"Dreariness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the end came in the wet dreariness of the little churchyard, and slowly the mourners departed, until at length were left only the parson, ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... clenched his fist at her. He probably thought that she had again broken a charm for which he had paid money. She spoke kindly and cheerfully, again and again; but he was either deaf or too ill to understand. To relieve the sense of dreariness, she went to work again. She thoroughly cleansed the pail, and filled it afresh from the brook, looking anxiously down the lane for the approach of some human creature, and then applied herself to rubbing ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... speech, too secret for really conscious thought, too holy to call from the innermost shrines of the heart; and there they linger and hover, demanding to be satisfied, and until they are satisfied there is void and dreariness within, be the sunshine never so bright without. And so Cornelia was a-hungered. She could fight against herself to save Drusus's life no longer; she could build around herself her dream castles no more; she must see him face to face, must hold his hand in hers, must ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... quite steady. The unmistakable friendliness in the girl's words and manner had sent a quick throb of joy to his heart. Her evident delight in his coming had filled him with rapture. He could not know that it was only the chill of the snowstorm that had given warmth to her handclasp, the dreariness of the day that had made her greeting so cordial, the loneliness of a maiden whose lover is away that had made ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... followed night, and night had followed day monotonously, without a change in the heartbreaking dreariness of their round. ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... usual in northern latitudes. The heavy rumbling of the wretched vehicle, the cramped position in which they were obliged to sit, the fatigue of a long day's walking without rest or refreshment, the dreariness of the road and chill aspect of the weather, combined to make this journey as miserable a one as it well could be. Yet it was only the very beginning of the troubles Elsie had brought upon ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... Dartmoor appears the head-quarters of dreariness and desolation, forming a mountain tract of nearly 80,000 acres in extent, strewed with granite boulders and fragments of rocks, and appearing to set cultivation ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 574 - Vol. XX, No. 574. Saturday, November 3, 1832 • Various
... feet an hour. Instinctively, coming back, they had taken him a devious course, and it was a desert in which no circling cabman hovered over possible prey. He paused on a corner and measured the dreariness; then he made out through the gathered dusk that he was in one of those tracts of London which are less gloomy by night than by day, because, in the former case of the civil gift of light. By day there was nothing, but by night there were lamps, ...
— The Altar of the Dead • Henry James
... the voice, and, stumbling up a step or two, entered a narrow door, which was with difficulty held open behind him, and which swung to with a loud noise the minute he crossed the threshold. This or the dreariness of the place in which he found himself disturbed him greatly. Bare floors, stained walls, meagre doorways, and a common pine staircase, lighted only by the miserable candle which the old woman had relit—were these the appointments of the palatial home ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... in the long days, and months, and years, that were to come? How should she drag through a useless and monotonous existence in this dull place? Even now, earnestly as she sought to do good in her mission of mercy, there were hours and hours of wretched, unspeakable dreariness and desolation. When her work was ended, when the fever was over, what would become of her then? That dim vision of the cloister and veil was dim as ever in the far distance. No ardent glow, no holy longing filled her heart at the thought, to tell her she had found ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... was spoken Steve recognized the slip. Watching Garry's eyes widen he knew that Garry had caught it also. For a moment a torrent of words trembled on the latter's lips. And then he swallowed and nodded shortly. The vague dreariness of his acceptance was fully as electrical as the threatened ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... down, but a steady fire which would go on burning. To me he talked much of his home. He used to walk beside my pony, and tell me about "his dear father"—how lovingly his voice used to linger over those words!—of the struggle it had been to leave him, of the dreariness of the day of embarkation. Years after he could hardly bear to recall it to mind. I remember his bright look the first day it became certain that we must visit England. "Why, then you will see my dear father, and tell him all about me!" I knew all his people ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... low mean portals of the Casino two red posters blazed under the electric lamps, with a cheap provincial effect.—and the emptiness of the quays, the desert aspect of the streets, had an air of hypocritical respectability and of inexpressible dreariness. ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... But the dreariness of the deserted house, with no one on the steps but Quiz, and all the furniture muffled in sheets, struck Gillian more than she had expected, though the schoolroom had been wakened up for her, a bright fire on the hearth, and ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... discerned hills, shrubberies, and gardens in the vicinity of the town, the appearance of which is not calculated to delight the traveller, for a large desert region of sand girdles both city and gardens, giving an air of dreariness ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... grass. The oxen stood around as if utterly dispirited, and would sometimes make a faint effort to pick up and eat some of the dry brush that grew around the desolate camp. This camp is now known to be in the northern part of Death Valley, but then they knew no names for anything, but if dreariness and absence of life, and threatened danger all around were any indication, they might well have named it Death Valley as was afterwards done by the party with ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... her pretty peach-coloured dress, and her "James," who walked about, indulging in gay reminiscences of his own wedding, and looking the most comfortable specimen imaginable of a worthy middle-aged "family man." Nevertheless, in spite of Mr. Thornycroft's efforts to cheer up the dreariness of the group, it was a great relief to everybody when, at the earliest reasonable time, the bride's small party started, and were at length assembled under the dark arches of Bloomsbury Church—darker than usual today, for the morning had gloomed over, and ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... passion; and she hinted at jealousy in the words, "If you are very happy, it is ill-natured of you not to tell me so, except 'tis what is inconsistent with my own." In his reply Swift dwelt upon the dreariness of his surroundings at Laracor, and reminded her that he had said he would endeavour to forget everything in England, and would write as ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... in the general confusion. There was something strange in the way the pair lived, lonely and unloved in their ancient home, amidst a crowd of ever-changing attendants, who succumbed one by one to the awful dreariness of the isolated life, and went away to give place to others, who, in their turn would give it up after six months or a year. And yet neither Greifenstein nor Clara ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... been very happy there, but many people had been very kind; and the place, with all its dreariness, had a strange, still charm, and was full of historic ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... wood, a dismal place where a mournful wind stirred, where trees dripped upon me and wet leaves brushed my face like ghostly fingers, while rain-sodden underbrush and bracken clung about my wearied limbs. Through this clammy dreariness I followed my tireless companion until suddenly his dim form vanished and I was groping amid damp leaves; but through this dense thicket came his hand to seize and drag me on until I found myself in a place of ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... could be supplied from one source only. It might have been thought by any other than a sternly tentative philosopher, that the denial of their natural food to human feelings would have provoked a reactionary desire for it; and that the dreariness of the street would have been gilded by dreams of pastoral felicity. Experience has shown the fact to be otherwise; the thoroughly trained Londoner can enjoy no other excitement than that to which he has been ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... up and poured into the church, warming up its cold dreariness, I lay down and slept, for I had not nearly finished the sleep so comfortably begun in the basement the ...
— Three Times and Out • Nellie L. McClung
... the tower. It was most pitiably forlorn of aspect, with a brick-paved floor, bare holes through the massive walls, grated with iron, instead of windows, and for furniture an old stool, which increased the dreariness of the place tenfold, by suggesting an idea of ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... refused to acknowledge the force of all she said, it had its effect, and she gradually lost her hold on her new belief. But losing that, she lost all hope. "Wormwood and gall" were her portion, and, while she fulfilled the outward duties of religion, dreariness and settled despondency took possession of her mind. ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... not improve as the night wore on: soon a thin, cold drizzle added to the dreariness and to Maurice de St. Genis' ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... Not for its dreariness, though it is very dreary. Not for its dampness, though it is very damp. Nor for its desolate condition, though it is as desolate and neglected as house can be. But chiefly for the unaccountable nightmares with which its interior ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... we passed up the river was calculated to give a good impression of the country, the zest being, however, without doubt, greatly heightened by the monotonous dreariness of a tempestuous voyage. The highlands and valleys, as we sailed up, had a verdant woody appearance, and were interspersed with rural and chateau scenery; herds of cattle remarkable for length of horn, and snow-white sheep, were grazing placidly in the lowlands. ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... the means to this end is the absolute suppression of the desires. To expand the circle of wants is necessarily to multiply temptations and therefore to increase the number of sins.' No material and intellectual advantages, no increase of human happiness, no mitigation of the suffering or dreariness of human life can, according to this theory, be other than an evil if it adds even in the smallest degree or in the most incidental manner to the sins that are committed. 'A sovereign, when calculating the consequences of a war, should ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... with—well, with other women when women, at hours of ease, could still care or count for him, but having never shared the place with any shuffling or snuffling stranger. It was a world of fidgets and starts, however, the world of his present dreariness—he alone possessed in it, he seemed to make out, of the secret, of the dignity of sitting still with one's fate; so that if he took a turn about or rested briefly elsewhere even foolish philanderers—though ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... rival's view by identifying it with Protagoras's. Thus does all spontaneity of thought, all freshness of conception, get destroyed. Everything you touch is shopworn. The over-technicality and consequent dreariness of the younger disciples at our american universities is appalling. It comes from too much following of german models and manners. Let me fervently express the hope that in this country you will hark ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... a particularly listless air. The leafless trees hung out long and drooping arms, that swayed to and fro in the biting wind. The sullen sky overhead added its tone of dreariness to the picture. There was no cheerful whir of factories and shops, no brisk steps of men going to and fro, though there were enough standing around in groups with scowling faces and compressed lips, or flushed ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... For birth but wakes the spirit to the sense 155 Of outward shows, whose unexperienced shape New modes of passion to its frame may lend; Life is its state of action, and the store Of all events is aggregated there That variegate the eternal universe; 160 Death is a gate of dreariness and gloom, That leads to azure isles and beaming skies And happy regions of eternal hope. Therefore, O Spirit! fearlessly bear on: Though storms may break the primrose on its stalk, 165 Though frosts may blight the freshness of its bloom, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... dreariness that strains Through the voice that calling, quivers, till a whisper but remains, "Yakonwita, Yakonwita, I am lost ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... as my sight could penetrate, to be pierced in all directions with innumerable creeks and pools, some of these latter being very great of extent; and, as I have before made mention, everywhere the country was low set—as it might be a great plain of mud; so that it gave me a sense of dreariness to look out upon it. It may be, all unconsciously, that my spirit was put in awe by the extreme silence of all the country around; for in all that waste I could see no living thing, neither bird nor vegetable, ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... cheerlessness of the gloom. The vehicle in which I rode was a fly on three wheels, the fourth having apparently been broken and taken off, causing the fly to sag on one side and drag on its axle over the muddy ground, the fly thus moving only at a foot's pace in a way calculated to enhance the dreariness of the occasion. The driver on the box in front of me was so thickly muffled up as to be indistinguishable, while the horse which drew us was so thickly coated with mist as to be practically invisible. Seldom, I may say, have I had a drive of ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... above it, nothing but marsh can be seen; so much so that it was difficult along the bank of the river to find a spot dry enough to camp upon, and I was, consequently, obliged to eat and sleep in my boat. The dreariness of this voyage can hardly be realized, and it was with feelings of delight that I landed at the Mission at the Pas where the Rev. Mr. ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... into an impropriety. There was something almost pathetic to me in this attempt to wrest gayety and excitement out of these dull materials; to fight against the blackness of that wintry sky, and the stubborn hardness of the frozen soil, with these painted sticks of wood; to mock the dreariness of their poverty with these flaunting raiments. It did not seem like them, or rather, consistent with my idea of them. There was incongruity deeper than their bizarre externals; a half-melancholy, half-crazy absurdity in their action, the substitution of ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... long before Beatrix dared trust her voice to speak, and then Miss Gannion was startled at the utter dreariness of her tone. ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... some one explain why orange-peel has such a close affinity for horses and sawdust? I have attempted to account for it by an elaborate stretching of the theory of chemical affinities. People crack peanuts at the CIRCUS, because the cracking of peanuts in its prosaic dreariness is in harmony with the cracking of jokes by the dreary clown. The clown himself is always hoarse, obviously because of his intimate association with the feats of horsemanship. Here are two cases in which the theory of affinities clearly ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 35, November 26, 1870 • Various
... length in this way because my sister made no answer. I saw her tired eyes gazing into the dreariness of Oakley Street and felt a pang strike through me. After a pause, in which again she said no word, I added: "So, when you write the letter, you might hint, perhaps, that I usually work all the morning, and—er—am not a very lively visitor! Then she'll understand, ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood
... Ruth in a voice that for dreariness was a replica of his own. "Do you think it's possible for us to get around it ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... Golden Gate, and continuing the tour of inspection, a valley of large dimensions is seen. The contrast between the rich green of almost faultless verdure, and the dreariness of the rocks left behind, is striking. It would seem as though nature had built up an immense barrier between the weird and the natural, so that the one could not affect the other. The Bible speaks of the intense comfort of the shade of a great rock in a dry and thirsty ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... in all their glory, and the night was calm and bright, and all we had to try our patience was a little frost. And there I slept; and there I often awoke; and in my intervals of wakefulness I gazed on the magnificence of the outspread skies, and mused on the dreariness of the surrounding wilderness, and thought of the stirring scenes through which I had passed in days gone by, and of the strange and death-like silent one in which I then was placed. "And what will the future be?" said I. "And here is my son; in the ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... chill and ominous. As the three most interested in the event came together on the road facing the point from which Hazen had decided to make his desperate plunge, the dreariness of the scene was reflected in the troubled eye of the lawyer and that of the still more profoundly affected Ransom. Only Hazen gazed unmoved. Perhaps because the spot was no new one to him, perhaps because an unsympathetic sky, a stretch of ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... when I was on my way to place a cross over my son's grave in the cemetery at Tara Hill. By this time, the grass was green, the trenches were filling up and in the cloudless blue sky larks were singing. The impression of dreariness was passing away, and the wounds on the breast ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... scant wardrobe and cooking utensils in a corner, behind a gray faded curtain. His pictures, simple pieces of canvas with tattered edges, nailed to the four walls, leaving hardly an inch uncovered, were the only decoration and furnished a most peculiar wall paper, which heightened the dreariness ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... reader's and my own mind's eye with that which next presented itself? I confess, so pleasant was the contrast then, that I still, in recalling that scene to memory, prepare myself, by the renewed vision of its dreariness and desolation, for the more grateful reception of an image than which earth contains none lovelier—it was a lovely girl. She fled thither for shelter: I did not see her until she was close by me; but never surely did man's eyes ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... Everybody was relieved when April opened with sunny showers and the long and severe winter seemed to be at an end. It had not made Bessie more in love with her life at Abbotsmead: there had, indeed, been times of inexpressible dreariness in it very trying to her fortitude. With the dawning of brighter days in spring she could not but think of the Forest with fresh longing, and she watched each morning's post for the arrival of that invitation to Fairfield which Lady Latimer had promised ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... and began to sing on notes too high for her, and tunelessly, as sign of her defiance, and the words of her song dealt with the dreariness of the moor and her determination to escape from it; but in the midst ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... nor a gaudy flower of summer gave to the air the perfume, or to the earth the colour of sweet life, to soothe and lighten the dreariness of the dead: such thoughts in the Middle Ages would have been almost pagan. Then the darkness of death was like the darkness of night here in this necropolis hewn in the side of the ancient rock, whose very substance ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... or folded peasant hut,— Some noontide echo sweetly voluble; Some song of toil reclining from the heat, Or low of kine, or neigh of tethered steeds, Or honest clamor of some shepherd dog, Laughter, or cries, or any living breath, To make inroad upon this dreariness. Methinks no shape of savage insolence, No den unblest, nor hour inopportune, Could daunt me now, nor warn my maiden feet From friendly parle, that am distract of heart, With doubt, desertion, utter loneliness. Death would ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... wish to leave. The winter peace of the little village had been like an enveloping anodyne to her weary body and mind. Removed from all her past, from the sights and the people that suggested those obsessing thoughts which had filled her waking hours with dreariness, she had sunk into the simple routine of Grosvenor as the tired body sinks into a soft bed. The daily sight of the snowy fields, the frozen hillsides black with forests, and the dry spirituous air, lifted her. Now and then the effect of the anodyne wore ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... and said in one of his published papers that never had he forgotten, through all the intervening years, the smell of the damp straw in which he was packed and forwarded like game, carriage-paid. "There was no other inside passenger, and I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and it rained hard all the way, and I thought life sloppier than I ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... uneventful dreariness with his platoon, Dunshie joined the machine-gunners, because he had heard rumours that these were conveyed to and from their labours in limbered waggons. But he had been misinformed. It was the guns that were carried; the gunners invariably walked, ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... hung upon them descended in little showers. From below, the dull roar of the sea came up to them in a muffled undertone, like a melancholy background to the slighter sound. There was an indescribable dreariness about it all which quickened the acute ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... army post was fully two miles from the town, she accepted proffered guidance to the famous Gilsey House and promptly fell asleep. The light of a new day gave her a first real glimpse of the surrounding dreariness as she stood looking out through the grimy glass of her single window, depressed and heartsick. The low, rolling hills, bare and desolate, stretched to the horizon, the grass already burned brown by the sun. The town itself consisted of but one short, crooked ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... of Ireland is depressing, but it is very beautiful; at least if your taste includes an appreciation of what is wild, magnificent, and sombre. Oppressed you must be, even if you are an artist, by its bleakness and its dreariness, its lonely lakes reflecting a dull, grey sky, its desolate boglands, its solitary chapels, its wretched cabins perched on hillsides that are very wildernesses of rocks. But for cloud effects, for wonderful ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... listening till the noise died away. Then she sank all limp in a chair and began to cry. There was wrath in her sobs, and bitter self-pity. She had made a fine tragedy scene, but the glory of it was short. She did not regret it, but an immense dreariness had followed on her heroics. Was there ever, she asked herself, a ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... stretched away the Long Island meadows, dark, soundless, apparently uninhabited. Only this spot of light broke the monotony of dreariness. A keen, chill, October wind sighed past, stirring the girl's delicate gown as its folds lay unheeded in the dust, fluttering her fur-lined cloak and shaking two or three childish curls from the bondage of her velvet hood. The driver swung himself down and ...
— The Flying Mercury • Eleanor M. Ingram
... of the witch crouching near the lantern, that repulsive creature in spectacles—Goya spectacles; the pattern hasn't varied since his days—these ladies and their companions, especially that anonymous one in a hood, coupled with the desperate dreariness of the background, a country dry and hard as a volcanic cinder, make a formidable ensemble. Zuloaga relates that the beldames screeched and fought in his studio when he posed them. You exclaim while looking at them: "How now, you ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... chairs, and an entirely inadequate square of carpet upon the floor. I have already said that it was a large room, and when I add that it was lighted only by two candles, which stood upon the table in the centre, some idea will be afforded of its general dreariness. ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... never shouted or coughed down—the House is too small, and nearly all the members are on friendly terms with each other. Until the adoption of the time limit business was in daily danger of being arrested by speeches of phenomenal length and dreariness. Anthony Trollope, who listened to a debate at Wellington in 1872, thought the New Zealand parliamentary bores the worst he had known. The discussions in Committee are often admirably businesslike, except when there ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... all that would enfeeble their dignity. To me, his eloquence now resembles those midsummer night dreams, in which all is contrast, and all is magical. Shapes, diminutive and grotesque for a moment, and then suddenly expanding into majesty and beauty; solitudes startling the eye with hopeless dreariness, and at a glance converted into the luxury of landscape, and filled with bowers of perpetual spring. The power of his contrasts still haunts me; Aladdin's palace, starting from the sands, was not more sudden, fantastic, or glittering. Where all seemed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... quietly, and I woke, refreshed, to the sound of summer rain pattering on the shrubs. The little oak avenue looked wet and dreary; but no amount of rain or outward dreariness could damp me, with the expectation of Mr. Hamilton's return; and I helped Chatty arrange our rooms ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... to the memory of five little brothers, ...to which I had been indebted for a belief that they all had been born on their backs, with their hands in their trousers pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence";—all these points, combined with the general dreariness of the landscape, the far-stretching marshes, and the distant sea-line, soon revealed to us that this was Pip's country, and we might momently expect to see the convict's head, or to hear the clank of his chain, ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... of hope about his pillow, unconscious that the javelins are already grasped which will send him to his long and dreamless sleep. The death of Wallenstein does not cause tears; but it is perhaps the most high-wrought scene of the play. A shade of horror, of fateful dreariness, hangs over it, and gives additional effect to the fire of that brilliant poetry, which glows in every line of it. Except in Macbeth or the conclusion of Othello, we know not where to match it. Schiller's genius is of a kind much ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... or fancied, refusal would be more unmaidenly than consent, and allowed Tom to lead her in. And there, within those dismal walls, the twilight sinking into a cheerless night of rain, encouraged by the very dreariness and obscurity of the place, she told Tom the trouble of mind their interview at the oak was causing her, saying that now it would be worse than ever, for it was altogether impossible to confess that she had met him yet again ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... mouldering furniture, discoloured wainscoting and ceiling, rusty stove, and ashy hearth, in all their inert neglect. Close to the door there stood a candlestick, with an extinguisher upon it; as if the last man who had been there had paused, after securing a retreat, to take a parting look at the dreariness he left behind, and then had shut out light and life together, and closed the ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... the Isle of Axholme, in the midst of a long stretch of fen country bounded by four rivers, and for a great part under water, Epworth was at that epoch dreariness itself. The Rev. Samuel's spirits must have sunk within him as the carts bearing his already large family and his few household belongings toiled through quagmire and morass; they must have fallen still farther when he gazed down the one straggling street at the rectory of mud ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... some bread and meat for supper: but the dreariness of our situation, together with the uncertainty under which we all labored, as to our future destiny, almost deprived us of the sense of hunger, and destroyed our relish ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... she could hardly tell how, that her father had been offered a government appointment connected with the Fiji Islands, and then that, glad to escape from the dreariness which had settled down on the house since his wife's death, about eighteen months previously, he had accepted it, and she had speculated much on her probable fate; but had never before been officially informed of his designs for himself ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... capable, and the number of capables who flatly declined the moment they heard they were to go down into the country, might have worn out the patience of a more patient man. And the capables willing to overlook the dreariness of the country in consideration of high wages rose up immediately and bid him good-day when informed the patient ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... night of the Declaration the Under-secretary announced in the House that the Russians were moving down the Baltic, the French toward the Straits: and the next morning dawned with the dreariness of last mornings and days. However, soon after 1 P.M., the Lord of the Sea landed at Bristol, his yacht being one of the swiftest things afloat; there heard the known facts; and thence wired to Beech's London ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... freed from all embarrassment, and being sought in marriage by many distinguished persons resolved to remain a widow no longer. The dreariness of her solitary life she might have borne, but her bodily infirmities had become intolerable. This chaste and saintly lady, after so many years of blameless widowhood, without even a breath of scandal, owing to her long absence from a husband's embraces, began to suffer internal ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... thunder-bolts. And now, we halt to see the sunset. The change that falls upon the dreary region and on the whole mountain, as its red light fades, and the night comes on—and the unutterable solemnity and dreariness that reign around, who that has witnessed ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... find, by the presence of the De Brezes,—but he had risen from it haunted by the conviction that the Fosses were not happy. Nobody, if one examined into it, was happy; all this pretense was pathetic to the point of dreariness. Gerald knew everybody's affairs to some extent, after spending most of his life in the same community, and a little city where gossip is an elegant occupation. This person had made bad investments; that one was crippled ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... and leafless dwarf trees, presented a ghastly and sun-stricken appearance; and here and there a ridge of dark-red heat-blistered rock jutted out above the jungle, and added by its rugged barrenness to the dreariness of the picture. Away to the north-east stretched the unbroken line of the N'dungu Escarpment, while far off to the south I could just catch a glimpse of the snow-capped top of towering Kilima N'jaro. The one redeeming feature of ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... seemed to catch for the first time the dreariness of his whole attitude—the dejection of his spare angular body and ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... what a pleasant biographer the boy is! He does not drag his hero down through the vale of life, amidst declining fortune, breaking health, dwindling away of friends, and the usual dreariness of the last few stages. Neither does the biography end with the death of his hero; and by the way, it is not very pleasant to have one's children contemplating one's death, even for the sake of writing one's life; but the biographer brings the adventures of his ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... almost always amiable and graceful, naturally produces intimate relations, and not unfrequently reciprocal attachments. One may conceive of such a thing as a cold, repulsive resistance to such attractions in the dreariness of a desert, or even within the four walls of a cell; but when such influences are not merely occasionally, but unceasingly brought to bear upon the senses, they too often leave impressions which, by a law of our sinful nature, ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... ground. And lo! 'tis Papsukul, our god of Hope,— With cheerful face comes down the fearful slope Of rugged crags, and blithely strides to where Our hero stands, amid the poisonous air, And says: "Behold, my King, that glorious Light That shines beyond! and eye no more this sight Of dreariness, that only brings despair, For phantasy of madness reigneth here!" The King in wonder carefully now eyes The messenger divine with great surprise, And says: "But why, thou god of Hope, do I Thus find ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... early hour in the morning until darkness and a storm appeared to be simultaneously drawing over us. I then hastened to the top of a small sandhill to ascertain whether there was any adjacent open space where even our tents might be pitched, and I cannot easily describe the dreariness of the prospect that hill afforded. No signs of the river were visible unless it might be near a few trees which resembled the masts of distant ships on a dark and troubled sea; and equally hazardous now was this land navigation, from our uncertainty as to the situation ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... Brookes!" said Arctura with a smile. "If it were not for you it would be dour dour.—You do not know, Mr. Grant—mistress Brookes herself does not know how much I owe her! I should have gone out of my mind for very dreariness a hundred ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... relapses into the dreariness of most ship-diaries, till they come into the Texel, when it is to a certain extent relieved ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... warming at Farmer Hare's were quite vanished. Watson, having showed by his mother-wit and presence of mind that he was a man to be relied upon, had now resumed his privilege of growling, and gave vent to many angry words at the roughness and unutterable dreariness of the way. ...
— Chasing an Iron Horse - Or, A Boy's Adventures in the Civil War • Edward Robins
... meanness had dogged his steps. It is piteous to dwell upon these squalid scenes. We need not recall the second-hand wardrobe that decked him out as a physician in this practice, unimaginably poor and dark and dingy. Fancy cannot conceive a greater dreariness or deeper destitution. He was so poor that his poorest patients felt compassion for his even greater poverty. Seeing one day his doctor's pockets bulging with papers, so that he looked like the man of letters in a then clever ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... clearer, more distinct, yet remained the same dead expanse of restless water, on which they tossed helplessly and alone. Nothing broke the grimness of it, not even a bird in the air, or a leaping fish; complete desolation met the eye in every direction, a threatening, menacing dreariness amid which each approaching swell seemed about to sweep them to destruction. The wind increased slightly with the dawn, buffeting the frail raft to which they clung desperately, and showering them with spray, while, as the light became stronger, they searched ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... nothing was so important as to give the poor something beautiful to look at and think about—a photograph or copy of some chef d'oeuvre, an objet d'art, lessons in literature and art which would uplift their souls from the dreariness of their surroundings. Three weeks as a factory girl had changed my beliefs. If the young society women who sacrifice one evening every week to talk to the poor in the slums about Shakespeare and Italian art would instead offer diversion first—a play, a farce, ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... city,' he continued, 'but I don't know as I blame them. We've been living dull, drab lives for sure. Let us liven things up a bit, and give our people something to look forward to during the week, and something pleasant to remember. It's the utter dreariness of life that kills people—not ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... use? Suppose she struggled with her, got rid of her, made her harmless, prevented her grandfather from flourishing his stick— what would be the use of it? It would be like killing one mouse or one snake in the boundless steppe. The vast expanse, the long winters, the monotony and dreariness of life, instil a sense of helplessness; the position seems hopeless, and one wants to do nothing—everything ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... and though there are sedate people who are contented with life as they see it, yet in most minds there is a fluttering of little tremulous hopes forecasting ease and freedom; and there are also many tired and dispirited people who are not content with life as they have it, but acquiesce in its dreariness; yet all who have any part in the world's development are full of schemes for themselves and others by which the clogging and detaining elements are somehow to be improved away. Sensitive people want to find life more harmonious and beautiful, healthy people desire a more ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Wilde's career. So long as the sunny weather lasted and friends came to visit him from time to time Oscar was content to live in the Chalet Bourgeat; but when the days began to draw in and the weather became unsettled, the dreariness of a life passed in solitude, indoors, and without a library became insupportable. He was being drawn in two opposite directions. I did not know it at the time; indeed he only told me about it months later when the matter had been decided irrevocably; but this was the moment ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... dreariness, a single plate is not butter, a single weight is not excitement, a solitary ...
— Tender Buttons - Objects—Food—Rooms • Gertrude Stein
... northern side of this narrow ravine, being in some measure exposed to the southern sun, is clothed with woods; the southern is a great wall of bare rock rising in terraces, or giant steps, that might well suggest the dreariness and desolation of a landscape in the moon. This barren expanse of naked rock is called the Szekler Stone, and was formerly surmounted by the castle of a Hungarian vice-voivode. Its ruins are still to be seen there. The lower slopes of this mountainside are cultivated now, and the ploughshare ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... than two or three days occurred, during the months of July and August, in which that heavy fall of snow took place which so commonly converts the aspect of nature in these regions, in a single hour, from the cheerfulness of summer into the dreariness of winter. Indeed, we experienced very little either of snow, rain, or fog: vegetation, wherever the soil allowed any to spring up, was extremely luxuriant and forward; a great deal of the old snow, which had laid on the ground during the last ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... you display your rusticity. You play, Jacob, like a bonnet-laird, or a sailor in a tavern. The same dulness, the same petty greed, cette lenteur d'hebete qui me fait rager; it is strange I should have such a brother. Even Square-toes has a certain vivacity when his stake is imperilled; but the dreariness of a game with you I positively lack ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and heavy vapour in the air—it seems to poison Eleanor as she inhales it in her lungs. A settled apathy pervades her spirit. For some moments she feels nothing, has not a thought—only a strange ringing in her head. The landscape before her looks desolate and terrible, an unredeemed dreariness darkens her soul like a London ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... paragraph, on page 182, beginning, "A visitor to Plymouth," gives us a picture better than that which hangs in the Pilgrim Hall. If the sternest foe of the Pilgrims across the water could have looked upon the exiles in their winter dreariness, hungry, wasted, dying, cowering beneath the accumulation of their woes, he might have regarded the scene as presenting but a reasonable retribution upon a stolid obstinacy in the most direful and needless self-inflictions. "Why could they not have been content to cling to the comforts of Old England, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... dusky and shadowed; the window-frames were traced on the blinds by the gas freshly lighted outside, and moving in the breeze with a monotonous dreariness. Carey stood a moment, and then her eyes getting accustomed to the darkness, she discerned a little heap lying curled up before the ottoman, her head on a great open book, asleep-poor child! quite worn out. Carey moved quietly across and sat down by her, longing ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... dreariness, the heaviness of a country dinner party! It seems to last four times as long as any other—parish, horses, or crops the only topic of conversation. How can you be interested in old Jane Smith's rheumatism when you have never heard of her before; ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... down in a colourless silver glow, which prophesied winter and storms, and to Duncan the grey dreariness seemed in keeping with his feelings. For Donald had gone back to the city that day, and when he had bidden the boy farewell the old man had also parted with his great aspiration. Donald had come to him the week before, and with his usual frankness made known ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... for all the general aspect of the country on this side of the valley of Mexico, suffice it to say, that there is a universal air of dreariness, vastiness, and desolation. The country is flat, but always enlivened by the surrounding mountains, like an uninteresting painting in a diamond frame; and yet it is not wholly uninteresting. It has a character ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... occupied, and slightly turning in his seat, fixed his dark eyes on her face, and remarked, "You seem to be quite comfortably situated, Mistress White; this pleasant fire and comfortable apartment contrast finely with the cold and dreariness without doors." ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... was something very touching in these evidences of the fresh country life which they had left for the dull atmosphere and steaming fogs of the metropolis. They told a sad tale of old associations broken, and old loves forsworn; of days of comfort and prosperity exchanged for the dreariness of poverty; and freedom, love, and happiness, all snapped asunder for the leaden chain of suffering to be forged instead. One could not help thinking of all those two hapless people must have gone through before they could have summoned courage to leave their own dear village, where ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... immorality, but produced, as in this instance, by the operation of regular causes, and is the result of the attractiveness of new modes of inquiry which invited application to the criticism of old truths, to be accepted or rejected after being fully tested; there is something to relieve the dreariness of the prospect. And when we look to the result, there is abundant cause for thankfulness. The agitation of free thought has produced permanent contributions to theology. Extravagant and shocking as some of the inquiries have ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... the pleasures of childhood, I cannot say that I knew many of them in those old Nuremberg days. Still I was not unhappy, nor even very dull. It may be that, knowing nothing pleasanter, I was not even conscious of the dreariness of the atmosphere I breathed. There was, at all events, a big old-fashioned garden full of vegetables and cottage-flowers, at the back of the house, in which I almost lived in Spring and Summer-time, and from which I managed to extract a great deal of enjoyment; while ...
— Monsieur Maurice • Amelia B. Edwards
... did he seem; but surely his existence here, admitting that it was to terminate with his last breath, had been not unkindly given; with no higher moral responsibilities than the beasts of the field, but with a larger scope of enjoyment than theirs, and with all their blessed immunity from the dreariness and ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... comparative defeat with fashion in its most distinctive moments of pleasuring (for one thing I wished to see how the dreariness of Madrid gaiety in the Paseo de la Castellana would compare with that of Roman gaiety on the Pincian) which made us the more determined to see a bull-fight in the Spanish capital. We had vowed ourselves in coming to Spain to set the Spaniards an example of civilization by inflexibly ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... contributions of Mill to economic science are very much more than developments—even though we understand that term in its largest sense—of any previous writer. No one can have studied political economy in the works of its earlier cultivators without being struck with the dreariness of the outlook which, in the main, it discloses for the human race. It seems to have been Ricardo's deliberate opinion, that a substantial improvement in the condition of the mass of mankind was impossible. He considered it as the normal state of things ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... whirl at this reply. That Paula should become indifferent to his existence from a sense of superiority, physical, spiritual, or social, was a sufficiently ironical thing; but that she should have relinquished him because of the presence of a rival lent commonplace dreariness to her cruelty. ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... so infinitely, so immeasurably lonely, with that awful, irretrievable day at Dover behind her, with all its dreariness, its silent solemnity, its weird finish in the vestry, the ring upon her finger, her troth plighted to a man whom she feared ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... number of ants, of a beautiful pink colour, that are found there. A few scattered palms, and some ill-built ruined huts occurring at intervals, and betokening the greatest wretchedness, alone relieved the dreariness of the remainder ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... her, saturated as she still was with Catholic spirituality, into the love of Good, the infinite of heaven. She conceived of charity, service to others, as the true occupation of life; but she cowered in the gloomy dreariness of finding in it no food for the fancy that lay crouching in her heart like an insect at the bottom of a calyx. Meanwhile she sat tranquilly sewing garments for the children of the poor, and listening abstractedly to the grumblings ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... of the timid young novice—are surely very finely painted. "I rushed to the shutter, and flung it back: there was no one in the sacristy. I looked into the garden; it was deserted, and the mid-day wind was roaming among the flowers." The dreariness is wonderfully described: only the poor pale boy looking eagerly out from the window of the sacristy, and the hot mid-day wind walking in the solitary garden. How skilfully is each of these little strokes dashed in, and how well do all together combine to make a picture! ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the limousine kept straight on in its headlong course, then, of a sudden, it swerved to the left. The gleam of a river—all silver with moonlight—struck up through a line of trees on one side of the car, the blank, unbroken dreariness of a stretch of waste land spread out upon the other, and presently, by the slowing down of the motor, Ailsa guessed that they were nearing their destination. They reached it a few moments later, and a peep from the window, as the vehicle ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... and purple halo reflected from their own smoke, and beyond that again by a zone of darkness which magnified the extent of the chapel, while it rendered it impossible for the eye to ascertain its limits. Some injudicious ornaments, adopted in haste for the occasion, rather added to the dreariness of the scene. Old fragments of tapestry, torn from the walls of other apartments, had been hastily and partially disposed around those of the chapel, and mingled inconsistently with scutcheons and funeral emblems of the dead, which they elsewhere exhibited. On each side of the stone ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... back to St. Eve, having made no step forward; and only one piece of advice did Lawyer Trefy give me, and that was to go to a tailor and get some new clothes, also to a barber and let him dress my hair. This I did, and, in spite of the dreariness of my prospect, I must confess I was pleased at the change made in my appearance; for youth, I suppose, always loves finery; and thus, although I could see no meaning in his advice, I was glad the lawyer ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... allow myself to dwell on the dark, the gloomy and melancholy side of life. Nor shall I try to thrill your heart, dear reader, with scenes of melancholy, sad as the things may be that I have to tell you. The worst of all demoniacal aberrations is a passion for wallowing in the mire of dreariness, of melancholy. Guard yourself, guard yourself against the dismal lime rods that threaten the free flight ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... of the place; their forms without grandeur, their ranges continuous and without elevation. The lake itself was certainly as fine as rocky shores and numerous islands could make it: but it was encompassed with such dreariness; it was deformed so much by its purgatorial island; the associations connected with it were of such a degrading character, that really the whole prospect before me struck my mind with a sense of painfulness, and I said to myself, 'I am already in Purgatory.' ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... to leave these walls. Yesterday, one of you, who was praised, replied, that "if she did well she hoped that efforts would be made to have her pardoned." I can feel the monotony and dreariness of your confinement, but I entreat you to believe that for many of you it would be the greatest misfortune to be taken from here too soon. You know, better than I can, the temptations that await you in the world; and you must now perceive how dark is ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... pleasant look of the country. It was a lovely evening, and quiet as summer; not a breath stirring. The leaves were all off the trees; the hills were brown; but the soft, warm light that still lingered upon them forbade any look of harshness or dreariness. These hills lay towards the west, and at Thirlwall were not more than two miles distant, but sloping off more to the west as the range extended in a southerly direction. Between, the ground was beautifully broken. Rich fields and meadows lay on all sides, sometimes level, and ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... get on. We've got what we like—to say nothing of having each other. We've the faculty of admiration and several capital convictions. We're not stupid, we're not mean, we're not under bonds to any kind of ignorance or dreariness. You're remarkably fresh, and I'm remarkably well-seasoned. We've my poor child to amuse us; we'll try and make up some little life for her. It's all soft and mellow—it ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... we are almost sure to mark and bring distinctly out its most peculiar and striking features; the scenes resembling those of our own quiet and happy land are passed over as tame and familiar, while the dreariness of the desert, the horrors of a "barren and dry land where no water is,"—the boundless plains, or the bare mountain-tops, the lonely shore or the rocky isle—scenes like these, are commonly dwelt upon and described. In short, the very spots which are least enticing, in reality, ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... knitting. The Admiral was in his big chair by the fire with his hands folded across his waistcoat and his eyes shut. The colorful work of the two women, the light of the fire, the glow of the little lamp at Cope's elbow, the warmth of the red furniture saved the room from dreariness in spite ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... better. To her unfortunately the life within the walls seemed of a quite blatant vulgarity; pervaded by lacqueys, by officials of every kind and degree, by too much food, too many clothes, by waste, by a feverish frittering away of time, by a hideous want of privacy, by a dreariness unutterable. To her it was a perpetual behaving according to the ideas officials had formed as to the conduct to be expected of princesses, a perpetual pretending not to see that the service offered ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... increases. Instead of sandy flats, we get verdant plains, and even rice fields, for the neighboring mountains spread their abundant streams over these high regions of the Celestial Empire. We do not complain of this change after the dreariness of the Kara-Koum and the solitude of Gobi. Since we left the Caspian, deserts have succeeded deserts, except when crossing the Pamir. From here to Pekin picturesque sites, mountain horizons, and deep valleys will not be wanting along the ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... Nothing could exceed in dreariness the appearance of the tracks through which we journeyed on this and the two following days. The creek on which we depended for a supply of water, gave such alarming indications of a total failure that I at one time had serious thoughts ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... the trenches are dreariness itself. Sometimes we get discouraged to the point of exhaustion, but these days are rare and when they do occur there is always an alleviation. In every trench, in every section, there is some one ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... Sir Charles's speech, which he counted to have been the best of his life, dealt briefly with the leading political topics of the day—Home Rule and the Radical programme—but soon passed to the personal issue. He recalled the change from the murky dreariness of March to the height of summer loveliness which reigned about them, and the change no less great in the moral atmosphere. He reviewed the history of the attacks that had been made, the avowed determination to prevent his being their member; and at the close he declared himself ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... days at Sitka there was nearly one continued fall of rain. The weather was cold and squally, snow had fallen, and the channels were traversed by restless masses which had broken off from the glaciers. In short nothing could exceed the dreariness ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... expostulated with the doctor for this rough interruption: "Now, sir," said he, "was not that rude?" The full rudeness is only apparent when we remember that Brentford was in that day a byword for dreariness and dirt—Thomson in the Castle of Indolence calls it "a town of mud." When Johnson visited Glasgow, however, he joined the troop of its admirers himself, and Boswell took the opportunity to put him then in mind of ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... the sitting-room were not drawn, and the family group was before them. The apartment was furnished with elegance and taste, but the very genius of dreariness seemed to brood over its occupants. The sombre colors of their mourning dresses seemed a part of the deep shadow that was resting upon them, and the depth and gloom of the shadow was intensified by their air of despondency and the pallor of their faces. ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... all the afternoon we passed through the marshes of Pondoovery; and Yann widened there, and flowed solemnly and slowly, and the captain bade the sailors beat on bells to overcome the dreariness of the marches. ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... good condition. Glen took them to his hiding place and spent a great deal of the afternoon cleaning off the rust. Then he began work on a rough block of stone which lay near and was greatly gratified at the result of his labors. So the afternoon slipped away without the dreariness of ...
— The Boy Scout Treasure Hunters - The Lost Treasure of Buffalo Hollow • Charles Henry Lerrigo
... the roads should be open, but she could not love the snow; it spoke to her of dreariness, savagery, and captivity, and she watched the dwindling stripes with satisfaction, and hailed the fall of the petty avalanches from one Eagle's Step to another as her forefathers might have rejoiced in the ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his acceptance of the Chief-Secretaryship in 1885, the book becomes the fascinating record of not one man, but two, and that without any intrusion whatever on the rights of the main figure. The dreariness of the Irish struggle is lightened by touch after touch that only Mr. Morley could have given. Take that picture of the somber, discontented Parnell, coming, late in the evening, to Mr. Morley's ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... which she woke. Before eleven o'clock Dick was out of the house, and this left Kate four hours of lonely idleness staring her blankly in the face. Sometimes she practised a little music, but it wearied her. She had courage for nothing now, and brandy and water was the only thing that killed the dreariness that ached in heart and head. Many half-pint bottles had succeeded the first, and, ashamed to admit her secret drinking, she now paid the landlady regularly out of her own money. When funds were low, a little bill was run up, and this was produced and talked over ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... that while there was shelter in all and food in all and some kind of fire and some kind of wine in all, yet one has left upon us an indescribable and unaccountable memory of mortality and decay, of dreariness in the rooms and even of tastelessness in the banquet. So any one who has enjoyed the stories of Dickens as they should be enjoyed has a nameless feeling that this one story is sad and almost sodden. Dickens himself had this feeling, though his breezy vanity forbade ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... look around. We had great hopes, however, of seeing the city in the evening, but we had to 'Stand by' and on no account leave camp. This was horrible. The tents were too dark to play cards, we had no reading matter or letters to answer, and once more seemed doomed to an evening of deadly dreariness. However, we decided to patrol the camp, my chum and I. As we walked off together we little dreamed that exactly one month from that day he was to be called upon to pay the supreme sacrifice of all. We walked round that camp, feeling ...
— One Young Man • Sir John Ernest Hodder-Williams
... of the day had gone by it had been this dreariness that had deepened on him, after the violent emotions of the morning. It was as if he already saw himself beaten down and crushed by those forces he had begun to recognize. And even this reminder that ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... atmosphere laden with soot and redolent of many blended odors, but after the fusty smell of the shop it was almost health-giving. In the large public-house opposite, with its dirty windows and faded signboards, the gas was already being lit, which should change it from its daylight dreariness to a ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... apparently existed. Fronting again to the north he looked upon the same grim barrenness, only that far off, against the lighter background of distant sky, there was visible a faint blur, a bluish haze, which he believed to be the distant sand dunes bordering the Arkansas. The intense dreariness of it all left a feeling of depression. His eyes turned and regarded the girl riding silently beside him. The same look of depression was visible upon her face, and she was gazing off into the dull distance with lack-lustre eyes, her slender ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... Yule (or Christmas time, especially), the dreariness of the weather, the length of the night, would naturally require something extraordinary, to wake and rouse men from their natural inclination to rest, and to a warm bed, at that hour. The summons, then, to the Wakes ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... wild-apple orchard,—places where one may have many thoughts and not decide anything. It is a scene which I can not only remember, as I might a vision, but when I will can bodily revisit, and find it even so, unaccountable, yet unpretending in its pleasant dreariness. When my thoughts are sensible of change, I love to see and sit on rocks which I have known, and pry into their moss, and see unchangeableness so established. I not yet gray on rocks forever gray, I no longer green under the ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... gray and raw, with a wet snow that changed to rain as it fell. The country roads were ankle-deep with mud, the wayside paths thick with sodden leaves. The dreariness of the countryside that Saturday afternoon suited his mood. He had ridden to the end of the street-car line, and started his walk from there. As was his custom, he wore no overcoat, but a short ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and lakes shaded by forest-trees of great size and beauty; and so silent is it, far removed from the din of cities, that it seems as if a single footstep would disturb the sleep of the dead. Here the neglectfulness and dreariness of the outer aspect of the grave are completely done away with, and the dead lie peacefully under ground carpeted with flowers, and shaded by trees. The simplicity of the monuments is very beautiful; that to Spurzheim has merely his name upon the tablet. Fulton, Channing, and ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... all these things, or ought to. What people need is simplicity and beauty of life—joy and hope and kindness. Anything which helps these things on is fine; anything which bewilders and puzzles and gives a sense of dreariness is simply injurious. I want to be told to be quiet, to try again, not to be disheartened by failures, not to be angry with other people, to give up things, rather than to get them with a sauce of envy and spite—the feeling of a happy and affectionate family, ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... getting up I had a rare game with Davie, whose shrieks of laughter at length brought Mrs. Mitchell with angry face; but I found myself kindly disposed even towards her. The weather was much the same; but its dreariness had vanished. There was a glowing spot in my heart which drove out the cold, and glorified the black frost that bound the earth. When I went out before breakfast, and saw the red face of the sun looking through the mist like ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... anything, but lay all day long on his sofa, fidgeting his nurse extremely—while, in her intense terror lest he might die, she fidgeted him still more. At last, seeing he really was getting well, she left him to himself—which he was most glad of, in spite of his dullness and dreariness. There ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik |
