"Cheerless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... years went on, and all felt the influence of her pure, stainless, unselfish life, they came to esteem her as almost a saint, and no house was complete which had not in it some likeness of the sad, but inexpressibly sweet face which had a smile for every one, and which was oftenest seen in the cheerless houses where hunger and sickness were. There Lucy Grey was a ministering angel, and the good she did could never be told in words, but was known and felt by those who never breathed a prayer which did not have in it a thought of her and a wish for ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... says Mr. A.G. Riddle, "I called at the White House to present a distinguished stranger, who had important matters to bring to Mr. Lincoln's notice. It was evening—cold, rainy, and cheerless. The Executive Mansion was gloomy and silent. At Mr. Lincoln's door we were told by the attendant to enter. We found the room quite dark, and seemingly vacant. I advanced a step or two, to determine if anyone were present, and was arrested by a strange apparition, at first not distinguishable: ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... condition of Mecklenburg is thus described in a letter written by Stein during a journey in 1802:—"I found the aspect of the country as cheerless as its misty northern sky; great estates, much of them in pasture or fallow; an extremely thin population; the entire labouring class under the yoke of serfage; stretches of land attached to solitary ill-built farmhouses; ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... There in that cheerless abode dead Balder was enthroned, but, said Frigga, he who braves that dread journey must take no heed of him, nor of the sad ghosts flitting to and fro, like eddying leaves. First he must accost their gloomy queen and ...
— Told by the Northmen: - Stories from the Eddas and Sagas • E. M. [Ethel Mary] Wilmot-Buxton
... sombre dreams. Parental feelings thrill her tortur'd breast, And all the frantic mother stands confest— A very Niobe—sad, hapless name! In figure, features, and in all the same: The same in all as Vengeance fierce pursued Far to a wild and cheerless solitude. For Salmo's bard has sung (by Heaven's decrees) In awful pomp she mounted on the breeze— Borne by the buoyant wind—a ghostly form— She sail'd along the region of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... grandmother lived still, entirely supported by this self-sacrificing man. Her, who had been the bane of his life, blighting his hope, and awarding him, for love and domestic happiness, long mourning and cheerless solitude, he treated with the respect a good son might offer a kind mother. He had brought her to this house, "and," continued the priest, while genuine tears rose to his eyes, "here, too, he shelters me, his old tutor, and Agnes, a superannuated servant of his father's family. To our sustenance, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... my income has been sufficient to warrant me in buying any thing I desire for personal comfort, I often think of the cheerless experiences of that winter. And I can truthfully say that my heart goes out to the homeless and destitute, and I am always willing to extend a helping hand to those who show ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... his arms and paced up and down in his cheerless, untidy room. Father Goriot waited till the student's back was turned, and seized the opportunity to go to the chimney-piece and set upon it a little red morocco case with Rastignac's arms stamped in gold ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... overweighted the general, the former having soared into an ether which would not sustain the pinions of the latter. The well-used plea of an "act of God" will not stand. The autumn of 1812 was mild, the winter late in opening. Neither cheerless steppes, nor phenomenal cold, nor unheard-of snows, nor any reversal of nature's laws,—not even the motley nationalities of the grand army, or an unhistoric migration from south to north,—none of these was the chief cause of failure, which is to be found in the attempt ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... now in the cheerless white hallway, his tall figure exaggerated in a long driving-cloak, his high features sharpened in the light ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... a cheerless morning. Gusts of fine, sprinkling rain drove hither and thither on a blustering wind, while overhead hung a leaden sky with patches of black cloud ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... they are, their own way of conveying an impression? One may go into a house which has been empty for a long time, and yet feel, instinctively, what sort of people were last sheltered there. The silent walls breathe a message to each visitor, and as the footfalls echo in the bare cheerless rooms, one discovers where Sorrow and Trouble had their abode, and where the light, careless laughter of gay Bohemia lingered until dawn. At night, who has not heard ghostly steps upon the stairs, the soft closing of unseen doors, the tapping on a window, and, perchance, a sigh or ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... Majesty's armed trawlers were plunging through the sea on their lonely beat in the Western Ocean. The Hebrides lay far to the southward, and less than two days' steam ahead lay the Arctic Circle. These cheerless surroundings, however, found no echo in the hearts of the watch below on the leading ship of the unit, who were lounging on the settees in the oil-smelling fo'c'sle discussing their prospects of long leave, for their ship was to ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... on their hike back to Bridgeboro, a cheerless group. Before going out between the old gateposts they turned for a last glimpse of the scene of their pleasant camping and working adventure. Only a few uprights of one shack remained. The accident had done the work of a day in ten seconds. There was the charred area where their mighty ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... connection, it was true that he had intended to draw a fictitious character, a being whom he may have feared he might one day become, but whom he did not recognize as himself. He was not sated, he was not cheerless, he was not unamiable. He was all a-quiver with youth and enthusiasm and the joy of great living. He had left behind him friends whom he knew were not "the flatterers of the festal hour"—friends whom he returned to mourn and nobly celebrate. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... chill and ghastly dawn of a severe winter morning; the gray, cheerless opening of day borrows its faint light only for the purpose of enabling you to see that the country about you is partially covered with snow, and that the angry sky is loaded with storm. The rising sun, ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... what a cheerless, forbidding place a deserted house is by night. The partly open door stuck fast; but we squeezed in, and Addison struck a match. One low room occupied most of the interior; there was a fireplace, but so much snow had come down the large chimney ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... that history? Methought I was a prince in some Eastern island that had no features in common with the colder north of my native home. By day I looked upon the dull walls of a German town, and saw homely or squalid forms passing before me; the sky was dim and the sun cheerless. Night came on with her thousand stars, and brought me the dews of sleep. Then suddenly there was a new world; the richest fruits hung from the trees in clusters of gold and purple. Palaces of the quaint fashion of the ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... needlework and her painting adorned the walls. At such times as the fastidious mistress of the house condemned various articles of furniture as too antiquated for her taste, Gertrude would get them secretly conveyed up here; so that her lofty bower was neither bare nor cheerless, but, on the contrary, rather crowded with furniture and knick-knacks of all sorts. She kept her possessions scrupulously clean, lavishing upon them much tender care, and much of that active service in manual labour which she found no scope for elsewhere. ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... straining at mighty cables as if impatient to start on her long and hazardous voyage across the tumbling seas. A raw, piercing northeaster, howling dismally above the monotonous creaking and puffing of the donkey-engine, swept through the cheerless, draughty dock, chilling the spectators to the marrow. The sun, vainly trying to break through the banks of leaden-colored clouds, cast a grayish pall over land and sky. A day it was of sinister portent, that could not fail ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... sacred writings increasing numbers, in the growing generations; deafening their ears by its irrational clamor to the voice of the Living God which whispers in these pages, through the holy men who spake as they were moved of the Holy Ghost. It has fathered the doubt which to-day sits, cheerless and chill, within the hearts and homes of thousands who once rejoiced in the warmth and light of God, but who now accept the alternative their teachers thrust upon them—"all or none"—and throw away the Blessed Book wherein God of old ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... of sight the widow return'd, shut the gate and enter'd her lonely room. There was no light in the old cottage that night—the heart of its occupant was dark and cheerless. Love, agony, and grief, and tears and convulsive wrestlings were there. The thought of a beloved son condemned to labor—labor that would break down a man—struggling from day to day under the hard rule of a soulless gold-worshipper; the knowledge that years must pass thus; the sickening idea ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... approve of late marriages, observing that more was lost in point of time, than compensated for by any possible advantages[379]. Even ill assorted marriages were preferable to cheerless celibacy. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... man in the minority group who seemed somewhat less cheerless than his companions. When they asked him what hope there was, what way of escape he saw, he could not answer, but he still professed to believe that the President's downfall was not so imminent as it seemed. ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... across the bridge, in most unattractive surroundings, stands a roofed rough pile of wooden planks—the residence of the Sultan. At a few paces to the left of it one sees another gloomy structure, smaller and more cheerless than the royal abode—it is the domicile of Hadji Butu, ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... being thus reflected from the jambs; and the aperture being thus the smallest possible outside, this is the favorite military form of inlet window, always found in magnificent development in the thick walls of mediaeval castles and convents. Its effect is tranquil, but cheerless and dungeon-like in its fullest development, owing to the limitation of the range of sight in the outlook, which, if the window be unapproachable, reduces it to a mere point of light. A modified condition of it, with some combination of the outlook ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... silence—silence unbroken through the long hours of the night as they slowly passed. Then the dawn came. The side-lights showed fainter and fainter in the water; the light on the mast shed no rays on the deck, but twinkled uselessly behind its glass. Then the mate turned his gaze from the wet, cheerless deck and heaving seas to the figure in the boat dragging behind. The skipper, who returned his gaze with a fierce scowl, was holding his wet handkerchief to his temple. He removed it as the mate looked, and showed a ghastly wound. Still, neither ...
— Sea Urchins • W. W. Jacobs
... Joan's brother's room—a cheerless place of hewn stone. What kind of a man could he have been? What were his reflections as he went about his farm-work and thought of his sister at the head of armies? Was he merely a lout or something worse—the prototype of our Conscientious Objector: a coward who disguised his ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... ready-to-hand food gave him leisure. His days were all dreams. Weary of crouching over the fire before the opening of his humpy, he began to wander in the flesh as he was wont to wander in mind. He was seen a mile away from the cheerless camp, where his companions, with smoke-dried eyes, lamented ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... at W. 40 degrees N. The country still looked very cheerless in every direction, and no signs of improvement appeared to relieve the dreary scene around, or to lead me to hope ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... be wholly fraternal? They had come from, not only different stocks of population, but from different creeds in religion and politics. There could be no congeniality between the Puritan exiles who settled upon the cold, rugged and cheerless soil of New England, and the Cavaliers who sought the brighter climate of the south, and who, in their baronial halls, felt nothing in common with ...
— Historic Papers on the Causes of the Civil War • Mrs. Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... did leave it, when only ten or twelve years old, and sailed, a poor cabin-boy, to the West Indies. This was his starting-point in life. Never had any boy a smaller capital on which to build his fortune. He went out from his unhappy home, ignorant, poor, unfriended, and unknown. That from such a cheerless beginning he should rise to the rank of a merchant prince must be accounted one of the ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... facilities for spending it among pleasant companions in agreeable ways. He had shot up to his full height, five feet eleven inches, and from his handsome features there shone those piercing dark eyes which riveted attention where-ever they were turned. His loveless, cheerless boyhood was over, and the liberty of Oxford, which, even after the mild constraint of a public school, seems boundless, was to him the perfection of bliss. He began to develop those powers of conversation which ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... pleasure. But they unquestionably are The child on a holiday will eat a bun with only three currants in it with three times more pleasure than he will eat a frankly plain bun A suet pudding without currants or raisins is prison fare, barren to the eye and cheerless: let but an infrequent currant or raisin peep from the mass and it is a pudding for a birthday. So universal is the passion for currants as an aid to pleasure that during the past three weeks the only matter that rivalled in general interest the question whether ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... cheerless most of the time, yet millions of sheep are raised in this southern land and Punta Arenas is the shipping point. A kind of coarse grass grows here that is nourishing and sheep thrive and live for weeks alone on the open plains. Wool, hides and meat are brought to this ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... many days lay over cheerless hills and barren plains; and many a tear was brushed from that young cheek by the hand which his father had so ...
— Allegories of Life • Mrs. J. S. Adams
... to head south, with the wind light at the westward. The sea was greatly diminished about noon; but a mile an hour, for those who had so long a road before them, and who were so near a coast that was known to be fearfully inhospitable, was a cheerless progress, and the cry of "sail, ho!" early in the afternoon, diffused a general joy in ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... home, she says, "Even in this giddy place my heart is full to bursting; should I allow myself more time for meditation it would surely break, and pour forth its lava streams on the thirsty dust of human pride. In the dark, cheerless hour of midnight, my burning, throbbing brain still keeps its restless beating, scarce bestowing the poor refreshment of a feverish dream to strengthen the earthly tenement. My health is failing; there will soon be nothing left for me but the drifts of thought and memory, which gather around a ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... found that, to all appearance, she was in even a worse plight, as the rocks to leeward of her were above the water, and she was much more exposed, should bad weather come on. Never, perhaps, was there a scene more cheerless and appalling: a dark wintry sky—a sky loaded with heavy clouds—the wind cold and piercing—the whole line of the coast one mass of barren rocks, without the slightest appearance of vegetation; the inland ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the Catamarans as they sat pondering upon that important question,—how they were to find food,—cheerless as the clouds of night that were now rapidly descending over the surface of the sea, and ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... thousand miles a day was no more than an easy space for the fleet Pegasus to pass over. Bellerophon was delighted with this kind of life, and would have liked nothing better than to live always in the same way, aloft in the clear atmosphere; for it was always sunny weather up there, however cheerless and rainy it might be in the lower region. But he could not forget the horrible Chimera which he had promised King Iobates to slay. So at last, when he had become well accustomed to feats of horsemanship in the air, and could manage Pegasus with the least motion of his hand, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... successor, then Woe to that daughter, and no peace for her Did she not, with an utter selfishness, Stand in her younger sister's light? imperil The poor child's welfare? doom her possibly To an old maid's forlorn and cheerless lot? ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... pass, joy is out of fashion, Honest fun that fooled a dog or knew a friendly gate, Now the craft are vagabonds, sick with modern passion, Riding up and down the shore, on an aching freight; Sullen are the battered looks, cheerless talk or tipsy, Sickly in the smoky air, starving in the day, Pining for a city's noise at Kingston or Po'keepsie, Eager more for Gotham and ...
— Ballads of Peace in War • Michael Earls
... thought, and, knowing what that clearness is, I can imagine what light is to the eye. It is not a convention of language, but a forcible feeling of the reality, that at times makes me start when I say, "Oh, I see my mistake!" or "How dark, cheerless is his life!" I know these are metaphors. Still, I must prove with them, since there is nothing in our language to replace them. Deaf-blind metaphors to correspond do not exist and are not necessary. Because I can understand the ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... reluctance that grim winter yields its claims and makes way for its gracious and all-conquering foe. Spring is upon everything with all the characteristic suddenness of the Canadian climate. A week—a little seven days—and where all before had been cheerless wastes of snow and ice, we have the promise of summer with us. The snow disappears as with the sweep of a "chinook" in winter. The brown, saturated grass is tinged with the bright emerald hue of new-born pasture. The bared trees don that yellowish tinge which tells of breaking leaves. ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... than laughter; For a cheerless face makes a blithesome heart. 4. The heart of the wise is in the mourning-house; The heart of fools in the ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... over, Filippo felt in better spirits and ran quickly across the bridge. He soon threaded his way to a poor street that led towards one of the city gates, where everything looked dirtier and more cheerless than ever. He had not expected a welcome, and he certainly did not get one, as, after climbing the steep stairs, he cautiously pushed open the door ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman
... slowly upward through the cheerless, mist-laden skies, the engine well throttled back and running as smoothly as any engine could. To make sure that all was in perfect working order, they circled for ten minutes over the town, trying the different controls, ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... sprawling city. Absorbed, charmed, grimly content with the abominable desolation of it all, he stood and gazed. No evidence of any plan, of any continuity in building, appeared upon the waste: mere sporadic eruptions of dwellings, mere heaps of brick and mortar dumped at random over the cheerless soil. Above swam the marvellous clarified atmosphere of the sky, like iridescent gauze, showering a thousand harmonies of metallic colors. Like a dome of vitrified glass, it shut down on the illimitable, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... range of hills, and found a single hut on the summit. Night was coming on, it was raining, and we were told that there was a very bad road before us over mountains, and no other house for three leagues. We determined to stay at the hut, although the prospect of our night's entertainment was a most cheerless one. The hut was about twenty feet square, with a small attached shed for a kitchen. The floor was the natural earth, littered with corn husks and other refuse. There was not a bit of furniture, excepting ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... once more, we spent our time basking in the sunshine, drinking it in as it were, for it seemed so delightful in spite of its heat after our dull, cheerless, hazy home in the ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... sat Margaret—not weeping; she could not do that—her grief was too great, and the fountain of her tears seemed scorched and dried; but, with white, compressed lips, and hands tightly clasped, she thought of the past and of the cheerless future. Occasionally through the doorway there came a small, dark figure; a pair of slender arms were thrown around her neck, and a voice murmured in her ear: "Poor, poor Maggie." The next moment the figure would be gone, and in ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... seas. With his hatchet he hacked foothold on the ladder, left his men in the dory, and notched his perilous way to the deck. The fore-hatch was open, just as the hastily departing salvagers had left it. He went below, down the frosted iron ladder. He was fronted with a cheerless aspect. Cargo and water hid what damage she had suffered. The fat man had secured most of the cargo that the water ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... when a man is in any trouble or anxiety; if so, in this respect it may be said to be next door to the beer-barrel, or to the use of spirits. If one man may soothe his feelings with this narcotic, another may stimulate them, when he is low and cheerless, with alcohol. The Apostle James says, "Is any merry, let him sing psalms." He does not say, Is any afflicted or low, let him smoke and drink! No; "let him pray," and depend upon God. Many a lesson which might be learned from God on our knees, is let slip altogether because ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... hath the man That would over-live his span. Length of days brings many a moan When life's prime is past and gone; But of pleasures, never a one. Then all alike from dole to save, Comes the dark and cheerless grave. ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... was falling with a steady drone from a sky of unbroken, cheerless gray, and rivulets of water trickled from the drooping vegetation. Mosses and ferns, revived by the superabundance of moisture had sprung up on the decaying trunks and branches of the uprooted trees, pushing their feathery leaflets through the blanket of ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... can pour out our influence boldly: it is a wine that excites no two souls in a like manner; and we are always ignorant what the nature of the intoxication will be, whether fruitful or barren, blithe or cheerless. ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... me is fair, and light is cheerless. But are not you afraid in yonder walls Where the lamp's light ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... shed Yield thee a hearth and shelter for thy head, And some poor plot, with vegetables stored, Be all that Heaven allots thee for thy board,— Unsavory bread, and herbs that scattered grow Wild on the river brink or mountain brow, Yet e'en this cheerless mansion shall provide More heart's repose than ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... back to Dennis?" asked Fleda gently. "Some other woman will make him happy when he forgets me," was the cheerless, grey reply. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... he now lulled youth asleep with was a very cheerless threnody, but he brightened once more at praise of ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... been hospitable, our doors open to many; but to part with our well-garnished dwelling had now become inevitable. We retired, with one servant, to a remote house of meaner dimensions, and were sought no longer by those who had come in our wealth. I looked earnestly around me; the present was cheerless, the future dark and fearful. My parents were dead, my few relatives in distant countries, where they thought perhaps but little of my happiness. Burleigh I had never loved other than as a father and protector; but he had been the benefactor of my fallen family, and to him ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... wishes, and thereby made me poor in wishes, poor in enjoyment. You deprived me of the power of wishing, for every thing was mine even before I could desire it. It was only necessary for me to stretch out my hand, and it belonged to me. Cheerless and solitary I stood amidst your wealth, and all that I touched was turned into hard gold. The rich man's daughter envied the beggar woman in the street, for she still had ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... a gloomy looking building, this Morgue, and it is rarely empty. In a dark, cheerless room, with a stone floor, there are rows of marble slabs supported by iron frames. Over each one of these is a water jet. Stretched on these cold beds, are lifeless forms, entirely covered with a sheet except as to their ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... separates the two sides of the unlucky hamlet far more than a river would do, for a river could, at least, be crossed by a bridge. A few gaunt willows creep timorously down its sandy sides; at the very bottom, which is dry and yellow as copper, lie huge slabs of argillaceous rock. A cheerless position, there's no denying, yet all the surrounding inhabitants know the road to Kolotovka well; they go there often, and ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... it was not cheerless; for when Eda put out her head at the curtain doorway of the tent, and opened her eyes upon the magic scene, the sun's edge rose above the horizon, as if to greet her, and sent a flood of light far and near through the spacious universe, converting ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... shelter from the rain, and too frail to afford protection from the burning heat of the noonday sun, or the chilling effects of the midnight blast. As their families increased, another and another cabin was added, as crazy and as cheerless as the first, until, admonished of the increase of their own substance, the influx of wealthier neighbors, and the general improvement of the country around them, they were allured by pride to do that to which they never would ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... to Nan, shivering inside that cheerless cab, as if the world had stopped like a run-down watch, and that she alone, with her melancholy equipage, retained in all that vast stillness the ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... much a love match as middle-age marriages are wont to be, and following it there was Paradise gossip to assert that Caleb's wife brought gracious womanly reforms to the cheerless bachelor house at the furnace. Be this as it may, she certainly brought one innovation—an atmosphere of wholesome, if somewhat austere, piety hitherto unbreathed by the master or ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... where Urban entertained S. Catherine, where Rienzi came, a prisoner, to be stared at. Pass by the Glaciere with a shudder, for it has still the reek of blood about it; and do not long delay in the cheerless dungeon of Rienzi. Time and regimental whitewash have swept these lurking-places of old crime very bare; but the parable of the seven devils is true in more senses than one, and the ghosts that return to haunt a deodorised, disinfected, garnished sepulchre are almost more ghastly than those ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... subject. The Hindu sages were men of acute and patient thought; but their attempt to solve the problem of the divine and human natures, of human destiny and duty, has ended in total failure. Each system baseless, and all mutually conflicting; systems cold and cheerless, that frown on love and virtuous exertion, and speak of annihilation or its equivalent, absorption, as our highest hope: such is the poor result of infinite speculation. "The world by wisdom knew not God." O, that India would ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... officers were glad of me as a doctress and nurse may be easily understood. When a poor fellow lay sickening in his cheerless hut and sent down to me, he knew very well that I should not ride up in answer to his message empty-handed. And although I did not hesitate to charge him with the value of the necessaries I took him, still he was thankful enough to be able to purchase them. When we lie ill ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... inexpressibly cheerless. No other human creature was apparent, and the only sounds audible above the wind were those of the trickling streams which distributed the water over the meadow. A heron had been standing in one of these rivulets about twenty yards from the officer, and they vied with each other in stillness ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... crept over the low-hanging moon. The world, so glorious in its softened radiance half an hour ago, was dull and cheerless now. And with a strange heartache and sense of impending evil ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... suggestion. With a very severe frown and downcast eyes she sat staring at the table. It seemed a very cheerless table suddenly, with all the dogs in various stages of disheveled finery grouped blatantly ...
— Peace on Earth, Good-will to Dogs • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... directly in the track that Moodie and Monaghan must have taken; and I now made no doubt that they had been attacked and killed on their return through the woods with the cow, and I wept and sobbed until the cold grey dawn peered in upon me through the small dim window. I have passed many a long cheerless night, when my dear husband was away from me during the rebellion, and I was left in my forest home with five little children, and only an old Irish woman to draw and cut wood for my fire, and attend to the wants of the family, but that was the ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... a stealthy step approached. It stopped, a wooden door swung back, and a band of greyish light showed a low room of rough beams without a window. At the door Wife Gougeon peered in, and behind her was the cheerless perspective of the shop, additionally cheerless in the grey of ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... roused herself. "The rooms look cheerless in winter without the open fireplaces we are ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... with sealed doors, where a family of 7,000,000 sits in silence around a cheerless hearth.... America opened the window ... and slipped a loaf of bread into the larder."—Frederick Palmer, in ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... excitement and fatigue of Catherine's journey to N—— had considerably accelerated the progress of disease. And when she reached home, and looked round the cheerless rooms all solitary, all hushed—Sidney gone, gone from her for ever, she felt, indeed, as if the last reed on which she had leaned was broken, and her business upon earth was done. Catherine was not condemned to absolute poverty—the poverty which grinds and gnaws, the ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... and great and lovely in human experience; and yet, if He did not rise again from the tomb, it would, after all, be only a dead thing—like a splendid specimen of carved marble in some grand museum, exquisite to look upon, and of priceless value, but cold and cheerless, ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... delirious or the perishing man, time has no measuring. I do not know how we spent the night, or how long it was. Some time it became morning, if morning might be called this gray and cheerless lifting of the gloom, revealing to us the sodden landscape, overcast with still drizzling skies which blotted out each ray ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... the exultation of this association with relentless and cunning pursuit, and began to wonder how any normal human being could adopt a profession which embraced all these cheerless handicaps when there were so many occupations into which a little sunlight and ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... from out our store Which might have cheered some cheerless hour When they with earth's ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... condition and prospect of the small proprietors so numerous in France and Flanders. The contrast between the French small landowner and the English agricultural labourer is very great. Nothing has struck me as so pathetic as the condition of the English farm labourer—so hopeless, so cheerless. Our Scottish peasants have more education, more energy, and are more disposed to emigrate. Their wages are fixed more by custom than by competition, and their independence has not been sapped by centuries ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... from its corner the tall clock looked down on them solemn and voiceless. There was no denying that it was scary, as Belle expressed it. What light there was seemed unreal, and the closed rooms when they peeped in were cheerless and ghostly. ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... work in shops and factories, and how to live without homes. As a consequence, girls come up to the factories from their schools with ideals,[36] so far as the school has shaped them, founded on unmarried school mistresses and George Washington; and they pass, by way of the altar, into cheerless tenements which the school still thinks of as places where children are cared for, family clothing is made and the family baking is done. Practically, of course, most education is given outside the schools, ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... ruined French village, with guns booming in the distance and the nearer sound of water running through tall reeds and over green stones and between great mossy trees. Indeed, my life would now be, comparatively speaking, a cheerless desert, because I should never have met the most beautiful—Well, all clouds have silver linings; some have golden ones with rainbow edges. No; I am not sorry I stopped at the St. ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... 'Please don't think that these spirits are my affinities. My work is purely philanthropic, so Theodore Parker used to tell mother. It was my duty, he said, to comfort the cheerless, to liberate the earth-bound, and so I had to have these poor creatures waiting around. That's why I gave it up. It got to be too dreadful. We never could tell what would come next. Murderers and barnburners ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... on the third day of December, a cheerless and comfortless day at the close of the most inclement autumn I ever remember, that the patriot Army of the South was paraded on the court-house common in Charlotte to listen to the reading of General Gates's final order, the order announcing the arrival of Major-general Greene from Washington's ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... I would not, if I could, convert those poor people. You know, I often fancy—I mean fear—I often sympathize too much with your creed. It was only at service last Sunday I was thinking of it; our religion seems so cold, so cheerless compared to yours. You remember the convent-church at St. Leonard's—the incense, the vestments, the white-veiled congregation—oh, how beautiful it was; we shall ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... gallery and floor and walls had crept out from the gloom into the dancing flare of the fire and the steady glow of the sconces. The weather had broken a day or two before; all the afternoon sheets of rain had swept across the fields and gardens, and heavy cheerless clouds marched over the sky. The wind was shrilling now against the north side of the hall, and one window dripped a little inside on to the matting below it. The supper-table shone with silver and crockery, and the napkins by each place; and the door from the kitchen was set wide for the passage ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... driving showers running through it from time to time, and an atmosphere penetratingly damp and cheerless. On the beach two companies of volunteers were drilling in the rain, no doubt getting an appetite for breakfast. Without uniforms, their trousers tucked into their boots, and here and there a white blanket fastened shawl-like over the shoulders, they looked, as one of our passengers observed, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... which was their destination was a commonplace white-washed structure, with straggling stables and out-houses, standing in a grassy hollow which sloped down from the edge of the chalk cliffs. It was a cheerless house even when in use, but now with its smokeless chimneys and shuttered windows it looked doubly dreary. The owner had planted a grove of young larches and firs around it, but the sweeping spray had blighted them, and they hung their ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... soften the rough features of uncultivated nature. The prospect of Rangoon, as we approached, was quite disheartening. I went on shore, just at night, to take a view of the place and the mission-house, but so dark and cheerless and unpromising did all things appear, that the evening of that day, after my return to the ship, we have marked as the most gloomy and distressing that we ever passed." The mission-house was not quite empty, though Felix Carey, who they had ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... came to my hands in Philadelphia. So long a time has elapsed since we have been separated by events, that it was like a letter from the dead, and recalled to my memory very dear recollections. My subsequent journey through life has offered nothing which, in comparison with those, is not cheerless and dreary. It is a rich comfort sometimes ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... going away, but you are cheerless, charmless, returning. What has happened to you, Gelban? But have you seen her, and are Deirdre's hue and complexion as ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... man and the children could do nothing. The children hovered over the fire in the wretched old cabin. And what a cold, cheerless ...
— Shadows of Shasta • Joaquin Miller
... hours have fled without a trace: In vain I strove their parting to delay; Brightly they beamed, then left a cheerless space, Like an o'erclouded smile, that in the ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... and composure returned. But it was too late. In the space of two months, twenty years had passed over my head. When I rose from my sick-bed I was as feeble and as broken- down as you see me now. My past had been cheerless and dim, without one ray of happiness; yet that past was all my life! Henceforward there was nothing left for me to undertake, to regret, or to desire. The pendulum swung idly backwards and forwards on the line of Indifference. I wonder ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... as I was the last, I remarked that I could not spoil such an interesting project by withholding my consent. But it seemed to me all the time that the whole thing was a joke and that it would end at once in a laugh. I thought of the cold and cheerless surface of the moon, comparing it in my mind with the delectable world we were leaving, and had no relish for the proposed trip. Something of my feeling must have been reflected in my countenance, for Zenith, who had been looking at me, said in ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... the chill in the air of the cheerless room had suddenly accentuated itself, she arose, took a match-box from the mantel, and, stooping, lit ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... In the cheerless interior of one of these freight cars (much the same kind of car as that in which we were confined during the trip from Brussels to Aix—apparently used as a horse-stall on the previous trip, and with no bedding beyond a damp pile of straw in one corner) the American noticed a young German ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... a solemn requiem sung To the departed day, Upon whose bier The velvet pall of midnight lead been flung, And Nature mourned through one wide hemisphere Silence and darkness held their cheerless sway, Save in the haunts of riotous excess; And half the world in dreamy slumbers lay, Lost in the maze of sweet forgetfulness. When lo! upon the startled ear, There broke a sound so dread and drear,— As, like a sudden peal of thunder, Burst the bands of sleep asunder, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... doubt of Willoughby's constancy, could not witness the rapture of delightful expectation which filled the whole soul and beamed in the eyes of Marianne, without feeling how blank was her own prospect, how cheerless her own state of mind in the comparison, and how gladly she would engage in the solicitude of Marianne's situation to have the same animating object in view, the same possibility of hope. A short, a very short time however must now decide ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... distinguishable, at a short distance, from the straggling black pines and willow bushes that seemed thrust out into the waste from the ravines above and below the fort. But on a nearer approach, the fort assumed an air of greater importance; the influences, too, of the cold, cheerless scene we have described, were broken and dissipated by the sights of comfort and sounds of cheerfulness within. The shout of the water-drawer, as he roused the dogs and went forth with his empty cask, hauled on a little sledge, ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... of Drupada, Yudhishthira answered, saying 'Be not cheerless, O king; let joy fill thy heart! The desire cherished by thee hath certainly been accomplished. We are Kshatriyas, O king, and sons of the illustrious Pandu. Know me to be the eldest of the sons of Kunti and these to be Bhima and Arjuna. By these, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... rapids, the scene of our two days' upward struggle. These rapids extend about twelve miles as the river runs, alternating between rattling, rocky plunges and swift, smooth water, for the most part through a densely-wooded ravine cleft through low but abrupt hills, and as lonely and cheerless as the heart of Africa. The solitude is of that sort which takes hold upon the very soul and weaves about it hues of the sombrest cast. From our parting with the Indians on first reaching the river we had neither seen nor ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... most of her clothes, and put her white nightgown over the rest, that she might sleep warmly in them all the night, for her little hands and feet felt very chilly to his touch. The fire had gone out while they were away, and the grate looked very black and cheerless. The room was in great disorder, just as they had left it, and the gas, which was burning high, cast a cruel glare upon it all. But Tony saw nothing except the dear face of Dolly, resting on one check upon the pillow, with her curly hair tossed about it in confusion, and her open eyes gathering a ...
— Alone In London • Hesba Stretton
... been all day face to face with such cheerless surroundings, and was on his way homewards. But presently he stopped at the entrance of a little "boreen," where a wrinkled, red-skirted dame was standing sentry, leaning on a stout blackthorn stick. "Is it me you're looking out for, Mrs. Capel?" he asked. ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... from his diaries we learn that he was in Oban on 22nd October, Aberdeen on 5th November, Inverness on the 9th, and thence he went to Tain, Dornoch, Wick, John o'Groat's, and to the island towns, Stromness, Kirkwall, and Lerwick. He was in Shetland on the 1st of December—altogether a bleak, cheerless journey, we may believe, even for so hardy a tramp as Borrow, and the tone of the following extract from one of his rough notebooks in my possession may perhaps be explained by the circumstance. Borrow is on the ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... Madeline went outdoors she forgot the cheerless, bare interior. Florence led the way out on a porch and waved a hand at a vast, colored void. "That's ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... their comfortless home, poorly clad, and pale and thin from want of healthy and sufficient food. Did they think of him, and talk with so much delight of his return? Alas! no. He brought no sunshine to their cheerless abode. ...
— Woman's Trials - or, Tales and Sketches from the Life around Us. • T. S. Arthur
... dawn of a cheerless morning the trio started off, and by continual tramping, and an occasional lift from a carter reached a public house where they lingered for some hours, and then went on again until the next night. They turned into ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... Why do I peer Into the darkness of the day to come? Is not to-morrow even as yesterday? And will the day that follows change thy doom? Few flowers grow upon thy wintry way; 5 And who waits for thee in that cheerless home Whence thou hast fled, whither thou must return Charged with the load that makes thee ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... himself, the virtuous Vidura approached Yudhishthira, the son of Dharma. Then the illustrious Ajamida devoted to truth and having no enemy on earth, reverentially saluted Vidura, and asked him about Dhritarashtra and his sons. And Yudhishthira said, 'O Kshatta, thy mind seemeth to be cheerless. Dost thou come here in happiness and peace? The sons of Dhritarashtra, I hope, are obedient to their old father. The people also, I hope, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... striped gown and blue woolen stockings, and smelled the cooking cabbage, but they never struck him with so great a sense of discomfort as they did to-day when he stood, hat in hand, wondering why home seemed so cheerless. It was as if the shadow of the great shock awaiting him had already fallen upon him, oppressing him with a weight he could not well shake off. He had no thought that any harm had come to Ethie, and yet his first question was for her. Had his mother heard from her while he was away, or ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... many others have done, but cheerless sexton's work, this digging up of boyish recollections. One by one, they come to light—the brave hopes and dreams and aspirations of youth; the ruddy life has gone out of them; they have shriveled into an alien, pathetic dignity. They might have been one's great-grandfather's ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... of unbaffled prowess had gone away from Kamyaka, the sons of Pandu, O son, were filled with sorrow and grief. And the Pandavas with cheerless hearts very much resembled pearls unstrung from a wreath, or birds shorn of their wings. And without that hero of white steeds that forest looked like the Chaitraratha woods when deprived of the presence ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... mood of the morning.... Hours had flown magically. It was past mid-afternoon.... There was one more picture that had held him, not for itself, but like the Japanese scene, for the thoughts it incited.... An aged woman in a cheerless room, bending over the embers of a low fire. In the glow, the weary old face revealed a bitter loneliness, and yet it was strangely sustained. The twisted hands held to the fire, would have fitted exactly about the waist of a ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... Carpenter; but that detracts nothing from the merits of Mr. Woodburn, who, as we hung suspended over that frightful abyss, I knew and felt, was throwing his life to the winds to save mine. O, why could it not have been, as I have often said to myself during our cheerless ride this evening,—why could it not have been Peters, to perform all that I have this day seen in that poor, despised, and persecuted ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... Christ and HIS words. It matters not where we meet the word, if it is Christ's we are touched and made tender. An aged man stands in a prayer-meeting in a bare and cheerless hall, and says in broken and faltering voice, "The dear Lord has blessedly SANCTIFIED my heart," and like a flash the room lightens, and the whole place seems changed and made cheery. The heart cries, "That is my ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... consolation for those days which must come to all, when, fallen into the sere and yellow leaf, the society of the young and gay can no longer charm them, and the present requires the recollections of the past to render it less cheerless; recollections only to be found in those who have ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... fore-paws, would wrinkle his brows and lift up his eyelids every now and then, to exchange a glance of mutual understanding with his master. But there was a chamber in Shepperton Vicarage which told a different story from that bare and cheerless dining-room—a chamber never entered by any one besides Mr. Gilfil and old Martha the housekeeper, who, with David her husband as groom and gardener, formed the Vicar's entire establishment. The blinds of this chamber were always down, except once a-quarter, when Martha ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... -round her | blowing, Yellow | leaves the | woodlands | strewing, By a | river | hoarsely | roaring, Isa | -bella | strayed de | -ploring. 'Farewell | hours that | late did | measure Sunshine | days of | joy and | pleasure; Hail, thou | gloomy | night of | sorrow, Cheerless | night that ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... counted his beads in prayer. The glare of lightning gradually ceased, the storm passing away to the westward with distant reverberations. Yet clouds overcast the skies, leaving the early morning hours dark and cheerless. With the first faint glow of day lighting the pathway, I stood up, dizzy at viewing the awful abyss below our narrow shelf. We could perceive now more plainly the terrific havoc wrought above, but our eyes turned away from it in horror. ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... and wise Vidura serve thy mandate and behest, Let a father's pride and gladness fill this old and cheerless breast." ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... so, senor," and curtsying to her master she went away, leaving Avendano by her departure in a state of feeling like that of the tired wayfarer when the sun sets and he finds himself wrapt in cheerless darkness. He went, however, to give an account of what he had seen and done to Carriazo, who very soon perceived that his friend had been smitten in the heart; but he would not say a word about the matter then, until ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... all the generals in the army of the Republic, and anticipating even Republican statesmen, had clearly pointed to the cause of the war. At Craney Island I met two accomplished women of the Society of Friends, who, on a most cheerless spot, and with every inconvenience, were teaching the children of the freedmen. Two good men, one at the fort and the other at Norfolk, were distributing the laborers on farms in the vicinity, and providing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... with her dignity, as well as the dictate of her heart. She looked upon her child as she lay there, in her now adorned loveliness; she gazed about the room so filled with comfort and delight, and as her thoughts wandered from these blessings to her own cheerless home, and to the past few months of destitution; and as visions of weary days of toil, and nights of cold and hunger and wretchedness, and the shadow of that lovely little one returning from her loathsome labors, with muddy ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... to-night, The sullen wind was soon awake, It tore the elm-tops down for spite, And did its worst to vex the lake: I listen'd with heart fit to break. When glided in Porphyria; straight She shut the cold out and the storm, And kneel'd and made the cheerless grate Blaze up, and all the cottage warm; Which done, she rose, and from her form Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl, And laid her soil'd gloves by, untied Her hat and let the damp hair fall, And, last, she sat down by my side And call'd me. When no voice replied, She put my arm about her ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... May, Might, Could, Would, Should! How powerless ye For evil or for good! In every sense Your moods I cheerless call, Whate'er your tense Ye are imperfect, all! Ye have deceived the trust I've shown In ye! Away! The Mighty ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... their berths; no one to speak to; the pale light of the single lamp, swinging to and fro from the beam, so dim that one can scarcely see, much less read, by it; the water dropping from the beams and carlines and running down the sides, and the forecastle so wet and dark and cheerless, and so lumbered up with chests and wet clothes, that sitting up is worse than lying in the berth. These are some of the evils. Fortunately, I needed no help from any one, and no medicine; and if I had needed help I don't know where ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... one on that particular day. The sky was overcast and gray, with a distinct threat of rain. The sea was gray and cold and cheerless. The fields were bare and bleak and across them moved a damp, chill, penetrating breeze. From horizon to horizon not a breathing creature, except themselves, was visible. And in the immediate foreground were the tumbled, crumbling memorials ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... making their way through the Park; the searer, yellower Park of late November. It looked duller and more cheerless than David ever remembered it. The leaves rattled on the trees, and ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... arrived; Lavretzky did not wish to sleep in his aunt's bed; he gave orders that a bed should be made up for him in the dining-room. Extinguishing the candle, he stared about him for a long time, and meditated on cheerless thoughts; he experienced the sensation familiar to every man who chances to pass the night, for the first time, in a place which has long been uninhabited; it seemed to him that the darkness which surrounded him on all sides could not accustom itself to the new inhabitant, that the very walls ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... and holy! Meet him in that place; Change his cheerless melancholy Into joy and grace; If thou hast forgiven, vex not; If thou lovest, go, Watching ever by the ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... him, still empty, scarcely even held romance now. Rain dripped from it sadly. Its cheerless bareness seemed worse than the most ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... a very cheerless proceeding. She found an opportunity, when Irene was out of the way, to talk to her room-mates on ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... went hammering through cheerless seas, and the lines were heavy with great ling fish, it was pleasure to match his young supple thews with those of the strongest men. And it was pleasure, when hungry and weary, to turn shoreward, and feel the smell ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... his room, the sight of his furniture, his engravings, his books on their shelves, and his table covered with its papers distressed him. His long evenings of study near this lamp, the long hours of thought over some difficult work, the austere and cheerless year that he had lived there, all had been dedicated to Maria. It was in order to obtain her some day, that he had labored so assiduously and obstinately! And now the frivolous and guilty child was doubtless weeping for joy in Maurice's ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... Memory comes, And leads me gently through her twilight realms. What poet's tuneful lyre has ever sung, Or delicatest pencil e'er portrayed The enchanted, shadowy land where Memory dwells? It has its valleys, cheerless, lone, and drear, Dark-shaded by the lonely cypress tree. And yet its sunlit mountain tops are bathed In heaven's own blue. Upon its craggy cliffs, Robed in the dreamy light of distant years, Are clustered joys serene of other days; Upon its gently sloping hillside's bank The ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... the yoke of Rome—how bitter is human life—how cheerless is the mystery of the cross to those deluded and perishing souls! How gladly they would rush into the blazing piles with the Brahmin women, if they could hope to see the end of their unspeakable miseries through the momentary tortures which would open ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... into the parlor, and busied herself arranging flowers she had ordered to make the place less cheerless for the little wedding. The proprietress came in presently with more flowers, a box bearing the card of James Thorpe. The woman was ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... dark side of the Moon, I should prefer to be a resident on the illuminated side. The former, when his long, blazing, roasting, dazzling day is over, has a night 354 hours long, whose darkness, like that, just now surrounding us, is ever unrelieved save by the cold cheerless rays of the stars. But the latter has hardly seen his fiery sun sinking on one horizon when he beholds rising on the opposite one an orb, milder, paler, and colder indeed than the Sun, but fully as large as thirteen of our full Moons, and therefore shedding thirteen times as much light. This ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... the hospital hut at the police headquarters at Reindeer. A cheerless, primitive place of healing, severe but adequate, as were most things which concerned the lives of the riders of ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... sunset way into a leaden sky, caring for the Brown twins all day while their mother was shopping; while they slept, mending stockings out of the big round basket that Mrs. Brown always kept by her sewing-chair; coming home at night to a cheerless house and a solitary meal for which she had no appetite; getting up in the night to go to Grandma Fergus taken down suddenly with one of her attacks; helping Mrs. Smith out with her sewing and spring cleaning. Menial, monotonous tasks many of them. ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... was all over, and the little house-hold was compressed into the humble second class carriage, cheerless and cushionless, whirling through indefinite England in a way that confounded all their geography and topography. Gradually as the day darkened into heavy, chilly July rain, the scarcely kept up spirits ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... made by moralists, was not an objection to its sinfulness but an objection to its charm. In brief, he feared comfort, satisfaction, joy. The boarding houses in which he dragged out his gray years were as bare and cheerless as so many piano boxes. He avoided all the little vices and dissipations which make human existence bearable: good eating, good drinking, dancing, tobacco, poker, poetry, the theatre, personal adornment, philandering, adultery. He was insanely suspicious of everything ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... in, looking restless and anxious, he sent her to the kitchen to get her dinner with Joseph; and with the master of the house, grim and saturnine, and Hareton absolutely dumb, I made a cheerless meal, and ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds. |
