"Desolation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with a few words only, the first year of our bereavement, as even now I shudder to recall the feeling of loneliness and desolation which took possession of us, when we found ourselves left alone in the home where everything reminded us so strongly of the departed one. There was a small apartment adjoining our usual sitting-room which my father was wont to call ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... when the floods of God's judgments sweep over the world. The captivity of the idol and the burst bubble of the monarchy bid us all make Jehovah our God and King. The vacant shrine and empty throne are followed by utter and long-continued desolation. Thorns and thistles have time to grow on the altars, and no hand cuts them down. What of the men thus stripped of all in which they had trusted? Desperate, they implore the mountains to fall on them, as preferring to die, and the hills to cover them, as willing ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... historic tragedies, in the figures of the Jewish martyrs of old Ukraina, Gogol can only discern "miserable, terror-stricken creatures." Thus one of the principal founders of Russian fiction set up in its very center the repelling scarecrow of a Jew, an abomination of desolation, which poured the poison of hatred into the hearts of the Russian readers and determined to a certain extent the literary ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... in a bleak voice of desolation and fright. "Dear heaven, that horrible Margot's confederate, the ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... of the most beautiful and accomplished of women, her husband the incumbent of exalted official position,—now, wealth, beauty, and position vanished; the grave hiding all she loved; sitting in silence and desolation, the memories of the long past almost her sole companions. When in the tide of time has there been truer realization of the words ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... the sound of the wind rushing through the ruins was like the moaning of the spirits of the dead inhabitants crying aloud for vengeance. The sounds increased in volume as we neared this scene of awful desolation, and the groans became a crescendo of shrieks which, combined with the crash of shell-fire, made one's ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... He accepted the desolation of his life, for the sake of all beyond life, greater than life, which looked down on him from the ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... backs upon the abomination of Keegark's desolation and went up the gangway together, looking very little like ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... certainly an advantage, as hostilities were necessarily to have continued somewhere during all that period, that all the bloodshed and desolation had been concentrated upon one insignificant locality, and one more contiguous to the enemy's possessions than to those of the united States. It was very doubtful, however, whether all that money and blood might not have been expended in some other manner ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... and thereby exposes herself to a portion of its plagues. In vain will it be urged as a plea of justification, that the authors of the revolution in France, having overturned the constitution of their own country, and spread desolation through the wide extent of it, menaced other nations, and us also; and that, therefore, Britain, acting on the first principle of nature's law, self-preservation, joined the allied powers for her own defense. Though the Presbytery are by ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... things lay below them, dimly to be seen from the brilliant room. Within was warmth, light, and gladness; without, a cold place of shadows, limned in the grey of discontent and the black of want and desolation. ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... asked himself, was Aster the central figure in the picture of desolation that he was painting? He had never given her more than a passing thought before; had never thought of her save as a frank, generous, sunny-hearted girl. Now he began to recall words that she had spoken of which he had never before taken ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... world, but nowhere did she find any trace of her bridegroom. At last she gave up the search in despair. She could not bear to return to her own castle where she had been so happy with her lover, but determined rather to endure her loneliness and desolation in a strange land. She took a place as herd-girl with a peasant, and buried her jewels and beautiful dresses in ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... curse!) and Tuhfeh rose to him and kissed his hands. He in turn kissed her hand and called down blessings on her and said, 'How deemest thou? Is [not] this place pleasant, for all its loneliness and desolation?' Quoth she, 'None may be desolate in this place;' and he said, 'Know that no mortal dare tread [the soil of] this place.' But she answered, 'I have dared and trodden it, and this is of the number of thy favours.' Then they brought tables and meats and viands and fruits ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... the single line, the slender siding, a waiting-room, an office, the station-master's cottage, and a tiny yard of gooseberries and sweet-william. There seemed no road to it from anywhere, and to increase the desolation the waves of a tarn lapped on their grey granite beach half a mile away. I waited in the deep heather till I saw the smoke of an east-going train on the horizon. Then I approached the tiny booking-office and took a ticket ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... about ten miles from the shore, and the general appearance of the island suggested a recent snowfall. As the sun shone upon a bare white surface, the sterile slopes and mountain sides were utterly devoid of vegetation, and presented a sad aspect of desolation, which reminded me of the barren range on the shores of ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... desolation. A silent tempest had installed itself therein, placing everything in violent unnatural positions. Not a single tree still preserved its upright form and abundant foliage as in the days of peace. The groups of pines recalled the columns of ruined temples. Some were still standing ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... "Boulevard" Street. We clattered along the brick-floored trench, whose walls were overhung with the dewy grass and flowers of the orchard—that wonderful orchard whose aroma had survived the horror and desolation of a two years' warfare, and seemed now only to be intensified to a softer ...
— Attack - An Infantry Subaltern's Impression of July 1st, 1916 • Edward G. D. Liveing
... less frequent, with darker gaps of night between; and the rare street-lamps shone on cracked pavements, crooked telegraph-poles, hoardings tapestried with patent-medicine posters, and all the mean desolation of an American industrial suburb. Farther on there came a weed-grown field or two, then a row of operatives' houses, the showy gables of the "Eldorado" road-house—the only building in Westmore on which fresh paint was freely lavished—then the company "store," the machine ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... hardship he would not himself endure. He travelled for some miles in a heavy rain; and the wind, which howled mournfully among the rocks, and whose solemn pauses were filled by the distant roarings of the sea, heightened the desolation of the scene. At length he discerned, amid the darkness from afar, a red light waving in the wind: it varied with the blast, but never totally disappeared. He pushed his horse into a gallop, ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... so as to try to make you feel that the management took a personal interest in you. It was part of their job. Archie beamed absently and went in to lunch. Lucille's empty seat stared at him mournfully, increasing his sense of desolation. ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... it should be removed. The light would never be so acceptable, were it not for that usual intercourse of darkness. Too much honey doth turn into gall, and too much joy, even spiritual, would make us wantons. Happier a great deal is that man's case, whose soul by inward desolation is humbled, than he whose heart is, through abundance of spiritual delight, lifted up and exalted above measure. Better it is sometimes to go down into the pit, with him, who, beholding darkness, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... have said; while a "trace" represents something by way of an effect, which represents the cause in such a way as not to attain to the likeness of species. For imprints which are left by the movements of animals are called "traces": so also ashes are a trace of fire, and desolation of the land a trace ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... all their faults, were generally men of peace and study; and these monuments show that they were improving the world, while the warriors were spending their lives to spoil it. In many parts of Italy and France, which had lain in desolation and ruin from the time of the Goths, the monks restored the whole surface to fertility; and in Scotland and Ireland there probably would not have been a fruit tree till the sixteenth century, if it had not been for their peaceful labours. ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 391 - Vol. 14, No. 391, Saturday, September 26, 1829 • Various
... accomplished. E'en to this day I remember with joy those half-consumed timbers, And I can see once more the sun coming up in such splendor; For 'twas the day that gave me my husband; and, ere the first season Passed of that wild desolation, a son to my youth had been given. Therefore I praise thee, Hermann, that thou, with an honest assurance, Shouldst, in these sorrowful days, be thinking thyself of a maiden, And amid ruins and war shouldst thus have the courage to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... spout through which the merchandise collected from a wide area streams northwards to the Mediterranean shore. It marks the extreme northern limit of the fertile Soudan. Between Khartoum and Assuan the river flows for twelve hundred miles through deserts of surpassing desolation. At last the wilderness recedes and the living world broadens out again into Egypt and the Delta. It is with events that have occurred in the intervening waste ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... one quick dive and the ice closed over her for ever. It gave one a sickening sensation to see it, for, mastless and useless as she was, she seemed to be a link with the outer world. Without her our destitution seems more emphasized, our desolation more complete. The loss of the ship sent a slight wave of depression over the camp. No one said much, but we cannot be blamed for feeling it in a sentimental way. It seemed as if the moment of severance from many cherished ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... the poet of the present and the future, and of universal humanity. He saw in the past the fallen fragments on which men were to build anew—august scenes of desolation, whose ruin taught men to work more wisely. He painted them as the accessory features and distant landscape of colossal pictures, in whose foreground stood figures soaring beyond the limits of their place, instinct with the spirit of the time in which the poet lived, yet lifted out of it ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... changeful Atlantic through Swakopmund's deep sandy streets and you get the key to the town. For it ceases utterly, abruptly; from the door of its last villa, fitted with perfect furnishings from Hamburg, the bitter desolation that is the Namib Desert stretches away from your, very feet. Marvelling at this place, I was particularly struck by the size of its cemetery. But I was not long puzzled. If you strike Swakopmund on a fine sunshiny day you will be pretty ...
— With Botha in the Field • Eric Moore Ritchie
... to produce that magic sensation of a dream's delight. Then when I awake in the morning and realize that you are far, far away, and read your latest letter again with pangs of the bitterest remorse, I dwell only upon those passages which hint of other joys quite apart from your interest in me. My desolation is that of a storm-tossed soul, seized by every breath of fear and tortured by every agony known to the forsaken. Have you no pity for me, Margaret? Drive no more shafts of anguish through my bruised and shattered heart, but gently ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... lost in the solitude of my own heart; and that as your rustling branches give the loud blast to the waste below—borne on the thoughts of other years, I can look down with patient anguish at the cheerless desolation which I feel within! Without that face pale as the primrose with hyacinthine locks, for ever shunning and for ever haunting me, mocking my waking thoughts as in a dream; without that smile which my heart could never turn to scorn; ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... the full story of the Australian Imperial Force in France. They were written to depict the surroundings in which, and the spirit with which, that history has been made; first in the quiet green Flemish lowlands, then with a swift, sudden plunge into the grim, reeking, naked desolation of the Somme. The record of the A.I.F., and its now historical units in their full action, will be painted upon that background some day. If these letters convey some reflection of the spirit which fought at Pozieres, their object is well fulfilled. The author's profits are ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... scarcely in its usual pretty order, and no flowers graced the table. Evidently no one was expected. "All the better," he assured himself; "and her desolation will probably incline her the more to listen to one who can bring golden gleams on ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... college peace, and punished severely by the subtraction of some dozens from the numerical rank of the unfortunate youth engaged in so high a misdemeanor. A congregation of four was not esteemed an open, avowed contempt of the laws of decency and propriety, prophesying utter combustion, desolation, and destruction to all buildings and trees in the neighborhood; and lastly, a multitude of five, though watched with a little jealousy, was not called an intolerable, unparalleled violation of everything approaching the name of order, absolute, downright shamelessness, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... of the law which disgraced the government of the new dynasty; though it must be granted, that with a view to perpetuate their relationship to the father of the faithful, the people preserved certain copies of the Pentateuch, even after the desolation of their land and the complete extinction of ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... spake; and the multitudes marvelled. 15 But some of them said, By Beelzebub the prince of the demons casteth he out demons. 16 And others, trying him, sought of him a sign from heaven. 17 But he, knowing their thoughts, said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and a house divided against a house falleth. 18 And if Satan also is divided against himself, how shall his kingdom stand? because ye say that I cast out demons by Beelzebub. 19 And if I by Beelzebub cast out demons, by whom do your sons cast them out? therefore shall they be your ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... that one night, when the darkness had mercifully fallen upon this scene of sylvan desolation, and its still more incongruous and unsavory human restoration, and the low murmur of the pines occasionally swelled up from the unscathed mountain-side, a loud shout and the trampling of horses' feet awoke the dwellers in the shanty. Springing to their feet, they hurriedly seized ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... in the gate; and, child as he was, he knew that if it were not stopped that little stream would soon become a cascade, a great sheet of water, a torrent, and then a terrible inundation which would end in desolation and death. So the little fellow did not hesitate. He determined to try and prevent the mischief. Reaching up to the hole he placed his finger in it, but soon he found that the wood was rotten, and that the small hole would soon become larger. So he took off his jacket and, tearing off a ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... long level of K Street—once a cheerful, busy thoroughfare, now distressing in its silent desolation. The turbid water which seemed to meet the horizon edge before us flowed at right angles in sluggish rivers through the streets. Nature had revenged herself on the local taste by disarraying the regular rectangles by huddling houses on street ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... children bereft, the desperate mother Furious curses the day on which she bore, and was born ... when Weary with hollower eye, amid the carcases totter Even the buriers ... till the sent Death-angel, descending, Thoughtful on thunder-clouds, beholds all lonesome and silent, Gazes the wide desolation, and long broods over the ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... is very voracious, and easily caught, as it is neither cunning nor shy. As it lives in desolation, and has little to do with men, it knows nothing of trickery, nor dreams of the plots laid against its royal freedom. An interesting account is given of the capture of an albatross by an officer of a French ship. It was a sunny, windy day, and the vessel ...
— Harper's Young People, April 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... even make a jest of—that outstanding Christian virtue; yet men not held by Christian dogma have joyously surrendered to the sublimity of that divine idea. Hear Shelley speak: "What nation has the example of the desolation of Attica by Mardonius and Xerxes, or the extinction of the Persian Empire by Alexander of Macedon restrained from outrage? Was not the pretext for this latter system of spoliation derived immediately from the former? ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... yes, there was one, probably not of the old familiar number; a stranger that might have crept in for shelter from the first blasts of winter, and now clung to an angle in the farther wall, its wings folded,—asleep, not dead. But Kenelm saw it not; he noticed only the general desolation of the spot. ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... image, they brought it to the feet of the goddess, washed it while displaying its wound, anointed it with sweet-smelling unguents, wrapped it in a linen and woollen shroud, placed it on a catafalque, and, after expressing around the bier their feelings of desolation, according to the rites observed at fanerais, placed ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... scented nothing perilous in the situation. In any event, Dorothy would wed whomsoever she decreed; Mrs. Hanway-Harley was deservedly certain of that. While this came to her mind, Richard the enterprising went laying plans for the daily desolation of ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... bore rank weeds of secession and treason, spreading poison and devastation over that portion of our fair national heritage. But from the same soil, amidst the ruin and desolation which followed the breaking out of the rebellion, there sprang up growths of loyalty and patriotism, which by flowering and fruitage, redeemed the land from the curse that had fallen ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... down and watched the Indians through the opening which served as a door. A few minutes later her captors pushed off their canoe, stepped lightly on board and started down the river. With fast-beating heart the girl watched them until they had disappeared from view. Then a terrible feeling of desolation came upon her. She was in the wilderness, alone, with untold dangers surrounding her. Had they deserted her? Had the Indians brought her there to perish? The thought was horrible. What had she done to deserve such a fate? With straining eyes she watched the river, hoping to see the Indians ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... and their fate were in his hands. In this belief they threw themselves upon the ground to implore his mercy, and to beg that he would grant them their lives. The father, touched with compassion at seeing them in such great desolation, did all that he could to console them; and, to mitigate their fears, he caressed their children, of whom three were still at the breast, and five others a trifle older, and promised their parents to give them all the help that was in ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... for coffee, but she was weak, and the fear of being again left in the station alone prompted her to accept the well-meant invitation. In fact, she had in her hours of desolation become quite fond of the little old man with the ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose
... than were the Scandinavian Sea Kings of the middle centuries, whose gods were patrons of rapine and cruelty, their heaven a vast, cloud-built ale-house, where ghostly warriors drank from the skulls of their victims, and whose hell was a frozen horror of desolation and darkness, to be avoided only by diligence in robbery and courage in murder. The descendants of these human butchers are now among the best exponents of the humanizing influence of the gospel of Christ. The report of the Superintendent of the remnants ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of loneliness, of insecurity, of unknown dangers lurking behind that crippled archway, or beneath the shadows of the projecting eaves, whence the perpetual drip-drip of soot water came as a note of melancholy desolation. ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... for herself. Over the little place which had always been neat even when it was forlorn there was now the stamp of desolation. The beds which had been seeded or planted a month before, and which should now have been weeded, trimmed, and hoed, were growing with an untended recklessness that had all the proverbial resemblance to moral breakdown. ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... the greater sphere. Imagine that flying island devoid of soil, of trees or vegetation, of water or air, of everything but barren, uncrumbled, homogeneous rock, and you have some idea of the unadorned desolation of Phobos, into which we were slowly sailing, or falling. There was not even the slightest trace of sand or scraps of rock, such as time must have abraded from even the hardest surfaces, but the reason for this ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... the terrible results of the war with Amaziah of Israel; King Uzziah had not yet restored the treasures and vessels of which the temples had been looted; and, in the quarter of the city where Amos sold his bread, oh! such poverty, such wretchedness, such desolation! ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... rejected: all their magazines of corn, dried fish, barrelled eels, and other provisions which they had for themselves, and other provisions for Quebec market, were all destroyed. Wherever he went with his troops desolation followed."—And this, reader, was the glorious General Wolfe, whom his barbarous nation, and our own fools have extolled to the skies in marble monuments, and his sons. Cockburn was nothing compared with this immortal plunderer and burner ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... presidents in the most marked manner. All of them lowered their heads, and the majority kept them lowered for a long time. The rest of the spectators, except the marshals of France, appeared little affected by this desolation. ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... far from denying the real force of the arguments in proof of a God, drawn from the general facts of human society, but these do not warm me or enlighten me; they do not take away the winter of my desolation, or make the buds unfold and the leaves grow within me, and my moral being rejoice. The sight of the world is nothing else than the prophet's scroll, full of "lamentations, ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... of the desert was safe from his terrors," and he "carried flame at his pleasure among the nomes of the south." Even while bringing desolation to his foes, he sought to repair the ills which the invasion had brought upon his own subjects. He administered such strict justice that evil-doers disappeared as though by magic. "When night came, he who slept on the roads blessed me, because ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... we may believe the old scholiast, his name was CAESIUS BASSUS, a much admired lyric poet, who was living on his own farm, at the time when Mount Vesuvius discharged its torrents of fire, and made the country round a scene of desolation. The poet and his house were overwhelmed by the eruption of the lava, which happened A.U. 832, in the reign of Titus. Quintilian says of him (b. x. chap. 1.), that if after Horace any poet deserves to be mentioned, Caesius Bassus ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... purple, the gelid water writhed nakedly. Spectral islands elbowed each other, to peer at us as we flitted past. Still more wraithlike the mainland, fringed to the sea foam with saturnine pine, faded away into fastnesses of impregnable desolation. There was a sense of deathlike passivity in the land, of overwhelming vastitude, of unconquerable loneliness. It was as if I had felt for the first time the Spirit of the Wild; the Wild where God broods amid His silence; the Wild, His ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... and killed each other out of hand. And back of all that I had the feeling that I was caught in the same fate that had shut in upon them; and was even worse off than they had been, since I had no one to fight my life away with but must take it myself when I found my solitude in that rotten desolation more ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... thousand years of total eclipse. Finally Macaulay's Australian surveying the ruins of St. Paul's Cathedral from a broken parapet of London Bridge; and a Moslem conqueror of America looking from the hill of the Capitol at Washington upon the desolation of what was once the District of Columbia. Shall the end be an Oriental renaissance with the philosophies of Buddha, Mohammed and Confucius welded into a new religion describing itself as the last word of science, reason ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... as the Hermit stood forth, and, crucifix in hand, poured forth his description of the blasphemy of the infidels, the desolation of the sacred places, and the misery of the Christians. He had seen the very ministers of God insulted, beaten, even put to, death: he had seen sacrilege, profanation, cruelty; and as he described them, his voice became stifle, and his eyes ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... hostile cruelty. Is it not shame, he that should punish sin, Defend the righteous, help the innocent, Carves with his sword the purpose of his will Upon the guarders of the virtuous, And hunts admired, spotless maidenhead With all the darts of desolation, Because she scorneth to be dissolute? Me that he leaves, I do not murmur at; That he loves her, doth no whit me perplex, If she did love him, or myself did hate: But this alone is it that doth me vex: He leaves me that loves him, and her pursues, That loathes him ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... rock, unsoftened by other vegetation than rusty moss and the dull green splashes of lichen, all this was hidden, except when the mist, white and delicate where we stood, but thick and black above, opened whimsically and delusively, as mountain mists will do, and gave us vistas into the upper desolation. After such momentary rifts the mist thickened again, and swooped forward as if to involve our station, but noon sunshine, reverberated from the plains and valleys and lakes below, was our ally; sunshine checked the overcoming mist, and it stayed overhead, an unwelcome parasol, making our August ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... noticing, however, how truly it is a mirror of the author's heart, and of all the fond pictures of early friends and early life forever present there. It seems to us as if the very last accounts received from home, of his "shattered family," and the desolation that seemed to have settled upon the haunts of his childhood, had cut to the roots one feebly cherished hope, and produced the following exquisitely ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... trees, the utter desolation of the scenery, more impressive than in a view from the southern shore of the Great Salt Lake. The broad plain which intervenes between its margin and the foot of the Wahsatch Range is almost entirely lost sight of; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... that house, And all deserted! Desolation broods Upon those silent walls, and all is dead Within, save ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... disaster. What a most strange spectacle it is! Here he is, shut up in this wee corner of the realm like a rat in a trap; his royal shelter this huge gloomy tomb of a castle, with wormy rags for upholstery and crippled furniture for use, a very house of desolation; in his treasure forty francs, and not a farthing more, God be witness! no army, nor any shadow of one; and by contrast with his hungry poverty you behold this crownless pauper and his shoals of fools and favorites tricked out in the gaudiest silks and velvets you shall find in any Court in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... felt as if some great flood were sweeping her off her feet. She clutched mechanically at anything to save herself. Knight was there. He stood between her and desolation; but if he had spoken then—if he had said he wanted her, and begged her to stay, she ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... the head-waters of the river and the Kluchefskoi volcano, and nearly all are situated in picturesque locations, and surrounded by gardens and fields of rye. Nowhere does the traveller see any evidences of the barrenness, sterility, and frigid desolation which have always been associated ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... peats set up to dry, with many openings through and through, windy drains to gather and remove their moisture. Here and there was a tuft of dry grass, a bush of heather, or a few slender-stalked, hoary heads of CANNACH or cotton-grass; it was a land of devoted desolation, doing nothing for itself, this bountiful store of life and warmth for the ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... when not many feet from the summit of the slope, their climb having been made so much longer by its laborious nature; and as they stopped, the action of both was the same: they gazed about them nervously, startled by the utter loneliness and desolation of the spot, which might have been far away in some Eastern desert, instead of close to the cliffs and commons about which they had ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... was a picture of desolation. It was surveyed by two detachments, and was found to be covered with black and porous stones. The entire vegetation which could thrive on this mass of lava consisted of two or three kinds of rugose grass, which grew on the rocks, scanty bushes, especially the paper-mulberry, the 'hibiscus,' ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... Through the forest vast and vacant— Rung that cry of desolation; But there came no other answer Than the echo of his crying, Than the echo of the woodlands, "Minnehaha! Minnehaha!" All day long roved Hiawatha In that melancholy forest, Through the shadow of whose ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... have pierced the clouds that hung over me: even though it were but a passing ray, it would have enabled me to catch a momentary glimpse of the Beloved of my heart—but this was denied me. Instead, it was night, dark night, utter desolation, death! Like my Divine Master in the Agony in the Garden, I felt that I was alone, and found no comfort on earth or ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... that could be felt. The skipper himself took to the fore rigging, and placed one of the watch handy to the wheel; finally he called all hands up very quietly, and the men hung on anyhow. One drift after another passed by in dim majesty, and the spectacle, with all its desolation, was one never to be forgotten. After half an hour or so, Blair glanced up and noticed a dim form sliding down the shrouds; then the skipper rushed aft, for the helmsman could not see him, and then came a strange dark cloud of massive texture looming through ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... answered that," he said with desolation in his voice, "I'd probably be lying anyway. You've got to trust ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... and the two brothers looked out of Gluck's little window in the morning. The Treasure Valley was one mass of ruin and desolation. The inundation had swept away trees, crops, and cattle, and left, in their stead, a waste of red sand ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... gleams with ore, And fair Sudarsan's heights explore. Then on to Devasakha(735) hie, Loved by the children of the sky. A dreary land you then will see Without a hill or brook or tree, A hundred leagues, bare, wild, and dread In lifeless desolation, spread. Pursue your onward way, and haste Through the dire horrors of the waste Until triumphant with delight You reach Kailasa's glittering height. There stands a palace decked with gold, For King Kuvera(736) wrought of old, A home the heavenly artist planned And fashioned with his cunning hand. ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... to say which we found most diverting, the long, long landscape that divided as we passed, through it and closed up in the rear, leaving only the shining iron seam down the middle; the beautiful, undulating prairie land; the hot and dusty desolation of the plains; the delicious temperature of the highlands, as we approached the Rockies and had our first glimpse of Pike's Peak in its mantle of snow: the muddy rivers, along whose shores we glided swiftly hour after hour: the Mississippi by moonlight—we all ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... country in these terms:—"These wretches, sir, in France and England, cannot march half a mile in any direction without finding a house where food can be had and lodging; whereas such is the noble desolation of our magnificent country that in many a direction for a thousand miles I will engage that a dog shall not find shelter from a snow-storm, nor a wren find an apology for breakfast."] miles— northwards for six hundred; and the ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... Western Continent are found the ruins of what are pronounced by all scholars to be the highest civilization, and the most ancient in time, of any in the New World. There it arose, flourished, and tottered to its fall. Its glory had departed, its cities were a desolation, before the coming of the Spaniards. The explorer who would visit them finds himself confronted with very great difficulties. Their location is in a section of the country away from the beaten track of travel. Their sites are overspread with the luxuriant vegetation of tropical lands, ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... French Government allow a considerable portion of their own population actually to starve, or be obliged to emigrate to other parts of France, there to live the life of nomads at the expense of England, while the deserted provinces are given over to desolation? ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... cry reached him, went to his heart, but he did not turn; he went on through the wet, green little garden, and the curling leaves, where he had found peace and had left desolation. ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... you are in the fires and awful slaughter of Napoleon's wars. The flower of France is being pitilessly cut down for the lust of one man's ambition; and when that is spent, and the wail of the widowed country pierces heaven with its desolation, a costly asylum is built for the handful of soldiers who are left—and the great ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... current, and we could distinguish its course only so far as the first bend, a comparatively short distance away. Nowhere appeared the slightest evidence of life, either on water or land; all was forlorn and dead, a vista of utter desolation. Sam was standing up, his whole attention concentrated on the ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... transporting He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation works of death, destruction and tyranny already begun and tyranny already begun with circumstances of cruelty with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy unworthy the and perfidy scarcely head of a civilized nation. paralleled ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... says Massillon, "is a devouring fire, which tarnishes whatever it touches; which exercises its fury on the good grain equally as on the chaff, on the profane as on the sacred; which, wherever it passes, leaves only desolation and ruin; digs even into the bowels of the earth, and fixes itself on things the most hidden; turns into vile ashes what only a moment before had appeared to us so precious and brilliant; acts with more violence and danger than ever, in the time when it was apparently smothered up and ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... the furthest horizon. His canoe skirts the eastern shore of Michigan, where the forest rises like a wall from the water's edge, and as he advances onward, an endless line of stiff and shaggy fir trees hung with long mosses, fringe the shore with an aspect of desolation. Passing on his right the extensive Island of Bois Blanc, he sees nearly in front the beautiful Island of Mackinaw rising with its white cliffs and green foliage from the broad breast of waters. He does not steer toward it, for at that day the Indians were its only tenants, but keeps along the main ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... fourth we resumed our hazardous journey toward the rebellious city. Had it not been for the intrepidity of our leader, and the utmost confidence of the men in his ability to accomplish whatever he undertook, it would have been impossible to proceed. Fearing as we did the desolation and sorrows of "Libby Prison," ignorant of the forces we might soon encounter, and the ambuscades that might be laid for us, we nevertheless pushed bravely on, because we were bound to follow our chief, be the consequences ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... glare. The noise of the street annoyed him and made him childishly fretful, and the solitude of his own room seemed still more dreary and depressing. He went mechanically through the daily routine of his duties as if the soul had been taken out of his work, and left his life all barrenness and desolation. He moved restlessly from place to place, roamed at all times of the day and night through the city and its suburbs, trying vainly to exhaust his physical strength; gradually, as his lethargy deepened into ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... ladies insisted on their taking it. There have been instances where the delicate hand of woman hath kindled a young man's taste for strong drink, who after many years, when the attractions of that holiday scene were all forgotten, crouched in her rags, and her desolation, and her woe under the uplifted hand of the drunken monster who, on that Christmas morning so long ago, took the glass from her hand. And so, the woman stands on the abutment of the bridge, on the moon-lit night, wondering if, down under the water, there is ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... St. Marius, according to a custom received in many monasteries before the rule of St. Bennet, in imitation of the retreat of our divine Redeemer, made it a rule to live a recluse in a forest during the forty days of Lent. In one of these retreats, he foresaw, in a vision, the desolation which barbarians would soon after spread in Italy, and the destruction of his own monastery, which he foretold before his death, in 555. The abbey of La-Val-Benois[1] being demolished, the body of the saint was translated to Forcalquier, where it is kept with honor in a famous collegiate church ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... was deeply touched. How could she help being so in presence of the desolation and sorrow for which she felt herself and husband ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... women, children and old people in Paris and in France, wherever the war has brought desolation and distress. To France you owe a debt. It is not alone the debt you incurred when your great grandfathers fought for liberty, and to help them, France sent soldiers, ships and two great generals, Rochambeau and La Fayette. You owe France for that, but since ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... arrangements with Peggi Bullet and Shon, she took her way across the bridge. The year that had passed since Cardo had left her, with its varied experiences and trials, the bitter sense of loneliness and desertion, the pains and the delights of motherhood, the desolation and sorrow of bereavement, all had worked a change in the simple girl's character, that now surprised even herself, and she thankfully realised that her troubles had at all events generated a strength which enabled her to act for herself and attend to matters of business which had before been ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... cast across the plain, than, with a loud whirring sound, the locusts rose in the air. Notwithstanding the number which had been destroyed, the mass appeared in no way diminished in size. Onwards they flew to their unknown destination; but what a scene of desolation met our eyes across the country on which they had rested! For miles, as Donald had feared, not a blade of grass was to be seen. As far as the eye could reach, where the evening before the ground had been green and smiling, it now looked brown and parched up, as if a fierce fire ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... storms, the scene of human things Appear'd before me; deserts, burning sands, Where the parch'd adder dies; the frozen south; And desolation blasting all the west With rapine and with murder. Tyrant power Here sits enthroned in blood; the baleful charms Of superstition there infect the skies, And turn the sun to horror. Gracious Heaven! What is the life ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... believe that the writer of it would be judged to be mad from its contents. Mr. Kennedy had told the whole story of his wrongs, and had told it well,—with piteous truthfulness, as far as he himself knew and understood the truth. The letter was almost simple in its wailing record of his own desolation. With a marvellous absence of reticence he had given the names of all persons concerned. He spoke of his wife as having been, and being, under the influence of Mr. Phineas Finn;—spoke of his own ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... tell you for several days, because you have been so good, and I have heard you praying here at night that God would be merciful to me; but I waited until I had strength to be calm. I have lain here day after day, and night after night, face to face with desolation and despair, and now I have grown accustomed to the horror. I know that in this world there is no escape, no help, no hope; so—the worst is over. When you consent to fate, and stretch out your arms to meet death, there is no more terror, only ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... the last remnant of a doomed and nearly vanished race. Few, indeed, are the men who now have, or evermore shall have, the chance of seeing the mightiest of American beasts, in all his wild vigor, surrounded by the tremendous desolation of ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... gulping convulsively. He was thoroughly unstrung. The cold, desperate mood had passed. In its place came the old feeling of desolation. He was a child, aching for sympathy. He wanted to tell his troubles. Punctuating his narrative with many gestures and an occasional gulp, he proceeded to do ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... Clement, "that he had grace enough to whisper. Yes, my poor boy, it is only too true. I was sent for to find your father dying of delirium tremens-you just born, your mother nearly dead, the desolation of your sisters unspeakable. He was only thirty-six, and that vice, together with racing, had devoured him and all the property that should have come to his children. I think he tried to repent ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... there on the high tree-tops the vivid golden light quivered and made rainbows in the spiders' webs. There was a strong, almost stifling smell of resin. Then I turned into a long avenue of limes. Here, too, all was desolation and age; last year's leaves rusted mournfully under my feet and in the twilight shadows lurked between the trees. From the old orchard on the right came the faint, reluctant note of the golden oriole, who must ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... herded wolves, bold only to pursue; The obscene ravens, clamorous o'er the dead; The vultures, to the conqueror's banner true, Who feed where Desolation first has fed, And whose wings rain contagion: how they fled, When like Apollo, from his golden bow, The Pythian of the age one arrow sped And smiled! The spoilers tempt no second blow; They fawn on the proud feet that spurn them ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... for them but their Master's promise. Their eyes had been dimmed by their sorrowful hearts, so that they could not see the truth which He had been trying to reveal to them; and His departure had presented itself to them only as it affected themselves, and therefore had brought a sense of loss and desolation. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... seldom converse in the wastes, for there is something about the silence of the wilderness which discourages speech. And no land is so grimly silent, so hushed and soundless, as the frozen North. For days they marched through desolation, without glimpse of human habitation, without sight of track or trail, without sound of a human voice to break the monotony. There was no game in the country, with the exception of an occasional bird or rabbit, nothing but the white hills, the fringe of alder ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... Eleusis,—all of whom passed to the underworld, were restored for a season, and then retaken. Thus is my sorrow repeated without end. All things are taken from me. Night treads upon the heels of Day, the desolation of Winter wastes the fair fruit of Summer, and Death walks in the ways of Life with inexorable claims. But at the last, through Him, my First-begotten and my Best-beloved, who also died and descended into Hades, and the third day rose again,—through Him, having ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... dagger to her soul to see him attired in the blood-stained uniform of the enemies of her country, yet she knew that he had been driven by the most inexorable circumstances to assume the hated garb. But now he was overtaken with twofold desolation—he was a slave, and beyond the reach of one kind word of solace from her, for whom he had sacrificed all, save and except that which might be borne to him, through the ordinary channels, across ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... Sunday) Colonel Napier and his Unknown set out on horseback on an excursion to the ruins of Italica. As they sat on a ruined wall of the Convent of San Isidoro, contemplating the scene of ruin and desolation around, "the 'Unknown' began to feel the vein of poetry creeping through his inward soul, and gave vent to it by reciting with great emphasis and effect" some lines that the scene called ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... enjoyments through lies; who wrings Nature and all her resources to put a musket on his shoulder; who employs his intellect to hasten the hour of his death and to create diseases out of pleasures? When the rake of pestilence and the ploughshare of war and the demon of desolation have passed over a corner of the globe and obliterated all things, who will be found to have the greater reason,—the Nubian savage or the patrician of Thebes? Your doubts descend the scale, they go from heights to ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... breath and listened; but all that he heard now to break the silence of the vast desolation was the weird howl of some far away koshinee—the dreaded buffalo wolf of ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... that, when they compare their present conditions with others that are worse, Heaven may oblige them to make the exchange, and be convinced of their former felicity, by their experience; I say, how just has it been, that the truly solitary life I reflected on in, an island of mere desolation should be my lot, who had so often unjustly compared it with the life which I then led, in which had I continued, I had in all probability been exceeding prosperous ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... had still neither written to nor heard from, and she dared not hope to meet him. She fancied a wish to have tidings of his marriage: it would be peace; if in desolation. Now that she had confessed and given her pledge to Emma, she had so far broken with him as to render the holding him chained a cruelty, and his reserve whispered of a rational acceptance of the end between them. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... your people, so as to master them, and burn them at their leisure, and then, after having thinned their numbers by a hundred ambuscades in the woods and grass, to pursue you in your retreat even to Montreal, and spread desolation around it." [Footnote: Lamberville to La Barre, 9 Oct., 1684, in N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 260.] La Barre was greatly pleased with this letter, and made use of it to justify himself to the king. His colleague, Meules, on the other hand, ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... shrieking, impetuous sentimentalists go to work in the wrong way. They are the kind of people who would provide pigeon-cotes and dog-collars for the use of ferrets. I grant that the condition of many London streets is appalling; but make a house-to-house visitation, and see how the desolation is caused. Wanton, brutish destructiveness has been at work everywhere. The cistern which should supply a building cannot be fed because the spring, the hinge, and the last few yards of pipe have been chopped away ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... crown, of the liturgical year, was then made at the masses, in which the gospel of the last Sunday after Pentecost, the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, repeats, as well as the Gospel according to Saint Luke, recited on the first Sunday in Advent, the terrible predictions of Christ on the desolation of the time, on ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... to her child, as Keery's peaceful, shrouded face was hidden under the coffin-lid and carried away to Greenfield Hill. Pitiful whisper! happily all-unmeaning to the child, but full of desolation to the mother, floating with but one tiny plank amid the wild wrecks of a midnight ocean, and clinging as only the desperate can cling to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... nearly the same time Russell, returning to Gladstone a letter from Sumner to Cobden, expressed his sorrow "that the President intends a war of emancipation, meaning thereby, I fear, a war of greater desolation than has been since the revival of letters[861]." John Stuart Mill, with that clear logic which appealed to the more intelligent reader, in an able examination of the underlying causes and probable results of the American conflict, excused the Northern ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... kinsfolk, in the little churchyard where she used to gather daisies in her childhood! It takes a great deal of love to keep down the 'climbing sorrow' that swells up in a woman's throat when such memories seize upon her, in her moments of desolation. But if a foreign-born woman does willingly give up all for a man, and never looks backward, like Lot's wife, she is a prize that it is worth running a risk to gain,—that is, if she has the making of a good woman ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... woe-begone looks which tickled me, so much as the helpless, drowned-rat-like aspect we had all assumed—all except our chief, whose tall, strong figure holding a candle over his dishevelled head looked like the spirit of destruction presiding over a scene of desolation. ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... buried in the cellar. I may say that I was unsuccessful: the discovery of many human bones in the ruins had set the authorities digging for more. They had found the treasure and had kept it for their honesty. The house had not been rebuilt; the whole suburb was, in fact, a desolation. So many unearthly sights and sounds had been reported thereabout that nobody would live there. As there was none to question nor molest, I resolved to gratify my filial piety by gazing once more upon the face of my beloved father, if indeed our eyes had deceived ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... fear cometh as desolation, and their destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress cometh upon them, then shall they call upon God, but he will not answer." Proverbs, ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... trail where they found him, and, stuck in a candle-box, over the heap of stones above him, flutters lonesomely in the desolation of the mountain-side the little muslin rag that was once a flag. They call the hill on which he sleeps "Look ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... lodged, temporarily at least; but none of it appeared to have found its way to this particular place. Nakedness and dreariness were the two words which best described the island; the only interruption to its solitude and desolation being occasioned by the birds, which now came screaming and flying above the heads of the intruders, showing both by their boldness and their cries, that they were totally unacquainted ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... Magellan and Franky Drake fled away incontinent and would not be conjured back; though, indeed, the original discoverers would have had yet further occasion to gaze at one another "with a wild surmise" if they had seen shrieking companies "shooting the chutes." But here was vastness, here was desolation, here was silence; jagged ice masses in the foreground and boundless expanse beyond, solemn and mysterious. The Arctic Ocean was even ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... corruption on a country miles in front, which they could not even discern. The infantry went over the top throwing bombs and piled themselves up into mounds of silence. Nations far away toiled day and night in factories—and all that they might achieve this repellant desolation. The innocence of the project made one smile—a handful of women sailing from America to reconstruct! To reconstruct will take ten times more effort than was required to destroy. More than eight hundred years ago William ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... Carlos' room, with many cigarettes stuck behind his ears and in the band of his hat. When these were gone he grubbed for more in the depths of his clothing, somewhere near his skin. Puffs of smoke issued from his pursed lips; and the desolation of his pose, the sorrow of his round, wrinkled face, was so great that it seemed were he to cease smoking, he would die ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... distinction," said he; "no ambition. My original wish was to pass my life in easy, quiet obscurity, with her whom I loved. I was disappointed in my wish; she was removed, who constituted my only felicity in this life; desolation came to my heart, and misery to my head. To escape from the latter I had recourse to Chinese. By degrees the misery left my head, but the desolation of ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... gate that led to the house, and tied his horse inside. Here was the same desolation and silence that he had beheld at his own home. The grass on the lawn, although withered and dry from the intense drought that had prevailed in Kentucky that summer, was long and showed signs of neglect. The great stone pillars ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... No one need ever feel dull in Brighton. If I could have liked billiards, or cared for the theater, or enjoyed the brilliant shops on the crowded pier, with its fine music, I might have been happy enough; but I was miserable with this aching pain of regret and the chill desolation of a terrible loss. I tried the Aquarium. If fishes could soothe the heart of man, solace might be found there; but to my morbid fancy they looked at me with wide open eyes of wonder—they knew the secrets of the sea—the faint stir of life in the beautiful anemones had lost ...
— The Tragedy of the Chain Pier - Everyday Life Library No. 3 • Charlotte M. Braeme
... farther—was a piece of waste land, in the northern suburbs of the city. High up on the left I could discern a light or two, piercing the gloom of the sky; and I knew they shone from the wind-mills of Montmartre. In every other direction lay darkness; desolation swept by the night wind; silence broken only by the dismal howling of far-off watch-dogs. I might have been ten miles from Paris: even as I was a thousand miles from the man who had risen so happily ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... one or two seasons in my life during which I have felt as if the darkness of sorrow and desolation that crushed my inmost heart could never pass away, until death should make me cease to feel the ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... all these violent changes and arbitrary acts were the total ruin and desolation of the country, and the flight of the inhabitants: the said Warren Hastings having found every place abandoned at his approach, even by the officers of the very government which he established, and seeing ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... sat in rueful mood, a small antique beau of an old man in a coat which had once been blue silk, wearing breeches, the original colour of which no man could tell, and without his wig, his clear bald pate shining amidst the surrounding desolation like an ostrich's egg. Beside these worthies stood two trembling way—worn mules with drooping heads, their long ears hanging down most disconsolately. The moment we came in sight, the ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... led me to my room, succeeded in soothing me into calmness and I told her the cause of it. And she saw me to bed with sympathetic caresses and, after she left, it all broke out afresh and I cried myself to sleep in utter desolation and wretchedness. Of course the matter got out and my father began the book. He was sixty years old, not an indiscriminate reader, but a man of kind and boyish heart. I felt a sort of fascinated curiosity ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... Fred pointed to the trampled garden, the litter in the park, and the desolation visible at the Hall, where window casements had been either smashed or taken off, and rough barricades erected; so that where all had once been so trim and orderly, ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... Aunt Amy was as yet only a name to them, Aunt Beth soon faded into a pleasantly vague memory, but Aunt Dodo was a living reality, and they made the most of her, for which compliment she was deeply grateful. But when Mr. Bhaer came, Jo neglected her playfellows, and dismay and desolation fell upon their little souls. Daisy, who was fond of going about peddling kisses, lost her best customer and became bankrupt. Demi, with infantile penetration, soon discovered that Dodo like to play with ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... a woodsman, and alert in every sense like the creatures of the wild themselves, his wits were awake almost before his body was, and his instincts were even quicker than his wits. The desolation and the savage cold of the wilderness had admonished him even in that terrifying moment. As he leaped out in desperate flight, he had snatched with him not only the blankets, but his rifle and cartridge-belt from where they stood by the head of the bunk, and also ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... looked round on every side, and hope gave way before the scene of desolation. Immense branches were shivered from the largest trees; small ones were entirely stripped of their leaves; the long grass was bowed to the earth; the waters were whirled in eddies out of the little rivulets; ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... of unrest and discouragement, Iver appeared, and his presence lit up the desolation in which she was. The sight of him, the sound of his voice, aroused old recollections, helped to drive away the shadows that environed her, and that clouded her mind. There was no harm in this, and yet she was uneasy. Cheerful as she was when he was present, there was something feverish in this ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... south of Algeria, where at midday one sometimes has a feeling of being lost upon a waste of metal, gleaming, angry, tigerish in color. Here, in Egypt, both the people and the desert seem gentler, safer, more amiable. Yet these tombs of Sakkara are hidden in a desolation of the sands, peculiarly blanched and mournful; and as you wander from tomb to tomb, descending and ascending, stealing through great galleries beneath the sands, creeping through tubes of stone, crouching almost on hands and knees in ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... waters overflowing, cast down to the earth with the hand." Its capital might well deserve to be called "a bloody city," or "a city of bloods." Few conquering races have been tender-hearted, or much inclined to spare; and undoubtedly carnage, ruin, and desolation followed upon the track of an Assyrian army, and raised feelings of fear and hatred among their adversaries. But we have no reason to believe that the nation was especially bloodthirsty or unfeeling. The mutilation ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... disappointed in my expectations of going on shore. The visiting surgeon advised my husband and me by no means to land, as the mortality that still raged in the town made it very hazardous. He gave a melancholy description of the place. "Desolation and woe and great mourning—Rachel weeping for her children because they are not," are words that may well be applied to ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... defence of the burghers-of their patriotism and their courage. Frederick's eyes glistened with emotion, and in the fulness of his thankful heart he promised to stand by his faithful Berliners to the end. But when D'Argens told of the desolation which the Russians had wrought amongst the treasures of art in Charlottenburg, the brow of the king grew dark, and with profound ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... moving picture players and the other train passengers found a scene of desolation awaiting them as they alighted. But it was not as bad as might have been expected, and no one had been killed. In fact, no one was hurt, save the fireman and engineer of the passenger train, and ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... farther. Above the drumming of the wind the roar of the sea became more audible every moment; the spume was thicker; the end of the valley, ordinarily the meeting-place of sand and grass and small streams with their yellow flags and forget-me-nots, was a desolation of white foam beyond which against the cliffs showing black in the nebulous moonlight the breakers leapt high with frothy tongues. Mark thought that they resembled immense ghosts clawing up to reach the summit of the cliff. It ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... had plunged into a reckless life, as into a whirlpool of destruction,—that he was among those associates, of high rank socially, of nearly the lowest morally, whom he had formerly known at college. Here was triumph for the prudent father,—desolation to the loving woman,—and to Everett, what? Pain, keen pain, and bitter anxiety,—but no quailing of the heart. He had too much faith in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... his cartoons that first arise in one's recollection. And it is (with but one or two exceptions) exclusively in his cartoons that Leech showed his tragic power. "The Poor Man's Friend" (1845), in which Death, gaunt and grisly, comes to the relief of a wretch in the very desolation of misery and poverty, tells as much in one page as Jerrold's pen, with all its strength and intensity, could make us feel in a score. Ten years later the same idea was splendidly developed and magnificently realised in the cartoon entitled "General Fevrier turned Traitor," ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... the sacraments was what one might call the natural one of making more visible the shadows which enveloped his path, as well as stimulating his instinctive efforts to pierce through them. After the rapturous joy which succeeded confession and absolution, a period of desolation and dryness heavier than he had ever known at once set in. Perhaps he had expected the very reverse of this. At all events, it was not many days before it drew from him the complaint that in leaving Concord he had also left behind him the great interior sweetness which ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... love and your womanhood and end this wholesale murder. Remember the great war in Europe! What did it accomplish? Nothing except to fill millions of graves with brave sons and beloved husbands. Nothing except to darken millions of homes with sorrow. Nothing except to spread ruin and desolation everywhere. Are you going to allow this ghastly business ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett |
