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More "Squalor" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... roof-scene descends in a gorge! He who would travel on foot through the pass of that defile, of which we see but the picturesque summits, stops his nose, averts his eyes, guards his pockets, and hurries along through the squalor of the grim London lazzaroni. But seen above, what a noble break in the sky-line! It would be sacrilege to exchange that fine gorge for a dead flat of dull rooftops. Look here, how delightful! that desolate house with no roof at all,—gutted and skinned by the last London fire! ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... gaunt old beggar might be seen at the corner of one of the streets of Cadiz, surpassing his mendicant brethren in the loudness of his complaints and the squalor of the rags which covered him; and one day Glover, passing by, recognised in him his quondam acquaintance, the ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... stable yards? And yet just that was the situation of those considered most fortunate as to culture and refinement in your day. I know that the poor and ignorant envied the rich and cultured then; but to us the latter, living as they did, surrounded by squalor and brutishness, seem little better off than the former. The cultured man in your age was like one up to the neck in a nauseous bog solacing himself with a smelling bottle. You see, perhaps, now, how we look at this question of universal high education. No single thing is so important to every ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... on the edge of the Taufusi swamp, was a small collection of huts, jumbled together in squalor and dirt, with pigs dozing in the ooze and slatternly women beating out siapo in the shade. It was a dunghill of out-islanders, Nieues, Uveans, Tongans, Tapatueans, banded together in a common poverty; landless people of other archipelagoes, despised of the Samoans, and ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... smothering her joy. It was the fact that there was nowhere a touch to suggest preparation for her home-coming. Martin had made not even the crudest attempt to welcome her. It would have been as easy for Rose to be cheerful in the midst of mere squalor as for a flower to bloom white in a crowded tenement, but at the swift realization of the lack of tenderness for her which this indifference to her first impressions so clearly expressed, her faith in the man she had married ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... the blue capital, that fancy dictated. There where the way narrowed with an out-jutting balcony high up, and the fog thickened and the lights grew vague, the multitude of heads passed into the blur beyond with an effect of mystery, pictorial, remote; but where Arnold and Lindsay walked the squalor was warm, human, practical. A torch flamed this way and that, stuck in the wall over the head of a squatting bundle and his tray of three-cornered leaf-parcels of betel, and an oiled rag in a tin pot sent up an unsteady little flame, blue and yellow, beside a sweetmeat seller's basket, ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... when that had gone on for a little, a craving for beauty seemed to awaken in men's minds, and they began rudely and awkwardly to ornament the wares which they made; and when they had once set to work at that, it soon began to grow. All this was much helped by the abolition of the squalor which our immediate ancestors put up with so coolly; and by the leisurely, but not stupid, country-life which now grew (as I told you before) to be common amongst us. Thus at last and by slow degrees we got pleasure into our work; then ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... eat, and would have been in rags if the mother had not worked like a slave washing and mending their clothes. But these were not the sort of cases that the visiting ladies assisted; they only gave to those who were in a state of absolute squalor and destitution, and then only on condition that they ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... beautiful appearance when approached from the water, rising, as she does, in terraces which overlook the noble Tagus, and are in turn overlooked by the Sierras, ending in the Peak of Lisbon, at its mouth. Arriving thus, one does not see the filth and squalor, the tumble-down buildings, unpaved streets, or many poor mean houses tucked in among the grander ones. Lisbon has sometimes been called "The Sultana of the West," and the comparison is apt enough, ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... through all the social grades. It is further to be recollected that health and the chief comforts of life are correlative,—that the squalid family is the unhealthy family, and that, as we import our squalor, so also we import the materials and conditions of our disease. This a priori view is amply sustained by the statistics of our charitable institutions. Dr. Alanson S. Jones, whose position as President of the Board of Surgeons attached ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... of his parents and the squalor of his surroundings acted upon Jean Paul Marat as a spur, and from his fourteenth year the idea of cultivating his mental estate was ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... was a noise as of iron, and, if you listened more closely, a clanking of chains was heard, first of all from a distance, and afterwards hard by. Presently a specter used to appear, an ancient man sinking with emaciation and squalor, with a long beard and bristly hair, wearing shackles on his legs and fetters on his hands, and shaking them. Hence the inmates, by reason of their fears, passed miserable and horrible nights in sleeplessness. This want of sleep was followed ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... up, and said to myself, I should like to bathe and cleanse myself from the squalor produced by my late hard life and by Mrs. Herne's drow. I wonder if there is any harm in bathing on the Sabbath day. I will ask Winifred when she comes home; in the meantime I will bathe, provided I can find ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... passed forty-eight hours in the Black Hole, has been just summoned, to his great dismay, to the Captain's quarters. Having about him all the squalor of his incarceration, he shrinks from making his appearance before one whose silent gaze even was a reproach. However, not being so mad yet as to disobey orders, he goes up to the officers' quarters immediately upon his release from the Black Hole, twisting and breaking ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... therefore it is only prolonging our agony to go on with it. You know me so well, dear little girl, that you will quite understand how the thought of life-long poverty has proved too much for me. I am not made of such coarse fibre as most men—those men who can face squalor and privation, and lack all the little accessories that make life endurable, without being any the worse for it. I am too refined, too highly strung, too sensitive, to enter upon such a weary struggle with circumstances as my marriage with a woman as poor as ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... want to enter into all your thoughts, David. I have always known that those who devote themselves to the study of what is sublime and beautiful suffer proportionately from the squalor of actual facts." ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... not to be wondered at that such epidemics swept over Europe when it was taught that these were the vengeance of God. How could it be discovered that the real causes were the crowded conditions and bad sanitation of the cities, the squalor, the misrule, and gross immorality occasioned by the Holy Wars, when hordes of soldier-bandits plagued the countryside? The devout continued to live in their squalor, to trust in the Lord, and ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... icy wind swirled through the hall, driving clouds of ashes from the braziers. I heard loud voices without, and a hubbub began inside. For a moment it was quite dark, and then someone lit one of the flare lamps by the stage. It revealed nothing but the common squalor of a low saloon—white faces, sleepy eyes, and frowsy heads. The drop-piece was ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... doubled his danger, and more than once he saw the inside of the police-office. Henceforth, he was free of the family; he loafed in the Shirra-Brae; he knew the flash houses of Leith and the Grassmarket. With Jean Johnston, the blowen of his choice, he smeared his hands with the squalor of petty theft, and the drunken recklessness wherewith he swaggered it abroad ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... beneath; windows, broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud, and threatening to fall into it—as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations; every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... had donned her ragged slippers and a blue calico wrapper and shuffled to the foot of the emergency bed. Old Maggie was of that vague neighbourhood back of the Avenue, where squalor and poverty rubbed elbows ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of wood and drawers of water—standing to the skilled artizan of the thirteenth century almost precisely in the same relation as the bricklayer's labourer does to the mason in our own time. The sediment of the town population in the Middle Ages was a dense slough of stagnant misery, squalor, famine, loathsome disease, and dull despair, such as the worst slums of London, Paris, or Liverpool know nothing of. When we hear of the mortality among the townsmen during the periodical outbreaks of pestilence or famine, horror suggests that we should dismiss as incredible such stories ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... knew paint. The structures, garish husks of squalor, befouled the calm, pure atmosphere, and mocked ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... dismal sound. It seemed the low, hopeless, endless wail of some one forever lost. At last I advanced to an opening which communicated downward with deep tiers of cellars beneath a crumbling old warehouse; and there, some fifteen feet below the walk, crouching in nameless squalor, with her head bowed over, was the figure of what had been a woman. Her blue arms folded to her livid bosom two shrunken things like children, that leaned toward her, one on each side. At first, I knew not whether they were alive or dead. They made no sign; they did not ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... that the woman's strength was failing, and that she could not live. And there, in that nameless hovel, with death on the hearthstone and death and life hovering over the pitiful bed, the three great men went through the pain and the horror and squalor of birth, and they knew that they had never yet stood before ...
— A Christmas Mystery - The Story of Three Wise Men • William J. Locke
... especially if you are a mother, wife, or sweetheart. It is an easy thing to forget. You mustn't. Out there life is chiefly squalor, filth, and stench. The boy gets disgusted and lonesome and homesick, even though he may write to the contrary. Write to him at least three times a week. Always write cheerfully, even although something may have happened ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... In other words, he wished to see Christians doing the things that Christ did, and using, in matters of the church, the same business sense which they brought to bear upon their own affairs. He thought of the poverty, squalor and wretchedness of some for whom Christ died, and of the costly luxuries of the church into whose hands the Master had given the care of these. He thought of the doors to places of sin, swinging wide before the young, while the doors of the church were often closed against them. ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... an Equilateral from the ranks of his serf-born ancestors is welcomed, not only by the poor serfs themselves, as a gleam of light and hope shed upon the monotonous squalor of their existence, but also by the Aristocracy at large; for all the higher classes are well aware that these rare phenomena, while they do little or nothing to vulgarize their own privileges, serve as a most useful barrier against ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... modernity already mentioned, and assisting them, there is a great attention to "interiors." The writer has, for her time, a more than promising sense of the incongruity between Empire dress and furniture and the style of George II.: and the shabbiness or actual squalor of Charlotte Street and Chancery Lane show that she had either been a very early and forward scholar of Dickens, or had discovered the thing on her own account. Her age may excuse some of the weak points, but it makes the presence of the strong ones all the more remarkable: and it shows ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... alley, Keekie Joe, looking frightened and apprehensive, appeared out of the surrounding squalor. It was a characteristic of Keekie Joe that he always appeared without warning. A long habit of sneaking had given him this uncanny quality. Suddenly Pee-wee, in the full blush of his heroic triumph, was aware of the poor wretch shuffling along ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... superseded the filthy flooring of rushes. The loftier houses of the wealthier merchants, their parapeted fronts and costly wainscoting, their cumbrous but elaborate beds, their carved staircases, their quaintly-figured gables, not only contrasted with the squalor which had till then characterized English towns, but marked the rise of a new middle class which was to play its part in ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... no longer content to regard this world as a hopeless place of squalor and sin, as intrinsically and incurably wicked, as an abode which cannot be mended and which must, therefore, be despised and forsaken in spirit, even before the time when it has to be forsaken in body. The possible flawlessness of an other-worldly state no longer compensates for the glaring ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... with its peaked porch, where honest yokels quaffed nutty ale and a sign-board creaked and groaned from its gibbet across the road. But we had come too late in the painting-season for any other than Hobson's choice: the tidbits of grime and squalor were all taken, and we must e'en content ourselves to be mocked and reviled for the philistinism of our domestic establishing, or else hie us hence where artists were not and Ethel ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... squalor, filthiness, pollution, filth, corruption, dirtiness; indecency, smut, obscenity, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Similarly you have it that all triangles are equal, if that is a proposition of any value. But men as individuals are not all equal. One is stronger in body, another more able in mind: one predisposed to virtue, another to vice: one born in affluence and honour, another in squalor. Not men in the abstract, but living men, start at different points of vantage, and the distance between them widens as they run the race of life. We may lay it down as an axiom, in diametric opposition to Rousseau, that ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... thousands, who could see with his own eyes in almost every country of the world thousands of little girls rescued from defamation, thousands of women rescued from the sink of horrid vice, thousands of men new-born from lives of unimaginable crime and iniquity, thousands of homes once dreary with squalor and savagery now happy and full of purest joy; nay, who could see, as I have seen in India, whole tribes of criminal races, numbering millions, and once the despair of the Indian Government, living happy, contented, and industrial lives under the Flag of The ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... fishing boats were gradually laid up, until scarcely enough remained in commission to supply the demands of the home merchant for fish. Where there had been prosperity and bustle about wharves, and fish-houses, there succeeded idleness and squalor. Shipbuilding was prostrate, commerce was dead. The sailors returned to the farms, shipped on the privateers, or went into Washington's army. But when peace was declared, they flocked to their boats, and began to rebuild their shattered industry. Marblehead, which went into the ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... them, for the human eye sees most! What do we see? Squalor, vice, misery, dementia, feeble minds and feeble bodies. Old women on the verge of the grave eating scraps of food gathered from the City dustbins. Dirty and repulsive food, dirty and repulsive women! who have begged ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... middle of the century the air was full of ideas upon these social subjects. The temptation was irresistible to turn from the confusion of squalor, oppression, license, distorted organisation, penetrative disorder, to ideal states comprising a little range of simple circumstances, and a small number of types of virtuous and unsophisticated character. Much came of the relief thus sought and found. It ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... denser with snaky roots—not merely twisting about one's feet, but dropping from the boughs in nooses and festoons for one's neck; air-plants too, like birds' nests, further choking up the meshes, and hanging moss, like rotting carpets, adding still more to the murk and curious squalor of a foul fertility where beauty, like humanity, ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... is many, many years since I lived through that summer of siege in Harrodstown, the horrors of it are faded and dim, the discomforts lost to a boy thrilled with a new experience. I have read in my old age the books of travellers in Kentucky, English and French, who wrote much of squalor and strife and sin and little of those qualities that go to the conquest of an empire and the making of a people. Perchance my own pages may be colored by gratitude and love for the pioneers amongst whom I found myself, and thankfulness to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the dirt and squalor there was one touch of dainty hominess and comfort. This was found near Mountain Glen, where the superintendent of the mines lived. The house was an unpretentious wooden building with great porches and big, airy rooms, but ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird
... not follow: there are strange depths of idleness in man, a too-easily- got sufficiency, as in the case of the sago-eaters, often quenching the desire for all besides; and it is possible that the men of the richest ant-heaps may sink even into squalor. But suppose they do not; suppose our tricksy instrument of human nature, when we play upon it this new tune, should respond kindly; suppose no one to be damped and none exasperated by the new conditions, the whole enterprise ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and was conscious of it. The point of view was changed, and still changing. Something, a thing indefinable, but none the less real, had gone out of him. Once, in the heart of a thick darkness of squalor and misery, he had seen a great light and the name of it was love for his kind. But now the light was waning, and in its room a bale-fire was beckoning. There be those, fat, well-nurtured, and complacent souls faring ever along ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... can only purge itself of this breach of promise by paying the bill, with legal interest; if not, according to the legal terms of the agreement (forty acres and two mules), then in its just equivalents, either by pensioning the survivors of the slave system—many who are to-day in abject squalor and want—or by a liberal grant of money to the schools of the land charged with the educational development ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... of the most varied life in New York. To the north lay fashion and wealth, to the east and west, respectability and moderate means; to the south, poverty and squalor, vice and crime. All could be seen and heard from the windows of his sitting room. In the evenings toward spring he looked out upon a panorama of the human race such as is presented by no other city in the world and by no other ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... there; but all those who had gave graphic descriptions of the total ignorance of Mrs M'Swat. Why, the place was quite tabooed on account of its squalor ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... necessary to save a perilled burglar from Sing Sing, or taking measures to keep one hidden who might have told too much if brought upon the witness-stand. And yet Egbert Crawford was really visiting that den of black squalor with a very different object—to find an old darkey woman who was reported as living in that street, and in his capacity as one of the eleven hundred and fifty Commissioners of Deeds of the City and County of New York, to procure her "X mark" and ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... just beginning to spangle the gray. At Madison Square she decided to walk. She negotiated the 'bus steps with surprising skill for a novice, and scurried along the perilous crossing to the opposite side. She entered Madison Square. But why hadn't O. Henry emphasized its beauty, instead of its squalor? It lay, a purple pool of shadow, surrounded by the great, gleaming, many-windowed office buildings, like an amethyst sunk in a circle of diamonds. "It's a fairyland!" Fanny told herself. "Who'd have thought a city could be ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... First Church and in the tent meetings had had its effect upon the life of Raymond. But as he walked past saloon after saloon and noted the crowds going in and coming out of them, as he saw the wretched dens, as many as ever apparently, as he caught the brutality and squalor and open misery and degradation on countless faces of men and women and children, he sickened at the sight. He found himself asking how much cleansing could a million dollars poured into this cesspool accomplish? Was not the ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... waiting a little while on the chance of your coming in when I happened to look out of the window. A girl was coming down the street, looking at the numbers of the houses. She stopped here. Intuition told me she was Miss Goodwin. While she was ringing the bell I did all I could to increase the shabby squalor of your room. She was shown in here, and I introduced myself as your friend. We chatted. I drew an agonising picture of your struggle for existence. You were brave, talented, and unsuccessful. Though you went often hungry, you had a plucky smile upon your lips. It was a meritorious ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... the court or from the garden was a fantastic sight, a grotesque combination of walls of plaster patchwork which had once been whitewashed, of blistered paint, heterogeneous placards, and all the most unaccountable freaks of Parisian squalor; the green trellises were prodigiously the dingier for constant contact with a Parisian public. So, upon either side, the fetid, disreputable approaches might have been there for the express purpose of warning away fastidious people; ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... like the pestilence, it has "walked in the darkness and wasted at noon-day." When we read of thousands of miserable wretches, in all the cities and towns of a great nation, huddled together like so many swine in a pen; in rags, squalor, and want; without work, bread, or hope; dragging out from day to day, by begging, or the petty artifices of theft, an existence which is worthless and a burden; and when, at the same time, we see a system of laws, ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... affairs should come up for consideration. They did not; but the man himself had an experience that may have helped to keep his thoughts from brooding too much on his unfulfilled ambition. Years afterwards, when far away on lonely seas, amid the squalor of a little ship and the staggering buffets of a gale, there would surely sometimes leap into his memory a brightly coloured picture of this scene in the fertile valley of Malaga: the silken pavilions of the Court, the ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... Quaker's refusal of 'seven thousand pounds to boot.' Friend Prudence's practical conclusion will, by degrees, become that of all rational practical men whatsoever. On the present scheme and principle, Work cannot continue. Trades' Strikes, Trades' Unions, Chartisms; mutiny, squalor, rage and desperate revolt, growing ever more desperate, will go on their way. As dark misery settles down on us, and our refuges of lies fall in pieces one after one, the hearts of men, now at last serious, will turn to refuges of truth. The eternal stars ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... bound upon some especial errand. Clerks looked idly at her from open shop doors, and from windows above; and when she entered the marine region of Water Street, the heavy stores and large houses, which here and there were covered with a dull grime, as if the squalor within had exuded through the dingy red bricks, seemed to glare at her unkindly, and sullenly ask why youth, and beauty, and cleanly modesty should insult with sweet ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... Campion and I sat on the bed watching him, scarcely exchanging a word. The wife, poor creature, whimpered on her mattress. It was not a pleasant vigil. It lasted till the grey dawn crept in, pitilessly intensifying the squalor of the room, and until the dawn was broadening into daylight. Then two of Campion's men from Barbara's Building arrived to relieve us. Before we went, however, the neighbour who had taken charge of the children came in ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... trust an ear-witness, of a little bad music worse played, a little declamation, a glass of wine, and democracy untainted with the least suspicion of snobbery. There was a delicious absence of culture, on the one hand, and of romantic squalor on the other. The whole thing was solidly and sympathetically lower middle-class. The "soiree tant familiale qu'artistique" closed with a performance of the Marseillaise; and the intelligentsia retired to bed feeling that life was ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... blacks see commonly the worst of each other. This is a vast change from the situation in the past, when, through the close contact of master and house-servant in the patriarchal big house, one found the best of both races in close contact and sympathy, while at the same time the squalor and dull round of toil among the field-hands was removed from the sight and hearing of the family. One can easily see how a person who saw slavery thus from his father's parlors, and sees freedom on the streets of a great city, fails to grasp or ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... enthusiasm in a court where the living green combined with age to glorify the buildings. We did not see the dilapidation, we did not smell the dirt, we did not feel the squalor. A woman was lighting a fire in a brazier on her doorstep. She looked hostilely at us. We beamed in counteraction. She looked more hostilely. As the Artist wanted to sketch her house, some words seemed necessary. I detailed our emotions. Was not her lot, cast ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... intellect, and nothing more—leastways, nothing more that matters. What else there is to him of trunk and limbs and organs he has neglected until it has all fallen into decay. His very lack of personal cleanliness, the squalor in which he lives, the insufficient sleep which he allows himself, his habit of careless feeding at irregular intervals, all have their source in his contempt for the physical part of him. This talented man of varied attainments, accomplished linguist, skilled physician, ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... in the street called Cossitollah, flows all the motliness of a Calcutta thoroughfare in two counter-setting currents;— one Chowriagee-ward, in the direction of Nabob magnificence and grace; the other toward the Cooly squalor and deformity of the Radda Bazaar;— and as, in the glare of the early forenoon sun, the shadows of the hither or thither passing throngs fall straight across the way, from the Parsee's godown, over against me, to the gate of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... retained, too, a cleanness of spirit hardly to be looked for in such a primeval daughter of Eve. Her imagination and her reading had saved the girl's sweet modesty. A certain detachment made it possible for her to ignore the squalor of the actual and see it only as a surface triviality, to let her mind dwell in inner concepts of goodness and beauty while bestiality ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... strange to eyes accustomed only to the smaller towns of the land, is in all respects the most attractive sight in America, and one of the most remarkable places in the world, ranking next to London and Paris in the extent and variety of its attractions. Its magnificence is remarkable, its squalor appalling. Nowhere else in the New World are seen such lavish displays of wealth, and such hideous depths of poverty. It is rich in historical associations and in treasures of art. It presents a wonderful series of combinations as well as contrasts of individual and national ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... in squalls, and nourished in squalor—a week of dirty weather having converted the fore-cabin of the emigrant ship into something like a pig-sty. Appreciating the situation, no doubt, the baby boy began his career with a squall that harmonised with the weather, and, as the steward remarked to ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... enough to have personated one of the malignant beings of whom Zanoni had spoken. It was a small man, dressed in a fashion strikingly at variance with the elaborate costume of the day: an affectation of homeliness and poverty approaching to squalor, in the loose trousers, coarse as a ship's sail; in the rough jacket, which appeared rent wilfully into holes; and the black, ragged, tangled locks that streamed from their confinement under a woollen cap, accorded but ill with other details which spoke of comparative wealth. The shirt, open ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... balustrades, from which a Romeo might launch himself at daybreak, warned by the lark's song. A sudden angle in the road is turned, and we pass from airspace and freedom into the old town, beneath walls of dark brown masonry, where wild valerians light their torches of red bloom in immemorial shade. Squalor and splendour live here side by side. Grand Renaissance portals grinning with Satyr masks are flanked by tawdry frescoes shamming stonework, or by doorways where the withered bush hangs out a promise of bad wine. The Cappella Colleoni is our destination, that ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... that the session of this assembly drew near its close the ground-swell began to be felt of that tempest of popular wrath which eventually swept over France, and which the Jacobins rode and directed until it dashed even them upon the rocks. Squalor came forth and consorted with cleanliness; vice crept from its dens and sat down by the side of purity in high places; atheism took its stand at the altar, and ministered ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... Ghetto is an arrangement first contrived by Jews for keeping infidels out of a sacred precinct. When the infidels were strong enough they turned the tables and forbade the Jews to leave their Ghetto except at certain hours. For the misery, poverty and squalor of the Ghetto the Jew is not to blame—if he could, he would have the Ghetto a place of opulence, beauty and all that makes for the good. Every undesirable thing he would bestow on the outsider. In the twilight ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... of captivity exceeds all possibility of description; the profusion of stinks which they raised, the grease of their venerable garments and faces, the horrible messes cooked in the filthy pots, and devoured with the nasty fingers, the squalor of mats, pots, old bedding, and foul carpets of our Hebrew friends, could hardly be painted by Swift in his dirtiest mood, and cannot be, of course, attempted by my timid and genteel pen. What would they say in Baker Street to some sights with which our new friends favoured us? What ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... there runs a stream of water of exquisite clearness. There is very little crowding in the way of house-building. Each house in the city is surrounded by a green lawn, a garden and an orchard, so that poverty and squalor of the slum type is practically unknown. The communistic idea of homes in common, which has received so much attention of late years, was not adopted by the founders of this city, who, however, took excellent precautions to stamp out loafing, ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... consisted of the man, his wife and child, and three single men lodgers, who all lived and slept in one room. I found the lodgers airing themselves in the court-yard, while the beds were made and the room set in order. But I saw very little of squalor or filth even in the poorest quarters. As a check upon the assumed thoughtlessness of the Viennese artisans, the pawnbrokers are by civil ordinance closed a week before and after every great holiday, such ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... steep, up-hill streets of small palaces (but very large palaces for all that), with marble terraces looking down into close by-ways—the magnificent and innumerable Churches; and the rapid passage from a street of stately edifices, into a maze of the vilest squalor, steaming with unwholesome stenches, and swarming with half-naked children and whole worlds of dirty people—make up, altogether, such a scene of wonder: so lively, and yet so dead: so noisy, and yet so quiet: so obtrusive, and yet so shy and lowering: so wide awake, ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... estimate of the Ids could not be true. Now he was forced to admit that it was. In contact with all the skills of their Masters, which they would certainly be permitted to learn if they wanted to, the Ids chose primitive squalor when they ...
