain at first, had, with the advance into the South, grown bolder. They had come from the land of bleakness and barrenness—from the place of leafless trees—into the region of Summer, almost in a day and night. They had exchanged snows ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Florida - Or, Wintering in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope
... and flourish that our young bride may have a fine baby before a year is over; for if you die too quickly it is a sign of barrenness, and you will stick up there ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... examinations: that, if the condition of the higher female education in the United States was fairly represented by this company of young women, with a great deal that was elevated in aim, and earnest in intention, it was characterized by much confusion, much waste of power, and much barrenness of result, and admitted ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... wonderful work, and it must have taken some years compiling. Some extracts touching upon the holders of land in this neighbourhood have already been given, and in a sense they are very interesting, showing as they do the then barrenness of the land, and the paucity of inhabitants. Though in Henry VIII.'s reign an inventory of all properties in the hands of Churchmen was taken, it did not include the owners of land in general, and it ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... 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, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... Shakspeare—if he had been left for these 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
... then that man was Colonel John Hancock Landcraft, direct descendant—he could figure it out as straight as a bayonet—of the heavy-handed signer himself. His years and his empty desires bore heavily on the colonel. The trespass of time he resented; the barrenness of his hope ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... Barrenness and cold have descended on all the body of the earth. Nothing moves any more, except the wind, that is charged with cold water, and the shells, that are surrounded by infinity, and the crows, and the thought that rolls ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... stamens, or no fruit will be produced. Now if it be necessary to change the breed, or essential that the pollen produced by the stamens of one flower shall fertilize the pistil of another, to prevent barrenness, what should we contrive better than the arrangement already made by Him who knew the necessity and planned it accordingly? And it works so admirably, that we can hardly avoid the conclusion that bees were intended for this important purpose! It is thus planned! Their wants and their ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... acres of the acreage now out, are seedling trees that must be topworked before Oregon will be truly famous for the quality of the nuts it produces. These seedling trees are paying at present under our present high prices after many years of barrenness. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... have been taught by history to discount. Barrenness in the personal life is the price many a man has paid for public honours. Fortune must preserve an equilibrium among us. No man is blessed in everything. That you know from the Horace of your own school days. But, seldom hearing men speak the truth, ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... The severe 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 treading as softly as ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... 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. 'Why yes, Sir; meat and drink ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... this middle element of reasonable religious freedom is withdrawn, society vibrates, like a pendulum, between scepticism and superstition; the extreme of superstition reacting to scepticism, and then the barrenness of scepticism reacting again into superstition. When the persecutions in France had succeeded in extinguishing this middle element, then commenced a series of oscillations between religious despotism and atheistic license, ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... 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. ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... the Orders are chiefly distinguished by the fertility or barrenness of the florets of the disk, or ray ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... wilderness of whitish and leafless dwarf trees, presented a ghastly and sun-stricken appearance; and here and there a ridge of dark-red heat-blistered rock jutted out above the jungle, and added by its rugged barrenness to the dreariness of the picture. Away to the north-east stretched the unbroken line of the N'dungu Escarpment, while far off to the south I could just catch a glimpse of the snow-capped top of towering Kilima N'jaro. The one redeeming ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
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