"Barren" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and tints. They intentionally neglected the question of how men differ, because they were absorbed by the study of the underlying laws which must hold for every one. It is hardly surprising that the psychologists chose this somewhat barren way; it was a kind of reaction against the fantastic flights of the psychology of olden times. Speculations about the soul had served for centuries. Metaphysics had reigned and the observation of the real facts of life and experience had been disregarded. ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... possess, scattered through Pliny and Dionysius Cassius, agree in stating that the Druids chose dark places for their ceremonies, like the depths of the woods with "their vast silence." And as Carnac is situated on the coast, and surrounded by a barren country, where nothing but these gentlemen's fancies has ever grown, the first grenadier of France, but not, in my estimation, the cleverest man, followed by Pelloutier and by M. Mahe, (canon of the cathedral of Vannes), concluded that it was "a Druidic temple ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... black precipices, a broad bay with sloping shores, and a wide beach which seemed like a beach of sand. The surf broke here, but beyond the surf was the gentle sandy declivity, and beyond this there appeared the shores, still rocky and barren and desolate, but far preferable to what we had left behind. Far away in the interior arose lofty mountains and volcanoes, while behind us flamed the burning peak which we ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... since setting out from before Fredericksburgh, through a country, well enough by nature, but neglected, barren and depopulated. How large a portion of this great State was in this sad condition? Its naturally rich fields were grown up to scrub pines, mugworts and wormwood. Its fair valleys desolate of inhabitants, or inhabited by low white trash, as idle as ignorant. The groves and fields where ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... a field that was barren and filled with stones. In the spring when the warm nights came and when she was big with him she went to the fields. The heads of little stones stuck out of the ground like the heads of buried children. The field, washed with moonlight, ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... high in air, the beautiful and bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by their tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So omnipotent is art; which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced bright terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside at ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... goes on to say, "This great power of flight is seconded by as great a power of vision, which enables them, as they travel at that great rate, to view objects below, and so discover their food with facility. This I have proved to be the case by observing the pigeons, as they were passing over a barren part of the country, keep high in the air, and present such an extensive front as to enable them to observe ...
— True Stories about Cats and Dogs • Eliza Lee Follen
... had nothing in common with a vineyard; it was built upon arid land as bare and barren as a rock; not even a blade of grass grew within a hundred yards of its doors. The grim plainness of the old drab building was relieved only by a rickety bell-tower so stuffed with sparrows' nests that the bell within gave forth only a dull and muffled ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... Agora. Sure-footed and adventurous, they scale the side of the most unpromising crags in search of herbage and can sometimes be seen perching, almost like birds, in what seem utterly inaccessible eyries. Thanks to them the barren highlands of Attica are turned to good account,—and between goat raising and bee culture an income can sometimes be extracted from the very summits of the mountains. As for the numerous swine, it is enough to say that they range under Hybrias's ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... rides and the barren camp-sites what delight to awaken in this beautiful valley with the morning cool and breezy and bright, with smell of new-mown hay from the green and purple alfalfa fields, and the sunlight gilding the jagged crags above! Romer ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... the ordinary mind rarely, if ever, came to his mind. Noble feeling, depth of thought, strength, and grandeur are the associations which we have with him, and in the hands of weaker men, as his imitators were, these subjects became barren, hollow displays of distorted limbs and soulless heads ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... blood. A horse mercilessly starved in the fields; a wild bird wailing for its murdered mate; a tramp driven by hunger and primitive desire, and harried by the "insolence of office"; an old man denied the little luxuries of his senile greed; an old maid torn and rent in the flesh that is barren and the breasts that never gave suck; these are the natural subjects of his genius—the sort of "copy" that one certainly need not leave one's ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... less so than the human personality of which they remain the symbol. Twenty-four hundred years ago, out of solitary meditation upon the pain and the mystery of being, the mind of an Indian pilgrim brought forth the highest truth ever taught to men, and in an era barren of science anticipated the uttermost knowledge of our present evolutional philosophy regarding the secret unity of life, the endless illusions of matter and of mind, and the birth and death of universes. ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... to reason," said Buzzford. "'Tis barren ignorance that leads to such words. He's a simple home-spun man, that never was fit for good ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... Barbarossa to command; and his soldiers, even the princes of the empire, were accustomed under his reign to obey. As soon as he lost sight of Philadelphia and Laodicea, the last cities of the Greek frontier, he plunged into the salt and barren desert, a land (says the historian) of horror and tribulation. [23] During twenty days, every step of his fainting and sickly march was besieged by the innumerable hordes of Turkmans, [24] whose numbers and fury seemed ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... in your speed, Antonius, To touch Calpurnia; for our elders say, The barren, touched in this holy chase, Shake ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... the most recent on these matters, is astonished why the Histories of Friedrich should be such dreary reading, and Friedrich himself so prosaic, barren an object; and lays the blame upon the Age, insensible to real greatness; led away by clap-trap Napoleonisms, regardless of expense. Upon which Smelfungus takes ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... Crane's best interests, he pretended to consent out of pure chivalry. "What you ask," he said, "is very little; I would do a thousand times more for you. There is nothing you could ask of me that would not give me more pleasure than anything else in my barren life. But I could not bear to see you wedded to Mortimer; he is not worthy—you are too good for him. I don't say this because he is more fortunate, but I love you and want ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... view of the injunction to increase and multiply, he can justify the large celibate class created by positive command of the Catholic church, not only by the ordination of priests, but by the constant urging of the church that women should become the barren brides of Christ by taking on them the vows ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... be told that it has always been so in every country, and that the fine society of all lands is as profuse and flashy as our own. We deny it, flatly. Neither English, nor French, nor Italian, nor German society, is so unspeakably barren as that which is technically called "society" here. In London, and Paris, and Vienna, and Rome, all the really eminent men and women help make up the mass of society. A party is not a mere ball, but it is a ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... Petronius who introduce them mainly for satirical ends. But the Christians could not thus escape from the obsession of sex; it was ever with them. We catch interesting glimpses of their struggles, for the most part barren struggles, in the Epistles of St. Jerome, who had himself been an athlete in these ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... have done for Ireland whole worlds of new things. But the Liberals, with the very same power to do heretofore, and to propose now, neither did then, nor can propose at present. And why? partly because the privilege of acting for Ireland, so fruitful in reproaches, is barren in practice: the one thing that remained to be done,—viz. the putting down agitators—has been done; and partly because the privilege of proposing for Ireland is dangerous: first, as pledging themselves hereafter; second, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... widow, and that Thomas Dimsdale, bachelor, was to do as much to Catherine Harston, spinster. They communicated the tidings to their friends, and the result was a great advertisement to the little church, so that the incumbent preached his favourite sermon upon barren fig trees to a crowded audience, and received such an offertory as had never entered ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... on a flat outcropping of rock two miles from Whisper camp. Lone frowned and stared at the ground, and Swan spoke sharply to Jack, who was nosing back and forth, at fault if ever a dog was. But presently he took up the scent and led them down a barren slope and into grassy ground where a bunch of horses grazed contentedly. Jack singled out one and ran toward it silently, as he had done all his trailing that morning. The horse looked up, stared and went galloping down the little valley, stampeding the others ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... barren plain studded with clumps of trees led to the wood, to the little wood which had seemed to them to resemble the one at Kermarivan. Grainfields and hayfields bordered the narrow path, which lost itself in the ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... become clear: we drive again in under Cleven, the barren side of Kinnakulla: it is a rocky wall, different from almost all the others. The red stone blocks lie, strata on strata, forming fortifications with embrasures, projecting wings and round towers; but shaken, split and fallen in ruins—it is an architectural fantastic freak of nature. A brook ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... to be taught; because those original ideas of rectitude, to which the mind is compelled to assent when they are proposed, are not always as present to it as they ought to be. When people are gone, if not into a denial, at least into a sort of oblivion of those ideas, when they know them only as barren speculations, and not as practical motives for conduct, it will be proper to press, as well as to offer them to the understanding; and when one is attacked by prejudices which aim to intrude themselves into ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... pope-bred Princeling crawl ashore, And whistle cut-throats, with those swords that scraped Their barren rocks for wretched sustenance, To cut his passage to the ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... and looked around—at the empty trail, the waterless flats, the barren hills all about—and then he raised his fist, which still clutched the chunk of quartz, and shook it at the pillar of dust. His throat was dry and no words came, to carry the burden of his hate, but as he ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... remain blind to the idiotic folly of our founders, who forswore every delight of life for the pleasures of dying martyrs by hunger, by thirst, and by pestilence, and by the swords of savages, while they vainly strove to defend a barren desert, valuable only in the eyes of superstition. Our Order soon adopted bolder and wider views, and found out a better indemnification for our sacrifices. Our immense possessions in every kingdom of Europe, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Velasquez, whose adherent he was. He now openly proclaimed his intention of marching against Cortes and punishing him, so that even the natives who had flocked to this new camp comprehended that these white men were enemies of those who had come before. Narvaez proposed to establish a colony in the barren, sandy spot which Cortes had abandoned, and when informed of the existence of Villa Rica, he sent to demand the submission of the garrison. Sandoval had kept a sharp eye upon the movements of Narvaez from the time that his ships had first appeared upon ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... to cover those that cling to the crags. Nothing proves to me so clearly that it is the air which principally nourishes trees and plants as the flourishing appearance of these pines. The firs, demanding a deeper soil, are seldom seen in equal health, or so numerous on the barren cliffs. They take shelter in the crevices, or where, after some revolving ages, the pines ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... looking as if it were only the dirty eaves hanging from its more aspiring neighbour on the right, supports itself against the cabin on the left, about three feet above the ground. Can that be the habitation of any of the human race? Few but such as those whose lot has fallen on such barren places would venture in; but for a moment let us see what ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... ridiculed as an impossibility; the circulation of the blood is hinted at; added to which is the marvellous anticipation of anaesthetics as applied to surgery, to be mentioned later on, an idea which also remained barren of results for something like sixteen centuries, until Western science stepped in and secured the prize. Here it may be fairly argued that, considering the national repugnance to mutilation of the body in any form, it could hardly be expected ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... set his traps; he thought of her, as, hard on the trail of moose, or deer, or wolf, or bear, he scoured the valleys and hills; in the shadow of the trees at twilight, in fancy he saw her lurking; even amidst the black, barren tree-trunks down by the river banks. His eyes and ears were ever alert with the half-dread expectation of seeing her or hearing her voice. The scene Victor had described of the white huntress leaning upon her rifle was the most vivid ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... whom she could say what she pleased, from whom she had a right to ask for counsel and protection, a man who delighted to be near her, and to make much of her. In comparison with her old mode of living, her old ideas of life, her life with such a lover was passed in an elysium. She had entered from barren lands into so rich a paradise! But there is no paradise, as she now found, without apples which must be eaten, and which lead to sorrow. She regretted in this hour that she had ever seen Brooke Burgess. After all, with her aunt's love and care for her, with her mother ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... from them in return the strictest obedience to her will and wishes. But of all virtues most sacred in her eyes was that of the love of truth, which she ever sought to implant in their minds; assuring them, that, without it, all other virtues were but as unprofitable weeds, barren of fruits and flowers. She was simple and dignified in her manners, and had a hearty dislike for every thing savoring of parade and idle show. She always received her friends and visitors with a cordial smile of welcome, spreading before them with an unsparing ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... upon such roots as they could dig by the way. Of the provisions brought from St. Louis,—flour and canned stuff,—there remained barely enough to suffice for ten days' emergency rations; and of course they could not hope to find game upon the barren mountains, particularly at that season of the year. They were just entering upon ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... make an effort, except, perhaps, to rise and poke the selector when he tried to tempt their appetites with slices of immature pumpkin. They died peacefully and persistently, until all were gone save a certain dangerous, barren, slab-sided luny bovine with white eyes and much agility in jumping fences, who was ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... about 98% thick continental ice sheet and 2% barren rock, with average elevations between 2,000 and 4,000 meters; mountain ranges up to 4,897 meters high; ice-free coastal areas include parts of southern Victoria Land, Wilkes Land, the Antarctic Peninsula area, and parts of Ross Island on McMurdo Sound; glaciers form ice shelves ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... mothers in this world,—some who are capable of sacrificing their children to Moloch, who will barter their own flesh and blood in return for some barren heritage or other. There are those who will exact from those dependent on them heavy tithes of daily patience and uncomplaining drudgery; while others, who are "mothers indeed" give all, asking ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... author of "Coningsby," or whether they express his sincere opinion on the future of Greece in the East. Doubtless the future belongs to those who hope and work; but no nation can produce anything great by struggling on a soil so small, so barren, and so narrow, just as no individual can work efficiently if deprived of every resource, and kept without air ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... was born and reared in Hartford, in the State of Connecticut—anyway, just over the river, in the country. So I am a Yankee of the Yankees—and practical; yes, and nearly barren of sentiment, I suppose—or poetry, in other words. My father was a blacksmith, my uncle was a horse doctor, and I was both, along at first. Then I went over to the great arms factory and learned my ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... it; and Carley found herself and belongings dumped out into the windy and sunny open. The moment was singularly thrilling and full of transport. She was free. She had shaken off the shackles. She faced lonely, wild, barren desert that must be made habitable by the genius of her direction and the labor of her hands. Always a thought of Glenn hovered tenderly, dreamily in the back of her consciousness, but she welcomed the opportunity to ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... fundamental truth on which rests all religion, and all philosophy capable of accounting for facts. Such is the grand cause which claims all the efforts which we are wasting too often in barren conflicts—the cause of God. But do I say the truth? Is it the cause of God which is at stake? When a surgeon, by a successful operation, has restored sight to a blind man, we are not wont to say that he has rendered a service to the sun. This cause is our own; ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... eaten bare to the very earth, and where there is nothing to be had but thistles, will rather fall soberly to those thistles and be hunger-starv'd, than they will offer to break their bounds; whereas the lusty courser, if he be in a barren plot, and spy better grass in some pasture near adjoining, breaks over hedge and ditch, and to go, ere he will be pent in, and not have his bellyful. Peradventure, the horses lately sworn to be stolen,[31] carried ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... into irregular groupes, with intervening glades; and firs, which they generally raise around their houses, look dull and funereal in the summer season. — I must confess, indeed, that they yield serviceable timber, and good shelter against the northern blasts; that they grow and thrive in the most barren soil, and continually perspire a fine balsam of turpentine, which must render the air very salutary and sanative to lungs ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... years... together with the extraordinary uncertainty of the issue of the voyage, as we had nothing but our hands to depend upon to obtain a cargo which was only to be done through storms, dangers, and breakers, and taken from barren rocks in distant regions. But after a voyage of four years for one vessel and five for the other, we were all permitted to return safe home to our friends and not quite empty-handed. We had built both of the vessels we were in and navigated them two and ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... then? The world thought it had done with him. All seemed gone for which his wife had prized him. Should he accept that, and in its acceptance take up his life as valetudinarian, his life forgotten of the world which he had loved to conquer, barren of interest for the woman whom it had been his strongest passion to win against her instincts, to hold as it were against her will, and to fascinate in face of her distaste? Such were the terms offered; Alexander Quisante lay long hours open-eyed and thought of them. There ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... front room, but was under the windward wall. In the teeth of the gale the old man crawled out of the hole, extended his length on the ground, and began to drag his stiff and trembling frame, with hands, elbows and knees, across the fifty feet or so of barren soil that lay between the hole and the cottage. He heard the crash of bricks before he had accomplished half the distance; without pausing to look he crawled rapidly on till he crossed the threshold, and saw ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... preserving and breeding the game animals, like the deer, the moose, the elk, the buffalo, the antelope, the mountain sheep and goat, and many others, which but for their care would long since have become extinct. They select barren regions in mild climates, not fit for agriculture, and enclosing large tracts with wire fences, they raise great quantities of these valuable game animals, which they sell to the wealthy gourmands of the great ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... perfectly-formed semicircular bay, the spit on which they stood forming one side, a similar spit being on the other about a hundred and fifty yards away, while the whole wore the aspect of a volcanic crater, one side of which had been washed down by the sea, the black jagged rock and barren aspect being suggestive of this having been once the scene ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... me as he pleased. Three days after beheld us on our way to the rich empire of Texas—its plains, rich but barren—unstocked, wild-running to waste with its tangled weeds—needing, imploring the vigorous hand of cultivation. Even such, at that moment, was my heart! Rich in fertile affections, yet gone to waste; waiting, craving, praying for the hand of the cultivator!—Yet ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... of the woman's colorless words went to Helen's heart with appalling force—"so many others just like us." This stricken home was not then an exception. With flashing vividness her mind pictured many rooms similar to the cold and barren apartment where she sat. She visioned as clearly as she saw Mrs. Whaley the many other wives and mothers with Bobbies and Maggies who were caught helplessly in the monstrous net of the strike, as these were caught. She knew now why the Interpreter and Billy Rand worked so hard. And again she felt ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... Should he bring down shame and perplexity upon all those beings to whom he was attached by so many tender ties of affection and gratitude? degrade his father's widow? impeach and sully his father's and kinsman's honor? and for what? for a barren title, to be worn at the expense of an innocent boy, the son of his dearest benefactress. He had debated this matter in his conscience, whilst his poor lord was making his dying confession. On one ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... us stand out of the way a little, so that they may twirl at their ease. Come, illustrious children of this inhabitant of the briny, brothers of the shrimps, skip on the sand and the shore of the barren sea; show us the lightning whirls and twirls of your nimble limbs. Glorious offspring of Phrynichus,[172] let fly your kicks, so that the spectators may be overjoyed at seeing your legs so high in air. Twist, twirl, tap your bellies, kick your legs to the ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... first at Nome and staked alongside the discoverers, who undertook to put me in right for once; but although the fellows around me made fortunes in a day, my ground was barren and my bed-rock swept clean by that unseen hand which I always felt but could never avoid. I leased proven properties, only to find that the pay ceased without reason. I did this so frequently that owners began to refuse me and came to consider me a thing of evil omen. Once ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... Scotch fashion of whipping for every act of disobedience or of simple, playful forgetfulness was still kept up in the wilderness, and of course many of those whippings fell upon me. Most of them were outrageously severe, and utterly barren of fun. But here is one that ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... his speech is lost sorrowfully in the air, or only awakens an echo which reverberates it, but cannot reply; his love knows not where to fix itself, and falling back on itself, threatens to become a barren egotism; in short, fill his being aspires to another self, but his other self does not exist. At this time, when the desire for communion was stifling him, he slept, and from his side God took a rib and made woman, and brought her to him. Behold ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... night, remember these children, reared as carefully as yours, without relatives, money, or future. They will be placed on farms to do a peasant's work with peasants. These women bereft of all that was dear face a barren future. These aged men anticipate for their only remaining blessing death, which will take them from a world which ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... one of these barren gray rocks, which, from its shape and perforation, exactly resembles the barbacan and gate of a castle, St. Remy is situated. The Hotel de la Graille, where we took up our abode for the night, was as comfortable as most French inns, ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... its surroundings, this strange and sweet self- abandonment must have its source in just the disappearance of the sensation of adjustment, on which the feeling of personality is based. But how can it be, we have to ask, that a principle so barren of emotional significance should account for the ecstasy of religious emotion, of aesthetic delight, of creative inspiration? It is not, however, religion or beauty or genius that is the object of our inquiry at ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... sea, the sandy plain stretching inland, with the rivers meandering through it, and the long sweep of shore which encompasses the Greve, with Avranches, and its groves and gardens, in the back ground. Close at hand, and almost beneath one's feet, as it were, is the barren rock called the Tombelaine, which, though somewhat larger than the Mont St. Michel, is not inhabited. Even this rock, however, was formerly fortified by the English; and several remains of the old towers ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 479, March 5, 1831 • Various
... the Congress altogether barren of positive result; for it gave birth to that conception of a "Confederation of Europe," which, though never realised, has been one of the guiding ideas of nineteenth-century politics. As this solution ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... far succeeded that a new edition of Amelia was called for on the day of publication. Johnson, to whom we owe this story, was thoroughly captivated with the book. Notwithstanding that on another occasion he paradoxically asserted that the author was "a blockhead"—"a barren rascal," he read it through without stopping, and pronounced Mrs. Booth to be "the most pleasing heroine of all the romances." Richardson, on the other hand, found "the characters and situations so wretchedly low and dirty" that he could not get ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... Holland, have been known to complain about the limited circle they can hope to reach, how true, how pathetically true, is this of Iceland, with its scant eighty thousand inhabitants of poor fishermen and farmers thinly spread over the lordly spaces of their far-away, rugged and barren island! What audience can an author expect there? Nor is it to be thought that his very difficult mother-tongue will permit a comprehension of his work among the reading public ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... somewhere before me was the roar of great waters, and forced me a passage with my hatchet until this denser wood gave place to a grove of mighty palm trees, and beyond these I came suddenly upon a great, barren rock that overhung a lake, whose dark waters were troubled by a torrent hard by that poured into it with a great rushing sound, a torrent of prodigious volume though of no great height. "So here" (thinks I) "is Adam's 'notable fall of water,'" and sitting down, I fell ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... was discoloured, the furniture old-fashioned and shabby; she would think it a poor, mean place. Even the orchard over the hill brought him no comfort now. Blossom would not care for orchards. She would be ashamed of her stupid old father and the barren farm. She would hate White Sands, and chafe at the dull existence, and look down on everything that went to ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Zaitun and Quinsai, reached the isle, landed, and took possession of the plain and of a number of houses; but they were unable to take any city or castle, when a sad misadventure occurred. A storm threatened and some of the troops were embarked; but about thirty thousand were left upon a small and barren island by the sailing of the ships. The sovereign and the people of the larger island rejoiced greatly when they saw the host thus scattered and many of them cast upon the islet. As soon as the sea calmed they assembled a great number of ships, sailed thither and landed, hoping to capture all those ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... sea the road is lined with gardens. Nothing could be more unpromising in appearance than this soil before it is ploughed and pulverized by the cultivator. It looks like a barren waste. We passed a tract that was offered three years ago for twelve dollars an acre. Some of it now is rented to Chinamen at thirty dollars an acre; and I saw one field of two acres off which a Chinaman has sold in one season ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... his very existence has been disputed, and his works have been declared to be an ingenious compilation, drawn from the productions of a multitude of singers. It is not my intention here to enter into the endless and barren controversy which has raged round this question. It will be more to the purpose to try and form some general idea of the characteristics of the Greek Epic; and to do this it is necessary to give a brief review of the political and social conditions in ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... method of agreement, of differences, of residues, and of concomitant variations. The course which he marked out so laboriously and so ingeniously for Induction to follow was one which was found to be impracticable, and as barren of results as those deductive philosophies on which he lavished his scorn. He has left precepts and examples of what he meant by his cross-examining and sifting processes. As admonitions to cross-examine and to sift ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... surrounded his vessel; or if he is tempted to do so, frost-bites may attack his hands and his feet, and deprive him of their use. Sometimes the Arctic explorer has had to journey for weeks together across the barren waste of ice or snow-covered ground, dragging his sledge after him, and sleeping night after night under the thin roof of a canvas tent; and, as summer draws on, often wet through from the melting snow, without an opportunity of drying his clothes. Seldom has he an abundance, ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... never hovers over the deserted waste. A blade of grass or an insect finds no existence there. The shrivelled lichen alone, clinging to the weathered surface of the broken brick, seems to glory in its universal dominion over those barren walls. Of all the desolate pictures I have ever seen that of Warka incomparably surpasses all." Surely in this case it cannot be said that appearances are deceitful; for all that space, and much more, is a cemetery, and what a cemetery! "It is difficult," again says Loftus, ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... line day and night for fourteen consecutive days, passing continuously through bleak, barren and almost unpopulated regions, crossing numerous wide rivers, an enormous lake and several mountain ranges, waiting sometimes for hours in sidings to allow homeward bound trains to pass, and seeing enough snow, even before winter had actually ...
— Through Siberia and Manchuria By Rail • Oliver George Ready
... and nothing is gained by reiterating our adherence to the principle, while refusing to provide any means of making our intention effectual. In the amended form the treaties contain nothing except such expression of barren intention, and indeed, as compared with what has already been provided in The Hague arbitration treaty, they probably represent not a step forward but a slight step backward, as regards the question of international arbitration. As such I do not think they should receive ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... known only by the vague reports of hunters or gold-seekers—at least that part watered by the river Gila and its tributaries. This river, which takes its rise in the distant mountains of the Mimbres, passes under various names through an immense extent of sandy barren country, the arid monotony of which is interrupted only by the ravines hollowed by the waters, which in their erratic course, ravage ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... of our excursion to Stonehenge had a significance for me which renders it memorable in my personal experience. As we drove over the barren plain, one of the party suddenly exclaimed, "Look! Look! See the lark rising!" I looked up with the rest. There was the bright blue sky, but not a speck upon it which my eyes could distinguish. ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... out a raw-boned stripling fra the north, to try my fortune with them here in the south; and my first step intill the world was, a beggarly clerkship in Sawney Gordon's counting house, here in the city of London, which you'll say afforded but a barren sort of a prospect. ...
— The Man Of The World (1792) • Charles Macklin
... of two and a half miles across the valley is an abrupt rocky mountain range of most irregular and picturesque formation, covered with scanty brushwood here and there, or rising into barren pinnacles and plateaux of rock. In outline and appearance this portion of the landscape was wonderfully like the Trosachs. A patch of blue sea was caught in between the overhanging cliffs of Balaklava as they ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... ten miles north-west. Box-tree flats, of more or less extent, were intercepted by abrupt barren craggy hills composed of sandstone, which seemed to rest on layers of argillaceous rock. The latter was generally observed at the foot of the hills and in the bed of the river; it had in most places been worn by the action ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... marquis de Martainville, then mayor of the town they determined, on the 24th april 1823, that a monumental burying should be established on the east of Rouen, on a portion of the hill of Fir-Trees which was barren, and could be disposed ...
— Rouen, It's History and Monuments - A Guide to Strangers • Theodore Licquet
... extraordinary discovery achieved by him, is produced or mentioned, although he belonged to a family of some note in Tuscany, which still existed in the present century. In this respect, Italy, the birth place and home of Verrazzano, is as blank and barren as France. All that is really shown of any pertinency is the single circumstance, that possibly the claim to the discovery was advanced in Italy, and in that country alone, at the time of the construction of the globe of Ulpius in 1542, but not ...
— The Voyage of Verrazzano • Henry C. Murphy
... thirty years: "Yeow jest turn raound 'n' drive me back a piece, the way we come. I allow I'll git a weed thet'll break thet fever. Faster, faster! Run yer hosses. 'Tain't above er mile back, whar I seed it," she cried, leaning out, eagerly scrutinizing each inch of the barren ground. "Stop! Here 'tis!" she cried. "I knowed I smelt the bitter on 't somewhars along hyar;" and in a few minutes more she had a mass of the soft, shining, gray, feathery leaves in her hands, ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... previously, when close in to barren and isolated Sala-y-Gomez, the POCAHONTAS had spoken the Chilian corvette O'HIGGINS, bound from Easter Island to Valparaiso. The captain of the corvette entertained the American master courteously, and ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke
... strange that the great empires which had carried their conquests so far on every hand had neglected to conquer Arabia. It was, indeed, comparatively isolated; it certainly did not lie in the common paths of the conquerors; doubtless it appeared barren, and by no means a tempting prize; and withal it was a difficult field for a successful campaign. But from whatever reason, the tribes of Arabia had never been conquered. Various expeditions had won temporary ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... once, and then to his sorrow. By-and-by, for a certainty, the man's sense of duty, the principles that had ruled him so long—and ruled more men then than now, for faith was stronger—would assert themselves. And he would go back to the Baltic lands, the barren, snow-bitten lands of his prime, a greyer, older, more sombre man—but not ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... ground, without the especial permission of Ceres, you may conceive what a terrible calamity had here fallen upon the earth. The husbandmen plowed and planted as usual; but there lay the rich black furrows, all as barren as a desert of sand. The pastures looked as brown in the sweet month of June as ever they did in chill November. The rich man's broad acres and the cottager's small garden patch were equally blighted. Every little girl's flower bed showed nothing but dry stalks. The old people shook ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... fair size when you see it on the map; but you have to remember that nearly all the land which is called Egypt on the map is barren sandy desert, or wild rocky hill-country, where no one can live. The real Egypt is just a narrow strip of land on either side of the great River Nile, sometimes only a mile or two broad altogether, never more than thirty miles broad, except near the mouth of the river, where it widens ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Egypt • James Baikie
... thirsty earth. It is impossible not to feel disappointment that the practical energies which at the beginning of the eighteenth century seemed ready to expand into full life should have proved comparatively barren of permanent results. But though the effort was not seconded as it should have been, none the less honour is due to the exemplary men who made it. It was an effort by no means confined to any one section ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... sailed to some other country, but his money now is nearly spent, and employment must be obtained. What can he do? Where and of whom shall he seek work? His life had been spent mostly at school. True, he is a physical athlete, but how farm this barren resource? If chance come to explore remote wilds, this will accord with his restless spirit, while ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... in this house as well as in our own. I remember piles of newspapers but no bound volumes other than the Bible and certain small Sunday school books. All the homes of the valley were equally barren. My sister and I jointly possessed a very limp and soiled cloth edition of "Mother Goose." Our stories all came to us by way of the conversation of our elders. No one but grandmother Garland ever deliberately told us ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... they mean," she murmured to herself. "This is what they mean." It was the joy past expression, the contentment past understanding. And all in one evening they had sprung up for her out of a barren thirsty land. Blent had never been beautiful before nor the river sparkled as it ran; youth was not known before, and beauty had been thrown away. The world was changed; and it was ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... and careless, but he loved to display his riches and magnificence, and made his marches and encampments as much scenes of festival as of war. What this showy duke wanted from their poor cities and barren country the Swiss could not very well see. "The spurs and the horses' bits in his army are worth more money than the whole of us could pay in ransom if we were all taken," ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... life hath ebbed away Comes flooding back, with a ripply cheer, Into every bare inlet and creek and bay; 60 Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it, We are happy now, because God wills it; No matter how barren the past may have been, 'T is enough for us now that the leaves are green; We sit in the warm shade and feel right well 65 How the sap creeps up and the blossoms swell; We may shut our eyes, but we cannot help knowing That skies are clear ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... Barren's took," Allen told him suddenly—"the one just off the road. I saw smoke ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... an old maid, the fear of her own virginity was really gaining on Alvina. There was a terrible sombre futility, nothingness, in Manchester House. She was twenty-six years old. Her life was utterly barren now Miss Frost had gone. She was shabby and penniless, a mere household drudge: for James begrudged even a girl to help in the kitchen. She was looking faded and worn. Panic, the terrible and deadly panic which overcomes so many unmarried women ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... drain'd her spirit dry, Fashioned in weakness, yet in weakness strong Where honour were the foeman, what is she Before the onslaught of satanic serfs?— The mirror of her purity obscured, Polluted by lust's pestilential breath— Pluck'd like a flower to while an hour away, Then cast to wither on the barren ground, Shattered and bruised beneath base passion's heel, And all the clinging tendrils of her love Torn bleeding from the ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... and Belgian officers he may find one reason in a fact well known to him—namely, that Germany was establishing an elaborate network of strategical railways leading from the Rhine to the Belgian frontier through a barren, thinly populated tract. The railways were deliberately constructed to permit of a sudden attack upon Belgium, such as was carried out ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... heard no more, The springs are silent in the sun; The rivers, by the blackened shore, With lessening current run; The realm our tribes are crushed to get May be a barren desert yet. ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... Michigan and the Illinois by the Tippecanoe, is a great convenience. It is immediately in the center of the back line of that fine country which he wishes to prevent us from settling, and above all, he has immediately in his rear a country that has been but little explored, consisting principally of barren thickets, interspersed with swamps and lakes, into which our cavalry could not penetrate, and our infantry only by ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... a sea could so brood with the memory of aeons. Only a sea, lying so silent beneath the high skies, could hint the mystery of life still behind its barren veil. ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... long in the Bushmen, rather short in the Pygmies. These degraded wanderers inhabit an area extending from the inner ranges of the mountains of Cape Colony, through the central Kalahari desert, to near Lake Ngami, and thence northwestward to the Ovambo River. Into these, the most barren portions of the South African deserts, they have been driven by the encroachments ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... back life failed, as the experts engaged immediately perceived they must upon viewing the corpse; and during the subsequent autopsy, when the dead man's body had been examined by chemist and microscopist, the result was barren of any pathological detail. No indication to explain his death rewarded the search. Not a clue or suspicion existed. He was healthy in every particular, and his destruction remained, so far, inexplicable to science. ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... very last thing which the tree does in the autumn is to complete its buds for female flowers. That is the very last job the tree has on hand and if the tree cannot complete the buds for female flowers perfectly, then a very little wood killing will make that a barren tree, although it appears to be a good strong tree. That covers the kinds of winter injury I have seen in the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... the breeze that has yet scarce come, if not the rustlings of schemes and orders of existence near though unseen?" Perchance the range of the abode and destiny of the soul after death is all immensity. The interstellar spaces, which we usually fancy are barren deserts where nonentity reigns, may really be the immortal kingdom colonized by the spirits who since the beginning of the creation have sailed from the mortal shores of all planets. They may be the crowded ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the Bison, herd together in bands, and generally frequent barren grounds during the summer months, keeping near the rivers; but retire to the woods in winter. They seem to be less watchful than most other wild animals; and when feeding are not difficult of approach, provided the hunters go against the wind. When two or three men get so ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... means or way how to pacifie his wife. And therefore thinks it best himself to take th'advice of Doctor, and most especially with that French Doctor, who is so renowned for his skill of making many men and women that before were barren and unfruitfull to conceive children: Insomuch that they do now every year precisely bear a young son, or a daughter, yea somtimes two at a time. It is thereby also very necessary that the good woman her self consult with some experienced Midwives, and old Doctresses; ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... are pleased in doing good, Though the ungrateful subjects of their favors Are barren in ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... interpenetration of ideas than a barren interchange of courtesies, or a bush-fighting argument, in which each man tries to cover as much of himself and expose as much of his opponent as the tangled thicket of the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... back door he opened it and stepped inside. Of all the barren places of crude, disheartening ugliness the Harvester ever had seen, ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... one another, men will, at such a time, seek one another's lives; and divested of Yuga, people will become atheists and thieves. And they will even dig the banks of streams with their spades and sow grains thereon. And even those places will prove barren for them at such a time. And those men who are devoted to ceremonial rites in honour of the deceased and of the gods, will be avaricious and will also appropriate and enjoy what belongs to others. The father will enjoy what belongs ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... on February 20th its headquarters reached Shikarpore. Ten days later, Cotton, leading the advance, was in Dadur, at the foot of the Bolan Pass, having suffered heavily in transport animals almost from the start. Supplies were scarce in a region so barren, but with a month's partial food on his beasts of burden he quitted Dadur March 10th, got safely, if toilsomely, through the Bolan, and on 26th reached Quetta, where he was to halt for orders. Shah Soojah and Keane followed, their troops suffering not a little from ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... considering his past hostility to it as a social institution, his renunciation of his sacred vows, and his ostentatious rejection of the Christian religion, such a step naturally caused some talk, and requires explanation—though none is given by M. Colmache, beyond the barren and somewhat commonplace intimation, that "he was influenced in this, as in many other instances, wherein he has drawn down the blame of the sticklers for consistency, by the desire to spare pain and trouble to his family; for he knew that his relatives would suffer much inconvenience ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... the storied lands across the Atlantic,—England, France, Germany, Italy, so rich in historical associations, steeped in legend and poetry, the very look of the fields redolent of the past,—and then turn to my own native hills, how poor and barren they seem!—not one touch anywhere of that which makes the charm of the Old World—no architecture, no great names; in fact, no past. They look naked and prosy, yet how I love them and cling to them! They are written over with the lives of the first settlers that ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... dress slightly drawn from behind, and turning, confronted the person of a lad who might, judging from his size, be some seventeen years of age. His form was beautiful in its outline, and his step light and graceful; but the face, alas! that throne of the intellect was a barren waste, and his vacant eye and lolling lip showed at once that the poor boy was little less than an idiot. And yet, as he looked upon the slave, and saw the tear glistening in her eye, there seemed to be a flash of intelligence cross his features, as though ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray |
