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More "Bleak" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... undertaken by the orders of one of His Majesty's naval officers, commanding on the southwest coast of America, it was soon ascertained that it was a most dangerous land to approach and to continue near. Its sterility and bleak and forbidding appearance, from all the accounts published respecting it, are scarcely equalled, certainly are not surpassed, in the most inhospitable countries near the North Pole; while ships are suddenly exposed to most violent storms, from which there ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... now reached a part of the road where the country assumed a totally different character; the woods and moors were no longer visible, but a broad and somewhat bleak extent of country lay before them. Here and there only a few solitary trees broke the uniformity of the wide fields and scanty hedgerows, and at distant intervals the thin spires of the scattered churches rose, like the prayers of which they were the symbols, ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a bleak and cheerless landscape that lay before the travelers. The vast snow-covered plain stretched out before them, and, at their backs, was the desolate, black wilderness. Only the hope of gold kept ...
— The Young Treasure Hunter - or, Fred Stanley's Trip to Alaska • Frank V. Webster
... her myself, not only when she came to church, but when she was out on the hills with her son, whether taking a long, purpose-like walk, or—on special fine days—leisurely rambling over the moor or the bleak pasture-lands, surrounding the old hall, herself with a book in her hand, her son gambolling about her; and, on any of these occasions, when I caught sight of her in my solitary walks or rides, or while following my agricultural pursuits, I generally contrived ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... Satan blinded and urged on Did fling them headlong from a certain crag That up Clovelly way o'erhangs the sea— O'erhangs the sea to tempt unhappy folk. From door to door the piteous legend passed, And like a thrifty beggar took from each. And when the long autumnal season came To that bleak, bitter coast, and when at night The deep was shaken, and the pent cloud broke Crashing among the lurid hills of heaven, And in brief sudden swoonings of the gale Contentious voices rose from the sand-dunes, Then to low sobs and murmurs died away, The fishwives, with their lean ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... her voice. So, seeking asylum from the anxious ghosts that stalked between the walls of his house, he made his way down-town and rang the bell on Marcia Terroll's door. There are women men go to in triumph and women they go to when hurt. Often they are not the same women. It was a raw, bleak afternoon of disheartening drizzle and a reek of fog which veiled the tops of the taller buildings. As he waited for an answer to his ring, he could hear the fog-horn voice groaning over river and bay as though some huge monster were troubled ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... was as flat and as smooth as a billiard table, no rocks, no roll; and we chased a never-ending line of telegraph poles over a never-ending waste of sand. Another day we were traversing from dawn till sundown an evil-looking land strewn with boulders and ribs of rock, bleak, desolate, forbidding. ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... Descends the Arkansas. When the party reached the Arkansas late in October Wilkinson and three or four men journied down it and returned to the settled country. Wilkinson left on record his delight when he at last escaped from the bleak windswept plains and again reached the land where deer supplanted the buffalo and antelope and where the cottonwood was no longer the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... home, and his victim, Little Emily; and to some extent Sam Weller, Dick Swiveller, the Marchioness, young Podsnap, the Artful Dodger, and Charley Bates; while Oliver Twist, Little Nell, and Little Dorrit, Joe and Turveydrop in Bleak House, and Paul Dombey, young as they were, show the beginning of the pubescent change. Most of his characters, however, are so overdrawn and caricatured as to be ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... then on! where duty leads my course be onward still,— O'er broad Hindostan's sultry meads, o'er bleak Almorah's hill. ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that. Beside the fire, in the chair that had once belonged to the master of the house, sat Micah Ward. He looked very old now and infirm. The months in a prison hulk in Belfast Lough and the long weariness of his confinement in bleak Fort George had set their mark upon him. On his knees lay a Greek lexicon, but he was pursuing no word through its pages. It was open at the fly-leaf inside the cover. He was reading lovingly for the hundredth ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... every scene, every nook, she and her lover had immortalized in their memories; he would see it all, feel it all—yes, live it all, and become so impregnated with its witchery that it would shed lustre and glory upon all the bleak years to come. So well had she told her story, so perfect had been its word-painting, he was sure that he ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... alone in the attic which served her for a home in this bleak northern city, so far and so different from her own ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... and the castle of the Duke, its ruler, lay beside a lake that was bluer than the deepest indigo. A long time ago the Knight Wendelin and his squire George chanced upon this lake, but they found nothing save waste fields and bleak rocks around it, yet the shores must formerly have borne a different aspect, for there were shattered columns and broken-nosed statues lying on the ground. Against the hillside there were remains of ancient walls that once, undoubtedly, had supported terraces of vines, but the rains ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Thames are more akin to the characteristics of Essex than of Kent. The hop gardens are dwarfed and stunted, and presently hops, corn, and pasture give place to fields of turnips, which show up like masses of jade on the chocolate-coloured soil. The bleak churchyard of Cooling, overgrown with nettles, lies amongst these desolate reaches, which resound at evening with the shrill, unearthly notes of sea-gulls, plovers, and herons. Beyond the churchyard are the marshes, "a dark, flat wilderness", ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... field; Mail'd for the arrow and the lance, Bore not unharm'd my smiling glance; At other times collected, brave, Recoiled when I that picture gave; As if their inmost heart, laid bare, Shrank from the bleak, ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... dispersed; a rough bleak wind freezes the moisture in the atmosphere, and the moon rose in cloudless majesty in the heavens. It was a cold, clear December night, and the wet clothes of the fugitives were frozen stiff, like a harness, ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... gloom the ruined castle loomed darkly, a ghastly monument of evil deeds. I looked about for the madman but saw him not. The weirdness of the place, the horror of its secret, crept into my blood. I became afraid. Down the bleak road I picked my way, glancing fearsomely over my shoulder. I fain would have fled as had ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... the truth which I am fur from not wantin' to do, I should say that at first sight, it wuz rather of a bleak, lonesome lookin' spot, kinder wild and desolate lookin'. But as we went further along in it, we came to some little nooks and sheltered paths and spots, that seemed more collected together and pleasant. There ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... cold, bleak one, too—Father Foley, a popular and genial priest, on his way from a distant visitation, dropped in to see Widow O'Brien, who was as jolly as himself, and equally as fond of the creature comforts, and, what ...
— Toasts - and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say - the Right Thing in the Right Way • William Pittenger
... Thine indefeasible investiture, And that right round thy locks are native to; The heavens upon thy brow imperial, This huge terrene thy ball, And o'er thy shoulders thrown wide air's depending pall. What if thine earth be blear and bleak of hue? Still, still the skies are sweet! Still, Season, still thou hast thy triumphs there! How have I, unaware, Forgetful of my strain inaugural, Cleft the great rondure of thy reign complete, Yielding ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... Venice was a bleak and empty setting, the jewel gone. How vacant it looked, how vacant it was! We made not any effort to penetrate the galleries; I had no heart to urge my friend. For us the whole of Venice had become ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... encampment on Mud Island on the 10th Septr. 1804 haveing made 22 miles only to Day. Saw Several Indians on the hills at a distance this evening viewing us. our encampment of this evening was a very disagreable one, bleak exposed to the winds, and the Sand wet. I pitched on this Situation to prevent being disturbed by those Scioux in the Course of the night as well as to avoid the Musquetors-. Killed 9 ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... married life, I on my sea-enterprise. If ever I cherished an ill-feeling for Miss Mamie, I forgave her now; so brave and kind, so pretty and venturesome, was her decision. The weather frowned overhead with a leaden sky, and San Francisco had never (in all my experience) looked so bleak and gaunt, and shoddy, and crazy, like a city prematurely old; but through all my wanderings and errands to and fro, by the dock side or in the jostling street, among rude sounds and ugly ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... McDonald Islands Heard Island - 80% ice-covered, bleak and mountainous, dominated by a large massif (Big Ben) and an active volcano (Mawson Peak); McDonald Islands - ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... fields. It was on this side of the town that the local aristocracy lived. And who were the great people of this small town? Not the younger branches of the county families that held hereditary state in their manor-houses on the wild bleak moors, that shut in Monkshaven almost as effectually on the land side as ever the waters did on the sea-board. No; these old families kept aloof from the unsavoury yet adventurous trade which brought wealth to generation after generation ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... spring comes early, this April afternoon showed the land still naked and cold. On the coppices, dispirited catkins drooped their tassels from the wet branches of the undergrowth, but the young leaves lurked within their brown coverings as though they shivered at the thought of venturing out into the bleak air. On the oaks, dead leaves from the past autumn clung obstinately to their mother-branches. The hop-lands were a dreary drab; hop-poles huddled against one another for warmth; streams ran swollen ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... remembered that Augustine was waiting for her downstairs and that in little more than an hour her husband would be with her. And suddenly the agony lightened. A giddiness of relief came over her. He was kind: he did not judge her: he knew all, yet he respected her. Augustine was like the bleak, stony moor; she must shut her eyes and stumble on towards the firelight. And as she thought of that nearing brightness, of her husband's eyes, that never judged, never grew hard or fierce or remote from human tolerance, a strange repulsion from her son rose in her. ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... by a rising swell; A story of weakness, shame, and wrong Mutely the frozen features tell. Noiseless falls on it, the tears of dew, Over it softly the breezes blow; Wavelets, kissing the tangled hair, Murmur a requiem sad and low. Out to the barren, bleak hillside Rough hands bear it with scorn and jest. Cradled once in a mother's arms— Once by a mother's fond lips pressed— Under the clods of a new-made grave; A rough-hewn board at the foot and head, Where never a flower of love ...
— Debris - Selections from Poems • Madge Morris
... long bleak road from Subiaco to Vicovaro, a violent dry wind against us, veiling all things in dust, a spring near Spiagge: a wide runnel of water spirting out of the travertine and running off into clear rills where the mules drink. The water they collect up here for the ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... them in his small bleak room, turned the lamp low, and opened the door of the diminutive wood-stove to let the firelight in the room. The three sat around it.... Peter Mowbray felt strange and young beside them. The woman seemed ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... added Bernard, "that I should think it little short of murderous to take that unlucky child from the one woman who understands her up into the bleak north at this ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... ancient commonwealth—his earliest associations were connected. A kind of rude equality still reigned in the manners of the rustic population, which was not likely to be disturbed by the influx of the world into a bleak and gloomy district remote from the great roads. Here young Niebuhr grew up a studious and solitary boy; instructed by his father in French, the rudiments of Latin, and above all, in geography and history, which the old traveller taught him to illustrate by maps and plans, and by ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 - Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 • Various
... name of "New Scotland?" The picture would here be complete if it were set off with here and there a meagre and dried up highlander, without shoes, stockings or breeches, with a ragged plaid, a little blue flat bonnet, sitting on a bleak rock playing a bag-pipe, and singing the glories of a country that never was conquered! To finish the picture, you have only to imagine a dozen more ragged, raw-boned Scotchmen, sitting on the bare rocks around ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... toil and pleasure through the day of existence; then, fading, following the sinking sun, he goes down in death's night to the pallid populations of shade. Again: the fruitful bloom of summer is succeeded by the bleak nakedness of winter. So the streams of enterprise and joy that flowed full and free along their banks in maturity, overhung by blossoming trees, are shrivelled and frozen in the channels of age, and above their sepulchral ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the vicinity of the spot where the mess tent had stood, the rest of the troop greeted their coming with a faint cheer. It takes a good deal to utterly discourage a bunch of healthy boys; and while things looked pretty bleak, still they made out to consider the adventure in the light of a joke. No one wished his companions to know just how badly frightened he ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... palace with its brilliant mosaic floors, its frescoed ceilings, and gorgeous ornaments, filled Ben with delight; he was surprised that some of the churches were so very plain—elaborate sometimes in external architecture but bare and bleak within with their ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... a haunter of the tree-clad valleys, of the prattling brooks with the meadowsweet drooping over them, and of the lone, bleak hills where the great ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... wakes up and assists the entire spiritual nature of individuals and communities, I think there is really more opportunity here than anywhere else on the face of the earth. And, as a sign and instrument of this, I would point to some District School-house; rough, weather-worn, standing in some bleak corner of New York or New Hampshire; through whose closed windows the passer-by catches the confused hum of recitation, or at whose door he sees children of all conditions mingling in motley play. Of all conditions, so far as external ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... them, then, to turn their attention to the land, which is their chief source of wealth. Let them buy it up, or gain it by long leases, inch by inch and acre by acre, until not only the bleak bogs and wild mountains of Connaught are again their own, but the rich meadow-lands and smiling wheat-fields of Munster and Leinster. Let their brethren in America and Australia associate with them in this, and thus will they build up again a true Irish yeomanry and nobility—for nobility has ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... sat and smoked and watched her every movement with keen, critical eyes. Were they not Spaniards who had danced all through their childhood and youth, as naturally as they breathed? About Gallito's mouth played the bleak smile which in him betokened content, while Jose could barely wait for her to finish her preliminary exercises before he besought her to let him join her. Even Mrs. Nitschkan laid down some fishing tackle with which she was engrossed and Mrs. ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... reins, walked forward, hoping she wouldn't make him push around her. But apparently she read the determination in his face and stood aside, her expression bleak now. ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... jerked in his panting horse, nothing but the desert, still, hot, thirsty, a great tortured thing under the merciless sky. Nothing but long level stretches so bleak, so barren, that a jackrabbit could not have hidden his gaunt, gray body. Nothing as he looked with narrowing eye far to east and west, north and south, but a vast, silent monotone of plain that would seem to conceal nothing, as open ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... money-maker and the totals at the foot of the pages in the soiled yellow bankbook were the milestones that marked the progress he had already made. They told him that the daily struggles with Fatty, the long tramps through Caxton's streets on bleak winter evenings, and the never-ending Saturday nights when crowds filled the stores, the sidewalks, and the drinking places, and he worked among them tirelessly and persistently were not ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... morning, when I was fighting my way to school against the wind, I couldn't see anything but the road in front of me; but in the late afternoon, when I was coming home, the town looked bleak and desolate to me. The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify—it was like the light of truth itself. When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy roofs and the blue ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... sea. On waves of balm A white sail of rare glow Came rounding to the harbor's calm With fullest promise—lo! Bleak winds arise, as false she cries, "A black ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... Miss Mann, "her colour is remarkably good: it is not subject to any variation like ours. The bleak sea air does not dim the roses on her cheeks; while these young ladies look as blue and as cold as figures carved out of stone. Of course, Miss Leigh will think me very uncharitable in saying that Mrs. D. paints; but I know she ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... gardens heavy-laden with golden fruit. Tall accacias a mass of canary colored bloom. Opulent palms shivering against a gray sky. Close mountains green and dense with forest trees, their crests filagreed with redwoods. Far mountains lifting their bleak ridges above bare brown ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... bleak hillside, the bleak hillside, he lay— Her lips were red, and red the stream that slipped his life away. Ah, crimson, crimson were her lips, but his were ...
— Fires of Driftwood • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... bearing on him for the last few weeks! We should all be kindly and genial, if we had the same chance of being so. But if Dr. Longley had a living of a hundred pounds a year, a fretful, ailing wife, a number of half-fed and half-educated little children, a dirty, miserable house, a bleak country round, and a set of wrong-headed and insolent parishioners to keep straight, I venture to say he would have looked, and been, a very different man in that railway-carriage running up to London. Instead of the genial smiles that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... bodies. Animalcules have been found in the blood of the frog and the salmon; according to Nordmann, the fluids in the eyes of fishes are often filled with a worm that lives by suction (Diplostomum), while in the gills of the bleak the same observer has discovered a remarkable double aniimalcule (Diplozoon paradoxum), having a cross-shaped form with two heads and two ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... offered his arm as a support, but the prelate did not accept it. They arrived in this manner at the government house, Baisemeaux rubbing his hands and glancing at the horse from time to time, while Aramis was looking at the bleak bare walls. A tolerably handsome vestibule and a staircase of white stone led to the governor's apartments, who crossed the ante-chamber, the dining-room, where breakfast was being prepared, opened a small side door, and closeted himself ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the princesses of his own kith, whose brown cheeks blush with the blood of ancient Pharaohs and who exult with Babbulkund in her surpassing beauty, and who know nought of the desert or the jungle or the bleak hills to the north. Quite unadorned and clad in simple garments go all the kith of Nehemoth, for they know well that he grows weary of pomp. Unadorned all save one, the Princess Linderith, who weareth Ong Zwarba and the three lesser gems of the sea. Such a stone is Ong Zwarba ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... delighted, 'you could provide us with a few of these crows, we should really feel very much obliged to you; for we have a long and cold campaign before us among the bleak hills of Nepal; and we are all fond ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... hour or so of midnight, when they left the regular streets behind them, and entered on the deeper gloom of that neutral ground where the house was situated. The town lay in the distance, lurid and lowering; the bleak wind howled over the open space; all around was black, ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... mile further on, another hill reared its bleak and barren head on the opposite side of the rivulet. Once fairly in the gorge, there was no exit save at the upper end of the ravine. Here, then, I must intercept my game, which I was able to do by taking a nearer cut over the ridge, that saved ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... the three assembled in the bleak drawing-room of the hotel. Frohman ordered a little supper of ham sandwiches and sarsaparilla, after which he rehearsed the love scene, which simply consisted of a tender little parting in a doorway. It served ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... her in his arms—she was very, very slight—and lifted her to his lips, and then, throwing one side of his own scanty coat about her and holding it there with an affectionate hug, he said, "Come, come, little daughter, it's too bleak for a little body like you to be out. It's cruel, cruel, but I dared not tell him it was so late. What does he know or care for my poor little ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... came, the twilight had faded out, and the little figure, too, had vanished, leaving that one breast desolate, save when a lightsome shadow flitted across its ever-verdant memory. The summer cottage looked dreary, with its closed blinds, and the autumn leaves rustling about it in the bleak winds; but the little tombstone still gleamed in the sunlight, that cast a pleasant and warm halo upon it, and the birds and squirrels sung and leaped about in the beauteous grove as blithesome ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... South African population enjoy incomes, material comforts, and health and educational standards equal to those of Western Europe. In contrast, most of the remaining population suffers from the poverty patterns of the Third World, including unemployment, lack of job skills, and bleak living conditions. The main strength of the economy lies in its rich mineral resources, which provide two-thirds of exports. Economic developments for the remainder of the 1990s will be driven largely by the new government's ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... In a bleak Lanarkshire factory village in the south of Scotland, Robert Owen, millowner, socialist and Welshman, found that unless he could provide for the education of the children of his factory hands, no parents would consent to settle in the district and he would be without ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... mountains, rivers, and such like natural eccentricities being left out of the count, is to describe fifty other West of Ireland towns. There is a railway-station, bleak, gray, and windswept, situated, for the benefit of local car-owners, a mile and a half from the town, and the road which connects the two is execrable. There is a workhouse, in Ballymoy as everywhere else in this lost land the most prominent ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... no sport early in the morning. It was a cold bleak February day, with occasional storms of sleet. We rode from cover to cover, but all in vain. "I am sorry, sir, that we are to have such a bad day, as you are a stranger here," said one gentleman to ...
— The O'Conors of Castle Conor from Tales from all Countries • Anthony Trollope
... living thing appeared in the limit of Shefford's vision. He gazed shudderingly at the unwelcoming habitation, at the dark eyelike windows, at the sweep of barren slope merging into the vast red valley, at the bold, bleak bluffs. Could any one live here? The nature of that sinister valley forbade a home there, and the spirit of the place hovered in the silence and space. Shefford thought irresistibly of how his enemies would have consigned him to just such a hell. He thought ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... I told her tales of the grey city of the North where I had been colleged. I told of the bleak and biting winds which cut their way to the marrow of the bones. I described the students rich and poor, but mostly poor, swarming into the gaunt quadrangles, reading eagerly in the library, hasting grimly to be wise, posting hotfoot to distinction or to death. She listened with eyes intent. ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... night is chill; the forest bare; Is it the wind that moaneth bleak? There is not wind enough in the air To move away the ringlet curl From the lovely lady's cheek— There is not wind enough to twirl The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, Hanging so light, ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... time, unaccustomed to being alone and disturbed by the bleak north wind which beat ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... the next day; and all through night and day the steady roar of beating cylinders hung in Kenneth Torrance's ears. At last came Point Christensen and a descent; sleep and then quick, decisive action; and again the amphibian rose, heavily loaded now, and droned on toward the ice and the cold bleak skies of the far north. On, ever on, until Point Barrow, Alaska's northernmost spur, was left behind to the east, and the world was one of drifting ice on gray water. Muscles cramped, mind dulled by the everlasting roar, head aching and weary, Ken held the amphibian ...
— Under Arctic Ice • H.G. Winter
... evening, when she passed into the drawing-room, with Mrs. Crowborough, bleak, unbending, and trailing her chains of jet, she comforted herself again with the reflection that what she was "seeing" might not be particularly exciting, "but ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... it is so bleak to-day and you have a cold, perhaps it would be just as well for you ...
— A Missionary Twig • Emma L. Burnett
... was to accompany him to the bishop's, but as it was still too soon to call for him, he stood for a few moments looking down upon the campus. The giant shadow of the Hall had now crept to the verge of the plateau. There was no human figure on its bleak expanse, but the small trees which found scant nourishment in the rock beneath swayed gently in the broken wind, like a line of sentries marking time. In the centre of the line the flagpole sprang up, thin and white, lifting the stars and stripes into the lurid light above the shadow. ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... the emblem of happiness, but he knew the blue of my eyes was the real joy sign—or something like that he said. It startled me. I tried to tell him he must not talk like that but my words were useless. He went on to say that the world was bleak and unlovely till I came to Philadelphia and wouldn't I tell him I ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... imperceptible touches of primrose on the eastern horns. It was a moonless night, but the sky was alive with stars, and now and then one fell. The last house in the valley was soon passed, and we entered those bleak gorges where the wind, fine, noiseless, penetrating like an edge of steel, poured slantwise on us from the north. As we rose, the stars to west seemed far beneath us, and the Great Bear sprawled upon the ridges of the lower hills outspread. We kept slowly ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... eagerly. The blue serge coat felt none too warm in the bleak east wind, and it would be a relief to be spared the chilly walk, and be bowled along instead in the doctor's luxurious brougham. She drew her chair nearer to the fire, and proceeded to confide various whys and wherefores to the sympathetic Eleanor—sympathetic, but hardly responsive ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... these often occupied the mind of Mr. Grim. Such were his thoughts as he sat in his luxurious parlor, one bleak December evening, surrounded by every external comfort his heart could desire, when a child not over seven or eight years of age was brought into the room by a servant, who ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... natural, that art had evidently interfered with nature, yet concealed its interference. After tracing it some yards, they came to a chasm on the opposite side; and, passing through it, Agellius soon found himself, to his surprise, on a bleak open hill, to which the huge mountain formed merely a sort of facade. Its surface was half rock, half moor, and it was surrounded by precipices. It was such a place as some hermit of the middle ages might have chosen for his solitude. The two walked briskly across it, and at length came ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... her eyes. She took Rhona's arm and they stepped out into the bleak street. Wind whipped their faces like quick-flicked knives. They walked ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... out into a bleak world. The sky was a leaden grey, and the wind from the river blew with ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... for you on needful matters," she began again. "I die here—I!—in this black house, in a bleak island, far from all decency and proper ways of man; and now my treasure must be left. Small pleasure have I had of it, and leave it with the less!" ...
— The Waif Woman • Robert Louis Stevenson
... views of the sea, the mountain-heights, and the valley-reaches, obtainable from Morne Rouge, the place has a somewhat bleak look. Perhaps this is largely owing to the universal slate-gray tint of the buildings,—very melancholy by comparison with the apricot and banana yellows tinting the walls of St. Pierre. But this cheerless gray is the only color which can resist the climate of Morne ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... blew the wind from the bleak north; tearing through the moaning pine forest, that tossed and swayed before the tempest, gnawing Catherine's nose and fingers, and snatching up, as it were, handfuls of snow, and hurling them in a rage through the air. Poor Catherine was nearly frozen, yet she struggled bravely ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... tossed it hither and thither, the boiling, racing flood hurried it with terrific force towards the ocean. The tall, massive figure swayed like a reed in a tempest, and suddenly the half despairing, half defying song was lost in the roar of the bleak, green surges. All knew ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... pile of rugged gray stone, symmetrically built, but aggressively ugly in its very regularity, since it insulted the graceful curves of Nature everywhere discernible. It stood nakedly amidst the bare, bleak meadows glittering with pools of still water, with not even the leaf of a creeper to soften its menacing walls, although above them appeared the full-foliaged tops of trees planted in the barrack-yard. It looked ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... itself before him, the sense of personal love and aid towards the Lord and Master whom he served grew upon him. Neither the gazelle-eyed Ayesha nor the prosperous village life presented any great temptation. He would have given them all for one bleak day of mist on a Border moss; it was the appalling contrast with the hold of a Moorish galley that at times startled him, together with the only too great probability that he should be utterly incapable of saving poor little Ulysse from ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... spring of the year 1421 was bleak and dreary in that wild lonely vale, and large was the fire burning on the hearth in the castle hall, in the full warmth of which there sat, with a light blue cloth cloak drawn tightly round him, a tall old man, of the giant mould of Scotland, and with ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... point of brilliance in the murky gloom. It showed, on the floor where they stood, a litter of dried vegetation—food, doubtless placed there as an offering. It was dry now, and dusty, and through it there shone the bleak whiteness of bones. Beyond was the floor, and beyond that.... The whiteness that had been but a blur grew ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... had dropped a shovelful of hot coals, or rather as if some corrosive fluid had been spilled. I remained here a few moments, idly wondering what might have been the history of the former tenants, and what could have induced any one to build a house in a spot so bleak and exposed, where scarcely a pretence of soil offered itself for a garden. As I stood there, a singular impression came upon me that I was not alone. For a moment, and a moment only, I became conscious of another presence in the room. The impression ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... swiftly after. The three were so tired, their vitality was so reduced that they lay down in the snow, and drew long, painful breaths. When some measure of strength was restored they stood up and surveyed the place where they stood, a bleak summit over which the wind blew sharply. Nothing grew there but low bushes, and they felt that, while they may have escaped the war band, their own physical case was worse instead of better. Both cold and wind ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... The country looked very bleak and bare, but a little hut was visible a short distance from the shore, and the children, having fastened up the Dolphins to one of the wooden piles, assisted the Dodo to alight, and made their ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... confronted her. "No, it ain't much of a fire yet, but our hired girl she joined a movin'-picture outfit, so us two he-things are doin' the best we can chasin' a breakfast." And the tramp, Overland Red, ragged, unkempt, jocular, rose from his knees beside a tiny blaze. He pulled a bleak flop of felt from his tangled hair in an over-accentuated ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... are utterly destitute of moral and religious teachings. No efforts have ever been made by Protestants for their salvation. If you fellows are looking, in earnest, for a hard job, there is one ready for you to tackle on those bleak prairies." ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell
... Ev'n winter bleak has charms to me, When winds rave thro' the naked tree; Or frosts on hills of Ochiltree Are hoary gray; Or blinding drifts wild-furious flee, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... I did not go to the plains this fall," said La Certe, stirring the logs on the fire with his toe and emitting a prolonged sigh of mingled smoke and contentment, while a blast from the bleak nor'-west shook every blackened rafter in ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... few days, which happened to be very fine, Beth revelled out of doors. Everything was a wonder and a joy to her in this fertile land, the trees especially, after the bleak, wild wastes to which she had been accustomed in the one stormy corner of Ireland she knew. Leaves and blossoms were just bursting out, and one day, wandering alone in the grounds, she happened unawares upon an orchard in full bloom, and fairly gasped, utterly overcome by ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... change from Lord Timon the rich, Lord Timon the delight of mankind, to Timon the naked, Timon the man-hater! Where were his flatterers now? Where were his attendants and retinue? Would the bleak air, that boisterous servitor, be his chamberlain, to put his shirt on warm? Would those stiff trees that had outlived the eagle turn young and airy pages to him, to skip on his errands when he bade them? Would the cool brook, ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... picturesquely on a sky, human with smoke mildly ascending. A broken wall that a great elm tears and rends, startles the silence; apple-orchards spread no flowery snow, and the familiar thrushes have deserted the moss-grown trees, in other times their trees; and the virgin forest ceases only to make bleak place for marish plains with lonely pools and stagnating streams, where perchance a heron rises on blue ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... absent at a Shakespeare reading. Dr. Trenire had been out all day, a long round over bleak country, and had not been home more than an hour. Kitty had heard him come, and had longed—as she had never longed in the days when she was free to do as she liked—to go and superintend his meal, and hear all about his day. But she knew what a to-do there would ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... housie, too, in ruin! It's silly wa's the win's are strewin! An' naething, now, to big a new ane, O' foggage green! And bleak December's winds ensuin' Baith snell ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... of utter disillusion for her. The great house on the Avenue proved to be but four bleak walls; and when the villa on Long Island was built, she tried to be as enthusiastic as Morgan wanted her to be. He lavished gifts upon her. He brought out gay house-parties for weekends. Lucia did her best to keep her part of a bad bargain. She made herself ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne
... winters have held in their icy grasp the bleak land in which he yielded up his life for a principle, and the flowers of two summers have blossomed upon his grave, overlooking the Hudson. But it was only his body that we buried there. His spirit still lives, for his was a spirit too big and noble to be bound by the narrow confines of ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... Paris), having been left an orphan, was sent to live with relatives in a village on the Normandy coast. It was a bleak, inhospitable shore, and its inhabitants lived their drab, hopeless lives under the morbid fear of inevitable death. The Chanteaus, Pauline's guardians, took advantage of her in every way, and Lazare Chanteau, ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... my pathway bleak, Those flowers that once ran wild, As on a father's careworn cheek The ringlets of his child; The golden mingling with the gray, And stealing half ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... have fear, and this one was crying. I kept well behind her, and as soon as she reached the village, I meant to lose sight of her and return, for a village is guardian enough. But when we had passed the bleak meadow of the slaughter-house and the wide, wet-smelling wood yard and had reached the first cottage on Daphne Street, I was startled to see her unlatch that cottage gate and enter the yard. And I was suddenly sadly apprehensive, ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... under the sun. He stands for the natural verities. You cannot change him, move, nor hurt him. He can earn neither your praises nor reproach. As well might you blame the staring noon of summer or throw a kind word to the everlasting hills. The bleak pride of the Castillano, the flint and steel of Aragon, the languor which veils Andalusian fire—travelling the lands which gave them birth, you find them scored in large over mountain and plain and riverbed, ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... strange quietude, like a sense of apprehension in nature! And so on through the revolving year, in all places in all weathers, there is pleasure in the open air, except on these chalk hills because of their bleak nakedness. There the wind and driving rain are not for but against you, and may overcome you with misery. One feels their loneliness, monotony, and desolation on many days, sometimes even when it is not wet, and I here recall an amusing ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... advantage of being cool and healthy. It is all bare and windy, and one generally stops at a rest-house nearby for something to eat. I got out and took both dogs with me, while Kadir Buksh made tea. A soldier told, us we should find Stanley "out there," nodding his head towards a bare, bleak hill. ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... consented to, and with infinite difficulty they began their march; for, as the snow had completely covered every tract, and the daylight began to fail, they wandered at random through a vast and pathless wood. At every step which Tommy took he sank almost to his knees in snow. The wind was bleak and cold, and it was with much difficulty that Harry could prevail upon him to continue his journey. At length, however, as they thus pursued their way with infinite toil, they came to some lighted embers, which either some labourers or ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... raised our anchor, and continued to sail along that bleak coast until we came to a hidden harbor, well protected by a number of barren islands from the storms of the Arctic Ocean, and cast anchor before a large fishing settlement. It ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu
... bright centre and sunlight I leap, I caper, I dance my dance; but when I look up, I see they are not deceived. For nothing ever placates them, nothing ever moves to a look of approval that ring of bleak ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... died not by the squire's hand but by the sharp strong jaws of the hound who had once before saved the squire's life. But he was alive. It would not take much to kill him; a little pressure on his wounded throat would be enough. Even to leave him there, uncared for, till morning in the bleak wind, lying upon the cold ground, would be almost certain to put an end to his life. But to the honour of Charles James Juxon be it said that such thoughts never crossed his mind. He pulled off his heavy ulster greatcoat, wrapped it about the felon's ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... on the Dovre Fjelds of Norway. It must be rather a dull business in that region, taking into consideration the barren plains, the bleak winds, and desolate aspect of the country. No sweet hawthorn bushes are there, beneath which ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... The fancied fabric melts away; Each Gothic arch, memorial-stone, And long, dim, lofty aisle, are gone; And lingering last, deception dear, The choir's high sounds die on my ear. Now slow return the lonely down, The silent pastures bleak and brown, The farm begirt with copsewood wild, The gambols of each frolic child, Mixing their shrill cries with the tone Of Tweed's ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... Flemish coast were blockaded by a Dutch fleet and the Channel was guarded by the English, and the Spaniards, accustomed to the quieter seas of the south, did not know how to navigate in this squally and bleak northern climate. What happened to the Armada once it was attacked by ships and by storms I need not tell you. A few ships, by sailing around Ireland, escaped to tell the terrible story of defeat. The others perished and lie at the bottom ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... long stretch of banked-up sand on the north side of the bar, where, amid the shelter of the coarse, tufted grass the delicate, graceful creatures will sit three months hence on their fragile white and purple-splashed eggs. The boobies are but visitors, for their breeding-places are on the bleak, savage islands far to the south, amid the snows and storms of black Antarctic seas. But here they dwell together, in unison with the gulls, and were the wind not westerly you could hear their shrill cries and hoarse croaking as they ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... was outwardly suppressed, the influence of her late employer and of his somber teachings. Somewhere with her was associated the idea of punishment, vindictiveness, revenge. I remembered again suddenly my odd notion that she sought to keep her present mistress here, a prisoner in this bleak and comfortless house, and that really, in spite of her obsequious silence, she was intensely opposed to the change of thought that had reclaimed Mabel to a ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood
... coming from Lucerne they had approached their inn by this path, and, feeling that they knew it, had hitherto neglected it in favor of untrodden ways. But at last the list of these was exhausted, and Rowland proposed the walk to Engelberg as a novelty. The place is half bleak and half pastoral; a huge white monastery rises abruptly from the green floor of the valley and complicates its picturesqueness with an element rare in Swiss scenery. Hard by is a group of chalets and inns, with the usual appurtenances of a prosperous Swiss resort—lean brown guides in baggy ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... tender Dryads folded he forgets The pallid witness of those nameless things, In renovated senses lapt, and joins The full, keen joyance of the day, so they From sights and sounds of battle smeared with blood, And shrieking souls on Acheron's bleak tides, And wail of execrating kindred, slid Into oblivious slumber and a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... because he had a constitutional aversion to piling up agony ahead of him; besides, Dill could see for himself that the loss would be heavy, though just how heavy he hadn't the experience with which to estimate. As March came in with a blizzard and went, a succession of bleak days, into April, Billy knew more than he cared to admit even to himself. He would lie awake at night when the wind and snow raved over the land, and picture the bare open that he knew, with lean, Double-Crank stock drifting ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... sphere,—action to bless and to refine and to exalt all around her, and to pour whatever else of ambition was left unsatisfied into sympathy with the aspirations of man. Despite her father's fears of the bleak air of England, in that air she had strengthened the delicate health of her childhood. Her elastic step, her eyes full of sweetness and light, her bloom, at once soft and luxuriant,—all spoke of the vital powers fit to sustain a mind of such exquisite mould, and the emotions ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and powerful. You live in a beautiful home where the bleak winds never penetrate. Your hunger is always appeased with the choicest foods. Your heart is kept warm by all these blessings, and would bleed at the sight of distress among your red children. Father, we are poor and weak. ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... breviary. The drive turned and turned again in great sloping curves; more divines were passed, and then there came a terrace with a balustrade and a view of the open country. The high red walls of the college faced bleak terraces: a square tower squatted in the middle of the building, and out of it rose the octagon of the bell-tower, and in the tower wall was the great oak door studded with ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... declared by a thousand spiritual utterances, as that of Heaven. It is well for us to dwell with thankfulness on the unfolding of the flower, and the falling of the dew, and the sleep of the green fields in the sunshine; but the blasted trunk, the barren rock, the moaning of the bleak winds, the roar of the black, perilous, merciless whirlpools of the mountain streams, the solemn solitudes of moors and seas, the continual fading of all beauty into darkness, and of all strength into dust, have these ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... think it was the first stopping place after we left East St. Louis, and we were put on board the cars and secreted in the gentlemen's smoking car, in which there were only a few rebels. We arrived in Springfield about twelve o'clock at night. When we took the cars it was dark, bleak and cold. It was the 18th of March, and as we were without bonnets and clothing to shield us from the sleet and wind, we suffered intensely. The old trader, for fear that mother might make her escape, carried my brother, ...
— The Story of Mattie J. Jackson • L. S. Thompson
... summer afternoons, When from the blue horizon to the shore, Casting faint silver pathways like the moon's Across the Ocean's glassy, mottled floor, Far clouds uprear their gleaming battlements Drawn to the crest of some bleak eminence, When autumn twilight fades on the sere hill And autumn winds are still; To watch the East for some emerging sign, Wintry Capella or the Pleiades Or that great huntsman with the golden gear; Ravished in hours ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... tossing the bright golden ears into wagons that were placed between the rows for that purpose, while others were hauling the grain to their barns to store it away for the winter's use. The broad corn leaves rustling in the wind seemed to whisper, "Winter is coming with his cold, bleak storms to rob the earth of her summer splendor; but he will bring his beautiful coverlet of snow to protect her fields and to prepare them ...
— How John Became a Man • Isabel C. Byrum
... on the bleak sea-beach, A fisherman stood aghast, To see the form of a maiden fair, Lashed close to ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... moorland lay dark and mute. The mist was around them. They seemed to stand on an islet of the clouds. In front the day-break was bursting the confines of the bleak racks of cloud. Then the day came in its wondrous radiance, and flooded the world in a vast ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... around it Threatening peaks, while stern seas bound it, With cold winters, summers bleak, Curtly smiling, never meek, 'Tis the giant we must master, Till he work our will the faster. He shall carry, though he clamor, He shall haul and saw and hammer, Turn to light the tumbling torrent,— All his din and rage abhorrent Shall, if we but do our duty, Win ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... the mountain the two children shrank back into their mufflers, before the sweep of the wet, chill wind; but the mill was in sight—beyond the slope of bleak pastures outlined with stone walls—sunk deep in the valley beside a rapid mountain stream, a dim bulk already glimmering with points of light. Toward this the two little workwomen slopped ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... grew suddenly bleak and fierce, and his right hand flashed out to Daughtry's wrist, prisoning it in withered fingers ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... Anglo-Saxon poems is adapted to men of this stamp. Their souls delight in the bleak boreal climes, the north wind, frost, hail, ice, howling tempest and raging seas, recur as often in this literature as blue waves and sunlit blossoms in the writings of men to whom these exquisite marvels are familiar. Their descriptions are all short, save when they refer to ice ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... wonders that my Lord Dacre and all his company do say they saw that night, six times, of spirits and fearful sights. And universally all their company say plainly the Devil was that night among them six times.' In that gaunt and bleak Border country the traveller overtaken by night may feel a disquieting awe even in these days when the rising moon is no longer a lamp to guide enemies to the attack. Four hundred years ago, when it lay blood-stained and scarred with a thousand fights, bearing no crops ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... was fair, this woman! Warm and flaxen waved her hair; Her blue Breton eyes made summer In that bleak December air. ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman
... as the chances of defeat. Twice we found women on board; and though I have seen towns sacked, and of late days in France some very horrid public tumults, there was something in the smallness of the numbers engaged, and the bleak dangerous sea-surroundings, that made these acts of piracy far the most revolting. I confess ingenuously I could never proceed unless I was three parts drunk; it was the same even with the crew; Teach himself was fit for no enterprise till he was full of rum; and it was one ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Lord Timon the rich, Lord Timon the delight of mankind, to Timon the naked, Timon the man-hater! Where were his flatterers now? Where were his attendants and retinue? Would the bleak air, that boisterous servitor, be his chamberlain, to put his shirt on warm? Would those stiff trees that had outlived the eagle turn young and airy pages to him, to skip on his errands when he bade them? Would the cool brook, when it was iced with winter, ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... on an outer rock, where they were retrieved subsequently. Then he beached his boat, and with many hands at work we soon had our belongings ashore and our three craft above high-water mark. The spit was by no means an ideal camping-ground; it was rough, bleak, and inhospitable—just an acre or two of rock and shingle, with the sea foaming around it except where the snow-slope, running up to a glacier, formed the landward boundary. But some of the larger rocks provided a measure of shelter from the wind, and as we clustered round the blubber-stove, ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... month of November, 1539. The winter in these regions, though short, had often days of such excessive cold that men upon the open prairie, exposed to bleak winds called northers, often perished from the severity of the weather. De Soto resolved to establish himself in winter-quarters at Anhayea. With his suite he occupied the palace of the chief. The other houses were appropriated to the soldiers for their barracks. He threw up strong fortifications ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... the land where I often have wended My way o'er its mountains and valleys of snow; Farewell to the rocks and the hills I've ascended, The bleak arctic homes of the buck and the doe; Farewell to the deep glens where oft has resounded The snow-bunting's song, as she carolled her lay To hillside and plain, by the green sorrel bounded, Till struck by the blast of ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... Rupert[3] 'gainst traitors contending, Four Brothers enrich'd with their blood the bleak field For Charles the Martyr their country defending, Till death their attachment ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... was a raw day of Autumn's bleak beginning, When nights are equal, but not so the days; The Parcae then cut short the further spinning Of seamen's fates, and the loud tempests raise[et] The waters, and repentance for past sinning In all, who o'er the great deep take their ways: They vow to amend their lives, and yet they don't; ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... customs, in an exquisite social sense, in the culture of the humorous and the imaginative, in impressibility to every touch of noble and useful enthusiasm. It would be easy to dilate upon the causes which seem to have produced this choice joyous spirit in so unexpected a region as the far, bleak North: but that would be a lengthened subject; and we must content ourselves at present with the fact. And, instead of branching out into general vague illustrations of what I mean by this lyric joyousness, I shall localise it, and embody the meaning in a sketch, light and imperfect ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the only house visible from the cove. As you turned the southern point, a village was seen down the coast; and about half way between that and the pines was a wooden house, brown and weather-beaten, standing unsheltered on the bleak shore. Back of this house, shutting out all prospect but that of the ocean, was a tall cliff, covered with ragged yellow pines and stunted cedars, from which on stormy nights many a quivering flame had shot upward, luring ships to their ruin. Still, with this grim protest against the ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... were bleak and wintry enough on the marsh for even a hare to take to the timber for comfort. During most of that winter Garron peddled the skins of rabbits he snared on the marsh, and traded and bought their pelts, and he lived poor that no one might suspect his wealth. He and his mate rose, like the wild ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... out than the country to the right, and the various groups of trees, disposed upon the sides of the elevations that bounded the western side of the valley, were most ornamental. On the opposite side, the country was less inviting, and the hills were bleak and bare. At length a clear horizon appeared to the south, the direction in which the river was flowing; Captain Sturt landed to survey the country, and beneath him was the great object of his search, the termination of one of Australia's longest and ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... the most remote districts of the south of Scotland, where an ideal line, drawn along the tops of lofty and bleak mountains, separates that land from her sister kingdom, a young man, called Halbert, or Hobbie Elliot, a substantial farmer, who boasted his descent from old Martin Elliot of the Preakin-tower, noted in Border story and song, was on ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... countries, the humblest and least powerful nations, became its strongholds. It was little Geneva in the midst of mighty foes plotting her destruction; it was Holland on her sand-banks by the northern sea, wrestling against the tyranny of Spain, then the greatest and most opulent of kingdoms; it was bleak, sterile Sweden, that gained victories ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... carried him up to the bleak tor side, and dug his grave there; the black cat following us to look. Five feet deep we laid him, having dug down to solid rock; and having covered him over, went silently back to the hovel. Joan had not ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... only roads. In seaside towns it could be a mark for for sailors at sea; such was the Truro meeting-house. Then, too, our Puritan ancestors dearly loved a "sightly location," and were willing to climb uphill cheerfully, even through bleak New England winters, for the sake of having a meeting-house which showed off well, and was a proper source of envy to the neighboring villages and the country around. The studiously remote and painfully inaccessible locations ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... again. A snowy mantle covered the hills and valleys, and the bleak winds moaned through the naked trees. The merry sleigh-bells jingled in the streets, and merrier lads and lasses filled the village school-house. The skating grounds never presented more attractions to Nat and ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... from Nice. H. Carenio; coach daily to and from Menton, 14m. S. The road now ascends the Col di Brouis, 2871 ft., whence passengers in this direction have their last view of the Mediterranean. The descent is now made through bleak and barren mountains to Giandola, 39 m. N.E. from Nice, 1247 ft., at the base of lofty frowning rocks. Inns: trangers, Poste. Coach daily between this and Ventimiglia. To the E., on the Roja, are Breglio, pop. 2580, and the ruins of the castle of Trivella. The road now ascends a narrow defile ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... from the afternoon reception at the Embassy. His temper seemed to crave the bleak wet air of the cold streets, and he did not hurry himself. He intended to dine at home that evening, and he anticipated some kind of disagreement with his father. The two men were too much alike not to be congenial, but too combative ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... romantic, new-born love in her heart, she was unable to answer for a moment. Her breath was snatched away; but as she struggled to regain it and to speak, a bleak picture of the future without him rose before her eyes. She couldn't give him up, and go on living, after the glimpse he had shown her ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... payment began, but it was not, had never been, the real Mary-Clare who had paid. Something had retreated during the bleak years, that which remained fulfilled the daily tasks; kept its own council, laughed at length, and knew a great joy in the baby Noreen, seemed a proof that God was still with her while she held to ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... the loveliest residences in all Scotland. It is built on the extremity of a long tongue of land which stretches out between two salt-water lochs—Loch Beg, the "little," and Loch Mhor, the "big" lake. The latter is grand and gloomy, shut in by bleak mountains, which sit all round it, their feet in the water, and their heads in mist and cloud. But Loch Beg is quite different. It has green, cultivated, sloping shores, fringed with trees to the water's edge, and the least ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... which has just been described, seems indeed a subject worthy of the talents of a skilful painter. The fancy of the artist would represent the dreary and frightful appearance of the ice-covered sea, stretching away as far as the eye could reach, a bleak and boundless waste; the dark and broken clouds driving across the fitful sky; the ship motionless amidst the islands and mountains of ice, her shrouds and sails being fringed and stiffened with the frozen spray. On the deck would appear the form of Hudson himself, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... too, in ruin! Its silly wa's the win's are strewin'! An' naething, now, to big anew ane, O' foppage green! An' bleak December's winds ensuin', Baith snell ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... early sensibility to be an unerring sign of a soul formed for the fine arts; and Canova used to say that he was in love when but five years old. But these instances, however, prove nothing. Calf-love, as it is called in the country, is common; and in Italy it may arise earlier than in the bleak and barren regions of Lochynagar. This movement of juvenile sentiment is not, however, love—that strong masculine avidity, which, in its highest excitement, is unrestrained, by the laws alike of God and man. In truth, the feeling of this kind of love is ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... their strange architecture and peculiar ornamentation, suggest some different race as their builders. The present surroundings are of the gloomiest character. The country is barren and desert. The valley in which the ruins are located is high and narrow, but surrounded by bleak hills. The soil is dry and sandy, and almost devoid of vegetation. The cold winds, blowing almost constantly, sweep before them great clouds of sand. A small stream flows through this dreary waste, which, during the rainy season, ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... my companion, "that you did not make the acquaintance of our hills during the bleak winter, when their charms were hidden in the snow, and they had nothing better to offer their worshipper than rain and sleet and nipping winds. They would have lost your ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... environments of these groups and segments of older civilizations were quite as dissimilar as those among which the nations of Europe developed. The cold and bleak hills of New England no more resemble the rich river bottoms of the South than the sand dunes of Prussia resemble the fertile plains of Andalusia. Geographical differences tend to produce economic differences. If to these be added inherited antagonisms like those of Puritan ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... taken by the antelope-stalkers; then, suddenly again, whirled about and began frantically signalling to the column. They saw him quickly swing his battered trumpet from behind his back and raise it to his lips, sounding some call. Floating across the wind, over the bleak and barren prairie, came almost together the muffled sound of two rifle-shots, then the stirring ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... the bleak garret expressively and shrugged his shoulders again. "I think you are wrong, Mr. Beecot. ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... east-and-west valley which opens from the hollow of Luz and closes beyond them in a col over which goes the road. These baths are much higher than Luz, and the way is a steady incline throughout. The valley soon shows itself in marked change from the fertile basin we have quitted; it grows bleak and less cultivated; rubbly slopes of shale and slate cover the hills; the vegetation becomes scanter. We are nearing now the Pic du Midi de Bigorre, the summit seen so plainly from Pau, far eastward of the Pic du Midi d'Ossau. It ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... traces of his once celestial strains. 735 Arcadia's sons, the dwellers at the foot Of mount Cyllene, where AEpytus sleeps Intomb'd; a generation bold in fight, And warriors hand to hand; the valiant men Of Pheneus, of Orchomenos by flocks 740 Grazed numberless, of Ripe, Stratia, bleak Enispe; Mantinea city fair, Stymphelus and Parrhasia, and the youth Of Tegea; royal Agapenor these, Ancaeus' offspring, had in sixty ships 745 To Troy conducted; numerous was the crew, And skilled in arms, which every vessel brought, And Agamemnon had with barks himself Supplied them, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... down before us in weird, uncanny dances of their own. The evening was full of eerie sounds—the creaking of fir boughs, the whistle of the wind in the tree-tops, the vibrations of strips of dried bark on the rail fences. But we carried summer and sunshine in our hearts, and the bleak unloveliness of the outer world only intensified ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of the thermometer from 53 degrees, at 6.5 A.M. to 68 degrees in the afternoon in an open verandah. The place, however, is not a cheerful one, for the aspect on every side except to the E. and NE. is dreary, marshes and the usual bleak grassy hills being alone visible. My favourite spot in this direction would be the Nungbree hill, the altitude of which, at least of that part over which the road to the village runs, is 5,439, (or probably 5,700,) temperature of the air being **, and water boiling at 202.5 degrees. ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... thus definitely adopted, and no old one left to fall back upon. And Madison Avenue, after dark, shows little to reassure a new playwright who carries in his pocket a note ending with the words, "before deciding to put on another play I have been considering." It was Bleak Street, that night, for young Stewart Canby, and a bleak, ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... weather was perfect, but the years and professional cares had done their fatal work, and our lagging spirits refused to respond to the jocund call of the day. Again we approached, with an absurd shrinking, the bleak old house. The bleak old house was not there; nay, it was there, but transformed. It was painted red. Blossoming vines clambered over it; French windows descended to meet its wide verandas; striped awnings sheltered its rooms from the July sun. The lawns, ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... Hayne sat there thinking, partly of what the doctor had said, but more of what had occurred during the late afternoon. Midnight was called by the sentries. He went to his door and looked out on the broad, bleak prairie, the moonlight glinting on the tin roofing of the patch of buildings over at the station far across the dreary level and glistening on the patches of snow that here and there streaked the surface. It was all so cold and calm and still. ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... Poutrincourt was charmed, and forthwith obtained from De Monts a private grant of the surrounding country. He established his demesne here, naming the place Port Royal, while Champlain and De Monts, continuing their way around the Bay of Fundy, came at length to the bleak island of St. Croix, where they founded ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... said to have 1000 inhabitants. It is so situated among rocks, that it is almost hidden from view. On a rock opposite the town are the ruins of the fortress Bogus. Now the scenery begins to be a little more diversified, and forests are mingled with the bleak rocks; little valleys appear on both the shores; and the river itself, here divided by an islet, frequently expands to a considerable breadth. The peasants' cottages were larger and better than those in Norway; they ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... to taxes been led mainly by those who faced bleak economic futures or the loss of once-powerful positions and declining family status, one could agree with those who say that the reaction of Virginians to the Currency, Sugar, Stamp, or Tea Acts was primarily ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... very often, but when it did, a nameless something seemed to cover us, and in passing, left a shadow which turned our happy evenings cold and bleak. ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... past the bleak pulpit of saint Mark's, under the railway bridge, past the Queen's theatre: in silence. Hoardings: Eugene Stratton, Mrs Bandmann Palmer. Could I go to see LEAH tonight, I wonder. I said I. Or the Lily of Killarney? Elster Grimes Opera Company. Big powerful ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... delicious. The drive has been more prosaic, more commonplace, or approaching to it, than we have before traveled in this hill country. This October coloring would make far tamer scenery beautiful, but I can fancy it very bleak and dismal when 'blow, blow November's winds,' whereas here, at the Franconian Notch, you feel as it were housed and secured by nature's vast fortresses and defences. The 'Eagle's Cliff' is on one side of you, and Mount Cannon (called so from a resemblance of a rock on the summit ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... resemblance to a lion in Landor's features), John Forster, who afterwards wrote his life, and Charles Dickens, who named a child after him and touched off his merrier turbulent side most charmingly as Leonard Boythom in "Bleak House". But his most constant companion was a Pomeranian dog; in dogs indeed he found comfort all his life, ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... Hard and bleak, keen and cruel, Short-hilted, long-shafted, I froze into steel: And the blood of my elder, His hand on the hafts of me, Sprang like a wave In the wind, as the sense Of his strength grew to ecstasy, Glowed like a coal At the throat of the furnace, As he knew me ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... heredity had played him; and his attitude toward Gabrielle was much the same. He knew that he couldn't and didn't want to keep pace with her enthusiasms any more than he could keep pace with the baronet's potations. He had been born on a bleak downland, and some of its characteristics had got into the thin, cold humour that was his blood. He was incapable of the generous passions of the people of Roscarna; but I think he was a good man, for all that. Even Mrs. Payne, who had reason ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... we hove-to under a close-reefed maintopsail for fear of the ice throughout the long hours of Antarctic blackness. We were in no temper to think of ghosts, and yet though no one had delivered the news authoritatively, it had come by this wild bleak time to be known that Captain Griffiths and Miss Le Grand were engaged. Mrs. Burney told me so one day in the cuddy, and with a wicked flash of her dark eye wondered that people could think of making love ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... the orders of one of His Majesty's naval officers, commanding on the southwest coast of America, it was soon ascertained that it was a most dangerous land to approach and to continue near. Its sterility and bleak and forbidding appearance, from all the accounts published respecting it, are scarcely equalled, certainly are not surpassed, in the most inhospitable countries near the North Pole; while ships are suddenly exposed to most violent storms, from which there is little chance of escaping, ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... however, that there is a really worthy class which such a qualification would exclude,—ploughmen, labourers, and country mechanics, who reside permanently in humble cottages, the property of the owner of the soil, and who, though their course through life lies on the bleak edge of poverty, are God-fearing, worthy men, at least morally qualified to give, in the election of a teacher, an honest and not unintelligent voice. And yet, hitherto at least, we have failed to see any principle which a British statesman would recognise as legitimate, on which this class ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... Fort. This was a squat, ungainly pile of rugged gray stone, symmetrically built, but aggressively ugly in its very regularity, since it insulted the graceful curves of Nature everywhere discernible. It stood nakedly amidst the bare, bleak meadows glittering with pools of still water, with not even the leaf of a creeper to soften its menacing walls, although above them appeared the full-foliaged tops of trees planted in the barrack-yard. It looked as though the grim walls belted a secret orchard. What with ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... does no less befriend that part of the earth from which it removes, in order to temper it, than that it approaches to favour it with its beams. Its kind, beneficent aspect fertilises all it shines upon. This change produces that of the seasons, whose variety is so agreeable. The spring silences bleak frosty winds, brings forth blossoms and flowers, and promises fruits. The summer yields rich harvests. The autumn bestows the fruits promised by the spring. The winter, which is a kind of night wherein man refreshes and rests himself, ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... the traveller, "we visited the far-famed Niger or Quorra, which flows by the city about a mile from our residence, and were greatly disappointed at the appearance of this celebrated river. Bleak, rugged rocks rose abruptly from the centre of the stream, causing strong ripples and eddies on its surface. It is said that, a few miles above Boussa, the river is divided into three branches by two small, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... not deny that, looking round upon the dreary region, and seeing nothing but bleak fields and naked trees, hills obscured by fogs, and flats covered with inundations, he did for some time suffer melancholy to prevail upon him, and wished himself again ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... miles, the road winds through a bleak valley called Smithem Bottom, till recently the favourite resort of the cockney gunners for rabbit-shooting; but whether from the noise of their harmless double-barrel Nocks, or the more dreadful carnage of the Croydon poachers, these animals are now exceedingly ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... little streams hurrying along, swollen with the January thaw which had taken all the snow from the hills. She had heard her elders say about her so many times that she could not stand the cold, that she shivered at the very thought of cold weather, and certainly nothing could look colder than that bleak country into which the train was now slowly ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield
... extra-planetaries on a bleak, friendless world like Irwadi, he'd regularly gambled away and drank away his monthly paycheck in the interstellar settlement which the Irwadians had established in the Old Quarter of Irwadi City. But last month he'd managed to come ...
— Equation of Doom • Gerald Vance
... my face, When thinking what bleak fate befell The only sister of our race— A thing too horrible ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... On the bleak mountain thus I was the pitifulest atom of loneliest humanity, yet felt no loneliness. The face of the earth frowned in angry fury, the awfulness of the raging elements dwarfed all else to utter annihilation. But even at such a time, coming all too seldom in the lives of most of us, when standing ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... the capital is much like many another modern city, somewhat bleak, cosmopolitan of population, with strong national lines of demarkation, and a caste system almost as fixed as that of India, but with none of the romance the reader of Prescott, Mme. Calderon, and the rest expects. Since anarchy fell upon the land, even the Sunday procession ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... to say that can, at this advanced stage of the trial, ward off that sentence of death, for I might as well hurl my complaint (if I had one) at the orange trees of the sunny south, or the tall pine trees of the bleak north, as now to speak to the question why sentence of death should not be passed upon me according to the law of the land; but I do protest loudly against the injustice of that sentence. I have been brought to trial upon a charge ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... me at her plight, So suddenly confessed: Dismissing late distaste for life, I craved its bleak unrest. ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... ivrywhere. In anny part iv this fair land iv ours it shud be th' right iv anny man to get a divoorce, with alimony, simply be goin' befure a Justice iv th' Peace an' makin' an affydavit that th' lady's face had grown too bleak f'r his taste. Be Hivens, I'd go farther. Rather than have people endure this sarvichood I'd let anny man escape be jumpin' th' conthract. All he'd have to do if I was r-runnin' this Governmint wud be to put some clothes in ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... Sarah's words had struck the key-note to the feelings of the whole company. In the heart of every one arose a strong desire to sink out of this cold, bleak, terrifying open air into the comfortable motherly arms of the encircling waters. For a few minutes Captain Jim Hubbell had experienced a sense of satisfaction at finding himself once more upon the deck of a vessel floating upon the open sea. He felt that he was in ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... the Dnieper, the Volga, and their the Euxine or other seas. tributary streams, (30) which form so many (54) natural outlets into the Euxine or other seas; (44) while the cold and Lastly, the cold bleak plains shivering plains which stretch stretching towards Archangel and towards Archangel and the shores towards the shores of the White of the White Sea are (48) covered Sea, and covered with immense with immense forests ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... Mountains crosses the Canadian border another range edges in toward it from the south. Between these ranges lies a space of from twenty to forty miles; and midway between them flows a clear, wonderful river through dense forests. Into the river empty other, tributary, rivers rising in the bleak and lofty fastnesses of the mountains to right and left. Between them, in turn, run spur systems of mountains only a little less lofty than the parent ranges. Thus the ground plan of the whole country ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... I might wander, It should be toward the sun; The blessed South Should fill my mouth With ripeness just begun. For bleak hills, bare, With stunted, spare, And scrubby, piney trees, Her gardens rare, And vineyards fair, And her rose-scented breeze. For fearful blast, Skies overcast, And sudden blare and scare Long, stormless moons, And placid noons, And—all ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... limbs; he took three times as long as he once would to mount each well-known ridge, and as he went he glanced backward from time to time to know if he were pursued. Away up the head of the little branch were the Shoshones, bleak, forbidding; no enemies were there, and the Park was beyond it all—on, on he must go. But as he climbed with shaky limbs, and short uncertain steps, the west wind brought the odor of Death Gulch, that fearful little valley where everything was dead, where ...
— The Biography of a Grizzly • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... the turn now for the young people to be happy. Cold and bleak it is here on the Fife coast, but they are among roses and sunshine and so God bless them, I say, and keep us and every one from cutting short their turn of happiness. You had your bride time, Madame, and when Angus McAllister first took me to his cottage in Strathmoyer, ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... a solitary, lonesome, dreary-looking spot on that bleak winter day; and life inside those tiny houses was restricted and full of limitations. Denas thought of them all, but she weighed and measured the life without taking into account the love that sat on each hearthstone—the love that turned the simple houses into homes and the plain, hard-working ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... to-day if she knows that she is shut up alone in that nearly empty house. How the storm will beat upon Allan's windows all the winter! How the wind will howl around the big, desolate place! And think of the real Theodora waiting among all kinds of rude surroundings on that bleak Fife coast. There must have been a mistake with that girl, uncle. She was meant for lofty rooms and splendid clothing, and to be waited upon hand and foot. Don't you think souls must often wonder at the ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... stay, e'en as thou art, All cold, and all serene— I still might press thy silent heart, And where thy smiles have been! While e'en thy chill, bleak corse I have, Thou seemest still mine own; But there I lay thee in thy grave— And I am ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... remarkably wide streets and a number of well-built churches, not all of the Establishment, however. The solid old houses, consisting entirely of the local stone, are not uninteresting and are in keeping with the dour and bleak scenery of the island. The mistake of importing alien red bricks of a most aggressive hue has not been made here. Those that flame from the hill slope above Portland station only succeed in emphasizing the general bleakness of their surroundings. ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... gates of the Orgreaves, and gazed at the facade of the house—not at her window, because that was at the side—and it was all dark. The Orgreaves had gone to bed: he had expected it. Even this perfectly futile reconnaissance had calmed him. While dressing in the bleak sunrise he had looked at the oval lawn of the Orgreaves' garden, and had seen Johnnie idly kicking a football on it. Johnnie had probably spent the evening with her; and it was nothing to Johnnie! She was ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... and escape. Far from morbid naturally, she did her best to deny the thought, and so simple and unartificial was her type of mind that for weeks together she would wholly lose it. Then, suddenly it would return upon her with a rush of bleak reality. It was not only in her mind; it existed apart from any mere mood; a separate fear that walked alone; it came and went, yet when it went—went only to watch her from another point of view. It was in ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... Here, on one bleak, late November Monday morning, in front of the new school-house, stood Bart Ridgeley, who appeared then and there pursuant to a stipulation made with him, to keep their first school. He undertook it with great doubt ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... of hills on every side, all covered with moss, ferns, and heather, with scarcely a tree of any kind to be seen, except those that fringed the shores of the lake down in the valley. The view from the summit was very extended, but the wind blew there so bleak and cold that the whole party were very glad to leave it and come down, after a very brief survey ...
— Rollo in Scotland • Jacob Abbott
... spurs, but none of the latter was of great height. The towering peaks rose more to the north and west. There was variety and yet sameness in the vast undulating expanse, with its wealth of wood, of rocks, some bleak and dark of color, and others fringed with vegetation, of swelling hills, many of which elsewhere would have been called mountains, and beautiful valleys, with numerous streams hidden through most of their flow, all seeking an outlet ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... serious and absurd. With so free a design, no thought that occurred to him would need to be dismissed without expression; and he could draw at full length the portrait of his own bedevilled soul, and of the bleak and blackguardly world which was the theatre of his exploits and sufferings. If the reader can conceive something between the slap-dash inconsequence of Byron's "Don Juan" and the racy humorous gravity and brief noble touches that distinguish the vernacular poems of Burns, he will ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Little or no tobacco has ever been raised in those states, while corn has been one of the chief products. In Virginia, where tobacco has been the principal crop, the land has deteriorated, the rich soil has been exhausted, and become more sterile than were the bleak hills of New England when the Pilgrim reached her shores; while in New England, where corn has been produced in abundance, and but very little tobacco, the soil has been improved until it has become almost or quite as rich as that of Virginia was at any time since its settlement. In this day the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... and Challis, looking somewhat out of place, smoking a heavy wooden pipe in the disused, bleak drawing-room, waited, almost silent, until his visitor should come to ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... the vast plains and prairies: bushwood and herbage—the dry grass—the tall reed—the twining parasite—or the giant of the forest, charred and blackened, but still proudly erect—alike attest and bewail the conquering fire's onward march; and the bleak desert, silent, waste, and lifeless, which it leaves behind seems forever doomed to desolation: vain fear! the rain descends once more upon the dry and thirsty soil, and from that very hour which seemed the date of cureless ruin, Nature puts forth ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... and noble Bosch—pride of all beauty-loving Hollanders. The palace with its brilliant mosaic floors, its frescoed ceilings, and gorgeous ornaments, filled Ben with delight; he was surprised that some of the churches were so very plain—elaborate sometimes in external architecture but bare and bleak within with their blank, ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... The blueberry plains looked bleak and bare enough now. It had rained incessantly for days, growing ever colder and colder as it rained. The sun came out at last, but it shone in a wintry sort of way,—like a duty smile,—as if light, not heat, were its object. A keen wind ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... interrogation which often looked out of her eyes. They had passed Boulogne, and through the dawn, vague as an opal, appeared a low range of hills, and as these receded, the landscape flattened out into a bleak, morose plain. ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... for the capture of the Holy City were in preparation. I have a grateful recollection of this building, for in it the military attaches and I stayed before the Official Entry into Jerusalem, and its roof saved us from one inclement night on the bleak hills. On the 20th November the Turks did their best to keep the place under German ownership. The hill on which it stands was well occupied by men under cover of thick stone walls, the convent gardens on the opposite side of the highway was packed with Turkish infantry, and across the deep ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... was in the bleak December, And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor. Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore— For the rare and radiant ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe
... Aleppo is about 120 English miles. And this journey added to discomfort, hardship, and to hardship—lack of food for the mission party. It necessitated travelling three miles into the hills, and when a lofty bleak plain was reached, the muleteers made it clear that they were to ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... other rivers that run between bleak, rocky banks—banks a thousand feet high, whose bald, naked "bluffs" frown at each other across the deep chasm, in the bottom of which roars the troubled water. Often these banks extend for hundreds of miles, so steep at all points that one cannot ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... got on the roof first, and handed up the ladies; and they all stood looking out over the country. It was not a cold, bleak, snowy day, as Christmas in northern latitudes has a right to be. The winter had been mild—one of a series of mild winters, overturning the old traditions of frosts and snow-storms that lasted for months, and to a great extent stopped ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... fire, her Cottage-home; Yet o'er the moorland will she roam In weather rough and bleak; And when against the wind she strains, Oh! might I kiss the mountain rains That sparkle on ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... branch - the Plymouth Company - also sent out an, expedition, and tried to found a colony at the mouth of the Kennebec River. But it was a failure. Some of the adventurers were so discouraged with the cold and bleak appearance of the land that they sailed home again in the ship which had brought them out. Only about forty-five or so stayed on. The winter was long and cold, and they were so weary of it, so homesick and miserable, that when in the spring a ship came out with provisions ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... thus seasonably into a good state of cultivation. Mr. Griswold is a Vermonter, a practical farmer, and an energetic man, and doubtless turns his agricultural experience to good account, great as is the difference between the bleak hills of New England, and this equatorial region. His lady, an interesting woman, is just recovering ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... house on that beautiful stretch of Michigan Avenue which overlooked the lake. But the real insult was that this publishing house, instead of having a building, or at least a floor, all to itself, simply had a place penned off in a bleak, dirty building such as one who had done work in sociological research instinctively associated with a box factory. And the thing which fairly trailed her visions in the dust was that the partition penning them off did not extend to the ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... inhabitants; and lastly, by a general air of poverty which all the opulence of manufactures cannot remove." He considers that "at an uncertain period during the occupancy of the Lacies, the first principle of population" (in these forests) commenced; it was found that these wilds, bleak and barren as they were, might be occupied to some advantage in breeding young and depasturing lean "cattle, which were afterwards fattened in the lower domains. Vaccaries, or great upland pastures, were laid out for this purpose; ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... faded out, and the little figure, too, had vanished, leaving that one breast desolate, save when a lightsome shadow flitted across its ever-verdant memory. The summer cottage looked dreary, with its closed blinds, and the autumn leaves rustling about it in the bleak winds; but the little tombstone still gleamed in the sunlight, that cast a pleasant and warm halo upon it, and the birds and squirrels sung and leaped about in the beauteous grove as blithesome and glad as if life's rolling ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... dak-bungalow standing on a high stone plinth. The untidy khansamah—the custodian of the rest-home—hurried on to the verandah to greet the unexpected visitor and show his "boy" where to put the sahib's bedding and baggage in a bleak room with a cane-bottomed wooden bed ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... wind doth blow, Bleak in the morning early; All the hills are covered with snow, And winter's ...
— The Real Mother Goose • (Illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright)
... to bed," snapped Scrap; and it sounded as moving, as forlorn, as that line spoken years and years ago by an actress playing the part of Poor Jo in dramatized version of Bleak House—"I'm always moving on," said Poor Jo in this play, urged to do so by a policeman; and Mrs. Fisher, then a girl, had laid her head on the red velvet parapet of the front row of the dress ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... with my hand in thine, Grave and low, and sweet and slow, As the wood bird over head, Brooding notes, half sung half said,— "In the world so bleak and wide, Hearts make Edens of their own; Wilt thou linger by my side,— Wilt thou live for me alone, Making bright the winter weather, Thou ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... the cold, bleak upper rooms of the house, looking out of the windows upon the wide desolation of winter, the waste of snow, the bare forest, the cold, dark waters of the bay—listening to the driving tempest, and singing, full of glee as she always was when the ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... Irish girl went with the last snow, and on one of those midsummer-like days that sometimes fall in early April to our yet bleak and desolate zone, our hearts sang of Africa and golden joys. A Libyan longing took us, and we would have chosen, if we could, to bear a strand of grotesque beads, or a handful of brazen gauds, and traffic them for some sable maid with crisped locks, whom, uncoffling from the captive train ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... March!" said Merrihew, his thought traveling back to his own bleak country, where winter is so long and summer ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... Marie. Do, dear, wish it, for I'm not successful. I played hard at my game, because playing it made me forget other things. Almost anybody playing a game long enough becomes half-expert at it. But successful? No, no, dear. So far I seem to have travelled only unending roads through bleak countries; and I'm dreading to ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly
... Venice an appreciation that will live in my mind with every delight of that dearest place in the world. But all the same you remain for me a dearest of friends, whether I see you framed by your Venice, or brightening up our bleak London, should you come there. In Venice, however, should I live and you be there next autumn, it will go hard with me if I do ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... Day by day we perfect ourselves in the art of seeing nature more favourably. We learn to live with her, as people learn to live with fretful or violent spouses: we dwell lovingly on what is good, and shut our eyes against all that is bleak or inharmonious. We learn, also, to come to each place in the right spirit. The traveller, as Brantome quaintly tells us, 'fait des discours en soi pour ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the land opposite, where there had once been a forest fire, the red weeds that follow conflagrations grew strong and rank in the summer time and little saplings sprouted up among the charred and wrecked trunks of the brule. But at this time it all looked very bleak and desolate. ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... sank, he gave a stroke or two down the river, and disappeared after her. This was followed by another cry of horror and despair, for somehow, the idea of desolation which marks, at all times, a deep, over-swollen torrent, heightened by the bleak mountain scenery around them, and the dark, angry voracity of the river where they had sunk, might have impressed the spectators with utter hopelessness as to the fate of those now engulfed in its ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... sampling the impromptu dessert, assured his hostess that her husband's eulogy had been only too moderate. He vowed he had never eaten such apple sauce. But Mrs. Merriam still looked bleak. She knew she could make a better deep-dish peach pie than Mrs. Allen could. And, then, to give the minister apple sauce and nabiscos!—the first time he had eaten at her table ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... night of great anxiety and fear, they left Sally's room while it was yet dark. It was bitterly cold; the winter stars shone keen and glittering in the bleak sky. Hetty threw on a heavy cloak, ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... Glenister, accompanied by these two, slipped out into the whirling storm, and a half-hour later the rest followed. One by one the Vigilantes left, the blackness blotting them up an arm's-length from the door, till at last the big, bleak warehouse echoed hollowly to the voice of the wind ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... again no more the woodland maids, Nor pastoral songs delight—Farewell, ye shades— No toils of ours the cruel god can change, Tho' lost in frozen deserts we should range; Tho' we should drink where chilling Hebrus flows, Endure bleak winter blasts, and Thracian snows: Or on hot India's plains our flocks should feed, Where the parch'd elm declines his sickening head, Beneath fierce-glowing Cancer's fiery beams, Far from cool breezes and refreshing ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... traversed a distance of sixty miles. He succeeded at length in retracing his course, and anchored on the southern shore of Frobisher's Bay, in the Countess of Warwick's Sound. But the desire for gold, the bleak winds, barren shores, and drifting icebergs, all combined to dispel the hopes of making a successful settlement, and the adventurers turned their faces homeward, carrying once more a cargo of ore, which proved, like the first, to be ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... the beacon on Pendle Hill in Lancashire. Two were stationed on either side of the north-eastern extremity of the mountain. One looked over the castled heights of Clithero; the woody eminences of Bowland; the bleak ridges of Thornley; the broad moors of Bleasdale; the Trough of Bolland, and Wolf Crag; and even brought within his ken the black fells overhanging Lancaster. The other tracked the stream called Pendle Water, almost from its source amid the neighbouring hills, and ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... clumsily busying himself about the preparation of an illy-cooked meal, and later sitting smoking in the desolate silence. She saw him go forth to his daily toil with all the lightness gone from his step, to return at nightfall, with a heaviness born of more than mere physical fatigue, to the same bleak bareness. ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... pale and bleak. Madame Desvarennes opened her window and cooled her burning brow in the fresh morning air. The birds were awake, and were singing on the trees in ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... greenroom in the Westervelt, the reading took place on the open stage, which was bleak and draughty. The company sat in a funereal semicircle, with the author, the star, and the manager in a short line facing them. All the men retained their overcoats, for the morning was miserably raw, and at Helen's positive command kept their heads covered; and the supernumerary women sat ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... saw Diego Ramirez and the Iledefonsos, with an interval of a fortnight between the sightings—a cluster of bleak rocks, standing out of surf and broken water, taking the relentless battery of huge seas that swept them from base to summit. Once, in clear weather, we marked a blue ridge of land far to the norrard, and Old Martin and Vootgert nearly came to blows as to whether ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... deserted," says one, as he taps on the door a second time. "No, that cannot be!" returns the other, peering through a small window into the barrack-like room. It was from this window the light shone, and, being a bleak November night, a wood fire blazed on the great hearth, shedding its lurid glows over everything around. It is the pale, saline light of wreckwood. A large binnacle lamp, of copper, hung from the centre of ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... ever find out we may see for ourselves already.—A little tribe of valiant fair-haired men, whether all Teutons, or, as Mr. Latham thinks, Sclavonians with Teuton leaders, still intimately connected with our own English race both by their language and their laws, struggling for existence on the bleak brown bogs and moors, sowing a little barley and flax, feeding a few rough cattle, breeding a few great black horses; generation after generation fighting their way southward, as they exhausted the barren northern ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... in hand, Telling the thoughts tongue could not speak; Was it unmanly that our eyes O'erflowed with love upon the cheek? I hear thy cheery voice outspeak, 'Courage, the months will quickly fly, And ere November chill and bleak We meet at ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... that lies In ten degrees of more indulgent skies, Nor at the coarseness of our heaven repine, Though o'er our heads the frozen Pleiads shine: 'Tis liberty that crowns Britannia's isle, And makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains smile. 140 Others with towering piles may please the sight, And in their proud aspiring domes delight; A nicer touch to the stretched canvas give, Or teach their animated rocks to live: 'Tis Britain's care ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... as most of the Macleods of that family had been. And if you ask about the graves of Roderick and Ronald, what is one to say? They are known, and yet unknown. The two lads were in one of the Highland regiments that served in the Crimea. They both lie buried on the bleak plains outside Sevastopol. And if the memorial stones put up to them and their brother officers are falling into ruin and decay—if the very graves have been rifled—how is England to help that? England is the poorest country in the world. There was a talk some ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... an idea of the responsibility of a locomotive engineer, it is necessary to ride a hundred miles or so in an engine. The author was given this privilege on a bleak, frosty day, early last winter. He was told by the officials that he took the ride at his own risk, and as a matter of personal favor, and that he must not interfere with the engineer or fireman in the execution of their duties. The guest was received kindly by both engineer and fireman, and was ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... already.—A little tribe of valiant fair-haired men, whether all Teutons, or, as Mr. Latham thinks, Sclavonians with Teuton leaders, still intimately connected with our own English race both by their language and their laws, struggling for existence on the bleak brown bogs and moors, sowing a little barley and flax, feeding a few rough cattle, breeding a few great black horses; generation after generation fighting their way southward, as they exhausted the barren northern soils, or became too numerous for ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... to bleak Norway is certainly a "far cry," yet the adventure of the "Pilgrim from Paradise" is also known to the Norse peasants, in connection with the quest of the greatest noodles: A goody goes to market, with ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... I grant, they can now only gather, for the most part, vainglorious laurels, whilst they adjust to a hair the European balance, taking especial care that no bleak northern nook or sound incline the beam. But the days of true heroism are over, when a citizen fought for his country like a Fabricius or a Washington, and then returned to his farm to let his virtuous ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... clime, that lies In ten degrees of more indulgent skies, Nor at the coarseness of our heaven repine, Though o'er our heads the frozen Pleiads shine: 'Tis liberty that crowns Britannia's isle, And makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains smile. 140 Others with towering piles may please the sight, And in their proud aspiring domes delight; A nicer touch to the stretched canvas give, Or teach their animated rocks to live: 'Tis Britain's care to watch o'er Europe's fate, And hold in balance each ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... the defence of Arminian doctrine. A voice shouts "Carstairs Junction," with a command of the letter r, which is the bequest of an unconquerable past, and inspires one with the hope of some day hearing a freeborn Scot say "Auchterarder." The train runs over bleak moorlands with black peat holes, through alluvial straths yielding their last pickle of corn, between iron furnaces blazing strangely in the morning light, at the foot of historical castles built on rocks that rise out of the fertile plains, and then, after ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... of sight and only bleak, rugged mountains were below them. One peak rose higher than the others, and faced the sea, and to this point the great eagle ...