— Cubs of the Wolf • Raymond F. Jones
... time it seemed as if the loathsome atmosphere of hate and squalor must disappear in presence of the tall fresh country girl; the deputy sergeant-major put a restraint upon himself before his sister-in-law, and the sickly wife found comfort and relief in talking to her. But eventually the presence of this third party ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... Rachel was enjoying herself, attired in a pretty, pink cambric gown, her black hair—which now seemed, oh, so soft and pretty!—tied back with little pink bows. And Rachel's eyes—well, there! no one would ever have suspected that they had only been accustomed to the squalor of Gran's apartment, and Gran herself, but one short week ago. They now looked on the world in general, and this fair scene in particular, with all the nonchalance of one born and brought up in the ...
— Five Little Peppers and their Friends • Margaret Sidney
... yourself, because it gives you such a superior sense of humility, and I am enjoying the luxury to the full. I saw a great deal of beautiful and promising work going on, and I saw ever so much pain, and squalor, and unnecessary unhappiness. I needn't tell you that I've made up my mind to assault that pain and squalor and unhappiness, and try to drive them out of the field; I needn't tell you, because the newspapers have done that ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... its design. The arch is flanked by slight hexagonal tourelles, each capped by a pinnacle decorated with niches in front. Within is a little courtyard, and fragments of the building running round in the same Tudor style, but given up to squalor and decay, evidently let out to poor lodgers. This charming fragment excites a deep melancholy, as it is a neglected survival, and may disappear at any moment—the French having little interest in these English monuments, indeed, being eager to efface them when they can. It is always ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... was the break in the wall through which the river ran on its way to join the Mississippi. As they climbed slowly among the hills, the valley they had left grew still more beautiful, as the squalor of the little town was hid by the dusk of distance. Both men were silent for a long time. Howard knew the peculiarities of his companion too well to make any remarks or ask any questions, and besides it was a ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... desolate-looking place by comparison with his former impressions of it. The morning was grey-skied, but full of a hard quality of light, which brought out to the uncompromising uttermost the dilapidated squalor of the Surrey side. The water was low, and from the mud and ooze of the ugly opposite shore, or perhaps from the discoloured stream itself, there proceeded a smell which offended his unaccustomed nostril. A fitful, gusty wind was blowing from the east, and ever and again ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... with one window, barred like those in the outer room. It was fitted up with toilet conveniences according to the best advices of its day. Over all the neat personal arrangements there was the slur of neglect, a sad squalor which even a king's palace wears ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... whole of the buildings lost in dirt and wretchedness. The inhabitants of this filthy nook were of the lowest and most depraved description, and no other tenants could indeed have been found to make their dwelling there; as in addition to the squalor of the buildings themselves, the deeply-sunk and humid soil, which in fact formed an open sewer that drained the adjacent streets, supported several permanent gibbets arranged in the form of a cross; while the thoroughfares ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... unspeakable infamy, and I should have been worse than a coward if I had shrunk from doing what was necessary; but there would have been no use whatever in my reading novels detailing all this misery and squalor and crime, or at least in reading them as a steady thing. Now and then there is a powerful but sad story which really is interesting and which really does good; but normally the books which do good and the books which healthy people find interesting are those which are not in the least of the ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... breweries, powder mills, scattered hovels, and unkempt streets. Here was no sun, but plenty of bare whitewash. Even Alec, accustomed to the singularly ugly etchings of Paris viewed from its chief railways, was completely disillusioned by these drab adumbrations of commerce and squalor. The Tave was no longer blue, but dull brown with the mud of recent rain. Not even the inhabitants were attractive. They were not garbed as Serbs, but wore ungainly costumes that might have passed unnoticed in the Bowery. He was irresistibly reminded ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... the place. It was on the boundary line of the two most turbulent wards in the city. To the north was the Italian colony, to the south was the Irish colony. Both were orderly and self-respecting as a rule, though squalor and poverty abounded. But these two races are at once the simplest and most quick-tempered, and whenever an Irishman or an Italian crossed the boundary line there was usually a hurry call for the patrol wagon, and some one was always more or ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... I pictured the two children and myself alone in that strange, out-of-the-world place, where it really seemed to me we might all three be made an end of without any one being the wiser of it! There was a general look of squalor and stolid depression about the people too: the landlord was a black-browed, surlily silent sort of man, his wife and the one maid-servant looked frightened and anxious, and the only voices to be heard were those of half-tipsy peasants drinking ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... rapidly, until he is the degraded creature you saw yesterday. His cronies have very appropriately given him the sobriquet of 'Whiskey Jemmie.' I understand his wife and children are existing in utter poverty—brought, by his abuse, to be abject specimens of squalor ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... terrifying. Whenever they entered the room, the brother and sister always kept a frightened eye on those doors. This dull winter morning, when they came quaking along behind their mother into this grim place, it was still in the squalor of morning confusion. Later, Harris would open the shutters and tidy things up; he would dust the painted pine bureau and Blair's photographs and the slender green bottle of German cologne on which the red ribbons of the calendar were beginning to ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... Arno farewell till the late afternoon. Steady climbing now, and then a turn to the right and we see Pelago before us, perched on its crags, and by and by come to it—a tiny town, with a clean and alluring inn, very different from the squalor of Pontassieve: famous in art and particularly Florentine art as being the birthplace of Lorenzo Ghiberti, who made the Baptistery doors. From Pelago the road descends with extreme steepness to a brook in a rocky valley, at a bridge over which the real climb begins, to go ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... initiating—of the irreverence and pride and destruction that were about to follow in his footsteps, wasting, defiling, scarring, obliterating, turning beauty into ashes, and worse! That divine mechanics should thus, through selfishness and avarice, be leagued with filth and squalor and ugliness! When one looks upon Raglan, indignation rises—not at the storm of iron which battered its walls to powder, hardly even at the decree to level them with the dust, but at the later destroyer who could desecrate ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... in the court of his sovereign, proud, happy, praised; great men shook him familiarly by the hand, and a winsome maiden smiled upon him. Now he was a chained slave, doomed to work, eat, and sleep on a narrow plank for ten long years. Ten years! could he survive ten days of the horror and squalor and degradation? ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... half-drunk officials, miserably dressed, degraded, poor, in this scene of past magnificence, called up thoughts of the contrast between the government of old Mitla and the present,—of past magnificence and modern squalor. ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... have been at the bottom of it; and, depend upon it, wherever you see a condition at all resembling hers, you will find, on inquiry, that the sufferer has allowed herself to be dealt with by the Bulls of Rome. The cases of squalor and ignorance, in all the world most like your aunt's, are to be found in their own household; on the steps of their doors; in the heart of their homes. In Switzerland, you may cross a line no broader than a bridge or a hedge, and know, in an instant, where the Bulls ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... filthy little lanes the moment one quits the few main thoroughfares. High over head, to be sure, the red crags of the Acropolis may be towering, crowned with the red, gold, and white tinted marble of the temples, but all around seems only monotonous squalor. The houses seem one continuous series of blank walls; mostly of one, occasionally of two stories, and with flat roofs. These walls are usually spread over with some dirty gray or perhaps yellow stucco. For most houses, the only break in the street ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... their trade in many a mean street, so much the counterpart of Budge Street that he had watched a certain window or door with involuntary trepidation, until he realized that it was not Budge Street, that he was a happy alien to its squalor, that he was a butterfly, a thing of woods and hedgerows fluttering for an inconsequent moment in the gloom. He came among them, none knew whence he was going, none knew whither. He was conscious of being a creature of mystery. He pitied ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... of private and public documents that are slowly opening out a prospect of new economic methods, methods conceived in the generous spirit of scientific work, that may yet arrest the drift of our western civilization towards financial and commercial squalor and the social collapse that must ensue inevitably on that. In view of the composition of the Committee, the Majority Report is in itself an amazing triumph of Sir Richmond's views; it is astonishing that he was able to drive his opponents so far and ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... grew very rich but the masses lived in squalor and poverty. Never for a moment was the country at peace. It was for ever fighting someone, somewhere, for causes which did not interest the subjects at all. Until, through this continuous and exhausting warfare, most of the Assyrian soldiers had been killed ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon
... mind of the Cape man, used as he was to the open spaces of both sea and land, these dingy blocks of brick houses, three and four stories in height, all quite alike in smoke and squalor and even in the pattern of the net curtains at their parlor windows, made as dreary a picture as he had ever imagined. He thought of that pale, slender, violet-eyed girl coming back to this ugly block at night, after long hours at the restaurant, having to look forward to nothing more beautiful, ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... the Leap when he opened his heavy eyes and gazed at the rude squalor of his cave. The dishes were unwashed, the floor was dirty, a long-tailed rat hung balanced on the table-edge—and he was tired, tired, tired. He heaved himself up and reached for the water-bucket but he had forgotten to fill it at the ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... humanity by drawing a line with your stick in the dust on the ground. On the Protestant side, neatness; cheerfulness; industry; education; continual aspiration, at least, after better things. On the Catholic side, dirt, disease, ignorance, squalor, and misery. I have so constantly observed the like of this, since I first came abroad, that I have a sad misgiving that the religion of Ireland lies as deep at the root of all its sorrows, even as English misgovernment and Tory villainy." Almost the counterpart of this remark is ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... attic singer, no ballroom warbler. And why? Because I am practical. Mine is no squalor of song that cannot transmute itself, with proper exchange value, into a flower-crowned cottage, a sweet mountain- meadow, a grove of redwoods, an orchard of thirty-seven trees, one long row of blackberries ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... bed and the dining-table in the same apartment. For they dine and sleep and work and play all at the same time. A man works at night and sleeps by day: he lies yonder as calmly as if in a quiet country cottage. The children have no place to play in but the living-room or the street. It is not squalor—it is crowded life. The people are pushed together by the necessities of existence. These people have no dislike to it at all: it is right enough to them, and so long as business is brisk they are happy. The man who lies ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... beginning were very low and like homely cottages or poor shepherd huts made at all adventures of every rude piece of timber that came first to hand, with mud walls and ridged roofs thatched over with straw." The picture was really that of the common English town of More's day, the home of squalor and pestilence. In Utopia however they had at last come to realize the connexion between public morality and the health which springs from light, air, comfort, and cleanliness. "The streets were twenty feet broad; the houses backed by spacious gardens, and ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... flat in a thorough temper, angry, headachy, almost feverish after the rich scones and the rich tea, and the even less wholesome talk. The apartment house seemed, as indeed it was, grimy and odorous almost to squalor, and Aunt Kate almost hateful in her cheerfulness and energy. This was Wednesday, and on Wednesday evenings she was always happy, for then Wolf and Norma came to dinner with her. To-night, busily manipulating ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... our dwelling the unsightly squalor of a negro village, which lay at a distance of a mile and a half on the other side of an abrupt hill to our rear. It consisted merely of some score of huts, of miserable aspect, formed of matting, stretched on stakes stuck in the ground; and in other cases, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... had fought his way with his fists to the position of practical dictator in the city of Reuton. The story was seldom told without a mention of his man Max—Lou Max who kept the south end of Reuton in line for the mayor, and in that low neighborhood of dives and squalor made Cargan's a name to conjure with. Watching him now, Mr. Magee marveled at this cheap creature's evident ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... before the years of the last wars was in a different world of thought and feeling from that of the dingy, suspicious, secretive, and uncharitable existence of the respectable poor, or the constant personal violence, the squalor and naive passions of the lowest stratum. Yet there were no real differences of blood and inherent quality between these worlds; their differences were all in circumstances, suggestion, and habits of mind. And turning to more individual ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... called, when she had let herself into the flat. Contrary to orders, the little hall was in darkness. There was no answer. She lit the hall and passed into the kitchen, lighting it also. There, in the terrible and incurable squalor of Marthe's own kitchen, Marthe's apron was thrown untidily across the back of the solitary windsor chair. She knew then that Marthe had gone out, and in truth, although very annoyed, she ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... wage-earner to be that of sufficient and suitable food. But in any large city and in most smaller communities there are found those who have refined instincts, aspirations for a life of physical and moral cleanness, who by force of circumstances are obliged to come in contact with filth and squalor and careless disorder in order to find shelter. If they can be kept from degenerating, their rise when it comes will lift those below them, but it is a Herculean task to lift them by lifting all below as well. ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... as she stepped from the squalor of the hotel into the splendor of the morning her head lifted. She drank the clear, crisp wind as one takes ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... excavated and decently interred. But not one had been touched. Buried in frenzied haste by amateur, imperilled grave-diggers with a military purpose, these dead men decayed at leisure amid the scrap-heap, the cess-pit, the infernal squalor which once had been a neat, clean, scientific German earthwork, and which still earlier had been part of a fair countryside. The French had more urgent jobs on hand than the sepulture of these victims of a caste and an ambition. So they liquefied ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... private charities were numerous and without self-crediting, the present writer happens to know. Once, after going through the great wine-cellar where millions were coined, I went through the barracks in the upper portion of the same building, where a wretched tenantry of the Devil's poor lived in squalor. Each of these families was required to pay room-rent to the millionnaire. As I passed along, I found one man and woman in wrathful distress. They must pay their rent, or be turned out of their rooms. The rent was two ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... gladness have I had from my wanderings. Upon no altar did I see my name shine, nor the perfumed flame flicker; the Lydian measures were silent, and the praise of Cytherea. And everywhere I went I found the same senseless troubled haste, and pale mean faces of men, and squalor, and tumult. Grace and joyousness have fled—even from your revelry! But I have seen your new gods, and understand: for, all grimy and mis-shapen and uncouth are they as they stand in your open places and at the corners of your streets. Zeus, what a place must Olympus now be! And can ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... lack of thrift and energy could assert itself. The surroundings were mean enough and squalid enough at their best, but the oppressive shadows of night made them meaner and more squalid than they really were. The sun, which shines so lavishly in that region, appeared to glorify the squalor, showing wild passion-flowers clambering along the broken-down fence of pine poles, and a wistaria vine running helter-skelter across the roof of the little cabin. But the night hid all ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... by threatening to make capetes[69] of them. This was the College de Pouillerye denounced by Rabelais and notorious to students as the College des Haricots, because they were fed there chiefly on beans. Erasmus was a poor boursier there, disgusted at its mean fare and squalor, and Calvin, known as the "accusative," from his austere piety. Desmoulins, the inaugurator of the Revolution, and St. Just, its fiery and immaculate apostle, sat on its benches. To obtain admission to the college of Cluny (1269) ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... threw away his fetishes after a hard struggle with all the past and present environment that bound him. Then at once his instinct was to make a better home for his family. He must get away from the heathen village, with its squalor, and impurity, and idolatry. It is true that environment does not regenerate the soul, but the renewed soul transforms the environment. Better conditions are evidence of the new life. On the contrary, when some fall back to heathenism, they fall into slovenly attire, ill-kept ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... settlement now stands on Shamien, a pretty islet in the river, in splendid contrast with the squalor of the native streets. The city wall is not conspicuous, if indeed it is visible beyond the houses of a crowded suburb. Yet one may be sure that it is there; for every large town must have a wall for protection, and the whole empire counts no fewer than 1,553 walled cities. What an index to the ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... which thing does act in this way, and which thing fails to make the true connection, is the secret (somewhat incommunicable, it must be confessed) of seership, and doubtless we must not expect of the seer too rigorous a consistency. Emerson himself was a real seer. He could perceive the full squalor of the individual fact, but he could also see the transfiguration. He might easily have found himself saying of some present-day agitator against our Philippine conquest what he said of this or that reformer of his own time. He might have called him, as a private person, a ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... not to go down after ten o'clock at night. These are known as the back slums. But nowhere is there any sign of poverty or anything at all resembling Stepney or the lower parts of an European city, The Chinese quarter is the nearest approach thereto, but it is quite sui generis, and squalor is ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... none practically; and though now and then, as all byways are visited, one finds remnants of old Paris, and a court or narrow lane in which crime might lurk or poverty hide itself, as a whole there is hardly a spot where sunshine cannot come, and the hideous squalor of London is absolutely unknown. One quarter alone is to be excepted in this statement, and with that we are to deal farther on. The seamstress in a London garret or the shop-worker in the narrow rooms of the East End ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... uncle took me after leaving the University, and I went even farther afield than that,—to Palestine and Egypt. You would like Egypt even better than Turkey, Miss Joan, for there, thanks to our rule, you have picturesqueness without squalor, whereas Turkey does not stand a close inspection. We were thankful to leave Constantinople after a very few days, but were sad indeed to turn our backs on fascinating Cairo. If I had the seven-leagued boots, I should be a frequent ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... slope, beneath some thousands of roofs packed close together like heads in a crowd, lurks the squalor of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. The imposing cupola of the Pantheon, and the grim melancholy dome of the Val-du-Grace, tower proudly up above a whole town in itself, built amphitheatre-wise; every tier being grotesquely represented by a crooked ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... by the sweat of their brow. He also thought that a country life was justly to be preferred even to the most splendid riches; for the most wholesome fruits of it seemed to be born and reared in the shelter of a middle estate, halfway between magnificence and squalor. But he did not wish to pass the kindness of the youth unrequited, and rewarded the esteem he had shown him with the mantle he had cast among the thorns. So the peasant's son approached, replaced the parts of his belly that had been torn away, and bound up with a plait of ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... saying that the poor of Scrooby village were not interesting. There was very little squalor or degradation; their poverty seemed not a descent, but a condition to which they had been born; the faces which Sadie saw were dulled and apathetic rather than sullen or rebellious; they stood up ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... weeks he began to distinguish in the squalor of the faces that surrounded him the separate causes of their malady—to know drink from disease, dissipation from destitution, the drug-habit from hunger. Complexion and facial expression stood more than dress as an ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... he had himself seen. They lived in a roofless hovel with the door walled up and plastered over with clay, and with a narrow slit left for a window, through which they received food. They spoke to those who visited them but once in the year, at Pentecost; not content with the squalor and solitude of their hut, they loaded themselves with masses of iron which bent them double. Theodoret was wont to peer in through the chink at the revolting sight of the ghastly women, a mass of filth, crushed double ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... by the high carts, on two solid wheels, and drawn by four or six oxen, hauling the cut cane. But the villages they passed, single streets of unrelieved squalor in a dusty waste, they decided were immeasurably depressing. No one who could avoid it walked; lank men in broad straw hats and coat-like shirts rode meagre horses with the sheaths of long formidable blades slapping their miserable hides. Groups of fantastically saddled ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... glad to lift themselves from all this squalor and misery, and be raised into a newer ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... had never witnessed any spectacle of beggary, nor had he ever heard the name of God uttered to second an entreaty for alms. Here, however, all the lazars and the wretched in Rome were collected together; hundreds of young and old in that extreme of squalor, nakedness, and disease which affrights the English traveller in Italy, were seen on all sides; and their importunities and cries, for the love of God, and the mercy of Christ, to relieve them, thrilled ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... clumsy and inferior work-women? Think of it long and patiently, till you come to see, as she bids you, the true relation between the idleness of women and money in the Fifth Avenue and the hunted squalor of women without money at the Five Points. Women of Boston, the parallel stands good for you. Listen, and you may hear the dull murmur of your own "Black Sea," as it surges ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... and the fine old painted tiles on the floor were loose and broken in places. In the ceiling certain pink and well-fed cherubs still supported unnatural thunderclouds through which Juno forever drove her gold-wheeled car and team of patient peacocks, smiling high and goddess-like at the squalor beneath. Still Diana bent over Endymion cruelly foreshortened in his sleep, beyond the possibility of a waking return to human proportions. Mars frowned, Jove threatened, Venus rose glowing from the sea; and below, ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... Germany like an infuriated beast with a genius for military tactics, scattering armies which dispersed only to join together and face him again. While Richard was in his cradle the whole of Saxony was filled with the squalor and misery and loathsome terrors of war. Leipzig was occupied by the French; Marshal Davoust was left there as commandant, with power of life and death, and all the other privileges of a military governor; and in the deputy-registrar of the law-court he found the man for the post of provisional ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... and feel and find His fiery-hearted presence everywhere. Even so dear Hesper, bringer of all good things, Sends the same silver dews Of happiness down her dim, delighted skies On some poor collier-hamlet—(mound on mound Of sifted squalor; here a soot-throated stalk Sullenly smoking over a row Of flat-faced hovels; black in the gritty air A web of rails and wheels and beams; with strings Of hurtling, tipping trams) - As on the amorous nightingales And roses of Shiraz, or the walls and towers Of ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... Middle Ages presented a sad contrast to the magnificence of an Empire which was fading to remoteness year by year. The ugly towns did not attempt to hide their squalor, when dirt was such a natural condition of life that a knight would dwell boastfully upon his contempt for cleanliness, and a beauty display hands innocent of all proper tending. The dress of the people was ill-made and scanty, lacking the severe grace of the Roman ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... ha! Good! that was very good! But why did you do this? Not that I care for her. I care not. But my curiosity. And it must have inconvenienced you, this squalor." ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... grossness! Naples, breeding, teeming, laughing, fighting, festering, city of music, city of fever and death! Naples, at once abominable and enchanting—city to which, spite of noise, stenches, cruelty and squalor, those will return, of necessity, and return again, whose imagination has once been taken captive in the meshes ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... London poor. Those experiences now became fraught with a new meaning. The solemn doctrines he had preached in those days: were they really a panacea for all the ills of the flesh? He thought upon the gaunt bodies, starved souls, and white faces—the dirt, the squalor of ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... this amazing manner, cinder-smeared, hot, rumpled, and very tired, Ailsa Paige and Letty Lynden entered the unspeakably dirty streets of the Capital of their country and turned into the magnificent squalor of Pennsylvania Avenue which lay, flanked by ignoble architecture, straight and wide and hazy under its drifting golden dust from the great unfinished dome of the Capitol to the Corinthian colonnade of the Treasury. Their ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... fitted to guard it. She hurried away quite unconscious of the admiring eyes that were raised from dockets and ledgers behind the grille. She made for the court in which "The Firefly" had its abode. The squalor of the passage, the poverty stricken aspect of the stairs,—items which had prepared her on other occasions for the starvation rate of pay offered for her work,—now passed unheeded. This affectation of scanty means was humorous. Obviously, ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... strange behavior that draws people's attention, for it may be done well or ill. Hence Augustine says (De Serm. Dom. in Monte ii, 12) that "in the practice of the Christian religion when a man draws attention to himself by unwonted squalor and shabbiness, since he acts thus voluntarily and not of necessity, we can gather from his other deeds whether his behavior is motivated by contempt of excessive dress or by affectation." Religious, however, would especially seem not to act thus from affectation, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... naturally and perhaps inevitably in an age where national life has degenerated into materialism and squalor, and the artist feels himself a stranger in a world of Philistines, we need not here pause to examine and criticise. It has been mentioned merely to illustrate by contrast the Greek view, which was diametrically opposed ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... the proper celebration of the festival-day. A third room was devoted to the chocolate and sangaree drinkers, who might be seen emptying their cups and glasses with as much satisfaction and relish, as if the sight of the poverty and squalor that surrounded them gave additional zest to the draught; while, all about them, between and under chairs, tables, and benches, the wretched Leperos lay grovelling. Parties of richly-dressed Spaniards and Creoles, both men and women, their eyes ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... the village and asked for Ugumu's factory. "This is it," said an exceedingly dirty, good-looking, civil-spoken man in perfect English, though as pure blooded an African as ever walked. "This is it, sir," and he pointed to one of the huts on the right-hand side, indistinguishable in squalor from the rest. "Where's the Agent?" said I. "I'm the Agent," he answered. You could have knocked me down with a feather. "Where's John Holt's factory?" said I. "You have passed it; it is up on the hill." This showed Messrs. Holt's local factory to be no bigger than Ugumu's. At this point a big, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... two rivers, the clear and swiftly-flowing Angara (which rises in Lake Baikal to join the river Yenisei just below Yeniseisk), and the small and unimportant Irkut river. It is an unfinished, slipshod city, a strange mixture of squalor and grandeur, with tortuous, ill-paved streets, where the wayfarer looks instinctively for the "No-thoroughfare" board. There is one long straggling main street with fairly good shops and buildings, but beyond this Irkutsk remains much the same dull, dreary-looking place ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... in new countries, and but few old countries have managed to exist without it. As to Ireland, we may rejoice to say that there is less of it now than there was twenty years since. Things are mending there. But though such excuses may be truly made—although an Englishman, when he sees this squalor and poverty on the quays at Queenstown, consoles himself with reflecting that the evil has been unavoidable, but will perhaps soon be avoided—nevertheless he cannot but remember that there is no such squalor and no such poverty ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... fought his way with his fists to the position of practical dictator in the city of Reuton. The story was seldom told without a mention of his man Max—Lou Max who kept the south end of Reuton in line for the mayor, and in that low neighborhood of dives and squalor made Cargan's a name to conjure with. Watching him now, Mr. Magee marveled at this cheap ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... window. A girl was coming down the street, looking at the numbers of the houses. She stopped here. Intuition told me she was Miss Goodwin. While she was ringing the bell I did all I could to increase the shabby squalor of your room. She was shown in here, and I introduced myself as your friend. We chatted. I drew an agonising picture of your struggle for existence. You were brave, talented, and unsuccessful. Though ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... Baths in the same neighborhood. That time they succeeded at once. And now here we are, planning a great system of municipal baths as the people's right, not as a favor to any one, and the old lie that the poor prefer to steep in their squalor is no longer believed by any person with sense. This month contracts will be given out for the fitting of nine public schools with shower-baths where we had one before, and notice is given that that one will be open to the people on Sunday mornings. No, we ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... the Middle Ages presented a sad contrast to the magnificence of an Empire which was fading to remoteness year by year. The ugly towns did not attempt to hide their squalor, when dirt was such a natural condition of life that a knight would dwell boastfully upon his contempt for cleanliness, and a beauty display hands innocent of all proper tending. The dress of the people was ill-made and scanty, lacking the severe grace of the Roman ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... was a great and glorious thing, and that happiness was a fruit which hung within reach of every hand. Now I have lived for six years trying single-handed to relieve the want and suffering of the needy people with whom I come in contact, and their squalor and wretchedness have sickened me, and, what is still worse, I feel that all I can do is as a drop in the ocean, and, after all, amounts to nothing. I know I am no longer the same reckless girl who, with the very best intention, sent you wandering through the ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... a wheat-ear; here, a whole life epitomized; but here, too, all the miseries of that life. A ray of light falling from heaven as if by special favor on those puny flowers and the vigorous wheat-ear brought out in full relief the dust, the grease, and that nameless color, peculiar to Parisian squalor, made of dirt, which crusted and spotted the damp walls, the worm-eaten balusters, the disjointed window-casings, and the door originally red. Presently the cough of an old woman, and a heavy female step, shuffling painfully ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... bitterly reproach Sarah for her treachery and tried to still her protestations of love by pointing out to her that I had absolutely no fortune, and could only offer her a life of squalor, not to say of what. But this she knew, and vowed that penury by my side would make her happier than luxury beside any other man. Ah, Sir, 'tis given to few men to arouse such selfless passion in a woman's heart, and it hath oft been my dream in the ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... gaunt she was, and with many lines in her prematurely old face. Perhaps they told of the hard fight her brave spirit waged against the stern ordering of her life; of the struggles with squalor,—inevitable concomitant of poverty,—and to keep together the souls and bodies of those numerous children, with no more efficient assistance than could be wrung from her reluctant husband in the ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... occupied a place with their protector nearly akin to that of wife. But in the ordinary way their reign over any one heart was shortlived, and their career, though splendid, was brief,—a youth of folly, a premature old age of squalor and neglect. Their habits were luxurious and extravagant. In dress they outvied the splendour, not insignificant, of the Roman matrons; and they might be seen courting the admiration of the wealthy loungers of Rome by dashing along the Appian Way behind a team of spirited ponies driven ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... these old-world splendours given place? Splendid gin-shops, plate-glass palaces, into which squalor and misery rush and drown the remembrance of their wretchedness in drowsy and poisonous potations of an inferior quality of liquor. Such splendour and squalor is the very contrast which makes thinking men ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... numbers. Take, for instance, the little publication The Deaconess, issued by the East London Home, and notice the undertakings carried on by the members—district-visiting, nursing of the sick, mothers' meetings, Sunday-school teaching, Bible classes, and all the multitudinous ways of meeting the squalor, poverty, ignorance, sickness, and sin of the poor of the east of London. There is no poetic enthusiasm that strengthens one for such work, the dirt, the degradation, the forlorn condition are ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... Emmanuel and the Italian troops entered Rome and took possession of it as the Capital of Italy, free from the Alps to Taranto, they found it a city of ruins, squalor, and hardly habitable in a sanitary point of view. Interesting, of course, to the traveller from its wealth of splendid relics of the past and vast treasures of art, but as undesirable for residence as the Upas Valley. Now what does the traveller see? A prosperous and happy population; ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... resort of all classes bent on pleasure, furnished high or low. At no time before or since was there such fantastical fashion in dress, both in cut and gay colors, nor more sumptuousness in costume or luxury in display among the upper classes, and such squalor in low life. The press teemed with tracts and pamphlets, written in language "as plain as a pikestaff," against the immoralities of the theatres, those "seminaries of vice," and calling down the judgment of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... to a discontent that he could scarcely restrain. With the utmost discrimination in delicate shades of beauty and luxury he was yet condemned to spend his days in surroundings hardly raised above poverty-stricken squalor. Incongruous as it was he could yet imagine Taou Yuen moving with a certain appropriateness about the Ammidons' spacious grounds and house; but he was absolutely unable to picture her here, ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... to say, it was a tradition before that time that there was abundance and even luxury in Scotland. There had been a tendency in history of late to dwell on the poverty and squalor of Scotland in comparison with other countries—all that should be produced, and made perfectly conceivable—and then also to dwell on the records of kirk- sessions and presbyteries, showing the state of morality in Scotland. All that it was desirable should be ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... We know, the great cathedrals, the pageantry and splendor, the exquisite handicraft, the tapestries and illuminated manuscripts, the vast learning and the incomparable dialectic. We know also the social injustices, the misery and squalor the ignorance in which the mass ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... millions of pounds, and political economists place their hands upon their hearts and declare that Great Britain is the most happy and prosperous country on the face of the globe. But the declaration is illusory in the extreme. No country can be happy and prosperous whose "mudsills" live in squalor, want, misery, vice and death. If Great Britain is happy and prosperous, how shall we account for the constant strikes of labor organizations for higher pay or as a protest against further reduction of wages below which man cannot live and produce? The balance of trade desire is the curse ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... the purring night sounds. He had passed from the affluent stone piles on the boulevard to the cheap flat buildings of a cross street. His way lay through a territory of startling contrasts of wealth and squalor. The public part of it—the street and the sidewalks—was equally dirty and squalid, once off the boulevard. The cool lake wind was piping down the cross streets, driving before it waste paper and dust. In his preoccupation he stumbled occasionally ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... wolves instead of lambs? They'd eat her all the sooner if she was meek to them. Fight or be eaten. It was easier to change the town completely than to conciliate it! She could not take their point of view; it was a negative thing; an intellectual squalor; a swamp of prejudices and fears. She would have to make them take hers. She was not a Vincent de Paul, to govern and mold a people. What of that? The tiniest change in their distrust of beauty would be the beginning of the end; a seed to sprout and some day ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... great, after being of none account, and hast gotten riches after squalor, being foremost in these in the city, and hast knowledge concerning useful matters, so that promotion is come unto thee; then swathe not thine heart in thine hoard, for thou art become the steward of the endowments of the God. Thou art not the last; another ...
— The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni - The Oldest Books in the World • Battiscombe G. Gunn
... Her rod of fast-sealed buds on high; Fling wide her petals—silent, swift, Lovely to the sky? Since as she kindled, so she will fade, Flower above flower in squalor laid. ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... this can be changed, if only he will accept the generous offer I am bearing him," said Phil to himself, as he looked around at the evidences of squalor and poverty. "Inside of six months this place could have a thrifty look; the women would own decent dresses, the children shoes for their feet if they wanted them; yes, and even a schoolhouse would stand right in the middle of the village, with a teacher ready to show these poor things how to read ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... three cents each! What, then, must become of clumsy and inferior work-women? Think of it long and patiently, till you come to see, as she bids you, the true relation between the idleness of women and money in the Fifth Avenue and the hunted squalor of women without money at the Five Points. Women of Boston, the parallel stands good for you. Listen, and you may hear the dull murmur of your own "Black Sea," as ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... way. Marat once said of him: "Il n'est pas dangereux." The phrase had been taken up. Within the precincts of the National Convention, Marat was still looked upon as the great protagonist of Liberty, a martyr to his own convictions carried to the extreme, to squalor and dirt, to the downward levelling of man to what is the lowest type in humanity. And his sayings were still treasured up: even the Girondins did not dare to attack his memory. Dead Marat was more powerful than his living ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... arises naturally and perhaps inevitably in an age where national life has degenerated into materialism and squalor, and the artist feels himself a stranger in a world of Philistines, we need not here pause to examine and criticise. It has been mentioned merely to illustrate by contrast the Greek view, which was diametrically opposed to this, and valued art in proportion as it represented in perfect ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... with his flock tender and comprehending and patient. The only indulgence he accorded to his senses was in the forms and ceremonies of his ritual, the vestments and furniture of his church. His vicar was able to give him a free hand in the obscure squalor of Lima Street; the ecclesiastical battles he himself had to fight with bishops who were pained or with retired military men who were disgusted by his own conduct of the services at St. Simon's were ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... Canada is a change pleasing to imagine. From dusky lane and fetid alley to open, bright Canadian fields is, in the very thought, refreshing. A child is snatched from pinching hunger, fluttering rags, and all the squalor of gutter life; from a creeping existence in the noisome pool of slum society is lifted up into some taste for decency and cleanliness; from being trained in the school whose first and last lesson is to fear neither God nor man, is taught the beginnings of Christian ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... may have been just such a Verona as this which delights and depresses us, only with new beautiful things being built quite naturally alongside of decayed and defiled ones; things nowadays all equally levelled in ruin and squalor. The splendour of the Past may be a mere fiction of our own, like the romance of the Past which we say we no longer believe in. But history gives us, I ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... my uncle took me after leaving the University, and I went even farther afield than that,—to Palestine and Egypt. You would like Egypt even better than Turkey, Miss Joan, for there, thanks to our rule, you have picturesqueness without squalor, whereas Turkey does not stand a close inspection. We were thankful to leave Constantinople after a very few days, but were sad indeed to turn our backs on fascinating Cairo. If I had the seven-leagued boots, I should be a frequent ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... now—ignorant, squalid savages, half naked, living on potatoes such as a Yankee pig would scorn, speaking only their barbarous native tongue, lying and thieving through terror and want, with their children growing up in hopeless squalor. Very few savages lead such lives, while few people are so oppressed and harassed by the pains and penalties of civilization. For they are chin-deep in debt. I saw promissory notes five and six times renewed, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... tell of what their contents may once have been. The magazines were well fitted to convey a strong impression, not only of the size, but also of the splendour of the palace which needed such storerooms. There was no meanness or squalor about the domestic offices of the House of Minos. The doorways leading into the magazines from the Long Corridor were of fine stone-work, and the side-walls, both of the gallery and the magazines, had been covered with painted plaster, presenting ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... vigorous and indignant minds who find in the ugliness and moral squalor of our situation, the unhappy influence of Christ and his saints. They are wrong. The history of Oscar Wilde's writings ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... was either looking up a witness whose testimony might be necessary to save a perilled burglar from Sing Sing, or taking measures to keep one hidden who might have told too much if brought upon the witness-stand. And yet Egbert Crawford was really visiting that den of black squalor with a very different object—to find an old darkey woman who was reported as living in that street, and in his capacity as one of the eleven hundred and fifty Commissioners of Deeds of the City and County of New York, to procure her "X mark" and take her acknowledgment in the little matter of ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... were numerous and without self-crediting, the present writer happens to know. Once, after going through the great wine-cellar where millions were coined, I went through the barracks in the upper portion of the same building, where a wretched tenantry of the Devil's poor lived in squalor. Each of these families was required to pay room-rent to the millionnaire. As I passed along, I found one man and woman in wrathful distress. They must pay their rent, or be turned out of their rooms. The rent was two or three dollars. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... left was the break in the wall through which the river ran on its way to join the Mississippi. As they climbed slowly among the hills, the valley they had left grew still more beautiful, as the squalor of the little town was hid by the dusk of distance. Both men were silent for a long time. Howard knew the peculiarities of his companion too well to make any remarks or ask any questions, and besides it was a genuine pleasure ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... again amid the despair and squalor of his death-bed, warning his friends against his own example, and addressing to the wife he had not seen for years those words endorsed on a bill for ten pounds, words ever memorable in the history of English letters: 'Doll, I charge thee by the love of our youth, and by my soul's rest, ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... for a little, before returning to the hotel—through the narrow cobble-paved streets, with their alternations of splendour and squalor, their palaces, churches, hovels, their dark little shops, their neglected shrines, their vociferous population, their heterogeneous smells—and along the Riva, with its waterside bustle, its ships loading and unloading, and its unexampled view of ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... glimpse of a barmaid at an upper window interested him pleasantly for a moment.) And the Redcliffe Arms was the true gate to the stucco and areas of Redcliffe Gardens. He looked down into the areas and saw therein the furtive existence of squalor behind barred windows. All the obscene apparatus of London life was there. And as he raised his eyes to the drawing-room and bedroom stories he found no relief. His eyes could discover nothing that ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... bring one to a slum; but the region my hansom was now penetrating was one unending slum. The streets were filled with a new and different race of people, short of stature, and of wretched or beer-sodden appearance. We rolled along through miles of bricks and squalor, and from each cross street and alley flashed long vistas of bricks and misery. Here and there lurched a drunken man or woman, and the air was obscene with sounds of jangling and squabbling. At a market, tottery old men and women ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... and then, as all byways are visited, one finds remnants of old Paris, and a court or narrow lane in which crime might lurk or poverty hide itself, as a whole there is hardly a spot where sunshine cannot come, and the hideous squalor of London is absolutely unknown. One quarter alone is to be excepted in this statement, and with that we are to deal farther on. The seamstress in a London garret or the shop-worker in the narrow rooms of the East End lives in a gloom for which there is neither outward ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... and the sunlight, and the peaceful Sabbath sound to which he made response, seemed like a bright picture framed by the door, and set off by the stable's blackness. The whole formed such a contrast to themselves, as they lay wallowing, like some obscene animals, in their squalor and wickedness on the two heaps of straw, that for a few moments they looked on without ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... the squalor and the mud, so high up in the firmament as to be invisible from the earth, they fight the eternal issues of right and wrong. Every fight is a romance, every report is an epic. They are the knighthood of this war. Without fear and without reproach, they have ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... done there was badly and meanly done. It was white- washed from the topmost point of every chimney down to the lowest edge of the basement. A whited sepulchre. For there was foulness there, in the air, in the surroundings, in every thing. Squalor and dirt reigned. His heart grew sick as those hideous walls rose ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... ward Old Maggie had donned her ragged slippers and a blue calico wrapper and shuffled to the foot of the emergency bed. Old Maggie was of that vague neighbourhood back of the Avenue, where squalor and poverty rubbed elbows ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... name shine, nor the perfumed flame flicker; the Lydian measures were silent, and the praise of Cytherea. And everywhere I went I found the same senseless troubled haste, and pale mean faces of men, and squalor, and tumult. Grace and joyousness have fled—even from your revelry! But I have seen your new gods, and understand: for, all grimy and mis-shapen and uncouth are they as they stand in your open places and at the corners ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... sees in small Mediterranean ports for the petty coasting traffic; a lean, slender craft of some eighty or hundred tons register, with all her pristine smartness thoroughly submerged in southern happy-go-lucky squalor. There was a faint gray pencil of steam feathering away from her escape-pipe, and as we drew nearer I saw she had hove short, and was ready to break her anchor out of the ground ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... day coincides with the inner mood there is intoxication in its breath; and Selden, hastening along the street through the squalor of its morning confidences, felt himself thrilling with a youthful sense of adventure. He had cut loose from the familiar shores of habit, and launched himself on uncharted seas of emotion; all the old tests and measures were left behind, and ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... of Lamo's buildings knew paint. The structures, garish husks of squalor, befouled the calm, pure atmosphere, and mocked the ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... were only ten years on ... As it is it would be madness ... madness and squalor and the end of everything ... Between us we haven't a couple of pennies to rub together ... How she rides! ... She was never meant for Brixton ... No, nor I ... Why didn't I hold my tongue? ... Oh what a fool, what a fool! Thank Heaven the horses ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... Ridgeway, and Josie—stood nervously huddled together, their elbows close in, as if to avoid contact with the prevailing filth, their immaculate white outing-clothes detaching themselves violently against the squalor and sordid grime ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... unlocked and opened the door for Houston, and one of them entered with him. It was a small room, evidently a woman's, and its general squalor and dilapidation were made more apparent by tawdry, shabby bits of finery strewn here and there. Curtains of red damask, faded and ragged, hung at the window, excluding the daylight, and on a small table a kerosene ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... discomfort and squalor is soon forgotten and the romance and picturesqueness of these far-off streets remains as a very pleasant memory amidst the winter fogs and coldness of our ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... in the mountains of North Carolina, I passed by a large number of 'coves,' as they call them there, or heads of small valleys between the hills, which had been newly cleared and planted. The impression on my mind was one of unmitigated squalor. The settler had in every case cut down the more manageable trees, and left their charred stumps standing. The larger trees he had girdled and killed, in order that their foliage should not cast a shade. He had then built ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... shores of which stood a city, by no means so large as London or even as Paris; but exceeding in grandeur the London or the Paris of that day, as the Paris of to-day exceeds in elegance the comparative squalor of the Paris of three centuries ago. According to the leather-covered little German book, the city was beautiful beyond comparison with any of the European cities of that period. I should suppose that the author thought ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... knew such a thing as bread; many had never in their life tasted such a delicacy; few Villages possessed an oven. A weaving-loom was rare, the spinning-wheel unknown. The main article of furniture, in this bare scene of squalor, was the Crucifix and vessel of Holy-Water under it [and "POLACK! CATHOLIK!" if a drop of gin be added].—The Peasant-Noble [unvoting, inferior kind] was hardly different from the common Peasant: he himself guided his Hook Plough (HACKEN-PFLUG), and clattered with his wooden slippers ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... wonderful displays of power in the First Church and in the tent meetings had had its effect upon the life of Raymond. But as he walked past saloon after saloon and noted the crowds going in and coming out of them, as he saw the wretched dens, as many as ever apparently, as he caught the brutality and squalor and open misery and degradation on countless faces of men and women and children, he sickened at the sight. He found himself asking how much cleansing could a million dollars poured into this cesspool accomplish? Was not the living source of nearly all the human misery they sought to relieve untouched ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... rivals proclaimed themselves the original discoverers of 'London's Shame': one enterprising author even thought of going to law about it as a question of copyright. Owners of noisome lanes in the East End trembled in their shoes, and sent their agents to inquire into the precise degree of squalor to be found in the filthy courts and alleys where they didn't care to trust their own sensitive aristocratic noses. It even seemed as if a little real good was going to come at last out of Ernest Le Breton's impassioned pleading—as if the sensation were going to fall ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... throwing me prone upon my face. After a little I learned to move with a halting gait, striding out with the free limb and pausing to pull my burden after me with the other. This habit, learned in the squalor and darkness of the dungeon hells of Ceuta, I have never been ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... the wealthy ones as the dime fiction-writer sees them, but there was a feeling of something more personal. It was something which she hugged to her bosom as a priceless pearl of enjoyment in the midst of a barren, rock-bound life of squalor. ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... Which, however, he had employed rather ruthlessly in his work. For he resolutely cut out all that had been agreeable to the generations which had thriven on the various phases of virtue and its rewards. Beauty he replaced with ugliness; dreary squalor was the setting for crippled body and deformed mind. The heavy twilight of Scandinavian insanity touched his pages where sombre shapes born out of Jewish Russia moved like anachronisms through the unpolluted ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... supercilious tone that he had now and then been tempted to address to his brother. "It is not fit that Ethel should give up everything, health and all, to such a set as these. They look as if they had been picked out of the gutter—dirt, squalor, everything disgusting, and summer coming on, too, and that horrid place with no window to ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... a distance, was not without a certain picturesqueness; but the distance had to be great enough to lose sight of the uncouthness which a close inspection revealed. Besides, its squalor did not much matter. It did not affect the temper of the folk living within its boundaries. To them the place was a little temporary "homelet," to coin a word. For frontier people are, for the most part, transient. They only ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... her childhood days, and, mechanically, she turned her eyes toward it. She recalled, dully, the strange sequence of events that had transformed her from a squatter's brat and lifted her out of the bleak barrenness of life in the shack. She'd escaped the squalor, the horrid cold and the hardships, common to the women of the Silent City. She lived more comfortably and decently than the fishermen's wives. She'd learned many things, but all her efforts to improve herself had been centered in her ambitions for Boy. Now it was all wasted! She'd ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... strange depths of idleness in man, a too-easily-got sufficiency, as in the case of the sago-eaters, often quenching the desire for all besides; and it is possible that the men of the richest ant-heaps may sink even into squalor. But suppose they do not; suppose our tricksy instrument of human nature, when we play upon it this new tune, should respond kindly; suppose no one to be damped and none exasperated by the new conditions, the whole enterprise ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... courtyards: and he was greatly disgusted. But he fed and clothed that shabby multitude; those degenerate descendants of Portuguese conquerors; he was their providence; he kept them singing his praises in the midst of their laziness, of their dirt, of their immense and hopeless squalor: and he was greatly delighted. They wanted much, but he could give them all they wanted without ruining himself. In exchange he had their silent fear, their loquacious love, their noisy veneration. It is a fine thing to be a ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... steep-roofed cots about us, or in the old stone inn, with its peaked porch, where honest yokels quaffed nutty ale and a sign-board creaked and groaned from its gibbet across the road. But we had come too late in the painting-season for any other than Hobson's choice: the tidbits of grime and squalor were all taken, and we must e'en content ourselves to be mocked and reviled for the philistinism of our domestic establishing, or else hie us hence where artists were not and Ethel ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... lovely natural surroundings groveled in squalor and lived upon potatoes, milk, butter, and cheese. The only produce that brought in any money was the cheese, which most of them carried in small baskets to Grenoble or its outskirts. The richer or the more energetic among them sowed buckwheat for home consumption; ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... even on the surface. The day passes in doing nobody knows what, to-day in one manner, and to-morrow, as a result of a sudden inspiration, entirely contrariwise—everyone lives his life in idleness, slovenliness, and a measureless disorder—chaos and squalor reign in his matrimonial and sexual relations—a naive absence of conscientiousness distinguishes his work; in public affairs he shows an irrepressible inclination towards despotism, and an utter absence of consideration towards his fellow-creatures; and his attitude ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... sun-dial- -the steep, steep, up-hill streets of small palaces (but very large palaces for all that), with marble terraces looking down into close by-ways—the magnificent and innumerable Churches; and the rapid passage from a street of stately edifices, into a maze of the vilest squalor, steaming with unwholesome stenches, and swarming with half-naked children and whole worlds of dirty people—make up, altogether, such a scene of wonder: so lively, and yet so dead: so noisy, and yet ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... fall,—how ragged and jagged the roof-scene descends in a gorge! He who would travel on foot through the pass of that defile, of which we see but the picturesque summits, stops his nose, averts his eyes, guards his pockets, and hurries along through the squalor of the grim London lazzaroni. But seen above, what a noble break in the sky-line! It would be sacrilege to exchange that fine gorge for a dead flat of dull rooftops. Look here, how delightful! that desolate house with no roof at all,—gutted and skinned by the last London ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... thought this a much more suitable object, and one moreover which could be carried out without any contact with dirt and wickedness! Squalor and the miseries of poverty had always been as closely shut out of her life as they were from the trim prosperity of the precincts, and Miss Unity considered it fitting that they should be so. She knew that these squalid folk were there, close ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton
... streets by prisoners does not extend to the native houses and courtyards, which therefore survive in all their original, inconceivable squalor—squalor so uncompromising that it has long ago ceased to be picturesque. What glimpses into humble interiors, when native secretiveness has not raised a rampart of earthen bricks at the inside of the entrance! In the daytime it is like looking into vast, abandoned pigsties, fantastically encumbered ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... d'Ossau. It is not as yet in sight from this valley, however, though we are approaching it nearly and though it closely overtops the col which rises beyond Bareges. The road continues desolate, and the dull grey-green pastures hardly serve to relieve its deserted and forlorn squalor. The clouds brood on the hills, the air grows chilly as we ascend, and more than once we sigh half dubiously for the bright parlor left behind at Luz. We move leisurely, almost reluctantly, on, not ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... about by grimy streets and dull brick buildings; the air which had been all a-sparkle for her in her babyhood, was, through her youth, dull, smoke-grimed, fog-soaked; for roomy spaciousness and gentle luxury had been exchanged the dinginess and squalor of the place in Soho. The occasional visits to the theatre where her father played the flute, now and then a Sunday walk with him when the weather was sufficiently urbane (marred, always, by his peering watch of every passing face, which had never been rewarded till they met the staring ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... sallow teetotalers, ye manufacturers of lemonade, ye cocoa-drinkers! You only see the sodden wretch who hangs about the public-house door in filthy slums, blinking his eyes in the glaze of electric light, shivering in his scanty rags—and you do not know the squalor and the terrible despair of hunger which he strives to forget.... But above all, you do not know the glorious ale of the country, the golden brown ale, with its scent of green hops, its broad scents of the country; its foam is whiter than snow ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... places. In the ceiling certain pink and well-fed cherubs still supported unnatural thunderclouds through which Juno forever drove her gold-wheeled car and team of patient peacocks, smiling high and goddess-like at the squalor beneath. Still Diana bent over Endymion cruelly foreshortened in his sleep, beyond the possibility of a waking return to human proportions. Mars frowned, Jove threatened, Venus rose glowing from the sea; and below, the unctuous black dust settled and thickened on ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... truth?" said Sim Gage suddenly. His eyes ran furtively around the room in which they sat, taking in, without noting or feeling, the unutterable squalor of the place. ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... grain, possibly the government tribute houses, as they were of different design and vastly superior build to the mud and stick hovels in which the people live. In their surroundings the natives exhibit all the squalor and dirt of China, with none of the cleanlier qualities of the people of Japan. Though they followed us about in droves, they never attempted any familiarities; in fact our first overtures were treated with awe-like silence. The only words we understood, in common with them, ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... are known as the back slums. But nowhere is there any sign of poverty or anything at all resembling Stepney or the lower parts of an European city, The Chinese quarter is the nearest approach thereto, but it is quite sui generis, and squalor is ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... marine-store dealer; the landings and the floors are strewn with dirt which a smart, cleanly countrywoman would have cleared away without ten minutes' trouble. The very windows are robbed; and the whole set of inhabitants rests in contented, unspeakable squalor. No—something more is required than delicate, silky-handed reform; something more is required than ready-made blocks of neat dwellings; and something more is required than sighing sentimentalism, which looks ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... the chamber in which he was standing it was clear enough that no human being ever lived. Mary's drawing-room ought to be a bower in which she at least might pass her time with books and music and pretty things around her. The squalor of the real living room might be conjectured from the untouched cleanliness of this useless sanctum. At last the lady came to him and welcomed him with very grim courtesy. As a client of her husband he was very well;—but as a nephew of Lady Ushant ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... corn laws; there is dearth, real, or were it even factitious, an indubitable scarcity of broad. And so, on the 2nd day of May, 1775, these waste multitudes do here, at Versailles chateau, in widespread wretchedness, in sallow faces, squalor, winged raggedness, present as in legible hieroglyphic writing their petition of grievances. The chateau-gates must be shut; but the king will appear on the balcony and speak to them. They have seen the king's face; their ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... but plenty of bare whitewash. Even Alec, accustomed to the singularly ugly etchings of Paris viewed from its chief railways, was completely disillusioned by these drab adumbrations of commerce and squalor. The Tave was no longer blue, but dull brown with the mud of recent rain. Not even the inhabitants were attractive. They were not garbed as Serbs, but wore ungainly costumes that might have passed unnoticed in the Bowery. He was irresistibly reminded of the stage, ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... blatant foreign priests, who preach to the heathen the doctrines of self-imposed poverty and mendicancy, and yet themselves live sumptuously enough in comfortable houses, surrounded by a wife and a numerous progeny, in the midst of heathen squalor and misery." ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... it seems to us, forever settled the question as to whether the louse bites the flesh or sucks blood, and decides a point interesting to physicians, i.e., that the loathsome disease called phthiriasis is a nonentity. From this source not only many living in poverty and squalor are said to have died, but also men of renown, among whom Denny in his work on the Anoplura, or lice, of Great Britain, mentions the name of "Pheretima, as recorded by Herodotus, Antiochus Epiphanes, the Dictator Sylla, the two Herods, the Emperor Maximian, and Phillip the Second." Schioedte, ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... miserable lives. Through all these studies runs a quaint vein of humor, relieving the pathos of the situations. The picturesque costume of the old Rat Killer tickles the sense of humor, and conveys somehow a delightful suggestion of his humbuggery which offsets the touching squalor of the grotesque little apprentice. And none but a humorist could have created the swaggering hostler's boy holding ...
— Rembrandt - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... background of grimy houses found a place in the picture framed by my port-hole, across a wide stretch of paved quay brown with frozen mud. The colouring was sombre, and the most conspicuous feature was a little cafe with curtained windows and a shabby front of white woodwork, corresponding with the squalor of these poorer quarters bordering the river. We had been shifted down there from another berth in the neighbourhood of the Opera House, where that same port-hole gave me a view of quite another soft of cafe—the best in the town, I believe, and the very one where the worthy Bovary and his wife, ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... laws of sanitation. The white roofs in a ring of cactus and amid the scarlet blossoms of the pomegranate make a delightful picture seen from the top of a neighbouring hill, but there is the usual complete disillusionment when you have passed the outskirts of the town. Not all the dirt and squalor, however, could minimise the intense feeling of satisfaction amongst the troops at having at last conquered the bogy that had for so long prevented the advance into ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... hoc fonte se derivarunt omnes nequitiae. Ne quid obiter dicam de ambitione, adulatione plusquam aulica, ne tristi domicaenio laborent, de luxu, de foedo nonnunquam vitae exemplo, quo nonnullos offendunt, de compotatione Sybaritica, &c. hinc ille squalor academicus, "tristes hac tempestate Camenae," quum quivis homunculus artium ignarus, hic artibus assurgat, hunc in modum promoveatur et ditescat, ambitiosis appellationibus insignis, et multis dignitatibus ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... unprofitable to follow on into the grandeurs of Louis XIV, if one hopes to find an advance there in truth-telling architecture. At the end of that splendid official success the squalor of Versailles was unspeakable, its stenches unbearable. In spite of its size the Palace was known as the most comfortless house in Europe. After the death of its owner society, in a fit of madness, plunged into the rocaille. When ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... traits and the squalor of the city are lost, so delicately tender is the mass of buildings painted against the ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... all the ministries of science. And thus won they a poor pittance wherewithal to purchase some little comfort or luxury, or ornament to their persons; for vanity had not forsaken some in their rusty squalor, and they sought to please her, their mistress or their bride. There you saw accomplished men conjuring before their eyes, on the paper or the canvass, to feed the longings of their souls, the lights and the shadows of the dear days that far away ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... silence did not leave him. The causes of his embitterment were many, remote and near. He was angry with himself for being young and the prey of restless foolish impulses, angry also with the change of fortune which was reshaping the world about him into a vision of squalor and insincerity. Yet his anger lent nothing to the vision. He chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and tasting its mortifying flavour ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... midst of black squalor, they came to an oasis like a bright jewel fallen in the trough of swine. It was Berryan, the first town of the M'Zabites, people older than the Arabs, and hated by them with a hatred more bitter than ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Grieve walked back along Market Street his heart danced within him. Neither mud nor darkness, neither the squalor of the streets, nor the penetrating damp of the air, affected him at all. The crowd, the rush of life about him, the gas in the shops, the wares on which it shone, the endless faces passing him, the sense of hurry, of business, of quick living—he ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the gloom and darkness. In each corner of the room was a bed, with a smaller one pushed underneath, and two sick people suffering from slow fever. It is no wonder, for eleven people occupied this one room, about twelve feet square. Need we wonder that misery and squalor are seen all around? An old soap box from the grocery formed a corner cupboard. Two old chairs which perhaps belonged to their great-grandmother, all frame and no seat, an empty box, and a bucket of water with a tin scoop, formed ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 2, February, 1889 • Various
... archway of a manufactory exchanged rude but admiring remarks about her as she passed. The paces of the cob, the dazzle of the silver-plated harness, the fine lines of the cart, the unbending mien of the driver, made a glittering cynosure for envy. All around was grime, squalor, servitude, ugliness; the inglorious travail of two hundred thousand people, above ground and below it, filled the day and the night. But here, as it were suddenly, out of that earthy and laborious bed, rose the blossom of luxury, grace, and leisure, the final elegance of ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... hinder them," said Mr. Beebe. "They are worth it." Unlatching the gate, he sauntered over the triangular green to Cissie Villa. "Hullo!" he cried, shouting in at the open door, through which much squalor ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... assisting them, there is a great attention to "interiors." The writer has, for her time, a more than promising sense of the incongruity between Empire dress and furniture and the style of George II.: and the shabbiness or actual squalor of Charlotte Street and Chancery Lane show that she had either been a very early and forward scholar of Dickens, or had discovered the thing on her own account. Her age may excuse some of the weak points, but it makes the presence of the strong ones ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... society, or whose avocations have caused him to mingle, at one time or other, with a great number of people, who cannot call to mind the time when some shabby, miserable wretch, in rags and filth, who shuffles past him now in all the squalor of disease and poverty, with a respectable tradesman, or clerk, or a man following some thriving pursuit, with good prospects, and decent means?—or cannot any of our readers call to mind from among the list of ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... to examine at a better perspective one of the leaning walls. Down the steps of the building came a young man who seemed to epitomize its degradation, squalor and infelicity—a narrow-chested, pale, unsavory young man, puffing ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... day the single narrow street which connected the neat brick and frame respectability of New Town with the picturesque adobe squalor of Old Town was filled by a curiously varied crowd. The tourist from the East, distinguished by his camera and his unnecessary umbrella, jostled the Pueblo squaw from Isleta, with her latest-born ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... from the floor, for her father would know her no more, and had passed out of this world, unconscious of all the squalor and ruin about him; and the poor girl was sobbing ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... is now devoting herself withdraws her eyes from beauty, as her heart from rest; nor do I conceive any revival of great art to be possible among us while the nation continues in its present temper. As long as it can bear to see misery and squalor in its streets, it can neither invent nor accept human beauty in its pictures; and so long as in passion of rivalry, or thirst of gain, it crushes the roots of happiness, and forsakes the ways of peace, the great souls whom it may chance to produce will all pass away from it helpless, ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... ancestry! This, then, is the man who has undertaken to crush my friend Lecour on the question of extraction! All the world knows that his paternal uncle, of the same name as he, is a common carter in Quebec, and his children in the last ditch of squalor and degradation." ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... temperance of our race. For, by one of those strange oversights that human nature is guilty of, Scotland, in opening the door for song and dance and all the merry crew of mirth, seems to admit quite freely two vagabonds that have no business there, Squalor and Drunkenness. Yet notwithstanding this grave unlikeness between the two peoples, Hawthorne seems to have found a connecting clew, albeit unwittingly, when he remarked, as he did, on his first visit to Glasgow, that in spite of the poorer classes there excelling even those of Liverpool in ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... loafer's wife, smiling her queer defiance at pain and fate, and letting meddling "lidies" know that without sixteen hours' "settin" she could not keep her husband and children alive. Stale commonplace, that all the world knows by heart!—the squalor of the pauperum tabernae dimming the glory of the regum turres. Yet there are only a few men and women in each generation who really pass into the eclipsing shadow of it. Others talk—they feel ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... since I lived through that summer of siege in Harrodstown, the horrors of it are faded and dim, the discomforts lost to a boy thrilled with a new experience. I have read in my old age the books of travellers in Kentucky, English and French, who wrote much of squalor and strife and sin and little of those qualities that go to the conquest of an empire and the making of a people. Perchance my own pages may be colored by gratitude and love for the pioneers amongst whom I found myself, and thankfulness ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... respectable middle-class, fifty-pound-a-year, "semi-detached," "family" house, in a respectable middle-class road of the little north-county town of Sidon, midway between the trees of wealth upon the hill, and the business quarters that ended in squalor on the bank of the broad and busy river,—a house boasting a few shabby trees of its own, in its damp little rockeried slips of front and back gardens,—on a May evening some ten or twelve years ago, a momentous crisis of contrasts ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... profanity of speech. Here you have the artistic reason, and, by implication, that which forbids its use in literature—namely, its ineffectiveness. But though she selects, Mrs. Woods does not refine. She exhibits the life of the travelling show in its habitual squalor as well as in its occasional brightness. How she has managed it passes my understanding: but her book leaves the impression of confident familiarity with this kind of life, of knowledge not merely accumulated, but assimilated. Knowing as we do that Mrs. Woods was not brought up in a circus, we infer ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... strangely garbed traders, laden camels, gorgeous Roman soldiers, brown-faced priests, black-bodied slaves; sunlit hills high above one, distant faintly blue mountains far ahead of one—a thronged labyrinth of shadow and light, of noise and confusion, of pomp and squalor. ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... peace with the vivid image of things if it be only vivid enough, the votary of this ideal may well occasionally turn over such values with the wonder of what one takes them as paying for. They pay sometimes for such sorry "facts of life." At Genzano, out of the very midst of the village squalor, rises the Palazzo Cesarini, separated from its gardens by a dirty lane. Between peasant and prince the, contact is unbroken, and one would suppose Italian good-nature sorely taxed by their mutual allowances; that the prince in especial ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... emergence of an Equilateral from the ranks of his serf-born ancestors is welcomed, not only by the poor serfs themselves, as a gleam of light and hope shed upon the monotonous squalor of their existence, but also by the Aristocracy at large; for all the higher classes are well aware that these rare phenomena, while they do little or nothing to vulgarize their own privileges, serve as a most useful barrier against revolution ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... more like bee-hives than human habitations. They had also every one of them a group of date-palms, overhanging a cluster of mean bare houses; and they all alike had a picturesque and even imposing air from a distance, but faded away into indescribable squalor as one got abreast of them. Our progress was monotonous. At twelve, noon, we would pass Aboo-Teeg, with its mosque, its palms, its mud-huts, and its camels; then for a couple of hours we would go on through the midst of a green field on either side, studded ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... either side resembled those which he had seen on the other island. Small and rough many of them were; but their whitewashed walls, the strong sunshine, and the large space of grass or pine shrubs that was about each, gave them an appearance of cleanliness. There was no sign of the want or squalor that he had expected; indeed, so prosperous did many of the houses look, that he himself began to have an injured feeling, thinking that he had been brought to befriend people who might very well have ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... struck by the number of persons—and particularly of women—who wore that most pathetic of all the liveries of distress, "the look of having seen better days." In the most wretched streets I traversed there was more squalor than suffering—the dirtiest and most ragged people in them showing no signs of starvation, or even of insufficient rations; and certainly in the most dismal alleys and by-streets, I came upon nothing so revolting as the hives of crowded misery which ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... Neither winners nor losers would want more of the blundering offices of Mr. Harry Boyce. He was back again after his conversation with royalty—and royal breeches—a hack writer in his garret. And Alison as far away as ever. The wonderful Alison! The beauty of her flashed into his squalor. He felt her passionate life. Be hanged to Alison! Let the hack ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... said. "You must not heed such tales. You are too warm-hearted. The sordid side of life is not for you. We who have to come in contact with it, and know it in all its wretched squalor, know only too well that rarely, if ever, can one of the high-pitched stories of personal wrong be justified. The greater the criminal, the greater the protestations of innocence and injustice. Do not be deceived. You, who are ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... neat, for God's sake. I have seen orthodox people who bathe twice and wash their hands hundreds of times in the day, but whose clothes are sticky with dirt, sweat and oil. Whatever else it may mean, Religion does not mean squalor, offensive odours in body and clothes and general neglect of external clean linen and dirt. The Yogi is a man of supreme REFINEMENT. Read that word and understand all it means. The clothes you wear in day-time ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... which was very prevalent at this time. However, there was much to be seen. Palaces and hovels, magnificent hotels and humble coffee houses. Strange people and stranger costumes. Weird sights, sounds, and smells. Some streets no wider than our back lanes, teeming with people, filth, and squalor, and every window, doorway, or hole in the wall with something in it for sale. Veiled women and shuttered upper windows in the better class residential quarter hinted romance to those who had read the adventures ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... no time to mutter more than a couple of words; but he had doubtless observed that I was decently dressed and, therefore, took deep offence because I had dared enter his den so unceremoniously, and spy out the squalor and untidiness of it. ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... face showed close to one of the streaming windows; sometimes a black-eyed, pallid face, but never a face wholly sane and healthy. This was an underworld where squalor and vice went hand in hand through the beautiless streets, a melting-pot of the world's outcasts; this was the shadowland, which last night had ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... Equality! Your squalor I decline, With you I would no better be Nor sprung of older ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... It must be remembered that these accounts are by two sceptics, who saw nothing in the witches but poor, degraded old women. In a description which assumes their supernatural power such minute details would not be possible; yet there is quite enough in Banquo's description to suggest neglect, squalor, and misery. But if this were not so, there is one feature in the description of the sisters that would settle the question once and for ever. The beard was in Elizabethan times the recognized characteristic of the witch. In one old play ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... prosperity as of either. You see that at every step. Not a house but is in perfect repair and in perfect condition; the low white paling fences glitter in their purity; the window are bright and clear. And meet whom you will, man, woman or child, no rags or penury or squalor will offend you; but the look is of respectable comfort and real ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... content to regard this world as a hopeless place of squalor and sin, as intrinsically and incurably wicked, as an abode which cannot be mended and which must, therefore, be despised and forsaken in spirit, even before the time when it has to be forsaken in body. The possible flawlessness of an other-worldly state no longer compensates for the glaring ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... personated one of the malignant beings of whom Zanoni had spoken. It was a small man, dressed in a fashion strikingly at variance with the elaborate costume of the day: an affectation of homeliness and poverty approaching to squalor, in the loose trousers, coarse as a ship's sail; in the rough jacket, which appeared rent wilfully into holes; and the black, ragged, tangled locks that streamed from their confinement under a woollen cap, accorded but ill ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... gladly with her loveliness, thankful that she, who once had looked upon him kindly, did not now turn to see his squalor. The blaze was thawing his chilled limbs and fast warming him, the brass pot was singing merrily. He kept his hands gratefully near it, and as, from time to time, the girl held up her arms admiringly to let the firelight shine upon her bracelets ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... later I beheld the miracle. It was wrought on the last day of December, in the laboratory of the hospital, high above the gloom and squalor of the city. The miracle occurred within a brilliant little circle of light, and I saw it with my eye glued to a microscope. It passed off swiftly and quietly, and though I expected it, I was filled with a great ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... reluctantly conceded that there are few uglier or more commonplace towns in New England than Stillwater,—a straggling, overgrown village, with whose rural aspects are curiously blended something of the grimness and squalor of certain shabby city neighborhoods. Being of comparatively recent date, the place has none of those colonial associations which, like sprigs of lavender in an old chest of drawers, are a saving grace to other quite as dreary nooks ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... book of rules for the gentleman of that day advises him to wash his hands every day and his face almost as often! In the monasteries bathing was permitted only to invalids and the very old. Perfume was used copiously, and filth and squalor abounded. This even in royal circles. Among the common people ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... the door and opened it. There, bobbing her head and smirking mechanically, stood that loathsome creature, Old Meg. In these rich surroundings her frightful squalor was all the more accentuated. Those at the table drew back in utter disgust as she tottered into the room. As she passed Zita ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... or now and then sends a slant ray, thrown down into the dark court in seeming mockery. It is impossible for any one to get from language alone, either spoken or written, an adequate idea of the loneliness, the sense of gloom, the filth and squalor, of the apartments in some of these Boston tenement houses. It requires a strong stomach, and a still stronger determination that nothing shall thwart you from knowing how your brothers and sisters live, ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... can keep in comfortable ease But one superfluous Staff for one week's play; If from my squalor I may hope to squeeze The wherewithal to check for half a day The untimely razing of a single Hut— 'Tis well; I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... paralysis, a refusal of the nerves to respond to the normal stimuli, as well as an unnatural stimulation. There are commonwealths, plainly to be distinguished here and there in history, which pass from prosperity to squalor, or from glory to insignificance, or from freedom to slavery, not only in silence, but with serenity. The face still smiles while the limbs, literally and loathsomely, are dropping from the body. These are peoples that have lost ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... lives,—lives which nevertheless strongly attracted white men of evil and shiftless, but adventurous, natures, and to which white children, torn from their homes and brought up in the wigwams, became passionately attached. Yet back of the lazy and drunken squalor lay an element of the terrible, all the more terrible because it could not be reckoned with. Dangerous and treacherous allies, upon whom no real dependence could ever placed, the Indians were nevertheless the most redoubtable ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... brought what was supposed to be a sample of this soup to the officer seated in the pilot house high above the squalor, and he would pick out a bean from the mess on the end of a fork and place it to his lips and nod his head gravely, and the grinning steward ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis
... at Frank as he spoke, and the young man gave him an approving nod, after which they rode on through the squalor and horrors of the place till the road grew more straight and wide, the hovels fewer. Then the filth and misery grew scarcer, patches of cultivated land appeared, from which weary-eyed faces looked up, half wondering, here and there, but only to sink ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... minuteness that leaves us no room to doubt its possessing a living original; yet how disgusting to suppose that such a crew were really to be seen at the board of a brother writer! and in what bad taste does their host describe and ridicule their squalor! That such things were in those times cannot be doubted. Even in this century, in the golden days of book-making, we are told how Constable and how Ballantyne, the great publisher and the great printer of Edinburgh,—"His Czarish Majesty," and "the Dey of All-jeers," as Scott would call them,—delighted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... the world was not worthy'' have laid down their lives for conscience' sake. There are few places in all the world that are more depressing to a white man than a Chinese city. The dreary monotony and squalor of its life are simply indescribable. Chefoo is usually considered one of the most attractive cities in China, and the missionaries who reside there are regarded as fortunate above their brethren. But even a brief stay will convince the most sceptical that nothing but the strongest ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
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