"Barrenness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... make it impossible to trace its course. Miracles, angels, theophanies, dreams, are never absent from the palette. When Rachel eats the mandrakes which Reuben had found, and which Leah had given up to her, and they remove her barrenness so that she becomes the mother of Joseph, we have a story based on a vulgar superstition. Purely mythical elements are found isolated in the story of Jacob's wrestling with the Deity at the ford of the Jabbok. Etymology and proverbs are a favourite ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... remarkable manner by our use of Language. We denominate the want of Feeling Cold or Frigidity—in respect to the Mind or the individual character. The absence of Thought and Knowledge, or, in other words, Intellectual Barrenness, is called Darkness or Obscurity of the Mind. While the lack of Will or Purpose in the Mind is said to be the absence of Tension or Strain (the great Musical term); and the Stillness or quiet hence resulting may be appropriately designated as the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Joy of all time and glory! When in the coldness of a frigid school, Upon the barrenness of a hard bench, My teacher's graceless hands placed thee before me, O peerless book, what I had thought would be A ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... at the clouds and the sun behind them, he saw no God; he saw the desert plain, the barrenness of the earth, the overladen, wretched donkey staggering under his pannier, and the broad-hatted peasant urging him on. He looked at the sunset and tried to imagine the Trinity that sat there, but he saw nothing. And ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... one that looked over the Midway, and her young strength made nothing of the two flights of stairs which she had to climb to get to it. At first the severity of the apartment repelled her, but she had no money with which to make it more to her taste, and after a few hours its very barrenness made an appeal to her. It seemed to be like her own life, in need of decoration, and she was content to let things take their course. It seemed probable that roses would ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... and biting winds had gradually been left behind, and Nature, coy and uncertain at first, had, with the advance into the South, grown bolder. They had come from the land of bleakness and barrenness—from the place of leafless trees—into the region of Summer, almost in a day and night. They had ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Florida - Or, Wintering in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope
... increased to 13, for the church, provided for in the original scheme, but not begun until 1899, was added. Those inclosed—to quote statistics from the register—a court 586 feet long by 246 feet wide—31/4 acres—relieved from barrenness by big circular plots in which flourished palms, bamboos and a medley of other tropical translations. Penetrate 10 feet into one of these plots, which are always damp from much watering, and it takes little imagining to fancy ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... personal esteem for the character of Frederic. The enemy of the church is accused of maintaining with the miscreants an intercourse of hospitality and friendship unworthy of a Christian; of despising the barrenness of the land; and of indulging a profane thought, that if Jehovah had seen the kingdom of Naples he never would have selected Palestine for the inheritance of his chosen people. Yet Frederic obtained from the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... the writer's art. In the majority of woman's books you see that kind of facility which springs from the absence of any high standard; that fertility in imbecile combination or feeble imitation which a little self-criticism would check and reduce to barrenness; just as with a total want of musical ear people will sing out of tune, while a degree more melodic sensibility would suffice to render them silent. The foolish vanity of wishing to appear in print, instead of being ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... demonstrated that "reproductive organs, when of different length, behave to one another like different species of the same genus in regard both to direct productiveness and the character of the offspring; and that consequently mutual barrenness, which was once thought conclusive proof of difference of species, is worthless as such, and the last barrier that was raised between species and varieties ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... Cromwell spared is desecrated By weed and worm, left to the stormy play Of wind and beating snow, or renovated By more destructful hands: Time's worst decay Will wreathe its ruins with some loveliness, But these new Vandals can but make a rain-proof barrenness. ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... publications among them—Domestic Cookery, Etiquette for Ladies, and Hints on the Breeding of Poultry. An ugly little clock, ticking noisily in a black case, and two candlesticks of base metal placed on either side of it, completed the ornaments on the chimney-piece. Neither pictures nor prints hid the barrenness of the walls. I saw no needlework and no flowers. The one object in the place which showed any pretensions to beauty was a looking-glass in an elegant gilt frame—sacred to vanity, and worthy of the office that it filled. ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... advantage which he derived from his early training raised him above his competitors. If he was taken into a warehouse as a porter, he soon became foreman. If he enlisted in the army, he soon became a serjeant. Scotland, meanwhile, in spite of the barrenness of her soil and the severity of her climate, made such progress in agriculture, in manufactures, in commerce, in letters, in science, in all that constitutes civilisation, as the Old World had never seen ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... tragedy progressed swiftly toward finality. The Englishman came from among women. For months he had been in a torment of desolation. Cummins' wife was to him like a flower suddenly come to relieve the tantalizing barrenness of a desert; and with the wiles and ways of civilization he ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... The severe barrenness of the staircase made them very grave. An attendant, superbly attired in a red waistcoat and a coat trimmed with gold lace, who seemed to be awaiting them on the landing, increased their emotion. It was with great respect, and treading as softly as possible, ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... the matter of marriage, the rights of man alone are regarded. All over India, however, among the educated classes, Mahomedans excepted, public opinion is now requiring a justification for a second marriage, as, for example, the barrenness, insanity, infirmity, or misconduct of the first spouse. The temptation of a second dowry is still, however, operative with men of certain high castes in which bridegrooms require to be paid for. The writer well remembers the pitiful comic tale of a struggling ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... inclosed and cultivated; a few houses, and some movables. The genius, the industry of the inhabitants would accompany them; and it is those alone which constitute the sole wealth of their island. Its present fame would perish, and in a few years it would return to its pristine state of barrenness and poverty: they might perhaps be allowed to transport themselves in their own vessels to some other spot or island, which they would soon fertilise by the same means with ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... III, dist. xxxvii, 3. For St. Thomas Aquinas, see his works, Migne, vol. iii, Paris 1889, quaestio 78, pp. 587 et seq., citing the Scriptures and Aristotle, and especially developing Aristotle's metaphysical idea regarding the "barrenness" of money. For a very good summary of St. Thomas's ideas, see Pearson. pp. 30 et seq. For Dante, see in canto xi of the Inferno a revelation of the amazing depth of the hostility to the taking of interest. For the London law of 1390 and the petition to the king, see Cunningham, Growth ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... no regions cursed with irremediable barrenness, or blessed with spontaneous fecundity; no perpetual gloom, or unceasing sunshine; nor are the nations here described either devoid of all sense of humanity, or consummate in all private or social virtues. Here are no Hottentots ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... millions of years to tame a mountain, to curb its rude, savage power, to soften its outlines, and bring fertility out of the elemental crudeness and barrenness. But time and the gentle rains of heaven will do it, as they have done it in the East, and as they are fast ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... did not bear up under exile as we would have wished. Unlike Victor Hugo at Guernsey, he was alone, and surrounded by savages. Yet even Victor Hugo lifted up his voice in bitter complaint. Seneca failed to anticipate that, in spite of the barrenness of Corsica, it would some day produce a man who would jostle his Roman Caesar for first place on ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... responsible for the descriptions you complain of are thrifty businessmen, with no idea that there can be any possible attraction in a country where crops can't be raised, timber cut, or ore dug up. For my part, I thank the Lord for the beautiful barrenness that has consecrated this great region to loneliness. Here there will always be a chance to get out of sight and sound of the swarming millions who have already left scarcely standing-room for a man in the East. I wouldn't give much for a country where there are ...
— Deserted - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... minutes West, by observations made of the Sun and Moon this morning. It is of a circular figure, and may be about 24 Leagues in Compass; the land is of a height sufficient to be seen 12 or 15 Leagues, and of a very broken, uneven Surface, and hath more the appearance of barrenness than fertility. Last night we saw smoke up it, and this morning some people, and therefore must be inhabited. Yesterday Lieutenant Gore, having the Morning Watch at the time we first saw this Island, thought he saw land ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... continually alter in the wind-storms. Sand wholly, and—except the strong paved Highway that now runs through it (to Reppen, Meseritz and the Polish Frontier, and is strongly paved till it get through Kunersdorf)—chaotic wholly; a scene of heaped barrenness and horror, not to be matched but in Sahara; the features of the Battle quite blown away, and indecipherable in ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... plowing is a positive injury. All land should be broken up once in three or four years, and not kept longer than that under the plow at one time. Some farmers keep land perpetually in grass, refusing to have a plow touch it on any condition. They see wrong tillage produce barrenness. But by this practice they are great losers; they never get over one half the hay or pasturage that could be obtained by frequent tillage and manuring, and ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... the category of its requisites. When superfluousness of words is not occasioned by overflowing animal spirits, as in Beaumont and Fletcher, or by the very genius of luxury, as in Spenser (in which cases it is enrichment as well as overflow), there is no worse sign for a poet altogether, except pure barrenness. Every word that could be taken away from a poem, unreferable to either of the above reasons for it, is a damage; and many such are death; for there is nothing that posterity seems so determined to resent as this want of respect for its time and trouble. The world is too ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... 21, 1862, Sibley defeated Colonel E. R. S. Canby at Valverde near Fort Craig. But his further advance was hindered by the barrenness of the country, by the complete destruction of all Union stores likely to fall into his hands, and by the fact that he was between two Federal forts when the battle ended. On the twenty-eighth of March there was a desperate fight in Apache Canon. Both sides claimed the victory. ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... by the granting of emancipation. But it was said that there was a difference between the cases of Antigua and other colonies, such as Jamaica, and it was urged that while the negroes of the former, from the smallness and barrenness of the place, would be forced into work, that in the latter they would run away, and take refuge in the woods. Now, he asked, why should the negro run away from his work, on being made free, more than during the continuance of his apprenticeship? Why, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... cannot be checked. It advances by an inherent energy which it is futile to ignore. And it ought to advance for the result will inevitably be to the advantage of China. A locomotive brings intellectual and physical benefits, the appliances which mitigate the poverty and barrenness of existence and increase the ability to provide for the necessities and the comforts of life. In one of our great locomotive works in America I once saw twelve engines in construction for China, and my imagination kindled as I thought what a ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... that it should be, for he began stealing away Kaviak's few cherished possessions—his amulet, his top from under the bunk, his boats from out the water-bucket, wherewith to mitigate the barrenness of the Yukon tree, and to provide a pleasant surprise for the Esquimer who mourned his playthings as gone for ever. Of an evening now, after sleep had settled on Kaviak's watchful eyes, the Boy worked at a pair of little ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... is the conclusion of all intelligent men who have thought upon the subject. The kind of scriptures or science which one always studies gives him the kind of knowledge which it is capable of giving. Such Knowledge verily becomes agreeable to him. Ignorance leads to barrenness of invention in respect of means. Contrivance of means, again, through the aid of knowledge, becomes the source of great felicity. Without entertaining any scruples and any malice,[390] listen to these instructions. Through the decrease of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... gratefully, Protesteth his devotion is my price— Suppose I write what harms not, though he steal? I half resolve to tell thee, yet I blush, What set me off a-writing first of all. An itch I had, a sting to write, a tang! For, be it this town's barrenness—or else The Man had something in the look of him— His case has struck me far more than 'tis worth. So, pardon if—(lest presently I lose In the great press of novelty at hand The care and pains this somehow stole from me) I bid thee take the thing while fresh ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... and yet true, Scenes of accomplish'd bliss! which who can see, Though but in distant prospect, and not feel His soul refreshed with foretaste of the joy? Rivers of gladness water all the earth, And clothe all climes with beauty; the reproach Of barrenness is gone. The fruitful field Laughs with abundance; and the land, once lean, Or fertile only in its own disgrace, Exults to see its thistly curse repeal'd; The various seasons woven into one, And that one ...
— Studies in Prophecy • Arno C. Gaebelein
... several Children, they grow strangely out of Shape in their Bodies; As for Barrenness, I never knew any of their Women, that have ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... the region to which most of the Seminole have been driven by the advances of civilization, is, taken all in all, unlike any other part of our country. In climate it is subtropical; in character of soil it shows a contrast of comparative barrenness and abounding fertility; and in topography it is a plain, with hardly any perceptible natural elevations or depressions. The following description, based upon the notes of my journey to the Big Cypress Swamp, indicates the character of the country generally. ...
