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More "Desolation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I had thought, bare and deserted. There was a musty smell about it, as though it had not been opened for a long time, and dust and desolation lay heavy upon it. A dark stain on the floor near the window suggested to my fancy the idea of blood. Had some wayfarer less fortunate than I been inveigled to his death in this ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... my own faith rather than to the object of it for salvation; and I did in my heart, exceedingly glory in this supposed faith of mine. The dreadful dispensation under which I was laid showed me at once, that of faith I had not to the value of a grain of mustard-seed; and now I felt the desolation of spirit which none can know who have not been so compelled to make such a discovery. I did not rebel; I owned the justice of God: nay, the very first words I could find breath to utter broke forth ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... seen her, not heard the sound of the sleigh-bells. He was standing with his foot upon the sawbuck and the saw across his knee, he was staring at the woodpile, and there was stamped upon his face a look which no man or woman had ever seen there, a look of utter loneliness and desolation, a look as of a soul condemned to wander forever through the infinite, cold spaces ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... on the mantel, where the children could see it. Great sobs shook Jurgis at this memory—they would spend their Christmas in misery and despair, with him in prison and Ona ill and their home in desolation. Ah, it was too cruel! Why at least had they not left him alone—why, after they had shut him in jail, must they be ringing Christmas chimes ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... the poor aching head of the latter in her lap and trying to speak a word of consolation to the old, broken-hearted man, whose hand was grasped in hers. But Maddy knew he was there. She could hear his voice each time he spoke to Mrs. Noah, and that made the desolation easier to bear. She did not look forward to the time when he would be gone; and when at last he told her he was going, she started quickly, and with a gush of tears, exclaimed: ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... of Donegal will be in the front of the battle. No heart beats more warmly for freedom than mine; and did I stand alone I would take to the bogs and join those who shelter there, defying the might of England. But I have my people to think of. I have seen how the English turn a land to desolation as they sweep across it, and I will not bring fire and sword into these mountain valleys unless all Ireland is banded in a common effort. You have seen Scotland wasted from sea to sea, her cities burned, her people slain by thousands, her dales and valleys wasted; ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... shrub, grew on that sterile ground. Nothing could be more dreary than the prospect—a bleak waste without vegetation; the high mountains with their rock and crags; the everlasting ice and the vast masses of snow. The very sublimity of the scene was awfully impressed with all the marks of stern desolation and solitude. As in that cold climate wood is not liable to decay, they joined the boards of which the hut was constructed, with the help of their axe, very tolerably, filling up the crevices with moss, which grows in abundance all over the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... their calm light steals into my soul, and the faces of my loved scholars come out of the intervening darkness and smile upon me, until, for a brief moment, I forget my barred window, the mad-house, and my desolation, and fancy that I am again with them. I boarded with Daniel Baker, and can never forget his own and his ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... compatible with a state of penury. Dilapidated old palazzi, if you will go out of the way for them, are to be had for five shillings a year. And as for the people who live in them—no, until you have explored Venice socially as much as I have you can form no idea of their domestic desolation. They live on nothing, for they have nothing to live on." The other idea that had come into my head was connected with a high blank wall which appeared to confine an expanse of ground on one side of the house. Blank I call it, but it was figured over with the patches that please a painter, ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... was a sad sight to see the great courts and long galleries left all dreary and empty. It made me think of Whitehall and of Windsor, though we little knew that at that very time there was worse there than even desolation. ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... tramped homeward through the rain, or been picked up by waiting conveyances. There was no one to meet Grace, and it made her feel homesick and lonely. As she stood alone on the rough unpainted boardwalk in front of the passenger-room a sense of desolation crept into the very marrow of her bones. She couldn't understand it, this indifference on the part of her family. The ticket agent came out and was about to lock the door. He was going home to his ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... it. But Francisco was overwhelmed by the desolation. "I am going South," he told his son. "I can't bear to see this. I don't even know ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... this peak or that, widening the horizon, until at length the whole, wide, tumbled mass of peak and precipice, of canyon, valley, and tortuous, twisted mountain trail lay revealed in all its grim, lifeless, forbidding desolation. ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... ill cutting of the turf. There hath, indeed, been some little improvement in the manufactures of linen and woollen, although very short of perfection: But our trade was never in so low a condition: And as to agriculture, of which all wise nations have been so tender, the desolation made in the country by engrossing graziers, and the great yearly importation of corn from England, are lamentable instances under what ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... in some forgotten past. Rachel's eyes had a certain calm fixity in them that comes not of natural temperament, but of past conflict, long waged, and barely but irrevocably won. A faint ray of comfort stole across the desolation of his mind as he looked at her. He did not notice whether she was handsome or ugly, any more than we do when we look at the dear familiar faces which were with us in their childhood and ours, which have grown up beside us under the same roof, which have rejoiced with us and wept with us, ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... a new proof to Edith of the depth of need to which she had come down that she missed them. She missed their frivolity and inconsequentiality because they were the only interests she had. She was thrown back, therefore, on her own desolation and on her ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... more than in the way of soldiering. They liked the little addition to their pay, if they were of frugal mind; they had also their own quiet room to sleep in, and I often thought the family life, offering as it did a contrast to the bareness and desolation of the noisy barracks, appealed to the domestic instinct, so strong in some men's natures. At all events, it was always easy in those days to get a man from the company, and they sometimes remained for years with an officer's family; in some cases ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... sword! Swift messengers, and sharp, Reapers that leave no gleanings. In their path Silence and desolation fiercely stalk. —O'er trampled hills, and on the blood-stain'd plains There is no low of kine, or bleat of flocks, The fields are rifled, and the ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... assigned by the firm to their Mr. Boole for his personal use was a small and dingy compartment, redolent of that atmosphere of desolation which lawyers alone know how to achieve. It gave the impression of not having been swept since the foundation of the firm, in the year 1786. There was one small window, covered with grime. It was one of those windows you see only in lawyers' offices. Possibly some reckless Mainprice ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... Beelzebub the prince of the demons casteth he out demons. 16 And others, trying him, sought of him a sign from heaven. 17 But he, knowing their thoughts, said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and a house divided against a house falleth. 18 And if Satan also is divided against himself, how shall his kingdom stand? because ye say that I cast out demons by Beelzebub. 19 And if I by Beelzebub cast out demons, by whom do your sons ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... hastening onward, for which your present petty trials are serving as a preparatory discipline. According to the manner in which these are met and supported, will be your patience in the hour of deep darkness and bitter desolation. Waste not one of your present petty sorrows: let them all, by the help of prayer, and watchfulness, and self-control, work their appointed work in your soul. Let them lead you each day more and more trustingly to "cast all ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... ear for them. But he looked back and up to the western sky, with a flat-topped mountain clearly outlined against it. There was his country, and in his country he had left Jig alone and helpless. A feeling of utter desolation and failure came over him. He had started with a double-goal—Sandersen or Cartwright, or both. He had failed lamentably of reaching either one. He looked back to the sheriff, squat, insignificant, gray-headed. What a man to ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... on the coming tide, his eyes seemed to dwell particularly on the black and decayed hulls of two vessels, which, half immersed in the quicksand, still addressed to every heart a tale of shipwreck and desolation. The tide wheeled and foamed around them, and, creeping inch by inch up the side, at last fairly threw its waters over the top, and a long and hollow eddy showed the resistance which ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... The third act—the terrible peripety in the love of Philippe and Helene—has run its agonizing course, and worked itself out. The old dramaturgy would certainly have ended the scene with a bang, so to speak—a swoon or a scream, a tableau of desolation, or, at the very least, a piece of tearful rhetoric. M. Donnay does nothing of the sort. He lets his lovers unpack their hearts with words until they are exhausted, broken, dazed with misery, and have nothing more to say. ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... the door and locked it she turned back into the empty room, moving uncertainly as though scarcely knowing what she was about. And then, suddenly, the terror of utter desolation seized her, and for the first time she realised what Clive had been to her, and what he had not been—understood for the first time in her life the complex miracle called love, its synthesis, its every element, ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... years the mansion had been erected, and by turns became the seat of baronial splendour and of civil feuds,—of the best and basest feelings of mankind;—the loyalty and hospitality of cavaliers; the fanatic outrages of Roundheads; and ultimately of wanton desolation! The gate through which Colonel Lilburne and his men entered, was blocked up with a hurdle; and the yard where his forces were marshalled was covered with high flourishing grass; the towers had almost become mere shells, but the vaulted passages, once stored with luxuries and weapons, still ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 279, October 20, 1827 • Various
... out and then gave a cry of joy. It was broad daylight, but the army was gone, soldiers, horses, tents, everything. The Calle de los Muertos was once more what its name meant. Silence and desolation had regained the ruined city. He blew out the lantern and set it down at the opening. It had served him well. Then he went out and climbed again to the summit of the pyramid, from which he examined ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... except His Holy Spirit:"—"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish but have everlasting life." "Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and a house divided against a house falleth." "But whoso hath this world's goods and seeth his brother have need and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?" "All things whatsoever ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... writers, Gildas alone appears to me (as often as the course of my subject leads me to consult him) worthy of imitation; for by committing to paper the things which he himself saw and knew, and by declaring rather than describing the desolation of his country, he has compiled a history more remarkable for its ...
— The Description of Wales • Geraldus Cambrensis
... preceding chapter, form a singular feature in the physical aspect of the island of Sardinia. There are few travellers, I think, of much experience who, in traversing such tracts of country, have not been struck at one time by the desolation of their depths of solitude, or been pleased, at another, by the glimpses of nomade life, their occasional accompaniments; and who would not be willing to admit that, in their general impressions on ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... He seems also to have entered into some examination of the specific prophecies; for he objects to the application of the words "the abomination of desolation" to other objects than that which he considers its original meaning. See Hieronym. on Matt. xxiv. 15, the reference to which is given in ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... article in the London Examiner, springs from the same impulse: I love a good cigar, and have been in my day an inveterate smoker, but hope, and am now endeavoring, to overcome the useless and enervating habit, more especially since I have seen the poverty and desolation occasioned in Virginia from the cultivation of tobacco. Still I must confess, that even now, like an old war horse when he smells powder, am I, when I come in contact with the odoriferous exhalation of a good cigar. If he with delight snuffs in ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... the unspeakable horrors of this war. It is not only those who are fighting at the front who have known the full tragedy, it is those also who are fighting at home the relentless foe of poverty, sickness, and desolation. If victory comes to Japan, half the glory must be for those silent heroic little women, who gave their all, then took up the man's burden and cheerfully bore ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... for two years, and the great point was to preserve its air of desolation. No outside arrangement was touched; the torn remnants of some balcony hangings were left fluttering in the wind; the closed windows and the closed doors, the absence of smoke from the chimneys and of lights from the windows, preserved the ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... "I know. I have just been learning." The brave lips quivered, but she kept firm hold of herself. "I know all the joy and—all the pain." She stopped short at the look in Dick's face. The buoyant, glad light flickered and went out. A look of perplexity, of great fear, and then of desolation, like that on her own face, spread over his. He knew her too well to misunderstand her meaning. She leaned over to him, still kneeling in the grass. "Oh, Dick, dear!" she cried, taking his hand in hers with a mother-touch and tone, "must you suffer, too? Oh, don't say you must! ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... beautiful creature in the world. He stared back along his path, but the many curves and breaks in the cliff hid from him every sign of Chance Along. Not a roof, chimney, or streamer of smoke broke the desolation. In all the frozen scene he could find no mark of man or man's handiwork. South and north, east and west, lay the frosted barrens, the gray sea, the edge of the cliff twisting away to nothingness around innumerable ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... the sun of the day following the fire risen upon the scene of smoking desolation, when preparations began for rebuilding. It was felt at once that the city would be rebuilt more substantially ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... saith also another prophet, 'The great day of the Lord is near, and hasteth greatly. The bitter and austere voice of the day of the Lord hath been appointed. A mighty day of wrath is that day, a day of trouble and distress, a day of wasteness and desolation, a day of blackness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness, a day of the trumpet and alarm. And I will bring distress upon the wicked, and they shall walk like blind men, because they have sinned ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... not by the green pasture of the restored soul, but houseless, under the shelter of a palace vestibule ruined and abandoned, with the noise of the axe and the hammer in her ears, and the tumult of a city round about her desolation. The spectator turns away at first, revolted, from the central object of the picture, forced painfully and coarsely forward, a mass of shattered brickwork, with the plaster mildewed away from it, and the mortar mouldering from its seams; and if he ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... Eric returned to No. 7, full of grief, and weighed down with the sense of desolation and mystery, the other boys were silent from sympathy in his sorrow. Duncan and Llewellyn both knew and loved Russell themselves, and they were awestruck to hear of his death; they asked some of the particulars, but ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... favour, for all the pride of his soul. Then came up Iblis (whom God curse!) and Tuhfeh rose to him and kissed his hands. He in turn kissed her hand and called down blessings on her and said, 'How deemest thou? Is [not] this place pleasant, for all its loneliness and desolation?' Quoth she, 'None may be desolate in this place;' and he said, 'Know that no mortal dare tread [the soil of] this place.' But she answered, 'I have dared and trodden it, and this is of the number of thy ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... another surprising interior. There was plain living and high thinking in the midst of a wilderness that was, to say the least, uninviting; the windows rattled and the sand peppered them. Without was the abomination of desolation; but within the desert blossomed as ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... But it is profoundly hoped that no coming generation will be called upon to utilize the experiences of the past in facing in their day, in field or forum, the dangers of disruption and anarchy, mortal strife and desolation, between those of one race, and blood, and nationality, that marked the history of America ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... to make the heart of any onlooker turn sick, and a shudder passed through the frame of the trader as he gazed at the scene of desolation before him. ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer
... lowlands of Belgium. The heart-broken woman rested motionless in the stern-sheets. We covered her with all the available garments, and, even in the midst of our own griefs, could not help feeling that the suddenness of her double desolation had made her perfectly unconscious of ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... but I have known homes, too, that made drunkards by the shortest cut. I know a dozen now—yes, ten dozen—from which, if I had to live there, I should certainly escape to the saloon with its brightness and cheer as often and as long as I could to brood there perhaps over the fate which sowed desolation in one man's path that another might reap wealth and luxury. That last might not be my way, but it is a human way, and it breeds hatred which is not good mortar for us to build with. It does not bind. Let us remember that and just ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... which no man might measure, the glances which had just devoured his young but virile countenance passed to that of the father. They did not leave it again. "Son?" With what tenderness he spoke, but with what a ring of desolation. "I understand your effort and appreciate it; but it is a useless one. You cannot deceive these friends of ours—men who have known my life. If you were in the ravine that night, so was I. If you handled John Scoville's stick, so did I, AND AFTER YOU! Let us not struggle for the ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... would not have been disgraced by your choice; and the name, for which I thank not my father, should not have been despised by the woman who pardoned my presumption, nor by the man who now tramples on my anguish and curses me in my desolation." ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... dear friend, whether I ever shall get home across that great ocean, but here in Rome I shall no longer wish to live. O, Rome, my country! could I imagine that the triumph of what I held dear was to heap such desolation on thy head! ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... make us so wretched. Oh, mother, what would home be without you? It is only an hour or two since we missed you; but those hours were full of desolation. Tell ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... now wealthy provinces were soon in his hands. The silk factories were silent; the Cities were falling into utter and hopeless desolation: rebellion, war and famine, raged and reigned supreme. Gordon made them pause! His marvellous power of organizing and leading men, a power derived from an inflexible, determined, fearless, and deeply religious temperament, influenced the ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle
... were filled with the silks and woollens manufactured in the vicinity. All this has passed away, the town has the aspect of a ruined place, and its lofty and elegant public buildings—the remains of former prosperity—seem to mock its present desolation. ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... and to the point. I agreed pretty well with all you said about George Eliot: a high, but, may we not add? - a rather dry lady. Did you - I forget - did you have a kick at the stern works of that melancholy puppy and humbug Daniel Deronda himself? - the Prince of prigs; the literary abomination of desolation in the way of manhood; a type which is enough to make a man forswear the love of women, if that is how it must be gained. . . . Hats off all the same, you understand: a woman ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his nervousness Ivan noticed, as he waited, the unusual fact that the shades of the drawing-room were all pulled down. And it seemed to him, too, that there was about the house an air of unwonted desolation, which, as the minutes passed, certainly became intensified in his mind. Once more he sounded the huge knocker; and yet again: this time so vigorously that the door shook. His sense of calamity had grown till it was a presentiment. Yet his heart rose as, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... Schoolmaster, "I wept, for I suffered, and rage is fruitless. I say to myself, to-morrow, and to-morrow, forever I shall be a prey to the same delirium, the same mournful desolation. What a life! oh, what a life! Better I had chosen death, than to be interred alive in this abyss, which incessantly racks my thoughts! Blind, solitary, and a prisoner! what ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... desolation; and I rejoice to leave it again this evening. Even Pam has not a lev'ee above once or twice a week. Next winter, I suppose, it will be a fashion to remove into the city: for, since it is the mode to choose aldermen at this end of the town, the maccaronis will certainly adjourn to Bishopsgate-street, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... now a critical period with us. We were a small number in the garrison—a powerful army before our walls, whose appearance proclaimed inevitable death, fearfully painted, and marking their footsteps with desolation. Death was preferable to captivity; and if taken by storm, we must inevitably be devoted to destruction. In this situation we concluded to maintain our garrison, if possible. We immediately proceeded to collect what we could of ...
— The Adventures of Daniel Boone: the Kentucky rifleman • Uncle Philip
... emerging from under a French War Loan poster. The ceiling was adorned with an oval of flowers and little plaster cupids in low relief which had also suffered and in places showed the laths. The office was nearly empty. The littered desks and silent typewriters gave a strange air of desolation to the gutted drawing-room. Andrews walked boldly to the furthest desk, where a little red card leaning against the typewriter ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... pard-like Spirit beautiful and swift— A love in desolation masked—a Power Girt round with weakness; it can scarce uplift The weight of the superincumbent hour; Is it a dying lamp, a falling shower, A breaking billow;—even whilst we speak Is it not broken? On the withering flower The killing sun smiles brightly: on a cheek ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... spirit of my dream. The wanderer was alone as heretofore, The beings which surrounded him were gone, Or were at war with him; he was a mark For blight and desolation, compassed round With hatred and contention; pain was mixed In all which was served up to him, until, Like to the Pontic monarch of old days, He fed on poisons, and they had no power, But were a kind of nutriment; ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... melancholy sea-marshes where men cannot dwell for the malaria, and where for hour after hour we rode in a silence unbroken save by the plash of fish in the lagoon, or the cry of a heron solitary among the reeds. This desolation lasted all the way to Biguglia, where we turned aside again among the foothills to avoid the fortress of Bastia and the traffic of the roads about it. Beyond Bastia we were safe in the fastnesses of Cape Corso, across which, from this eastern shore to the western, and to the camp at ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... visit, that I should ever have landed here, under my present peculiar circumstances, or that after so many years I should find so much to interest me in a place that presented nothing to my recollection but utter desolation. The alteration in the island was indeed curious, and I am happy to learn, that the improvements still proceed with at least equal energy, and proportionate success. Since my last visit, I am told that, the inhabitants have greatly increased their facilities of obtaining, and preserving ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... carry, and hiding, in rude and uncertain places of concealment, those which they were compelled to leave behind. The region, thus, which lay between the two encampments was rapidly becoming a solitude and a desolation, across which no communication was made, and no tidings passed to give the armies at the encampments intelligence ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... the good priest, and his own deep reflections on the subject. The madness of all human pursuits—the vanity and frivolity of life—now awoke in his breast sensations of pity and disgust. But love and friendship—those drops of honey in the cup of gall—did not their sweetness in this hour of desolation atone for the bitter dregs, and hold him to earth? The mighty struggle was to rend asunder these new-formed and holy ties. For him there existed no hope of a reprieve. Wise and good men had tried and found him guilty ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... her eye fixed upon the ship which was bearing away him whom she might never see more. The white sail is smaller and smaller, until it appears but a speck, and is finally lost in the distance. And then what a sense of desolation! Oh, might we all seek for strength in time of trouble, of Him who will not turn a deaf ear to the cries of his children! Who hath said, "As thy day, so shall thy strength be." Would that all might seek for ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... cultivated on all sides, yet the rocks were entirely bare, which surprised me, as they were more on a level with the surface than any I had yet seen. On inquiry, however, I learnt that some years since a forest had been burnt. This appearance of desolation was beyond measure gloomy, inspiring emotions that sterility had never produced. Fires of this kind are occasioned by the wind suddenly rising when the farmers are burning roots of trees, stalks of beans, &c, with which they manure the ground. ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... vocabulary of folly. All this, however, quadrates with the character of a good republican; as he hates England, why not murder English?" In April, 1803, Dennie denounced Democratic Government, and prophesied that of it would come "civil war, desolation and anarchy." His pranks had now become too broad to bear with, and on the Fourth of July this latest publication of his was condemned as "an inflammatory and seditious libel," and a bill of indictment ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... may be traced in martyrdoms of the flesh, in weary hours, strange experiences, unhappy tempers, restless struggles, unrequited triumphs,—in the glare of midnight lamps, and of wild, haggard eyes,—in sorrow, want, desolation, despair, and madness. Born in sorrow, the book trails a pathway of sorrow through the ages. And each book in the Parisian library stands for all this,—some that were produced with tears having been always read for jest,—some that were lightly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... light was blinding, dazzling, cruel. Away at sea it had nothing to focus itself upon, nothing to exhibit but infinite spaces of blue water and desolation. ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... Bill hunt for his mine in the creek beds. The last of the moose went down to their yarding grounds, and even the far-off glimpse of a caribou was a rarity. The marmots had descended into their burros, the snowshoe rabbit hopped, a lonely figure in the desolation, through the drifts. Such of the other little people that remained—the weasel and the ptarmigan—had turned to the hue of the ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... he groaned. "You do not know what sort of a life it would be, the hardships, the deprivations, the necessarily long separations when I would have to be in some place utterly impossible for you, for months at a time. It's the very abomination of desolation. And fancy your trying to adapt yourself to it! You, used to this!" rapping the electric. "And this, and this!" touching lightly the ermine on her cloak and the jewels at her throat. "No." He shook ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... of the desert was safe from his terrors," and he "carried flame at his pleasure among the nomes of the south." Even while bringing desolation to his foes, he sought to repair the ills which the invasion had brought upon his own subjects. He administered such strict justice that evil-doers disappeared as though by magic. "When night came, he who ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... unrest and discouragement, Iver appeared, and his presence lit up the desolation in which she was. The sight of him, the sound of his voice, aroused old recollections, helped to drive away the shadows that environed her, and that clouded her mind. There was no harm in this, and yet she was uneasy. Cheerful as she was when he was present, there was something feverish in this ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... liberal or conservative, did not understand much in the world of politics, but they did understand that such a doctrine as that, if carried out, would take them to a very Gehenna of revolutionary desolation. And so Moggs was banished from the Northern Star, the inn at which Mr. Westmacott was living, and was forced to set up his radical staff at the ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... twenty-eight years to come, and then have compassed fewer years than the man beside her. She had refused resolutely to permit her thought to dwell on the tragic difference in their ages, a difference that had no meaning now, but would symbolize death and desolation hereafter; but her mind had moments of abrupt insight that no Will could conquer, and not long since she had gasped and covered her ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... her sitting the very figure of desolation in the midst of her bed, with her face thinned and whitened to the little white hull of a prayer. The moment she was alone with him she poured forth such a tale of degradation as rarely passes the lips of a woman. Since a year after her husband's death she had ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... for the day. I need amusement, interest, occupation—more than you can imagine. I am in the same mood, as far as desolation and discouragement go, that you are in. I must be about, seeing people and diverting my mind. We can each supply the other with one thing that we need. I have money. To earn a little of that professionally, by a humane service, should ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... the commandant of the fortress had terrible tales to tell of Ulugh Ali's raid on the island, and the horrors that the Turks had perpetrated in the villages, which now presented a scene of ruin and desolation. Gil d'Andrada rejoined the fleet there. He had not seen the Turkish armament, but he had obtained news of it from coasters and fishermen. He estimated from these reports that it was inferior in numbers to the Christian fleet, and he ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... now into lower grounds near the Mississippi. All around them was a vast and luxuriant vegetation, cut by sluggish streams and bayous. But the same desolation reigned everywhere. The people had fled before the advance of the armies. Late in the afternoon they saw pickets in blue, then the Mississippi, and a little later they ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... her husband's confidence, and had been his helpmeet throughout their married life. She was well able to carry on single-handed the course of action he had pursued through his long rule at Gablehurst; yet not the less for this did she feel the desolation of her approaching widowhood; and it seemed an additional sorrow (although she recognized its necessity) that Tom was also to be taken ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... heads and driven in herds, like cattle, into Hungary. If a regular army moved out against them, they dispersed like the winds of heaven, and the joyful cry went up, "God be praised, they are gone;" but soon they reappeared to harass the retreating soldiery. The horrors of desolation and rapine were the condition most congenial to them; in these they revelled and rejoiced; and most happy were they when they could anoint their beards with German blood, or, casting their firebrands into the houses ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... dear Hector in these projects with her sweetest smile; but a terrible accident, followed by a catastrophe no less horrible, destroyed these delightful dreams and brought desolation to this happy home. ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... there's nothing to do but read. It would be hard for you to picture our little room; the match-boarding, split by the changes from heat to bitter cold, the smell of hot iron, the dead silence, and the grim white desolation outside. Perhaps it's curious, but after working hard all day, earning dollars, one can't read rubbish. One wants romance, but romance that's real and has the ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... drive the people through flame and smoke and desolation. They had fire in front of them, fire behind them, and fire to left and right of them, and saw only destruction ahead of them. Yet, after taking them through all these horrors, he finally led them ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... the picnic that afternoon; she was never short of a cavalier to wait on her lightest behest; she was her prettiest, her most charming self. The American whispered to her that a picnic without her would be a desolation and he had half a mind to stop another week at his aunt's—but Gertrude was not enjoying herself. From behind the gorse bushes, from between the moss-grown boulders, from beneath the dark foliage of the Scotch firs, there peeped at her ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... Gabriel's grief and woe and desolation, as he sat in his grim cell with aching head, bruised face and bleeding heart, with all his plans now broken, with the very soul within him dead—in this grief and anguish, I say, the foul harpy-brood of Capitalism revelled and rioted ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... desecrated ruins, there is still so much of magic in her aspect, that the hurried traveller, who must leave her before the wonder of that first aspect has been worn away, may still be led to forget the humility of her origin, and to shut his eyes to the depth of her desolation. They, at least, are little to be envied, in whose hearts the great charities of the imagination lie dead, and for whom the fancy has no power to repress the importunity of painful impressions, or to raise what is ignoble, and disguise what is discordant, in a scene ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... here; he remembered the secret niche in the wall, where he had once seen the Doctor deposit some papers. He looked, and there they were. Who was the heir of those papers, if not he? If there were anything wrong in appropriating them, it was not perceptible to him in the desolation, anxiety, bewilderment, and despair of that moment. He grasped the papers, and hurried from the room and down the stairs, afraid to look round, and half expecting to hear the gruff voice of Doctor Grim thundering after him ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... will turn in such a righteous cause, so help me Heaven!' cried Graham, in a voice that at last made itself heard, and confronting them as he spoke. 'Least of all will I turn upon this threshold which owes its desolation to such men as ye. I give no quarter, and I will ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... three places like that on this division the past two weeks," said Phil to break the silence. He nodded towards the disused station building that was receding down the track, its boarded windows and broken platform eloquent of desolation. "I've wondered why a perfectly good station like that should be built in the first place if it was to be abandoned later on without even ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... written immediately after my return from France to London, when I could not but be struck, as here described, with the vanity and parade of our own country, especially in great towns and cities, as contrasted with the quiet, and I may say the desolation, that the Revolution had produced in France. This must be borne in mind, or else the reader may think that in this and the succeeding Sonnets I have exaggerated the mischief engendered and fostered among us by undisturbed ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... consent through their representatives. The fiery Josiah Quincy, Jr., would say,—"Before the freeborn sons of the North will yield a general and united submission to any tyrannic power on earth, fire and sword, desolation and ruin, will ravage the land." The intrepid Samuel Adams would say,—"Before the King and Parliament shall dragoon us, and we become slaves, we will take up arms and our last drop of blood." The calm Andrew Eliot would say,—"You cannot conceive ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... never Inflicted purposely on human hearts A voluntary pang! But that is false— She loved me, and I loved her.—Fatal passion! Why dost thou not expire at once in hearts Which thou hast lighted up at once? Zarina![ah] I must pay dearly for the desolation Now brought upon thee. Had I never loved 430 But thee, I should have been an unopposed Monarch of honouring nations. To what gulfs A single deviation from the track Of human duties leads even those who claim The homage of mankind as their ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... that the writer of it would be judged to be mad from its contents. Mr. Kennedy had told the whole story of his wrongs, and had told it well,—with piteous truthfulness, as far as he himself knew and understood the truth. The letter was almost simple in its wailing record of his own desolation. With a marvellous absence of reticence he had given the names of all persons concerned. He spoke of his wife as having been, and being, under the influence of Mr. Phineas Finn;—spoke of his own former friendship for that gentleman, who had once saved his life when he fell among thieves, and ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... deserted wing was like a moving shuddering thing in the desolation of the silence and the darkness. It was as though the echoing corridor and the empty rooms were whispering, with the appeal of the forgotten, for friendly human companionship and light to disperse the horror of sinister shapes and brooding ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... to tones broken, tender, and pitying as those of a bereaved father sorrowing over his hapless children; then, as visions of the utter extinction of his race would break upon his prophetic soul, it would come wailing out like the despairing cry of a Hebrew prophet lamenting the impending desolation ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... till, when she thought there would be a hush, the crescendo of the work of the coming day began, she felt no doubt as to what this was which absorbed her and kept sleep so far aloof from her eyelids. It had started from as small a beginning as a fire that devastates a city, reducing it to desolation and blackened ash. A careless passenger has but thrown away the stump of a cigarette or a match not entirely extinguished near some inflammable material, and it is from no other cause than that that before long the walls of the tallest buildings totter and ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... lords and other captains of that our land before you, as of good congruence ye must needs do; ye, after and amongst other overtures by your wisdom then to be made, shall declare unto them the great decay, ruin, and desolation of that commodious and fertile land, for lack of politic governance and good justice; which can never be brought in order unless the unbridled sensualities of insolent folk be brought under the rule of the laws. ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... millions of inhabitants; but his surprise was decreased when their journey occasionally lay through tracts of streets, consisting often of capacious mansions entirely tenantless. On seeking an explanation of this seeming desolation, he was told that the Hubbabubians were possessed by a frenzy of always moving on, westward; and that consequently great quarters of the city are perpetually deserted. Even as Skindeep was speaking their passage was stopped by a large caravan of carriages and wagons heavily laden with human creatures ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... we had yet passed, seemed to have gathered itself for a serried assault upon the lovely verdure beyond. Outposts of the sage-brush, its unsung heroes, perhaps, showed here and there among ferns and wild roses—leafless, gaunt, and dead; one knotted specimen even had planted its banner of desolation in the shade of a wild lilac and there died. A twittering of birds gladdened our dusty ears, and from afar there came a splashing of water. Our feet, burned by the desert sands, torn by yucca and cactus, ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... when he got up, stood on the floor, looked at the world no longer from beyond its rim but from within its coils, he became again enmeshed, a creature crying "I, I, I," a child wanting Pears' soap and never getting it, a pilgrim here on earth and stranger. Then the seas of desolation would swamp him and he would sink and sink, tumbled in ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... reached the door of the apartment it was discovered to be locked, and, to all appearance, had been so for some time, as the key could not be found;—a circumstance which, to my English apprehension, naturally connected itself with notions of damp and desolation, and I again sighed inwardly for the Gran Bretagna. Impatient at the delay of the key, my noble host, with one of his humorous maledictions, gave a vigorous kick to the door and burst it open; on which we at once entered ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Napoleon. That great emperor had seemed to make war upon the very elements themselves, to have contended with Nature, and to have almost defeated Providence itself. The enemies of the North, more savage than Goth or Vandal, mounting the swift gales of a Russian winter, had carried death, desolation, and ruin, to the very gates of Paris. Wellington fought at Waterloo a bleeding and broken nation—a nation electrified, it is true, to almost superhuman energy by the genius of Napoleon, but a nation prostrate and bleeding nevertheless. Compare this, my friends, ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... as one may call it, of the Encantadas, that which exalts them in desolation above Idumea and the Pole, is, that to them change never comes; neither the change of seasons nor of sorrows. Cut by the Equator, they know not autumn, and they know not spring; while already reduced to the lees of fire, ruin itself can work little more upon them. ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... Maggie's voice made Katherine suddenly shy; there was a hint at loneliness and desolation there that was something beyond her reach. She wanted to help. She was suddenly frightened at her urging of Paul's suit. Something seemed to say to her: "Leave this alone. Don't take the responsibility of ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... the wind-torrent came. Soon we were on the flat plateau of the Causse, where last year's faded grass was frosted white, and a torn winding-sheet wrapped the limbs of a dead world. There was no beauty in this death, save the wild beauty of desolation, and a grandeur inseparable from heights. Before us grouped the mountains of Auvergne, hoary headed; and looking down we could see the twistings of the road we had travelled, whirling away and away, like the blown tail of a kite trailed ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... merits of this poem; we cannot help noticing, however, how truly it is a mirror of the author's heart, and of all the fond pictures of early friends and early life forever present there. It seems to us as if the very last accounts received from home, of his "shattered family," and the desolation that seemed to have settled upon the haunts of his childhood, had cut to the roots one feebly cherished hope, and produced the following exquisitely tender ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... no scene in all the world to equal that. The tranquillity of lesser spaces was not here manifest. Sound, movement, life, seemed to have no fitness here. Ruin was there and desolation and decay. The meaning of the ages was flung at him, and a man became nothing. When he had gazed at the San Juan Canyon he had been appalled at the nature of Joe Lake's Herculean task. He had lost hope, faith. The thing was not ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... kingdom, but is divided into many. This king therefore seeing what had been done, was filled with wrath; and indignant, on the one hand, at the freedom of the raiders and the insolence of the proud, and on the other, pitying the desolation of the kingdom and the downfall of the king, he went down to the cell of the poor man; urged him to return, but did not succeed in persuading him. He was instant, nevertheless, pledged himself to help him, assured him that he need not doubt the result, promised ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... real camp life, and had only played at camping in the Adirondacks. Left to their own devices, they would have passed a most uncomfortable if not a perilous night, for the mercury stood at many degrees below zero. But they had Yim with them, and he, being perfectly at home amid all that desolation, was determined to enjoy all the home comforts it could be ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... of this the more intense her conviction became, until at last, from the force of her own fancies, she became as certain of this as though some one had actually told her of his departure. Then there came over her a mighty sense of desolation. What should she do now? Life seemed in that instant to have lost all its sweetness and its meaning. Again there came to her that thought which many times during the last few weeks had occurred, and now had grown familiar—the ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... failings. It was just a passing cloud, he told himself. Both of them would have been more upset had their love affair come to a sudden and abrupt close. He remembered how he had felt when he had parted from Lalage, the fever and the agony of it, the sense of utter desolation and hopelessness. And from that he came to think of Lalage herself. She had never turned on him because he drank. Far otherwise. The knowledge had made her more tender, more watchful over his comfort, more anxious to shield him from worries which might drive him into the power of his enemy. ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... comparatively bare. The lofty and enormously strong brick chimney was still standing in spite of the many explosions, and, here and there, a horse appeared, looking wistfully at the ruins of its former home. There, the intending diggers stood, gazing mutely for a while on the scene of desolation. ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... father destroyed Samaria and her idols, but he shall not destroy Jerusalem. He may ravage Ephraim, and punish the gluttony and drunkenness, and oppression of the great landlords of Bashan; he may bring misery and desolation through the length and breadth of the land: there is reason, and reason but too good for that: but Jerusalem, the place where God's honour dwells, the temple without idols, which is the sign that Jehovah is a living ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... frightful tugging, they were halfway on their journey, being well out on what two weeks ago was the battle field, but now presenting a picture of broadcast desolation. Shell craters, caused by heavier projectiles burrowing and bursting, pockmarked the ground like a telescopic photograph of the moon. Fields, so lately rich with waving grain, were blasted into subsidences and cavities, bisected by crumbled trenches before which the wreckage of barbed-wire ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... glanced toward the window. The rain was still falling, changing the City of the Sun into a city of desolation. It looked as though it would never see the sun again—and her life looked ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... there is but too much reason to believe that the implacability of Seymour was the implacability, not of an affectionate father, but of a factious and malignant agitator. He tried to make what is, in the jargon of our time, called political capital out of the desolation of his house and the blood of his first born. A brawl between two dissolute youths, a brawl distinguished by nothing but its unhappy result from the hundred brawls which took place every month in theatres and taverns, he magnified into an attack on the liberties of the nation, an attempt ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... on a journey very soon," vouchsafes the stranger. "I wish it could be prevented, for it brings more pain than pleasure—misery, desolation." ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... a form of naked force, like a gloomy crag without a particle of beauty or any vegetation, save what will grow on the most horrid rocks, and the condition of whose existence there, seems to be that it deepens the desolation—a mind unredeemed by virtue save in the shape of remorse—unvisited by weakness, until it came transmuted into the tiger of madness—whose very sermons were satires on God and man—whose very prayers had a twang of blasphemy—whose ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... a tear, he hung his head, To see such desolation spread. He said: "To slugs I hatred bear, To locusts that devour the ear, To caterpillars, fly, and lice; But what are they to cursed dice? Or what to cards? A bet is made, Which ruin is to mount or glade; ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... Barnhourie and the Back Shore of Leswalt was as full of danger as it was entirely without glory. If they were unlucky, they might be cashiered for losing the ship. If lucky, the revenue men would claim the captured cargo. If they secured the malefactors they would sow desolation in a score of respectable families, with the daughters of which they had danced at ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... so wanton! There was scarcely a single collection of houses in that fifty miles which I traversed which did not bear its ugly scar of fire and shell, scarcely a farmhouse that was not crumbled or peppered with machine-gun bullets. Miles of desolation may be seen in a couple of hours' drive around Vitry-le-Francois,—Favresse, Blesmes, Ecrinnes, Thieblemont, Maurupt, Vauclerc,—with acre upon acre of ruined buildings, a chimney standing here and there, heaps of twisted iron that once were farm machines, withered ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... in prevailing on the Senate to advance one loan of 100,000 francs to pay a portion of the arrears due to his troops, and a second of 200,000 francs to provide clothing for his army, etc. This scanty supply will cease to be wondered at when it is considered to what a state of desolation the whole of Germany was reduced at the time, as much in the allied States as in those of the enemies of France. I learnt at the time that the King of Bavaria said to an officer of the Emperor's household in whom he had great confidence, "If this continues we ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... last horse vanished out of sight behind a rock, desolation settled upon me. That slender line of living beings somewhere on ahead was the only link between us and civilisation—civilisation which I understood, which was human and touchable—and the awful vastness of those endless peaks, wherein lurked a hundred dangers, and ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... a situation as to cut him off from all communication with his dominions; and ravaged the country with his light troops, levying contributions wherever they went, and burning the villages with savage ferocity as far as the gates of Munich. Thus was avenged the barbarous desolation of the Palatinate, thirty years before, by the French army under the orders of Marshal Turenne. Overcome by the cries of his suffering subjects, the Elector at length consented to enter into a negotiation, which made some progress; but the rapid approach of Marshal Tallard with the French army ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... with a few words only, the first year of our bereavement, as even now I shudder to recall the feeling of loneliness and desolation which took possession of us, when we found ourselves left alone in the home where everything reminded us so strongly of the departed one. There was a small apartment adjoining our usual sitting-room which my father was wont to call ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... when the floods of God's judgments sweep over the world. The captivity of the idol and the burst bubble of the monarchy bid us all make Jehovah our God and King. The vacant shrine and empty throne are followed by utter and long-continued desolation. Thorns and thistles have time to grow on the altars, and no hand cuts them down. What of the men thus stripped of all in which they had trusted? Desperate, they implore the mountains to fall on them, as preferring to die, and the hills to cover them, as willing ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... historic tragedies, in the figures of the Jewish martyrs of old Ukraina, Gogol can only discern "miserable, terror-stricken creatures." Thus one of the principal founders of Russian fiction set up in its very center the repelling scarecrow of a Jew, an abomination of desolation, which poured the poison of hatred into the hearts of the Russian readers and determined to a certain extent the literary ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... in a bleak voice of desolation and fright. "Dear heaven, that horrible Margot's confederate, the ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... of the most beautiful and accomplished of women, her husband the incumbent of exalted official position,—now, wealth, beauty, and position vanished; the grave hiding all she loved; sitting in silence and desolation, the memories of the long past almost her sole companions. When in the tide of time has there been truer realization of the words ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... the sound of the wind rushing through the ruins was like the moaning of the spirits of the dead inhabitants crying aloud for vengeance. The sounds increased in volume as we neared this scene of awful desolation, and the groans became a crescendo of shrieks which, combined with the crash of shell-fire, made one's ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... He accepted the desolation of his life, for the sake of all beyond life, greater than life, which looked down on him from the ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... backs upon the abomination of Keegark's desolation and went up the gangway together, looking very little like ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... certainly an advantage, as hostilities were necessarily to have continued somewhere during all that period, that all the bloodshed and desolation had been concentrated upon one insignificant locality, and one more contiguous to the enemy's possessions than to those of the united States. It was very doubtful, however, whether all that money and blood might not have been expended in some other manner ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... and thereby exposes herself to a portion of its plagues. In vain will it be urged as a plea of justification, that the authors of the revolution in France, having overturned the constitution of their own country, and spread desolation through the wide extent of it, menaced other nations, and us also; and that, therefore, Britain, acting on the first principle of nature's law, self-preservation, joined the allied powers for her own defense. Though the Presbytery are by ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... things lay below them, dimly to be seen from the brilliant room. Within was warmth, light, and gladness; without, a cold place of shadows, limned in the grey of discontent and the black of want and desolation. ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... asked himself, was Aster the central figure in the picture of desolation that he was painting? He had never given her more than a passing thought before; had never thought of her save as a frank, generous, sunny-hearted girl. Now he began to recall words that she had spoken of which he had never before taken ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... world, but nowhere did she find any trace of her bridegroom. At last she gave up the search in despair. She could not bear to return to her own castle where she had been so happy with her lover, but determined rather to endure her loneliness and desolation in a strange land. She took a place as herd-girl with a peasant, and buried her jewels and beautiful dresses in ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... curse!) and Tuhfeh rose to him and kissed his hands. He in turn kissed her hand and called down blessings on her and said, 'How deemest thou? Is [not] this place pleasant, for all its loneliness and desolation?' Quoth she, 'None may be desolate in this place;' and he said, 'Know that no mortal dare tread [the soil of] this place.' But she answered, 'I have dared and trodden it, and this is of the number of thy favours.' Then they brought tables and meats and viands and fruits ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... the single line, the slender siding, a waiting-room, an office, the station-master's cottage, and a tiny yard of gooseberries and sweet-william. There seemed no road to it from anywhere, and to increase the desolation the waves of a tarn lapped on their grey granite beach half a mile away. I waited in the deep heather till I saw the smoke of an east-going train on the horizon. Then I approached the tiny booking-office and took a ticket ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... about ten miles from the shore, and the general appearance of the island suggested a recent snowfall. As the sun shone upon a bare white surface, the sterile slopes and mountain sides were utterly devoid of vegetation, and presented a sad aspect of desolation, which reminded me of the barren range on the shores of ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... "Boulevard" Street. We clattered along the brick-floored trench, whose walls were overhung with the dewy grass and flowers of the orchard—that wonderful orchard whose aroma had survived the horror and desolation of a two years' warfare, and seemed now only to be intensified to a softer ...
— Attack - An Infantry Subaltern's Impression of July 1st, 1916 • Edward G. D. Liveing
... less frequent, with darker gaps of night between; and the rare street-lamps shone on cracked pavements, crooked telegraph-poles, hoardings tapestried with patent-medicine posters, and all the mean desolation of an American industrial suburb. Farther on there came a weed-grown field or two, then a row of operatives' houses, the showy gables of the "Eldorado" road-house—the only building in Westmore on which fresh paint was freely lavished—then the company "store," the machine ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... hardship he would not himself endure. He travelled for some miles in a heavy rain; and the wind, which howled mournfully among the rocks, and whose solemn pauses were filled by the distant roarings of the sea, heightened the desolation of the scene. At length he discerned, amid the darkness from afar, a red light waving in the wind: it varied with the blast, but never totally disappeared. He pushed his horse into a gallop, ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... so as to try to make you feel that the management took a personal interest in you. It was part of their job. Archie beamed absently and went in to lunch. Lucille's empty seat stared at him mournfully, increasing his sense of desolation. ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... it should be removed. The light would never be so acceptable, were it not for that usual intercourse of darkness. Too much honey doth turn into gall, and too much joy, even spiritual, would make us wantons. Happier a great deal is that man's case, whose soul by inward desolation is humbled, than he whose heart is, through abundance of spiritual delight, lifted up and exalted above measure. Better it is sometimes to go down into the pit, with him, who, beholding darkness, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... have said; while a "trace" represents something by way of an effect, which represents the cause in such a way as not to attain to the likeness of species. For imprints which are left by the movements of animals are called "traces": so also ashes are a trace of fire, and desolation of the land a trace ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... all their faults, were generally men of peace and study; and these monuments show that they were improving the world, while the warriors were spending their lives to spoil it. In many parts of Italy and France, which had lain in desolation and ruin from the time of the Goths, the monks restored the whole surface to fertility; and in Scotland and Ireland there probably would not have been a fruit tree till the sixteenth century, if it had not been for their peaceful labours. ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 391 - Vol. 14, No. 391, Saturday, September 26, 1829 • Various
... accomplished. E'en to this day I remember with joy those half-consumed timbers, And I can see once more the sun coming up in such splendor; For 'twas the day that gave me my husband; and, ere the first season Passed of that wild desolation, a son to my youth had been given. Therefore I praise thee, Hermann, that thou, with an honest assurance, Shouldst, in these sorrowful days, be thinking thyself of a maiden, And amid ruins and war shouldst thus have the courage to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... spout through which the merchandise collected from a wide area streams northwards to the Mediterranean shore. It marks the extreme northern limit of the fertile Soudan. Between Khartoum and Assuan the river flows for twelve hundred miles through deserts of surpassing desolation. At last the wilderness recedes and the living world broadens out again into Egypt and the Delta. It is with events that have occurred in the intervening waste ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... one quick dive and the ice closed over her for ever. It gave one a sickening sensation to see it, for, mastless and useless as she was, she seemed to be a link with the outer world. Without her our destitution seems more emphasized, our desolation more complete. The loss of the ship sent a slight wave of depression over the camp. No one said much, but we cannot be blamed for feeling it in a sentimental way. It seemed as if the moment of severance from many cherished ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... the poet of the present and the future, and of universal humanity. He saw in the past the fallen fragments on which men were to build anew—august scenes of desolation, whose ruin taught men to work more wisely. He painted them as the accessory features and distant landscape of colossal pictures, in whose foreground stood figures soaring beyond the limits of their place, instinct with the spirit of the time in which the poet lived, yet lifted out of it ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... changeful Atlantic through Swakopmund's deep sandy streets and you get the key to the town. For it ceases utterly, abruptly; from the door of its last villa, fitted with perfect furnishings from Hamburg, the bitter desolation that is the Namib Desert stretches away from your, very feet. Marvelling at this place, I was particularly struck by the size of its cemetery. But I was not long puzzled. If you strike Swakopmund on a fine sunshiny day you will be pretty ...
— With Botha in the Field • Eric Moore Ritchie
... to produce that magic sensation of a dream's delight. Then when I awake in the morning and realize that you are far, far away, and read your latest letter again with pangs of the bitterest remorse, I dwell only upon those passages which hint of other joys quite apart from your interest in me. My desolation is that of a storm-tossed soul, seized by every breath of fear and tortured by every agony known to the forsaken. Have you no pity for me, Margaret? Drive no more shafts of anguish through my bruised and shattered heart, but gently ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... lost in the solitude of my own heart; and that as your rustling branches give the loud blast to the waste below—borne on the thoughts of other years, I can look down with patient anguish at the cheerless desolation which I feel within! Without that face pale as the primrose with hyacinthine locks, for ever shunning and for ever haunting me, mocking my waking thoughts as in a dream; without that smile which my heart could never turn to scorn; ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... the full story of the Australian Imperial Force in France. They were written to depict the surroundings in which, and the spirit with which, that history has been made; first in the quiet green Flemish lowlands, then with a swift, sudden plunge into the grim, reeking, naked desolation of the Somme. The record of the A.I.F., and its now historical units in their full action, will be painted upon that background some day. If these letters convey some reflection of the spirit which fought at Pozieres, their object is well fulfilled. The author's profits are ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... scarcely in its usual pretty order, and no flowers graced the table. Evidently no one was expected. "All the better," he assured himself; "and her desolation will probably incline her the more to listen to one who can bring golden gleams on ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... college peace, and punished severely by the subtraction of some dozens from the numerical rank of the unfortunate youth engaged in so high a misdemeanor. A congregation of four was not esteemed an open, avowed contempt of the laws of decency and propriety, prophesying utter combustion, desolation, and destruction to all buildings and trees in the neighborhood; and lastly, a multitude of five, though watched with a little jealousy, was not called an intolerable, unparalleled violation of everything approaching the name of order, absolute, downright shamelessness, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... of the law which disgraced the government of the new dynasty; though it must be granted, that with a view to perpetuate their relationship to the father of the faithful, the people preserved certain copies of the Pentateuch, even after the desolation of their land and the complete extinction of ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... spake; and the multitudes marvelled. 15 But some of them said, By Beelzebub the prince of the demons casteth he out demons. 16 And others, trying him, sought of him a sign from heaven. 17 But he, knowing their thoughts, said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and a house divided against a house falleth. 18 And if Satan also is divided against himself, how shall his kingdom stand? because ye say that I cast out demons by Beelzebub. 19 And if I by Beelzebub cast out demons, by whom do your sons cast them out? therefore shall they be your ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... that one night, when the darkness had mercifully fallen upon this scene of sylvan desolation, and its still more incongruous and unsavory human restoration, and the low murmur of the pines occasionally swelled up from the unscathed mountain-side, a loud shout and the trampling of horses' feet awoke the dwellers in the shanty. Springing to their feet, they hurriedly seized ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... in the gate; and, child as he was, he knew that if it were not stopped that little stream would soon become a cascade, a great sheet of water, a torrent, and then a terrible inundation which would end in desolation and death. So the little fellow did not hesitate. He determined to try and prevent the mischief. Reaching up to the hole he placed his finger in it, but soon he found that the wood was rotten, and that the small hole would soon become larger. So he took off his jacket and, tearing off a ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... long level of K Street—once a cheerful, busy thoroughfare, now distressing in its silent desolation. The turbid water which seemed to meet the horizon edge before us flowed at right angles in sluggish rivers through the streets. Nature had revenged herself on the local taste by disarraying the regular rectangles by huddling houses on street ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... children bereft, the desperate mother Furious curses the day on which she bore, and was born ... when Weary with hollower eye, amid the carcases totter Even the buriers ... till the sent Death-angel, descending, Thoughtful on thunder-clouds, beholds all lonesome and silent, Gazes the wide desolation, and long broods over the ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... is very voracious, and easily caught, as it is neither cunning nor shy. As it lives in desolation, and has little to do with men, it knows nothing of trickery, nor dreams of the plots laid against its royal freedom. An interesting account is given of the capture of an albatross by an officer of a French ship. It was a sunny, windy day, and the vessel ...
— Harper's Young People, April 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... even make a jest of—that outstanding Christian virtue; yet men not held by Christian dogma have joyously surrendered to the sublimity of that divine idea. Hear Shelley speak: "What nation has the example of the desolation of Attica by Mardonius and Xerxes, or the extinction of the Persian Empire by Alexander of Macedon restrained from outrage? Was not the pretext for this latter system of spoliation derived immediately from the former? ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... yes, there was one, probably not of the old familiar number; a stranger that might have crept in for shelter from the first blasts of winter, and now clung to an angle in the farther wall, its wings folded,—asleep, not dead. But Kenelm saw it not; he noticed only the general desolation of the spot. ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... image, they brought it to the feet of the goddess, washed it while displaying its wound, anointed it with sweet-smelling unguents, wrapped it in a linen and woollen shroud, placed it on a catafalque, and, after expressing around the bier their feelings of desolation, according to the rites observed at fanerais, placed ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... scented nothing perilous in the situation. In any event, Dorothy would wed whomsoever she decreed; Mrs. Hanway-Harley was deservedly certain of that. While this came to her mind, Richard the enterprising went laying plans for the daily desolation of ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... bore rank weeds of secession and treason, spreading poison and devastation over that portion of our fair national heritage. But from the same soil, amidst the ruin and desolation which followed the breaking out of the rebellion, there sprang up growths of loyalty and patriotism, which by flowering and fruitage, redeemed the land from the curse that had fallen ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... down and watched the Indians through the opening which served as a door. A few minutes later her captors pushed off their canoe, stepped lightly on board and started down the river. With fast-beating heart the girl watched them until they had disappeared from view. Then a terrible feeling of desolation came upon her. She was in the wilderness, alone, with untold dangers surrounding her. Had they deserted her? Had the Indians brought her there to perish? The thought was horrible. What had she done to deserve such a fate? With straining eyes she watched the river, hoping to see the Indians ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... and their fate were in his hands. In this belief they threw themselves upon the ground to implore his mercy, and to beg that he would grant them their lives. The father, touched with compassion at seeing them in such great desolation, did all that he could to console them; and, to mitigate their fears, he caressed their children, of whom three were still at the breast, and five others a trifle older, and promised their parents to give them all the help that was in ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... for coffee, but she was weak, and the fear of being again left in the station alone prompted her to accept the well-meant invitation. In fact, she had in her hours of desolation become quite fond of the little old man with the ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose
... than were the Scandinavian Sea Kings of the middle centuries, whose gods were patrons of rapine and cruelty, their heaven a vast, cloud-built ale-house, where ghostly warriors drank from the skulls of their victims, and whose hell was a frozen horror of desolation and darkness, to be avoided only by diligence in robbery and courage in murder. The descendants of these human butchers are now among the best exponents of the humanizing influence of the gospel of Christ. The report of the Superintendent of the remnants ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of loneliness, of insecurity, of unknown dangers lurking behind that crippled archway, or beneath the shadows of the projecting eaves, whence the perpetual drip-drip of soot water came as a note of melancholy desolation. ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... for herself. Over the little place which had always been neat even when it was forlorn there was now the stamp of desolation. The beds which had been seeded or planted a month before, and which should now have been weeded, trimmed, and hoed, were growing with an untended recklessness that had all the proverbial resemblance to moral breakdown. ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... the greater sphere. Imagine that flying island devoid of soil, of trees or vegetation, of water or air, of everything but barren, uncrumbled, homogeneous rock, and you have some idea of the unadorned desolation of Phobos, into which we were slowly sailing, or falling. There was not even the slightest trace of sand or scraps of rock, such as time must have abraded from even the hardest surfaces, but the reason for this ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... the terrible results of the war with Amaziah of Israel; King Uzziah had not yet restored the treasures and vessels of which the temples had been looted; and, in the quarter of the city where Amos sold his bread, oh! such poverty, such wretchedness, such desolation! ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... rejected: all their magazines of corn, dried fish, barrelled eels, and other provisions which they had for themselves, and other provisions for Quebec market, were all destroyed. Wherever he went with his troops desolation followed."—And this, reader, was the glorious General Wolfe, whom his barbarous nation, and our own fools have extolled to the skies in marble monuments, and his sons. Cockburn was nothing compared with this immortal plunderer and burner ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... presidents in the most marked manner. All of them lowered their heads, and the majority kept them lowered for a long time. The rest of the spectators, except the marshals of France, appeared little affected by this desolation. ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... far from denying the real force of the arguments in proof of a God, drawn from the general facts of human society, but these do not warm me or enlighten me; they do not take away the winter of my desolation, or make the buds unfold and the leaves grow within me, and my moral being rejoice. The sight of the world is nothing else than the prophet's scroll, full of "lamentations, ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... we may believe the old scholiast, his name was CAESIUS BASSUS, a much admired lyric poet, who was living on his own farm, at the time when Mount Vesuvius discharged its torrents of fire, and made the country round a scene of desolation. The poet and his house were overwhelmed by the eruption of the lava, which happened A.U. 832, in the reign of Titus. Quintilian says of him (b. x. chap. 1.), that if after Horace any poet deserves to be mentioned, Caesius Bassus ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... purple, the gelid water writhed nakedly. Spectral islands elbowed each other, to peer at us as we flitted past. Still more wraithlike the mainland, fringed to the sea foam with saturnine pine, faded away into fastnesses of impregnable desolation. There was a sense of deathlike passivity in the land, of overwhelming vastitude, of unconquerable loneliness. It was as if I had felt for the first time the Spirit of the Wild; the Wild where God broods amid His silence; the Wild, His ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... and killed each other out of hand. And back of all that I had the feeling that I was caught in the same fate that had shut in upon them; and was even worse off than they had been, since I had no one to fight my life away with but must take it myself when I found my solitude in that rotten desolation more ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... thousand years of total eclipse. Finally Macaulay's Australian surveying the ruins of St. Paul's Cathedral from a broken parapet of London Bridge; and a Moslem conqueror of America looking from the hill of the Capitol at Washington upon the desolation of what was once the District of Columbia. Shall the end be an Oriental renaissance with the philosophies of Buddha, Mohammed and Confucius welded into a new religion describing itself as the last word of science, reason ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... as the Hermit stood forth, and, crucifix in hand, poured forth his description of the blasphemy of the infidels, the desolation of the sacred places, and the misery of the Christians. He had seen the very ministers of God insulted, beaten, even put to, death: he had seen sacrilege, profanation, cruelty; and as he described them, his voice became stifle, and his eyes ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... hostile cruelty. Is it not shame, he that should punish sin, Defend the righteous, help the innocent, Carves with his sword the purpose of his will Upon the guarders of the virtuous, And hunts admired, spotless maidenhead With all the darts of desolation, Because she scorneth to be dissolute? Me that he leaves, I do not murmur at; That he loves her, doth no whit me perplex, If she did love him, or myself did hate: But this alone is it that doth me vex: He leaves me that loves him, and her pursues, That loathes him ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... rock, unsoftened by other vegetation than rusty moss and the dull green splashes of lichen, all this was hidden, except when the mist, white and delicate where we stood, but thick and black above, opened whimsically and delusively, as mountain mists will do, and gave us vistas into the upper desolation. After such momentary rifts the mist thickened again, and swooped forward as if to involve our station, but noon sunshine, reverberated from the plains and valleys and lakes below, was our ally; sunshine checked the overcoming mist, and it stayed overhead, an unwelcome parasol, making our August ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... noticing, however, how truly it is a mirror of the author's heart, and of all the fond pictures of early friends and early life forever present there. It seems to us as if the very last accounts received from home, of his "shattered family," and the desolation that seemed to have settled upon the haunts of his childhood, had cut to the roots one feebly cherished hope, and produced the following exquisitely ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... trees, the utter desolation of the scenery, more impressive than in a view from the southern shore of the Great Salt Lake. The broad plain which intervenes between its margin and the foot of the Wahsatch Range is almost entirely lost sight of; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... that house, And all deserted! Desolation broods Upon those silent walls, and all is dead Within, save ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... disaster. What a most strange spectacle it is! Here he is, shut up in this wee corner of the realm like a rat in a trap; his royal shelter this huge gloomy tomb of a castle, with wormy rags for upholstery and crippled furniture for use, a very house of desolation; in his treasure forty francs, and not a farthing more, God be witness! no army, nor any shadow of one; and by contrast with his hungry poverty you behold this crownless pauper and his shoals of fools and favorites tricked out in the gaudiest silks and velvets you shall find in any Court in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... felt as if some great flood were sweeping her off her feet. She clutched mechanically at anything to save herself. Knight was there. He stood between her and desolation; but if he had spoken then—if he had said he wanted her, and begged her to stay, she ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... the head-waters of the river and the Kluchefskoi volcano, and nearly all are situated in picturesque locations, and surrounded by gardens and fields of rye. Nowhere does the traveller see any evidences of the barrenness, sterility, and frigid desolation which have always been associated ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... peats set up to dry, with many openings through and through, windy drains to gather and remove their moisture. Here and there was a tuft of dry grass, a bush of heather, or a few slender-stalked, hoary heads of CANNACH or cotton-grass; it was a land of devoted desolation, doing nothing for itself, this bountiful store of life and warmth for the ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... when not many feet from the summit of the slope, their climb having been made so much longer by its laborious nature; and as they stopped, the action of both was the same: they gazed about them nervously, startled by the utter loneliness and desolation of the spot, which might have been far away in some Eastern desert, instead of close to the cliffs and commons about which they had ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... was a picture of desolation. It was surveyed by two detachments, and was found to be covered with black and porous stones. The entire vegetation which could thrive on this mass of lava consisted of two or three kinds of rugose grass, which grew on the rocks, scanty bushes, especially the paper-mulberry, the 'hibiscus,' ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... Through the forest vast and vacant— Rung that cry of desolation; But there came no other answer Than the echo of his crying, Than the echo of the woodlands, "Minnehaha! Minnehaha!" All day long roved Hiawatha In that melancholy forest, Through the shadow of whose ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... have pierced the clouds that hung over me: even though it were but a passing ray, it would have enabled me to catch a momentary glimpse of the Beloved of my heart—but this was denied me. Instead, it was night, dark night, utter desolation, death! Like my Divine Master in the Agony in the Garden, I felt that I was alone, and found no comfort on earth or ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... that could be felt. The skipper himself took to the fore rigging, and placed one of the watch handy to the wheel; finally he called all hands up very quietly, and the men hung on anyhow. One drift after another passed by in dim majesty, and the spectacle, with all its desolation, was one never to be forgotten. After half an hour or so, Blair glanced up and noticed a dim form sliding down the shrouds; then the skipper rushed aft, for the helmsman could not see him, and then came a strange dark cloud of massive texture looming through ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... answered that," he said with desolation in his voice, "I'd probably be lying anyway. You've got to trust ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... and the two brothers looked out of Gluck's little window in the morning. The Treasure Valley was one mass of ruin and desolation. The inundation had swept away trees, crops, and cattle, and left, in their stead, a waste of red sand ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... gleams with ore, And fair Sudarsan's heights explore. Then on to Devasakha(735) hie, Loved by the children of the sky. A dreary land you then will see Without a hill or brook or tree, A hundred leagues, bare, wild, and dread In lifeless desolation, spread. Pursue your onward way, and haste Through the dire horrors of the waste Until triumphant with delight You reach Kailasa's glittering height. There stands a palace decked with gold, For King Kuvera(736) wrought of old, A home the heavenly artist planned And fashioned with his cunning hand. ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... to say which we found most diverting, the long, long landscape that divided as we passed, through it and closed up in the rear, leaving only the shining iron seam down the middle; the beautiful, undulating prairie land; the hot and dusty desolation of the plains; the delicious temperature of the highlands, as we approached the Rockies and had our first glimpse of Pike's Peak in its mantle of snow: the muddy rivers, along whose shores we glided swiftly hour after hour: the Mississippi by moonlight—we all ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... country in these terms:—"These wretches, sir, in France and England, cannot march half a mile in any direction without finding a house where food can be had and lodging; whereas such is the noble desolation of our magnificent country that in many a direction for a thousand miles I will engage that a dog shall not find shelter from a snow-storm, nor a wren find an apology for breakfast."] miles— northwards for six hundred; and the ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... Western Continent are found the ruins of what are pronounced by all scholars to be the highest civilization, and the most ancient in time, of any in the New World. There it arose, flourished, and tottered to its fall. Its glory had departed, its cities were a desolation, before the coming of the Spaniards. The explorer who would visit them finds himself confronted with very great difficulties. Their location is in a section of the country away from the beaten track of travel. Their sites are overspread with the luxuriant vegetation of tropical lands, ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... French Government allow a considerable portion of their own population actually to starve, or be obliged to emigrate to other parts of France, there to live the life of nomads at the expense of England, while the deserted provinces are given over to desolation? ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... cry reached him, went to his heart, but he did not turn; he went on through the wet, green little garden, and the curling leaves, where he had found peace and had left desolation. ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... you are in the fires and awful slaughter of Napoleon's wars. The flower of France is being pitilessly cut down for the lust of one man's ambition; and when that is spent, and the wail of the widowed country pierces heaven with its desolation, a costly asylum is built for the handful of soldiers who are left—and the great ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... current, and we could distinguish its course only so far as the first bend, a comparatively short distance away. Nowhere appeared the slightest evidence of life, either on water or land; all was forlorn and dead, a vista of utter desolation. Sam was standing up, his whole attention concentrated on the ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... transporting He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation works of death, destruction and tyranny already begun and tyranny already begun with circumstances of cruelty with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy unworthy the and perfidy scarcely head of a civilized nation. paralleled ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... says Massillon, "is a devouring fire, which tarnishes whatever it touches; which exercises its fury on the good grain equally as on the chaff, on the profane as on the sacred; which, wherever it passes, leaves only desolation and ruin; digs even into the bowels of the earth, and fixes itself on things the most hidden; turns into vile ashes what only a moment before had appeared to us so precious and brilliant; acts with more violence and danger than ever, in the time when it was apparently smothered up and ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... the furthest horizon. His canoe skirts the eastern shore of Michigan, where the forest rises like a wall from the water's edge, and as he advances onward, an endless line of stiff and shaggy fir trees hung with long mosses, fringe the shore with an aspect of desolation. Passing on his right the extensive Island of Bois Blanc, he sees nearly in front the beautiful Island of Mackinaw rising with its white cliffs and green foliage from the broad breast of waters. He does not steer toward it, for at that day the Indians were its only tenants, but keeps along the main ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... fourth we resumed our hazardous journey toward the rebellious city. Had it not been for the intrepidity of our leader, and the utmost confidence of the men in his ability to accomplish whatever he undertook, it would have been impossible to proceed. Fearing as we did the desolation and sorrows of "Libby Prison," ignorant of the forces we might soon encounter, and the ambuscades that might be laid for us, we nevertheless pushed bravely on, because we were bound to follow our chief, be the consequences ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... glare. The noise of the street annoyed him and made him childishly fretful, and the solitude of his own room seemed still more dreary and depressing. He went mechanically through the daily routine of his duties as if the soul had been taken out of his work, and left his life all barrenness and desolation. He moved restlessly from place to place, roamed at all times of the day and night through the city and its suburbs, trying vainly to exhaust his physical strength; gradually, as his lethargy deepened into ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... ladies insisted on their taking it. There have been instances where the delicate hand of woman hath kindled a young man's taste for strong drink, who after many years, when the attractions of that holiday scene were all forgotten, crouched in her rags, and her desolation, and her woe under the uplifted hand of the drunken monster who, on that Christmas morning so long ago, took the glass from her hand. And so, the woman stands on the abutment of the bridge, on the moon-lit night, wondering if, down under the water, there is ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... St. Marius, according to a custom received in many monasteries before the rule of St. Bennet, in imitation of the retreat of our divine Redeemer, made it a rule to live a recluse in a forest during the forty days of Lent. In one of these retreats, he foresaw, in a vision, the desolation which barbarians would soon after spread in Italy, and the destruction of his own monastery, which he foretold before his death, in 555. The abbey of La-Val-Benois[1] being demolished, the body of the saint was translated to Forcalquier, where it is kept with honor in a famous collegiate church ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... was deeply touched. How could she help being so in presence of the desolation and sorrow for which she felt herself and husband ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... women, children and old people in Paris and in France, wherever the war has brought desolation and distress. To France you owe a debt. It is not alone the debt you incurred when your great grandfathers fought for liberty, and to help them, France sent soldiers, ships and two great generals, Rochambeau and La Fayette. You owe France for that, but since ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... arrangements with Peggi Bullet and Shon, she took her way across the bridge. The year that had passed since Cardo had left her, with its varied experiences and trials, the bitter sense of loneliness and desertion, the pains and the delights of motherhood, the desolation and sorrow of bereavement, all had worked a change in the simple girl's character, that now surprised even herself, and she thankfully realised that her troubles had at all events generated a strength which enabled her to act for herself and attend to matters of business which had before been ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... cast across the plain, than, with a loud whirring sound, the locusts rose in the air. Notwithstanding the number which had been destroyed, the mass appeared in no way diminished in size. Onwards they flew to their unknown destination; but what a scene of desolation met our eyes across the country on which they had rested! For miles, as Donald had feared, not a blade of grass was to be seen. As far as the eye could reach, where the evening before the ground had been green and smiling, it now looked brown and parched up, as if a fierce fire ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... storms, the scene of human things Appear'd before me; deserts, burning sands, Where the parch'd adder dies; the frozen south; And desolation blasting all the west With rapine and with murder. Tyrant power Here sits enthroned in blood; the baleful charms Of superstition there infect the skies, And turn the sun to horror. Gracious Heaven! What is the life ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... believe that the writer of it would be judged to be mad from its contents. Mr. Kennedy had told the whole story of his wrongs, and had told it well,—with piteous truthfulness, as far as he himself knew and understood the truth. The letter was almost simple in its wailing record of his own desolation. With a marvellous absence of reticence he had given the names of all persons concerned. He spoke of his wife as having been, and being, under the influence of Mr. Phineas Finn;—spoke of his own ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... tell you for several days, because you have been so good, and I have heard you praying here at night that God would be merciful to me; but I waited until I had strength to be calm. I have lain here day after day, and night after night, face to face with desolation and despair, and now I have grown accustomed to the horror. I know that in this world there is no escape, no help, no hope; so—the worst is over. When you consent to fate, and stretch out your arms to meet death, there is no more terror, only ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... the last remnant of a doomed and nearly vanished race. Few, indeed, are the men who now have, or evermore shall have, the chance of seeing the mightiest of American beasts, in all his wild vigor, surrounded by the tremendous desolation of ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... gulping convulsively. He was thoroughly unstrung. The cold, desperate mood had passed. In its place came the old feeling of desolation. He was a child, aching for sympathy. He wanted to tell his troubles. Punctuating his narrative with many gestures and an occasional gulp, he proceeded to do ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... Clement, "that he had grace enough to whisper. Yes, my poor boy, it is only too true. I was sent for to find your father dying of delirium tremens-you just born, your mother nearly dead, the desolation of your sisters unspeakable. He was only thirty-six, and that vice, together with racing, had devoured him and all the property that should have come to his children. I think he tried to repent ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... there on the high tree-tops the vivid golden light quivered and made rainbows in the spiders' webs. There was a strong, almost stifling smell of resin. Then I turned into a long avenue of limes. Here, too, all was desolation and age; last year's leaves rusted mournfully under my feet and in the twilight shadows lurked between the trees. From the old orchard on the right came the faint, reluctant note of the golden oriole, who must ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... herded wolves, bold only to pursue; The obscene ravens, clamorous o'er the dead; The vultures, to the conqueror's banner true, Who feed where Desolation first has fed, And whose wings rain contagion: how they fled, When like Apollo, from his golden bow, The Pythian of the age one arrow sped And smiled! The spoilers tempt no second blow; They fawn on the proud feet that spurn them ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... for them but their Master's promise. Their eyes had been dimmed by their sorrowful hearts, so that they could not see the truth which He had been trying to reveal to them; and His departure had presented itself to them only as it affected themselves, and therefore had brought a sense of loss and desolation. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... seldom converse in the wastes, for there is something about the silence of the wilderness which discourages speech. And no land is so grimly silent, so hushed and soundless, as the frozen North. For days they marched through desolation, without glimpse of human habitation, without sight of track or trail, without sound of a human voice to break the monotony. There was no game in the country, with the exception of an occasional bird or rabbit, nothing but the white hills, the fringe of alder ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... Eleusis,—all of whom passed to the underworld, were restored for a season, and then retaken. Thus is my sorrow repeated without end. All things are taken from me. Night treads upon the heels of Day, the desolation of Winter wastes the fair fruit of Summer, and Death walks in the ways of Life with inexorable claims. But at the last, through Him, my First-begotten and my Best-beloved, who also died and descended into Hades, and the third day rose again,—through Him, having ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... dagger to her soul to see him attired in the blood-stained uniform of the enemies of her country, yet she knew that he had been driven by the most inexorable circumstances to assume the hated garb. But now he was overtaken with twofold desolation—he was a slave, and beyond the reach of one kind word of solace from her, for whom he had sacrificed all, save and except that which might be borne to him, through the ordinary channels, across ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... Sunday) Colonel Napier and his Unknown set out on horseback on an excursion to the ruins of Italica. As they sat on a ruined wall of the Convent of San Isidoro, contemplating the scene of ruin and desolation around, "the 'Unknown' began to feel the vein of poetry creeping through his inward soul, and gave vent to it by reciting with great emphasis and effect" some lines that the scene called ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... enjoyments through lies; who wrings Nature and all her resources to put a musket on his shoulder; who employs his intellect to hasten the hour of his death and to create diseases out of pleasures? When the rake of pestilence and the ploughshare of war and the demon of desolation have passed over a corner of the globe and obliterated all things, who will be found to have the greater reason,—the Nubian savage or the patrician of Thebes? Your doubts descend the scale, they go from heights to ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... breath and listened; but all that he heard now to break the silence of the vast desolation was the weird howl of some far away koshinee—the dreaded buffalo wolf of ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... that, when they compare their present conditions with others that are worse, Heaven may oblige them to make the exchange, and be convinced of their former felicity, by their experience; I say, how just has it been, that the truly solitary life I reflected on in, an island of mere desolation should be my lot, who had so often unjustly compared it with the life which I then led, in which had I continued, I had in all probability been exceeding prosperous ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... had still neither written to nor heard from, and she dared not hope to meet him. She fancied a wish to have tidings of his marriage: it would be peace; if in desolation. Now that she had confessed and given her pledge to Emma, she had so far broken with him as to render the holding him chained a cruelty, and his reserve whispered of a rational acceptance of the end between them. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... your people, so as to master them, and burn them at their leisure, and then, after having thinned their numbers by a hundred ambuscades in the woods and grass, to pursue you in your retreat even to Montreal, and spread desolation around it." [Footnote: Lamberville to La Barre, 9 Oct., 1684, in N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 260.] La Barre was greatly pleased with this letter, and made use of it to justify himself to the king. His colleague, Meules, on the other hand, ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... shrieking, impetuous sentimentalists go to work in the wrong way. They are the kind of people who would provide pigeon-cotes and dog-collars for the use of ferrets. I grant that the condition of many London streets is appalling; but make a house-to-house visitation, and see how the desolation is caused. Wanton, brutish destructiveness has been at work everywhere. The cistern which should supply a building cannot be fed because the spring, the hinge, and the last few yards of pipe have been chopped away ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... crown, of the liturgical year, was then made at the masses, in which the gospel of the last Sunday after Pentecost, the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, repeats, as well as the Gospel according to Saint Luke, recited on the first Sunday in Advent, the terrible predictions of Christ on the desolation of the time, on ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... to her child, as Keery's peaceful, shrouded face was hidden under the coffin-lid and carried away to Greenfield Hill. Pitiful whisper! happily all-unmeaning to the child, but full of desolation to the mother, floating with but one tiny plank amid the wild wrecks of a midnight ocean, and clinging as only the desperate can cling to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... nearly the same time Russell, returning to Gladstone a letter from Sumner to Cobden, expressed his sorrow "that the President intends a war of emancipation, meaning thereby, I fear, a war of greater desolation than has been since the revival of letters[861]." John Stuart Mill, with that clear logic which appealed to the more intelligent reader, in an able examination of the underlying causes and probable results of the American conflict, excused the Northern ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... kinsfolk, in the little churchyard where she used to gather daisies in her childhood! It takes a great deal of love to keep down the 'climbing sorrow' that swells up in a woman's throat when such memories seize upon her, in her moments of desolation. But if a foreign-born woman does willingly give up all for a man, and never looks backward, like Lot's wife, she is a prize that it is worth running a risk to gain,—that is, if she has the making of a good woman ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... woe-begone looks which tickled me, so much as the helpless, drowned-rat-like aspect we had all assumed—all except our chief, whose tall, strong figure holding a candle over his dishevelled head looked like the spirit of destruction presiding over a scene of desolation. ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... buried in the cellar. I may say that I was unsuccessful: the discovery of many human bones in the ruins had set the authorities digging for more. They had found the treasure and had kept it for their honesty. The house had not been rebuilt; the whole suburb was, in fact, a desolation. So many unearthly sights and sounds had been reported thereabout that nobody would live there. As there was none to question nor molest, I resolved to gratify my filial piety by gazing once more upon the face of my beloved father, if indeed our eyes had deceived ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... fear cometh as desolation, and their destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress cometh upon them, then shall they call upon God, but he will not answer." Proverbs, ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... trail where they found him, and, stuck in a candle-box, over the heap of stones above him, flutters lonesomely in the desolation of the mountain-side the little muslin rag that was once a flag. They call the hill on which he sleeps "Look ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... lodged, temporarily at least; but none of it appeared to have found its way to this particular place. Nakedness and dreariness were the two words which best described the island; the only interruption to its solitude and desolation being occasioned by the birds, which now came screaming and flying above the heads of the intruders, showing both by their boldness and their cries, that they were totally unacquainted ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... Magellan and Franky Drake fled away incontinent and would not be conjured back; though, indeed, the original discoverers would have had yet further occasion to gaze at one another "with a wild surmise" if they had seen shrieking companies "shooting the chutes." But here was vastness, here was desolation, here was silence; jagged ice masses in the foreground and boundless expanse beyond, solemn and mysterious. The Arctic Ocean was even ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... corruption on a country miles in front, which they could not even discern. The infantry went over the top throwing bombs and piled themselves up into mounds of silence. Nations far away toiled day and night in factories—and all that they might achieve this repellant desolation. The innocence of the project made one smile—a handful of women sailing from America to reconstruct! To reconstruct will take ten times more effort than was required to destroy. More than eight hundred years ago William ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... Carlos' room, with many cigarettes stuck behind his ears and in the band of his hat. When these were gone he grubbed for more in the depths of his clothing, somewhere near his skin. Puffs of smoke issued from his pursed lips; and the desolation of his pose, the sorrow of his round, wrinkled face, was so great that it seemed were he to cease smoking, he would die ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... distinction," said he; "no ambition. My original wish was to pass my life in easy, quiet obscurity, with her whom I loved. I was disappointed in my wish; she was removed, who constituted my only felicity in this life; desolation came to my heart, and misery to my head. To escape from the latter I had recourse to Chinese. By degrees the misery left my head, but the desolation of ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... gate that led to the house, and tied his horse inside. Here was the same desolation and silence that he had beheld at his own home. The grass on the lawn, although withered and dry from the intense drought that had prevailed in Kentucky that summer, was long and showed signs of neglect. The great stone pillars ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... No one need ever feel dull in Brighton. If I could have liked billiards, or cared for the theater, or enjoyed the brilliant shops on the crowded pier, with its fine music, I might have been happy enough; but I was miserable with this aching pain of regret and the chill desolation of a terrible loss. I tried the Aquarium. If fishes could soothe the heart of man, solace might be found there; but to my morbid fancy they looked at me with wide open eyes of wonder—they knew the secrets of the sea—the faint stir of life in the beautiful anemones had lost ...
— The Tragedy of the Chain Pier - Everyday Life Library No. 3 • Charlotte M. Braeme
... farther—was a piece of waste land, in the northern suburbs of the city. High up on the left I could discern a light or two, piercing the gloom of the sky; and I knew they shone from the wind-mills of Montmartre. In every other direction lay darkness; desolation swept by the night wind; silence broken only by the dismal howling of far-off watch-dogs. I might have been ten miles from Paris: even as I was a thousand miles from the man who had risen so happily ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... one or two seasons in my life during which I have felt as if the darkness of sorrow and desolation that crushed my inmost heart could never pass away, until death should make me cease to feel the ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... all these violent changes and arbitrary acts were the total ruin and desolation of the country, and the flight of the inhabitants: the said Warren Hastings having found every place abandoned at his approach, even by the officers of the very government which he established, and seeing ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... sat in rueful mood, a small antique beau of an old man in a coat which had once been blue silk, wearing breeches, the original colour of which no man could tell, and without his wig, his clear bald pate shining amidst the surrounding desolation like an ostrich's egg. Beside these worthies stood two trembling way—worn mules with drooping heads, their long ears hanging down most disconsolately. The moment we came in sight, the ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... led me to my room, succeeded in soothing me into calmness and I told her the cause of it. And she saw me to bed with sympathetic caresses and, after she left, it all broke out afresh and I cried myself to sleep in utter desolation and wretchedness. Of course the matter got out and my father began the book. He was sixty years old, not an indiscriminate reader, but a man of kind and boyish heart. I felt a sort of fascinated curiosity ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... Fred pointed to the trampled garden, the litter in the park, and the desolation visible at the Hall, where window casements had been either smashed or taken off, and rough barricades erected; so that where all had once been so trim and orderly, ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... Aunt Amy was as yet only a name to them, Aunt Beth soon faded into a pleasantly vague memory, but Aunt Dodo was a living reality, and they made the most of her, for which compliment she was deeply grateful. But when Mr. Bhaer came, Jo neglected her playfellows, and dismay and desolation fell upon their little souls. Daisy, who was fond of going about peddling kisses, lost her best customer and became bankrupt. Demi, with infantile penetration, soon discovered that Dodo like to play with ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... a woodsman, and alert in every sense like the creatures of the wild themselves, his wits were awake almost before his body was, and his instincts were even quicker than his wits. The desolation and the savage cold of the wilderness had admonished him even in that terrifying moment. As he leaped out in desperate flight, he had snatched with him not only the blankets, but his rifle and cartridge-belt from where they stood by the head of the bunk, and also ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... looked round on every side, and hope gave way before the scene of desolation. Immense branches were shivered from the largest trees; small ones were entirely stripped of their leaves; the long grass was bowed to the earth; the waters were whirled in eddies out of the little rivulets; ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... of unrest and discouragement, Iver appeared, and his presence lit up the desolation in which she was. The sight of him, the sound of his voice, aroused old recollections, helped to drive away the shadows that environed her, and that clouded her mind. There was no harm in this, and yet she was uneasy. Cheerful as she was when he was present, there was something feverish in this ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... south of Algeria, where at midday one sometimes has a feeling of being lost upon a waste of metal, gleaming, angry, tigerish in color. Here, in Egypt, both the people and the desert seem gentler, safer, more amiable. Yet these tombs of Sakkara are hidden in a desolation of the sands, peculiarly blanched and mournful; and as you wander from tomb to tomb, descending and ascending, stealing through great galleries beneath the sands, creeping through tubes of stone, crouching almost on hands and knees in ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... waters overflowing, cast down to the earth with the hand." Its capital might well deserve to be called "a bloody city," or "a city of bloods." Few conquering races have been tender-hearted, or much inclined to spare; and undoubtedly carnage, ruin, and desolation followed upon the track of an Assyrian army, and raised feelings of fear and hatred among their adversaries. But we have no reason to believe that the nation was especially bloodthirsty or unfeeling. The mutilation ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... disappointed in my expectations of going on shore. The visiting surgeon advised my husband and me by no means to land, as the mortality that still raged in the town made it very hazardous. He gave a melancholy description of the place. "Desolation and woe and great mourning—Rachel weeping for her children because they are not," are words that may well be applied to ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... defence of the burghers-of their patriotism and their courage. Frederick's eyes glistened with emotion, and in the fulness of his thankful heart he promised to stand by his faithful Berliners to the end. But when D'Argens told of the desolation which the Russians had wrought amongst the treasures of art in Charlottenburg, the brow of the king grew dark, and with profound ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... moving picture players and the other train passengers found a scene of desolation awaiting them as they alighted. But it was not as bad as might have been expected, and no one had been killed. In fact, no one was hurt, save the fireman and engineer of the passenger train, and ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... farther. Above the drumming of the wind the roar of the sea became more audible every moment; the spume was thicker; the end of the valley, ordinarily the meeting-place of sand and grass and small streams with their yellow flags and forget-me-nots, was a desolation of white foam beyond which against the cliffs showing black in the nebulous moonlight the breakers leapt high with frothy tongues. Mark thought that they resembled immense ghosts clawing up to reach the summit of the cliff. It ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... had plunged into a reckless life, as into a whirlpool of destruction,—that he was among those associates, of high rank socially, of nearly the lowest morally, whom he had formerly known at college. Here was triumph for the prudent father,—desolation to the loving woman,—and to Everett, what? Pain, keen pain, and bitter anxiety,—but no quailing of the heart. He had too much faith in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... his cartoons that first arise in one's recollection. And it is (with but one or two exceptions) exclusively in his cartoons that Leech showed his tragic power. "The Poor Man's Friend" (1845), in which Death, gaunt and grisly, comes to the relief of a wretch in the very desolation of misery and poverty, tells as much in one page as Jerrold's pen, with all its strength and intensity, could make us feel in a score. Ten years later the same idea was splendidly developed and magnificently realised in the cartoon entitled "General Fevrier turned Traitor," ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... the sacraments was what one might call the natural one of making more visible the shadows which enveloped his path, as well as stimulating his instinctive efforts to pierce through them. After the rapturous joy which succeeded confession and absolution, a period of desolation and dryness heavier than he had ever known at once set in. Perhaps he had expected the very reverse of this. At all events, it was not many days before it drew from him the complaint that in leaving Concord he had also left behind him the great interior sweetness which ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... love and your womanhood and end this wholesale murder. Remember the great war in Europe! What did it accomplish? Nothing except to fill millions of graves with brave sons and beloved husbands. Nothing except to darken millions of homes with sorrow. Nothing except to spread ruin and desolation everywhere. Are you going to allow this ghastly business ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
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