— Policeman Bluejay • L. Frank Baum
... imaginable is a stone-cutters' shed on a bleak day in the first week in March. The large ones stretching along the north shore of Lake Mesantic are no exception to this statement. A high wind from the northeast was driving before it particles of ice, and now and then a snow flurry. It penetrated ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... impeded her work, and babbled questions about this or that. Beside the fire, in the chair that had once belonged to the master of the house, sat Micah Ward. He looked very old now and infirm. The months in a prison hulk in Belfast Lough and the long weariness of his confinement in bleak Fort George had set their mark upon him. On his knees lay a Greek lexicon, but he was pursuing no word through its pages. It was open at the fly-leaf inside the cover. He was reading lovingly for the hundredth time an inscription ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... to a window and saw that they were over a bleak and rocky island covered with ice ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... period of the Revolution, the last proprietor of Ravenswood Castle saw himself compelled to part with the ancient family seat, and to remove himself to a lonely and sea-beaten tower, which, situated on the bleak shores between St. Abb's Head and the village of Eyemouth, looked out on the lonely and boisterous German Ocean. A black domain of wild pasture-land surrounded their new residence, and formed the remains ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... rested musingly on the bleak promontory. It would be a fit abode, she thought, for some recluse, determined to eschew the society of his fellow-men; here he could dwell, solitary and apart, surrounded on three sides by the grey, dividing ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... located, even old Pluto, where crews of Nigran technicians were obviously at work, building giant structures of lux metal. The great cities of the Nigrans were beginning to bloom on the once bleak plains of the planet. The mighty blaze of Sirius had warmed Pluto, vaporizing its atmosphere and thawing its seas. The planet that the Black Star had stolen from the Solar System was warmer than it had ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... waning moon in the east, and the weird blue streamers of the aurora, which went racing swiftly back and forth along the northern horizon. Even when the sun rose, huge and fiery, in a haze of frozen moisture at the south, it did not seem to infuse any warmth or life into the bleak wintry landscape. It only drowned, in a dull red glare, the blue, tremulous streamers of the aurora and the white radiance of the moon and stars, tinged the snow with a faint colour like a stormy sunset, and lighted up a splendid mirage in the north-west which startled us with its solemn ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... bright in its green, stands out among the faded brackens. The gorse is profusely in bloom: it always is in Cornwall. Still farther over there are sheep visible on the uplands; beyond these, again, the bleak brown moors rise into peaks of hills; overhead the silent blue, and all around the sweet, fresh ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... and then the sun shone fitfully through the clouds, lighting up with a cold sparkle the thick ivy, wet with the last night's rain, which clung to the walls of Walden's rectory. There was a chill wind, and the garden looked bleak and deserted, though it was kept severely tidy, Bainton never failing to see that all fallen leaves were swept up every afternoon and all weeds 'kep' under.' But there was no temptation to saunter down the paths or across ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... that company going up Libberton Brae, then along Roslin Muir, the morning light touching the Pentlands, and making them like onlooking ghosts; then down the hill through Auchindinny woods, past "haunted Woodhouselee"; and as daybreak came sweeping up the bleak Lammermuirs, and fell on his own door, the company would stop, and James would take the key, and lift Ailie up again, laying her on her own bed, and, having put Jess up, would return with Rab and shut ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... Sometimes I would pass an entire day without seeing one mammal and perhaps not more than a dozen birds of any size. The weather at that time was cheerless, generally with a gray film of cloud spread over the sky, and a bleak wind, often cold enough to make my bridle hand quite numb. At a slow pace, which would have seemed intolerable in other circumstances, I would ride about for hours at a stretch. On arriving at a hill, I would slowly ride to its summit, and stand there to survey the prospect. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... hear the wind roar over the rocks, at intervals when we waked, for it had grown quite cold and windy. The night was in its elements, simple even to majesty in that bleak place,—a bright moonlight and a piercing wind. It was at no time darker than twilight within the tent, and we could easily see the moon through its transparent roof as we lay; for there was the moon still above us, with Jupiter and ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... whether he will go forth and put his fortune to the test "to win or lose it all" or settle down into the position of faithful legal hired man. He is getting a bit bald, he has had one or two tussles with his bank about accidental overdrafts. The world looks pretty bleak outside and the big machine of the law goes grinding on heartless, inevitable. Who is he to challenge the future? The old job is fairly easy; they can't get on without him, they say; here is where he belongs; he knows his business—give ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... and I decided to leave the university without one, he invited me on a long visit to Graden Easter; and it was thus that I first became acquainted with the scene of my adventures. The mansion house of Graden stood in a bleak stretch of country some three miles from the shore of the German Ocean. It was as large as a barrack; and as it had been built of a soft stone, liable to consume in the eager air of the seaside, it was damp and draughty within and half ruinous without. It was ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... Pearl Bryan, taken to Greencastle, Ind., from the Newport, Ky., Morgue on that cold, bleak wintry day in February, lay in its beautiful snow-white casket in the vault in Forest Hill Cemetery in Greencastle, until March, 27. The heart-broken sisters, urged on by the friends of the family, had pleaded with their aged ...
— The Mysterious Murder of Pearl Bryan - or: the Headless Horror. • Unknown
... furniture, without being costly, was good of its kind; the very excellent collection of books was methodically arranged in ample book-shelves, and carefully preserved by glass doors; the bright fire in the grate—for though it was called summer, it was but a bleak cold day in Edinburgh; and the respectable-looking middle-aged woman who had just laid the cloth for dinner, and now brought it in; all gave an air of comfort and repose to a dwelling much humbler than she had been accustomed to live in, but far better than ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... doin' o't; He 'll thrash, and I 'll toil on the fields in the spring, And turn up the soil at the plowin' o't. And whan the wee flow'rets begin then to blaw, The lavrock, the peasweep, and skirlin' pickmaw, Shall hiss the bleak winter to Lapland awa, Then we 'll ply the blythe ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... is coffee and bread for breakfast, potatoes for dinner, with salt—and in having the salt they were lucky—bread and coffee for supper. Insufficiently clothed, there by the North Sea, they watched the bleak hours pass, with nothing to do except cling together in a vain attempt to ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... from the soil that gave them birth is a spiritual force which no conquering empire should dare to kill. How powerful it is, how mysterious, how unaccountable, and how infinitely pathetic! The land of one's country may be so bleak, so bare, so barren, that the stranger may think God can never have intended that it should be trodden by the foot of man, yet it seems to us, who were born to it, to be the fairest spot the sun shines upon. The songs of one's country ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... rivers that run between bleak, rocky banks—banks a thousand feet high, whose bald, naked "bluffs" frown at each other across the deep chasm, in the bottom of which roars the troubled water. Often these banks extend for hundreds ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... never heard till now. Ile speak to her And she shall be my Queen. Hail forren wonder Whom certain these rough shades did never breed Unlesse the Goddes that in rurall shrine Dwell'st here with Pan, or Silvan, by blest Song Forbidding every bleak unkindly Fog To touch the prosperous growth ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... human art, are perhaps as attractive to an American eye as any stronger feature could be. Our journey, however, between Manchester and Sheffield was not through a rich tract of country, but along a valley walled in by bleak, ridgy hills extending straight as a rampart, and across black moorlands with here and there a plantation of trees. Sometimes there were long and gradual ascents, bleak, windy, and desolate, conveying ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... well as to read and write; one was an artist and the third a musician, having studied in London and Florence. It was during this ever-to-be-remembered week that Miss Anthony, escorted by Mrs. Ford, visited Haworth, the bleak and lonely home of the Brontes. It was a dark, drizzly October day, intensifying all the gloomy memories of the place. She sat in the old church pew where those shivering girls endured such discomforts through the fearful services, with their benumbed ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... vehicles. The mottled Moon rode high. Big tires whispered on damp concrete. Lights blinked past. The trucks curved around corners, growled up grades, highballed down. There were pauses at all-night drive-ins, coffees misguidedly drunk in a blurred, fur-tongued half wakefulness that seemed utterly bleak. Oh, hell, Frank Nelsen thought, wasn't it far better to be home in bed, ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... in the Anglo-Saxon poems is adapted to men of this stamp. Their souls delight in the bleak boreal climes, the north wind, frost, hail, ice, howling tempest and raging seas, recur as often in this literature as blue waves and sunlit blossoms in the writings of men to whom these exquisite marvels are familiar. Their descriptions are ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... scaled the peak and found no shelter in fame's bleak and barren height. Lead me, my Guide, before the light fades, into the valley of quiet where life's harvest ...
— Stray Birds • Rabindranath Tagore
... Ah! bleak and barren was the moor, Ah! loud and piercing was the storm, The cottage roof was shelter'd sure, The cottage hearth was bright and warm—An orphan boy the lattice pass'd, And, as he mark'd its cheerful glow, Felt doubly keen the midnight ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... heat. While their hats and caps and wrappers, hanging up, a few small bundles on the ground in a corner, and in another corner three or four old walking-sticks, worn down at the end to mere fringe, linked this smug interior with the bleak outside in ...
— The Seven Poor Travellers • Charles Dickens
... wee bit housie, too, in ruin! Its silly wa's the win's are strewin"! And naething now to big a new ane O, foggage green, And bleak December's winds ensuin' Baith ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... it would be only the last rich dazzle of the sunset. Presently it would vanish. The owls would be hooting. The chill night would be settling down upon us, out there in the bleak country, sorrowful, alone. Fear would take hold of us. To keep up our courage a little, we would nibble at the figs which we had hoped to give to the pages, at the fougasso which we had hoped to present to the Kings. As for the hay for the hungry camels, we would throw it away. Shivering in the ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... get the last wisps of fog and gray murk out of his system—but there were other passengers already shivering and eyeing him in unfriendly fashion because of the open window. He wanted to get out and run and run bareheaded, over the bleak, brown hills; but he closed the window and behaved as well as ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... world, where at least minorities of people had hoped for some nobler vision of the world's needs, and for some healing remedy for the evils which had massacred its youth. The League of Nations, which had seemed to promise so well, was hedged round by limitations which made it look bleak and barren. Still it was peace, and the rivers of blood had ceased to flow, and the men were ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... wee bit housie, too, in ruin! It's silly wa's the win's are strewin! An' naething, now, to big a new ane, O' foggage green! And bleak December's winds ensuin' Baith ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... country. Our view to the eastward was very confined; to the westward the interior was low and dark, and was backed in the distance by lofty ranges, parallel to which we had been running for some days. The right bank of the valley was beautifully undulated, but the left was bleak and bare. The valley had a breadth of from three to four miles, and the flats were more extensive under the former than under the latter. They were scarcely two feet above the level of the water, and were densely covered with reeds. As there was no mark upon the reeds to indicate ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... gambolling a welcome, or the children who called to her from the door-step. The world seemed strangely empty, for this evening at least. Love was snatched away, and they forbade remembrance. She went swiftly into the house without looking about her, conscious of a new dread and hatred for the bleak land, the forest's eternal shade, the snow and the cold,—for all those things she had lived her life amongst, ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... the easy-flowing style of the chroniclers of the period of which I write—(and how often has the scribe wished he could)—this chapter would open with the announcement that on this particularly bleak, wintry afternoon a gentleman in the equestrian costume of the day, and mounted upon a well-groomed, high-spirited white horse, might have been seen galloping rapidly up a country lane leading to ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... expected her travellers, and toward the east, where already the snow was taking on a faint bluish tint, a reflection of the sky deepening toward night in that half-circle of the horizon. Distant and a little bleak and cheerless ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... many men, taking northeast storms, bleak winds, thunder-showers, flies, mosquitoes, Canada thistles, hot sunshine, cold snows, weeds, briers, thorns, wild beasts, snakes, alligators, and such like things, which they don't happen to like, and putting them all together, attempt to persuade you that this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... but, to say nothing of the injury which not unfrequently attends the sudden change from the stagnant heat of our furnaced dwellings to the bleak winds of the icy lake, is it not true that the chest-muscles are so little moved that the finest skating may be done ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... seen Spring come to the mountains? Have you felt the subtle power on the human heart, of trance-drugged impulses awakening in plant, in animal, in humanity; in the deep hard arteries of the ancient hills themselves? Winter there is grim and bleak beyond the telling. In far separated cabins, held in the quarantine of mired roads, men and women have lived, from hand to mouth, sinking into ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... all circumstances is bleak and stern. But that early April day it seemed to Milly unduly depressing. The squalid little settlements on the outskirts of the great city were like eruptions in the low, flat landscape. Around the factories ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... slowly undressed she thought of Joe Hooper in his new "shepherd plaid" suit and wondered if he were getting along. And she thought of the Thompsons living in their bleak finery on the top floor of the Ardmore, just sixty feet removed from the hideous clatter of the traffic. And she speculated on the appearance of Mrs. Thompson with all the hairs in her eyebrows that nature meant them to have. And then she thought upon Claybrook's boyishness ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... 'Tis a bleak wild, but green and bright In the summer warmth and the mid-day light, There's the hum of the bee and the chirp of the wren, And the dash of the brook from the older glen. There's the sound of the bell from the scattered flock, And the shade of the beach lies cool on the rock, And fresh from ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... sand, The tall pines dwarfed to sage-brush, and the grass Grew sparse and bitter in the alkali, But fared we always toward the setting sun. Our oxen famished till the last one died And our great wagons rested in the snow. We climbed the high Sierras and looked down From winter bleak upon the land we sought, A sunny land, a rich and fruitful land, The warm and golden ...
— The Acorn-Planter - A California Forest Play (1916) • Jack London
... American, three in Italian, one in Dutch occupation. In all, at a cost of nearly a quarter of a million, some fourscore distinct posts of observation were provided; among them such inhospitable, and all but inaccessible rocks in the bleak Southern Ocean, as St. Paul's and Campbell Islands, swept by hurricanes, and fitted only for the habitation of seabirds, where the daring votaries of science, in the wise prevision of a long leaguer by the elements, were supplied ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... effort more, my altar this bleak sand; That Thou O God my life hast lighted, With ray of light, steady, ineffable, vouchsafed of Thee, Light rare untellable, lighting the very light, Beyond all signs, descriptions, languages; For that O God, be it my latest word, here on my knees, Old, poor, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... Farmer Sinclair's; they had often remarked him, but could give me no other information. I then proceeded towards the coast; there was a small public house belonging to Sir Lionel close by the sea shore; never had I seen a more bleak and dreary prospect than that which stretched for miles around this miserable cabaret. How an innkeeper could live there is a mystery to me at this day—I should have imagined it a spot upon which anything but a sea-gull or a Scotchman ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in his sly arraignment, prodded a very live, raw spot, and she knew that it was bleak unhappiness and not rancour that ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... simple enough, on the face of it, but the Eurasian was a master of cunning as well as a master of science, and high peril attended any matching of wits with him. Carse closed the log, his face bleak, his mind made up. A shuffle of feet brought his gaze ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... clergyman in the little village of Haworth, and that the literary sensation of the day found its source in a nervous, shrinking, awkward, plain, delicate young creature of thirty-one years of age, whose life, with the exception of two years, had been spent on the bleak and dreary moorlands of Yorkshire, and for the most part in the narrow confines of a grim gray stone parsonage. There she had lived a pinched and meagre little life, full of sadness and self-denial, with two sisters more delicate than herself, a dissolute brother, and a father her only ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... stared down into the closet for what seemed like an interminable time. His eyes were bleak and his mouth was grim and stiff as he passed a slow ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... escape from that Time Fear. The instant it came upon him he lost all interest in historical research. 1069, 732, 2407, 1928—every date terrified him. The Black Plague in London, the Great Fire, the Spanish Armada in flames off the coast of a bleak little island that would soon mold the destiny of half the world—how meaningless it all seemed in the ...
— The Man from Time • Frank Belknap Long
... to work in my own. I do not drink milk, and I do drink coffee; and I had rather run my risk with the average of city milk than with the average of country coffee. Fresh air is very desirable; but the air on the bleak hills of the Hudson in March is at times a trifle too fresh. The pure snow as it lies on field, and fence, and tree, is beautiful, I confess. But when one goes out to walk, it is convenient to ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... night, were all burned with the house. The stranger's horse and saddle were found in the barn, some little distance from the house, but there was no clew to his identity. There were only a few people then who had settled in this bleak region, and there was no funeral other than the assembling of a half dozen together, who dug a grave within fifty feet from the elms, and there laid the charred remains of the unfortunate victims. I had seen a small, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... and they were always cold. They seized her with bleak fingers; and one of Edith's chief functions was to comfort and reassure her for as long a while each time as was required to reach the stage of being able to shake them off. Here was one, however, too icily convincing to be shaken off. It fell upon her with the ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... Bleak, black, deep, and cold is Utrovand, a long pocket of glacial water, a crack in the globe, a wrinkle in the high Norwegian mountains, blocked with another mountain, and flooded with a frigid flood, three thousand ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... confetti still glistening in our hair, perfumed powder on our clothes, the murmuring of clandestine whispers still in our ears, the rhythm of swaying girls still in our blood. As we pass out into the bleak street, the first faint flush of dawn is in the east. The waesserer are washing off the cabs; a helmeted hauptmann salutes lazily as we pass, and we drive home full of the intoxications of that pagan gaiety which the Viennese, more than any other people, have preserved ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... be helped preoccupied him as if he had been twenty, thirty, fifty years older; and the world seemed to him a shocking place, a gray, bleak, melancholy hell where there was nothing but sadness, and ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... couch of moss. Had any of them come from Riversdale? Perhaps some had been hatched under his own eaves? (Any mention of Riversdale was sufficient to soften Owen's heart.) And now under the tamarisks his thoughts floated about that bleak house and its colonnade, thinking of a white swallow which had appeared in the park one year; friends were staying with him, every one had wanted to shoot it, but leave had not been granted; and his natural kindness of heart interested him as he lay in the shade of ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... boat for half an hour, Will sat there in the warm sunshine, trying to picture what it looked like up around cold, bleak Centerville just then. As he fondled his camera other memories were called up, in which it had done its share in the way of perpetuating the exciting events connected with the various outings enjoyed ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen
... truth, and when she came to know that he was doomed her pity was so vast that she sickened under its weight. She had come prepared to see him die, as all men do when they have lived out their time, but she had not counted on seeing him die like this, with suffering in his bleak old eyes and a smile of derision ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... ago the day was cold and bleak. It drizzled through the dreary hours, freezing as it fell. But to many loving hearts, its sleet and rain were not its gloom. On this day was laid to rest in Mother Earth the loved remains of one numbered in the health-seeking trio of the year before. What a contrast with that day one year ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... an Alpine peak, Stands, when the sunrise lifts the East, And gilds the crown and lights the cheek Of largest monarch down to least, Of all the summits cold and bleak, ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... twelve, and a wild, bleak night, blowing hard and raining in torrents. Dismal as it was outside, I was glad within—so glad that I could have shouted out from pure exultation. If any of you gentlemen have ever pined for a thing, and longed for it during twenty ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the forlorn little figure was out of sight; then she got up and looked around her. She shuddered. Her life was as bleak as the bleak landscape smitten by the salt wind—cold and grey and ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... glorious winter's night. Through a blue haze one saw the ground, covered with snow, shining under the magical moon. And the trees of the forest were also covered with snow; great clusters glistened in their branches. Almost as light as day. Not a bleak light, but an enchanting one, which dazzled in the cold, brisk air. Into the woods walked the Spirit of Art. As he gazed at the surrounding beauty he grew sad, and wondered why he had never reproduced such ...
— Futurist Stories • Margery Verner Reed
... warmth and colour, for I cared not for either; but now it seems to me that the bright gleam of your golden hair, and the warm glow of your violet robe, are far more beautiful than my ice-diamonds and sparkling crystals, and that my palace will be very bleak and desolate when you have gone. Stay with us, gentle fairy, and ...
— How the Fairy Violet Lost and Won Her Wings • Marianne L. B. Ker
... Mershire, which is in the middle of England, there lies a narrow ridge of high table-land, dividing, as by a straight line, the collieries and ironworks of the great coal district from the green and pleasant scenery of the western Midlands. Along the summit of this ridge runs the High Street of the bleak little town of Sedgehill; so that the houses on the east side of this street see nothing through their back windows save the huge slag-mounds and blazing furnaces and tall chimneys of the weird and terrible, yet withal fascinating, Black Country; while the houses ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... One bleak December day, at a market place in Warsaw, a young Jew, baited beyond endurance, struck out madly at his aggressors, and in the general melee that followed, the son of a high official was killed. No one knew how he became ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... God's bidding the avalanche fell. No precaution could save the traveler who was in its path. He was instantly borne to destruction, and buried where no voice but the archangel's trump could ever reach his ear. Terrific storms of wind and snow often swept through those bleak altitudes, blinding and smothering the traveler. Hundreds of bodies, like pillars of ice, embalmed in snow, are now sepulchred in those drifts, there to sleep till the fires of the last conflagration shall have consumed their winding sheet. Having toiled two days through such scenes ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... the shoulder, gently. Russ turned his head and looked into the face of his friend, a face as bleak as ever, but with a hint of smile in the ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... expenses and public investment. In 2000, the World Bank approved a structural adjustment loan of $35 million to help support fiscal reforms. However, reforms could prove difficult given the government's bleak financial situation. ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... this bleak country like one who saw it for the first time. She saw without perceiving, for her mind was occupied with personal consideration. She found it difficult to decide whether she should leave her bundle ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... to doubt that Charles James Fox ..." Mr. Burley began; but here Mrs. Stretton told him that she knew his sister well; had stayed with her not six weeks ago; and thought the house charming, but bleak in winter. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... guards snapped like whips around them as she and the other Rejects crowded and stumbled down the boarding ramp and out onto the rocky ground. There was the pull of a terrible gravity such as she had never experienced and they were in a bleak, barren valley, a cold wind moaning down it and whipping the alkali dust in bitter clouds. Around the valley stood ragged hills, their white tops laying out streamers of wind-driven snow, and the ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... affectionately implored him not to return to England, or attempt to resume his professional duties; but in vain. While staying in Ireland, he regretted the fast flight of time, evidently clinging to the society of his brothers and sisters, to the latter of whom he was most devotedly attached; but bleak, bitter, blighting November saw him again established at the Temple, and fairly over head and ears in the business of the commencing term. He attended the courts as usual; went out in the evenings to arbitrations and consultations as of old; dined also at the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... of toil and pleasure through the day of existence; then, fading, following the sinking sun, he goes down in death's night to the pallid populations of shade. Again: the fruitful bloom of summer is succeeded by the bleak nakedness of winter. So the streams of enterprise and joy that flowed full and free along their banks in maturity, overhung by blossoming trees, are shrivelled and frozen in the channels of age, and above their sepulchral beds the leafless branches creak in answer to the shrieks ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... also wanted a facsimile of his hayfield, as it looked when the haymakers were among the tedded grass, or under the Redwater ash-trees, to present him with a pleasant spectacle within, now that the bleak autumn was coming on, and there would be nothing without but soaked or battered ground, dark skies, and muddy or snowy ways. The Mayor desired a pig-sty, with the most charming litter of little black and white ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... than either Cannes or Nice, the mountains encircling the town more closely; there is consequently more hill-climbing, and fewer extended walks and excursions for invalids. It was occasionally bleak and cold after sunset during this early part of the year, and invalids were all obliged to gain the shelter of their dwellings by about four p.m. These cold, biting winds generally blew from north or east, the main streets being like drafty ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... It was a bleak day towards the end of March, and Mark was walking across the Park and Gardens from his rooms in South Audley Street to Malakoff Terrace, charged with a little note from Mabel to Trixie, to which he was to bring back an answer; for, although Mabel had not ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... delay arrival at the goal of our desires; we can dally by the wayside if we will. Only our own loss, our own suffering, our own unsatisfied longing shall punish us. But who is so stupid that he would remain wandering in the bleak and barren desert, when he might by a turn of his hand enter fields Elysian and merge his soul into the boundless areas of infinite bliss ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... garden. As days and weeks passed, the dream blurred into the gray of her humdrum life and was gone. And so that day and that night dropped from time into eternity, and who knows of all the millions of stars that swarmed the heavens, what ones held the wandering souls of the simple people of that bleak Western town as they lay on their pillows and dreamed. For if our waking hours are passed in worlds so wide apart, who shall know ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... one—for these are feelings which one never does talk of—there is no language that I ever learned which will express them. But I have never heard any music that could reach my soul like that which God gives us in the blossom season—the summer, the fall of late fruit—and the bleak, hard winter, when the clash of ice against ice has a sound that no ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... brother by the hand, not to let go till she had seen him in the bosom of his class-mates. There a sullen wild-eyed mite in petticoats was being dragged along, screaming, towards distasteful durance. It was a drab picture—the bleak, leaden sky above, the sloppy, miry stones below, the frowsy mothers and fathers, the ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... mountain there is peace! It is cold and gray there in the early morning, and the hills are bleak and black, but I remember days when from this same spot I've watched the deep, soft blue and green; I've sat here as the hills were glowing in the changing evening lights and our valley grew dark and cold. What ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... shoe-shop, rented a vacant store room on Market Street and went into the millinery way of life. And it wasn't enough that the tired genii had to gouge out the streets of Harvey; to fill in the gulleys and ravines; to dab in scores of new houses; to toil and moil over the new hotel, witching up four bleak stories upon the prairie. It wasn't enough that they had to cast a spell on people all over the earth, dragging strangers to Harvey by trainloads; it wasn't enough that the overworked genii should have to bring big George Brotherton to town ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... It towered across the sky, hiding Orion and the moon; it dipped below the horizons. The whole grey sheet of it rose up before his eyes and stood. Through its unfolding skirts ran ten thousand eddies of swirling sand as the creases of its grave-clothes smoothed themselves out in moonlight. And a bleak, scarred countenance, huge as a planet, gazed down into ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... and inspected the land upon which he had been cast. A small, barren island, bleak and inhospitable, and strangely metallic, met his gaze. The rays of the sun beating down upon it were thrown back with an uncomfortable intensity; the substance of the island was a lustrous, copperlike metal. No soil softened the harshness of the surface; ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... fallen into greater and greater disrepute. War costs, measured in terms of human well-being and welfare had soared to fantastic heights before 1945. The devastation, during that year, of two moderate sized cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was a foretaste of the increasingly bleak chances of human survival with the stockpiling of nuclear weapons far more destructive than the fission bombs used ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... brightening the gloom of his infancy with any deceptive gleams of January sunshine. A bitter north wind made a dreary howling among the leafless trees, and swept across the broad bare fields with merciless force—a bleak cruel new-year's-day, on which to go out a-pleasuring; but it was more in harmony with Ellen Carley's thoughts than brighter weather could have been; and she went to and fro about her morning's work, up and down cold windy passages, ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... gigantic portal of The Fort. This was a squat, ungainly pile of rugged gray stone, symmetrically built, but aggressively ugly in its very regularity, since it insulted the graceful curves of Nature everywhere discernible. It stood nakedly amidst the bare, bleak meadows glittering with pools of still water, with not even the leaf of a creeper to soften its menacing walls, although above them appeared the full-foliaged tops of trees planted in the barrack-yard. It looked as though the grim walls belted a secret orchard. ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... reached it they stood discernible in a tolerable winter daylight. The Honourable James Barker, one of the most powerful officials in the English Government (by this time a rigidly official one), was a lean and elegant young man, with a blank handsome face and bleak blue eyes. He had a great amount of intellectual capacity, of that peculiar kind which raises a man from throne to throne and lets him die loaded with honours without having either amused or enlightened the mind of a single man. Wilfrid Lambert, the youth with the nose which appeared to impoverish ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... winter months the depth of the water nowhere exceeded three feet, except after heavy rain, and although the stream was rather swift, it could usually be forded with very little risk. The valley itself had a bleak and deserted appearance, save in the immediate vicinity of the few and widely-scattered villages, around which were clustered fruit trees and ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... parish of St. Ouen's. Plemont, Grosnez, L'Etacq, all that giant headland could well take care of itself—the precipitous cliffs were their own defence. A watch-house here and there sufficed. No one lived at L'Etacq, no one at Grosnez; they were too bleak, too distant and solitary. There ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... varied to a considerable extent in its aspect, is yet universally shagged with forests, or deformed by marshes: moister on the side of Gaul, more bleak on the side of Norieum and Pannonia. [32] It is productive of grain, but unkindly to fruit-trees. [33] It abounds in flocks and herds, but in general of a small breed. Even the beeve kind are destitute of their usual stateliness and dignity of head: ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... bounds of Abbotsford, we came upon a bleak-looking farm, with a forlorn, crazy old manse, or farmhouse, standing in naked desolation. This, however, Scott told me, was an ancient hereditary property called Lauckend, about as valuable as the patrimonial ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... raw the north wind doth blow, Bleak in the morning early; All the hills are cover'd with snow, And winter's ...
— Harry's Ladder to Learning - Horn-Book, Picture-Book, Nursery Songs, Nursery Tales, - Harry's Simple Stories, Country Walks • Anonymous
... nestle mostly in sheltered nooks. Beyond Baughl's, the ruins first strike his view; the red walls of the church stand boldly out on the barren mesilla; and to the north of it there are two low brown ridges, the remnants of the Indian houses. The bleak summits of the high northern chain seem to rise in height as he advances; even the distant Trout mountains (Sierra de la Trucha) loom up solemnly towards the head-waters of the Pecos. About Glorieta the vale disappears, and through the shaggy crests of the Canon del Apache, ...
— Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier
... and featureless save for an occasional low, rounded mound, a menhir or a dolmen, and (if such may be termed features) great pits that opened in the earth like cold craters, which the countryfolk termed avens. A strange, bleak land, inhospitable, wind-harried, haunted, the home of seven ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... hadn't thought of him since the one time they had met in Alexandria. That was a year ago. It seemed much longer. Since the Boss-man had exiled his cousin to that bleak rock to the east of Flora there had been no word of him. And now—he laughed a sharp bark of humorless annoyance—Douglas couldn't have timed it ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... but he had discovered overnight the futility of fanning a hearthstone blaze when the flue was choked so completely. Before him lay the task of first correcting the draught. Temporary genialities had no place in his sudden, bleak speculations. Helen shirred his eggs to a turn, pressed the second cup of coffee on him, browned him a fresh slice of toast ... he suffered her favors, but he was unmoved by them. They did not even annoy him. When he kissed her good-by he felt the relaxation of her body ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... that the long day would never come to a close; yet it was as dark and as short as a bleak, gloomy day in November could be. Evening at length came, but brought no Algernon. Mr. Moore had paid his visit, and was gone. He expected nothing less than the death of his patient, after giving his consent to such an extraordinary event; and he had even condescended to take a draught and some ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... in passion's stormy day When wild I roamed the bleak heath of distress Bade the bright form of Justice meet my way, And told me ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... my taste, being as bleak as the bleakest parts of Scotland, and nothing like so pointed and characteristic. It has a flavour of its own, though, which I may try and catch, if I find the space, in the proposed article. 'Will o' the Mill' I sent, red hot, ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and had taken to the examination of cemeteries, and a careful inspection of the "cold hic jacets of the dead." At this time he was a frequent visitor of "Lone Mountain,"—a dreary hill-top, bleak enough in its original isolation, and bleaker for the white-faced marbles by which San Francisco anchored her departed citizens, and kept them down in a shifting sand that refused to cover them, and against a fierce and persistent wind that strove to blow them utterly away. ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... of beating cylinders hung in Kenneth Torrance's ears. At last came Point Christensen and a descent; sleep and then quick, decisive action; and again the amphibian rose, heavily loaded now, and droned on toward the ice and the cold bleak skies of the far north. On, ever on, until Point Barrow, Alaska's northernmost spur, was left behind to the east, and the world was one of drifting ice on gray water. Muscles cramped, mind dulled by the everlasting roar, head aching and weary, Ken held the ...
— Under Arctic Ice • H.G. Winter
... It was on a bleak and windy night in December that we were driven through a pelting rain to one of the docks on the North River, which our steamer was to leave at high tide in the early morning. When we alighted Mr. Murmurtot stood shivering in a greatcoat and muffler ...
— The Master of Silence • Irving Bacheller
... weather has been delicious. The drive has been more prosaic, more commonplace, or approaching to it, than we have before traveled in this hill country. This October coloring would make far tamer scenery beautiful, but I can fancy it very bleak and dismal when 'blow, blow November's winds,' whereas here, at the Franconian Notch, you feel as it were housed and secured by nature's vast fortresses and defences. The 'Eagle's Cliff' is on one side of you, and Mount Cannon ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... was no greenroom in the Westervelt, the reading took place on the open stage, which was bleak and draughty. The company sat in a funereal semicircle, with the author, the star, and the manager in a short line facing them. All the men retained their overcoats, for the morning was miserably raw, and at Helen's positive command kept their heads covered; ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... housie, too, in ruin! Its silly wa's the win's are strewin'! An' naething, now, to big a new ane, O' foggage[7-7] green! An' bleak December's winds ensuin', Baith ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... strains. 735 Arcadia's sons, the dwellers at the foot Of mount Cyllene, where AEpytus sleeps Intomb'd; a generation bold in fight, And warriors hand to hand; the valiant men Of Pheneus, of Orchomenos by flocks 740 Grazed numberless, of Ripe, Stratia, bleak Enispe; Mantinea city fair, Stymphelus and Parrhasia, and the youth Of Tegea; royal Agapenor these, Ancaeus' offspring, had in sixty ships 745 To Troy conducted; numerous was the crew, And skilled in arms, which ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... is longer than the cold, bleak monotone of a dry gale out of the north. There is an undertone to the voices which depresses the soul as the rank wind shrivels the body. On whistling wings great flocks of wild fowl come driving down before the wintry gales, or they turn back from the prospect of an early spring. Steamboats ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... quick with unborn states! Autumn was mellow in the fatherland when they set sail, And winter deepened as they neared the West. Out of the desert sea they came at last, And their hearts warmed to see that frozen land. O, first gray dawn that filtered through the dark! Bleak, glorious birth-hour of our northern states! They stood upon the shore like new created men; On barren solitudes of sand they stood, The conquered sea behind, the unconquered wilderness before. Some died that year beneath the cruel cold, And some for heartsick ...
— The Song of the Stone Wall • Helen Keller
... and built the great earth-camp of Clovelly Dykes, or the smaller bold stronghold of Countisbury. At least, conjecturally this is so, and it is pleasant to believe it, for it links the Devon of our own day, the Devon of rich valleys and windy moors, the land of streams and orchards, of bleak, magnificent cliff and rock-guarded bay, of shaded combe and suave, fair villages, in an unbroken tradition of name and habitation with the men of that silent and ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... say that he might not have been a marrying man if disease and deafness had not harrowed his volcanic soul, and made his life so largely one of tempestuous tragedy, in which he wandered through the world, and found it as homeless and as bleak as did the Wandering Jew, whose quarrels with Fate were no more fierce, more majestic, nor more vain than Beethoven's. Among the multitudinous agonies that throng his letters and rave through his music, are many cries of wild longing for a ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... another species, but there too only the experts can tell the difference. In the beautiful province of Ontario, between the three great lakes Ontario, Erie and Huron, is a region where it grows well and is universally prevalent, and it grows alike in the limestone flats of the South and on the bleak sandy prairies and ridges of our great central plain. In the Tennessee mountains and southward into Alabama is, however, the greatest red-cedar region and the place where the trees reach their finest growth. In northern Alabama fallen trees have been found 100 feet in height, three feet ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... chilly and empty afternoons in early winter, when the daylight is silver rather than gold and pewter rather than silver. If it was dreary in a hundred bleak offices and yawning drawing-rooms, it was drearier still along the edges of the flat Essex coast, where the monotony was the more inhuman for being broken at very long intervals by a lamp-post that looked less civilized than a tree, or a tree that looked more ugly than a lamp-post. A ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... approach to sea-side cliffs that we saw was at Whitby, on the Yorkshire coast, where the abbey of St. Hilda stood, after whom the American maiden in The Marble Faun was named. But the German Ocean was bleak and cold, and my experiences in it were even more harrowing than elsewhere; I can imagine nothing more dispiriting to a small boy than to be dragged down over a harsh beach in an old-fashioned British bathing-machine, its damp floor covered with gritty sand, with ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... ground for Roger. It would be as impossible for any bibliophile to pass this famous second-hand bookstore as for a woman to go by a wedding party without trying to see the bride. Although it was a bleak day, and a snell wind blew down the street, the pavement counters were lined with people turning over disordered piles of volumes. Within, he could see a vista of white shelves, and the many-coloured tapestry of bindings stretching far away to ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... gelding's reins, walked forward, hoping she wouldn't make him push around her. But apparently she read the determination in his face and stood aside, her expression bleak now. ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... ruined castle loomed darkly, a ghastly monument of evil deeds. I looked about for the madman but saw him not. The weirdness of the place, the horror of its secret, crept into my blood. I became afraid. Down the bleak road I picked my way, glancing fearsomely over my shoulder. I fain would have fled ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... inch from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... evilly," said Dick. "But what cheer! 'Tis but a squall, and presently it will blow over." But, in spite of his words, he was depressingly affected by the bleak disorder of the sky and the wailing and fluting of the wind; and as he got over the side of the Good Hope and made once more for the landing-creek with the best speed of oars, he crossed himself devoutly, and recommended to Heaven the lives ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... antiquated dwelling certainly does not belong to a new dispensation. Another land-mark of the past deserves notice—the ex-Commander of the Forces' lofty quarters; from its angular eaves and forlorn aspect it generally went by the name of "Bleak House." I cannot say whether the place was ever haunted, but it ought to have been. [149] On the summit of the plateau, formerly known as Buttes- a-Nepveu, and facing Mr. John Roche's stately mansion, Hon. P. Garneau and M. Bilodeau have ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... waves come rolling in to this rough and barren shore, but as far as the eye can see there is yet no sign of the awaited boat. On that point of land in the distance are a few rude houses which must be the homes of the Pilgrims. This dreary place, so bleak and barren, makes us wonder how they could ever hope to survive the perils ...
— Stories Pictures Tell - Book Four • Flora L. Carpenter
... joy. Miss Abingdon's large staff of servants, all elderly and all over-paid, combined with their mistress to welcome Miss Erskine back. The familiar rooms had never looked more pleasant than on this bleak December afternoon. A big tea-table was set by the fire, and the massive silver upon it winked delightedly at the newly arrived guest. The fire (Miss Abingdon was famous for her good fires) roared joyfully up the chimney; the dogs knew Jane's voice ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... definitely adopted, and no old one left to fall back upon. And Madison Avenue, after dark, shows little to reassure a new playwright who carries in his pocket a note ending with the words, "before deciding to put on another play I have been considering." It was Bleak Street, that night, for young Stewart Canby, and a bleak, bleak ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... though privately I promised a pardon as before. After travelling a little way, we emerged from the low land of the valley, and ascended a higher track to the normal level of the plateau, which, as I have said before, was all bleak and barren, with scarcely a tree growing on it, and very stony. Here I saw a large troop of ostriches and numberless gazelles stalking away out of the line of the caravan's march. My men were all highly anxious I should shoot them, but I would not, to try what effect ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... broad awake now; and both the shadow and the peaceful expression were gone from her face. It was a look of blank astonishment at first with which she regarded her father, but very soon indeed that changed into one of bleak despair. He saw that she understood perfectly what he was there for, and that there was no need at all for him to trouble himself with making ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... stay little Violet, and on through the long hall she went, heedless of the snow that gathered on her feet, and the bleak wind that blew around her; while the King with wondering eyes looked on the golden light that played upon the dark walls as ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott
... plantation and another gate, and drew up at the door of a very large, handsome, brick house, with projecting gables and a verandah. The older I grow the more convinced I am that contrast is everything in this world; and nothing I can write can give you any idea of the delightful change from the bleak country we had been slowly travelling through in pouring rain, to the warmth and brightness of this charming house. There were blazing fires ready to welcome us, and I feel sure you will sufficiently appreciate this fact when I tell you that by the time the coal reaches ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... it was, running through a region of bleak, barren, and desolate mountains. Through these the stream had forged its way by numerous canons, and rushed along a channel at most places inaccessible. It was a black and gloomy river. Where were ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... been a bleak July day, and as night came on a bitter westerly howled through the trees. Cold! was n't it cold! The pigs in the sty, hungry and half-fed (we wanted for ourselves the few pumpkins that had survived the drought) fought savagely ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach, A fisherman stood aghast, To see the form of a maiden fair, Lashed close to a ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... doorway he peered cautiously out. The sky was dull and hazy and a steady, drizzling rain fell. There is something about a drear, rainy day which "gets" one, if he has but a makeshift shelter; and this bleak, gray morning carried poor Tom's mind back with a rush to rainy days at his beloved Temple Camp when scouts were wont to gather in tent and ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... questions immediately under our consideration. "Red Gauntlet" has been cited as an authority in this body, but I think I might cite another of the same class which would be more in point. It is the "Bleak House," by Charles Dickens, in which the circumlocution office is so graphically described. It would be decidedly more ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... son of the great Chartist), who had been a friend of mine in Heidelberg, where he had taken his degree as doctor of Philosophy, to pass a week in the country at a charming old Elizabethan place, said to have been the original Bleak House. Everything there was perfectly delightful. There were two or three charming young ladies. I remember among them a Miss Oliphaunt. There was a glorious picnic, to which I and all walked eight miles and back. I admired on this occasion for the first time the pedestrian ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... with "savings," had delivered his soul to the local builders and built himself a house, and there it stood, ill-designed, mean-looking, isolated, ill-placed on a cheaply fenced plot, athwart which his domestic washing fluttered in the breeze amidst a bleak desolation of enterprise. Then presently our railway crossed a high road, and a row of mean yellow brick houses—workmen's cottages, and the filthy black sheds that made the "allotments" of that time a universal eyesore, marked ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
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