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More "Dismal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dismal loneliness. Then came her vexing thoughts again; And quick, as if she broke duress Of heavy weariness or pain, She sought ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... which rippled, curdling as she stepped into it, and which, as she advanced, darkened with the slime raised by her feet. She was bearing in her arms the semblance of a sick child, which struggled convulsively and filled the air with dismal wails. These cries seemed to be answered by a multitude of other children, some bloated like toads, others mere skeletons lying upon the bank, or floating upon the thick brown waters of the pond. And all seemed to address their cries to her, as if she were the cause of their weeping; ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... fire has burnt out, the Chase looks very black and dismal. But the roots and underground stems of both the Heather and the Gorse are still alive. Fresh shoots will grow, and soon the Gorse will be golden in the spring, the Heather purple in the summer, ...
— Wildflowers of the Farm • Arthur Owens Cooke
... poor Hubert's rooms, with their refurbished furnishings covered with white linen, looked cold and almost terrifying. A long window was open, and the velvet curtain swayed as though it shielded some dismal figure. But, when he had crossed the room and drawn the curtain aside, it was to see a bit of fairyland, the roof moonlit and transformed by growing things into a garden. ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... caused the imagination to conjure up all manner of weird and unearthly fancies concerning them. Walpole, for instance, writing of Berkeley Castle, says: "The room shown for the murder of Edward II., and the shrieks of an agonising king, I verily believe to be genuine. It is a dismal chamber, almost at the top of the house, quite detached, and to be approached only by a kind of footbridge, and from that descends a large flight of steps that terminates on strong gates, exactly a situation for a corps de garde." And speaking of Edward's imprisonment here, may be mentioned ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... who end their conversation with you by wearily suggesting that you go down to the basement to find what you seek, do not receive a meager seven dollars a week as a reward for their efforts. Neither are they all obliged to climb five weary flights of stairs to reach the dismal little court room which is their home, and there are several who need not walk thirty-three blocks to save carfare, only to spend wretched evenings washing out handkerchiefs and stockings in the cracked little washbowl, while one ear is cocked ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... been sounded. She darted from the verandah across the path and snatched the baby from her brother's arms; then, running back to the verandah, her chain clanked again and again, and she rent the air with a dismal wail— ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... ground there; it's filled with large grave rats as big as kittens, and the springs of black water there go through the chinks of the rocks and flow into all the wells, and fairly pyson the folks; it's a dismal place, I tell you; I wonder the air from it don't turn all the silver in the Governor's house of a brass colour—and folks say he has four cart loads of it—it's so everlastin' bad; it's near about as ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... of the boy between every lash. This inhuman act, so unbecoming the character of an officer and a gentleman, we all resented, and retiring to the gun-room in a body, gave three deep and heavy groans in chorus. The effect was dismal; it was heard in the ward-room, and the first lieutenant sent down to desire we should be quiet; on which we immediately gave three more, which sent him in a rage to the quarter-deck, where we were all summoned, and the reason of the noise demanded. ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... at the extreme end of the street,— dark, dismal, quite awe-inspiring on a night like this. A narrow lane stretched from the hotel to the sanctuary and beyond. There is nothing at hand to show whether it is a Methodist, a Presbyterian, or a Baptist ...
— The Flyers • George Barr McCutcheon
... care and effort. Alice never dreamed of growing impatient in her mother's service. She did not wait to be asked to help her, but watched for opportunities, and so proved a great blessing and treasure in the lowly cottage home, that would have been very dismal and sad without her sunny, ...
— Little Alice's Palace - or, The Sunny Heart • Anonymous
... altogether, there is very little to show that they imagined any happy state for them after death, not even as a reward for a righteous life, nor, on the other hand, looked to a future state for punishment of wrongs committed in this world, but promiscuously consigned their dead to the ARALI, a most dismal region which is called the "support of chaos," or, in phrase no less vague and full of mysterious awe, "the Great Land" (Ki-gal), "the Great City" (Urugal), "the spacious dwelling," "where they wander in the dark,"—a region ruled by a female divinity called by different ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... river sailing is this Alaskan expedition. Here is a whole tangle of rivers full of strange tides, mysterious currents, and sweet surprises. Moreover, we can get lost if we want to—no one can get lost in a river. We can rush in where pilots fear to tread, strike sunken rocks, toss among dismal eddies, or plunge into whirlpools. We can rake overhanging boughs with our yard-arms if we want to—but we don't want to. In 1875 the United States steamer Saranac went down in Seymour Narrows, and her fate was sudden death. The United States steamer Suwanee met with a like misfortune on ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... was let to some dismal people until my father died and my mother took it over. I'm sorry I can't get sentimental about it, as if it were an ancestral hall, Mr. Spooner. I want to get rid of the place, because I ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... as instant to his eyes as if it had been but yesterday. That insistent bell brought the scene surging back to him: the dismal day; the drizzle; the few mourners; little David decked out in black, his fair hair contrasting with his gloomy clothes, his face swollen with weeping; the Dale hushed, it seemed in death, save for the tolling of the bell; and ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... the garrison—diversions not infrequently hilarious enough. Now food abounds and superabounds; henceforth neither drought nor deluge can work their evil will; insect foes, as well as may be, are kept at bay; there is room in plenty instead of dismal overcrowding. The grateful plant repays the care bestowed upon it by bursting into a sportiveness unsuspected, and indeed impossible, amidst the alarms and frays incessant in the wilderness. It departs from parental habits in most astonishing fashion, puts forth ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... for some time through such dismal streets, we dboucher on the grande place; and before us lies the palace dedicated to all the glories of France. In the midst of the great lonely plain this famous residence of King Louis looks low and mean—Honored ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... more dismal than the sunless canons which in Chicago are called streets; and the luckless being who is concerned there with retail trade is condemned to pass the greater part of his life in unrelieved ugliness. Things, however, are rather better in the "office" quarter; ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... room was no longer the smoky, dismal, miserable place which it was formerly. It was neatly papered; it was swept clean; there was a cheerful fire, which burnt quite clearly: the mulatto woman was cleanly dressed, and, rising from her work, she clasped her hands together with an emotion of joyful gratitude, ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... couples be dancing as to render such caution impossible, stop at once, and do not go on until the room has become somewhat cleared. In a few minutes others will have paused to rest, and you can then continue. Your partner will be grateful that your consideration has preserved her from the dismal plight in which we have seen some ladies emerge from this dance—their coiffeurs disordered, their dresses torn, and their cheeks crimson with fatigue and mortification, while their indignant glances plainly showed the anger they did not care to express in words, and which ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... the experience of an American—it is somewhat remarkable, that, while we stood gazing at this kitchen, I was haunted and perplexed by an idea that somewhere or other I had seen just this strange spectacle before. The height, the blackness, the dismal void, before my eyes, seemed as familiar as the decorous neatness of my grandmother's kitchen; only my unaccountable memory of the scene was lighted up with an image of lurid fires blazing all round the dim interior circuit ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... literature—never read them or think of them. A line or two linger in the memory; a few telling strokes of occasional and felicitous energy are quoted, but this is all. As wholes, these exaggerated stories were worthless; they taught nothing, and, therefore, they are forgotten. If nowadays a dismal poet were, like Byron, to lament the fact of his birth, and to hint that he was too good for the world, the Saturday Review would say that 'they doubted if he was too good; that a sulky poet was a questionable ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... was at home. He was engaged for the present with another patient, but if Charlotte liked to wait he would see her in her turn. Certainly she would wait. She gave her card to the man who admitted her, and was shown into a room, very dark and dismal, where three or four patients were already enduring a time of suspense waiting for their interviews. Charlotte, knowing nothing of illness, knew, if possible, still less of doctors' rooms. A sense ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... not as dismal as you think. If Bertha did worry him he would be quite different. Or if she'd leave him alone, and let him arrange his life as he pleases. But she doesn't dare lose her hold of him on account of the money, and so when HE isn't jealous ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... Glenuskie?' cried Ralf Percy. 'Look up; I verily thought you were sped by Death in bodily shape; but 'twas all an abominable grisly pageant got up by some dismal caitiffs.' ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... as we got out of the sweet-scented air, we came into another that smelt of asphaltus, pitch, and sulphur burning together, with a most intolerable stench, as of burned carcases: the whole element above us was dark and dismal, distilling a kind of pitchy dew upon our heads; we heard the sound of stripes, and the ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... sitting down alone in the old familiar house which had ceased to be his, taking a calm if somewhat dismal survey of affairs. The pendulum of the clock bumped every now and then against one side of the case in which it swung, as the muffled drum to his worldly march. Looking out of the window he could perceive ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... good night and went thoughtfully down the dark stairs, a strange sense of peace upon him. Curiously enough, while he felt that he had left the Presence up in that little dismal room, it yet seemed to be moving beside him, touching his soul, breathing upon him! He was so engrossed with this thought that it never occurred to him that he had given the old woman every cent he had ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... comedy of our August migration; the only change being that instead of Dinard we went to the West Coast of Scotland to stay with some of Barbara's relatives. One gleam of joy irradiated that grey and dismal sojourn—the news that Jaffery, his mission in Crim Tartary being accomplished, would be home for Christmas. Our host and hostess were sporting folk with red, weatherbeaten faces and a mania (which they expected ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... the dismal outlook, Winter had passed without actual disaster to the Confederate arms and now that Spring had come the plantation home of the Herbert Carys, twenty miles below Richmond, had never had a fairer setting. White-pillared and stately the old Colonial mansion stood on one of the low, emerald ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... river's brim, Where Charon plies the ceaseless oar, Two mighty Shadows, dusk and dim, Stood lingering on the dismal shore. Hoarse came the rugged Boatman's call, While echoing caves enforced the cry— And as they severed life's last thrall, Each Spirit spoke one parting sigh. "Farewell to earth! I leave a name, Written in fire, ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... This caress of the king, however harmless in itself, had in it for her something dismal and dreadful. It was the involuntary, instinctive touch of the headsman, who examines the neck of his victim, and searches on it for the place where he will make the stroke. Thus had Anne Boleyn once put her tender white hands about her slender neck, ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... heavily-trodden path between two rocks. They plodded along it until, rounding a crag, they perceived immediately before them a yawning cave. Although the singer was out of sight, the noise made by him was now almost overwhelming and so dismal that the children were on the point of joining ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas
... near God in peace and love without fulfilling certain mental conditions—that he would not have her just as she was now, filled her with an undefined but terribly real misery, only the more distressing that it was vague with the vagueness of the dismal negation from ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... remained in this state; at that period I did not even know what time meant. Sometimes, but very rarely, my father summoned me and my mother to the terrace of the palace; these were hours of recreation for me, as I never saw anything in the dismal cavern but the gloomy countenances of the slaves and Selim's fiery lance. My father was endeavoring to pierce with his eager looks the remotest verge of the horizon, examining attentively every black speck which appeared on the lake, while my mother, reclining by his side, ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... was in great discontent at this match: he easily foresaw the dismal consequences to himself and his successors from such an increase of dominion united to the crown of England: he knew what impressions might be made in future times to the shaking of his throne by an aspiring and warlike king, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... laurels. He wished to die, for he could not survive the destruction of his country. But first he must arrange his affairs, make his will, and bid adieu to his friends. The king opened the door hastily, and desired that a light should be brought—it was no easy thing to procure in this dismal, deserted village. The adjutant succeeded at last, however, in getting a few small tallow candles, and placing them in old bottles, in the absence of candlesticks of any description, he carried them to the king. Frederick ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... had once more commenced to well up from the dark depths, and in a most agonizing fashion too. Even Rod felt a thrill, although he could give a pretty good guess concerning the nature of the poor unfortunate who was the contributing cause for those dismal groans. ...
— The Big Five Motorcycle Boys on the Battle Line - Or, With the Allies in France • Ralph Marlow
... arrest, charged with the most heinous offence of which an officer could be guilty, it is no wonder that Calhoun's heart sank within him on that dismal journey to Tullahoma. ...
— Raiding with Morgan • Byron A. Dunn
... Homer. But the Thebais is a professedly mythological epic, and Statius commands a light touch and brilliant colours. The reader merely groans when the heavy-handed Silius introduces his wondrously engraven shield,[610] his funeral games,[611] his Amazon,[612] his dismal catalogues,[613] his Nekuia.[614] In the latter episode, he even introduces the Vergilian Sibyl of Cumae; it is a redeeming feature that Scipio does not make a 'personally conducted tour' through the nether world; such a direct challenge to the Sixth Aeneid was perhaps impossible for so true ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... any wonder that with this vicious dressage of intelligence and will the native, of old logical and consistent—as the analysis of his past and of his language demonstrates—should now be a mass of dismal contradictions? That continual struggle between reason and duty, between his organism and his new ideals, that civil war which disturbs the peace of his conscience all his life, has the result, of paralyzing all his energies, and aided by the severity of the climate, ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal
... Through the gloom of the weeks preceding his inauguration he held his even way. Perhaps in the more terrible crises through which he was afterwards called to pass, a firmer nerve was required, but not so rare a combination of qualities as he had shown in the dismal months with ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysteric Passions, Vulgarly Call'd the Hypo in Men and Vapours in Women (1711). The mental causes are noted as well in an anonymous pamphlet in the British Museum, A Treatise on the Dismal Effects of Low-Spiritedness (1750) and are echoed in many similar early and mid-eighteenth century works. Some medical writers of the age, like Nicholas Robinson, had reservations about the external mental bases of the hyp and preferred ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill
... in the middle of that horrible ocean. I will not renew my thanks, though I never can thank you enough for that affectionate inspiration of following me on that watery waste, with tokens of your remembrance, and cheering that most dismal of all conditions with such an ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... like a print, clear enough to distinguish tree from boulder and sky from water, yet not clear enough to show the texture of anything. The third stage was that in which colours began to appear, yet flat and dismal, holding, it seemed, no light, yet reflecting it; and all in an extraordinary cold clearness. Nature seemed herself, yet struck to dumbness. No breeze stirred the twigs overhead or the undergrowth through which they rode. Once, as the two, riding ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... decomposition of the vegetation during long ages must have produced beds like the peat-deposits of America and Great Britain. In the Dismal Swamp of Virginia there is said to be a mass of vegetable matter 40 feet in thickness, and on the banks of the Shannon in Ireland is a peat-bog 3 miles broad and 50 feet deep. When conditions were so much more favourable for these deposits, beds 400 feet in thickness may easily have been produced. ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... homeward, Hastens to his golden portals, Head awry and visage wrinkled, Crooked cap upon his forehead, Since as ransom he had promised Ilmarinen, magic artist, Thus to save his life from torture On the distant fields of Northland In the dismal Sariola. When his stallion he had halted On the Osmo-field and meadow, Quickly rising in his snow-sledge, The magician heard one knocking, Breaking coal within the smithy, Beating with a heavy hammer. Wainamoinen, famous minstrel, Entering the smithy straightway, Found ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... made these niceties constitutional. It was almost as difficult for Miss Mattie to say "I'll fix up your bed right there on the sofa" as it would have been for Red to pick a man's pocket, yet, when she thought of his instant and open generosity and what a dismal return therefor it would be to thrust him out for reasons which she divined would have no meaning for him, she heroically resolved to throw custom to the winds, ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... 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
... bewildered by the strangeness of his situation, did not at first perceive that he was left alone. Surprised, and chilled by the sudden silence of the chamber, he rose, withdrew his hands from his face, and again he saw that countenance so mute and solemn. He cast his gaze round the dismal room for Arthur; he called his name—no answer came; a superstitious tremor seized upon him; his limbs shook; he sank once more on his seat, and closed his eyes: muttering, for the first time, perhaps, since his childhood, words of penitence and prayer. ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... doom'd me to examine in my lov'd one's Little-go? "O Love and Duty, sisters twain, in diverse ways ye pull; "I dare not 'pass,' I scarce can 'pluck:' my cup of woe is full. "O that I ever should have lived this dismal day to see"! He knit his brow, and nerved his hand, and wrote ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... cannot live without brain-work. What else is there to live for? Stand at the window here. Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the dun-colored houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material? What is the use of having powers, doctor, when one has no field upon which to ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... day out we ran into a storm that lasted three days and nights. The dismal curtains of the sky were drawn and we could hear the sullen tone of the advancing storm as onward we plowed through the ever-growing foam-crested waves. The second day the sea became awesome, and breathlessly we watched each mountain wave that swept past leaving us still unharmed. Great ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... and partly in respect of my own misfortunes, which you are going to read about. For I have often thought that January (which is mostly twelfth-cake and holiday time) is like the first four or five years of a little boy's life; then comes dismal February, and the working-days with it, when chaps begin to look out for themselves, after the Christmas and the New Year's heyday and merrymaking are over, which our infancy may well be said to be. Well can I recollect that bitter first of February, when I first ...
— The Fatal Boots • William Makepeace Thackeray
... dottrell, and scarce any golden plovers (of which we have great store generally) but vast lonely birds, that cried at night, and moved the whole air with their pinions; yet no man ever saw them. It was dismal as well as dangerous now for any man to go fowling (which of late I loved much in the winter) because the fog would come down so thick that the pan of the gun was reeking, and the fowl out of sight ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... even in the first dismal days of his life to stay peacefully within-doors. On the Sunday following his birth he was carried to the meeting-house to be baptized. When we consider the chill and gloom of those unheated, freezing churches, growing colder and damper and deadlier with every wintry blast—we wonder that ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... his beard and floundered ahead like a bear. Jack Cockrell passed the word to the chief that the gold was awaiting them. Like shadows the Yemassees drew near the creek and then, full-lunged, terrific, their war-whoop echoed through the dismal Cherokee swamp. Nimble Jack Cockrell was not far behind them, his heart pumping ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... hate any thing so dismal! Every body that did read it had melancholy faces for a week. 'Cecilia' is as pathetic as I can bear, and more sometimes; yet, in the midst of the sorrow, there is a spirit in the writing, a fire in the whole composition, that keep off that heavy depression given by Richardson. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... flapping weakly to a warmer clime. They might stay a little, some of them, deceived by the hanging peat-smoke into the notion that somewhere here were warmth and comfort; but the cold searched them to the core, and such as did not die on the roadside took up their dismal voyaging anew. ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... "The servant from his pathway turns aside, And through bye-roads and solitary goes; Purposely lighting on a stream, whose tide From Apennine into our river flows; Where, both of farm and busy city wide, A holt, and dark and dismal greenwood grows. Silent appeared the gloomy place, and one Fitting the cruel deed ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... that are celebrating their mysteries. They pay well and he had to sing dismal hymns for them behind a curtain; the wildest stuff, in which he does not follow a word, and that I do ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... such a blast through all the swish and sweat, Through rattle and rumpus and raps, and the kicks and cuffs that they get, Through the chatter and tread, and the rudder's wash, and the dismal clank Of the shameful chain which forever binds the slave ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... apertures in the wall (windows no longer) were large enough, they threw out tables, chests of drawers, beds, mirrors, pictures, and flung them whole into the fire; while every fresh addition to the blazing masses was received with shouts, and howls, and yells, which added new and dismal terrors to the conflagration. Those who had axes and had spent their fury on the movables, chopped and tore down the doors and window frames, broke up the flooring, hewed away the rafters, and buried ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... should seem to be A very dismal place; Your "auld acquaintance" all at once Is altered in the face; Their discords sting through Burns and Moore, Like hedgehogs ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... a dismal letter from Harte, last week; he tells me that he is at nurse with a sister in Berkshire; that he has got a confirmed jaundice, besides twenty other distempers. The true cause of these complaints I take to be the same that so greatly disordered, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... in this place of refuge, and so he retreated to the north, to some estates he had there, in the remote Highlands. A detachment of forces was sent in pursuit of him. Now there are, north of Scotland, some groups of dismal islands, the summits of submerged mountains and rocks, rising in dark and sublime, but gloomy grandeur, from the midst of cold and tempestuous seas. Bothwell, finding himself pursued, undertook to escape by ship to these islands. His pursuers, ...
