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Wilderness   Listen
noun
Wilderness  n.  
1.
A tract of land, or a region, uncultivated and uninhabited by human beings, whether a forest or a wide, barren plain; a wild; a waste; a desert; a pathless waste of any kind. "The wat'ry wilderness yields no supply."
2.
A disorderly or neglected place.
3.
Quality or state of being wild; wildness. (Obs.) "These paths and bowers doubt not but our joint hands. Will keep from wilderness with ease."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Wilderness" Quotes from Famous Books



... had its own mill, its own bakehouse, and whatever was needed in an abstemious domestic economy (Figure 38); their silent hospitality to the wayfarer, who was refreshed in a separate apartment; the lands around their buildings turned from a wilderness into a garden, and, above all, labor exalted and ennobled by their holy hands, and celibacy, forever, in the eye of the vulgar, a proof of separation from the world and a sacrifice to heaven—these were the things that arrested the attention of the ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... of passage through this wilderness of water were endured before the sea-worn mariners, rounding a cape on September 12th, saw stretching before them to the southward a long coast of plain and mountain which they were able to follow with a fair wind. Gradually the sea went down; the current ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young

... but in vain, she was away with the fairy, and they knew not whither. King Orfeo in grief called together his barons and knights and squires, and bade them obey his high steward as regent; he himself went forth barefoot and in poor attire into the wilderness, with naught but ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick

... creatures themselves—this, he had been taught by Uncle Andy, was one of the first essentials to the acquirement of true woodcraft, as only such stillness and such patience could admit one to anything like a real view of the secrets of the wild. Even the least shy of the wilderness folk are averse to going about their private and personal affairs under the eyes of strangers, and what the Child aspired to was the knowledge of how to catch them off their guard. He would learn to see for himself how the rabbits and the partridges, the woodchucks and the weasels, the red ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts

... the steppe, the more beautiful it became. Then all the South, all that region which now constitutes New Russia, even as far as the Black Sea, was a green, virgin wilderness. No plough had ever passed over the immeasurable waves of wild growth; horses alone, hidden in it as in a forest, trod it down. Nothing in nature could be finer. The whole surface resembled a golden-green ocean, ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... surface of about 110,600 square miles. Over a large portion of this wide-extending region, even the wild Indian, there unable to find subsistence, but seldom roamed; and thus for ages it remained a howling wilderness, inhabited, and that only at certain seasons, by the jaguar, the peccary, the agouti, and the timid deer. Here, when the summer sun sends down its burning rays day after day from a cloudless sky, the grass withered and shrivelled ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... sir," said he, "that you will not be offended with what I am going to say. Singing comes cheap to those who do not pay for it, and all this is done at the cost of one whose bones lie rotting in some wilderness or grinding to powder in the surf. If these men were to see my father come back to Ithaca they would pray for longer legs rather than a longer purse, for money would not serve them; but he, alas, has fallen on an ill fate, and even when people do sometimes say that he is coming, we no longer ...
— The Odyssey • Homer

... writes: "God is the father 208:18 of mind, and of nothing else." Such an utterance is "the voice of one crying in the wilderness" of human beliefs and preparing the way of Science. Let us learn 208:21 of the real and eternal, and prepare for the reign of Spirit, the kingdom of heaven, - the reign and rule of universal harmony, which cannot be lost nor remain 208:24 ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy

... blessing from heaven. The plains, which formerly had been thronged with a happy and industrious population, where nature had lavished her choicest gifts, and plenty and prosperity had reigned, were now a wild and desolate wilderness. The fields, abandoned by the industrious husbandman, lay waste and uncultivated; and no sooner had the young crops given the promise of a smiling harvest, than a single march destroyed the labours of a year, and blasted the last hope of an afflicted ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.

... use also: When you are moved to take some man who is still young into your confidence, ask him to let you see his Bible and then let him see yours, and point out to him the rents and wounds and wilderness places in yours. And thus, by these two uses of a clipped-up and half-empty Bible, you may make gains that shall yet set you above those whose Bibles of promises are still as fresh as when they came from God's own hand. And Samson said, ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte

... am I to teach you? "A reed (from the wilderness) shaken with the wind"? Not I but the present despair of the world teaches you. I am only a loud amongst many suffocated cries from West and East, from North and South, directed to you: lift up your hearts and listen! ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic

... weak nobleman committed himself to a low disguise, in the vain hope of effecting his escape, Sir John Cochrane, after a gallant fight against overwhelming numbers, finding his enemies were gathering large reinforcements, retired with his troops to a neighbouring wilderness or morass, where he dismissed them, with the request that each man would provide the best way he could for his own safety. For himself, having received two severe wounds in the body during the engagement, and being worn out with fatigue, he sought refuge ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various

... colleague of Cromwell's friend the Cabalist, Manasseh ben Israel.[333] To quote Jewish authority on this question, Mr. Lucien Wolf writes that Templo "had a monomania for ... everything relating to the Temple of Solomon and the Tabernacle of the Wilderness. He constructed gigantic models of both these edifices."[334] These he exhibited in London, which he visited in 1675 and earlier, and it seems not unreasonable to conclude that this may have provided a fresh source of inspiration to the Freemasons who framed the masonic ritual some forty ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... established among the colonists, who, by common consent, elected Christian as their head. Pretty little huts, and diligently cultivated fields of taro, yam, and potatoes, soon adorned the wilderness. After the lapse of three years, Christian became the father of a son, whom he named Friday Fletcher October Christian; but the infant's birth made its father a widower. Strongly inclined to a second marriage, and all the women being already ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue

... her to see Was the wilderness town of Ville Marie! The proud St. Lawrence, with silver foam, Touched softly the base of our island home, But frowning forest and tangled wood Made ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon

... Aldrich, and learned the technical terms of a philosophy which had ceased to have any real life in it. At Cambridge, ardent young radicals spoke with contempt of this 'horrid jargon—fit only to be chattered by monkies in a wilderness.'[23] Even at Cambridge, they still had disputations on the old form, but they argued theses from Locke's essay, and thought that their mathematical studies were a check upon metaphysical 'jargon.' It is indeed characteristic ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen

... with thrilling adventure, woods lore and the story of the wonderful experiences that befell the Cranford troop of Boy Scouts when spending a part of their vacation in the wilderness. ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely

... like that off the day before around Trevillian, was mostly fought dismounted by both sides, as had also been the earlier fights of the cavalry during the summer in the Wilderness, at Todd's Tavern, Hawe's Shop, and Matadequin Creek. Indeed, they could hardly have been fought otherwise than on foot, as there was little chance for mounted fighting in eastern Virginia, the dense woods, the armament of both parties, and the practice ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan

... life alone in the sweet, wholesome woods had soothed a bitter and rebellious heart. There is a balm for deepest wounds in the wind, and in the stillness of a wilderness there is salve ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers

... is the matter?" said Percy; "you look as if this world was a howling wilderness, and you wanted to howl too. What, crying over that bird? Poh! I can buy you a screech-owl any time, that will make twice the noise he could in his best days. Come, hurry, and ...
— Little Prudy's Sister Susy • Sophie May

... he fares, and to the border comes Of Eden, where delicious Paradise, Now nearer, crowns with her enclosure green, As with a rural mound, the champain head Of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild, Access denied; and overhead upgrew Insuperable highth of loftiest shade, Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm, A sylvan scene, and, as the ranks ascend, Shade above shade, a woody theatre Of stateliest ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard

... fugitives toiled on all night, pursued by spectres of horror and despair; hearing still the war-whoops and the shrieks; possessed with the one thought of escape from the wilderness of death. In the morning some order was restored. Braddock was placed on a horse; then, the pain being insufferable, he was carried on a litter, Captain Orme having bribed the carriers by the promise of a guinea and a bottle of rum apiece. Early in the succeeding night, such as had not fainted ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman

... a wilderness we now inhabit Since this confounded "open" strife prevails! It may be good; I do not wish to crab it, But you should hear the language it entails, Should see this waste of wide uncharted craters Where it is vain to seek the companies, Seeing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 20, 1917 • Various

... in his adaptation of himself to a new state of society, had acquired a bold buccaneering air, not absolutely lawless, but defensive and prompt. One might have supposed him a child of the wilderness, long accustomed to live out of the confines of civilization, and about to ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... were low and primitive in mental processes, nearer to their plodding burros than to the bright-eyed sensitive dogs, they were the best who would consent to wander with the sheep through the wilderness, seeing nothing, doing nothing, knowing nothing, having before them nothing but the vision of a distant pay day, a drunk, the calabozo, and the kind boss who would surely bail them out. Ah, that was it—the one love and loyalty of those simple-minded creatures who, unfit ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge

... on an expedition more hazardous. He had persuaded Washington of the impossible, that he could advance through the wilderness from the seacoast of Maine and take Quebec by surprise. News travels even by forest pathways. Arnold made a wonderful effort. Chill autumn was upon him when, on the 25th of September, with about a thousand picked men, he began to advance ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong

... Caracalla's thirst, for simultaneously almost, he was in Gaul, in Dacia—wherever there was prey. African by his father, Syrian on his mother's side, Caracalla was not a panther merely; he was a herd of them. He had the cruelty, the treachery and guile of a wilderness of tiger-cats. No man, said a thinker, is wholly base. Caracalla was. He had not a taste, not a vice, even, which was not washed and rewashed in blood. In a moment of excitement Commodus set his guards on the spectators in the amphitheatre; the damage was slight, for the Colosseum was ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus

... The founder of a new faith has usually begun by the earnest and authoritative declaration of a few simple truths and positive doctrines, for which his disciples provide, in course of time, the necessary philosophical basis. Bentham's voice had been crying ineffectually in the wilderness; and he now set about laying with his own hands the foundations of his beliefs upon primary scientific principles, always with unswerving aim and application to concrete facts. He was a thorough-going ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... land, these towns and towers Destroyed are with sword, with fire and spoil, How many it be unhurt that you and yours In safety thus apply your harmless toil?" "My son," quoth he, "this poor estate of ours Is ever safe from storm of warlike broil; This wilderness doth us in safety keep, No thundering drum, ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso

... trouble by introducing two comparisons in the same sentence or paragraph, one of which contradicts the other. Thus should we say "Pilot us through the wilderness of life" we would introduce two figures of speech, that of a ship being piloted and that of a caravan in a wilderness being guided, which would contradict each other. This is ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody

... day, amid the wilderness of flowers and vines and mosses that had possession of the rooms, ranged along the mantel, hanging in clusters on the walls, were beautifully illuminated texts—and these were some of the words that they spoke to those who ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)

... and his successive misfortunes instantly occurs to me—the Sabeans, the Chaldeans, the great wind from the wilderness—but being a little doubtful as to his example having a very consoling effect, with some difficulty, and at the cost of a great pressure exercised on myself, I ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton

... o' God, where the wild flavor of the wilderness is blended with the courtly atmosphere ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess

... perhaps thought of Gaud, to whom, doubtless, Sylvestre had plighted him in his last hours; and she had become a poor girl now, alone in the world. And above all, perhaps, the mourning for his beloved brother still preyed upon his heart. But this heart of his was a virgin wilderness, difficult to explore and little known, where many things took place unrevealed on ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti

... and I found myself in a narrow passageway in almost complete darkness. But my friend walked confidently forward, turned the angle of the building and entered the miniature wilderness which once ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer

... lovely views of Mombasa and Kilindini, while beyond these the Indian Ocean sparkled in the glorious sunshine as far as the eye could see. The summit of the Rabai Hills having been reached, we entered on the expanse of the Taru Desert, a wilderness covered with poor scrub and stunted trees, and carpeted in the dry season with a layer of fine red dust. This dust is of a most penetrating character, and finds its way into everything in the carriage as the train passes along. From here onward game ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson

... a moonlit wilderness—such a wilderness as a deserted garden speedily becomes, the wealth in the soil converting it the sooner to a savage chaos. Full of the impulse of discovery, and the hope of presenting himself with importance to ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald

... the heart of a metropolis his home would have stretched out into mystic distances of greenery and surrounded itself with a limitless reach of cool, vibrant, amber atmosphere, and looked out upon a colorful and fragrant wilderness of flowers, and he would have dwelt in the solitudes that ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett

... at about fifteen years. I worked at the field on that same plantation I told you about. I worked there for just about ten years. Then I farmed at the same place on shares. I stayed there till I was 'bout twenty-six years old. Then I moved to Wilderness Place in the Cotton Belt in Mississippi. I farmed ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration

... beauty of his character. The chief traits which shone forth through his life were conspicuous in the hour of death. There are few events in history to be compared, for grandeur and pathos, with the last closing scene in that silent wilderness of snow. The great leader, with the bodies of his dearest friends beside him, wrote and wrote until the pencil dropped from his dying grasp. There was no thought of himself, only the earnest desire to give comfort and consolation to others in their sorrow. His very last ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley

... abundantly to reward the liberality of many upon this occasion. And we hope the generosity, especially of persons of distinction and note, will be a happy lead and inducement to still greater liberalities, and that in consequence thereof the wide-extended wilderness of America will blossom as the rose, habitations of cruelty become dwelling places of righteousness and the blessing of thousands ready to perish come upon all those whose love to Christ and charity to them has been shown upon this occasion. Which is the hearty prayer of your ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith

... five hundred miles from this lodge into the wilderness,—two of the squaws accompanying ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various

... interest. It is now more than an hundred years since a small band of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians settled in that valley. Though but few in number, and braving the elements and the savages, they determined to carry with them into the wilderness not only the Christian's hope, but the Christian's ordinances. A small building of logs arose soon after the settlement, in which for many years an educated and regularly-ordained minister preached the gospel to a little flock. ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various

... now obliged to depart, and to give up all hopes of ever again seeing my beautiful Princess Apotheola. My only chance of a guide through the wilderness would have been lost had I delayed. So I reluctantly mounted my pony; and I left the Indians of Tuckabatchie and their Green-Corn Festival, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... was silent, then turned rosy red. "Oh, Mr. Starr, was it you who brought us out of the Wilderness and restored us to our families? You appeared at the most fortunate moment, we were really lost," and she laughed heartily. "You are ...
— The Little Immigrant • Eva Stern

... cabinet of late Italian Renaissance work stood in a corner; the dark marble mantelpiece, that looked like a sarcophagus, was incongruously draped with an embroidered Italian cope, and a pseudo-Correggio Madonna, encompassed with a wilderness of gilt frame, smiled a pseudo-smile from the embossed paper of the walls. It was one of Jack's little trials to hear Imogen refer to ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... his way back to the camp without a guide. And if he were to attempt it and should lose his way, there could be very little doubt that he would perish miserably of exposure and starvation in that wilderness, where not even so much as a solitary hut had been sighted throughout the day. But, apart from this, and granting for the moment that his memory might be trusted to guided him aright, there were places to be passed and obstacles to be overcome which he admitted to himself he would not care to ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood

... week, but on Friday night put on his long black coat and his three-cornered hat, lit the seven candles at the table, and told his children and grandchildren how Jehovah had led His people through the wilderness, and how the Egyptians and all the other naughty people who persecuted them were long since dead, while the chosen race survived. And so happy in his race was this poor peddler and so proud of his pedigree that, as Heine says, had the great Rothschild entered at that moment and asked him ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... upon us like a Thief in the night; like a Torrent from the Mountain of Waters, or a Whirlwind from the Wilderness. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn

... seen from the bridge; an order to stop the ship had been telegraphed down to the engine-room, and obeyed. Still, when Sally Woodburn and I had been carried by the crowd far enough towards the stern to look out over the blue wilderness of water we were leaving behind, the ship's heart hadn't ceased its throb, throb, to which we had all grown so accustomed ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... my amusements were soon exhausted. The charm of the theatre does not last for very long; and, for a poor student, Paris shortly became an empty wilderness. They were dull and uninteresting people that I met with in the circle of the family with whom I lived; but these, and an old man who had now lost touch with the world, were all ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac

... but I should rather think not, and for one reason, which is, that although a person in the wilderness might subsist upon these animals, if always to be procured, yet the flights of locusts are very uncertain. Now there is a tree in the country where St. John retired, which is called the locust-tree, and produces a large sweet bean, shaped ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat

... brave fellows fought off their terrible fate, sometimes hoping, oftener despairing, and at last, one after another, they lay down far apart in the dreary solitude of the wilderness, to die ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various

... of more childlike confidence in thy Heavenly Father's will. Thou art not left unbefriended and alone to buffet the storms of the wilderness. Thy Marahs as well as thy Elims are appointed by Him. A gracious pillar-cloud is before thee. Follow it through sunshine and storm. He may "lead thee about," but He will not lead thee wrong. Unutterable tenderness is the characteristic of all His dealings. "Blessed be His name," says ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff

... land: I have left, by His guidance and strength, the bondage of Egypt, and have seen His wonders in the deep. May the endeavour of my life be, to keep close to that Angel, who can deliver us through the trials and dangers of the wilderness of this world. ...
— The Annual Monitor for 1851 • Anonymous

... It is almost totally dark when we alight at a tiny station in what seems to us a wilderness. It is a deserted country. Even the gayest member of the party, I am sure, was struck with a ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens

... the spirit of her own,—we may faintly measure the strength of the original impulse given to the feelings of men by the sacred majesty of the Roman throne. How potent must that splendor have been, whose mere reflection shot rays upon a distant crown, under another heaven, and across the wilderness of fourteen centuries! Splendor, thus transmitted, thus sustained, and thus imperishable, argues a transcendent in the basis of radical power. Broad and deep must those foundations have been laid, which could support an "arch of empire" rising to that giddy altitude—an altitude which sufficed to ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey

... north side of the house, where the gardens seemed to want screening from the weather or the view of the chapel, and some part of the old building required to be covered from the eye, the vacant ground, which was large, is very happily cast into a wilderness, with a labyrinth and espaliers so high that they effectually take off all that part of the old building which would have been offensive to the sight. This labyrinth and wilderness is not only well designed, and completely finished, but ...
— From London to Land's End - and Two Letters from the "Journey through England by a Gentleman" • Daniel Defoe

... pit, and saved as by a miracle from everlasting destruction, stretched the great Mother of Cities. Those who have only seen London veiled in her sombre robes of smoke can scarcely imagine the naked clearness and beauty of the silent wilderness of houses. ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells

... heav'n: the clouds From many a horrid rift abortive poured Fierce rain with lightning mixt, water with fire In ruin reconciled; nor slept the winds Within their stoney caves, but rush'd abroad From the four hinges of the world, and fell On the vext wilderness." ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham

... have known, (As who has not?) some heavenly one. Whom the dull background of despair Help'd to show forth supremely fair; If memory, still remorseful, shapes Young Passion bringing Eshcol grapes To travellers in the Wilderness, This truth will make regret the less: Mighty in love as graces are, God's ordinance is mightier far; And he who is but just and kind And patient, shall for guerdon find, Before long, that the body's bond Is all else utterly beyond In ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore

... the Nile by a mother who, by instinct or by divine suggestion, previsioned a high calling for her son; found, under Providential direction, by a daughter of Pharaoh; reared in the environment of a palace and with the advantages of the most enlightened court of his day; compelled to flee into the wilderness because of an outburst of race passion; called to a great work by a Voice that spoke to him from a bush that "burned but was not consumed"; modestly distrusting his ability yet dauntless as the spokesman of God—dispenser ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan

... swept over the plains, carrying entire villages with them or cutting wide swaths through the primeval forests, was a powerful influence upon everyday conduct. Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists, with their strict and hard Calvinism, penetrated first the wilderness beyond the mountains and built their rude log churches, in which stern preachers, like Samuel Doak, of Tennessee, or Jonathan Going, of Ohio, warned men against the wrath to come and the fiery furnace ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd

... its beginnings so near burlesque that they drew down upon its originators the scoff of their neighbors,—the organization increased its membership as it was driven from one state to another, building up at last in an untried wilderness a population that has steadily augmented its wealth and numbers; doggedly defending its right to practise its peculiar beliefs and obey only the officers of the church, even when its course in this respect has brought it in conflict with the government of the United States. Professing ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn

... sweet voice. Two weeks in a lonely country place had been far too long the summer before for Madame, and a wilderness was the last place she desired. But the plaintive song touched a sentimental chord and answered every purpose. Mr. Stockman, who sat midway of the center aisle, grasping his gold-headed cane, suffered the keen business lines of his face to relax and looked palpably ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock

... shadows deepen in the Jordan Valley, as no doubt Joshua once watched them from somewhere near that same spot before he marshalled his invading host. You could understand why people who had wandered forty years in a stark and howling wilderness should yearn for those coloured, fertile acres between the Jordan and the sea: why they should be willing to fight for them, die for them, do ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy

... Beast is no Disguise. No more let Ireland brag her harmless Nation Fosters no Venom since that Scots' Plantation; Nor can our Feign'd Antiquity obtain, Since they came in England has Wolves again. Nature her self does Scotch-men Beasts confess, Making their Country such a Wilderness; A Land that brings in Question and Suspence God's Omnipresence but that Charles came thence, But that Montrose and Crawford's Royal Band Aton'd their Sin, and Christened half the Land. Nor is it all the Nation has these Spots, There is a Church as well as Kirk of Scots, As in ...
— Quaint Gleanings from Ancient Poetry • Edmund Goldsmid

... that winter, no one had travelled the river south of Forty Mile, and, for that matter, the whole winter through they might be the only ones to travel it. In that day the Yukon was a lonely land. Between the Klondike River and Salt Water at Dyea intervened six hundred miles of snow-covered wilderness, and in all that distance there were but two places where Daylight might look forward to meeting men. Both were isolated trading-posts, Sixty Mile and Fort Selkirk. In the summer-time Indians might be met with at the mouths of the Stewart and White rivers, ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London

... not share it. Fortune, reputation these had no value to him except in Ruth's eyes, and there were times when it seemed to him that if Ruth was not on this earth, he should plunge off into some remote wilderness and live in ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 3. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner

... eternal now. The wilderness has a mysterious tongue, Which teaches awful doubt." (8/11. Shelley, Lines on Mt. Blanc.) One day the yawl was sent under the command of Mr. Chaffers with three days' provisions to survey the upper part of the harbour. In the morning ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin

... had the Spaniards come so far? What must this country have been like, then? Why had Coronado never gone back to Spain, to his riches and his castles and his king? I could n't tell them. I only knew the school books said he "died in the wilderness, of a ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather

... dread spirit, the spirit of self-destruction and non-existence,' the old man goes on, 'the great spirit talked with Thee in the wilderness, and we are told in the books that he "tempted" Thee. Is that so? And could anything truer be said than what he revealed to Thee in three questions and what Thou didst reject, and what in the books is called "the temptation"? And yet if there has ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... unbroken miles of wilderness. The wood was used for the settlers' homes, their fuel, and their scanty furniture, but they needed so little that it grew much faster than it could be used. The man who cut down a tree was a public benefactor. The trees, though so necessary to life, were regarded ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory

... so I will do for Israel—I will divide the waters for him when he crosses the Red Sea; as on the third day I shall create plants, so I will do for Israel—I will bring forth manna for him in the wilderness; as I shall create luminaries to divide day from night, so I will do for Israel—I will go before him by day in a pillar of cloud and by night in a pillar of fire; as I shall create the fowl of the air and the fishes of the sea, so I will do for Israel—I will bring quails for him from the sea; ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg

... was a storm of thwacks that fell on the back of Shibli Bagarag. When they had wearied themselves in this fashion, they took him as had he been a stray bundle or a damaged bale, and hurled him from the gates of the city into the wilderness once more. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... you mistake regarding the love of Miriam for this young man; they have seen little of each other; and it may be, as you yourself said, that he has perished in the wilderness." ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne

... and came out at the limekiln, where all day long one might hear "so-deep, so-deep, so-deep," and "go-round, go-round, go-round," until school commenced in the fall. Then the rattle of little homemade wagons, and the shrilling of boy voices might be heard all over the wilderness, and the black-stained hands of schoolboys told of the day of the walnut harvest. It was nearly a mile from the schoolhouse to the woods, and yet on winter afternoons no school-ma'am could keep the boys from using school hours to dig out the screw-holes ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White

... reputation and honor for himself, and that the boldness and daring of having alone discovered those villages of high stories so much spoken of throughout that country should be attributed to him; and carrying along with him the people who followed him, he endeavored to cross the wilderness which is between Cibola and the country he had gone through, and he was so far ahead of the friars that when they arrived at Chichilticalli, which is on the edge of the wilderness, he was already at Cibola, which is eighty leagues ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois

... plainly God has been leading me. I did not think of doing these things in my lifetime, but God has led me on. First Itu, and then the Creek, then back from Aro, where I had set my heart, to a lonely, spooky, wilderness. There no one ever went, but now miles ...
— White Queen of the Cannibals: The Story of Mary Slessor • A. J. Bueltmann

... can be influenced in better ways than this. I am sure that it would be felt as, to say the least, a want of political savoir faire if we were to treat this solemn question of civil and religious liberty as a subject for trifling. Florence is not a mere wilderness of factories and money-getting like London, nor a haunt of idle luxury like Paris. It is a ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich

... nothing was visible but a great, wan, icy wilderness. To the north a headland appeared on either hand, each about twenty-five miles away, and between them lay an expanse of sea dotted with many bergs. The nearer portions of the coast, together with the Mackellar Islets, were lost to view on ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... have been rigidly maintained for more than eighty years—the Belgian people punctually fulfilled their obligations; and, because they have declined to betray Europe by becoming the dependant of a powerful neighbour, or by participating in the violation of European public law, their country is a wilderness ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History

... go?' I asked. 'Can a woman exist unprotected? At thirty, in all the glory of your beauty, rich in powers of which you have no suspicion, full of tenderness to be bestowed, are you prepared to live in the wilderness where I could hide you?—Be quite easy. The Count, who for nine years has never allowed himself to be seen here, will never go there without your permission. You have his sublime devotion of nine years as a guarantee for your tranquillity. ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac

... disinterested tear I will consecrate to thy ashes! A nobler spirit lived not among the sons of men. Thy intellectual powers were truly sublime, and thy bosom burned with a god-like ambition. But of what use are talents and sentiments in the corrupt wilderness of human society? It is a rank and rotten soil, from which every finer shrub draws poison as it grows. All that, in a happier field and a purer air, would expand into virtue and germinate into usefulness, is thus concerted into ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin

... beasts, than that moment to end my days; and that I may the better declare what happened to me during that grievous captivity, I shall particularly speak of the several removes we had up and down the wilderness. ...
— Captivity and Restoration • Mrs. Mary Rowlandson

... call down the moon from out her sphere, On this sick youth work your enchantments here: Bind up his senses with your numbers so As to entrance his pain, or cure his woe. Fall gently, gently, and a while him keep Lost in the civil wilderness of sleep: That done, then let him, dispossessed of pain, Like to ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick

... not exchange this short, crazy, enchanting fantasy for a whole wilderness of seemly novels, proclaiming in decorous accents the undoubted truth that there are ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton

... of these men conquered the wilderness and brought up their sons to a sturdy, vigorous manliness, which resembles the colonial culture of Franklin, ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns

... so small as compared with their sacrifice. Modern-day Christs, that's what they were! Christs by the thousands, who had found no Josephs of Arimathea to hide their defilement in garden-sepulchres. There they lay at this moment in the wilderness of corruption where they had fallen, while living people between puffs of cigarettes, undertook to explain why they should ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson

... warn you, mademoiselle, I am king there, and not a constitutional king. I am Czar; my subjects are mine by purchase, and no one can escape from my kingdom, which is a hundred leagues from any human settlement, hemmed in by savages on the interior, and divided from the sea by a wilderness as wide as France." ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac

... and interesting as, after leaving the bridge of the Rajah rapid, there are about 1,000 feet of rock and boulders to pass through or over before you reach the next rapid, and, when half way, there would be nothing to show that you were not wandering through a mere wilderness of rocks were it not for the unceasing thunder, far below, from the bottom of the Rajah Fall. The next rapid to be crossed is that of the Roarer, which takes, before it goes over the precipice a most singular course—first flowing into a basin at the edge of the ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot

... 10 fools do among 300 sinners? They can do much harm, and had far better let the sinners seek peace their own way in the wilderness than ram it down their ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler

... you—you desire to hear of Colonel John Moredock. Well, a day in my boyhood is marked with a white stone—the day I saw the colonel's rifle, powder-horn attached, hanging in a cabin on the West bank of the Wabash river. I was going westward a long journey through the wilderness with my father. It was nigh noon, and we had stopped at the cabin to unsaddle and bait. The man at the cabin pointed out the rifle, and told whose it was, adding that the colonel was that moment sleeping on wolf-skins in the corn-loft above, so we must not talk very loud, for the colonel ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville

... say it? Even for that he hates me. A low voice Lost in a wilderness where none can hear! A voice of shipwreck on a shoreless sea! A low voice from the dust and from the grave (Sitting on the ground). There, am ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson

... tree-tops on the eastern shore of the stream, giving warning of the near approach of night, he ran the raft into a convenient bight on the lee shore—that the mosquitoes might not come off to them against the wind during the night—and came to an anchor in the midst of what seemed to be an unpeopled wilderness. ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood

... of terrour which those who are unwilling to suffer the reproach of cowardice have wisely dignified with the name of antipathy. A man who talks with intrepidity of the monsters of the wilderness while they are out of sight, will readily confess his antipathy to a mole, a weasel, or a frog. He has indeed no dread of harm from an insect or a worm, but his antipathy turns him pale whenever they approach him. He believes that a boat will transport him with as much safety as his neighbours, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... no small country. It comprises territory enough to make a good sized State. At present, it is almost one great wilderness, in many particulars as unknown as the Black Hills. It is coming into the world now, and will be well known in a few years. The great city of Cincinnati has determined to build a railroad through the very center of this great table in the north part of the State, connecting with ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 433, April 19, 1884 • Various

... his nets and boar spears, in the fandango and the bullfight. Sometimes he shut himself up in an inner chamber from the eyes of his courtiers. Sometimes he loitered alone, from sunrise to sunset, in the dreary and rugged wilderness which surrounds the Escurial. The hours which he did not waste in listless indolence were divided between childish sports and childish devotions. He delighted in rare animals, and still more in dwarfs. When neither strange beasts nor little men could dispel the black thoughts which gathered in ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... afternoons in May the same chatter and hiss of nesting starlings. From the scanty scraps of the paintings on the wall you can only guess vaguely at the texts of the old Sunday sermons: manna falls in the wilderness; Moses brings water out of the rock; probably the congregation listened with most eagerness to the third, the ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker

... more glaring tendency to subvert the authority of my opinion among my fellow-men, than instability. "What went ye out into the wilderness to see" said Jesus Christ: "a reed shaken with the wind?" We ought at all times to be open to conviction. We ought to be ever ready to listen to evidence. But, conscious of our human frailty, it is seldom that we ought immediately to subscribe to the propositions, however specious, that are ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin

... bloomed along the edge of the irrigation channels, and from the white flowers of the glossy, golden-fruited orange trees, floated a perfume delicious to the sense, while the silence was only broken from time to time by the bark of a wandering dog or the howl of a jackal in the wilderness. ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard

... Gore-Marston pleaded. "I've had a letter from him; he's just got back to civilization after being out in the wilderness, shooting, for six weeks. He'll be here in a month ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope

... that burned like stars sublime Go down the heavens of freedom, And true hearts perish in the time We bitterliest need them; But never sit we down and say, There's nothing left but sorrow— We walk the wilderness to-day, The ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various

... very straightforward kind—plain grass, shrubberies, winding paths, with comfortable wooden seats in sheltered places; one or two big beds, evidently of old-fashioned perennials, and some trellises for ramblers. The garden was adjoined by a sort of wilderness, with big trees and ground-ivy, and open spaces in which aconites and snowdrops were beginning to show themselves. Father Payne, I gathered, was fond of the garden and often worked there; but there were no curiosities—it was all very simple. Beyond that were pasture-fields, with a good many clumps ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson

... heard of the number of rattle and other snakes to be met with on the banks of the lake, but these have been nearly exterminated by the settlers. During my stay in the suburbs I only found a few water-snakes, basking in the sun amongst the wilderness of aquatic plants that cover the surface of the ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell

... the country of Assynt. The Earl of Kinnoul, being faint for lack of meat, and not able to travel any further, was left there among the mountains, where it was supposed he perished. Montrose had almost famished, but that he fortuned in his misery to light upon a small cottage in that wilderness, where he was supplied with some milk and bread.' Not even the iron frame of Montrose could endure a prolonged existence under such circumstances. He gave himself up to Macleod of Assynt, a former adherent, from whom he had reason to expect assistance in consideration of that circumstance, and, ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun

... that Reed should go out into the wilderness alone, and with neither food nor ammunition. Happily this part of the programme was thwarted. The faithful Virginia, in company with Milton Elliott, followed Mr. Reed after he had started, and carried him his gun and ammunition. The affectionate girl also managed to ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan

... no fear of any peril in the stretch of unbroken forest that opened before him. It was fortunate indeed for his peace of mind that he did not know what was awaiting him in the dark arches and labyrinths of the almost interminable wilderness. ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis

... have a few notions that will be knocked out of your head after you have been down this way a short time. You still seem to fancy you are going into a howling wilderness where there are only savages ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish

... trees had been cut down, so that at some points of our journey we had the impression of passing through a wilderness of roots. The tree trunks had all been removed so as to afford no cover to the enemy. All houses had been blown up or otherwise destroyed. Later we passed through the country which had been flooded as a further ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various

... It cannot, I think, be found in lack of earnestness; for today all the guides of the churches in England are serious, upright men, who would gladly lead if they could. Nor is it because they are voices uttering strange announcements in the wilderness; if they have a fault it is rather that they have so little to announce. The defect which is disclosed by the pictures given by "A Gentleman with a Duster" is primarily intellectual, and I propose to devote to ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie

... success in his intercourse with them. The handful of men with whom he set out from Matagorda Bay on the 7th of June, 1687, besides a few whose admiration for their leader knew no bounds, also included others who, like the children of Israel, thirsted for the life of him who had led them out into the wilderness to die. ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan

... of flame danced and sparkled and went out in it; and every now and then light detachments of this white cloud-like foam darted off from the vessel's side, each with its own small constellation, over the sea, and scoured out of sight like a Tartar troop over a wilderness." ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock

... many of you must have heard it from the honored lips of the Tuscarora pioneers whose deeds it chronicles. It is a story of our town in that rough-hewn past before railroads were dreamed of, before 'Clinton's Ditch' had touched our wilderness with its mighty wand and made it blossom like the rose. We owe a vast debt to De Witt Clinton," he digressed to add. "He was our Moses, and I can never think upon his great achievement without a thrill of gratitude. I confess to a mania for the ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther

... only to be traced as ruins, there is another village on the shores of the Horican. But, beyond this, the enterprise and energy of a people who have done so much in other places have done little here. The whole of that wilderness, in which the latter incidents of the legend occurred, is nearly a wilderness still, though the red man has entirely deserted this part of the state. Of all the tribes named in these pages, there exist only a few half-civilized beings of the Oneidas, on the ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper

... that Taillasson is further right when he maintains that Salvator's "Plato," nay, that even his "Holy St. John proclaiming the Advent of the Saviour in the Wilderness," look just a little like highway robbers—admitting this, I say, it is nevertheless unjust to argue from the character of the works to the character of the artist himself, and to assume that he, who represents with lifelike ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... adopting only their most outrageous fictions. His personages don't interest us, and yours will. You will have no competitor; and, if you had, you ought to be glad of it. The little I have done in that way is merely a "voice in the wilderness" for you; and if it has had any success, that also will prove that the public are orientalising, and pave the path ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron

... conquest was put into us? Mother says a great deal of it is owing to bad education nowadays, but some girls seem born for the express purpose of making trouble and would manage to do it if they lived in a howling wilderness. I 'm afraid I 've got a spice of it, and if I had the chance, should be as bad as any of them. I 've tried it and liked it, and maybe this is the consequence of that ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott

... Presbyterian Church now stands. Waddell was a close friend of President Jackson, and his fortune sprang from the services he rendered as financial representative of the "Old Hickory" Administration. In 1845, when he went "into the wilderness" to build, the Avenue, beyond Madison Square, was nothing but a country road lined with farms. It is told that when he was bargaining for the land, his wife sat under an apple-tree in a neighbouring orchard. Nine thousand one hundred and fifty dollars he paid for the tract, which ten ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice

... THE GREAT NORTHWEST Or, With Lewis and Clark Across the Rockies A splendid story describing in detail the great expedition formed under the leadership of Lewis and Clark, and telling what was done by the pioneer boys who were first to penetrate the wilderness of the northwest and push over the Rocky Mountains. The book possesses a permanent historical value and the story should be known by ...
— Randy of the River - The Adventures of a Young Deckhand • Horatio Alger Jr.

... ignorant, had risen in the scale of civilization and intelligence to a level which almost equalled that of a Hampshire villager. The double stream of emigration to the United States and migration to the English harvest-fields was stopped. An earthly paradise had been created in a howling wilderness by the self-denying labours of the holy ladies, aided by the statesmanlike liberality of the Congested Districts Board. There was another page of the article, but Hyacinth could stand ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham

... the world can supply. A man died not long ago who, at twenty-five years of age, with no previous training, was set to govern a kingdom with absolute power, and who did govern it so wisely and firmly that he literally changed a wilderness into a fruitful land. Probably no one who reads these lines will guess to whom they allude.' I can, however, say that they allude to James Grant Duff (1789-1858), author of the 'History of the Mahrattas,' and father of his friend Sir Mountstuart. Fitzjames had visited ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... were surging tides of excited men. It was difficult to make one's way. Toward midnight our aimless tramp brought us to the neighborhood of the beautiful church of St. Ouen, and there all was bustle and work. The square was a wilderness of torches and people; and through a guarded passage dividing the pack, laborers were carrying planks and timbers and disappearing with them through the gate of the churchyard. We asked what was going forward; ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain

... took for your own "judgment" was mere chance prejudice, and drifted, helpless, entangled weed of castaway thought; nay, you will see that most men's minds are indeed little better than rough heath wilderness, neglected and stubborn, partly barren, partly overgrown with pestilent brakes, and venomous, wind-sown herbage of evil surmise; that the first thing you have to do for them, and yourself, is eagerly and scornfully to set fire to THIS; burn all the jungle into wholesome ash-heaps, ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin

... law-givers, and to those whose society is thus held at a premium. It is true, that, excepting Will Cobbett, few English writers of eminence have taken the hospitable hint; but who could have foreseen this result, when so many of the literary race are perpetually sighing for lodges in the wilderness, and dwellings in the desert! Monsieur Dumas might indeed be reluctant to accept the flattering overtures of a country which is known to cherish such antipathies to his great ancestor Ham, and all that interesting family; and is quite, excusable for preferring the persecutions of French ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various

... perfect in its graceful foliage and smooth rounded stem, and of apparently equal height. Round the surfaces of these stems the green leaves and purple flowers of convolvuli clung. A few yards beyond the termination of this avenue we left the path and entered a wilderness of climbing plants. Carefully advancing (for there were arms stretched out on every side ready to pluck flesh or clothing), we took our stand opposite the coils of ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold

... occasions, though with inferior numbers, he attacked and defeated the Royalists. The Spaniards, having regained their power in other parts of the country, compelled, by the fearful cruelties they practised, vast numbers of men, women, and children to fly into the wilderness and take refuge in the camp of Paez. Among them were many persons of distinction; and a regular system of government being established, Paez was chosen supreme chief with the rank of general of brigade. ...
— The Young Llanero - A Story of War and Wild Life in Venezuela • W.H.G. Kingston

... they made their appearance about eighty years ago; yet prior to that time this region was under high cultivation, traces of orchards, orange groves, and iron-smelting furnaces remaining in what is now a howling wilderness. Elephants are caught in stockades or kraals. The Government employs hunting parties of 350 natives trained to the work, and more than 100 animals are sometimes secured ...
— Afghanistan and the Anglo-Russian Dispute • Theo. F. Rodenbough

... illustrating incidents in the life of St. Ranieri, the patron saint of Pisa, by Andrea da Firenzi, 1377. Those beyond the second door illustrate the temptations and miracles of hermits in the Theban wilderness, by the Lorenzetti. Between Nos. 39 and 40, Hell. Above 38, the Day of Judgment. Then, by Orcagna, the Power of Death,—filling those living in pleasure with horror, but those in sorrow with joy. Now ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black

... which eats, sleeps, awakes; eats and sleeps again, dreams dreams, but never lives. Or is life really nothing else? And is it just one more phase of the eternal martyrdom, a new mistake of the erring human soul, this banishing of one's self to the hopeless wilderness, only to long there for what one has left behind? Am I a coward? Am I afraid of death? Oh, no! but in these nights such longing can come over one for all beauty, for that which is contained in ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen

... and more healthful surrounding for the poor? Does not our national genius seem to lie altogether in the line of what is practically useful? Is it not our boast and our great achievement that we have in a single century made the wilderness of a vast continent habitable, have so ploughed and drained and planted and built that it can now easily maintain hundreds of millions in gluttonous plenty? Is not our whole social and political organization of a ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding

... cattle through the street— A Nation's thoroughfare of hopes and fears, First blazed by the heroic pioneers Who gave up old-home idols and set face Toward the unbroken West, to found a race And tame a wilderness now mightier than All peoples and all tracts American. Blent with all outer sounds, the sounds within:— In mild remoteness falls the household din Of porch and kitchen: the dull jar and thump Of churning; and the "glung-glung" of the pump, With ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley

... explorers noted first of all its solitude. Wigwam smoke could not be seen on either shore. Silence, save the breathing of the river as it rolled on its course, seemed to surround and threaten them with ambush. Still, day after day, the sweet and awful presence of the wilderness was their only company. Once Pierre Porteret dropped his paddle with a yell which was tossed about by echoing islands. A thing with a tiger's forehead and a wildcat's whiskered snout, holding ears and entire gray and black head above the ...
— Heroes of the Middle West - The French • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... impelled me through space with a velocity that precluded speech. Down! down! down! I was rapidly descending; and I knew that return to Flatland was my doom. One glimpse, one last and never-to-be-forgotten glimpse I had of that dull level wilderness—which was now to become my Universe again—spread out before my eye. Then a darkness. Then a final, all-consummating thunder-peal; and, when I came to myself, I was once more a common creeping Square, in my Study at home, listening ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott

... the Puritans landed on the sands of Massachusetts Bay. The illusion was gone,—the ignis-fatuus of adventure, the dream of wealth. The rugged wilderness offered only a stern and hard-won independence. In their own hearts, not in the promptings of a great leader or the patronage of an equivocal government, their enterprise found its birth and its achievement. They were of the boldest, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... the statesman, as the huntsman does to the cook, or the taker of quails to the keeper of quails; he has not the use of that which he acquires. The two enquirers, Cleinias and Socrates, are described as wandering about in a wilderness, vainly searching after the art of life and happiness. At last they fix upon the kingly art, as having the desired sort of knowledge. But the kingly art only gives men those goods which are neither good nor evil: and if we say further that it makes us wise, in what does it make us wise? Not in ...
— Euthydemus • Plato

... regarded, not merely with apathy, but with terror, the prospect of a voyage, that was to take the mariner from the safe and pleasant seas which he was accustomed to navigate, and send him roving on the boundless wilderness of waters, which tradition and superstitious fancy had peopled with innumerable forms ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott

... counted for something in the quiet backwater of our life, but also because we knew that he went away a less happy man than he had come. This time it was not sheer Wanderlust that had driven him into the wilderness. He had fled in the blind hope of escaping from the unescapable. The ogre to whatsoever No Man's Land he betook himself would forever be haunted by the phantom of the elf. . . . It was just as well he had ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke

... he said. "To go would be a mistake and a weakly selfish one on my part. I have long ceased to be a man of cities, and am best employed, and indeed am most at my ease, herding my few sheep here in the wilderness. I am part and parcel of just all that which we have agreed it is wise you shall leave behind you for a while. My presence would lessen the thoroughness of the change of scene and of thought. You take up a way of life which was familiar to you years ago. The ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... gold and enamelled, said to be the workmanship of George Heriot. The prayers were printed by A. Barker, 1574. The front side of the cover contains a representation of the raising of the serpent in the wilderness; whilst on the back is represented the judgment of Solomon. This book was for many years in the Duke of Sussex's collection; it was sold with the rest of the collection of the late George ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts

... Horace Porter's Campaigning with Grant, we have three distinct coffee incidents within fifty-odd pages; or explicitly, see pages 47, 56, 101; where, deep in the fiercest snarls of The Wilderness campaign ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... of the Red River continued to rise—slowly, it is true, and inch by inch instead of foot by foot—until these settlers in the great wilderness began to think, with something akin to superstitious fear, of that mighty deluge which had been sent to submerge the world in ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne

... white paling, tipped with green; the clean gravel walk that led up to the door, the borders of which were skirted with white and with red roses; the clusters of tulips, lilies and hyacinths—all contributed to make the wilderness "blossom as the rose;" and every day the kind-hearted man sought to add some new ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes

... whole company turned their gaze; recovering his breath somewhat, he said: "A bear, sir!" All guessed the rest, that the beast had come out from the jungle,58 that it was slipping through to the wilderness beyond the Niemen; all immediately recognised that it must be pursued at once, although they had not consulted together or thought the matter over. The common thought was evident from the clipped words, the lively gestures, the various orders that were issued, which, ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz

... others. Enough to profit them this way and yonder as one best can! You know the newspaper Press is a mighty engine. Still he had no delight in shuffling a puppetry; he would have preferred automatic figures. His calls for them resounded through the wilderness ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... treasure's worth Till time has stol'n away the slighted good, Is cause of half the poverty we feel, And makes the world the wilderness ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various

... religious origin. What has been held to be a work of the Revolution was in reality a fruit of the Reformation and its struggles. Its first apostle was not Lafayette but Roger Williams, who, driven by powerful and deep religious enthusiasm, went into the wilderness in order to found a government of religious liberty, and his name is uttered by Americans even ...
— The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens • Georg Jellinek

... dog of the same kind, which never burrows. It lives on small animals and birds, and rarely enters any of the towns. A similar dog, according to Colonel Hamilton Smith, inhabits the neighbourhood of the Cape, and particularly the Karroo or Wilderness. It is smaller than either of the others, and lives among bushes or under prominent rocks. Others, although not identified with the jackal, yet associating with him, inhabit the Uplands of ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... shut up in my chamber at an inn. I feel as if in a wilderness of savages, where all my safety consisted in solitude. I was glad not to meet with a human being whom ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown

... a preposition, a word which serves to connect words, and show the relation between them—it connects the words "antelope" and "wilderness"—and shows ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham

... and fire-arms could scarcely furnish them with food. But supposing that they should find the means of subsistence; how horrible must be their state, to be condemned to languish out the remainder of their lives in a desolate wilderness without the possession or hope of domestic comfort; and to be cut off from all commerce with mankind, excepting that of the naked savages, who prowl the desert, and who perhaps are some of the most rude and uncivilized inhabitants ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis

... its joy. As the joy of the Holy Ghost fills us, and we rejoice in God the Holy One, through our Lord Jesus Christ, as we lose ourselves in the adoration and worship of the Thrice Holy, we become holy. This is, even here in the wilderness, 'the Highway of Holiness: the ransomed of the Lord shall come with singing; the redeemed shall walk there; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they ...
— Holy in Christ - Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy • Andrew Murray

... smaller islands, which furnish too many weapons for the other side, and too few for their own; and have chosen rather to divert attention from these by triumphant clamors about the forlorn condition of Jamaica. This magnificent island, once the fairest possession of the British crown, now almost a wilderness, has been the burden of their lamentations over the fatal workings of emancipation. And truly if emancipation has really done so much mischief in Jamaica as they claim, it is a most damaging fact. Testimony of opposite ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... spouts his message to the wilderness, Lightens his soul and feels one burden less; But to the people preach, and you will find They'll pay you back with thanks ill to your mind. ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall

... I replied. Then we sat down upon a log and listened. R.C. had heard that whistle in Colorado, but had not recognized it. Just as the mournful howl of a wolf is the wildest, most haunting sound of the wilderness, so is the bugle of the elk the noblest, most melodious and thrilling. With tingling nerves and strained ears we listened. We heard elk bugling in different directions, hard to locate. One bull appeared to be low down, ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey

... Catamount Island was rather enjoyable. Old recollections of other days came cropping up from time to time, and were mentioned, to be commented on. And never before had a blazing fire seemed more delightful than just then. It is always so with those who go out into the wilderness to get close to Nature; the new experience has charms that ...
— The Strange Cabin on Catamount Island • Lawrence J. Leslie



Words linked to "Wilderness" :   bush, VA, wasteland, geographic area, richness, cornucopia, profuseness, frontier, geographical region, disfavour, political relation, waste, disfavor, Old Dominion State, Old Dominion, politics, woodland, profusion, geographical area, barren, geographic region, timber



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