"Bareness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... loss as mine passes over the soul like a plough cleaving a pasture line by line. The true stuff of the spirit is revealed and laid out in all its bareness. That customary outline, that surface growth of herb and blade, is all pared away. I have been accustomed to think myself a religious man—I have never been without the sense of God over and about me. But when an ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... whole scene reminds me very much of Egypt; and you might easily believe that you were sitting on the banks of the Nile somewhere between the first and second cataract. There are the same white, sandy banks, the same narrow fringe of verdure on each side, the same bareness and treelessness of the surrounding landscape, the same sun-scorched, stony hillocks; in fact, the whole look of the place is almost identical. The river, slow and muddy, is a smaller Nile; there only wants the long snout and heavy, slug-like form of an old crocodile on the ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... dwell, Will play the tyrants to the very same And that unfair which fairly doth excel; For never-resting time leads summer on To hideous winter, and confounds him there; Sap checked with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone, Beauty o'er-snowed and bareness every where: Then were not summer's distillation left, A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass, Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft, Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was: But flowers distill'd, though they with winter meet, ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare
... Norman castles had been humanized and refined so that the new dwellings of the nobility, if less imposing in appearance, were much more comfortable as places of residence. A gentle race had built their houses rather for peace than for war. He who compares the savage bareness of Pevensey or Guildford with the piled grandeur of Bodmin or Windsor cannot fail to understand the change ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... amid the desolation that has come upon her home, and the increasing bareness of all the accessories of her young life, its deeper needs and higher aspirations awaken to definite purpose and seek definite action, the direction they take is toward a hard stern asceticism, cramping up all life and energy within a narrow round of drudgeries and privations. ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... some of its sunniest vineyards, its most wildly romantic heights, and its most picturesque ruins. This part of its course may be said to end at the Siebengebirge, or 'Seven Mountains,' where the river again widens and the banks become more bare and uninteresting. Passing Bonn and Cologne, the bareness of the landscape is remarkable after the variety of that from which we have just emerged, and henceforward the river takes on what may be called a 'Dutch' appearance. After entering Holland it divides into two branches, the Waal flowing ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... in literature makes up for her historical poverty. Dr. Johnson was the first great man of letters to visit the town. He stayed in West Street with the Thrales, rode on the Downs and, after his wont, abused their bareness, making a joke about our dearth of trees similar to one on the same topic in Scotland. The Doctor also bathed. Mrs. Piozzi relates that one of the bathing men, seeing him swim, remarked, "Why, sir, you ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... of wood, Alfy carried it to the fireplace and lustily blew upon the embers till a little blaze started. Then she heaped the sticks upon this and presently had a roaring flame. At once the room grew cheerful, its bareness furnished, as it were, by ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... eyes, set in a frame of tawny hair, all in a frizzle, had peered in on them. The vision was clothed in garments so torn the wonder was that they stayed on at all, and there was a general look of abject poverty about her to which Sallie Calkins, with all the bareness of her lot, was a stranger. She stood for just a moment, as if transfixed by astonishment at the unwonted sight in the room, then turned and sped away as swiftly and silently as ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... shape of a gourd, with a long end that curved out of sight below, a very girdle of blue velvet binding the waists of the brown hills. At their left the shores of the wider part of the lake, the bulb of the gourd, were, in unexpected contrast to the bareness of the uplands, heavily wooded with great cottonwood trees and spruce. A grassy islet ringed with willows seemed to be moored here like the barge of some woodland princess. Away beyond, elevated on a grassy terrace at the head of the lake, and overlooking ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... she will like it here?" she asked suddenly, looking about the humble room which for the Lynch's, served as parlor, dining-room and kitchen. Now its bareness lay wrapped in a kindly shadow through which glinted diamond sparks from much-scrubbed tin. "It's nice—" Beryl meditated. She loved this hour, she loved the singing tea-kettle and the smell of strong soap and her mother's face in the lamplight, with all the loud noises ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... in worse and worse. Our nightshirts were wet through, so we got into our other shirts and knickerbockers, but preserved bareness in our feet. And the floor kept on being half an inch deep in water, however much we mopped ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... great, cold bareness and bleakness about the interior; for there are very few monuments, and those seem chiefly to be of ecclesiastical people. I saw no armed knights, asleep on the tops of their tombs; but there was a curious representation of a skeleton, at ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... entered this house to which she had come filled with gay anticipation and innocent curiosity. It had struck her from the first moment as gloomy, and it was undoubtedly cold, with its three sticks of wood ceremoniously smoking in the unaccustomed chimney-place. Its esthetic bareness had affected her like the meagerness of poverty. And now it seemed to her sad, horribly so, haunted by the gentle ghosts of that mother and sister who had known and touched all these things, sat in the chairs, looked through the windows, and who conceivably came back in the ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... Norman style which still flourished in Aquitaine in the twelfth century. Restored some twenty years ago, it had received the addition of a bell-tower which had not been contemplated in the original plan. At any rate, poverty had safeguarded its pure bareness. I tried to join in the prayers of the celebrant as much as my thoughts would permit, and then I returned with him to the presbytery. Here we breakfasted on a little bread and milk, after which we went to ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... standing in the center of the room. The electric light was turned on, revealing the bareness and absence of all ornament of the apartment; a fire was laid in the grate but not lit, and Priscilla's ugly square trunk, its canvas covering removed, stood in a prominent position, half on the hearthrug, half on the square of carpet which ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... in order to come down by the toboggan of the country, though we vowed one another not to attempt anything so mad. In the meanwhile, before it should be time for lunch, we could walk up to a small church near the station and see the people at prayer in an interior which did not differ in bareness and tawdriness from most other country churches of the Latin south, though it had a facade so satisfyingly Spanish, because I suppose it was so perfectly Portuguese, that heart could ask no more. Not all the ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... Bareness said, with emphasis. "Nay, I am ignorant as to who she was—but O my Louis! had you accorded me a tithe of the love you squandered on that abominable dairymaid I would have followed you ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... whispering love in the darkness. She had a ridiculous feeling that God really struggled like Mr. Britling, and that with only some indefinable inferiority of outlook Mr. Britling loved like God. She loved him for his maps and his dreams and the bareness of his talk to her. It was strange how the straining thought of the dead Teddy had passed now out of her mind. She was possessed by a sense of ending and beginning, as though a page had turned over in her life and everything was new. She had never ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... and back of the stage. The wild beast smell of the lion, although his cage had been hurriedly wheeled out through the scenery door, still persisted and caught the throat, and in the dim white-washed bareness, a few figures, stagehands in shirt-sleeves, and vague pale men in hard felt hats tiptoed about like perspiring ghosts. One of the latter approached Andrew. Monsieur Patou need have no fear, he whispered. Everything was arranged—the beautiful ballroom interior—the men who were to set the ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... time she had ever been in room—with its poverty, its bareness. She must have cast about it a look of delicate inquiry—as a woman is apt to do in a singleman's abode; for when she came again, in addition to pieces of soft old linen for bandages brought fresh cool fragrant sheets—the work of her own looms; a better ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... remorse of this man? Wait, then, until you lie alone, as he had done, through days as slow, revealing as ages, face to face with God and death. Wait until you go down so close to eternity that the life you have lived stands out before you in the dreadful bareness in which God sees it,—as you shall see it some day from heaven or hell: money, and hate, and love will stand in their true light then. Yet, coming back to life again, he held whatever resolve he had reached ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... somehow to close the incident, and we were all silent a moment, which I employed in looking about the room, and taking in with my literary sense the simplicity and even bareness of its furnishing. There was the bed where the invalid lay, and near the head a table with a pile of books and a kerosene-lamp on it, and I decided that she was a good deal wakeful, and that she read by that lamp when she could not sleep at night. Then there were the hard chairs ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... ironically frowned down upon gilded balconies and nude plaster women who supported them, robustly voluptuous creatures who faded into foliage below the waist, like plump nymphs escaping the rude pursuit of gods. Their bareness and boldness startled the convent-bred girl, even horrified her. She was the last to leave the omnibus, and then, instead of pushing in with her fellow-passengers to secure a room before others could snap up everything, she lingered ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... breeder of canaries, informs me that he believes that these statements are correct.): for in crested birds a narrow space of bare skin is left on the back of the head, where the feathers are up-turned to form the crest, and, when both parents are thus characterised, the bareness becomes excessive, and the crest itself fails to be developed. Mr. Hewitt, speaking of Laced Sebright Bantams, says (12/52. 'The Poultry Book' by W.B. Tegetmeier 1866 page 245.) that, "why this should be so I know not, but I am confident that those that are best laced frequently produce offspring ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... had wealthy relations at Kennard to whom she could return. Far different, indeed. At the thought of the homesickness that at times Ruth must know, of the lonesomeness of mountain and mesa from which she must suffer, of the deprivations, the hard bareness of the life, the moments of despair, he had a sensation of the bitter unfairness of things and a desire to snatch her safe away from the harsh pass in which she stood. It would be only right, it ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... were large as halls, one hundred by eighty feet, some of them, with whip-sawed floors, clay-chinked log walls, parchment {115} windows, and furniture hewed out of the green fir trees of the mountains. But the luxurious living made up for the bareness of furnishings. Shining samovars sung in every room. Rugs of priceless fur concealed the rough flooring. Chinese silks, Japanese damasks,—Oriental tapestries smuggled in by the fur traders,—covered the walls; and richest of silk attired the Russian officers and ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... his two sons, whose life might perhaps seem mysterious to their neighbors. In a wing towards the street, on the third floor, there are three large rooms which had been left in the state of dilapidation and grotesque bareness to which they had been reduced by the printing works. These three rooms, devoted to the evolution of the Picturesque History of China, were contrived to serve as a writing-room, a depository, and a private room, where M. d'Espard sat during part of the day; for after breakfast ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... greatly struck by the bareness of the fields and the poverty of the country; and as he journeyed further west the country became still wilder and more lonely. It was seldom now that he met any one who could speak English, and as the road was often little more ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... it, and garden tools kept off, there will soon be a dense carpet of golden flowers to brighten the wintry aspect of the open garden. Many things in the way of deciduous flowering shrubs may be grown with them, their bareness in winter and shade during summer favouring their enjoyment and growth. Early in the summer they die down. From that time the tubers may be lifted and transplanted. Such work should be finished in early autumn, or ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... almost to bareness struck Godefroid, whose quick eye took it all in as he recovered ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... paper held fast by two ill-applied and indistinct stamps. Bear in mind, too, that the guardians of the spoil are the sans-culottes who have made a conquest of it; that they are poor; that such a profusion of useful or precious objects makes them feel the bareness of their homes all the more; that their wives would like to lay in a stock of furniture; moreover, has it not held out to them from the beginning of the Revolution, that "forty-thousand mansions, palaces and chateaux, two-thirds of the property of France, would be the reward ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... In the very bareness of his use of them there lurks an occasional irony as in the following—a passage of prose broken by a single line of verse.(74) The Deity is ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... to plant much too closely. Observe well- developed trees, and see how wide a space they require. There is naturally an eager wish for shade as soon as possible, and a desire to banish from surroundings an aspect of bareness. These purposes can, it is true, often be accomplished by setting out more trees at first than could mature, and by taking out one and another from time to time when they begin to interfere with each other's growth. ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... settlements, separated from an ancient civilization by an unknown and dangerous sea on the one hand, menaced by all the perils of a virgin wilderness upon the other. All their life was simple to the point of bareness; austere, reduced to the most elemental necessities. Inevitably the order of their worship corresponded to the order of their society. It is certain, I think, that the white meeting-house with its naked dignity, the old service with its heroic simplicity, ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... onward, and came presently to a part where the grey plain did stretch out a bareness into the Night Land to my front; so that my way ended, unless I did make a ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... stands near the water, and at a distance shows a pretty wooden spire, is after the pattern of a New England meeting-house. When I reached it, the house was full and the service had begun. There was something familiar in the bareness and uncompromising plainness and ugliness of the interior. The pews had high backs, with narrow, uncushioned seats. The pulpit was high,—a sort of theological fortification,—approached by wide, curving flights of stairs ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... wood-fire blazed upon the English pattern hearth, and, for the light was fading outside, it flung an uncertain, flickering radiance about the room. Weston, sitting down, contrasted its luxury with the grim bareness of his match-boarded cubicle in the boarding-house, and with the log shanties of the railroad and logging camps. He frowned as he did so, for all that his eyes rested on made unpleasantly plain the distinction between himself and the girl whose room ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... one's finger in, looking like a mere spot in the middle of a great white panel; to accumulate so much patient and delicate workmanship on almost imperceptible accessories, and all to produce an effect which is absolutely nil, an effect of the most utter bareness and nudity. ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... jagged edges, forming a face yet steeper than the former slope. As he slowly slid inch by inch upon these, Knight made a last desperate dash at the lowest tuft of vegetation—the last outlying knot of starved herbage ere the rock appeared in all its bareness. It arrested his further descent. Knight was now literally suspended by his arms; but the incline of the brow being what engineers would call about a quarter in one, it was sufficient to relieve his arms of a portion of his weight, but ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... before the vintage began, and he thought he would be on the look-out for squalls, to use his own expression. To this end he took up his quarters in one of the attics which he had reserved by the terms of the lease, wilfully shutting his eyes to the bareness and want that made his son's home desolate. If they owed him rent, they could well afford to keep him. He ate his food from a tinned iron plate, and made no marvel at it. "I began in the same way," he told his daughter-in-law, when she apologized ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... him into their hands. For they were madmen—mad with the torture of hot winds and straining hopes that withered and fell; mad with their losses of that day, mad with the glare of sun of many days, and the stricken earth under their bound and sodden feet; mad with the very bareness of their inconsequential lives. ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... The flame-tree (ERYTHRINA INDICA) slowly abandons its foliage; but before the last yellow-green leaf is cast aside the fringe of the blood-red robe soon to overspread has appeared. The white cedar (MELIA CONFERTA) permits its leaves to become yellow and to fall lingeringly, but its bareness is merely for a week or so. So also does the foliage of the moo-jee (TERMINALIA MELANOCARPA) turn to deepest red and is discarded, but so orderly is the disrobing and the never varying fashion of foliage that the tree averts the scorn of the ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... same, or at all similar, for treating stone and for treating language. Greek poetry is statuesque in the sense that it depends greatly on its organic structure; it is not in the least so in the sense of being cold or colourless or stiff. But Greek poetry on the whole has a bareness and severity which disappoints a modern reader, accustomed as he is to lavish ornament and exaggeration at every turn. It has the same simplicity and straightforwardness as Greek sculpture. The poet has something to say and he ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... Clerics and laymen were alike admitted to embrace this Institute, under the name of Friars Minor. There were also some regulations relative to the Divine Office, prayer, the practice of virtue, fasts, the bareness of the feet, preaching, and the missions, which will be noticed when we come to speak of the second rule which the Patriarch gave in the year 1223, which they keep in his Order, and which is nothing more than an abridgment of the first. ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... four little boxes of sleeping-rooms, yellow painted floors, and bunks curtained with hand-embroidered dimity, stiff as a frozen crust of snow; a studio, with a few charming bits of old painted Dutch furniture to redeem it from bareness, and a kitchen which roused all Phil's ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... those solitudes — Then, sudden as a flame, the black-robed priest, The clotted earth piled roughly up about The hacked red oblong of the new-made thing, Short words in swordlike Latin — and a rout Of dreams most impotent, unwearying. Then, like a blind door shut on a carouse, The terrible bareness of ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... tired of this long, strange summer, and the first rains are eagerly looked for and joyously welcomed. The fall of the first showers after such a long season of bareness and brownness is almost as immediate in its effects as the waving of a fairy's magic wand over Cinderella, sitting ragged in the ashes and cinders. The change thus wrought is well described by a poet of the soil in a ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... from the soldiers who had penetrated to her Highness's praying-room, which, owing to its bareness and small size, had received at first but a cursory glance ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... along noisily over the rough road, and, a good deal inspired by it, Mrs. Sprague began to take something like interest in the melancholy country that flew past the window, as if seeking a place to hide its bareness in the blue line of uplands that marked ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... one table in the centre, some half a dozen chairs, and a very small Turkey-carpet, which did not cover one tenth part of the clean, cold, smooth, oak boards, constituted all the goods and chattels visible in the room. But what particularly added effect to the bareness of all within, was the singular and laborious bareness of all without. From each of these seven windows, nothing but a forlorn green flat of some extent was to be seen; there was not a tree, or a shrub, or a flower in the whole expanse, although by several ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... depressing bareness and emptiness of that gray-black expanse was changing. Far to the east a pink flush was spreading on the hills. It wavered and flowed, and it changed, as they watched, to deep areas of orange and red. The delicate pink swept in waves over valleys and hills, a vast kaleidoscopic ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... coach-houses and sheds were overrun with grass. Nor was it more retentive of its ancient state within; for, entering the dreary hall, and glancing through the open doors of many rooms, they found them poorly furnished, cold, and vast. There was an earthly savour in the air, a chilly bareness in the place, which associated itself somehow with too much getting up by candle-light, and not ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... of 1750" gives a more characteristic view of Edwards's mind and heart, and conveys an ineffaceable impression of his nobility of soul. His diction, like Wordsworth's, is usually plain almost to bareness; the formal framework of his discourses is obtruded; and he hunts objections to their last hiding place with wearisome pertinacity. Yet his logic is incandescent. Steel sometimes burns to the touch like this, in the bitter winters of New England, and one wonders whether ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... and she and Anne pattered off through the halls to the bareness and strangeness of which Anne could not get used. Where, she wondered, were the people in tarnished gilt frames—slim smiling ladies and stately gentlemen with stocks and wigs—that used to be there? The two girls played lady and come-to-see in the bare up-stairs rooms awhile. Then ...
— Honey-Sweet • Edna Turpin
... hill of cattle), sacred now to rabbits and hares and any other small game that can shelter on its bald sides. Up hill and down hill, between hills and around hills, mountains of every shape and degree of bareness and baldness looking down at us over one another's shoulders as we drove along. An ambitious little peasant clung on behind with his hands, his little bare feet thudding on the smooth road and over the loose layer of sharp stones that lay edge upwards in places. He thought he ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... and the pitiful bareness of the place seemed to become suddenly enhanced by the quiet dignity of his demeanor. Out of the gloom Mr. Thurwell came forward with outstretched hand, followed by another gentleman—a stranger. Between the two men, that one long ray of sunlight lay across the stone floor, and as ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... The bareness of Minnie Davis' yard was relieved by a single rosebush, and her small house might best be described as a "tumble-down shack." An unsteady wooden box served as a step to the fragment of ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... melting into the softest of indeterminate greys as the breeze rippled through their tops like fingers across a harp. The darker line of moorland in the background, scant as ever of herbiage, had yet lost its menacing bareness and seemed touched with the faint colour of the earth beneath, almost pink in the generous sunshine. The avenue into which he presently turned was starred on either side with a riot of primroses, running wild into the brambles, with here ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... at the cave and its supplies of skins and furs, its stores of wood and food. Fortune had helped their own skill and they had made a marvelous change in the place. Its bleakness and bareness had disappeared. In the cold and bitter wilderness it offered more than comfort, ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... a delusion. When John Osgood's small boat swept up the sands on the white crest of a league-long roller, how different was the scene! He saw a group of dilapidated huts, a tavern called The Angel's Rest, a blackfellow's hut, and the bareness of three Government offices, all built on piles, that the white ants should not humble them suddenly to the dust; a fever-making mangrove swamp, black at the base as the filthiest moat, and tenanted by reptiles; feeble palms, and a sickly ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... himself where lay the charm and power to attract in a place so colorless, and he thought, as was his habit with all interiors, how different he would want it to be if he ever became a member. His fresh young nature revolted at the dinginess and bareness of the surroundings. He couldn't understand why the men came here and what could be the fascination of sitting round these cold tables talking by the hour when there was so much happiness outside—so much of light and air and sunshine ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... been in Winn's room before, and as she sat down to wait for him her eyes took in its neat impressive bareness. It was a narrow hotel room, a bed in one corner, a chest of drawers, washstand, and wardrobe opposite. By the balcony window were a small table and an armchair. A cane chair stood at the foot of ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... it, now and then to look out of the windows, and finally at the last window she stopped to watch Augustine advancing over the lawn towards the house. It was a grey stone house, low and solid, its bareness unalleviated by any grace of ornament or structure, and its two long rows of windows gazed out resignedly at a tame prospect. The stretch of lawn sloped to a sunken stone wall; beyond the wall a stream ran sluggishly in a ditch-like channel; on the left the grounds ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... sitting smoking in the desolate silence. She saw him go forth to his daily toil with all the lightness gone from his step, to return at nightfall, with a heaviness born of more than mere physical fatigue, to the same bleak bareness. ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... is so against nature, such a half-view, that it must be corrected by a common sense and experience. "A man is born by the side of his father, and there he remains." A man must be clothed with society, or we shall feel a certain bareness and poverty, as of a displaced and unfurnished member. He is to be dressed in arts and institutions, as well as body-garments. Now and then a man exquisitely made can live alone, and must but coop up most men, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... The bareness of the country, the absence of the leaves on the lower bushes, the millions of small hoof-tracks, all were now explained. A migration of the springbok antelope, a "trek-boken," had swept over the spot. That it was that ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... pity, the first thought that would rush to one's lips at sight of Miss Sophie would have been: Poor little Miss Sophie! She had come among the bareness and sordidness of this neighborhood five years ago, robed in crepe, and crying with great sobs that seemed to fairly shake the vitality out of her. Perfectly silent, too, about her former life, but for all that, Michel, ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... drops that glittered on her cheek now were not caused by the rain. Her shimmering silken robes seemed to utter continuous soft whispers of applause to her nervous yet graceful movements. Altogether she was an incongruous object in the unhome-like bareness of a bachelor's apartments. "You are not very cordial, monsieur," she remarked in a cold tone, as she stood with her back to him, staring hard at an uninteresting picture above the mantel-shelf; "it seems to be a pleasure to you to ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... bed-clothes like a balloon filled with gas. He snored with the noise of a wheezy organ pipe, with prolonged snorts and comic chokings. His few hairs profited by his sleep, to stand up in a very strange way, as if they were tired of having been fastened for so long to that pate, whose bareness they were trying to cover, and a small stream of saliva was running out of one corner of his ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... that I thought, with this picture, and with their sinister garments of black and of blue, and with the bareness and harshness of the temple, that something might be combined which it would give me no satisfaction to witness. I placed myself near the door, where, in a moment, I could have regained the exquisite forest, and the odour of this carpet of woodruff, ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... tongues or points of sand; on our return of a gloomy red. The sun gone down. The crescent moon, Jupiter and Venus. The sound of the sea distinctly heard on the tops of the hills, which we could never hear in summer. We attribute this partly to the bareness of the trees, but chiefly to the absence of the singing birds, the hum of insects, that noiseless noise which lives in the summer air. The villages marked out by beautiful beds of smoke. The turf fading into ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... he never stopped his studies to inquire. He was like a great, rugged elm, with all its lacings and archings of boughs and twigs, which has stood cold and frozen against the metallic blue of winter sky, forgetful of leaves, and patient in its bareness, calmly content in its naked strength and crystalline definiteness of outline. But in April there is a rising and stirring within the grand old monster,—a whispering of knotted buds, a mounting of sap coursing ethereally from bough to bough with a warm and gentle ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... But he had as yet no audience, and had not begun to exercise his creative imagination. Moreover, to a nature like Hugh's, naturally temperate and ardent, and with no gross or sensuous fibre of any kind, there was a real craving for the bareness and cleanness of self-discipline and asceticism. There is a high and noble pleasure in some natures towards the reduction and disregard of all material claims and limitations, by which a freedom and expansiveness of the spirit can be won. Such self-denial gives to the soul a freshness and buoyancy ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of Wessex were weary and disheartened: fire and pillage had laid the countryside bare with that horrible bareness that only lies in ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... bareness made them dramatic for the weight of possibility they carried—the Colonel explained. Black Wolf and his band were out on the war-path. A soldier coming in wounded, escaped from the massacre of ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... you the thing in all its bareness. You may take this as a specimen of an Eastern house. People are apt to fancy that those long, latticed houses on the Bosphorus conceal unheard-of luxuries, and that the people live like Sybarites. It is quite untrue. They either try to imitate the French style, ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... much the lack of scenery in my narrative, that I thought it well to group in a few pages the African pictures I have given in the last chapter. My story had too much of the bareness of the Greek stage, and I was conscious that landscape, as well as action, was required to mellow the subject and relieve it from tedium. After our dash through the wilderness, let us return to the slow toil of ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... hath my absence been From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen! What old December's bareness everywhere. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... burden of his responsibility weighed upon him like old age. Here in this scant cabin things so serious as birth and death showed in a pathetic bareness, stripped of all ceremonial trappings, as mere events in the orderly working out of natural laws—events as seasonable as the springing up and the cutting down of the corn. In these simple lives, so closely lived to the ground, grave ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... still streaming across the road when Goldmorrow came up. Nothing could exceed the pity which the spectacle stirred in his breast. Tears streamed from his eyes. The bareness, the poverty, the misery of the present time seemed to come into view and gather into a point in what he saw. "Oh!" he cried to his companions, "if Christ were only come! Only He could deal with evils so great as these!" Then, ...
— The Children's Portion • Various
... strap attached, to sling over the shoulder. This, perhaps, contains a telescope. It would not be worth mentioning, save that our prophetic vision sees it coming into use by and by. Not to analyze too closely, everything in this room speaks of life, health, and movement. In spite of smallness, bareness, and angularity, it is fit for a May morning to enter, and expand ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... some cases, in fact, more than in the way of soldiering. They liked the little addition to their pay, if they were of frugal mind; they had also their own quiet room to sleep in, and I often thought the family life, offering as it did a contrast to the bareness and desolation of the noisy barracks, appealed to the domestic instinct, so strong in some men's natures. At all events, it was always easy in those days to get a man from the company, and they sometimes remained for years with an officer's family; in some cases attending ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... mysterious meaning, the mists seem to gather in the hollows of Helvellyn, and the forked Skiddaw hovers in the distance. There is little mention of mountainous scenery in Mr. Wordsworth's poetry; but by internal evidence one might be almost sure that it is written in a mountainous country, from its bareness, its simplicity, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... in a mechanics' cheap boarding-house in Duane Street, and we may imagine the bareness of his room, the feeble ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... he had lighted the cheap lamp and the room stood revealed in all its bareness. A small table, three wooden chairs, the little bed, a trunk in the corner, and a washstand, were insufficient to make it look furnished, garret ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... doubt that, during the Dark Ages, hangings woven and embroidered continued to be the custom throughout Europe. Our own Anglo-Saxon records prove that such furnishings were employed to mitigate the cold bareness of our northern homes from the earliest times. Sir G. Dasent informs me that in Icelandic Sagas, as early as the eleventh century, there are frequent notices of hangings both in churches and in the halls of houses; such, for instance, as ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... blankets were packed in trunks, the table-linen and china in drawers and closets. None of them was new—practically the entire furnishing antedated 1830, and much of them 1800—except that, here and there, a few old rugs of oriental weaves, relieved the bareness ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... books, a rug-covered cot, a corner cupboard, a wash-stand behind a screen, and a small table near the stove, behind which a box of wood could be seen, completed its furnishings; and still, despite its bareness, there was something in it which was not in the place wherein he lived, and wonderingly he again looked around. Had he found himself in the moon or at the bottom of the Dead Sea it would be hardly less remarkable than finding himself here. Adventures of this sort were entirely out ...
— How It Happened • Kate Langley Bosher
... our Lord and censing angels on W. front, as at Chewton. On exterior of church observe (1) debased S. porch; (2) crucifix on E. gable of nave. The interior is disappointing. The clerestory is spacious, and the roof fair, but a general sense of bareness pervades the whole building. The shabbiness of the chancel in particular is enhanced by a casement which does duty for an E. window. Note (1) Dec. windows to aisle; (2) rood-loft stair; (3) curious quatrefoil piscina in sanctuary; (4) some fragments of old glass ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... was confident that if he could have seen Agassiz again before he died he could have persuaded him that evolution was the solution of the problem of creation, though knowing that Agassiz could never have accepted the doctrine of natural selection in its bareness, absolutely convinced as he was of the agency of Conscious Mind in creation. And I had the further declaration of Owen himself in his expressed conviction that the process of evolution was directed by the Divine Intelligence. One statement ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... at Rome, St. Paul's in London is the largest church, in the world. The first impression a person gets is one of great vastness and bareness, for, unlike Westminster Abbey, here one does not encounter at every step famous statues, memorials, and graves. The nave is tremendous in width and in length. Chapels open from both sides, but they seem far off and shadowy. Way in the distance is the choir, the altar, and the group of chairs ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... her legs and temper, they stopped presently before a rather ornate cottage, with several peaks and a turret, which was set down in the midst of a square lawn that looked unnaturally green to Joyce in comparison with the bareness all about it. Grass, except in long scraggy tufts here and there, or in sparse blades in some odd fence corner, was not prevalent at the Works. Joyce liked all that was trim and beautiful, but just now ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... table. All kinds of tempting little articles were wrapped up in gay tissue paper, and purchased somewhat on the system of "buying a pig in a poke", an arrangement that at any rate afforded great amusement when the parcels were untied. The stalls soon began to exhibit a welcome bareness, and the stall-holders felt the fullness of their bags with satisfaction. Towards four o'clock everybody showed a tendency to migrate in the direction of the cafe chantant. This had been arranged in the largest of the classrooms. Tea was served at small ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... consideration of Miss Avies in the wider observation of the Chapel and its congregation. It was, as it had been on the occasion of her first visit to it, stuffy, smelling of gas and brick and painted wood, ugly in its bareness and unresponsiveness—and, nevertheless, exciting. The interior of the building had the air of one who has watched some most unusual happenings and expects very shortly to watch them again. Even the harmonium seemed to prick up its wooden ears in anticipation. And to-night the congregation ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... and gleams. And if I should try to render The tissues of fugitive splendour That fled down the wind of living, Will they read it some day in the future, And be conscious of an awareness In our old lives, and the bareness Of theirs, with the newest passions In the last fad ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... intercourse is never-ending. It includes in its sweep every phase of human love and self-devotion, all beauty and all power, all suffering and effort, all gentleness and rapture: here found in synthesis. Going forth into the bareness and darkness of this unwalled world of high contemplation, you there find stored for you, and at last made real, all the highest values, all the dearest and noblest experiences of the world of ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... sweetened, Jesus-touched, Christ-renewed lives, made like Himself. And the sweet music of their new lives comes up into His gladdened ears, and a few of the strains come to cheer you. One may have at first a strange feeling of bareness, for things that we've always clung to as essential have gone out from us to others. But with the outgoing of things has come an incoming of Himself, in greater abundance than we dreamed possible. He, within, ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... large house in a long wide street of houses, all exactly alike. When she arrived with Miss Bey, they were shown into a deliciously cool shady drawing-room, charmingly furnished, and the effect upon Beth, after the graceless bareness of St. Catherine's, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... silence, feeling somewhat chilled and perplexed, as who would not, having such an invitation before him? I had anticipated an affair with men only—a secret assault or a petard expedition. But seeing the bareness of my room, and the honour the king was doing me, I felt I had no choice, and I answered, 'That being the case, sire, I am wholly at ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... as neglected and overgrown had become orderly. The little beds cut in the turf were neat in their Winter bareness, despite a few dead leaves which had fluttered on to them. Her eyes fell on a pair of gardening gloves and a trowel lying on the grass by one of the beds. From the open mouth of a brown paper bag a bulb had partly rolled before it became stationary. ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... Cohen, him, himself, difficult to realise that his body had anything more to do with him than the yellow-drab waterproof which is a sort of uniform—a species of charity, covering a multitude of sins of poverty, shabbiness, thread-bareness—had to do ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... by various other members of the good lady's circle. Indeed, it completed Miss Birdseye herself, if anything could be said to render that office to this essentially formless old woman, who had no more outline than a bundle of hay. But the bareness of her long, loose, empty parlour (it was shaped exactly like Miss Chancellor's) told that she had never had any needs but moral needs, and that all her history had been that of her sympathies. The place was lighted by a ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... waving his arm; "we banish thee from our presence! This is our palace!—and our guards are at hand!" pointing to the still and skeleton trees that grouped round in ghastly bareness. "Begone!" ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... her housework slowly and vigorously. Mrs. Field's cleanliness was proverbial in this cleanly New England neighborhood. It almost amounted to asceticism; her rooms, when her work was finished, had the bareness and purity of a nun's cell. There was never any bloom of dust on Mrs. Field's furniture; there was only the hard, dull glitter of the wood. Her few chairs and tables looked as if waxed; the paint was polished in places from her doors and window-casings; her window-glass gave out green lights ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... us careless ones it seems no great matter whether there be a God or no? When all the world's wheels seem to roll smoothly, as if of themselves, and one can speculate with a confused curiosity as to the nature of the great far cause that moves them; but in grief—in the destitute bareness, the famished hunger of soul, when "one is not," how one craves for certainties! How one yearns for the solid heaven of one's childhood; the harping angels, the never-failing flowers; the pearl gates and jeweled walls of God's great ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... long as she made it good that she wasn't underhand about anybody else. She had denied everything and every one, she reflected as she went away—and that was a relief; but it also made rather a clean sweep of the future. The prospect put on a bareness that already gave her something in ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... her children. For though the Koli is the most naked of men, his whole workaday costume consisting of one rag about equal in amplitude to half a good pocket-handkerchief, his wife is the most dressy of women. She is always well-dressed even on common days. The bareness of her limbs may perhaps shock our notions of propriety at first, for, being a mud-wader of necessity, like the stork and the heron, she girds her garments about her very tightly indeed; but this only sets off her wonderfully erect and athletic figure, while her well-set head ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... hath my absence been From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen, What old December's bareness everywhere! And yet this time removed was summer's time; The teeming Autumn, big with rich increase, Bearing the wanton burden of the prime Like widow'd wombs after their Lord's decease: Yet this abundant issue seem'd ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... and over again the things which had happened to her. When one was sitting by a warm fire in a big, glowing room, it was quite delightful to hear how cold it could be in an attic. It must be admitted that the attic was rather delighted in, and that its coldness and bareness quite sank into insignificance when Melchisedec was remembered, and one heard about the sparrows and things one could see if one climbed on the table and stuck one's head and shoulders ...
— A Little Princess • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... as the door fell back, watched her for some token of awakened interest. But he watched in vain. The smallness of the room, its bareness, its one window, the absence of all furniture save the solitary cot drawn up on the right (not on the left, as she had said), seemed to make little or no ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... its season;" (not so hastily as that the frost pinch it, nor so late that no sun ripens it;) and that "his leaf shall not fade." I should like you to recollect this phrase in the Vulgate—"folium ejus non defluet"—shall not fall away,—that is to say, shall not fall so as to leave any visible bareness in winter time, but {41} only that others may come up in its place, and ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... into a room the size and bareness of a packing case and crammed to its capacity with a roller-top desk, a stenographer at a white-pine table, a cuspidor, a pair of shirt sleeves, a black ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... wistful mood. But whatever his subject, his treatment of it is the same. His lines are always strongly drawn; his handling is always simple; and his subject always romantic. But though romantic, it is simple almost to bareness,—one of the great causes both of his popularity, and of that deficiency in his poetry of which so many of his admirers become conscious when they compare him with other and richer poets. Scott used to say that ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... much on underneath, Roger; and your bareness, in such weather as this, would be as noticeable as your gown. Mind, before it gets light, get the ladies up, and carry our bag of victuals and the water skin over the crest. You may be sure that, as soon ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... the top of the granite ridge which is visible from Newport, and made them observe the peculiarity of the rock lines, and the contrast between their bareness and the fertility of the little intervening glades, for which they serve as a natural conservatory. Then they dipped down into the thickets of the farther side, finding all manner of ferns and wild-flowers and shy growing things, and so to the sandy flats above the third beach, ...
— A Little Country Girl • Susan Coolidge
... thoughts!—for verily the thoughts are the garments of the poet's soul,—and the common thief of things petty and material is no whit more contemptible than he who robs an author of ideas wherein to deck the bareness of his own poor wit! Come, place thyself at ease upon this cushioned couch, and give me thy attention, ... I feel the fervor rising within me, ... I will summon Zabastes, ... " Here he pulled a small silken cord which at once set a clanging bell echoing loudly through the palace, ... "And thou shalt ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... studied herself, long, curiously, and eagerly. Of course she knew she was pretty, but oh, the power of print! She found herself absolutely delightful. She was no longer Mme. Derline—she was the most beautiful woman in Paris! Her feet, her little feet—their bareness no longer troubled her—left the ground. She raised herself gently towards the heavens, towards the clouds, and ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... other hand, adversity is a supplement, making up what prosperity lacks. The very abundance of Christmas gifts ofttimes causes children to forget the parents who gave them. Some are adorned by prosperity as mountains are adorned with rich forests. Others stand forth with the bareness, but also with the grandeur and enduring strength, of Alpine mountains. Character is like every other structure—nothing tests ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... along the country road, which no longer was so green, so warm with sunshine, as before. Markland looked already cold in its bareness against the distant sky, all flushed with flying clouds, the young saplings about, bending before the wind, as if they supplicated for shelter and a little warmth, and the old tottering cedar behind the house, looking ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... condition, several stretches of cloister wall. These creations in a manner took care of themselves; aided by the blue of the sky above the cloister- court they glowed, they insistently lived; I remember the frigid prowl through all the rest of the bareness, including that of the big dishonoured church and that even of the Abbate's abysmally resigned testimony to his mere human and personal situation; and then, with such a force of contrast and effect of relief, the great sheltered sun-flares and ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... is widest, low-lying they seem, and therefore lovelier—undulating with fields and groves, where many a pleasant dwelling is embowered, into lines of hills that gradually soften away into another land. On the other side, sloping back, or overhanging, mounts beautiful in their bareness, for they are green as emerald; others, scarcely more beautiful, studded with fair trees—some altogether woods. They soon form into mountains—and the mountains become more and more majestical, yet beauty never deserts them, and her spirit continues ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... set half a mile farther on in the narrowing ravine, and on the way we passed a desolate dwelling, squalid, set in the marsh, its battered verandas and open doors disclosing a wretched mingling of native bareness with poverty-stricken European fittings. On the tottering veranda sat a ragged Frenchman, bearded and shaggy-haired, and beside him three girls as blonde as German Maedchens. Their white delicate faces and blue eyes, in such surroundings, struck one like a blow. ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... and accessible by a broad stair. Along the back of this, and coming to about half its width, runs the open front of the house, like a covered gallery: the interior sometimes neat and almost elegant in its bareness, the sleeping space divided off by an endlong coaming, some bright raiment perhaps hanging from a nail, and a lamp and one of White's sewing-machines, the only marks of civilisation. On the outside, at one end of the terrace, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Standing there before us, dressed simply in the plain black smock, cheeks flushed, eyes like stars, she reminded me of some rare stone in a velvet case. The bareness of the room, with its few genuine articles, set off the jewel-like brightness of my ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... very long time before she slept. The early sunshine, however, woke her in the small hours of the morning. There was no blind to the window, and the room faced east. Diana sat up in bed. Her eyes fell on the pictureless walls. Perhaps the very fact of their bareness made her look at them more particularly. She did not admire the pattern of the paper. In places it had been badly fitted together, especially in that corner. Why, the magenta roses actually overlapped! They did it in a sort of curve, almost as if they were outlining the top of a door. Was ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... forms, the trickeries, the mistakes, the false claims and falser assertions, the empty architecture that reveals the infidelity of its builders, the gross materialism, and the crass superstition of the Roman Church, one turns with relief of heart and eyes to the poverty and bareness of the dark and narrow catacombs, and to the simple piety of the words found upon their graves. In them is at once the exhibition and the promise of a purer Christianity. In them, indeed, one may see only too plainly the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... prompts us in these wider days of achievement to cover our wall spaces with pictures, moved our far-off forefathers and mothers to offer their skill in spinning, and weaving, and picturing with the needle hangings to cover the bareness of the home. This impulse grew with the centuries, until tapestries were a natural art expression of different races of men, so that we have Italian, Spanish, French, Dutch and English tapestries, each with national tastes ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... man's eyes roamed over the room, the bareness of which seemed still to impress him. Then he asked simply: "Where ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... from the street. It was a dramatic event for Louise to enter by the stage-door, and to find Maxwell recognized by the old man in charge as having authority to do so; and she made as much of the strange interior as the obscurity and her preoccupation would allow. There was that immediate bareness and roughness which seems the first characteristic of the theatre behind the scenes, where the theatre is one of the simplest and frankest of workshops, in which certain effects are prepared to be felt before the footlights. ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... been painted white and the walls were a grayish blue color with several pretty pictures scattered about them to break the bareness. ...
— Billie Bradley at Three Towers Hall - or, Leading a Needed Rebellion • Janet D. Wheeler
... into being, I made a rapid survey. We were in a room of gray stone, of no great size and quite bare of furnishing, save for a few stone benches built into alcoves in the wall. The bareness of the scene emphasized our lack of resources. As a sole ray of hope, I perceived a possible line of retreat if things should grow too warm for us, a door facing the one by which ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... rooms running the whole length of the house: the first was a lumber-room, the second her own especial cell. Cell-like it was, in its monastic or conventual bareness. It was vague with bareness: a huge, square room, gaunt as a barn, the walls and ceiling whitewashed, the floor plain boards. Yonder, near the one small window, stood a table and tall-backed oaken chair, afar off, as it were, from the doorway—a journey to them across the creaking ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... dye-baths, all except a thin superficial layer, which then has to be rubbed down, polished, and finished. Thus in a short time, since the bulk of that superficially dyed wool or fur on the top of every hat is but small, and has been much reduced by polishing and rubbing, you soon hear of an appearance of bareness—I was going to say threadbareness—making itself manifest. This is simply because the colour or dye only penetrates a very little way down into the substance of the felt, until, in fact, it meets the proofing, which, being as it ought to be, a waterproofing, ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith
... wall being unbearable to us, we paint it over with landscapes of our own devising. And that is what the unthinking mind calls the future. Any one can paint these pictures on the wall, and to complain of its bareness is to acknowledge the poverty of one's own imagination wishing for something,—never mind what. The higher, the more unattainable, the better. Only desire earnestly, and you will feel yourself alive again. Your misfortune, ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... are pale gray, with a gilded border running round the room, or rather two rooms, which are divided, but not separated, by crimson curtains. The furniture is crimson, and everything is so comfortable—such a contrast to German bareness and stiffness generally. A splendid grand piano (he receives a new one every year,) stands in one window. The other window is always open and looks out on the park. There is a dovecote just opposite the window, and doves promenade up and down upon the roof of it, and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... gifts of churches or tithes. The monastic buildings, including the chapel, were to be of the simplest description, without paintings, sculpture, or stained glass; and the ritual used at the services was in keeping with this bareness. The arrangements of the refectory and the dormitory were equally meagre. Hard manual work, strict silence, and one daily meal gave the inmates every opportunity ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... cages; baskets for the pugs lined with soiled shawls; absurd ornaments, china cats with exaggerated necks, alabaster figures of stereotyped female beauty and flowerpot stands of ornate bamboo. She loved portieres, and she would fain have mitigated the bareness of the panelled or distempered walls; only that here her husband was firm. She unconsciously mocked the few well-chosen, well-placed pictures on the walls (which she itched to cover with a "flock" paper) by placing in the same room on bamboo ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... door on the second floor was answered by a clumsy Russian maid-servant, who smiled a broad, good-natured recognition when she saw him, and, turning without a word, led the way along a narrow passage. The smell of tobacco smoke and a certain bareness of wall and floor suggested a bachelor's home. The maid opened the door of a room and stood aside for Cartoner ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... her into a little cleanly, raftered chamber. He knelt by the bedside and spoke gently to the girl who lay upon the white pillows, her deathly face more white than the clean, coarse linen. 'Twas true she did not see him, but lay staring at the wall's bareness, her lips moving as she muttered the name she had shrieked and wailed at intervals throughout the hours. "John—Oh, John Oxon!" he could barely hear, "God laughs at us—why ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... with their new home, seeming not to notice the bareness of it; but their father noted it all, and said to himself, "Austin has undertaken more than he can handle. I thought he would find out there is something to supporting a family." But he did not divide his ...
— The Hero of Hill House • Mable Hale
... coolness of the Passage des Eaux clinging to her garments. This woefully wretched den no longer affected her painfully. She moved about there as if in her own rooms, opening the round attic window to admit the fresh air, and pushing the table into a corner if it came in her way. The garret's bareness, its whitewashed walls and rickety furniture, realized to her mind an existence whose simplicity she had sometimes dreamt of in her girlhood. But what especially charmed her was the kindly emotion she experienced there. Playing the part of sick nurse, hearing the constant ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... foot at a critical moment, by obtruding it an inch or two beyond a half-lifted skirt, opening horizons to desire? She put on, indeed, her prettiest flowered muslin dress, with a low body and short sleeves; but horrified at so much bareness, she covered her fine arms with clear gauze sleeves and hid her shoulders under an embroidered cape. Her curls, a l'Anglaise, struck her as too fly-away; she subdued their airy lightness by putting on a very pretty cap; but, ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... growing darker. It had been almost brilliant during a part of the afternoon because the bareness of the branches let in the wintry sun. There were no leaves to keep it out and there had been a rare, chill blue sky. All seemed cold blue sky where it was not brown or sodden yellow fern and moss. The ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... sat down at the end of the wooden couch to which, without making any apology for the bareness of the tent, his host ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... Oh, it's no use pretending. It's got to come out. It's here," she rushed on, pressing her hands hysterically against her softly rounded bosom. "The dream is past. All dreams are past. I'm awake now—to this," she indicated the room about her, simple almost to bareness in its furnishing, with a gesture of indescribable feeling. "It's all I've got to waken to. All I've got to look forward to. I've tried to tell myself there's a good time coming, when I can peer into the great light world, and snatch something of the ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... complete, definite monument, belonging to a class. It is neither a Roman nor a Gothic church. The edifice is not a typical one. It has not, like the abbey at Tournus, the sober massive breadth, the round expansive arch, the icy bareness, the majestic simplicity of those buildings based on the semicircular arch. It is not, like the cathedral at Bourges, the magnificent, airy, multiform, bushy, sturdy, efflorescent product of the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... air and sunshine gets into them. Some of the best and most costly are along the Prado. A Cuban house interior generally impresses an American as lacking in home-like quality. Some of the best are richly adorned, but there is a certain bareness and an absence of color. As is usual with customs unlike our own, and which we are therefore prone to regard as inferior to ours, there are excellent reasons for Cuban interior decoration, or rather the lack of it. A little experience, ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... piano in that country is like the village pump—the hull country gets about it. Take things to eat an' things to wear an' things to make the shack look pretty an' interestin' and comfortable. They don't take much room and they take the bareness off. That's what kills the women folk in the West, the bareness inside and outside. Nothin' but chairs, table an' stove inside; nothin' but grass an' sand outside. That's what ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... to the scene around him, and found that the waves were more terrible in appearance than reality, Bob began to enjoy it, and to take in its grandeur and wildness. The bareness of the deck had struck him, at once; and he now saw that four of the cannon were gone—the two forward guns, on each side—and he rightly supposed that these must have been run out, and tumbled overboard, to lighten the ship forward, and enable ...
— Held Fast For England - A Tale of the Siege of Gibraltar (1779-83) • G. A. Henty
... one on first entering a Japanese dwelling is the extreme cleanliness, and white and chilling bareness ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... hidden by clouds or by the lofty mountains surrounding it, the peak at last stands forth distinctly, the incline becomes less steep, and those vast plains of intensely melancholy appearance, called Canadas by the Spanish, on account of their bareness, are crossed. A halt is made for lunch at the Pine grotto before climbing the huge blocks of basalt ranged in a circle about the crater, now filled in with ashes from the peak, and forming its enceinte. The peak itself is next attached, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... and crowded, and the mist of leaves grew brighter and brighter. No birds sang, for they had all flown away for the winter, and there were no flowers. But the drifting leaves hid the bareness, and magic ...
— The Little House in the Fairy Wood • Ethel Cook Eliot |