— Mary Queen of Scots, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... land. To meet the difficulty of a false oath, while he is walking over his neighbor's land, he puts a little dust from his own field into his shoes. As both sides are acquainted with the trick, the dismal farce of swearing is usually soon abandoned, in favor of ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... furthermore, to be the compensating justice of Nature, the treasures of the earth are always hidden in the most unattractive, dismal, and dreary spots. At least all the mining places I ever visited are so located, and Bisbee is no exception. To get away from the cramped little village and its unsavoury restaurant, I established my first camp four miles south ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... generous gondolier, and we go to the Hall—a dismal, bleak place, ghastly with the memories of last year's opulence and plenty, and here Giuseppe's fare is swelled by the stranger's mite. But here Giuseppe tells me of the "Relief Boat" which leaves for the flooded ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... a business is a comparatively new industry in America. It is true that the first attempts at growing this fruit were made to found an industry, but these were complete and dismal failures, and the start in growing grapes in America eventually came as a pleasing hobby. In evolving from a hobby into vineyard culture on a large scale, the business side of the industry long lagged. At present, with increasing competition, manifold ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... upon the solitudes of Green Street, along which he now dragged himself dreamily enough, ever extracting consolations from lugubrious cadences mournfully intoned. Very silent was the neighborhood. Very dismal the night. Very dreary and damp was Mr. Smithers; for a vile fog wrapped itself around him, filling his body with moist misery, and his mind with anticipated rheumatic horrors. Still he surged heavily along, tired Nature with tuneful charms ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... he had left me, everything seemed so strange, every one seemed so dull, every place seemed so desolate, that I felt as if I had been transported into some dismal scene, where I knew no one, and where there was no one likely to care about me in the slightest degree. My father went about his avocations in a different spirit to what he had so long been used to exhibit; it was evident he missed Heinrich as much as I did, and the villagers ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... hung over the camp, an air of expectant waiting. The sick men tossed upon their beds bewailing their inability to be up and doing, and calling feverishly for "news!" But no news came; nothing to break the dismal monotony. ...
— A Little Dusky Hero • Harriet T. Comstock
... cried Rinkitink, as he lay back in the shade. "I find it a decided relief to be away from that dismal ...
— Rinkitink in Oz • L. Frank Baum
... were yet far away. Indeed, it was not until all was over and a day too late that Cabell came up. A tragic sight confronted him; but his own march had been so dismal, so inauspicious that everything unfortunate that had happened seemed but a part of one huge catastrophe. He had come by the "old Pacific mail route, the bridges of which, in some places, were still standing in the uninhabited prairies."[815] ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... passed—a sad dismal winter for the royal family, and for Marie Antoinette in particular! None of those festivities, those diversions, those simple and innocent joys, which are wont to adorn the life of a woman and of ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... old lady and her three daughters who sat on the camp-stools by the step-ladder; the same fat old lady, bedizened with finery, and the same three young ladies, with strong features and dismal dresses, which the traveler encounters all over the Continent of Europe. The old lady was in a state of chronic agony lest the young ladies should be forcibly seized and carried away by some daring youth of the male sex; and the young ladies ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... wantonness of woe, O Youth to partial Fortune vainly dear! To plunder'd Want's half-shelter'd hovel go, Go, and some hunger-bitten infant hear Moan haply in a dying mother's ear: 5 Or when the cold and dismal fog-damps brood O'er the rank church-yard with sear elm-leaves strew'd, Pace round some widow's grave, whose dearer part Was slaughter'd, where o'er his uncoffin'd limbs The flocking flesh-birds scream'd! Then, while thy heart 10 Groans, and thine eye a fiercer sorrow dims, Know ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... pursuers wax fainter and fainter. In about half an hour he reached a small lake or tarn, as it is called in the north, which appeared to be the source of the stream. Here he had breathing time; but he was chilled with wet, and altogether in a dismal condition. He more than once thought he heard the voices of men and dogs in the blast; but their search was in vain, for about daybreak he reached a place of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... deep feeling on the matter, and Lionel, who had acted the voice and the curtsey, laughed too, and then perhaps ashamed of making fun of such an affair, added, "It is the best news I have heard this long time. What, and that is what she has been so dismal about these last few ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... class, were occupied in travaux forces—not indeed of a very hard description. These were employed in baking tortillas for the prisoners. Dirty, ragged, and miserable-looking creatures there were in these dismal vaults, which looked like purgatory, and smelt like—Heaven knows what! But, as I have frequently had occasion to observe in Mexico, the sense of smell is a doubtful blessing. Another large hall near this, which ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... the sweet flow of the water from the mouth of the white horse, which in general went on all night long. Suddenly came an awful sound—like a howl also, but such as never left the throat of dog. Again and again at intervals it came, with others like it but not the same, torturing the dark with a dismal fear. Dorothy had never heard the cry of a wild beast, but the suggestion that these might be such cries, and the recollection that she had heard such beasts were in Raglan Castle, came together to her mind. She was so weary, however, that worse noises than these ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... but in the presence of thousands of congregated fiends, who, having been apprised of the new plan about to be presented for peopling the Commonwealth of Hell with recruits from earth, had come up in all directions from their dismal abodes, to hear those plans reported, and witness the awarding of the prize for the one judged most worthy of adoption. Lucifer then mounted his throne, commanded silence, and ordered the competitors to advance and present, in succession, such plans as ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... interpretation, and the new methods of hermeneutics, and polychrome Bibles; and they laugh at the idea of the world's creation in six days; and altogether, they disturb and disquiet the dreams of the staid and stately veterans of the Famine years, and make them forecast a dismal future for Ireland when German metaphysics and coffee will first impair, and then destroy, the sacred traditions of Irish faith. And yet, these young priests inherit the best elements of the grand inheritance that ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... savage landholders. Manhattan's twenty-two thousand acres of rock, lake and rolling table land, rising at places to a height of one hundred and thirty-eight feet, were covered with sombre forests, grassy knolls and dismal swamps. The trees were lofty; and old, decayed and withered limbs contrasted with the younger growth of branches; and wild flowers wasted their sweetness among the dead leaves and uncut herbage at their roots. The wanton grapevine swung carelessly from the topmost boughs of the oak and the sycamore; ...
— Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883 • William C. Kingsley
... and a head that shook sadly in sympathy with him, Mrs. Finch's face underwent a most extraordinary transformation when she turned my way next. To my astonishment, her dim eyes actually sparkled; a broad smile of irrepressible contentment showed itself cunningly to me, in place of the dismal expression which had welcomed Oscar. Holding up the baby in triumph, the lady of the rectory whispered these words in my ear:—"What do you think he has done since ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... beast still. A week-old baby gives no more sign of intelligence, of love, or ambition, or hope, or fear, or passion, or purpose, than a week-old monkey, and is not half so frisky and funny. In fact, it is a puling, scowling, wretched, dismal, desperate-looking animal. It is only as it grows old that the beast gives way and the angel-wings bud, and all along through infancy and childhood the beast gives way and gives way and the angel-wings bud and bud; and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... left echoed an even stranger one—yet one I recognised at once as having mingled with my dreams; a woman's voice pitched at first in a long monotonous wail and then undulating in semitones above and below the keynote—a voice which seemed to call from miles away—a sound as dismal as ever ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... are frequently visible in Canada, but are most brilliant in the colder regions near the North Pole, where they serve to give light during the dark season to those dismal countries from which the sun is so many months absent. The light of the Aurora Borealis is so soft and beautiful, that any object can be distinctly seen; though in those cold countries there are few human beings to be benefited by this beautiful ...
— In The Forest • Catharine Parr Traill
... hands {804} A goblet wreath'd with ivy, fill'd it high With the grape's purple juice, and quaff'd it off Untemper'd, till the glowing wine inflamed him; Then binding round his head a myrtle wreath, Howls dismal discord:—two unpleasing strains We heard, his harsh notes who in nought revered Th' afflictions of Admetus, and the voice Of sorrow through the family that wept Our mistress. Yet our tearful eyes we showed not, Admetus so commanded, to ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... Oysters cried, Turning a little blue. "After such kindness that would be A dismal thing to do!" "The night is fine," the Walrus said, "Do ...
— The Best Nonsense Verses • Various
... message had arrived saying that the town had been heavily shelled during the night, and that there were a number of children and of wounded there, who ought if possible to be removed to some less dangerous situation. So we started off to see what we could do for them. It was a dismal morning, and the rain was coming down in a steady drizzle which continued all day long, but fortunately we had a closed car, and we were protected from the elements. The road to Ypres is a broad ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... miles over the plain, they came amongst those knolls at the mouth of the valley, and Sir Aymeris led Birdalone up to the top of one of the highest of them, and thence they could look into that dale and see how it winded away up toward the mountains, like to a dismal street; for not only was it but little grassed, but withal there was neither tree nor bush therein. Moreover, scattered all about the bottom of the dale were great stones, which looked as if they had once been set in some kind ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... should be buried in wicker-work baskets, with fern-leaves for shrouds, so that the poor clay might the more easily return to mother earth. Those who favor cremation suffer again a still more frantic disesteem; and yet every one deplores the present gloomy apparatus and dismal observances of our ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... dead with grief, at the news he received from Rome, in sight of the audience, otherwise he has not much business on the stage, and the play ought rather to have taken the name of Bassane's Jealousy, and the dismal Effects thereof, the Murder of his new Bride Clorina, and ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... say so, my dear, but you can't keep on making delightful idiots go down with the public. That was what I was thinking when you came in and found me looking so dismal. I had stopped in the middle of a most exciting scene because I had discovered that I was poking fun at ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... through the aisles of the forest—sounds elsewhere suggestive of night and darkness. Now and then, light shone upon the path—the light that indicates an opening in the forest; but it was not that of a friendly clearing. Only the break caused by some dismal lagoon, amidst whose dank stagnant waters even the cypress cannot grow—the habitat of black water-snakes and mud-turtles—of cranes, herons, and Qua-birds. Hundreds of these I saw perched upon the rotting half-submerged ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... of adventure in an unknown land was indeed enticing. In a few brief words he recalled my dismal forebodings of the life in an underground office in London, and contrasted it with a free existence in a fertile and abundant land, where I should be the guest and perhaps an official of its ruler. He urged me most strongly to go as his ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... fragrantly on the hearth of the small closet adjoining the Queen's chamber, suffusing it with a sense of comfort, the greater by contrast with the cheerlessness out of doors, where an easterly wind swept down from Arthur's Seat and moaned its dismal ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... on his southern journey, with twenty warriors to aid in the work which was now apparently nearing completion. Inspired by patriotic zeal, he passed from tribe to tribe, incessantly active. Through dismal swamps and across wide plains he made his way, and in his light canoe shot many a dangerous rapid. He laboured diligently among the Indians to make them sensible of their wrongs and induce them to sink their petty tribal jealousies in a ...
— Tecumseh - A Chronicle of the Last Great Leader of His People; Vol. - 17 of Chronicles of Canada • Ethel T. Raymond
... 'What a dismal failure it has been, though it began so well!' said Bessie, as she and the other juveniles went upstairs ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... Then the hills Rose bald and rugged o'er the wild abyss; The waters found their places; and the sun, The bright-haired warder of the golden morn, Parting the curtains of reposing night, Rung his first challenge to the dismal shades, That shrunk back, awed, into Cimmerean gloom; And the young moon glode through the startled void With ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... men would arrive with wounded, would ask in a whisper that was inhuman and isolating whether there were room on my carts. Then the body would be lifted up; there would be muttered directions, the wounded man would cry, then the other wounded would also cry—after that, there would be the dismal silence again, silence broken only by the shrapnel and the heavy plopping smothers of the rain. But it was myself upon whom my eyes were fixed, myself, a miserable figure, the rain dripping from me, slipping down my neck, squelching under my boots. And as I ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... the war, I despair of myself. There is not one gleam of light in all the sad landscape, and the abyss seems waiting at my feet to swallow me up with everything that I cherish. It is no use saying to this demon of the darkness that I know he is a humbug, a mere Dismal Jemmy of the brain, who sits there croaking like a night owl or a tenth-rate journalist. My Dismal Jemmy is not to be exorcised by argument. He can only be driven out ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... midnight to renew their outcries. But those in the Gangrene wards seemed to be denied even this scanty blessing. Apparently they never slept, for their shrieks never ceased. A multitude of whip-poor-wills in the woods around us began their usual dismal cry, which had never seemed so unearthly and full of dreadful ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... and perhaps best of all, as giving weight to any suggestions that I may make, across the dismal mud swamp that I often trod with such an aching heart and faltering steps came to meet me God's best and highest, with outstretched hands of help and encouragement. It was the highly-cultivated and thoughtful ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... quick wit put him up to a plan to serve the poor girl. Early in the morning he took his pack and went through the village up to the Rev. Mr. Horton's. There, under pretence of asking for kettles to mend, he told the most dismal tale to the housemaid. At breakfast-time this was reported to Mrs. Horton. Distress at such a time was sufficient to engage any lady's attention. Mrs. Horton was a frail, tender woman, but earnest in works of charity. The ponies were ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... severity of this first blow that I pleaded an engagement, presented my offerings (how dreadfully inappropriate they seemed!), and hurried away to a lecture on materia medica at the Ecole Pratique; that being a good, congenial, dismal entertainment for ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... it was on Stelton's tongue to blurt out what had happened two days previous, but an instinctive knowledge that Larkin would profit by the information restrained him, and he continued riding on in silence, a prey to dismal thoughts ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... I cared for my trunk—my life was the subject that interested me at the time. Outside, too, the doors and blinds rattled, the tiller-chain chattered and wailed and sobbed like a woman in distress, and above all other sounds rose the dismal fog horn, for a pall of mist ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller
... an eggshell from which the yolk had been sucked. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston suffered alike, and worthy ship owners had to leave off counting their losses upon their fingers and take to the slate to keep the dismal record. ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... Mr. Clarkson emitted a dismal groan, and clapping his hand over his mouth strove to make it pass muster as a yawn. It was evident that the malicious Mr. Smithson was deriving considerable pleasure from his discomfiture—the pleasure natural to the father of seven over the troubles of a comfortable bachelor. ...
— Ship's Company, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... walls, flanked by more than fifty towers, any preconceived ideas that one may have had of what it might be like will be dispelled in air. It is the most stupendously theatrical thing yet on top of earth, unless it be the sad and dismal Pompeii or poor rent ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... was growing so weak that Yeo gave him more cordial. After a pause Caranby resumed with a last effort, and very swiftly, as though he thought his strength would fail him before he reached the end of his dismal story. ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... comprehensive in relation to history, to summarise and represent in epic characters the traditional experience of an heroic age, is not the proper virtue of every kind of poetry, though it is proper to the Homeric kind. The freedom that belongs to the Iliad and the Odyssey is also shared by many a dismal and interminable poem of the Middle Ages. That foreign or literary subjects impose certain limitations, and interfere with the direct use of matter of experience in poetry, is nothing against them. The Anglo-Saxon Judith, which ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... doubt that, when they had gone, the buildings in which they had slept, the villages which they had seen, the wayside herders and flocks, would vanish like theatrical scenery, and the country present the dismal aspect ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... show a bad taste; for though the other daughters were as ugly as their hideous ma, Mary Shum was a pretty little pink, modest creatur, with glossy black hair and tender blue eyes, and a neck as white as plaster of Parish. She wore a dismal old black gownd, which had grown too short for her, and too tight; but it only served to show her pretty angles and feet, and bewchus figger. Master, though he had looked rather low for the gal of his art, had certainly ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... guests wore raincoats, too—we met a few on the way—with dull-colored suits underneath, and tailored hats. There wasn't a single bright, frivolous thing about that tea. Even the house was dismal—rows of black walnut bookcases with busts of great men on top, steel engravings framed in oak on the walls, and a Boston fern or two in red pots sitting about on plates. When I looked up from my weak tea, served in a common stock-pattern willow cup, and saw Lucy ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... in a damp and dismal cave across a slimy moor and whenever any one dies unshriven, he is sent for, and he comes after dark, his face shrouded, and prays and moans all night beside the corpse, eating all he possibly can of the food which has been placed about it, and what he can't consume on the spot he takes away ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... poor and dismal life they led there, Snjolfur and his wife. They were both used to hard work, but they had had no experience of privation and constant care for the morrow. Most days it meant putting to sea if they were to eat, and it was not every ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... lulls, however, in this dismal state of affairs. Sometimes the rain ceased; the sun burst forth in irresistible splendour, and the whole country began to steam like a caldron. A cart, too, succeeded now and then in struggling up with a load of fresh provisions; reviving a few sinking spirits for a time, and almost making ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... tugs waved dismal farewell. A chill wind had begun to harp through the cordage of the little schooner; the moan—far flung, mystic, a voice from nowhere—that presages the tempest crooned ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... see, the further I went into the history of this voyage, the more dismal it became. One miserable account, when examined, only brought up another. I saw no end to inquiry. The great question was, what was I to do? I thought the best thing would be to get the captain ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... into this dismal country with a face of mingled repulsion and interest, which showed that the scene was new to him. At intervals he drew from his pocket a bulky letter to which he referred, and on the margins of which he scribbled ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... accompany delirium tremens; the frightful twitching of the limbs is accompanied by a kind of depression that takes the very heart and courage out of a man; and yet no one who travels over these islands can avoid hearing jokes on the dismal subject made by boys who have hardly reached their twenty-fifth year. The bar encourages levity, and the levity is unrelieved by any real gaiety—it is the hysterical ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... cheer him. Besides, though Cassy had laughed, there had been a tugging at her heartstrings. Shabby, unkempt, in a frayed dressing-gown, his arm in a dismal sling, he looked so out of it, ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... secretly about him, and with which he was going to have hanged himself, and gave it into the Father's hands. The saint, to whom it was revealed, that extreme misery had reduced the unhappy wretch to this dismal melancholy, gave him comfort, retained him in the college for some time, and at length dismissed him with a round sum of money, sufficient for the entertainment of his family. He recommended, without ceasing, his friends and benefactors ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... except those familiar with their treacherous paths and labyrinthine channels, swamps have always afforded a refuge for individuals and peoples; and therefore as places of defense they have played no inconspicuous part in history. What the Dismal Swamp of North Carolina and the cypress swamps of Louisiana were to the run-away slaves, that the Everglades of Florida have been to the defeated Seminoles. In that half-solid, half-fluid area, penetrable only to the native Indian who poles his canoe along its tortuous channels of liquid ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... provender from the garden; such stuff one stored in match-boxes and pill-boxes, or packed in sacks of old glove fingers tied up with thread and sent off by waggons along the great military road to the beleaguered fortress on the Indian frontier beyond the worn places that were dismal swamps. And there were battles on ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... said the gentleman, after another and a dismal pause, 'why you wouldn't paper a room with representations of horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality - ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... some time he found himself not safe in this place of refuge, and so he retreated to the north, to some estates he had there, in the remote Highlands. A detachment of forces was sent in pursuit of him. Now there are, north of Scotland, some groups of dismal islands, the summits of submerged mountains and rocks, rising in dark and sublime, but gloomy grandeur, from the midst of cold and tempestuous seas. Bothwell, finding himself pursued, undertook to escape by ship to these islands. His pursuers, headed by Grange, who had ...
— Mary Queen of Scots, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... were known, the Christians had peace for a while. Therefore, in company with Julia and many others of the brotherhood, she was able to visit the catacombs on the Appian Way by night, and there in those dismal, endless tombs to offer prayer and receive the ministrations of the Church. The great Apostles, St. Peter and St. Paul, had suffered martyrdom, indeed, but they had left many teachers behind them, and the chief of these soon grew to know and ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... he looked down at my water-soaked form and wild-eyed countenance with gentle patience. Then he peered out over my head into the dismal night. He was a man of resolution but he hesitated for a moment. "Your father is suffering sharply, ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... little voice are unknown to me; her long-drawn call in the echoing darkness of midnight has so strange an accent, something so unexpected and wild, that it impresses me with a dismal feeling of ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... long ranks and lanes of the marketplace, and did not know till afterward that at one end of it, called the Pavement, the public executions used to take place for those great or small occasions which brought folks to the block or scaffold in the past. I had later some ado to verify the dismal fact from a cluster of people before a tavern who seemed to be taking bets for the Doncaster Week, and I could hardly keep them from booking me for this horse or that when I merely wanted to know whether it was on a certain spot the Earl of Northumberland had his head ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... following complete illustration of the effect produced by horsemen and fire-arms upon savage warriors. "The commando approached within 150 yards with a view to beckon some one to come out. On this, the enemy commenced their terrible howl, and at once discharged their clubs and javelins. Their black, dismal appearance and savage fury, with their hoarse and stentorian voices, were calculated to daunt; and the Griquas [horsemen], on their first attack, wisely retreated to a short distance, and then drew up. Waterboer, the chief, commenced firing, and leveled one of their warriors to the ground; ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... day that Monsieur and Madame Berthelini descended with two boxes and a guitar in a fat case at the station of the little town of Castel-le-Gachis, and the omnibus carried them with their effects to the Hotel of the Black Head. This was a dismal, conventual building in a narrow street, capable of standing siege when once the gates were shut, and smelling strangely in the interior of straw and chocolate and old feminine apparel. Berthelini paused upon the threshold with a painful ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... men were conducted to a dark and sombre building, which bore the appearance of a vast monastery. The interior was even more dismal in its appearance than the walls without. A solitary figure met them at the doorway. Their guards entered, and the gates were ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... kept in lavender that the poor girl is actually getting thin and losing her health; and then, you see, there's Aunt Zeruah, she mounts guard at our house, and keeps up such strict police regulations that a fellow can't do a thing. The parlors are splendid, but so lonesome and dismal!—not a ray of sunshine, in fact not a ray of light, except when a visitor is calling, and then they open a crack. They're afraid of flies, and yet, dear knows, they keep every looking-glass and picture-frame muffled to its ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... (Institut. Divin. vii. 15, &c.) relates the dismal talk of futurity with great spirit and eloquence. * Note: Lactantius had a notion of a great Asiatic empire, which was previously to rise on the ruins of the Roman: quod Romanum nomen animus dicere, sed dicam. quia futurum est tolletur de ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... ennoble the portrait of a hero, real Greek life of his own times does not fail sometimes—to obtrude on him. So he lets in bits now and again that belong to the state of things Hesiod describes, and confirm the truth of Hesiod's dismal picture. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... with a steadier voice, but her eyes hung upon his face with an eager look of expectation, as if yearning to detect there some gleam of hope, some contradiction of the dismal truth. He read that look aright and it pierced him like a sharp sword. He made a brave effort to respond to its appeal, but his features seemed hard as stone, and he could only cry out against his destiny, and bewail ...
— A Good-For-Nothing - 1876 • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... rather shy. Most men upon making such a dismal failure on two separate occasions, would probably be willing to give up the game, but there is something of the bull-dog about Sir Lionel. He will hold on ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... dear play-mate, tell me why In dismal black you're drest? Why does the tear stand in your eye? With sobs ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... a past like that; Back therefore to my darkening path again! No sound, no sight so far as eye could strain. Will the night send a howlet deg. or a bat? deg.106 I asked: when something on the dismal flat Came to arrest my thoughts ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... that hour was almost invariably announced by the dismal squawking of Penny Durkin's fiddle. Sometimes it was to be heard in the afternoon, but not always, for Penny was a very busy youth. He was something of a "shark" at lessons, was a leading light in the Debating Circle and conducted a second-hand business ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... in dismal failure. In 1681, when the shipmasters came to the appointed ports, they found that no shelter had been constructed for their goods. Thinking the law nullified, or not yet in operation, they traded as usual from private wharves. For this breach of the law, some of ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... the sound of Sails' dismal croaking. See the night! He could see nothing. The other's voice came out of an impenetrable void. Above him, beneath him, all about him, was nothing but blackness, thick, clinging gloom. The Stygian, fog-filled night crushed, like a heavy, intangible ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... even the purlieus of Rome sink into insignificance. Now run your eye along the East side of Orange street. A sidewalk sinking in mire; a long line of one-story wooden shanties, ready to cave-in with decay; dismal looking groceries, in which the god, gin, is sending his victims by hundreds to the greedy grave-yard; suspicious looking dens with dingy fronts, open doors, and windows stuffed with filthy rags-in ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... elaborate manoeuvres to see as little of his guest as possible. "A worthy man, but tedious," he said, "wonderfully well preserved—in body, that is; his mind has entirely gone to pieces; he has got some dismal notions in his head about the condition of the agricultural poor; he thinks they want uplifting! Now I am all for the due subordination of classes. The poor are there, if I may speak plainly, to breed—that is their first duty; and their only other duty that I can ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... enthusiastic Cleinias; but are not these things when spoken to a multitude hard to be understood, not to mention that they take up a dismal length of time? ...
— Laws • Plato
... me, "He wakes no more this side the sound of the angelic trump. When the hostile Sovereign shall come, each one will find again his dismal tomb, will take again his flesh and his shape, will hear that which through ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... had been a happy one; the afternoon was dismal. He knew he was marked. He saw men pointing at him, whispering about him, and could imagine what they were saying. In the morning he had been received casually as an equal. Nobody had welcomed him, nobody had paid particular attention to him. ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... exclaimed the wretched Bert, jumping to his feet; "let up on that dismal recitative. It would make a dog howl ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... accusation Dora threw herself and the doll upon their faces, and wept bitterly. The eyes of the soft-hearted Nicholas began to fill with tears, and he squatted down before her, looking most dismal. He had a fellow-feeling for her attachment to an old toy, and yet Robin's will was law ...
— The Peace Egg and Other tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... know nobody can spoil it but myself," said Armine. "And you know he said that one might make weakliness and sickness just as golden, by that great Love, as being up and doing. I was going to tell you, Babie, I was horridly wretched and dismal one day at Leukerbad when I thought mother and all were out of the way-gone out driving, I believe-and then Fordham came in. He had stayed in, ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... horses would make. Whether they took the mammoth into account I cannot say, but presume he was not considered. Wolves are numerous in all Siberia, and are not admired by the biped inhabitants. When our road seemed utterly lost, and our chances good for a bivouac in the steppe, we heard a dismal howl in a momentary lull of ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... Cliffe to his last blood-stained rest, did her mind sink in dreams of Ashe—and in the dismal reckoning up of all that she had so lightly and inconceivably lost. Sometimes she found herself absorbed in a kind of angry marvelling at the strength of ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... tick-tack! White old face with figures black! So when dismal, stormy days Keep him from his out-door plays, Most that he cares for is to sit Watching, always watching it. And when the hour strikes he thinks,— (A dear, wise head has the little Ginx!) "The clock strikes one, The mice ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... in sable stole, Graceful in years, pant eager for the goal. Old Norbury starts, and, with the seventh-form boys, In weeds of Greek the church-yard's peace annoys, With classic Weston, Charley Coote and Tew, In dismal dance about the mournful yew. But first in notes Sicilian placed on high, Bates sounds the soft precluding symphony; And in sad cadence, as the bands condense, The curfew tolls the knell ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 9, Saturday, December 29, 1849 • Various
... rose in his dismal chant and he cast more of the powder from his skin-bag into the fire. The smoke pillar grew to an immense size and, as he gazed at it, before Frank's amazed eyes a scene as strange to him as any he had ever set eyes on, began ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... ballad that tells of how a knight found, coiling round a tree in a dismal forest, a loathly dragon breathing out poison; and how, undeterred by its hideousness and foulness, he cast his arms round it and kissed it on the mouth. Three times he did it undisgusted, and at the third the shape changed into a fair lady, and he won his bride. Christ 'kisses with the kisses ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... sermon. The gravity with which he sets before us all the benevolent schemes of the medecin de campagne, and describes the whole charitable machinery of the district, makes his performance as dismal as a gigantic religious tract. But when, in his happier and wickeder moods, he turns this amazing capacity of graphic description to its true account, the power of his method makes itself manifest. Every bit of elaborate geographical and financial ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... translation of Homer's Iliad and Odysseys, by writing annotations on them. At length, after Mr. Shirley had lived to the age of 72, in various conditions, having been much agitated in the world, he, with his second wife, was driven by the dismal conflagration that happened in London, Anno 1666, from his habitation in Fleet-street, to another in St. Giles's in the Fields. Where, being overcome with miseries occasioned by the fire, and bending beneath the weight of years, they ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... but cunning, cruel, bigoted, and selfish, they make the spirit of oppressive laws, and the miserable state of the country, the harvest of their gain. Look more closely at the picture, gentlemen of the jury, and make, as I am sure you will, the dismal and terrible circumstances which I will lay before you your own. Imagine for a moment that those who are now, or at least have been, the objects of hot and blood-scenting persecution, had, by some political revolution, got the power of the State and of the laws into their own hands; suppose, for ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... it may be done if one will use the plain common-sense methods necessary to make plants succeed. Too much care and coddling is just as sure to make growth forlorn and sickly as too much neglect. That may be one reason why one frequently sees such healthy looking plants framed in the dismal window of a factory tenement, where the chinks can never be stopped tight and the occupants find it hard enough to keep warm, while at the same time it is easy to find leafless and lanky specimens in the superheated and moistureless air ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell
... person she meets? It would signify nothing—no, I mean only [she shudders]—the gravedigger! He has just finished digging a grave and is climbing out of it! She greets him and glances smilingly down into the dismal hole! She throws the nosegay into ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... an ill-fated event and leaves a dismal prospect," he said very quietly. "Sooner or later my nephews' death will be laid on me. To proclaim them dead would be to declare me guilty now. To conceal their death will be simply to postpone that guilt a time—a very little time, it may be. Curiosity ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... direction of her own humbler residence. She had to walk quite a mile and a half, and at the end of that time she found herself in a much poorer part of the large suburb where Middleton School was situated. The houses here were of a humble description—not even semidetached, but standing in long, dismal rows, a good many of them backing on to a railway-cutting. These houses boasted of no small gardens, but ran flush with the road. They were built of the universal yellow brick, and were about as ugly as ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... descended it; they coursed over the plains like grey-hounds; they passed through their own villages like a whirlwind; drew most of the inhabitants after them like the living tail of a mad comet, and only stopped when they fell exhausted on the damp ground in the remotest depths of their own dismal swamps. ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... the sort to spend these dismal days repining. Indeed he had no time, even had he been so inclined. His work filled up every minute of every rainy day and hours of the drenched night. If there was no sunshine outside there was plenty in his brave heart, and A Hoa's ...
— The Black-Bearded Barbarian (George Leslie Mackay) • Mary Esther Miller MacGregor, AKA Marion Keith
... flashes of fire. Thunderbolts also were darted upon them. Nor was there any thing which used to be sent by God upon men, as indications of his wrath, which did not happen at this time, for a dark and dismal night oppressed them. And thus did all these men perish, so that there was not one man left to be a messenger of this calamity to the rest of ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... moved into sight, and from it came spoutings of fire that showed dark, jagged wings heavily flapping. It walked a little and stopped; then walked again. Geoffrey could see a great snout and head rocking and turning. Dismal and unspeakable sounds proceeded from the creature as it made towards the cellar-door. After it had got close and leaned against the panels in a toppling, swaying fashion, came a noise of creaking and fumbling, and then the door rolled aside upon its hinges. Next, the blurred white ridge ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister
... with the gowan, and in the low ragged hedges there were clumps of sweet-smelling hawthorn. All the fields were green and lovely with the promise which summer crowns and autumn reaps; and it was all so lovely a world that there seemed in it no room for care or sadness or any dismal thing. Being thus alone, with no witness to their happiness but the birds and the bees, the pair of lovers ought to have found it a golden hour; but something appeared still to stand between them, like a gaunt shadow ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... the streets of Paris there was a shutting up of shops. Every day put a new row of iron curtains between the window panes, until at the end of the twelfth day the city seemed as dismal as London on a Sunday, or as though all the shops were closed for a public funeral. Scraps of paper were pasted on ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... utterance, as if they were syllables of one long word, which he must get through with as speedily as possible. His pronunciation was bad, and he did not modulate his voice so as to bring out the meaning of what he read. Every sentence was uttered with a dismal monotony of voice, as if it did not differ in any respect from that which ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... fearful violence, waves rising like mountains, and rain and sleet pouring from the dismal clouds. At ten, A.M., being then in fifteen fathoms of water, and drifting rapidly towards the shore, the captain summoned all hands into the cabin to consult about throwing our deck-load overboard, in order to leave us a better chance ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... to a quantity of huts built for the accommodation of African soldiers to the northward of the barracks, as well as to the house of a poor black woman called Dalrymple. These burnt briskly, throwing a dismal glare over the barracks and picturesque town of San Josef, and overpowering the light of the full moon, which illumined a cloudless sky. The mutineers made a rush at the barrack-room and seized on the muskets and fusees in the racks. Their ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis
... dash the dismal predictions of foolish and false prophets, came rustling from all the airts, far, far and wide over the rain-drenched kingdom, the great armament of the Autumnal Winds! Groaned the grain, as in sudden resurrection ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... not yet. Diderot had still a dismal wilderness to traverse. He was not without secret friends even in the ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... left the primitive gods that we see here, to embrace the Christian conception, which, even yesterday, made it live, is in way of denying everything, and struggles before the enigma of death in an obscurity more dismal and more fearful than in the commencement of the ages. (More dismal and more fearful still in this, that plea of youth is gone.) From all parts of Europe curious and unquiet spirits, as well as mere idlers, turn their steps towards Thebes, the ancient mother. Men clear the rubbish from its remains, ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... the box, Sir,' said Serjeant Snubbin. Mr. Winkle did leave the box, and rushed with delirious haste to the George and Vulture, where he was discovered some hours after, by the waiter, groaning in a hollow and dismal manner, with his head buried beneath ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... Saturday, October 9.—Still dismal weather. Our household, being composed in great measure of children and young people, is generally a cheerful one enough, even in gloomy weather. For a week past we have been especially gladdened with a little seamstress from Boston, about seventeen years old; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... in the very air that blew from that haunted region; it breathed forth an atmosphere of dreams and fancies infecting all the land. Several of the Sleepy Hollow people were present at Van Tassel's, and, as usual, were doling out their wild and wonderful legends. Many dismal tales were told about funeral trains, and mourning cries and wailings heard and seen about the great tree where the unfortunate Major Andre was taken, and which stood in the neighborhood. Some mention was made also of ...
— The Legend of Sleepy Hollow • Washington Irving
... another, so that the dynasty remained in power. Numerous widespread and furious risings nevertheless took place, usually led by princes. Thus during this period the history of the dynasty was of an extraordinarily dismal character. ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... recognizes the somber mystery. The fact, the power, the terror of death are displayed by Him without reserve or softening. And He goes to the root of the dire and dismal matter. He shows us that death as we know it is an unnatural thing, that it is the fruit of disobedience, and by giving us purity and peace He gives us eternal life. The words of Luther, so full of power, were called "half-battles"; but the words of Christ in their depth and ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... never been in those chambers before. They were dismal, close, unwholesome, and oppressive; the furniture, originally good, and not yet old, was faded and dirty, - the rooms were in great disorder; there was a strong prevailing smell of opium, brandy, and tobacco; the grate and fire-irons were splashed ...
— Hunted Down • Charles Dickens
... on the top step of the landing, and gazed down into the dark, dank water below. Once or twice a spectral thought loomed among the shadows of her brain; a wonder whether beneath that cold dismal surface there would not be rest from the troubles of earth. But she could not hold an idea before her for two consecutive moments; and she forgot what she thought about before she could act ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the snowy clifts Did send a dismal sheen; Ne shapes of men ne beasts we ken— The Ice was ...
— Lyrical Ballads 1798 • Wordsworth and Coleridge
... "This dismal trash, which has nearly dislocated the jaws of every critic who has read it," was the extremely rude judgment pronounced by Sydney Smith on Madame de Stael's Delphine. Sydney was a good-natured person and a gentleman, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... was so much alarmed, that he thought of immediately abdicating the government. And when, as I have before related, a man armed with a dagger was discovered near him while he was sacrificing, he instantly ordered the heralds to convoke the senate, and with tears and dismal exclamations, lamented that such was his condition, that he was safe no where; and for a long time afterwards he abstained from appearing in public. He smothered his ardent love for Messalina, not so ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... came. It was a new experience to them to feel the cold wind cutting through their skins and making them shiver. The dismal prospect of the leafless trees and the hard cold ground weighed heavily upon their hearts, and, worse still, there was less food. The scarcity grew serious, and hunger plunged them into unhappiness and despair. Doggie became melancholy, while Pussie grew peevish, then ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... 12th. Strong gales at S E, with much rain and dark dismal weather, moderating towards noon and wind varying ...
— A Narrative Of The Mutiny, On Board His Majesty's Ship Bounty; And The Subsequent Voyage Of Part Of The Crew, In The Ship's Boat • William Bligh
... one after the other, all the things against which you have been warned, and, when corrected, you look so very dismal and discouraged that the Scotch teacher comes quietly to your side and rides with you, and, feeling that he will prevent your horse from doing anything dangerous, you begin to mend your ways, when suddenly you hear the master proclaim in a voice which, ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... you, but may just mention the mangrove swamps that very often fringe the coasts in the tropics, and the cypress swamps of the Mississippi, which are so well described by Sir Charles Lyell in his recent works; also the great Dismal Swamp of Virginia, which appears to me to furnish the nearest analogue to the state of things that existed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... the campaign, not so much a battle as a catastrophe, delayed Harrison's operations. His failures had shaken popular confidence, and at the end of this dismal winter, after six months of disappointments in which ten thousand men had accomplished nothing, he was compelled to report to the ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... which you are going to read about. For I have often thought that January (which is mostly twelfth-cake and holiday time) is like the first four or five years of a little boy's life; then comes dismal February, and the working-days with it, when chaps begin to look out for themselves, after the Christmas and the New Year's heyday and merrymaking are over, which our infancy may well be said to be. Well can I recollect that bitter first of February, when I first launched out ...
— The Fatal Boots • William Makepeace Thackeray
... ensue, the fault should be chargeable to the culprit, and not to the inquisitors. The culprit was bound by an oath of secresy, strengthened by fearful penalties, not to divulge any thing that he had seen, known, or heard, in the dismal precincts of that unholy tribunal—a secresy illegal and tyrannical, but which constituted the soul of that monstrous association, and by which its judges were sheltered ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII., No. 324, July 26, 1828 • Various
... towns, the best possible disposition to make of the bicycle is to deliver it into the hands of some respectable Turk, request him to preserve it from the meddlesome crowd, and then pay no further attention to it until ready to start. Attempting to keep watch over it oneself is sure to result in a dismal failure, whereas an Osmanli gray-beard becomes an ever-willing custodian, regards its safe-keeping as appealing to his honor, and will stand guard over it for hours if necessary, keeping the noisy and curious crowds of his townspeople at a respectful distance "by brandishing a thick ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... night-air swept in through the open window and chilled the silent room, and the dead coals in the grate dropped one by one into the fender with a dismal echoing clatter; but the Picture still sat in the armchair with the same graceful pose and the same lovely expression, and smiled sweetly ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... winding wearily on through the tangled wilds. Now and then, from some distant quarter of the forest, were to be heard the howling of wolves, abroad on their nightly hunt. Then from an opposite quarter, but nearer, the dismal whoopings of the horned owl would send their quavering echoes creeping among the tree-tops, which, swaying to the night winds, filled the air with noises, like half-formed whispers in the ear. Then the shrill cry of the dingle-ambushed panther would ring ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... empress; "she looks as if she were dying! Oh, if she were right with her dismal prophecy of death! What if indeed she is to leave us? Have mercy, O God! I know that I love her too well. She will be taken from me; Heaven will claim from me this sacrifice!" [Footnote: The empress's words. Caraccioli, "Life of Joseph II.," ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... his spectre in shaky lines, as if the model had given the artist the horrors. This simulacrum rises out of the earth like an exhalation, and groups itself into shape above the spade with which all that is corporeal of its late owner has been interred. Please remark the uncomforted and dismal expression of the simulacrum. We must remember that the ghost or "Ka" is not the "soul," which has other destinies in the future world, good or evil, but is only a shadowy resemblance, condemned, as in the Egyptian ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... explosion that would have been combated, laughed at, and disposed of, but treated with silence, and each sinking down to be added to the weight of cruel injuries. There was no complaint; Sophy obeyed all orders with her old form of dismal submission, but everything proposed to her was distasteful, and her answers were in the ancient surly style. If attempts were made to probe the malady, her reserve was impenetrable—nothing was the matter, she wanted ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hearts and our homes. Let us bring the family into our amusements. Let gayety cease to be a commodity of export. Let us call in our sons, whom our gloomy interiors send out into the street, and our daughters, moping in dismal solitude. Let us multiply anniversaries, family parties, and excursions. Let us raise good humor in our homes to the height of an institution. Let the schools, too, do their part. Let masters and students—school-boys ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... look down on the less lofty roof under which he was born. The Herbert Street house, however, was spoken of as being on Union Street, and it is that one which is meant in a passage of the "American Note-Books" (October 25, 1838), which says, "In this dismal chamber FAME was won," as likewise in the longer revery in the same volume, ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... the cremation grounds—desert places, destitute of any other vegetation than the Caprifolia horrida. Each family has its furnace kept in good repair. The place is doleful, and a funeral scene on the only sunless day I experienced in Ladak was indescribably dismal. After death no one touches the corpse but the lamas, who assemble in numbers in the case of a rich man. The senior lama offers the first prayers, and lifts the lock which all Tibetans wear at the back of the head, in order to liberate ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... To the uttermost regions of the globe have not the indignant winds bruited its unparalleled infamy? Oh, outcast of all outcasts most abandoned!—to the earth art thou not forever dead? to its honors, to its flowers, to its golden aspirations?—and a cloud, dense, dismal, and limitless, does it not hang eternally between thy hopes ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of his fellow-beings, as if, were anything untoward to happen, assistance was close at hand and ready to be proffered, but now he might die a thousand deaths, and none be the wiser for his wretched end. As these and other thoughts equally dismal chased each other through his mind, the silence became more and more oppressive (for it was only now and then, hitherto, a word had been uttered), and it was with an emotion of thankfulness and relief he heard it broken by the voice ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... that has occurred in Canada since the country became inhabited by civilized man, was first seen in October, 1785, and again in July, 1814. At noonday a pitchy darkness, of a dismal and sinister character, completely obscured the light of the sun, continuing for about ten minutes at a time, and being frequently repeated during the afternoon. In the interval between each mysterious eclipse dense masses of black clouds, streaked with yellow, drove athwart ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... unwonted huskiness in Dr. Borden's voice, and Ackley, usually so grim and prompt, held the girl's hand lingeringly as he tried to make a joke about her defying him and the whole Confederacy. It was a dismal failure. Regarding him with her ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... for a while had seemed to Roosevelt so gray and dismal, had, in fact, slowly taken on new color. At times he had imagined that Dakota might satisfy him for a permanent residence, but that fancy, born of grief and disappointment, had vanished in the radiance of a new happiness. He had ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... suffocation in their ill-stored prison, delayed by calms, pursuing a circuitous route; and now, driven in fury before the raging tempest, in their scarcely seaworthy vessel. The awful voice of the storm howls through the rigging. The laboring masts seem straining from their base; the dismal sound of the pumps is heard; the ship leaps, as it were, madly from billow to billow; the ocean breaks, and settles with ingulfing floods over the floating deck, and beats with deadening weight, against the staggered ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... seeming to heed the interruption).—"A book that will sell; a book that will prop up the fall of prices; a book that will distract your mind from its dismal apprehensions, and restore your affection to your species and your hopes in the ultimate triumph of sound principles—by the sight of a favourable balance at the end of the yearly accounts. It is astonishing what a difference that little circumstance makes in our views of things in general. ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of a cell opens, cold and damp, as if death sat upon its walls; but it discloses no part of the inmate's person, and excites our sympathies still more. We know the unfortunate is there,—we hear the murmuring, like a death-bell in our ears; it is mingled with a dismal chaos of sound, piercing deep into our feelings. It tells us in terror how gold blasts the very soul of man-what a dark monster of cruelty he can become,—how he can forget the grave, and think only of his living self,—how he can strip reason of its right, ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... I had a dismal letter from Harte, last week; he tells me that he is at nurse with a sister in Berkshire; that he has got a confirmed jaundice, besides twenty other distempers. The true cause of these complaints I take to be the same ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... its dismal wail for a few seconds more before two patrolmen and a sergeant came up on horses. It took somewhat more time than that for Malone to convince the sergeant that he didn't have time to go down to the station to prefer charges. He showed his ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... all that dismal and lamentable night, plunged in this perplexity, looking for instant death; but our God (who never leaveth them destitute which faithfully call upon Him), although He often punisheth for amendment's sake, in the morning caused the winds to cease, and the fog, which ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt
... there arose a general wail of lamentation, and even of indignation. Nobody loved Lawyer Brent, who was a hard, if a just, man, anxious for his employer's good, but inclined, in spite of all cautions, to grind the tenants. To hear of his coming to Greenhow was dismal news to all concerned, and there was such a buzz of doleful inquiries that Mr Harford stopped on his way home to ask what ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... things, and Roman and Greek poets and monuments have in like manner avoided the grim, plain word—death, but they have done it for exactly the opposite reason from that for which the Christian does it. They did it because the thing was so dark and dismal, and because they knew so little and feared so much about it. And Christianity does it for exactly the opposite reason, because it fears it not at all, and knows it quite enough. So it toys with leviathan, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... this arrival at the Base, for there is not even a proper station in sight; you have been brought, like so many sheep or cows, into the dismal goods station, and you look in vain for the people who should be there to welcome you, to throw flowers, and to cheer as you arrive at the first halt of your great Odyssey. However, you shake yourself, you bundle your valise out of the carriage ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... such passages. There was frequently no other way from one pasturage to another but through these places of death-shade, or valleys of the shadow of death,—which was a term to express any dark and dismal place. ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... be my fate from my peculiar situation. To be sold to the highest bidder, and then wear the chains of slavery down to the grave. The day star of liberty which had once cheered and gladdened my heart in freedom's land, had then hidden itself from my vision, and the dark and dismal frown of slavery had obscured the sunshine of freedom from me, as they supposed for ...
— Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself • Henry Bibb
... "What a dismal-looking night it is!" said the accountant, as he led the way along the wooden platform towards the ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... is beyond my reach." 'Tis often a true thing that when we sit within our dark and dismal chamber without comfort, hope or happy retrospection, there stands upon the threshold a joyous phenomenon of which we have never so much as dreamt as being in existence; and this had come to Constance. If the Duke loved her, what would it matter if Cedric ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... "For a dismal, wretched, man-forsaken stretch of country it beats anything I ever saw," Walter exclaimed in disgust. "The river itself is about a half mile wide, but it twists, turns, and forks every few yards so as to puzzle a corporation lawyer. The ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... tears! How they would swell up at each throb of the wounded heart, at each dismal foreboding of the desponding spirit. But she had no time for them! Leonard must not be left alone, with no one to cover him up with ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... December, when Nancy, according to their agreement, began to hope for his return, a letter in a very different tone burdened her with dismal doubts. Tarrant had quarrelled with his friend. He had discovered that Sutherland was little better than a swindler. 'I see that the fellow's professed energy was all sham. He is the laziest scamp imaginable; lazier even ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... now as clearly as he saw the palace, the sentinels, the fortress, the river, the boats, and the Stock Exchange. And just as on this northern summer night there was no restful darkness on the earth, but only a dismal, dull light coming from an invisible source, so in Nekhludoff's soul there was no longer the restful darkness, ignorance. Everything seemed clear. It was clear that everything considered important and good was insignificant and repulsive, and that all ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... to the banks of the Monongahela, to see our youthful Washington supporting, in the dismal hour of Indian victory, the ill-fated Braddock and saving, by his judgment and his valor, the remains of a defeated army, pressed by the conquering savage foe? Or when, oppressed America nobly resolving to risk her all in defense of her violated right, he was elevated by the unanimous ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... sleeping bosom of the harbor; when no natural sound comes forth from the animate or inanimate creation but the dull and melancholy rote of the sea along the rocky and winding coast,—how often is the watcher startled from the reveries of an excited imagination by the piteous, dismal, and terrific screams of the unlaid ghost ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... could not help remarking: for instance, though Fitz is my closest friend, yet could I avoid seeing and being amused by his perplexity and his dismal efforts to be facetious? His eye wandered all round the little room with quick uneasy glances, very different from those frank and jovial looks with which he is accustomed to welcome you to a leg of mutton; and Rosa, from the other end of the table, and ...
— A Little Dinner at Timmins's • William Makepeace Thackeray
... denounced this laissez faire idea. The business of government, he repeated, is to govern; but this view makes it its business to refrain from governing. He fought most fiercely against the conclusions of political economy, "the dismal science," which, he said, affirmed that men were guided exclusively by their stomachs. He protested, too, against the Utilitarians, followers of Bentham and Mill, with their "greatest happiness principle," which reduced ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... being a just little creature, in spite of her jealousy, was obliged to admit that the visitor was as handsome as a picture. Then, seeing that there was no chance for her beside this splendid lady, she consoled herself with a dismal little proverb, and looked forward to the time when it would be necessary to put a ticket in the parlour window. Meanwhile, to have some one on whose bosom she could weep, Miss Greeb went round to see Mrs. Bensusan, leaving Diana in possession of Lucian, ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... and dismal life they led there, Snjolfur and his wife. They were both used to hard work, but they had had no experience of privation and constant care for the morrow. Most days it meant putting to sea if they were to eat, and it was not every night they went to bed with a full stomach. There was little ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... dead sheep; yet no redshanks nor dottrell, and scarce any golden plovers (of which we have great store generally) but vast lonely birds, that cried at night, and moved the whole air with their pinions; yet no man ever saw them. It was dismal as well as dangerous now for any man to go fowling (which of late I loved much in the winter) because the fog would come down so thick that the pan of the gun was reeking, and the fowl out of sight ere the powder kindled, and then the sound of the piece was so dead, that the shooter feared harm, ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... proud Trent, shrunk themselves dry, that since No sun or moon, or other cheerful star, Looked out of heaven, but all the cope was dark As it were hung so for her exequies! And not a voice or sound to ring her knell But of that dismal pair, the screeching owl And buzzing hornet! Hark! hark! hark! the foul Bird! how she flutters with her wicker wings! Peace! ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... cry for help. I prayed aloud that God would not let me die. I had lost all presence of mind; no thought of standing back against the wall came to me. I rushed madly forward in a frenzy of despair. The sound of my voice, as it echoed through that dismal place, was drowned in an instant by the sharp, discordant scream of the express. On I dashed, right in front of the goods train; the yellow light of the engine shone full upon me; death was at hand. It seemed that nothing short of a miracle could save me, ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... identifying eye, at first, as if they perceived that she was a new girl, but as if new girls were such an old story that they could not linger long over one girl of the kind. Certain of the young ladies after they went up stairs came down in long, dismal calico aprons that covered them to the throat, and with an air of being so much absorbed in their work that they did not know what they had on. They looked at Cornelia again, those who had seen her before, and those who had not, made up for it by looking at her twice, and Cornelia began to wonder ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... part of the ward but, as the weather was inclement and his boots let in the wet, he spent a great part of the day sitting by the fire in the Committee Room in Wicklow Street with Jack, the old caretaker. They had been sitting thus since e short day had grown dark. It was the sixth of October, dismal and cold ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... irretrievably over; she lingered upon a severe illness which had been part of the experience. She seemed to think that with a little judicious management she might have spent more time in that climate, and less in England. There was in her tone a suggestion of gentle envy of Laura, going forth to these dismal conditions with her young life in her hands all tricked out for the sacrifice, which left Duff Lindsay and his white and gold drawing-room entirely out of consideration. Any sacrifice to Mrs. Simpson was alluring, she would be killed all day long, ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... school to be paid for by such a day's price at home? Esther could not bear to think it. She sat pondering, chewing the bitter cud of these considerations. She longed to discuss them further, and get rid, if possible, of her father's dismal conclusions; but with him she could not, and there was no other. When her father had settled and dismissed a subject, she could rarely re-open a discussion upon it. The colonel was an old soldier; when he had delivered an opinion, he had in a sort given his orders; ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... many years since I saw a sight which so pricked and stirred my blood as the final episode of the procession of Eight Hours Day in Melbourne. The day was wintry and dismal. Early rains had threatened the dispersal of the patient crowds which lined the roads; the pavements were muddy and the sky was lowering. The march of the trades bodies did little to dispel the gloom of the day for the one onlooker concerning whose sentiments ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... infinite horizons; in the sky no speck floated against the dome of blue. More desolate than a derelict on the calm surface of the trackless ocean Lazette lay, its huddled buildings dingy with the dust of a continuing dry season, squatting in their dismal lonesomeness in the shimmering, ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... leaues are drops of new-shed-blood, As fresh as mornings dew distil'd on flowers, A very fatall place it seemes to me: Speake Brother hast thou hurt thee with the fall? Martius. Oh Brother, With the dismal'st obiect That euer eye with sight made ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... vastness of the stream, wishing, the while, that he could only be drowned, all at once and unconsciously, without undergoing the uncomfortable routine devised by nature. Then he thought of his flower. He got it out, rumpled and wilted, and it mightily increased his dismal felicity. He wondered if she would pity him if she knew? Would she cry, and wish that she had a right to put her arms around his neck and comfort him? Or would she turn coldly away like all the hollow world? This picture brought such an agony of pleasurable suffering that he worked it over and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... under ponds, run imbecile walls round irrational estates, scorch about the world in motor-cars, devise flying-machines, play golf and a dozen such foolish games of ball, crowd into chattering dinner parties, gamble and make our lives one vast, dismal spectacle of witless waste! So it struck me then, and for a time I could think of no other interpretation. This was Life! It came to me like a revelation, a revelation at once incredible and indisputable of the abysmal ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... age when every uttered sentiment of charity toward the insane is applauded to its remotest echo; an age in which the chains and locks and bars and dismal dungeon cells and flagellations and manifold tortures of the less humane and less enlightened past are justly abhorrent; an age which measures its magnificent philanthropy by munificent millions, bestowed without stint upon monumental ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... a lantern suspended from the ceiling threw a flickering light over the apartment, which contained no furniture excepting a couple of stout wooden benches. It was a dismal place by night, and only little less dismal by day, tall houses surrounding "the lock-up" prevented the faintest ray of sunshine from penetrating the ventilator over the door—long narrow window opening inward and propped up by ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Phemie rose to go. As Lady Augusta was under the impression that she was merely taking the dismal daily constitutional, which was one of her unavoidable penances, it would not do ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... croaking the most grim and dismal notes in all the wide, wild range of ballad poetry, as they ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... 1893, he produced a comedy called "Fanny," by George R. Sims, of London, in which W. J. Ferguson, Frank Burbeck, and Johnston Bennett appeared. It was a very dismal failure, but it produced one of the famous Frohman epigrams. Sims sent Frohman the following telegram a few ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... on their usual night, inquiries were naturally made after their associate. As he lived in the adjoining house, a particular friend went himself to inquire for him, and returned with the dismal tidings, that he could not possibly survive the night. This threw a gloom on the company, and all efforts to turn the conversation from the sad subject before ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... a tall, colored man, whose large white cravat made his face look still more black. M. Moronval begged Madame Constant to walk in, offered her his arm, and conducted her through a garden, large enough, but dismal with the dried leaves and debris ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... during a period of thoughtful silence when the night was darkest just before the dawn and the rain had settled to a dismal drizzle unrelieved by lightning or by thunder that the five occupants of the room were suddenly startled by a strange pattering sound from the floor below. It was as the questioning fall of a child's feet upon the uncarpeted boards in the ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a solemn spectacle, a drama, but a drama dismal and depressing. That man was not happy, and yet I envied him his happiness. How explain this except by the fact that happiness is within us, within each of us, and is the desire for what we do ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... which did not exist in Brazil, namely, the antagonism of an Anti-slavery North, which aided the Negroes by "underground railroads" to escape to free territory, or to cross the Canadian line, where slavery was prohibited. The Dismal Swamp in Virginia, and the Everglades of Florida were favorite hiding places for fugitives.[43] In Brazil the universal prevalence of slavery and the lack of opposition to the practice by any considerable group up to the last days of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... interest of allaying the animosity against his own person that Elector Maurice had prevailed upon Melanchthon to frame the Leipzig Interim. But in this respect, too, the document proved to be a dismal failure. Openly the people, his own former subjects included, showed their contempt for his person and character. Everywhere public sentiment was aroused against him. He was held responsible for the captivity and shameful ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... and very unhappy. My three children are all unwell. Had a dismal dream of being in hell: this is the third time I have had such a dream. As I am more than ever convinced that I cannot recover I will make a memorandum of my temporal concerns, for next to the spiritual they ought to be attended to for the sake of those ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... fall as I came in, and the wind was rising. It promised an ugly night. The alley looked dismal and dreary, and the hall of the house, as I passed through it, felt chilly as a tomb. It was the first stormy night I had experienced in my new quarters. The draughts were awful. They came criss-cross, met in the middle of the ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... rather be rid of us," he said quietly; and he continued to discuss the man's dismal misfortune, while they strolled out along the mole. But Pelle was not listening to him. He had caught sight of a little schooner which was cruising outside, and was ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... and little inclination, perchance, to contemplate its sublimity. The crew of the Gull light were surrounded by signals of disaster and distress. In whichever direction they turned their eyes burning tar-barrels and other flaring lights were seen, telling their dismal tale of human beings in urgent need of assistance or in ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... arrived, he urged to penetrate the swamp and storm the fort, but all hung back in awe of the dismal horrors of the place, and the danger of attacking such desperadoes in their savage den. The very Indian allies, though accustomed to bushfighting, regarded it as almost impenetrable, and full of frightful danger. Sublette ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... TILL THE PRESENT TIME.—In the general corruption of morals, which rose to its height during the reign of Louis XVI., gambling kept pace with, if it did not outstrip, every other licentiousness of that dismal epoch.(61) Indeed, the universal excitement of the nation naturally tended to develope every desperate passion of our nature; and that the revolutionary troubles and agitation of the empire helped to increase the gambling propensity of ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... traders and those possessing the least capital. I do not say it will, because, as I have said, what is not impossible may happen,—but it may for years make the whole factory property of Lancashire almost entirely worthless. Well, this is a very dismal look-out for a great many persons in this country; but it comes, as I have said,—it comes from that utter neglect of their opportunities and their duties which has distinguished the ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... Reverend Robert Hume was leading his horse down the slope which looks on the town from the south, and though his eyes had the faculty of seeing something cheerful even in dismal things, he acknowledged that, to eyes looking on it for the first time, the place might seem a ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... ago in one of these dismal streets there stood a still more dismal yard, bearing the name of Angel Court, as if there yet lingered among those grimy homes and their squalid occupants some memories of a brighter place and of happier creatures. Angel Court was about nine feet wide, and contained ten or ...
— Little Meg's Children • Hesba Stretton
... to her word, Madeline remembered at an opportune moment, when conversation had hushed and only the long, dismal wail of coyotes broke the silence, to turn toward ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
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