— The Seminole Indians of Florida • Clay MacCauley
... weeds and smothering, choking things that have kept the earth in barrenness where Eden-like gardens should have bloomed, and, thank God, all graves, will disappear. The desert shall bloom as the rose, the earth shall be renewed, made beautiful, and all creation loosened from its prison bonds shall sing and echo with unending harmonies in every freely ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... feeling in order that they may write, instead of writing because they feel. And of this Mr. Pater's first and famous book was a very clear proof. Exquisite in technical quality, in rare perception and subtle suggestion, it left, like all similar books, a sense of caducity and barrenness, due to the intuition of all sane persons that only an active synthesis of preferences and repulsions, what we imply in the terms character and moral, can have real importance in life, affinity with life—be, in ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... orthodox and even fanatical; but the Barmecides were strongly suspected of heretical leanings; and while the many- headed showed itself, as usual, violent, and ready to do battle about an Azan-call, the learned, who sooner or later leaven the masses, were profoundly dissatisfied with the dryness and barrenness of Mohammed's creed, so acceptable to the vulgar, and were devising a series of schisms ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... of supplying us by sea precluded the idea of any profit being ever realised; while it was quite evident the Company's benevolent views toward the Esquimaux could not be carried into effect. The extreme poverty and barrenness of their country, and their pertinacious adherence to their seal-skin dresses, which no argument of ours could induce them to exchange for the less comfortable articles of European clothing, were insurmountable obstacles. ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... in this alien place, he wondered if he wished himself back. But the moment he actually realised himself at home, and felt the tension of barrenness which it meant, felt the curious and deadly opposition of his wife's will against his own nature, the almost nauseating ache which it amounted to, he pulled himself together and rejoiced again in his new surroundings. Her will, her will, her terrible, implacable, cunning will! What was there ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... brightest intellects, are prepared for the discovery and selection of all that is great and noble in nature. The greatest natural genius cannot subsist on its own stock: he who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own will be soon reduced, from mere barrenness, to the poorest of all imitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what he has before often repeated. When we know the subject designed by such men, it will never be difficult to guess what kind of work is ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... salt water ends, the aspect of the country changes, not gradually, but suddenly; on the one hand absolute barrenness, on the other exuberant vegetation; and wherever irrigation brings a drop of water, plants spring up, and the sterile dust becomes fertile soil. The contrast is most striking. We had passed Lake Mareotis, and on either side of the railroad stretched fields of doora or maize, of cotton ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... small share of wonder; and, as an offset to this summer luxuriance of life, most disparaging pictures were drawn of the bleak sterility of New England,—and even that which was the only compensation for this barrenness of the earth, namely, the abundance of fish in the sea, was, as respects the revenue derived from it, made an especial subject of derision. Thus, doubtless, did the ancient Peloponnesian look upon Attica in the small beginnings ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... from the sea, though picturesque, is not inviting, giving one an idea of great barrenness. The mountains and rocks have a peaked aspect, like a spear pointed at one, as much as to say "Better keep off." People who land for the first time, however, are agreeably disappointed by finding that every opportunity for encouraging vegetation ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... curtains; who calls you in the morning, and makes ready your breakfast while you sit with your feet on the fender before the blazing grate; and to whom you pay your reckoning on leaving, having escaped entirely all the barrenness and publicity of hotel life, and had all the privacy and quiet of home without any of its cares or interruptions. And this, let me say here, is the great charm of the characteristic English inn; it has a domestic, homelike ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... influence of the great financial houses. Democracy is in shackles. Its leaders are gagged. Progress is stopped. Politics are barren——" He delivered this oration at dinner one night, and when he came to the barrenness of politics he knocked over Ascher's bottle of Perrier Water with a sweep of his hand "and it is the subtle influence of the financiers, the money kings, what the Americans used to call the Gold Bugs, which ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... tillage. But soon the dull and intolerable creta, ash-grey earth, without a vestige of vegetation, furrowed by rain, and desolately breaking into gullies, swallows up variety and charm. It is difficult to believe that this creta of Southern Tuscany, which has all the appearance of barrenness, and is a positive deformity in the landscape, can be really fruitful. Yet we are frequently being told that it only needs assiduous labour to render it ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... seems to us the philosophy of this matter. If we are right, it is no more than a first furrow in the crust of a soil which hitherto the historians have been contented to leave in its barrenness. If they are conscientious enough not to trifle with the facts, as they look back on them from the luxurious self-indulgence of modern Christianity, they either revile the superstition or pity the ignorance which made such large mistakes on the nature of ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... years by experience, her conversation exhibiting a wide range of reading, interwoven, with a deep knowledge of life. They spoke of ideals, of art, of literature, of secret aspirations, not often mentioned during such early acquaintanceship, breaking through that mental barrenness which had characterized their living for weeks, this common ground of thought and interest awakening between them an immediate friendliness and frankness of utterance delightfully inspiring. Almost without ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... word or two is misplaced. I wish some time you would consider the case under the following point of view. If sterility is caused or accumulated through Natural Selection, then, as every degree exists up to absolute barrenness, Natural Selection must have the power of increasing it. Now take two species, A and B, and assume that they are (by any means) half-sterile, i.e. produce half the full number of offspring. Now try and make (by Natural ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... the chilling blasts whistled around our dwelling, and everything seemed sealed up with perpetual frost, the ice and snow would be smoking around the spring. Thus, like a steady stream, let your graces flow, unaffected by the drought or barrenness of others, melting the ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... let this thought equalise all states. Let him do with us as with the waves of the sea, and whether he takes us to his bosom, or casts us upon the sand, that is, leaves us to our own barrenness, all ...
— Letters of Madam Guyon • P. L. Upham
... to take my last views of the Moon. For ragged and jagged cliffs of almost total barrenness, and yawning chasms lined with intolerable precipices, the Moon outrivals the Earth. I took a passing glimpse of the famous crater-mountains, called by our astronomers Copernicus and Theophilus, the former situated ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... persecution, imprisonment, disgrace, repulse, [1796] contumely, calumny, abuse, injury, contempt, ingratitude, unkindness, scoffs, flouts, unfortunate marriage, single life, too many children, no children, false servants, unhappy children, barrenness, banishment, oppression, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... in the world where women live licentiously and have few children, will you maintain that it is their business to have few children? And what would become of your towns if the remote country districts, with their simpler and purer women, did not make up for the barrenness of your fine ladies? There are plenty of country places where women with only four or five children are reckoned unfruitful. In conclusion, although here and there a woman may have few children, what difference ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... leaving it. In truth, he appears never to have occupied a thoroughly real Church-of-England position. He was at first, by education and private judgment, a Calvinistic Puritan; he became dissatisfied with the coldness and barrenness of this theory, and set about finding a new position for himself, and in so doing he skipped over true, sound English Churchmanship into a course of feeling and thought allied with and leading on to Rome. Even the hindrances which so long held ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... pot, boiled it all, and merrily feasted on it together. And on this day also, the Athenians carry about the Eiresione, a bough of the olive tree garlanded with wool, just as Theseus had before carried the suppliants' bough, and covered with first-fruits of all sorts of produce, because the barrenness of the land ceased on that day; and ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... the lusts of our heart have covered it. At the same time, a daily repetition of contrition and compunction washes off the stains which we discover in our souls, and strongly incites us, by the fervor and fruitfulness of our following life, to repair the sloth and barrenness of the past. Prayer must be made our main assistant in every step of this spiritual progress. We must pray that God would enable us to search out and discover our own hearts, and reform whatever is amiss in them. If we do this sincerely, God will undoubtedly grant our requests; ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... eternal refusal to follow Jesus by listening to the words of life that he brought, and our proneness to substitute something else in their place, that brings the barrenness that is so often evident in the everyday life of the Christian. We have been taught to believe in Jesus; we have not been taught to believe Jesus. This has resulted in a separation of Christianity from life. The predominating motive has been the saving of ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... world has stolen away our hearts. Evil associates have corrupted our good manners, and we are irreverent, sensuous, even in the house of God. To illustrate our impiety: suppose you, by some accident, had been cast away on some lone island, barrenness reigned around you; cold winds beat against you; alone and desolate you stood exposed to every element without and a prey to every want within. The sea in its wild fury roared around you. No living being heard your cries; no heart beat in sympathy with yours. Now, suppose in ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... decade immediately following Newton was one of comparative barrenness in scientific progress, the early years of the eighteenth century not being as productive of great astronomers as the later years of the seventeenth, or, for that matter, as the later years of the eighteenth century itself. Several of the prominent ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... into that which the dreamer mistook for reality. In that far-off home she saw all the bareness and roughness of the lonely life which, do what she would, she could not greatly alter; and there again Bates kissed her; she felt his touch in all its reality, and in her dream she measured the barrenness of the place against the knowledge that her love ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... keeping with the dreadful spirits of these unregenerate anchorites. The forlorn apartments were piled one above the other until the historic cylinder of stone opened to the sky. In contrast to the barrenness of the gray inclosures, through the squares of the windows throbbed the blue and gold, green and lilac, of Italian heavens ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... of the drear, dread monotony of those miles of sand, the desolate barrenness of which extended about in every direction, and, at last, weighed heavily upon their spirits, found the ride anything but tedious. They had so much to be thankful for, hopeful over: so much to say to each other. She described all that had occurred during her imprisonment, and ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... cleaning up a bit, he passed an amused eye over the bare, ugly, fusty little hotel bedroom. But somehow, as he stood in the middle of the room, a graceful, pleasing figure of youth and confidence, the smile faded. Towel in hand he surveyed the barrenness of it. He stared at the impossible wall paper, at the battered furniture, the worn carpet. He sniffed the stuffy smell of—what was that smell, anyhow?—straw, and matting, and dust, and the ghost-odor of hundreds who had occupied the room before him. It came over him with something of a ...
— Personality Plus - Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock • Edna Ferber
... hills, which, for barrenness, reminded me of the descriptions given of the Siberian steppes, I found, at 17,000 feet elevation, several minute arctic plants, with Rhododendron nivale, the most alpine of woody plants. On their sterile slopes grew a ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... motive and impulse is applied to it." He sees in Christian doctrine that strong force which is to break down "the vis inertiae of man, to set human nature going, to touch the spring of man's heart"; and he compares with St. Paul's doctrines and hopefulness the doctrinal barrenness, the ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... the juice of the olive, I forgot both heat and cold, happy in heavenly meditation. That cloister made abundant returns in its season to these granaries of the Lord; but so idle has it become now, that it is fit the world should know its barrenness. The days of my mortal life were drawing to a close, when I was besought and drawn into wearing the hat which descends every day from bad head to worse.[32] St. Peter and St. Paul came lean and barefoot, getting their bread where they could; but pastors now-a-days must ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... Clement the Seventh, had deceived the king; and Francis himself, disappointed in his ambitious designs by the pontiff's speedy death, looked upon her with little favor. For several years she had borne no children, and Henry was urged to put her away on the ground of barrenness. Nor was she more happy when her prayers had been answered, and a family of four sons and three daughters blessed her marriage. Her husband's infatuation respecting Diana of Poitiers embittered her life when dauphiness, and compelled her as queen to ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... in erecting this fortress, was to have fortified the straits, so as to have excluded all other nations from any passage into the South Sea: but, besides the barrenness of the soil, and excessive severity of the climate their most implacable enemies, the Indians, frequently assailed them, so that they were reduced to the last extremity of distress. All the stores they had brought from Spain were expended, and none could ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... dear to artists, of singular picturesqueness, surrounded and even washed by a deep moat, and shaded by tall trees—a haunt, indeed, "of ancient peace." The neighbourhood of this old Hall, and the luxuriant beauty of the inland village, so refreshing a contrast to the barrenness and ugliness of the country round his native town, enriched Crabbe's mind with many memories that served him well ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... consequently that fourteen thousand years were needed for the whole series of formations. A little further on, he however furnishes data, showing to every candid mind on what very vague estimates he had before relied. He says the fertile district of Hybla was suddenly turned to barrenness by an eruption of lava, and soon after restored to fertility by a shower of ashes. The change which he had required two thousand years to produce was here accomplished suddenly, and the whole argument by which he had arrayed ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... not merely be adorned, but invigorated, by the richest colourings of imagination, must labour to discover the secret of his composition; and every man who, born in party, desires to emancipate his mind from the egotism, bitterness, and barrenness of party, or achieve the still nobler and more difficult task of turning its evils into good, and of making it an instrument of triumph for the general cause of mankind, must measure the merits and success of his enterprise by its similarity to the struggles, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... intellect, who pass beyond their fellows and tower over them, entering at last upon a fatal treadmill of thought, where they yield to the innate indolence of the soul and begin to delude themselves by the solace of repetition. Then comes the barrenness and lack of vitality,—that unhappy and disappointing state into which great men too often enter when middle life is just passed. The fire of youth, the vigor of the young intellect, conquers the inner inertia and makes the man scale heights of ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... women. For months he had been in a torment of desolation. Cummins' wife was to him like a flower suddenly come to relieve the tantalizing barrenness of a desert, and with the wiles and soft speech of his kind he sought to breathe its fragrance. In the weeks that followed the flower seemed to come nearer to him, and this was because Jan and his people had not as yet fully measured the heart of the woman, and because the Englishman had not measured ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... within the vineyard indicates that the people to whom God looked in vain for the fruits of righteousness, were distinguished from the nations by the peculiar religious privileges which they enjoyed: the favourable circumstances of the tree aggravated the guilt of its barrenness. ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... shrub, not an out-house, not a tree near. One would have thought it a deserted house, but that a thin wreath of smoke lazily stole up from one of the brown chimneys; and graceful as that was it took nothing from the hard stern barrenness below which told of a worse poverty than that of paint ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... home life at this time would have seemed pathetic to an observer,—the more pathetic, perhaps, in that Dick himself was not aware of its exceptional barrenness. The holidays that bring new brightness to the eyes of happier children were to him simply days when he did not go to school, and was expected to provide an extra quantity of kindling wood. He was housed, and fed, and clothed, after a fashion, but not loved. Mr. ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... think Bob looks as happy as can be,' put in Miss Amabel briskly. 'I don't think the children were prepared for the barrenness and dreariness of an English winter. They have come from the land of brilliant flowers and sunshine, and naturally ...
— Bulbs and Blossoms • Amy Le Feuvre
... added in our Bibles (Hebrew 'oczer, "barrenness") is not only excluded by the metre, but is also wanting in the Septuagint version—conclusive proofs that it is a ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... near the sea, which, not long ago, suffered a very uncommon, and unexpected calamity. The sand of the shore was raised by a tempest in such quantities, and carried to such a distance, that an estate was overwhelmed and lost. Such and so hopeless was the barrenness superinduced, that the owner, when he was required to pay the usual tax, desired rather ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... the dry (we cannot call them high) grounds: the swamps, with which this coast abounds, are still more fruitful, and abundantly compensate the avidity and barrenness of the soil around them. They bear rice in such plenty, especially the marsh about New Orleans, "That the inhabitants reap the greatest advantage from it, and reckon it the manna of the land." [Footnote: ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... case out of six the sterility was due to the male. Kehrer, after a series of carefully conducted experiments, has arrived at the conclusion that in at least a third of the cases of sterile marriages the husband was the party at fault, and that gonorrhea was the cause of the barrenness. ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... distant mounds of sand or the overhanging river banks might hide of savage watchers, we could only conjecture. Seemingly the mass of Indian life, which only the day before had overflowed that vacant space, had vanished as if by some sorcerer's magic. To me, this unexpected silence and dreary barrenness were astounding; I gazed about me fairly bewildered, almost dreaming for the moment that our foes had lifted the long siege and departed while I slept. Heald no doubt read the thought in my eyes, for he laid a kindly hand upon my sleeve and ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... rise to at the judgment call. The music of thy nature folded round Its barrenness a majesty ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... were even asked for. Deb had blighted these unbusiness-like overtures on her own account, and Frances herself had said the rudest things about them and him—but not lately. In the utter dullness and barrenness of her life, she had been glad to accept the civilities of anything in the shape of a man—to try her 'prentice hand on any material. All the armoury of the born beauty was hers, and she knew as well how to use each weapon effectively as a blind kitten knows how to suck milk. They were easily ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... Resurrection, Sin and Righteousness, Ascension and Descension, Height and Depth, First and Last, Beginning and Ending, Flesh and Spirit, Wisdome and Foolishnesse, Strength and Weakness, Mortality and Immortality, Jew and Gentile, Light and Darknesse, Unity and Multiplication, Fruitfulness and Barrenness, Curse and Blessing, Man and Woman, Kingdom and Priesthood, Heaven and Earth, Allsufficiency and Deficiency, God and Man. And out of every Unity made up of twaine, it openeth that great two-leafed Gate, which ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... road wound for some distance through a wooded region and over several hills. At length it entered upon a settlement where the land was lean and rocks lifted their frowning heads above the surface. The few houses were poor, standing out grey and gaunt in the midst of this weird barrenness. But at every door Midnight was accustomed to stop. Well did she know the little voices which welcomed her, and the tiny hands which stroked her soft nose, or held up some dainty morsel of bread, potatoes or grass. But to-day there was none of this. She knew ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... region, from the dwelling-place of unveiled hearts. He woke up to an amazing infinity of contempt, to a droll bitterness of wonder, to a disenchanted conviction of safety. He had a glimpse of the irresistible force, and he saw also the barrenness of his convictions—of her convictions. It seemed to him that he could never make a mistake as long as he lived. It was morally impossible to go wrong. He was not elated by that certitude; he was dimly uneasy about its price; there was ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... Margaret's influence, which was singularly penetrating, and most beneficent where most deeply and continuously felt. Chance acquaintance with her, like a breath from the tropics, might have prematurely burst the buds of feeling in sensitive hearts, leaving after blight and barrenness. Natures, small in compass and of fragile substance, might have been distorted and shattered by attempts to mould themselves on her grand model. And in her seeming unchartered impulses,—whose latent law was honorable integrity,—eccentric spirits might have found encouragement for ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the affairs of an empire. The want of skill they supplied for a time by atrocity and blind violence. For legislative ability, fiscal ability, military ability, diplomatic ability, they had one substitute, the guillotine. Indeed, their exceeding ignorance and the barrenness of their invention are the best excuse for their murders and robberies. We really believe that they would not have cut so many throats, and picked so many pockets, if they had known how to govern in ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... shewed their white bark in the distance. We reached the Darling at half-past five, as the sun's almost level beams were illuminating the flats, and every blade of grass and every reed appeared of that light and brilliant green which they assume when held up to the light. The change from barrenness and sterility to richness and verdure was sudden and striking, and nothing certainly could have been more cheering or cheerful than our first camp on the Darling River. The scene itself was very pretty. Beautiful and drooping trees shaded ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... degrading! To it she attributed this bluntness in her faculties of perception and enjoyment, this barrenness of the world about her. It was dreadful to look forward upon a tract of existence thus vulgarized. Already she recognized in herself the warnings of a possible future in which she would have lost her intellectual ambitions. There is a creeping paralysis of the soul, ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... in the handling, and in spite of the Rosalind wound being at least partially healed, the same minor key prevails as in the earlier poems. In the spring of the great age of English song Spenser's note is like the voice of autumn, not the fruitful autumn of cornfield and orchard, but a premature barrenness of ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... Unitarians—small and gallant band!—were like persons standing on tiptoe before an opening glory. In their isolated and often mistaken struggle they had felt themselves for generations stricken with chill and barrenness; their blood now began to feel the glow of new kinships, the passion of large horizons. So, along the banks of some slender and much hindered stream, there come blown from the nearing sea prophetic scents and murmurs, and one may dream that the pent water knows at last ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... treat—his birthday. Because of it, they had given him actual food for the first time in years: a cake, conspicuous in its barrenness of candles; a glass of real vegetable juices; a dab of potato; an indescribable green that might have been anything at all; and a little steak. A succulent, savory-looking piece of ...
— Life Sentence • James McConnell
... ones bud and flourish in their place. Nor we, nor all we do, can death withstand; Whether the Sea, imprison'd in the land, A work imperial! takes a harbour's form, Where navies ride secure, and mock the storm; Whether the Marsh, within whose horrid shore Barrenness dwelt, and boatmen plied the oar, Now furrow'd by the plough, a laughing plain, Feeds all the cities round with fertile grain; Or if the River, by a prudent force, The corn once flooding, learns ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... chasm itself held no fascination for me. I could appreciate its dizzy depths, its vastness, its marvelous color effects, and its weird contours. I could feel the immensity of it, and it repelled instead of attracted. I seemed to see its barrenness and desolation, the cruel deception of its poisonous springs, and its insurmountable walls. I could visualize its hapless victims wandering frantically about, trying to find the way out of some blind coulee, until, exhausted and ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... facing a problem quite as great, was harboring ambitions quite as dazzling, as when he rode a sweaty horse across the barren stretches of the Rolling R Ranch and dreamed the while of soaring far above the barrenness. ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... produced by similar means, from rocks largely or wholly composed of silex or quartz. The mixture of these two give rise to soils of an infinite variety, almost, having many differing degrees of fertility, down to barrenness. But you have practically but one soil to deal with, a true limestone soil of high fertility, which has received considerable accessions from silicious rocks. Your bottom lands do not differ materially from the upland, except that ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... carried round the well three times in a direction Deishal—that is from east to west, according to the course of the sun. They also drink of the water and bathe in it. These operations are accounted a certain remedy for various diseases. They are particularly efficacious for curing barrenness, on which account it is frequently visited by those who are very desirous of offspring. All the invalids throw a white stone on the Saint's cairn, and leave behind them as tokens of their gratitude and confidence some rags of linen or ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... only, and will produce no fruit unless a staminate variety is planted near. I have never considered this an objection against a variety; for why should any one wish to raise only one variety of strawberry? All danger of barrenness in pistillate kinds is removed absolutely by planting staminate sorts in the same bed. In nurserymen's catalogues pistillate varieties are marked "P.," and the purchaser has merely to set out the plants within a few feet of some perfect flowering kind to secure ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... been lost by the shameful indifference of the Middle Ages. "Each famous author of antiquity whom I recall," he indignantly exclaims, "places a new offense and another cause of dishonor to the charge of later generations, who, not satisfied with their own disgraceful barrenness, permitted the fruit of other minds and the writings that their ancestors had produced by toil and application, to perish through shameful neglect. Although they had nothing of their own to hand down to those who were to come after, they robbed ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... at all compare them; and, in truth, in no conceivable sense of the word is it applicable, any more than a geometrician can be affirmed to compare a polygon to a point, because he generates the line out of the point. The writer attributes to a philosophy essentially vital the barrenness of the mechanic system, with which alone his imagination has been familiarised, and which, as hath been justly observed by a contemporary writer, is contradistinguished from the former principally in this respect; that demanding for every mode and act of existence real ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the strangest place imaginable, its barrenness and the variegated colours of the rocks convey the idea of its volcanic origin, and give it a look as if it had come out of the furnace. I cannot make out where the stones so universally found all over the slopes of the mountains, came from, for very generally they seem water-worn. ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... open the door, and she followed him into the ghastly barrenness of the place that ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... to the southward of the temple in the rock, the mountains abruptly ceased, and we entered on a wide extended plain which, to the southward and on each side, was terminated only by the horizon. This sudden transition from barrenness to fertility, from the sublime to the beautiful, from irregularity to uniformity, could not fail to please, as all strong contrasts usually do. The country was now in a high state of tillage; the chief products were rice, sugar-canes, and tobacco; ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... more congenial to certain phases of the mind, than those of which we have already spoken. At one time the heart is stirred by a sense of the grandeur of the face of nature, by the strife of the elements, or, as in Northern Asia by the aspect of the dreary barrenness of the far-stretching steppes; at another time, softer emotions are excited by the contemplation of rich harvests wrested by the hand of man from the wild fertility of nature, or by the sight of human habitations raised beside some wild and foaming torrent. Here I regard less ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... Wecheganawaw.—Then he took the staff, or trunk of the hemlock divested of its branches, and struck it deep into the earth, at the spot on the hill where the large tuft of green grass sprung up amidst barrenness. When he did so, the great fountain was broken up, and the waters burst out in a mighty volume. Slowly and gradually the element began to cover the earth, while the hunter and his family looked on. Now the low grounds appeared but ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... Proserpine (Persephone), whom Pluto had carried off from her. And Proserpine herself he said, signifies the fecundity of the seeds, the failure of which at a certain time had caused the earth to mourn for barrenness, and therefore had given rise to the opinion that the daughter of Ceres, that is, fecundity itself, had been ravished by Pluto and detained in the nether world; and when the dearth had been publicly mourned and ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... amidst the black and ugly mouths of exhausted coal-pits; and the gentle murmur of the stream was subdued by the loud rattle of the loom. Sometimes M. —— and his friend halted amidst all that is delightful and soothing; and after a short advance, found themselves amidst barrenness, deformity, and confusion. The remoter scenery was not less impressive. Behind them were the rugged mountains of Puy de Dome; the lofty Tarare lifted its majestic head beside them, and far before appeared the brilliant ...
— The Village in the Mountains; Conversion of Peter Bayssiere; and History of a Bible • Anonymous
... heaven, but because it is a flame of sulphur salt and bitumen, and was kindled in the dishonourable regions below, derived from Hell and contrary to God, it cannot pass forth to the element of love; but ends in barrenness and murmurs, fantastic expectations and trifling imaginative confidences; and they at last ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... their special circumstances of difficulty, are here in view, as everywhere else in the Epistle. Tempted to "fall away," to give up the "hope set before them," to relapse to legalism, to bondage, to the desert, to a famine of the soul, to barrenness and death—here they are dealt with, in order to the more than prevention of the evil. And here, as ever, the remedy propounded is our Lord Jesus Christ, in His personal glory, in His majestic offices, in His unfathomable human sympathy, ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... to him about the barrenness of her existence, as there was nobody she could go to see, and nothing to amuse her or distract her thoughts. She wished to ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... but your labors have been much more remarkably blessed than mine. May God send you hither with the like blessing as He has sent you to some other places, and may your coming be a means to humble me for my barrenness and unprofitableness, and a means of my instruction and enlivening. I want an opportunity to concert measures with you, for the advancement of the kingdom ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... cypress, the graceful palmetto. I pass rude sea-headlands, and enter Pamlico Sound through an inlet, and dart my vision inland; O the cotton plant! the growing fields of rice, sugar, hemp! The cactus, guarded with thorns—the laurel-tree, with large white flowers; The range afar—the richness and barrenness—the old woods charged with mistletoe and trailing moss, The piney odour and the gloom—the awful natural stillness, Here in these dense swamps the freebooter carries his gun, and the fugitive slave has his concealed hut; O the strange fascination ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... with clay, Is naughty for hops, any manner of way. Or if it be mingled with rubbish and stone, For dryness and barrenness let ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... he accepts it. My friends, I have heard the vows which Paaker has poured out over our pure altars, like hogwash that men set before swine. Pestilence and boils has he called down on Mena, and barrenness and heartache on the poor sweet woman; and I really cannot blame her for preferring a battle-horse to a hippopotamus—a Mena ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Scotch who had taken possession of a barren part of America, and wondered why they should choose it. JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, all barrenness is comparative. The SCOTCH would not know it to be barren.' BOSWELL. 'Come, come, he is flattering the English. You have now been in Scotland, Sir, and say if you did not see meat and drink enough there.' JOHNSON. ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... till the last moment, and then took up his job at the Golden Brier, apparently as depressed by the continued barrenness of their mutual labors as Philip was himself. After that, Philip fought his battle alone, day after day, and slow work it was; he could scarcely see ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... in a section of the world seemingly unblessed with her bounty, and all ungarnished with her fruits and flowers, seemed desirous of redeeming it from the curse of barrenness, by storing its bosom with a product, which, only of use to the world in its conventional necessities, has become, in accordance with the self-creating wants of society, a necessity itself; and however the bloom and beauty of ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... southern breakers, preserves the mean temperature of Smyrna; whilst the district between these two towns spreads in a succession of beautiful valleys, through which glide clear and sparkling streams. But on the western coast, from the steeple-rocks of Cape Grim to the scrub-encircled barrenness of Sandy Cape, and the frowning entrance to Macquarie Harbour, the nature of the country entirely changes. Along that iron-bound shore, from Pyramid Island and the forest-backed solitude of Rocky Point, to the great Ram Head, and the straggling ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... the great social machine, organized to its minutest details, and regulated through all its processes; these at first may lead the visitor from the New World to suppose that he has fallen upon some region of persevering formality, where all is frost and show, perpetual glitter and unmeaning barrenness. But pierce these formal barriers of etiquette, dissolve by the requisite appliances this superficial frost-work of the English circles, and none, it is believed, will have any just reason to complain of coldness and reserve. By the social barriers spoken of, are not meant the distinctions ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... blood was spouting on the ground, a married woman, who had no children, came forward very eagerly out of the crowd, to smear herself with it,—the application of criminals' blood being considered a very favourable medicine for women afflicted with barrenness,—so she indulged in ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... bitter on the palate. There was something barren in the clay from which God formed the Ploszowskis, since on that soil everything springs up and grows so luxuriously, yet produces no fruit. Truly, if with this barrenness, this powerlessness to act, I possessed the abilities of a genius, it would be a strange kind of genius,—a genius without portfolio, as there are ministers ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... his Journey to the Western Islands, observes: 'Now and then we espied a little corn-field, which served to impress more strongly the general barrenness.' [W. H. S.] The remark referred to the shores of Loch Ness (p. 237 of volume viii of ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... sands. The bay that washed the sands was called Belle Amour. The cliff was huge, sombre; it had a terrible granite moroseness. If you travelled back from its edge until you stood within the very heart of Labrador, you would add step upon step of barrenness and austerity. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Great Study closes with the pregnant words, "The source of knowledge is in the study of things." Not a syllable is added on that prolific text. A note informs the reader that there was a chapter on the subject, but that it has been lost. Chinese scholars, when taxed with the barrenness of later ages in every branch of science, are wont to make the naive reply, "Yes, and no wonder—how could it be otherwise when the Sage's chapter on that ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... several ways. First by way of ministration, in so far as irrational creatures minister to the needs of man. In this sense the Lord said to man (Gen. 3:17): "Cursed is the earth in thy work," so that its barrenness would be a punishment to man. Thus also David cursed the mountains of Gelboe, according to Gregory's expounding (Moral. iv, 3). Again the irrational creature is related to the rational creature by way of signification: and thus our Lord cursed ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... celebrated wit and courtier, pleads the cause of the French, an opinion which perhaps was not singular among the favourites of Charles II. But the rest of the speakers unite in condemning the extolled simplicity of the French plots, as actual barrenness, compared to the variety and copiousness of the English stage; and their authors' limiting the attention of the audience and interest of the piece to a single principal personage, is censured as poverty of imagination, when opposed to the diversification of characters exhibited in the ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... had found more than a Prophet, a landscape which in its sublimity excited the imagination as powerfully as any gigantic form of the Elijah could have done, even though Michel Angelo had drawn it. It is meant to represent, and does perfectly represent, an illimitable desert, a boundless surface of barrenness and desolation, where Nature can bring forth nothing but seeds of death, and the only tree there is dead and withered, not a leaf to be seen nor possible. The only other objects, beside the level of the desert, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... he find a law of conformity; each tree was a law unto itself, tall and strong and slender, youthful and buoyant, opening fond arms to the blue sky. The absence of the sap-greens of England conveyed at first an impression of barrenness, but that wore off, and the artistic side of his nature fed upon the soft harmonies of faded grass and subdued green foliage nursing misty purples in its shade. The ground was his bed and chair ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... is the only place on this coast, except Cette, without a history. The town is built in the form of an amphitheatre, its lovely little bay surrounded by rich southern vegetation. The oleanders and magnolias in full bloom, gardens and vineyards, are no less strikingly contrasted with the barrenness and monotony that follows, than Banyuls itself, spick and span, brand-new, with the buried cities scattered on the way, ancient as Tyre and Sidon, and once as flourishing. There is much sadness yet poetic charm in the landscape sweeps of silvery-green olive ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... p. 105. l. 21. —Sudra like. The lowest caste who are not privileged, and indeed have no disposition in the native barrenness of their minds to study ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... Horn itself, all seemed a waste. At the time of which we are writing, much less was known of the antarctic regions than is known to-day; and even now our knowledge is limited to a few dreary outlines, in which barrenness and ice compete for the mastery. Wilkes, and his competitors, have told us that a vast frozen continent exists in that quarter of the globe; but even their daring and perseverance have not been able to determine more ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... stream, whose fountains no man should discover, whose waters had for a season mingled with the mightier current of the divinely allotted destiny of the race, and had then gathered themselves apart and flowed off, to end as they had begun, in the stagnation and barrenness of the desert. Philosophers and men of letters, astronomers and chemists, atheists and republicans, had shown that they were only powerful to destroy, as the Goths and the Vandals had been. They had shown that ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... you have been taught by history to discount. Barrenness in the personal life is the price many a man has paid for public honours. Fortune must preserve an equilibrium among us. No man is blessed in everything. That you know from the Horace of your own school days. But, seldom hearing men speak the truth, you may not know ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... persuaded to be made a cuckold. It is not always an aversion to, or a dread of this distinction, which preserves us from it: of this her husband was very sensible; therefore, under the pretence of a pilgrimage to Saint Winifred, the virgin and martyr, who was said to cure women of barrenness, he did not rest, until the highest mountains in Wales were between his wife and the person who had designed to perform this miracle in London, ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... country around here," remarked Dave, as he looked at the general barrenness of the aspect. Here and there were clumps of trees and patches of rough grass, and ...
— Dave Porter in the Gold Fields - The Search for the Landslide Mine • Edward Stratemeyer
... of this barrenness, see an essay on Two Studies in the South, in Professor Brander Matthews' Aspects of Fiction. ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... original regular shape. In the circular funnel, whose walls consist of masses of lava stone, rests a quiet, black lake, that looks very mysterious to the wanderer. Only low juniper bushes grow near the crater, bearing witness to the barrenness of the land. From the foot of this mountain an immense stream of lava, as wide and deep as a glacier, broke forth and flowed into the valley, where the end of the stream is still to be seen in a high, steep wall ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... a rock where her gay blanket made a picturesque splotch of color against the gray barrenness of the hill behind her. She, too, heard what Ramon said, and she, too, thought that he had made the praise sound terribly sincere. He had not spoken to her at all after the first careless nod of recognition when he rode up. And although her reason had approved of his caution, her sore heart ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... from the Conception district of Panay saves life, and San Pascual Bailon cures barrenness. A Manila milkman who was punished for selling watered milk expressed surprise at the complaints of his customers, because no wrong had been committed, inasmuch as he had used nothing but holy water, which ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... May. The institution of a Board of Agriculture (which Hussey, Sheridan, and Fox opposed as a piece of jobbery) and the renewal of the Charter of the East India Company were the chief practical results of that session. But the barrenness of the session, the passing of the Traitorous Correspondence Bill, and the hardships connected with the balloting for the militia stirred the Radical Clubs to redoubled energy; so that home affairs ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... now and then had recourse to familiar tragedy to assist the barrenness of imagination; but the moral aim, which must exclusively prevail in this species, is a true extinguisher of genuine poetical inspiration. They have, therefore, been satisfied with a few attempts. The Merchant ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... more than they did for his want of penetration. He was constantly wavering in his resolution, but what to attribute it to I know not, for it could not come from his fertile imagination, which was lively. Nor can I say it came from his barrenness of thought, for though he did not excel as a man of affairs, yet he had a good fund of sense. The effect of this irresolution is very visible, though we do not know its cause. He never was a warrior, though a true soldier. He never was a courtier, though he had always a good mind ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... excessively bad for her—seeing that Lucy was not of the stuff to fashion new duties or charities for herself out of new relations—and that the small, vain, and yet affectionate nature ran an evil chance of ultimate barrenness and sourness. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... whoever trusted to imagination would soon find his own mind circumscribed and contracted to a few favourite images, and the repetition of these would sooner or later produce that very monotony and barrenness which had always haunted descriptive poetry in the hands of any but the patient worshippers of truth."[443] Wordsworth disapproved of Scott's method in description. He is quoted as having said: "Nature ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... with both sexes, attend IMPOTENCE; while the unhappy object is regarded as one deprived of so capital a pleasure in life, and at the same time, as disabled from communicating it to others. BARRENNESS in women, being also a species of INUTILITY, is a reproach, but not in the same degree: of which the reason is very obvious, according ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... also, he renewed relations with Abimelech of Gerar.* He married his relative Rebecca, the granddaughter of Nakhor and the sister of Laban.** After twenty years of barrenness, his wife gave birth to twins, Esau and Jacob, who contended with each other from their mother's womb, and whose descendants kept up a perpetual feud. We know how Esau, under the influence of his appetite, deprived himself ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... present. In the sombre light she stumbled against a screen covered with paper painted to look like lacquer-work, and, as the slip-shod old nurse in her serre-tete motioned her forward, she had a dismal sense of a lodging-house interior, a bourgeois barrenness enhanced by two engravings after Leopold Robert, depressingly alien from that dainty boudoir atmosphere of the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Priapus. And he destroyed the grove she had consecrated, and broke the most filthy idol, and burnt it at the brook Kedron. Dr. Cumberland inserts, that the import of the word Peor, or Baal Pheor, is he that shews boastingly or publicly, his nakedness. Women to avoid barrenness, were to sit on this filthy image, as the source of fruitfulness; for which Lactantius and Augustine ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... an acute form known as aridity or barrenness in all things that pertain to God. The most virtuous souls are not always exempt from this. It is a dislike, a distaste that amounts almost to a disgust for prayer especially, a repugnance that threatens ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... She told me that the lion's head, which I sent down to Alexandria to go to you, was in her room when a neighbour of hers, who had never had a child, saw it, and at once conceived. The old image worship survives in the belief, which is all over Egypt, that the 'Anteeks' (antiques) can cure barrenness. Mabrookah was of course very smartly dressed, and the reckless way in which Eastern women treat their fine clothes gives them a grand air, which no Parisian Duchess could hope to imitate—not that I think it a virtue mind you, ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... wondering how he had offended her, and how he could make amends. Could he have looked into Jean's soul, he would have seen that it was seared with the fresh memory of iron bars and high walls and her dad who never saw any roses; and that the contrast between their beauty and the terrible barrenness that surrounded him was like a blow ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... you for lovely flowers! including one of my chief favourites—a white Iris. It is very good of you. You do not know what pleasure they give me! If you continue to bless me with an occasional nosegay when I move into my house, I shall not so bitterly suffer from the barrenness of the garden. ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden |
