"Desolate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... For have I not felt twenty times the desolate advantage of being insulated here and of not minding anybody when I made my poems?—of living a little like a disembodied spirit, and caring less for suppositious criticism than for the black fly buzzing in the pane?—That ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... and dazed as the horrible prospect rose before her of being seized by these lawless men, tortured by the savage hands of the witch-finder, subjected to a cruel death, by fire, or at best by water. She pressed her hands together, feeling utterly desolate, and prayed her prayer to the God of the fatherless to save her or brace ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and the Infants Isabella entered the place in triumph, if triumph it could be called. It would be difficult to imagine a more desolate scene. The artillery of the first years of the seventeenth century was not the terrible enginry of destruction that it has become in the last third of the nineteenth, but a cannonade, continued so ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... lacked an hour or so of sunset, but the heavy clouds already created a twilight, and the wind began to moan through the forest, bringing with it a cold rain that made a monotonous and desolate patter on leaves and grass. The comrades were glad enough now of their shelter in the abandoned Council House. They had made at Pittsburg a purchase which conduced greatly to their comfort, that is, a pair of exceedingly light but warm ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Letham, tell us truly if there's any news come newly; Not the old fantastic rumours we have often heard before:— Desolate yet all undaunted! Is the town by Boers still haunted? This is all the news that's wanted—tell us truly we implore— Is there, is there a relief force? Tell us, tell us, we implore! Only ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... these Narrows on a long voyage like this of mine, it seems like going out into the broad highway, where not a soul is to be seen. For far away and away, stretches the great Atlantic Ocean; and all you can see beyond it where the sky comes down to the water. It looks lonely and desolate enough, and I could hardly believe, as I gazed around me, that there could be any land beyond, or any place like Europe or England or Liverpool in the great wide world. It seemed too strange, and ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... grown quite dusk. They were now come to a very wild and desert place, overgrown with shaggy bushes and so silent and solitary that nobody seemed ever to have dwelt or journeyed there. All was waste and desolate in the gray twilight, which grew every moment more obscure. Perseus looked about him rather disconsolately and asked Quicksilver whether they had a great deal farther ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... Simonides, Come with your weeping and sad elegies: Ye griefs and sorrows, come from all the lands Wherein ye sigh and wail and wring your hands: Gather ye here within my house today And help me mourn my sweet, whom in her May Ungodly Death hath ta'en to his estate, Leaving me on a sudden desolate. 'Tis so a serpent glides on some shy nest And, of the tiny nightingales possessed, Doth glut its throat, though, frenzied with her fear, The mother bird doth beat and twitter near And strike the monster, till it turns and gapes To swallow her, and she but just escapes. ...
— Laments • Jan Kochanowski
... this desolate part of the country was to capture turtles. Here is the ground of the green and loggerhead turtles, and, according to Sandy, the hawksbill, from which the shell of commerce is taken, is also ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... other means of passage; fighting inch by inch up plunging gorges, down which and over whose rugged boulders the narrowed waters foamed in almost resistless fury and milky foam—on and up, rod by rod, half a mile in the hour, till we came to a weary and desolate camp not two leagues from our breakfasts. There we cooked our suppers and ate in hoods and gloves, fighting mosquitos and black flies for every morsel, speculating as to the morrow's probabilities and discussing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... fog blew off, and the beach was visible on the right,—long, low, desolate, a shore of interminable sand, over which the breakers leaped and ran like hordes of wild horses with streaming tails and manes. Not a sign of vegetation was to be seen on that barren coast, nor any trace of human existence, save here a lonely house on the ridge, and yonder ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... have probably gone clear of the danger. But then, perhaps, she could not have had a swimming bath and a French cafe. That, of course, is a serious consideration. I am well aware that those responsible for her short and fatal existence ask us in desolate accents to believe that if she had hit end on she would have survived. Which, by a sort of coy implication, seems to mean that it was all the fault of the officer of the watch (he is dead now) for trying to avoid the obstacle. We shall have presently, in deference to commercial and industrial ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... Meresq unmoored a canoe and paddled himself off, unwitting of a young, desolate face pressed against an upper casement. From thence she had watched him waiting for Cecil at the landing, and, with eyes sharpened by anxiety, had detected their happiness in meeting. She could not go down to receive ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... blooming cheeks and star-lit eyes peeping out from under a sun-bonnet, enshrined in all the glories of the mountain redwoods, and I long to be with you if only to get some of the freshness and joy of the California mountains into my rather desolate soul. ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... What am I but a miserable brand Lit by mysterious wrath? I lie cast down A blackened branch upon the desolate ground. Where once I kindled ruin. I shall drink No cup of purest water but will taste Bitter with thy ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... they have known we were coming? We have marched through a hundred miles of the most desolate country we could find, and have come faster than any one could have ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... other species of these odd animals only observed in a wild state, and in the more desolate and uninhabited parts of the Cordilleras. These were the 'guanaco' ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... independent man, was facing the world for the first time on his own legs. His mother might have realised it had she been there—but she was not. Mary, however, was there, and in the very middle of her game, searching for him, as she was always doing, she found him desolate under the shadow of the oak. She slipped away, and, coming up to him with the shyness and fear that she always had when she approached him, because she loved him so much and he could so easily ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... disposition, and took him into the house. First, they entered a fine large hall, magnificently furnished; they then passed through several spacious rooms, in the same style of grandeur; but all appeared forsaken and desolate. A long gallery came next, it was very dark, just light enough to show that instead of a wall on one side, there was a grating of iron which parted off a dismal dungeon, from whence issued the groans of those victims whom the cruel giant reserved ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... gusts, would uprise and overwhelm both ends of the Nan-Shan in snowy rushes of foam, expanding wide, beyond both rails, into the night. And on this dazzling sheet, spread under the blackness of the clouds and emitting a bluish glow, Captain MacWhirr could catch a desolate glimpse of a few tiny specks black as ebony, the tops of the hatches, the battened companions, the heads of the covered winches, the foot of a mast. This was all he could see of his ship. Her middle structure, covered by the bridge ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... every article of commerce, and the people then seemed to be very happy under his government, which latterly was not the case; because the country in reality appeared in the year 1774 in a flourishing state, and in the year 1783 it appeared comparatively forlorn and desolate.—Q. Was the court of Asoph ul Dowlah, when you left India, equal in point of splendor to what it was in the time of Sujah ul Dowlah?—A. By no means: it was not equally splendid, but far inferior.—Q. Were the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... anguish as hers. The girl whose lover drops lifeless at her side, the mother by her dead child's cradle, Eve at the gate of paradise, the miser who finds his buried treasure replaced by a stone, the poet whose greatest work has perished in the flames, have not a more desolate air. The blood left her countenance, and it became as of marble; her arms fell by her side, as if their muscles had become flaccid; and she leant against a pillar, for her limbs refused to support her. As for me, with a livid ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... been made to take off the square, desolate ugliness of the building by planting a patch of garden surrounded by posts and wire; but they were not very successful, for, as a rule, things would not grow for want ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... I go back where all is desolate, Where reigns the terror of a curse, To knock, a beggar, at my father's gate, That ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... rifles and fighting with the rest, while the women of the country, including in their numbers all those of good estate and of gentle birth were, under the guardianship of lancers, set to march through the desolate forest tracts and over the countryside in order to establish new agricultural colonies. Here they were made to dig the soil and to plant cereals and sweet potatoes in order that the armies might be fed; and should any one of these women on the march fall by the wayside, ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... and untried affections: to a single gentleman, then, shall my lodgings be let.' Actuated by this beautiful and touching impulse (among the best impulses of our imperfect nature, gentlemen) the lonely and desolate widow dried her tears, furnished her first floor, caught the innocent boy to her maternal bosom, and put the bill up in her parlour-window. Did it remain there long? No. The serpent was on the watch, ...
— The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick - A Lecture • Frank Lockwood
... provincial town there stands a gasometer. On one side of this gasometer begins a region of disappointed fields, which, however, has hardly begun before a railway embankment cuts across, at an angle convenient for its entirely obscuring the few meadows and trees that in this desolate land do duty for a countryside. The dull workmen's streets that here abruptly present unfinished ends to the universe must console themselves with the gasometer. And indeed they seem more than content. For a street boasting the best view, as ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... he had been directed; and receiving as many contradictory and unsatisfactory replies in return; the young man at length arrived before the house which had been pointed out to him as the object of his destination. It was a small low building, one story above the ground, with even a more desolate and unpromising exterior than any he had yet passed. An old yellow curtain was closely drawn across the window up-stairs, and the parlour shutters were closed, but not fastened. The house was detached from any other, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... the gentle voice of Mrs. Faith, "did I startle you? I have been hunting for you everywhere," she added, laughing lightly. "I was afraid you would feel rather desolate. It is a pity. Now, ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... again in the humble house; not a human sound interrupted the stillness reigning in the desolate room. Only the hum of a few flies, rushing with their heads against the window-panes, was heard. Once a rustling noise was heard in a corner, and a mouse glided across the floor, its piercing, glittering eyes looked searchingly ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... famous romance the 'Exiles of Siberia,' of Madame Cottin, we have had no account of these desolate lands more attractive than the present work, from the pen of the Lady Eve Felinska, which, in its unpretending style and truthful simplicity, will win its way to the reader's heart, and compel him to sympathise with the ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... her desolate, But with her went along, as a strong gard Of her chast person, and a faithfull mate 75 Of her sad troubles and misfortunes hard: Still when she slept, he kept both watch and ward,[*] And when she wakt, he waited diligent, With humble service ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... to by Flaccus Albinus was the minster. If that is so, this church remained until it was ruined by the Danes in 1069. Then it was certainly either wholly or partially burnt down. Thomas, the first Norman archbishop, appointed in 1070, found the minster, the city, and the diocese, all waste and desolate. At first he was satisfied with roofing in what remained of the cathedral and otherwise restoring it as best he could. Afterwards, before 1080, he began to rebuild it. It is uncertain whether he rebuilt the whole church, or merely the nave ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... had drawn tears from Flora more than once, and she loved the good dog for his devoted attachment to the grief-stricken desolate old man. When, however, the fishing season returned, Jarvis roused himself from the indulgence of hopeless grief. The little cockle-shell of a boat was once more launched upon the blue sea, and Jarvis might daily be seen spreading its tiny white sheet to the breeze, ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... speaks of a tax or a duty, If he does not look grand on his knees, If he's blind to a landscape of beauty, Hills, valleys, rocks, waters, and trees, If he dotes not on desolate towers, If he likes not to hear the blast blow, If he knows not the language of flowers,— My ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... from the right—the way I had come, and I set off through the thickening dusk in that direction. But the odd thing was that I walked considerably further than the sound of the whistle could have carried and never a sign of human being or of house did I see—nothing but that desolate grassy sea-board ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... the house might be rat-ridden and desolate. The coulee might wear always the look of emptiness; but here, under the bluff by the spring, and in the room Jean called hers, one felt the air of occupancy that gave the lie to all ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... hope of treasure, coming to his help with a hundred and eighty-ton craft, the "Ayde," to which two smaller vessels were added. These being provisioned and manned, the bold navigator, with "a merrie wind" in his sails, set out again for the desolate north. ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Oh, how desolate the world was. The summer sky had no beauty; the fields, which I could still dimly see, were shorn of ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... I cannot tell!" she replied, smiling sweetly through her tears. "Tell me again that you love me; I do so want some one to love me! Is it true that you do, indeed, or is it only a beautiful dream? I have lived so desolate and alone that I can scarcely believe ...
— Isabel Leicester - A Romance • Clotilda Jennings
... desolate country, we see that he makes a note on the forsaken fields and the watch-towers in them. Cucumbers are cultivated in large quantities by the natives of Inner Africa, and the reader will no doubt call to mind the simile adopted by Isaiah some 2500 years ago, as he pictured ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... love knows no weariness, and, as the hours passed and Ambrose still slept, Mary forgot her aching back and arms, her forlorn position in that desolate attic, even the painful ordeal she had gone through by her husband's dying bed—forgot everything but the joy that, whether for life or death, her boy ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... In this desolate apartment in which Mr. Pinto had invited me to see him, there were three chairs, one bottomless, a little table on which you might put a breakfast-tray, and not a single other article of furniture. In the next room, the door of which was open, I could see a magnificent gilt dressing-case, ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... As soon as we were out of danger we came to anchor and refitted; and on the 19th of August we sailed from this uninhabited extremity of the world, where the inhospitable climate affords neither food nor shelter, and not a tree or shrub of any kind grows amongst its barren rocks; but all is one desolate and expanded waste of ice, which even the constant beams of the sun for six months in the year cannot penetrate or dissolve. The sun now being on the decline the days shortened as we sailed to the southward; and, on the 28th, in latitude 73, it was dark by ten o'clock ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... at their amazing promptitude. There was both reassurance and pathos in its unconscious youth. All this eagerness pressing forward—where? They did not know, nor I. Certainly we did not dream how strange a goal awaited one of us three, or on what weird, desolate path that traveler's ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... university to usefulness in the various walks of citizenship. The students who enjoyed the privilege of sitting at the feet of this grand college president there learned lessons of patriotism. They were advised to build up the places left waste and desolate, and to look hopefully forward to a reunited country and a ...
— Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of William H. F. Lee (A Representative from Virginia) • Various
... year—and the cynic cries, "Thank God!" And so, perhaps, do the very lonely. But then Christmas is not a festival for either the cynic or the desolate. The cynic is as welcome at the annual feast of turkey and plum pudding as Mr. "Pussyfoot" would be at a "beano"; while the lonely—well, one likes to imagine that there are no lonely ones at Christmas-time; ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... much more summary mode of accounting for our desolate state; for, on my suggesting that his bills might have been ill distributed or his notice insufficient,—being rather desirous thus to find a loophole for my vanity to creep out of,—he convinced me that all points of 'vantage had been ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... uttering a groan. I myself have seen at Lacedaemon, troops of young men, with incredible earnestness contending together with their hands and feet, with their teeth and nails, nay even ready to expire, rather than own themselves conquered. Is any country of barbarians more uncivilized or desolate than India? Yet they have amongst them some that are held for wise men, who never wear any clothes all their life long, and who bear the snow of Caucasus, and the piercing cold of winter, without any pain: and ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... constantly recurring storms, and the establishment of other ports, have resulted in driving many people away from the place, and the abolition of the coolie traffic has also tended to diminish the number of traders. Now the town has a desolate, deserted appearance, and the principal revenue of the government is derived ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... not to our impassioned love, as disciplined and exalted in the school of Shakspeare. They challenge our admiration, severe, and even stern, as impersonations of filial duty, cleaving to the steps of a desolate and afflicted old man; or of sisterly affection, maintaining the rights of a brother under circumstances of peril, of desertion, and consequently of perfect self-reliance. Iphigenia, again, though not ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... box was filled in his absence with a stream of friends, and a constant murmur of congratulation, which was music in the ears of Madame de Chateauvieux, and, for the moment, silenced in Kendal his own throbbing and desolate consciousness. ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... dreary phenomenon that overtook us ten miles down the valley. I had seen it but it had made no impression on my tortured mind. The great god of day had sprung up out of the earth to smile upon me—or at me—and I had let him go unnoticed, so black and desolate was the memory of the night he destroyed! I had only a vague recollection of the dawn. The thing that caused me the most concern was the discovery that we had run the last half of our journey in broad daylight with our acetylene lamps ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... long time before they went to sleep. That night Bertie Fellowes dreamt of Madame Tussaud's and the great pantomime at Drury Lane, and poor Shivers of a long creeper-covered bungalow far away in the shining East, and they both cried a little under the bed-clothes. Yet each put a brave face on their desolate circumstances to each other, ...
— Brave and True - Short stories for children by G. M. Fenn and Others • George Manville Fenn
... deposits, I shall defer my description till a subsequent chapter. It was late this evening ere the post-gig arrived from the south, and the night and several hours of the following morning were spent in travelling to Portree. I know not, however, that I could have seen some of the wildest and most desolate tracts in Skye to greater advantage. There was light enough to show the bold outlines of the hills,—lofty, abrupt, pyramidal,—just such hills, both in form and grouping, as a profile in black showed best; a low blue vapor slept ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... suitors. This of course is only the case with the younger women; the older women for one thing do not nag so much, and moreover they have usually children willing and able to support them. If they have not, their state is, like that of all old childless women in Africa, a very desolate one. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... overlooking the water. I walked all round the place three times (it doesn't take long), but lingered most under the southern wall, where the afternoon light slept in the dreamiest, sweetest way. I sat down on an old stone and looked away to the desolate salt-marshes and the still, shining surface of the etang; and, as I did so, reflected that this was a queer little out-of-the-world corner to have been chosen, in the great dominions of either monarch, for that pompous interview which took place, in 1538, between Francis I. ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... here and there with immaculate white, how, after that cruel ninety miles, none but a woman might tell. A cool, gray veil was rolled about her hatbrim. Her hands, shapely and good, were gloved in gray. Her foot, trim and well shaped,—for even a desolate pariah might note so much,—was shod in no ultra fashion, but in good feminine gear with high and girlish heels, all unsuited to gravel and slide-rock, yet exceeding good, as it seemed at that time. The girl raised her eyes, smiling frankly. There was no cold cream ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... nought else so worthy of regard, As is this river, has thine eye discern'd, O'er which the flaming volley all is quench'd." So spake my guide; and I him thence besought, That having giv'n me appetite to know, The food he too would give, that hunger crav'd. "In midst of ocean," forthwith he began, "A desolate country lies, which Crete is nam'd, Under whose monarch in old times the world Liv'd pure and chaste. A mountain rises there, Call'd Ida, joyous once with leaves and streams, Deserted now like a forbidden thing. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... was personified in her mind as a hulking coward, bullying the weak, fawning upon the strong, with no guiding principle in life save self-interest, but to-night, as she visualized it across the intervening miles, snow-bound, wind-swept, desolate, it was in the guise of a shivering pauper, miserable in his present, fearful ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... though a widow woman, and therefore entitled to occupy a pathetic position, its privileges were defined by the opinion that "she was not so badly off intirely as she might ha' been." Mick's departure need not have left her desolate, since she had another son and daughter at home, besides Essie married in the village, and Brian settled down at Murghadeen, here he was doing well, and times and again asking her to come and live with him. Then Mick would have been able to help her out of his pay much more efficaciously ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... almost interminable suite of book-rooms above, is a similar suite below stairs: but the general appearance of the latter is comparatively cold, desolate, and sombre. The light comes in, to the right, less abundantly; and, in the first two rooms, the garniture of the volumes is less brilliant and attractive. In short, these first two lower rooms may be considered rather as the depot for the cataloguing and forwarding of all modern books ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... regions, in which the southward attraction is hardly felt, walking sometimes in a perfectly desolate plain where there have been no houses nor trees to guide me, I have been occasionally compelled to remain stationary for hours together, waiting till the rain came before continuing my journey. On the weak and aged, and especially ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... sun's kiss will scarce fall Into one flower's gold cup; I think the bird will miss me, And give the summer up. O sweet place, desolate in tall Wild grass, have you forgot How her lips loved to kiss me, Now that ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... inebriate to become a self-supporting citizen instead of an object of charity; to visit the families of inebriates and by every means possible aid them to a higher and better life. It has brought sunshine and happiness into more than one thousand desolate homes, and enabled the heads of these homes to become self-supporting. Husbands and wives who have been driven asunder by the curse of drink have been re-united. Thousands of children who would have been thrown ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... hunger we suffered so much as from thirst. That was terrible. Hour after hour passed by. No relief appeared. I began almost to wish that I had laid my head down alongside my poor friend and old shipmate, Delisle, in the desolate savannah near Ou Trou. The thought was wrong—rank ingratitude to the merciful providence which had preserved me—but it was human, I fear. How admirably our gallant fellows behaved! Scarcely a murmur or a grumble was heard. Again the sun went down. ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... between Emmaus and Arimathea. In the first place no one knows where the places are, or is sure of their existence, and then between their presumed localities the country is wild, trackless, unbridged, uninhabited, and desolate. Massachusetts Avenue runs the whole length of the city, and is inserted on the maps as a full-blown street, about four miles in length. Go there, and you will find yourself not only out of town, away among the fields, but you will ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... a trifle startled by this apparition, so unexpected as it was, and so strange did it seem that any human creature should be at that hour of the night in so desolate and sinister a place. Involuntarily I paused as I came opposite her, and gazed at her intently. But the moonlight fell behind her, and the deep hood of her cloak so completely shadowed her face that I was unable to discern anything but the sparkle of a pair of eyes, which appeared to ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... with bone; and his wife come from her looking-glass without a painted face. I saw the Nerlis and the Vecchios contented with the simplest doublets, and their good dames hard at work at their spindles. O happy they! They were sure of burial in their native earth, and none were left desolate by husbands that loved France better than Italy. One kept awake to tend her child in its cradle, lulling it with the household words that had fondled her own infancy. Another, as she sat in the midst of her ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... prove her gipsy-descent. Old Viarda, finding that her schemes have fallen through, shows by a mark on Preciosa's shoulder, that the girl is Donna Clara's own daughter, who was robbed many years ago and was believed by her desolate parents to be drowned. In consideration of Preciosa's entreaties the gipsies are pardoned and only ordered to leave the country for ever. Preciosa is of course united to her ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... Such hangings have nothing in common with those of early times; they are not temporary coverings of bare spaces, but panels in decorated walls, where they form an integral part of the architectural composition and design. They do not merely serve to give warmth, comfort, and colour to desolate halls, as did those ancient tapestries belonging to the furniture of the great man who sent them on before him from palace to palace, carrying them away with his baggage lest some one else should do so in his absence. These were probably merely attached by loops and ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... I see the royal state of boroughs walking their desolate streets, hanging down their heads under disappointments, wormed out of all the branches of their old trade, uncertain what hand to turn to, necessitate to become 'prentices to their unkind neighbors, and yet after all finding their trade ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... built, and adorned with new figures to represent the fabulous King Lud, was not yet closed for the night; and the party came forth beyond the walls, with the desolate Moorfields to their left, and before them a number of rising ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... reached the old homestead she found it desolate. The light snow which had fallen overnight lay everywhere undisturbed. No paths had been cleared nor entrances swept. The windows were closed and shuttered as Amy never had seen them. Even the stables were shut up and deserted; and ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... causeways of civilization. Sime painfully worked his way around the post so that he could look south. But here too nothing met his eye but the orange cliffs with their patches of gray lichen. There was no comfort to be had in that desolate landscape. Nevertheless, Sime kept moving around, to keep the post between himself and the Sun. Already it was beginning to ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... on they went, treading close together and in single file, making little noise. Straight across the desolate stretch of land that lay between the two lines of trenches they went, and, when half way, there came from the German side a sudden burst of star shells. These are a sort of war fireworks that make a brilliant illumination, and the ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach
... that very budding time of the Elibank Plot, Newcastle suddenly discovered that the unwearied Eleanor Oglethorpe, Marquise de Mezieres, was in England,—had arrived secretly, without any passport. He tracked her down at Westbrook House, that lay all desolate and deserted, the windows closed, the right-of-way through the grounds illegally shut up. General Oglethorpe after 1746 had abandoned his home, for he had been court-martialled on a charge of not attacking Cluny and Lord George Murray, when the Highlanders ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... of all the orchard groves, Till the great sky was choked withal. We closed Our lips and eyes, and bore the God-sent evil. When after a long while this ceased, the maid Was seen, and wailed in high and bitter key, Like some despairing bird that hath espied Her nest all desolate, the nestlings gone. So, when she saw the body bare, she mourned Loudly, and cursed the authors of this deed. Then nimbly with her hands she brought dry dust, And holding high a shapely brazen cruse, Poured three libations, honouring the dead. We, when we saw, ran in, and straightway ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... send runners amongst us; they wish to make us enemies, that they may sweep over and desolate our hunting grounds, like devastating winds, or ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... bone; And, with no artful coloring on her cheeks, His lady leave the glass. The sons I saw Of Nerli, and of Vecchio, well content With unrobed jerkin; and their good dames handling The spindle and the flax: O happy they! Each sure of burial in her native land, And none left desolate abed for France. One waked to tend the cradle, hushing it With sounds that lulled the parent's infancy: Another, with her maidens, drawing off The tresses from the distaff, lectured them Old tales of Troy, and Fesole, and Rome. A Salterello and Cianghella we Had ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... once the rendezvous of so many kings and princes, were now desolate, and bore on their soiled floors the footprints of the hostile soldiers who had recently been quartered there. At the czar's solicitation, they had now been removed; but the queen's household servants had also left it. ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... kindest star of heaven, That bringeth all things good, wax'd pale, and straight There fell a flash of white malignant levin Among the gleaming waters desolate; The lights of sea and sky did mix and mate And change to rosy flame, and thence did fly The lovely Queen of Love that turns to hate, Like summer lightnings 'twixt ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... from the sea compelled him to be very crafty. Instead of pushing straightway for the bar and hoisting sail—which might have brought a charge of grape-shot after him—he kept in the gloom of the piles nearly into the left bank, and then hugged the shadow it afforded. Nothing but the desolate sands surveyed him, and the piles of wrack cast up by gales from the west. Then with a stout heart he stepped his little mast, and the breeze, which freshened towards the rising of the sun, carried him briskly through the ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... distance from the sea, and bring them to taste the sweets of civil life, by living in cities, and by the culture of the ground. He placed some of them in the little towns of Cilicia, which were almost desolate, and which received them with pleasure, because at the same time he gave them an additional proportion of lands. He repaired the city of Soli, which had lately been dismantled and deprived of its inhabitants by Tigranes, ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... from falling on the flure. She had seen enough, God help her!—for she took labor that instant, and, in about two hours, afterwards, was stretched a corpse beside her husband, with her heart-broken and desolate orphans in an uproar of outher misery about them. That was the end of Larry M'Farland and Sally Lowry; two that might have done well in the world, had they taken care of themselves—avoided, fairs and markets—except when ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... eyes of all who loved their fatherland and their race, the sight of a desolate country, with its ancient charters superseded by brute force, its industrious population swarming from the land in droves, as if the pestilence were raging, with gibbets and scaffolds erected in ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... twice, since his majority, he had returned to America to prove that he was not an expatriate, though certainly he was one, the only tie existing between him and his native land being the bankers who regularly honored his drafts. And who shall condemn him for preferring Italy to the desolate center of New York state, where good servants and good weather are as rare ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... smoke trails, hung below him, obscuring the sea. The ghostly cone of Etna loomed into the sky, extricating itself from swaddling bands of clouds which shrouded its lower flanks. The air was chilly upon this height, and the aspect of things was gray and desolate, without temptation, without enchantment, to lure ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... which looked weird, ghastly, and strange in the moonlight, being composed of those fleshy, nightmare-looking plants of cactus growth, the prickly pears, with their horrible thorns, while more and more the way in front began to spread out wild, desolate and strange in the soft, misty, silvery grey of the moonlight, through which the long-legged animals stalked, casting weird shadows upon the soft, sandy road, and save for one thing the passing of the little train would have been ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... have great reason to blame this violent letter: for I have no resolution at all. Abandoned thus of all my natural friends, of whose returning favour I have now no hopes, and only you to pity me, and you restrained, as I may say, I have been forced to turn my desolate heart to such protection as I ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... you to commiseration. I have both friends and kindred, not being, as Homer says, begotten of wood or of stone, no more than others, who might well present themselves before you with tears and mourning, and I have three desolate children with whom to move you to compassion; but I should do a shame to our city at the age I am, and in the reputation of wisdom which is now charged against me, to appear in such an abject form. What would men say of the other Athenians? I have always admonished those who have frequented ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... the next day opens a little sourly. It is almost clear overhead: but the clouds thicken on the horizon; they look leaden; they threaten rain. It certainly will rain: the air feels like rain, or snow. By noon it begins to snow, and you hear the desolate cry of the phoebe- bird. It is a fine snow, gentle at first; but it soon drives in swerving lines, for the wind is from the southwest, from the west, from the northeast, from the zenith (one of the ordinary winds of New England), from all points of the compass. ...
— Widger's Quotations of Charles D. Warner • David Widger
... bunch-grass and swarmed up the little hill like a pest of grasshoppers, mowing down the soldiers with the very newest and best weapons of warfare, and leaving nothing at last but the robbed and mutilated bodies lying naked in the desolate land of ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... footman, and immediately afterwards the window would be closed, like a gravestone falling on a sepulchre, and the neighbors would say to each other in a low voice, "Will there be another funeral to-day at the procureur's house?" Madame Danglars involuntarily shuddered at the desolate aspect of the mansion; descending from the cab, she approached the door with trembling knees, and rang the bell. Three times did the bell ring with a dull, heavy sound, seeming to participate, in the general sadness, before the concierge appeared and peeped through the door, which ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... my thirtieth birthday sounded, I suddenly realised, with a desolate feeling at the heart, that I was alone in the world. It was true I had many and good friends, and I was blessed with interests and occupations which I had often declared sufficient to satisfy any not too exacting human being. Moreover, a small but sufficient competency ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... them harm. But the Inca, having heard what the potter said, ordered all the Sinchis to be killed with great cruelty. After their deaths he slaughtered the people, leaving none alive except some children and old women. Thus was that nation destroyed, and its towns are desolate to ...
— History of the Incas • Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa
... all, on the right, is Storm King mountain, its granite rocks and precipices showing darkly here and there, as if its huge white mantle were old and ragged indeed. One might well shiver at the lonely, desolate wastes lying beyond it, grim hills and early-shadowed valleys, where the half-starved fox prowls, and watches for unwary rabbits venturing from their coverts to nibble the frozen twigs. The river, which above the ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... their whole life of freedom, and were compelled to begin again where slavery had left them. This, taken in connection with the burning of the church, the breaking up of the school, and the absence of Eliab and Nimbus, had made the once happy and busy little village most desolate and forlorn. ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... attacks on the writers of the time. It must be remembered, too, how bitter was the end of poor Greene, how keenly he felt, he the boon companion par excellence, finding himself "forsaken" in his need, and left alone in the shoemaker's desolate room. It is curious to think that among the men whose absence from his bedside he most resented was Shakespeare, and that this want of a visit whetted his already ill-disposed mind into expressing the only abuse known to have been directed by his contemporaries ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... Schaibar, ran and hid themselves in their shops and houses, shutting their doors, while others taking to their heels, communicated their fear to all they met, who stayed not to look behind them; insomuch, that Schaibar and prince Ahmed, as they went along, found all the streets and squares desolate, till they came to the palace, where the porters, instead of preventing Schaibar from entering, ran away too; so that the prince and he advanced without any obstacle to the council-hall, where the sultan was seated on his throne and giving audience. Here likewise the officers, at the approach ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... period; but his ax sank deeper than other men's, and the plaster cast of his great sinewy hand, at Washington, embodies the training of these frontier railsplitters, in the days when Fort Dearborn, on the site of Chicago, was but a military outpost in a desolate country. While the hard woods of Illinois were being entered, the pioneer movement passed also into the Missouri Valley. The French lead miners had already opened the southeastern section, and Southern mountaineers had pushed up the Missouri; but now the planters from the Ohio Valley and the ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... Beltane, "all this I know, for much of thee have I heard, messire: of thy dark doings, of the agony of men, the shame of women, and how that there be many desolate hearths and nameless graves of thy making, lord Pertolepe. Thou wert indeed of an high estate and strong, and these but lowly folk and weak—yet mercy on them had ye none. I have this day heard thee doom the innocent to death and bitter shame, and, lord, as ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... which was luckily drowned by Jamie's noise. The boat was gone; the burning glory of sunset was slowly dying out, and across the river came the first faint breath of the night. He was here on a desolate island, with a woman who did not care for him, and he had cared for her so much that his love was the very crown of his life. Her indifference would not make any outward change in him. He was not the kind of man to believe that his heart was broken, but he knew that he should ...
— A Vanished Hand • Sarah Doudney
... it should be so," said the girl, with tremulous anxiety, "what universal ruin! What is there on earth that could fill its place? If the empire falls into the power of the barbarians, Rome will be made desolate, and all the provinces laid waste ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... silver light, and rendering the road quite distinct, so that our traveller experienced no further difficulty in pursuing his way. He hurried forward at a rapid pace, yet could not resist the temptation to pause frequently and gaze in admiration on the scene of desolate grandeur around him. On such occasions he found it difficult to believe that the stirring events of the last few hours were real. Indeed, if it had not been that there were certain uneasy portions of his frame—the result of his recent encounter on the beach— which afforded ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... was dimly lit by daylight tubes from above. The damage he, Carse, had wrought when besieged in it, a week before, had all been repaired. The place was deserted—it seemed even desolate—but in Carse's moment of memory it was peopled. There had been the tall, graceful shape in black silk; there the operating table and the frail old man bound on it; there the four other men, white men and gowned in the smocks of ...
— The Passing of Ku Sui • Anthony Gilmore
... script was from her good comrade, Parker Pillsbury, now eighty-six, who had been an unfailing help during the most difficult years of her career and whom she probably trusted more completely than any other man. The other from her dearest friend, Elizabeth Stanton, read, "I never realized how desolate the world would be to me without you until I heard of your sudden illness. Let me urge you with all the strength I have, and all the love I bear you, to stay at home and rest ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... could find a teacher. Removing from the ancient, conservative capital of Moscow, he planted his government, in defiance of Sweden, upon her very frontier, causing the city of St. Petersburg to arise as if by magic from a desolate, icy ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... starving cur never moved, so intent was he on obtaining food, and thus it happened that a pitiful yelp of pain reached my ears, muffled by the closed window. The coupe whirled on its journey, and below, in the chill, desolate grayness of a winter afternoon, an ugly pup sat howling at the leaden skies, his right foreleg upheld, part of it dangling in a very unnatural manner. A pang of compassion for the dumb unfortunate stirred ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... daughters, on condition that thou serve me eight years, and if thou serve out the ten, it will be of thine own will, for I do not wish to press hardly on thee."[FN87] A certain man once said to one of his friends, "Thou hast made me desolate, for that I have not seen thee this long while." Quoth the other, "I have been distracted from thee by Ibn Shihab; dost thou know him?" "Yes," replied the first; "he hath been my neighbour these thirty years, but I have never spoken to him." "Indeed," rejoined ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights, and liberties he has subverted, whose properties he has destroyed, whose country he has laid waste and desolate. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... his opposition by a considerable bribe; the poor must alike contribute, or submit to be the victim of delays which, with perishable articles such as vegetables, represent his ruin. Is it surprising that the villages of the desolate plain of Messaria are for the most part devoid of fruit-trees? We are preaching to the Cypriotes the advantage of planting around their dwellings, as though they were such idiots as to be ignorant that "he who sows the wind will reap the whirlwind." If they plant fruit-trees ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... ready by this time, and the colonel set out, with a black driver, to find the Excelsior Cotton Mills. They proved to be situated in a desolate sandhill region several miles out of town. The day was hot; the weather had been dry, and the road was deep with a yielding white sand into which the buggy tires sank. The horse soon panted with the heat and the exertion, ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... And away rolled the coaches towards Bristol. Phoebe turned back into the house with a rather desolate feeling. For three days everybody would be gone. Those who were left behind were all strangers to her except Mr Edmundson, and she wanted to get as far from him as she could. True, there was Louise; but Louise could hardly be a companion for her, even had her work for Lady Delawarr ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... and indifferent under the continual strain, and what might have been a happy home was a desolate one, and its memory is a nightmare to ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... disgrace to the city which had produced him. But Linda now felt very thankful for the assurance of even his presence. Had it been Ludovic's mother, how much better would it have been! But that she should be received even by his father,—by such a father,—was much to her in her desolate condition. ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... lain down at the side of the tent, a little way from the fire, I fell soon into a deep slumber, which at first was dreamless. Presently, however, I came upon a very strange and unsettling dream; for I dreamed that I had been left alone on the island, and was sitting very desolate upon the edge of the brown-scummed pit. Then I was aware suddenly that it was very dark and very silent, and I began to shiver; for it seemed to me that something which repulsed my whole being had come quietly behind me. At that I tried mightily to turn and look into the shadows among the great ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... by Earl Gilbert of Strathearn and his Countess Matildis, as endowment to the newly-founded Abbey of Inchaffray. A few years later the Church of S. Bean of Foulis and the Church of the Holy Trinity of Gasc were added to the same endowment. Although now desolate, and appearing as a pendicle to an adjacent farm-steading, the old Kirk of Kinkell occupies a beautiful site in the valley, on a knoll, close by the river, and the kirkyard is still occasionally used. ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... eyes, and even a sort of horrid dignity in ours. Philip is not without a certain greatness, the greatness of unlimited external power, and of a will relentless in its dictates, guided by principles, false, but consistent and unalterable. The scene of his existence is haggard, stern and desolate; but it is all his own, and he seems fitted for it. We hate him and fear him; but the poet has taken care to secure him ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... a sterile red clay, spotted with scrub cedars. Country more bleak and desolate I have never known, and when, at noon, the rain ceased, a keen wind blew dismally across the barriers. I reached a turnpike at length, and, turning, as I thought, toward Alexandria, goaded my horse into a canter. An hour's ride brought me to a wretched hamlet, whose designation ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... against the Kentish monks. It was a lonely little cottage, all rusted over with lichen, and sometimes Joanna felt sorry for Socknersh away there by himself beside the Ditch. She sent him over a flock mattress and a woollen blanket, in case the old ague-spectre of the Marsh still haunted that desolate ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... eighty years, being destroyed by Chosroes II., of Persia, in A.D. 614, but was soon succeeded by another structure not so grand as its predecessor. In 1010, in the "reign of the mad caliph Hakem," the group of churches was entirely destroyed, and the spot lay desolate for thirty years, after which another church was erected, being completed in eight years. This building was standing in 1099, the time of the Crusaders, but was destroyed by fire in 1808. This fire "consumed many of the most sacred relics in the church. Marble columns of great ...
— A Trip Abroad • Don Carlos Janes
... Rainbow Bridge they came down to the world below, and presently found themselves in a desolate region of mountain and moorland, through which they wandered for a long, long time, without coming across any ...
— Told by the Northmen: - Stories from the Eddas and Sagas • E. M. [Ethel Mary] Wilmot-Buxton
... Only on condition of the grant of perfect social equality would she consent to stay, and Mrs. Gradinger, though she held advanced opinions, was hardly advanced far enough to accept this suggestion. Last of all, Mr. Sebastian van der Roet was desolate to announce that his cook, a Japanese, whose dishes were, in his employer's estimation, absolute inspirations, had decamped and taken with him everything of value he could lay hold of; and more than desolate, that he was forced to ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... road, and a dip in the earth beyond. Wherever we looked, far or near, we saw masses of granite of all shapes and sizes, heaped irregularly on the ground among dark clusters of heath. An old furze-cutter was the only human figure that appeared on the desolate scene. Approaching him to ask our way to St. Cleer's Well—no signs of which could be discerned on the wilderness before us—we found the old fellow, though he was eighty years of age, working away with all ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... there is no such thing as peace. Why go to a strange land to drag out my miserable days? I had two sons, a daughter, a home, a fortune. I enjoyed consideration and respect; now I am like a tree stripped of its branches, bare and desolate. And why? Because a man dishonored my daughter; because my sons wished to seek satisfaction from this man, placed above other by his office; because this man, fearing them, sought their destruction ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... desolate were not comforted by the knowledge which the returned Crusader delighted to impart. They had been sacrificed to the pride which led husbands and fathers to sell their estates and squander vast sums of money, that they might equip a band of followers to lead in triumph to the ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... proclamation and hang General Butler. But for me, I got no letter; and these echoes began to sound in my ear like the distant outside rumblings of the storm to one whose hearthstone it has already swept and laid desolate. I was not desolate; yet I began to listen as one whose ears were dim with listening. I met Faustina St. Clair again with uneasiness. Not the torment of my former jealousy; but a stir of doubt and pain which I could not repress at the sight ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... away from the forbidding crater and the desolate beds of lava with a feeling of disappointment that ...
— Rafael in Italy - A Geographical Reader • Etta Blaisdell McDonald
... the ebb when Newton was left in this desolate situation. After some minutes passed in bitterness of spirit, his natural courage returned; and, although the chance of preservation was next to hopeless, Newton rose up, resolved that he would use his best efforts, and trust to Providence for their success. ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... in the whole universe but only ourselves. But the solitude may be a solitude with God. Up there, alone with the stars and the sky and the everlasting rocks and menacing death, Moses had for companion the supporting God. That awful path is not too desolate and lonely to be trodden if we ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... birthplace of the painter Millet. It is at the tip of Cape La Hague, which juts abruptly from the French coast into the English channel. The cape is a steep headland bristling with granite rocks and needles, and very desolate seen from the sea. Inland it is pleasant and fruitful, with apple orchards ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... they wakened to find on every tongue the news of the terrible earthquake at Messina, and for many days it was Italy the desolate that filled their minds and kept their ...
— Rafael in Italy - A Geographical Reader • Etta Blaisdell McDonald
... voice, ran up quickly, called off his dogs, and drove them away from Homer. For or some time he stood wondering how a blind man should have reached such a place alone, and what could be his design in coming. He then went up to him, and inquired who he was, and how he had come to desolate places and untrodden spots, and of what he stood in need. Homer, by recounting to him the whole history of his misfortunes, moved him with compassion; and he took him, and led him to his cot, and having lit a fire, ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... been animated by unaffected good-will and an affection that was, after its kind, genuine. While she felt that it would be no longer possible to receive these mild manifestations of regard while giving something so different, she still knew, with a half despairing sinking of heart, how blank and desolate her life would be without them. She must meet him once more, and word was sent that she would receive his good-by after dinner. Having safely passed this one interview, she hoped that she might be able to control the future, and either cease ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... departments of society—whose long life was one embodied charity—and who gave steadiness and object to those impulses in me which else might have ended, as they began, in dreams. I remember, when pausing on the slippery threshold of active life, and looking abroad on the desolate future, how the earnestness of my friends gave me courage, and emboldened me, with no patrons but themselves, to enter the profession of my choice by its most dim and laborious avenue, and to brace myself ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... Widow indeed, and desolate, trusteth in God and continueth in supplications and prayers ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... 'My fair one was not made for sights like this; and were she here'—his lip trembled—'I might bear me less as a Christian man should. My sweet Catherine! Take care of her, John; she will be the most desolate ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... unreality in his own experiences must have crept into his mind; unconsciously he had been questioning his own sanity. Now, at sight of the sandy waste where he and Rawson had labored, with the dark slopes of desolate craters looming ahead and a blot of burned wreckage directly below to mark the site of their camp, the horrible reality of ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... snack, and he never needed rest. Moreover, he was still too new to his position to do other than glory in the fact that he was a free being, doing a man's work, and earning a man's wage. Out in the Camp he had been too desolate to feel that, but here in Buenos Aires, at the very moment when the great city was waking to the knowledge of her queenship in the southern world—when the commercial hordes of the north were sweeping down in thousands of ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... it, and he would thereby avoid the suspicion of having been trading with the British camp. Rupert quite agreed with the justice of this reasoning. The sheik selected a route that led them through a desolate country, and they reached the elbow of the Nile without encountering any natives, save two or three small parties at wells, from the time they left camp. This course was dictated not only by the reason that he had given Rupert, but by a fear for ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... The slender brown hands spoke of life in the open air, and the glow of the cheeks told of burning suns. Her form, her attitude, spoke not only of instinctive grace, but of a certain wildness in admirable harmony with the surrounding scene. Somehow, the ruggedness of the mountains and the desolate solitudes of the plains ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... be remembered that most of those who had presented themselves had already undergone a sifting fierce as fire. Of the three millions in Rome, two millions at least were exiles for their faith, preferring to live obscure and despised in the shadow of God rather than in the desolate glare of their ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... the room a few chairs, with brocaded cushions rudely torn, leant broken and desolate against the walls. A small footstool, once gilt-legged and satin-covered, had been overturned and roughly kicked to one side, and there it lay on its back, like some little animal that had been hurt, stretching its broken limbs upwards, pathetic ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Heaven, to hear thy sad coronach?" Wallace started at this salutation. The bard, with the same emotion, continued; "No choral hymns hallow thy bleeding corpse—wolves howl thy requiem—eagles scream over thy desolate grave! Fly, chieftain, fly!" ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... builds an exquisite nest of moss on the side of some shelving cliff or overhanging rock. The other day, passing by a ledge, near the top of a mountain in a singularly desolate locality, my eye rested upon one of these structures, looking precisely as if it grew there, so in keeping was it with the mossy character of the rock, and I have had a growing affection for the bird ever since. The rock seemed to love ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... returned to the Inn, still the poor travellers were in the same situation: they looked so desolate, and could so indifferently make themselves understood, that Mrs. Ord good- naturedly invited them to drink tea with us. They most thankfully accepted the offer, and two ladies and two gentlemen ascended the stairs with us to our dining-room. The chaise ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... way becomes so difficult that you must leave the motor and continue on foot. The Matopos are a wild and desolate range. It is not until you are well beyond the granite outposts that there bursts upon you an immense open area,—a sort of amphitheatre in which the Druids might have held their weird ritual. Directly ahead you see a battlement ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... religious aversion to taking away life in any form, permit the increase of these desolate creatures till in the hot season they become so numerous as to be a nuisance; and the only expedient hitherto devised by the civil government to reduce their numbers, is once in each year to offer a reward for their destruction, when the Tamils and ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... events which had been already attempted by others. She read a few paragraphs, and became interested, and in no long time she was absorbed in the volume. When she had once taken it up, she did not lay it down. Even at other times she would have prized it, but now, when she was so desolate and lonely, it was simply a gift from an unseen world. It opened a view of a new state and community of beings, which only seemed too beautiful to be possible. But not into a new state of things ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... ill-treat children. It is only women, who adore them, that kill them and ill-use them accordingly. She will be my little benefactress, God bless her! I may love her more than I ought, being yours, for my home is desolate without her; but that is the only fault you shall ever find with me. There is my hand ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... very foundations on which it stood. And of the farmers who still remain nearly all are now members of our Brotherhood. When the Great Day comes, and the nation sends forth its call for volunteers, as in the past, that cry will echo in desolate places; or it will ring through the triumphant hearts of savage and desperate men who are hastening to the banquet of blood and destruction. And the wretched, yellow, under-fed coolies, with women's garments over their effeminate limbs, will ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly |
