"Dreary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wifie, I 'm waefu' to leave thee, To leave thee sae lanely, and far frae me; Come night and come morning, I 'll soon be returning; Then, oh, my dear wifie, how happy we 'll be! Oh, cauld is the night, and the way dreigh and dreary, The snaw 's drifting blindly o'er moorland an' lea; All nature looks eerie. How can she be cheery, Since weel she maun ken I am parted ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... and dreary. There was nothing to be seen all around but hills and mountains, all covered with brakes and ferns, and moss and heather. There were no woods, no pastures, no fields, and no farm houses. It was the dreariest-looking country I ever saw. In the ...
— Rollo in Scotland • Jacob Abbott
... more dreary than a great city shut up and full of sleeping people. Only think of it! half a million of human beings all lying in darkness, unconscious of both happiness or misery, just as if sleeping in their tombs, only that the first glow of sunshine brings them to ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... beside them. Mr. Saville had come before her, and was at the door to receive her. She could not very well bear the presence of any one, nor the talk of cold-blooded arrangements. It seemed to keep away the dreamy living with Humfrey, and was far more dreary than the feeling of desolateness, and when they treated her as mistress of the house that was too intolerable. And yet it was worth something, too, to be the one to authorize that harvest supper in the big barn, in the confidence that it would be anything ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of the Cape man, used as he was to the open spaces of both sea and land, these dingy blocks of brick houses, three and four stories in height, all quite alike in smoke and squalor and even in the pattern of the net curtains at their parlor windows, made as dreary a picture as he had ever imagined. He thought of that pale, slender, violet-eyed girl coming back to this ugly block at night, after long hours at the restaurant, having to look forward to nothing more beautiful, in all probability, inside the house where she ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... I never saw them. Pardon me, major, your rifle is slipping," and leaning forward the Engineer straightened up the endangered weapon and braced it with his foot. "A dreary landscape this," he added, glancing out at the barren stretches of rolling ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... Sykes's boarder had started for the Maine coast where three unmusical, but sympathetic maidens were waiting to help him pass the dreary ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... painful and disturbing to one's whole physical and moral framework. I'll say this much for Starr: The first thing he did when he got up was to shoot the head off the snake, whose tail continued to buzz in a dreary, aimless way when there was absolutely nothing to buzz about. Snakes ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... position, and I pleased myself with drawing one from that. There this mystery stands, gazing only upon what is rich and fertile and instinct with life, the life-giving Nile rolling before it, and the fields of golden grain in view. Its back turned resolutely to the dreary sandy waste of death behind; and so it said to me as plainly as if it could speak, This is your lesson: let the dead past bury its dead; look forward only upon that which has life and grows steadily towards perfection. It is upon ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... little Kirsajee to Golgotha, their Place of Skulls, which is a dreary, treeless field, encompassed round about with a blank wall; and they laid him naked in a stone trough on the edge of a great pit, and left him there, betaking them, still solemnly veiled and mute, to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... embankments to jump over, and all, everything, was that awful olive-drab color till the souls of the new-made soldiers cried out within them for a touch of scarlet or green or blue to relieve the dreary monotony. Sweat and dust and grime, weariness, homesickness, humbled pride, these were the tales of the first days of those men gathered from all quarters who were ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... primitive fashion. The pipes used for opium-smoking in various parts of the East have small bowls; the drug is too costly to be used otherwise than in small portions at a time, and too powerful to need more than a few whiffs to produce the opium-smoker's dreary delirium. ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... no going back, for she had given her word, and must stay there until October. The months before her stretched out into a dreary waste. She thought of Miss Ainslie gratefully, as a redeeming feature, but she knew that it was impossible to spend all of her time in the house—it ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... oneself, yet is it comfortless; but introduce the idea of formality, and in dance and song you may find satisfying delight. Form is the talisman. By form the vague, uneasy, and unearthly emotions are transmuted into something definite, logical, and above the earth. Making useful objects is dreary work, but making them according to the mysterious laws of formal expression is half way to happiness. If art is to do the work of religion, it must somehow be brought within reach of the people who need religion, and an obvious means of achieving this is to introduce into ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... little after daybreak, the caravan was ready, and we soon got under way. Travelling with tedious slowness, aggravated by the dreary monotony of the road and the sandy plain, constantly crossing dry, shallow watercourses, lined on both sides by fringes of stunted acacias or other salsolacious plants, we at last arrived at a hot spring of sweet water, called Golamiro, and rested here for several hours ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... set, and found them in a dreary place full of rocks and blasted trees half-way up the mountain. They were so tired they could hardly walk, and longed to lie down anywhere to sleep; but, remembering the hunter's story of the bear, they were afraid to do it, till Tommy suggested climbing a tree, after making ...
— The Louisa Alcott Reader - A Supplementary Reader for the Fourth Year of School • Louisa M. Alcott
... groaned Sam, and he was right. The raft had disappeared completely, and all around them was a dreary waste of water, ...
— The Rover Boys on the Great Lakes • Arthur M. Winfield
... creeks. At this village the river widens to nearly a mile in extent; the low grounds become wider, and they as well as the mountains on each side are covered with pine, spruce-pine, cottonwood, a species of ash, and some alder. After being so long accustomed to the dreary nakedness of the country above, the change is as grateful to the eye as it is useful in supplying us with fuel. Four miles from the village is a point of land on the right, where the hills become lower, but are still thickly timbered. ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... come here to make the money wherewith he could further his gigantic combinations. All this mystery was part of his childish cunning. I hardly knew whether to box the little creature's ears, to box my own, or to laugh. I compromised with a smile on the last alternative, and baccarat being a dreary game to watch, I strolled off to the nearest ecarte table, and, to justify my presence in the room, backed one of ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... in your chin," said the cold voice, and poor Bridget, dropping suddenly down from the heights of heroic deeds to dreary commonplace, felt that this was ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton
... can't one always be fifteen, and believe everything one is told?" and she sighed. "Seven years and nothing done yet. Work, work, and nothing coming out of the work, and everything fading away. I think that life is very dreary when one has lost everything, and found nothing, and loves nobody. I wonder what it will be like in ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... These were dreary waitings upon Providence. The most spirited and sturdy murmured most at their forced inactivity. And even the women, whose heroic spirits had been proof against the severest cold, confessed their tempers fluctuated with the ceaseless variations of the barometer. They complained too that the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... that 18 Morgan Avenue was a dreary structure, appearing as if it had been standing twenty years too long. The wooden stairs creaked as he rested his weight on first one sore foot and then the other. Room 36 was at the top of the five-story ...
— Wanted—7 Fearless Engineers! • Warner Van Lorne
... that one finds in young house-surgeons or civilians. Thanks to the (Boer) war, many of them had reached out to the ends of our earth, and spoke of the sister nations as it did one good to hear. Consequently the interviews—which are as dreary for the reporter as the reported—often turned into pleasant and unpublished talks. One felt at every turn of the quick sentences to be dealing with made and trained players of the game—balanced men who believed in decencies not to be disregarded, confidences not to ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... "You're in a dreary airt of the house," he said apologetically, "but I hope you may find it not uncomfortable. Doom is more than two-thirds but empty shell, and the bats have the old chapel above you. Oidhche mhath! Good night!" ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... bright appear, And add new splendour to the year; Improve the day with fresh delight, And gild with joy the dreary night. ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... Montreal did the trick, and a committee of Dutchmen arrived to look over their Minnesota holdings with a view of selling out. Mr. Hill took them over the line—a dreary waste of slashings, then a wide expanse of prairie broken now and again by scrub-oak and hazel-groves; deep gullies here and there—swamps, sloughs and ponds, with assets of brant, wild geese, ducks ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... of this dear dream, They told a dreary tale that he had died, While to her father's hut, like some fair gleam Of sunlight, with some heavenly thought, she hied, And now both day and night, how sorely sighed, And inly groaned the poor bereaved maid, Nor could restrain ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... its waters extend over an area of a hundred square leagues to the foot of the salt mountains and basaltic rocks which encircle it. One can detect no trace of vegetation or animal life; not a sound is heard upon its shores, impregnated with salt and bitumen; the birds avoid flying over its dreary surface from which emanate deadly effluvia, and nothing can exist in its bitter, salt, oily, and heavy waters. Not a breeze ever stirs the surface of this silent sea, nothing moves therein save the thick load of asphalt which now and again ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... suddenly snatched away, by her evil star, from the grandparents who adore her, and transferred to the care of an aunt and uncle. Monsieur Rogron and his sister Sylvia. A hard, gloomy couple, these two; retired shopkeepers, who live in a dreary house in the back streets of a dreary country town. Their celibacy weighs heavily upon them; they are miserly, and absurdly vain; morose, and instinctively full ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... and without anybody by thy side, thou shalt wander through diverse countries, O wretch, thou shalt have no place in the midst of men. The stench of pus and blood shall emanate from thee, and inaccessible forests and dreary moors shall be thy abode! Thou shalt wander over the Earth, O thou of sinful soul, with the weight of all diseases ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... than a mile from it; the elevation, 700 feet above the sea, stunts the trees and limits the garden produce to the hardiest vegetables. The house is gaunt and hungry-looking."[27] The place realized Tennyson's words, "O, the dreary, dreary moorland." Here Carlyle read books, gave himself over to silent meditation, and wrote for his bread, although a man who possessed an adequate income could not have been more independent in thought than he was, or ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... the pathless forest dreary day and darksome night, Reft of all save native virtue, clad in ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... dissolved the charm, the disenchanted earth Lost all her lustre. Where her glittering towers? Her golden mountains where? All darkened, down To naked waste a dreary vale of ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... the equinox had begun to moan about the castle walls. The men were busy getting in the last of the fruits of the earth and storing them up against the winter need, whilst the huntsmen brought in day by day stores of venison and game, which the women salted down for consumption during the long dreary days when snow should shut them within their own walls, and no ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green
... honor attended the name of the Constant Prince, the Portuguese Regulus; and seldom as the Spanish admire anything Portuguese, a fine drama of the poet Calderon is founded upon that noble spirit which preferred dreary captivity to the yielding up his father's conquest to the enemies of his country and religion. Nor was this constancy thrown away; Ceuta remained a Christian city. It was held by Portugal till the house of Aviz was extinguished in Dom Sebastiao, and since ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is, if individual rights in the citizen, the town, the county, the State, shall not be vindicated as beyond all price, and defended with the utmost jealousy, at whatever cost, the spirit of liberty must have already died out, and the dreary process of centralization be already far advanced. It will thus be evident that the preservation of individual rights is the only possible preventative of centralization, and that free society has no interest to be compared for ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... dreary weeks that followed I was glad that I had had that dinner at sunset and moonrise with him down in the cove at the spring that was away from all the world. All during the days that never seemed ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... herself along by the bed carefully. With trembling steps she crossed the threshold and went into the sitting-room. The feeble light of breaking day struggled in, just clearly enough to enable her to distinguish things. The room looked dreary, clothing was strewn about, the chairs were out of their places, and the remains of the evening meal were still on the table. A moist heat pervaded this scene of disorder. The suffocating air seemed laden with a sense of the ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... the eyes, dim and hollow, glare unutterable things: and the grin of the fleshless lips is the gibbering mirth of the corpse torn from its cerements, and erect, as though the last trump had sounded, and the dead had arisen. No fresh flowers bloom in these dreary spots; no merry birds twitter there; no streamlets lapse sweetly with musical murmurs beneath the waterflags or the drooping boughs of trees. See! the blighted and withered plants are like the deadly nightshade—true flowers of war, blooming, or trying to bloom, on ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... three worlds, the physical, the psychic and the heavenworld; therefore his hair (aura) shows the three colours. He has the sevenfold vision also, indicated by the seven pupils in his eyes. Volumes of unutterably dreary research, full of a false learning, have been written about these legends. Some try to show that much of the imagery arose from observation of the heavenly bodies and the procession of the seasons. But who of the old bards would have ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... now evening, and the waste of water that lay stretched before the eye, though the softness of summer was shed upon it, had the wild and dreary aspect that the winds and waves lend to a view, as the light of day is about to abandon the ocean to the gloom of night. All this had no effect on Bluewater, however, who knew that two-decked ships, ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... raised up in different parts of Europe to break the yoke of the papacy and republish the gospel of grace. When the Evangelical Revival, after blessing England, was about to break into Scotland and end the dreary reign of Moderatism, there was raised up in Thomas Chalmers a mind of such capacity as completely to absorb the new movement into itself, and of such sympathy and influence as to diffuse it to every ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... whispered little bits of information about one and another. Then the whole shore seemed to be covered by enormous sheds, and later on it got farther off, and then the land lay distant, and it was very low and marshy and most dreary-looking, and I fancied it was becoming more difficult to keep my footing at the window; and just when Alister had been pointing out a queer red ship with one stumpy mast crowned by a sort of cage, and telling me that it was a light-ship, our own vessel began to creak ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... everything more closely. There was often little pleasure in the inspection. About half a mile from the church, Daisy's attention was drawn by one of these poor houses. It was very small, unpainted and dreary-looking, having a narrow courtyard between it and the road. As the gig was very slowly going past, Daisy uttered an exclamation, the first word she had uttered in a ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 2 • Susan Warner
... Dick had finished he took her out into the dreary little garden and tried to pacify her. She was generally good with him, but the heat, and teething, had made her fretful, and he had to walk up and down the cinder path till his arms ached almost beyond bearing. She went to sleep at last, and Dick sat down ...
— Dick Lionheart • Mary Rowles Jarvis
... on the borders of Etruria, in the marshy plain studded with hills that followed the Tiber, rose the city of Rome, the centre of the Roman people scattered in the plain. The land was malarial and dreary; but the situation was good. The Tiber served as a barrier against the enemy from Etruria, the hills were fortresses. The sea was but six leagues away, far enough to escape fear of pirates, and near enough to ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... vain That men call life, by you now safely pass'd, Is death indeed such punishment and pain?" Replied she: "While on earth your lot is cast, Slave to the world's opinions blind and hard, True happiness shall ne'er your search reward; Death to the good a dreary prison opes, But to the vile and base, who all their hopes And cares below have fix'd, is full of fear; And this my loss, now mourn'd with many a tear, Would seem a gain, and, knew you my delight Boundless ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... behold, the dreary winter's gone, The mantle of old age has time withdrawn. The sunbeam glitters in the morning dew, O'er hill and vale youth's bloom is ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... I did nothing but sit in the house, feeling dreary, and sigh, While ever arrived some fresh tale of decisions more foolish by far and presaging disaster. Then I would say to him, "O my dear husband, why still do they rush on destruction the faster?" At which he would look ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... not observe him, for she was bending tenderly over the white, wrinkled face, which lay upon the small, scanty pillow. John thought "how small and scanty they were," while he almost shuddered at the sound of his footsteps upon the uncarpeted floor. Everything was dreary and comfortless, and his conscience reproached him that his old father should die so poor, when he counted ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... trees can be studied at any time, even in winter, when the world outside is bare and dreary, and the evenings are long, and afford fine opportunity for such amusement. And what is more important still, the sheets prepared as we have shown can be sent through the mail to distant parts of the land, where the trees displayed on them do not grow, and ...
— Harper's Young People, June 1, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... me and behind me; when the past lies in the distance in dreary monotony, like a city of the dead; when the future offers me naught; when I see my whole being enclosed within the narrow circle of the present, who can blame me if I clasp this niggardly present of time ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... day passing without news, I cut the end of my business off altogether, and started for Stair, it being my thought that Nancy's visiting would be ended and that I should find her there awaiting my return. The home-coming was a dreary one, the house darkened and unsociably redd up, and I sat alone to a dinner, served me by Huey, in a depth of gloom and melancholy which he had never reached before, debating whether to write to Mauchline or to go ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... commander who has not had long personal experience of the place. There will be across one mere a belt of sand or gravel, carrying the heaviest burdens through the shallow water as might a causeway. Its neighbour, with a surface precisely twin, with the same brown water, fringed by the same leaves and dreary stretches of stunted wood, will be deep in mud, but a natural platform may stretch into a lake and fail the column which uses it before the farther shore is reached. In the strongest platforms of this kind gaps of deep clay or mud unexpectedly ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... San Francisco a dreary waste. Try as he would he could not keep Sophie Carr from being the sun around which the lesser nebulae of his thought continually revolved. He could no more help a wistful lookout for her upon San Francisco's streets than he could help breathing. ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... of America which now met our view," says Cook, "was dreary enough. It seemed to be cut up into small islands, which though by no means high, were very black, and almost entirely barren. In the background, we saw high ground covered with snow, almost to the water's edge. It is the wildest shore I have ever seen, and appears entirely composed of mountains ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... peaceful, convent-like atmosphere she found there, Helene experienced a feeling of suffocation. Her room astonished her, so calm, so secluded, so drowsy did it seem with its blue velvet hangings, while she came to it hotly panting with the emotion which thrilled her. Was this indeed her room, this dreary, lifeless nook, devoid of air? Hastily she threw open a window, and leaned out to ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... in "intellectual and moral midnight;" and in a Michigan report[208] to be "groping in thick darkness." In a Louisiana report[209] they are called "sorrow-stricken children of silence;" and in a Kentucky report[210] their lives are described as "dark, dreary and comfortless." The Southern Literary Messenger[211] of Richmond, Virginia, characterizes their existence as "intellectual night." The New York Commercial Advertiser[212] in the year the first school was opened affirms that "their intellectual faculties ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... even in the mouth of some impotent beldame, were enough to excite a shudder, but in that dreary epoch, these curses from the lips of clergymen were deemed sufficient to draw down celestial lightning upon the head, not of the blasphemer, but of his victim. Men, who trembled neither at sword nor fire, cowered like slaves before such horrid imprecations, uttered by tongues gifted, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... taken for granted that a life strictly dedicated to religion is stiff and dreary, that I may have some difficulty in persuading my readers that, as a matter of fact, in these early days of my childhood, before disease and death had penetrated to our slender society, we were always cheerful and often gay. My parents were playful with one another, and there were certain stock ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... was. She took the dreary veil, A hopeless girl! and the bright flush grew pale Upon her cheek: she felt, as summer feels The winds of autumn and the winter chills, That darken his fair suns.—It was away, Feeding on dreams, ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... officer in the city, only that he might act against him; those false promises by which the little garrison, unconquerable by any force, was beguiled to give itself up to mere butchery; the long captivity of the few scores of women and children who survived the general slaughter, only, after many dreary days of painful suspense, to be murdered in their prison-house as Havelock drew near the gates of Cawnpore: all these circumstances of especial horror made men regard their chief instigator rather as one of the lower fiends masquerading ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... Mr. Baron in a sort of dreary apathy, "do you and Louise wish to go away under an escort furnished by ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... our childhood, goodby, good-by forever! And you, our other friend, the street parade, must you go, too? And you, the gorgeous show-bills, must you tread the path toward the sundown? Good-by! Good-by! In that dreary land where you are going, the Kingdom of the Ausgespielt, it may comfort you to recollect the young hearts you have made happy in the days that were, but never more can ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland, with "the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space,—that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine heights above heights, surround the pole, and concentre the multiplied ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... camp. The sun had disappeared behind the jungle when they left the courtyard of the Three Elephants' Heads and ascended the stone steps towards the inner moat. They crossed the bridge, and entered the outer city in silence. The place was very dreary at that hour of the day, and to Codd, who was of an imaginative turn of mind, it seemed as if faces out of the long deserted past were watching him from every house. His companions, however, were scarcely so impressionable. They were gloating over the treasure they had ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... listened. Then on the silence of the night I heard a sort of dull, moaning sound, followed by a succession of splashes in the water. That is all I know of the fate of my poor shipmates. Almost immediately afterwards the large canoe followed us, and the deserted ship was left drifting about—a dreary, spectre-like hulk. Nothing was taken from her by the savages. The whole fiendish transaction was carried through as decorously and temperately as though it ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... matter ejected from the crater and scattered in this form over the surrounding country, we may judge from the scientific calculation that 315,000 tons fell in Naples alone! Everywhere appeared the same scenes of desolation, the same dreary tint, for so thickly had this aerial torrent of ashes descended, that buildings, trees and plants were completely hidden by it, the whole landscape suggesting the idea of a recent heavy fall of dirty-coloured snow. Paesi ridenti, ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... the blood 'twas Hell my soul was fearing; And dark and dreary in my eyes the future was appearing, While conscience told its tale of sin And caused a weight of ...
— God's Plan with Men • T. T. (Thomas Theodore) Martin
... centuries and all the chapters of the dreary story to the middle of the century we have just left behind, and look upon this picture of the New World's metropolis as it was drawn in public reports at a time when a legislative committee came to New York to see how crime and drunkenness ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... says Mr. Scrope, in his interesting account of the geology of Central France, "are called 'causses' in the provincial dialect, and they have a singularly dreary and desert aspect from the monotony of their form and their barren and rocky character. The valleys which separate them are rarely of considerable width. Winding, narrow, and all but impassable cliff-like glens predominate, giving to the Cevennes ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... reached the Louisa Diggings, near those quartz-ridges where, in fact, a 106 lb. lump of gold had been found. They encamped in the dark; and getting up betimes the next morning, looked eagerly out on this land of promise. It was a dull, dreary morning, and a heavy continuous rain plashed upon the earth. About 200 persons were taking the air in this watery atmosphere, their dress and movements corresponding well with the aspect of the hour. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... beginning to be interested. It amused and, at the same time, touched her to notice the difference between the dreary nature of the sentiments and the youthful, ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... Mr. Shannon." Gerald acknowledged the introduction with his deepest bow. He was dazzled. He had come to this dreary place to talk politics. But now this was out of the question. And he began explaining to the Princess; Mila he had fancied was some slattern waiting on the old fanatic of a prince. He told Mila this in a few words, and soon the pair laughed and chatted. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... assisted her to erect and adorn, and where she had passed those most delightful moments in human existence, the days of the first love, and first courtship, of two young, affectionate, and virtuous beings. Blessed moments! that occur but once in the dreary threescore years and ten, and fade away before we have time to enjoy them, and we only become conscious of their existence from the certainty that they are ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... from home to school Was often hard and weary. It did my youthful ardour cool And made my childhood dreary. ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... have been with other men I know not. For myself, I could not have come through that dreary winter unscathed without the influence of her, who would have been the first to disclaim such power. Among the velvet cushions of the east one may criticise the lapse of white man to barbarity; but in the wilderness human voice is as grateful to the ear as rain ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... May-day evening," said the wind. "I came from the westward. I had seen ships crushed into wrecks on the west coast of Jutland. I had hurried over the dreary heaths and green woody coast, had crossed the island of Funen, and swept over the Great Belt, and I was hoarse with blowing. Then I laid myself down to rest on the coast of Zealand, near Borreby, where there stood the forest and the charming meadows. The young ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... threw myself down half dead with weariness, the terrible old man held on tight to my neck, nor did he fail to greet the first glimmer of morning light by drumming upon me with his heels, until I perforce awoke and resumed my dreary march with rage ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Andrew Lang.
... we marry?" he demanded. "The garden cries out for you, my love, and I wish to hear your footstep in my house. It hath been a dreary house, filled with shadows, haunted by keen longings and vain regrets. Now the windows shall be flung wide and the sunshine shall pour in. Oh, your voice singing through the rooms, your foot upon the stairs!" ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... heather—flowers of the barren heights—are all that will flourish. There are, indeed, secluded valleys filled with muskmallows and bracken, but these are often visited by wild tempests, and sudden floods may make the whole region dreary and dangerous. ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow
... going to sea, and leaving that dear, patient little wife of yours at home, who has seen nothing of you all her life! It's all very well for you. You have the life, and the change, and the excitement, but you don't think of her eating her heart out in a dreary London lodging. You ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... my dreary little repast, wondering how I should get through the day, and speculating upon the possibility of my release before nightfall, and I had just concluded that I must make up my mind to face another night with the mosquitos and their hardy allies, when, to my great joy, a slatternly serving-maid came ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... the period, two generations, one might compare it with the "jubilee" of ancient Israel—a word made familiar toward the close of Queen Victoria's reign. The great event always took place at midwinter, the most dreary period of the year, and when the five intercalary days arrived they "abandoned themselves to despair," breaking up the images of the gods, allowing the holy fires of the temples to go out, lighting none in their homes, destroying their furniture and domestic utensils, ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... when, in about a month after my arrival in London, I went to Farnham, the place of my birth, what was my surprise! Every thing was become so pitifully small! I had to cross in my postchaise the long and dreary heath of Bagshot. Then, at the end of it, to mount a hill called Hungry Hill; and from that hill I knew that I should look down into the beautiful and fertile vale of Farnham. My heart fluttered with impatience, mixed with ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... low brushwood scattered over portions of the dreary plains of the Kandahar table-lands, we find leguminous thorny plants of the papilionaceous sub-order, such as camel-thorn (Hedysarum Alhagi), Astragalus in several varieties, spiny rest-harrow (Ononis spinosa), the fibrous ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... varicolored dough-bread, On a fire of cattle chips; Coffee made of green-scummed water, Nectar to his thirsty lips. On the ground he spread his blanket And reclining there alone, Heard the swiftly sweeping breezes Sing in dreary monotone Strange wild anthems, weird and lonesome, Like lost spirits floating by, While afar in broken measure ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... learned of his uncle's death, Stephen had acted with great energy, rapidity, and courage. Nor is there anything in the course of his reign to show that he was at any time lacking in these qualities. The period of English history upon which we enter with the coronation of Stephen is not merely a dreary period, with no triumphs abroad to be recorded, nor progress at home, with much loss of what had already been gained, temporary, indeed, but threatening to be permanent. It is also one of active feudal strife and anarchy, lasting almost a generation, ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... unstinted products of the farm at all seasons, and even tea and coffee, wines and spirits, at moderate cost; so that the New Englanders of the eighteenth century could look back with complacency and gratitude on the days when the Pilgrim Fathers first landed and settled in the dreary wilderness, feeling that the "lines had fallen to them in pleasant places," and yet be unmindful that even the original settlers, with all their discomforts and dangers and privations, enjoyed that inward peace and lofty spiritual life in comparison with which all material luxuries ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... been robbed and despoiled of all its furnishments. But the light-slits, where at certain hours of the day the rays of our Lord the Sun had fallen upon the image of the God, before this had been taken away, gave me vantage places from which I could see over the camp of these rebel besiegers, and a dreary prospect it was. The people seemed to have shucked off the culture of centuries in as many months, and to have gone back for the most part to sheer brutishness. The majority harboured on the bare ground. Few owned shelter, and these were merely ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... best, a dismal one. Overhead was a leaden sky; underneath, the thawing snow, which every hour assumed a more watery appearance; in the distance arose the dreary, gloomy, melancholy forest-trees; while all around was a thin, fine drizzle, which enveloped us, saturating and soaking us with watery vapor. We all became limp and bedraggled, in soul as well as ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... children were allowed to come out of their walls into the open air; for the thought had not yet occurred that these destitute creatures, who must some time or other help themselves through the world, ought soon to be brought in contact with it; that, instead of being kept in dreary confinement, they should rather be accustomed to serve and to endure; and that there was every reason to strengthen them physically and morally from their infancy. The nurses and maids, always ready to take a walk, never failed to carry or conduct us to such places, even in our first ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... and for a few minutes they sat silent, while the dreary, sodden, steaming streets of London, as, in their short experience, they had already begun to think of them, faded before the magic power of memory and they were once more back in camp—eating, swimming, walking, canoeing—subject always ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... Then followed a dreary exile of uneventful years, in which the ex- Emperor conducted paper campaigns of great fierceness against the English government, which with unprecedented parsimony allowed him no more than $60,000 a year and ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... all but English-speaking folk. As a girl in her teens, she had been charmed by the man's virile accomplishments, his soldierly bearing and gay talk of martial things, though Hannaford was only a teacher of science. Nowadays she thought with dreary wonder of that fascination, and had come to loathe every trapping and habiliment of war. She knew him profoundly selfish, and recognised the other faults which had hindered so clever a man from success in life; indolent ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... Mrs. Robson; "poor old gentleman! he is dead, sure enough; and, Heaven knows, many have been the dreary hours the dear young man has watched by his pillow! ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... recognition of the humanizing and beneficial influence of cheerful and well-furnished wards, on even the most degraded patients. "Those at one time considered to be fit only to be congregated together in the most dreary rooms of the asylum, with tables and benches fastened to the floor, and with nothing to interest or amuse them, are now in many asylums placed in wards as well furnished as those occupied by the more orderly ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... work, I wonder, to rest your personality? How for instance could you take your biggest, grayest, oldest worry about your doctor's bill, and rouge it up into a radiant, young joke? And how, for instance, out of your lonely, dreary, middle-aged orphanhood are you going to find a way to short-skirt your rheumatic pains, and braid into two perfectly huge pink-bowed pigtails the hair that you haven't got, and caper round so ecstatically before the foot-lights that the old gentleman and ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... Outside, the dreary church-bell tolled, The London Sunday faded slow; Ah, what is this? what wings unfold In this miraculous rose ...
— Silhouettes • Arthur Symons
... as it all was, there were olives and vineyards sometimes to be seen; often terraced hillsides which spoke of what had been. At last we came up out of a deep glen and saw at a distance the white line of wall which tells of Jerusalem. I believe it was a dreary piece of country which lay between, but I could hardly know what it was. My thoughts were fixed on that white wall. I forgot ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... fell, yet wild and clear. It ceased. With drooping eyes, "Once I did hear A song as wildly clear, as sad," she said, "In mine own realm." And as she spoke, dark dread The sky grew with a coming storm. "Oh, haste," He cried; "seek refuge ere this dreary waste Reeks with the rain!" And fast they sped Back to his ocean-cave. There safe, o'erhead They watched the piling clouds. With angry roar The baffled billows broke upon the rocks. O'er Them rushed the shrieking storm. Wild through the grot Wandered the prisoned wind, a troubled ghost that sought ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... through the dreary watches of our long Russian night I waited, that I might kill you with your Judas hire still hot in your hand. But you never came out; you never left that palace at all. I saw the blood-red sun rise through the yellow fog over the murky town; I saw a new day of oppression dawn on Russia; but ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde
... set. Betwixt Sardinia and the Corsic isle. And now the weight, that hung upon my thought, Was lighten'd by the aid of that clear spirit, Who raiseth Andes above Mantua's name. I therefore, when my questions had obtain'd Solution plain and ample, stood as one Musing in dreary slumber; but not long Slumber'd; for suddenly ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... Cornelius belonged to the merchant-bourgeoisie, who were prouder of their richly emblazoned shop signs than the hereditary nobility of their heraldic bearings. Therefore, although he might find Rosa a pleasant companion for the dreary hours of his captivity, when it came to a question of bestowing his heart it was almost certain that he would bestow it upon a tulip,—that is to say, upon the proudest and noblest of flowers, rather than upon poor Rosa, ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... mortal cares retreating,") is its association with "Greenville," the production of that brilliant but erratic genius and freethinker, Jean Jacques Rousseau. It was originally a love serenade, ("Days of absence, sad and dreary") from the opera of Le Devin du Village, written about 1752. The song was commonly known years afterwards as "Rousseau's Dream." But the unbelieving philosopher, musician, and misguided moralist builded better than he knew, and probably better than he meant when he wrote his ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... heavy motor was almost upon her, when Len rushed to snatch her from the on-rushing car. He caught the child, but slipped himself, succeeding however in pushing her beyond danger before the cruel wheels crushed out his life. The dreary days and nights that followed need not be recited here. The cost of the funeral and other expenses incident thereto bit deep into their savings, therefore as soon as she could pull herself together, Mrs. Turner sought employment and got ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... world, all seems to us darkness, self-deceit, and vanity. It sounds like a degradation of the very name of religion to apply it to the wild ravings of Hindu Yogins or the blank blasphemies of Chinese Buddhists. But as we slowly and patiently wend our way through the dreary prisons, our own eyes seem to expand, and we perceive a glimmer of light where all was darkness at first. We learn to understand the saying of one who more than anybody had a right to speak with authority ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... end of this dreary exercise they were dismissed to prepare for church where there followed a service which Avery regarded as downright revolting. It consisted mainly of prayers—as many prayers as the Vicar could get in, rendered in an ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... long, dreary afternoon and night, which they tried to while away in sleeping, for conversation, under the circumstances, soon became irksome. When they awoke, or, rather, when all were again alert and felt as though the night must have passed, the captain was the ...
— The Boy Volunteers with the Submarine Fleet • Kenneth Ward
... slumber. As he slept he dreamed. He was standing alone in a great desert. Darkness encompassed him, and a fearful loneliness froze his soul. About him lay bleaching bones. Neither trees nor vegetation broke the dull monotony of the cheerless scene. Nothing but waste, unutterably dreary waste, over which a chill wind tossed the tinkling sand in fitful gusts. In terror he cried aloud. The desert mocked his hollow cry. The darkness thickened. Again he called, his heart ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... I scanned the dreary monotonous valleys stretching away from the river. We had for several days been living on scenery, tobacco, and flapjacks. The scenery had flattened out, tobacco was running low; but the flapjacks bid fair to go on forever. I sought in my head for the exact adjective, the particular ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... 'Instead of dreary, inarable wastes, as supposed in earlier times, the millions of buffalo, elk, deer, mountain sheep, the primitive inhabitants of the soil, fed by the hand of nature, attest its capacity for the abundant support of a dense population through the skilful toil ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... came the order to re-cross the river. It was a stormy and dreary night, and so, of course, favorable to our purpose. The maneuver was executed in silence, and with commendable expedition. The rebels appeared to have no suspicion of General Burnside's intentions. The measured beat of our double quick was drowned by ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... 'boiled and bubbled,' of his visit to the soothsayer to purchase love charms, his stately declamations to Camilla and her elaborate replies to him, of his love letter concealed in a pomegranate, and her answer stitched into a copy of Petrarch,—is all very lively reading, much more so than that dreary love-making between Pyrocles and Philoclea, or between any other pair of the many exceedingly tiresome folk in Sidney's Arcadia. Grant that it is deliciously absurd. It is not to be supposed that a clever eighteen-year-old ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... moments, as he stared vacantly around the room, he could realize nothing save a dull, leaden weight of pain. In this dreary obscurity of suffering, distinct causes of trouble and fear began to shape themselves. There was a mingled sense of misfortune and guilt. He had a confused memory of a great disappointment, and he knew from his condition that he had ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... pole—Hell!" Then, of course, came the customary rasp on the rocks, but, if not, the cheery cry followed to the trackers ashore, "Ahchipitamook!" (Haul away!) and on we would go for a few yards more. Once, towards the end of this dreary business, when we were all crowded into the Commissioner's boat, where we took our meals, in the first really stiff rapid the keel grated as usual upon the rocks. With a better line we might have pulled through, but it broke, and the boat at once swung broadside to the current and listed ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... of amusement she expected to find among the illiterate swarm of ordinary people who in Washington represented constituencies so dreary that in comparison New York was a New Jerusalem, and Broad Street a grove of Academe. She replied that if Washington society were so bad as this, she should have gained all she wanted, for it would be a pleasure to return,—precisely the feeling she longed ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... is more perfectly miserable and comfortless than the domestic arrangement of poor families in general; they seem to have no idea whatever of order or economy in any thing; and every thing about them is dreary, sad, and neglected, in the extreme. A little attention to order and arrangement would contribute greatly to their comfort and conveniences, and also to economy. They ought in particular to be shown how ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... I am even unable to express to you personally my sincere thanks for all your past kindness. Bitterly as I deplore this, with equal truth do I fervently wish you, not only on this evening, but ever and always, the most agreeable social "reunions"—mine are all over—and to-morrow I return to dreary solitude! May God only grant me health; but I fear the contrary, being far from well to-day. May the Almighty preserve you, dear lady, and your worthy husband, and all your beautiful children. Once more I kiss your hands, and am unchangeably while ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... channels of the morass. It was a gloomy journey. The leafless trees frequently met overhead; the long rushes in the wetter parts of the swamp rustled as the cold breezes swept across them, and a slight coating of snow which had fallen the previous night added to the dreary aspect of the scene. At last they came ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... consequence of the holiday. In doing so, I had to leap a ditch or canal, in which both I and my horse came near closing our pilgrimage in a quagmire; but in time we were again upon the road. It is a dreary place about the hill of Tepeyaca, or Guadalupe, and if the Virgin had not smiled upon the barren hill and made roses grow out of it, it would be as uninviting as one of the hills of the valley of Sodom. This hill is now called the ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... violet in its mossy bed by the correspondent at Round Corners—these are the advance signs of the burgeoning season that are wired into the wise city, while the farmer sees nothing but winter upon his dreary fields. ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... a grand collection of substantial and dingy ricks of fine old hay—that most valuable but most gloomy looking species of agricultural property—to the general aspect of desolation by which the place was distinguished. One solitary old labourer, a dreary bachelor, inhabited, it is true, a corner of the old roomy house, calculated for the convenient accommodation of the patriarchal family of sons and daughters, men-servants and maid-servants, of which a farmer's household consisted in former days; and one open window, (the remainder ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford
... won't be a fight with the parson, there will with the wife," replied the other. "Hang the same parson," he added; "many a dreary chase he has sent us upon, with nothing but the fatigue of a dark and slavish journey for our pains. With what bitterness he's giving us 'Lillibullero,' and he scarcely able to sit on his horse! I think I'll advance, ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... her livid lips quivered with passion, while her eyes burned like coals of fire. "I stay here all this long, dreary winter with your mother! Never, Richard, never! I'll die before I'll do that. It is all—" she did not finish the sentence, for she would not say, "It is all I married you for"; she was too much afraid of Richard for that, and so ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... first entered it that night, he looked at the big room. How had he ever been able to think it cosy, home-like? It was dreary, forbidding, the sad hermitage of one who was resolved to turn his back on life, on the true life of close human relations, of inspiring intimacies, of that intercourse which should be as bread of Heaven to the soul. It was a hateful room. Nothing great, nothing ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... This part of the strait lies W.N.W.1/2 W. by the compass, and is about four miles over; so that the craggy mountains which bound it on each side, towering above the clouds, and covered with everlasting snow, give it the most dreary and desolate appearance that can be imagined. The tides here are not very strong; the ebb sets to the westward, but with an irregularity for which it is very difficult to account. About one o'clock, the Tamar anchored in the bay on the south shore, opposite to Cape ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... adultery with Bothwel, then they concerted his murder: and after she married the Regicide, lifted arms against the professors of the true religion, by whom she was obliged to flee to England. In a word, every dreary year of her unfortunate reign was blackened with some remarkable disaster, and by such acts of impudence and injustice, as corrupt nature and popish cruelty could suggest. After her elopement to England, the popish faction, of which she was the head, kept the nations in continual intestine ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... but one who resembles her. You know to whom I refer. Until I met Jean, I thought that my mother was the only one who reached my ideal of what a woman should be. Since meeting her, I have been very happy. Without her, the world would be very dreary to me. But perhaps you cannot fully understand ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... able to leave the stricken house, having done all in his power to lighten the horror of the dreary hour, he was in no mood for gaiety, and for a few moments he meditated sending a message to say he was, after all, unable to be present ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... the main road leading out of the northern gate." Pei Ming replied. "Once out of it, everything is so dull and dreary ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... The dreary age wore on. Louis slept! The little brother sat with his chin in his hands, his heart cold, his eyes closed. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... intention of de Grasse and de Bouille had been to capture Barbados, the most important of the Eastern Antilles still remaining to the British; but the heavy trade-winds, which in those days made a winter passage to windward so long and dreary a beat, twice drove them back to port. "The whole French fleet," wrote Hood, "appeared off Santa Lucia on the 17th of last month, endeavouring to get to windward, and having carried away many topmasts and yards ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... employment. The intrinsic musical interest of 'Der Fliegende Hollaender' is unequal. Wagner had made great strides since the days of 'Rienzi,' but he had still a vast amount to unlearn. Side by side with passages of vital force and persuasive beauty there are dreary wastes of commonplace and the most arid conventionality. The strange mixture of styles which prevails in 'Der Fliegende Hollaender' makes it in some ways even less satisfactory as a work of art than 'Rienzi,' which at any rate has the merit of homogeneity. ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... hours of morning in dreary speculation concerning what was happening at Belle Plain. In the end she realized that the day could go by and her absence occasion no alarm; Steve might reasonably suppose George had driven her into Raleigh ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... made acquaintance with the titular hero in the pages of VINGT ANS APRES, perhaps the name may act as a deterrent. A man might, well stand back if he supposed he were to follow, for six volumes, so well-conducted, so fine-spoken, and withal so dreary a cavalier as Bragelonne. But the fear is idle. I may be said to have passed the best years of my life in these six volumes, and my acquaintance with Raoul has never gone beyond a bow; and when he, who has so long pretended to be alive, is at last suffered to pretend to ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was a long-established house, spacious, venerable, and dreary. It was on the outskirts of an ancient town, which was of far more importance before our Lord was born than it has ever been since. We had little to do. There were nine brothers, a handful of resident orphans, and some ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... hung, lowering. There was no evidence that such a thing as a sun existed. The waves rolled out of this watery mist with an oily look, and the air was so damp and chilly that it made Morris shiver as he looked out on the dreary prospect. He thrust his hands deep into his coat pockets, which seemed to be an indolent habit of his, and walked along the slippery deck to search for the smoking-room. He was thinking of his curious and troublesome dream, when around the corner came the brunette, wrapped in a long cloak ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... Letter to Wilhelmina; parts of which we may recur to, as otherwise illustrative. But before going into that tragic budget of bad news, let us give the finale of Gotha, which occurred the next day,—tragi-comic in part,—and is the last bit of action in those dreary ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... There was an Austrian general, however, amongst the number, and therefore we might safely have slept another hour. The morning was very unpromising, the rain descended in a dull persistent downpour. We tried to hope it was the pride of the morning. The prospect was dreary enough to damp the spirits of some of our party. One man found that urgent private affairs called him hence; another averred he had an inflammatory sore throat. I expected a third would say he had married a wife and could not come. Happily, however, the weather ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... prepare it to receive non-interactive command input are often referred to as 'batch mode' switches. A 'batch file' is a series of instructions written to be handed to an interactive program running in batch mode. 2. Performance of dreary tasks all at one sitting. "I finally sat down in batch mode and wrote out checks for all those bills; I guess they'll turn the electricity back on next week..." 3. 'batching up': Accumulation of a number of small tasks that can be lumped together for greater efficiency. "I'm batching up ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... dreary castle of Peter of Blentz. In the courtyard Austrian soldiers mingled with the men of the bodyguard of the king of Lutha. Within, the king's officers fraternized with the officers of the emperor. Maenck led his prisoners to the great hall which was filled with ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... is the Martian habit, walked to the quarry mouth, up a winding and hard stone road. This dreary and desolate region seemed to have a charm. Its expanse of rigid waves of stone, pimpled with sharp excrescences, and as deeply pitted with cavernous grottoes, where no life seemed able to survive, save a stunted herbage, sparsely assembled in vagrant groups, or gathered in thirsty ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... coast, is required when War breaks out to use this knowledge for submarine-thwarting) is too long delayed, and all the non-active service part of the tale suffers from a very dull love-interest and some even more dreary racing humour. Archaic or not, however, Hillyard's anti-spy adventures, in an exquisite setting that the author evidently knows as well as his hero, are good fun enough. But the home scenes had (for me at least) a lack of grip and conviction by no means ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... kindness in which it was given, and then we bade them all good bye. Some turned away, too much affected to approach us and others, shook our hands with deep feeling, grasping them firmly and heartily hoping we would be successful and be able to pilot them out of this dreary place into a better land. Every one felt that a little food to make a change from the poor dried meat would be acceptable. Mr. and Mrs. Bennett and J.B. Arcane and wife were the last to remain when the others had turned away. They had most faith in the plan and felt deeply. Mrs. Bennett ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... old Fables, and the Pagan Strain, With Nymphs and Tritons, wafts him o'er the Main; Another draws fierce Lucifer in Arms, And fills th' Infernal Region with Alarms; A Third awakes some Druid, to foretel Each future Triumph from his dreary Cell. Exploded Fancies! that in vain deceive, While the Mind nauseates what she can't believe. My [Muse th' expected [1]] Hero shall pursue From Clime to Clime, and keep him still in View; His shining ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... indeed have required great courage on behalf of the old Voor-trekker Boers, when they and their families left Cape Colony, at the time of the Great Trek, in long lines of white-tented waggons, to have penetrated through that dreary-waste in search of the promised land, of green veldt and running streams, which they had heard of, as lying away to the north, and eventually found in the Transvaal. I have been told that President Kruger was on this historical trek, a Voor-looper, or little ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... in for this dream. And after all, I had an hour before me, the light was fading fast, and Fortnum Roscoe has a dreary way with him. "Living in a different time," I said: "do you mean in ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells |
