"Bleak" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The bleak wind howled around the corners, the white flakes by millions and millions came with it, and hurled themselves upon that house. In fact, that poor little cabin alone on the wide prairie seemed to be the object ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... capacity for work of all kinds, which seems to be their privilege, took on every sort of job and did them all remarkably well. Perhaps the most curious instance of this is that women at once took up the work of shepherds, and began to keep their flocks on bleak and lonely Downs; a function, remember, which no women had performed in England for two or three hundred years. Here is my account of the first shepherdess I ever saw, written on October, 1918, and on the day ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... to risk their lives to save those in peril on the dangerous coast of Jutland. Although hundreds of ships are wrecked on this dreaded "Jernkyst" (iron coast), their crews are invariably saved by these courageous men. The whole length of the west coast of Jutland is bleak and exposed to the storms and fogs of the North Sea. Not one single harbour of refuge can be found between Esbjerg and the Skaw. Dangerous sandbanks and massive cliffs guard the coast, making navigation both difficult and hazardous. All along this ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... feet—swept me back ten years. It was like a vision in a crystal—if such a thing could exist. I saw the whole past scene. The bare room—the old dead man—myself; the overwhelming wish to avenge my wrongs, and the sudden suggestion that turned the wish cold. I saw the long, bleak night in which I completed the colossal task of copying the Scitsym line for line; I saw the gray morning steal in across the room as I closed the book, returned it to its safe and replaced the key on my uncle's neck in preparation for the arrival of the ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... which followed, she saw the bride and bridegroom off at the railway depot, she remained to console her old friend for the loss of her daughter. Then she hied her off once more, back to the bleak, staring school-house, where she continued to propound sage maxims for the young of the district until her allotted task was done, and the tally of her ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... road at the best of times, but on a bleak night with snow there is real danger. The trap will take you over in no time when it comes in, or as soon as it is ...
— Dick and His Cat and Other Tales • Various
... position. At length, after a few anxious hours, the fire began to die out; but here we were on the top of a rock, without food or water, and with only so much powder and shot as each man carried in his pouch. Still, we had saved our lives and our horses, and had reason to be thankful. The spot was a bleak one to camp in, but we had no choice. To protect ourselves from the wind, we built up a hedge of brushwood, and lighted a fire. Food we could not hope to obtain until the morning, but Pierre and one of the Indians volunteered to go down to the river, ...
— Adventures in the Far West • W.H.G. Kingston
... ye stately swans, with grace— Ye ne'er again shall see His headlong dash among the dace Beneath the willow-tree; Ye little bleak, lift up your heads, Ye gudgeon, skip at score, The run between the lily beds Shall know ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 24, 1914 • Various
... a bleak and empty setting, the jewel gone. How vacant it looked, how vacant it was! We made not any effort to penetrate the galleries; I had no heart to urge my friend. For us the whole of Venice had become one bridge of sighs, and we sat in the shade of the piazza, ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... and glanced forward over Ben's burly shoulder, then, grabbing the vertical handrails on cab and tender, leaned out and gazed astern. The wagon road twisted over the bleak "divide" the train had just rounded, and, barring a team or two jogging slowly into town, was bare of traffic. "No chasers so far," he shouted, as he again ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... rivers, and such like natural eccentricities being left out of the count, is to describe fifty other West of Ireland towns. There is a railway-station, bleak, gray, and windswept, situated, for the benefit of local car-owners, a mile and a half from the town, and the road which connects the two is execrable. There is a workhouse, in Ballymoy as everywhere else in this lost land the most prominent building. There is a convent, immense and wonderfully ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... foggy afternoon as he climbed the long wind-swept hill of California Street,—one of those bleak, gray intervals that made the summer a misnomer to any but the liveliest San Franciscan fancy. There was no warmth or color in earth or sky, no light nor shade within or without, only one monotonous, universal neutral tint over every thing. There was a fierce ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... Hope look bleak, And Courage turn a little blue, Even with hearts as tough as teak May well occur; but, when they do, This thought will readjust your bile And prove the best of appetisers:—? Would I exchange (here's where you smile) ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 1, 1916 • Various
... herself at the receipt of this letter. The picture of Guy Darrell effacing his very life from his native land, and destroying the last memorials of his birthright and his home—the conviction of the influence she still retained over his bleak and solitary existence—the experience she had already acquired that the influence failed where she had so fondly hoped it might begin to repair and to bless, all overpowered her with emotions of yearning tenderness ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... abundance of Mexico and of Peru, in their palmiest and most prosperous condition. Nor, though only the frontier and threshold as it were to these swollen treasures, was the portion of country now under survey, though bleak, sterile, and uninviting, wanting in attractions of its own. It contained indications which denoted the fertile regions, nor wanted entirely in the precious mineral itself. Much gold had been already gathered, with little labor, and almost upon its surface; ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... circumstance that the philosophy of Education is founded on truths in the natural order. Where the sun shines bright, in the warm climate of the south, the natives of the place know little of safeguards against cold and wet. They have, indeed, bleak and piercing blasts; they have chill and pouring rain, but only now and then, for a day or a week; they bear the inconvenience as they best may, but they have not made it an art to repel it; it is not worth their while; the science of calefaction and ventilation is reserved for ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... tide, all proclaimed it to be indeed the ocean on whose bosom the great city rested so calmly; not such blue, soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the Neapolitan promontories, or sleeps beneath the marble rocks of Genoa, but a sea with the bleak power of our own northern waves, yet subdued into a strange spacious rest, and changed from its angry pallor into a field of burnished gold, as the sun declined behind the belfry tower of the lonely island church, fitly named ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... proceeds he had to pay the portions of his brother and sister, and his mother's jointure; the surplus left was scarcely visible in the executor's account. The hope of restoring the home and fortunes of his forefathers had long ceased. What were the ruined hall and its bleak wastes, without that hope which had once dignified the wreck and the desert? He wrote from St. Petersburg, ordering the sale of the property. No one great proprietor was a candidate for the unpromising investment; it was sold in lots among small freeholders and retired traders. A builder ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... his departure from France. Then people saw, at last, where all the golden schemes that had flooded upon popular credulity had borne us;—not to the smiling and fertile shores of Prosperity and Confidence, as may be imagined; but to the bleak rocks and dangerous sands of Ruin and Mistrust, where dull clouds obscure the sky, and where there is no protection ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... finally reached the last stretch of the journey—across country from the Jordan to Jerusalem. They were nearly there. But the last part of the trip was the hardest of all. Around them stretched a dreary desert. There were bleak hills, and ugly rocks, and hardly a drop of water anywhere to drink. No wonder nobody went to Jerusalem, except Jews and Roman soldiers! There were no gay caravans of Eastern merchants here. Galilee seemed very ...
— The King Nobody Wanted • Norman F. Langford
... to the shore. The sea was quite black and thick, and it was breaking high on the beach; the foam was flying about, and the wind was blowing; everything looked bleak. The fisherman was chilled with fear. He ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... a skeleton sketch of Haynes-Cooper, whose feelers reach the remotest dugout in the Yukon, the most isolated cabin in the Rockies, the loneliest ranch-house in Wyoming; the Montana mining shack, the bleak Maine ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... fine sturdiness he had never seen exceeded elsewhere. He went on musing over the permanence of things and the mutability of mortal joy, wondering if, in this world He had made without remedies for its native ills, God could take pleasure in the bleak framework of it. And when he had nearly reached the top of the slope, the three firs, where a turn to the left would bring him to the log cabin door, suddenly he stopped as if his inner self heard the command to halt. He looked about him, and his heart began ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... never does talk of—there is no language that I ever learned which will express them. But I have never heard any music that could reach my soul like that which God gives us in the blossom season—the summer, the fall of late fruit—and the bleak, hard winter, when the clash of ice against ice has a sound that no man or woman ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... boys of Chester Square, Pray give us of your meals a share. Just have the kindness to remember That this is chilly, bleak December; That snow has covered long the ground Till really nothing's to be found: So throw us out a crumb or two, And, as you would be ...
— The Nursery, February 1877, Vol. XXI. No. 2 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... pastoral here, and we seemed to have come into eternal spring after the bleak, windy plains encircling Avignon. It was beautiful to remember Petrarch's description of his golden-haired, dark-eyed love, fair and tall as a lily, sitting in the grass among the violets, where her bare feet gleamed whiter than the daisies when she took off her sandals. Even Nicolete, ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... chair that had once belonged to the master of the house, sat Micah Ward. He looked very old now and infirm. The months in a prison hulk in Belfast Lough and the long weariness of his confinement in bleak Fort George had set their mark upon him. On his knees lay a Greek lexicon, but he was pursuing no word through its pages. It was open at the fly-leaf inside the cover. He was reading lovingly for the hundredth time ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... urge that had led her on the ridiculous quest. A young, pretty, but portionless girl, with just enough money to support life in France for a few years, hopeless of marriage in a country where the women outnumbered the men by at least a million, would have a bleak future before her. He could guess that her high, proud spirit would rebel, on the one hand, at the prospect of pinching poverty and ignoble work and, on the other, from the alternative ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... The bleak wind of March Made her tremble and shiver; But not the dark arch Of the black flowing river; Mad from life's history, Glad to death's mystery, Swift to be hurl'd— Any where, any where ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... crest of the Cordillera, where it spreads out into a bold and bleak expanse, with scarce the vestige of vegetation, except what is afforded by the pajonal, a dried yellow grass, which, as it is seen from below, encircling the base of the snow-covered peaks, looks, with its brilliant straw-color ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... Across the water, tiny in the distance and quite alone amongst forests and moors, there is Brantwood; and beyond it everything seems uncultivated, uninhabited, except for one grey farmhouse high on the fell, where gaps in the ragged larches show how bleak and ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... back to rugged rocks, bleak shores, burning summers, nipping winters, at home, when you might have been cropping ever so many laurels in Germany? Kingsley's are coming back as covered with 'em as Jack-a-Green on May-day. Our six regiments did wonders; and ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... why he does not come," she exclaimed. "Oh, how I wish granny would come back! she may suffer harm coming along the rough path this bleak night in the dark." ...
— Michael Penguyne - Fisher Life on the Cornish Coast • William H. G. Kingston
... lasting fire. I began to understand how the field-mice winter—how the northern birds live through, and what a storm, on top of a storm, means to all creatures of the north country that are forced to take what comes, when the earth tilts up into the bleak and icy gray. We forget this as men, until ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... bleak season to ride through the poorest and ugliest country in Europe, but there was a cloudless sky above, and a bright, cold sun, which shimmered on the huge snowfields. My breath reeked into the frosty air, and Rataplan sent up two feathers of steam from his nostrils, while ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... shall lose you nothing, believe me. Come, Julia, let us go and array us for the journey. The nights are cold now, in December, and the passes of the Algidus are bleak and gusty." ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... it was in the bleak December, And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor. Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore— For the rare and radiant maiden ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe
... the weird blue streamers of the aurora, which went racing swiftly back and forth along the northern horizon. Even when the sun rose, huge and fiery, in a haze of frozen moisture at the south, it did not seem to infuse any warmth or life into the bleak wintry landscape. It only drowned, in a dull red glare, the blue, tremulous streamers of the aurora and the white radiance of the moon and stars, tinged the snow with a faint colour like a stormy sunset, ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... similar houses. Instead of striving for an effect of opulent gorgeousness by every device of material, color and decoration, the heads of the Vedian family had expressed, in their atrium, their cult of primitive simplicity. Compared with others of the houses of senators their atrium appeared bare and bleak. ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... much better. There are no gardens close up to the house, no flower-beds in the nooks and corners, no sweet shrubs peeping in at the square windows. Gardens there are, but they are away, half a mile off; and the great hall door opens out upon a flat, bleak park, with hardly a scrap around it which courtesy can ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... peered cautiously out. The sky was dull and hazy and a steady, drizzling rain fell. There is something about a drear, rainy day which "gets" one, if he has but a makeshift shelter; and this bleak, gray morning carried poor Tom's mind back with a rush to rainy days at his beloved Temple Camp when scouts were wont to gather in tent and ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... the Canaries, and came upon North America in the neighborhood of Pamlico Sound, avoiding the stormy route directly across the Atlantic which Gilbert had followed. They found, therefore, instead of the bleak shore of Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island, the genial climate of North Carolina ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton
... ready for bed. I stood in its soft light and looked across to the dark mass of the chapel opposite and saw that a dim light was still burning from the window by the organ loft. And as I stood and looked, the empty place that I had felt in the very center of my heart grew colder and more bleak until suddenly across the garden on perfumed waves of sound came the Tristan love song and filled my emptiness with a pain that was both hot and cold. I stood and let the flood dash over me as long as I could and then with a sob I sank on the floor and rested my head on the window ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... bleak hillside, dotted over with white tombstones, the looming city in the distance off at the right, Courtland recognized the group of spreading buildings that belonged to-his university. He marveled at the closeness of life and death in this world. Out there the busy city, everybody tired ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... used to preserve it. It is to burn precious oils in the tomb; it is to offer meat and drink to the dead: not so much an honor to the deceased as a disgrace to the survivors. Our palaces are vast inhospitable halls. There the bleak winds, there "Boreas, and Eurus, and Caurus, and Argestes loud," howling through the vacant lobbies, and clattering the doors of deserted guardrooms, appall the imagination, and conjure up the grim spectres of departed ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... stove was burning, and the temperature was exceedingly pleasant after the bleak air outside, where the raw wind blew strongly up ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... was fond of her mistress, in spite of her occasional cruelties, and lately the Countess had been strangely gentle. She required little attention, wished to be alone, and lay in her great bed, looking out steadily at the bleak mountain-tops, to which ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... because poetic, sentiment with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant, eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... indulge their fancy. The result was an austere uniformity of design that accorded fittingly with a landscape whose beauty was all of line and whose colour like the lichen on an old wall did not flauntingly reveal its gradations of tint to the transient observer. The bleak upland airs had taught the builders to be sparing with their windows; the result of such solicitude for the comfort of the inmates was a succession of blank spaces of freestone that delighted the eye with an effect of strength and leisure, ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... same day, that his elder brother, Owasso, was fishing in his magic canoe, a considerable distance out upon the lake; when he thought he heard the cries of a child upon the shore. He wondered how any human creature could exist on so bleak and barren a coast. ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews
... o'clock, P.M. the storm clouds cleared away, and the bleak, uninviting face of Labrador was plainly visible. The ship had settled to an altitude of fifteen hundred feet, and was moving northeasterly at the rate ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... canyon depths, bowing the forest before it, bending the meagre, crevice-rooted pines on the walls of the gorge, they knew it for what it was. A wind, strong and warm, a balmy gale, drove past them, flinging a rocket-shower of sparks from the fire. The dogs, aroused, sat on their haunches, bleak noses pointed upward, and ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... let me go, won't you?" Di pleaded, using her pet name for Father, which he likes because it sounds young and unparental. Then catching a bleak gleam in my eyes, she hastily added: "And afterward Peggy, if Captain ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... She gave him a bleak little smile. "My dear boy, if I had left all the hard things to my manager to do, Storm to-day would be just ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... the observations were taken upon points considered necessary, we prepared to return home by way of Mar Saba, hardly expecting to arrive by daylight at Jerusalem. We were, however, desirous of spending Christmas day there rather than in the bleak wilderness. ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... on their route, struck them as "one of the most appalling objects" which they had seen, being a bleak rock twelve hundred feet high above the level of the lake, with a perpendicular face of its full height. The Indians say, that any one who can scale it, and "turn three times on the brink of its fearful wall, will live for ever." We ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... the huge square where horses and cattle and elephants were bought and sold. The litter, in charge of the chief mahout, proceeded to the slave mart. Kathlyn glanced at the wall, wondering. Was her father alive? Was he in some bleak cell behind that crumbling masonry? Did he know that she was here? Or was he really dead? Ah, perhaps it were better that death should have taken him—better that than having his living heart wrung by the tale of his ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... moment, though smoke was rising from many of the chimneys to greet its sister mist. At the house of the detective across the way the blinds were still down and the shutters up. Yet the familiar, prosaic aspect of the street calmed her. The bleak air set her coughing; she slammed the door to, and returned to the kitchen to make fresh tea for Constant, who could only be in a deep sleep. But the canister trembled in her grasp. She did not know whether she dropped it or threw it down, but ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... know the natives of the Southern part of Argentina grow to a considerable size. Now Patagonia is a comparatively bleak and cold country. What would prevent some of that big tribe centuries ago, from having migrated to a warmer country, where life was more favorable? After several generations they may have grown to ...
— Tom Swift in Captivity • Victor Appleton
... that then was hard and frozen, was now carpeted with the luxurious grass; the birds sang merrily overhead, and the warm sunshine lighted up the wood with a beauty far different than was apparent upon that bleak winter night when Henry Schulte met his death upon the spot where ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... that took place on the occasion. Nothing could be more perfect than the condition of the force, both men and horses. The picturesqueness of the scene; the pleasant bay, with its sandy margin and background of bleak hills, seamed by the lines of the cavalry tents; the troops drawn up in the foreground in all their variety of colour and costume, from the two squadrons of H.M.'s Dragoon Guards on the right to the two squadrons ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... sea, Out of the bleak March weather; Drifting away for a loaf and play, Just you and I together; And it's good-bye worry and good-bye hurry And never a care have we; With the sea below and the sun above And nothing to do but dream and love, ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... blackbird tried to escape by hiding in the bramble. But he was not permitted to rest there; out he was soon driven and away into another bush, and again into still another further away, and finally he was hunted over the sheltering wall into the bleak wind on the other side. Then the persecutor came back and settled himself on his old perch on the bramble, well satisfied at his victory over a bird so much bigger than himself. All was again peace and harmony in the little social gathering, and the pleasant talkee-talkee went on as before. About ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... Plymouth Colony landed before they were called upon to battle with their first foes—the cold, the wind, and the storms on the bleak New England coast. Famine came next, and finally pestilence. The blast from the sea shook their frail cabins; the frost sealed the earth, and the snow drifted on the pillow of the sick and dying. Five kernels of corn a day ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... women he had been counting on presented themselves in charge of a licensed guide. He went to meet them and didn't conceal from them that he had marked them for his very own. The encounter was happy on both sides, and he accompanied them through the queer and endless interior, through labyrinths of bleak bare development, into legislative and judicial halls. He thought it a hideous place; he had seen it all before and asked himself what senseless game he was playing. In the lower House were certain bedaubed walls, in the basest style of imitation, which made ...
— Pandora • Henry James
... I think you had better get into the carriage. It is very bleak out here, and you ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... a fierce stretching of hands In gloom; and my feet, Treading tremulous over hard sands; A wind that wailed wearily slow, A plashing of waters below, A twilight on bleak lone lands, Spread out; and a sheet Of the moaning ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of this grey, grim, sea-beaten hole. I have a little cold in my head, which makes my eyes sore; and you can't tell how utterly sick I am, and how anxious to get back among trees and flowers and something less meaningless than this bleak fertility. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "Who knows?" Paddy Blake's replies, "Nobody." And yet all of you roving English, who delight in athletic sports and rural scenes—the forest glade and murmuring streams, a view halloo and the gallant hound; who love the bleak and healthy moors, the cool retreats, the flowery paths, and mountain solitudes, how happy would you be in Le Morvan. ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... said they, "beyond the green Isle of Erin, is our father's hall. Seven days' journey northward, on the bleak Norwegian shore, is our father's hall. ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... into the closet for what seemed like an interminable time. His eyes were bleak and his mouth was grim and stiff as he passed a slow ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... mother and Mary's three children with me, and they remained throughout the spring and summer. I had hoped that they would remain permanently, and had rented and furnished a home for them with that end in view; but, though they enjoyed their visit, the prospect of the bleak winters of Cape Cod disturbed my mother, and they all returned to Big Rapids late in the autumn. Since entering upon my parish work it had been possible for me to help my father and mother financially; and from the time ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... days and sleep upon them during the summer nights. They frequent the Bowery and those down-at-the-heels East Side streets where poor clothes and shrunken features are not singled out as curious. They are the men who are in the lodginghouse sitting-rooms during bleak and bitter weather and who swarm about the cheaper shelters which only open at six in a number of the lower East Side streets. Miserable food, ill-timed and greedily eaten, had played havoc with bone and muscle. They were all pale, flabby, sunken-eyed, hollow-chested, ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... California coast, then an uninhabited island given over to sunshine and wild goats, now one of the most popular and populous of California summer and winter resorts—for 'tis all the same on the Pacific coast; one season is damper than the other, that is the only difference. The coast grew bare and bleak; the wind freshened and we were glad to put on our wraps. And then at last, after a journey of nearly five thousand miles, we slowed up in a fog so dense it dripped from the scuppers of the ship; we heard the boom of the surf pounding upon the invisible ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... natural verities. You cannot change him, move, nor hurt him. He can earn neither your praises nor reproach. As well might you blame the staring noon of summer or throw a kind word to the everlasting hills. The bleak pride of the Castillano, the flint and steel of Aragon, the languor which veils Andalusian fire—travelling the lands which gave them birth, you find them scored in large over mountain and plain and riverbed, and bitten deep into the hearts of the indwellers. They are as seasonable ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... dunghill, a crowing cock, the shining and the withdrawal of the sun. An occasional pathos of simple humanity, and frequent patches of big Biblical words, relieved the homely tissue. It was a poetry apart; bleak, austere, but genuine, and ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... beneath an oak-tree, to which yet clung a number of brown leaves. Truelove sat down, drawing her cloak about her, for, though the sun shone, the air was keen. MacLean took off his coat, and kneeling put it beneath her feet. He laughed at her protest. "Why, these winds are not bleak!" he said. "This land knows no true and honest cold. In my country, night after night have I lain in snow with only my plaid for cover, and heard the spirits call in the icy wind, the kelpie shriek beneath the frozen loch. I listened; then shut my eyes ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... years had come and gone since that bleak February evening when Sir John Kirkland carried his little daughter to a place of safety, in the old city of Louvain, and in all those years the child had grown like a flower in a sheltered garden, where cold winds never come. The bud had matured into the blossom in ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... woods and wilds, and the nature—which was born thousands of years ere the teachings of civilization had tamed the wild man into an educated, home-loving being—revives, and the two struggle for mastery in his heart. The bleak mountain-peaks, the wide-extended plain and its wild denizens, and the excitement these give, stirs his bosom, and the wish struggles up to return to them. But the gentler chords of his heart are in tune. The once-loved home, and she, the once-loved ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... the stormy wind striking chill and bleak through the bending pines; it was raining in torrents; it was 5 P.M., and we were still some six miles from the haven where we would be; so, after a short and utterly ineffectual attempt to get the carriage past the obstacle, Jane and I set off to walk down ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... Island, is the most isolated and desolate spot imaginable during this weather. The frigid monotony of winter has settled down upon that region, and now it is haunted only by sea fowl. The bleak, barren promontory whereon stands the light is swept clean of its summer dust by the violent raking of cold hurricanes across it, and coated with ice from the wind-dashed spume of the great breakers hurled against ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... and exchanging confidential smiles. Jean was in the seventh heaven of happiness; the widow enthusiastically approved of the symptoms; and the only critic present appeared to be his exemplary sister. She listened to the concert with a bleak face, and regarded the dalliance on the sofa out of ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... satires enumerates the following as the most notable foreign delicacies: peacocks from Samos; grouse from Phrygia; cranes from Melos; kids from Ambracia; tunny fishes from Chalcedon; muraenas from the Straits of Gades; bleak-fishes (? -aselli-) from Pessinus; oysters and scallops from Tarentum; sturgeons (?) from Rhodes; -scarus—fishes (?) from Cilicia; nuts from Thasos; dates ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... like a jewel on the cusp of a horn, Porto Venere shines; and farther still, Lerici in the shadow of the hills washed by the sea, stained by the blood of the sunset, its great castle seeming like some splendid ship in the midst of the waters. From the bleak height of La Foce, whence all the woods seem to have run down to the shore, slowly one by one the lights of the city appear like great golden night flowers; soon they are answered from the bay, where the ships lie solemnly, sleepily at anchor, and at last ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... tone that, for the minute, imposed itself in its dry despair; it represented, in the bleak place, which had no life of its own, none but the life Kate had left—the sense of which, for that matter, by mystic channels, might fairly be reaching the visitor—the very impotence of their extinction. And Densher had nothing to oppose it withal, nothing but ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... entirely, so we could not get to Clark's "good camp," for with ten hours of utmost effort only about half a day's distance could be covered, when at last, finding the struggle useless, we were forced to halt for the night in a bleak bottom on the north bank of the river. But no one could sleep, for the wind swept over us with unobstructed fury, and the only fuel to be had was a few green bushes. As night fell a decided change of temperature added much to our ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... had been the first to bring home the fact that summer was gone. The chapel had been cold and bleak, and while they stood around the grave it began to rain. In the drawing-room at Cashelthorpe the fire had been lit, and tea awaited the brother and sister. Consoling as these comforts were they ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... man's love the lighter and the woman's burn no brighter Came to pass with us inevitably while slipped the shortening year . . . And there stands your father's dwelling with its blind bleak windows telling That the vows of man and maid are frail ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... light-willows stretched along the river-banks, and as they sailed through that ribbon of ghostly radiance they could see each other's faces. Thorvald's was bleak, hard, his eyes on the stream behind them as if he expected at any moment to see a Throg emerge from the surface ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... thought touched her with an arctic sense of cold and desolation. She drew away from it with an inward shudder, and in that instant of realization she saw the little old maid's personality really and truly standing in the middle of that bleak and frost-bound barrenness which she had dreamed as a possibility for herself. For the first time she saw and understood, and anger and bewilderment were alike swept away in the warm ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray
... Mamie, I forgave her now; so brave and kind, so pretty and venturesome, was her decision. The weather frowned overhead with a leaden sky, and San Francisco had never (in all my experience) looked so bleak and gaunt, and shoddy and crazy, like a city prematurely old; but through all my wanderings and errands to and fro, by the dockside or in the jostling street, among rude sounds and ugly sights, there ran in my mind, like a tiny strain ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it, and allowed her face to fall upon Clara's shoulder. So they stood, speaking no word, making no attempt to rid themselves of the tears which were blinding their eyes, but gazing out through the moisture on the bleak wintry scene before them. Clara's mind was the more active at the moment, for she was resolving that in this episode of her life she would accept no lesson whatever from Lady Aylmer's teaching no, nor any lesson whatever from the ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... Beyens in his dog-cart; the Empress drove with the Princess Metternich in a victoria to the field, where she left her and returned to the chateau. I fancy she was afraid of the dampness of this bleak November day. ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... copses of ash whose trunks showed pale as ghost-trees; he saw, gleaming here and there through the gorse-bushes, the stream that ran along the bottom of the slope below the cart-track that led to Cloom. He saw the bleak, grey homesteads, cottages and small farms, set here and there, as he turned in his seat to look around him. And his heart leapt to the knowledge that all these ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... rise twenty feet before we need give it a thought," said Hester. She had been reared along the river and had no fear of it. She loved it in any form it could assume—tranquil and quiet—frozen and white—rolling and bleak and sullen. In every form, she recognized only the beautiful and ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... last, its fierce heat giving way to the cool, fresh days of an early autumn. August, September, October—the months had dragged interminably by, and now it was November, bleak and chill, with gray skies and penetrating winds and sudden deluges of rain. Georgiana, sweeping sodden leaves from a wet porch after an all-night storm, looked up to see the village telegraph messenger approaching. ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... —on a bleak and cheerless morning in late October. It is not yet light; but a depressed party of about twenty-five are falling into line at the acrid invitation of two sergeants, who have apparently decided that the pen is mightier than the Lee-Enfield ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... they swung into the hospital area, but, seeing Quin's uniform, allowed them to enter. Past the long line of contagious wards, past the bleak two-story convalescent barracks, and up to the officers' quarters ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... invisible corner-stone upon which my vigorous world was built. I had climbed up into the airy heights, I had been writing of millionaires. And coming so abruptly now from my story of life in rich hotels, the place I had once glorified looked bleak and naked, elemental. Down to the ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... the agency of forces limited to the locality. They testify, Agassiz would perhaps say, not regarding the existence of some local glacier that descended from the higher grounds into the valley, but respecting the existence of the great polar glacier. I felt, however, in this bleak and solitary hollow, with the grooved and polished platforms at my feet, stretching away amid the heath, like flat tombstones in a graveyard, that I had arrived at one geologic inscription to which I ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... could scarcely believe she was in Egypt. The roaring of the wind suggested some bleak and Northern clime. The shutter crashed against the wall. At last she could bear the noise no longer, and she got up, went out on to the landing, and called ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... rich in interpretation of this principle. In every age man has received from society what he has given to society. This continent lay waiting for ages for the seed of civilization. At length the sower went forth to sow. Landing in midwinter upon a bleak coast, the fathers gave themselves to cutting roads, draining swamps, subduing grasses, rearing villages, until all the land was sown with the good seed of liberty and Christian civilization. Afterward, when tyranny threatened liberty, these worthies ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... thickets, and the drone of insects in the hot, dry grass. And through the branches of the trees on the lower terrace one could get frequent glimpses of the James River, thickly studded with black rocks and tiny green islands." No wonder that the girl from the bleak North found it in her heart to thrill at the beauty of such a gem from Nature's jewel-casket as was that garden ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... say," added Bernard, "that I should think it little short of murderous to take that unlucky child from the one woman who understands her up into the bleak north ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... aversion to piling up agony ahead of him; besides, Dill could see for himself that the loss would be heavy, though just how heavy he hadn't the experience with which to estimate. As March came in with a blizzard and went, a succession of bleak days, into April, Billy knew more than he cared to admit even to himself. He would lie awake at night when the wind and snow raved over the land, and picture the bare open that he knew, with lean, Double-Crank stock drifting tail to the wind. He could fancy them coming up against this fence ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... and ride in sun and wind, Through desert moors, hills bleak and high, Where wandering vapours fall, and ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... on account of the institution which crowns it. The land on which the College is built is a part of the farm which the late Charles Tufts received by way of inheritance; and, when asked by his relatives what he would do with the bleak hill over in Medford, he replied, "I will put a light on it." The tract of land originally given by Mr. Tufts consisted of twenty acres. Subsequently he gave his pledge to add other valuable tracts adjoining. This pledge has been fulfilled, so that the plot of ground, belonging ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... the bleak, loud whistling wind! Its crushing blast recalls to mind The dangers of the troubled deep; Where, with a fierce and thundering sweep, The winds in wild distraction rave, And push along the mountain wave With dreadful swell and hideous curl! Whilst hung aloft in giddy ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte
... quarries inland, the dark brown ploughed fields, and the black copses where many a bud is sleeping and waiting for the spring. A haze lies about the Downs and softens their smooth outline as in summer, if you can but face the bleak wind which never rests up there. The outline starts on the left hand fairly distinguished against the sky. As it sweeps round, it sinks, and is lost in the bluish haze; gradually it rises again, and ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... arrows, through soft dells of dreamy dew. Vext with gleams of Ladon's daughter, dashed along the son of Jove, Fast upon flower-trammelled Daphne fleeting on from grove to grove; Flights of seawind hard behind him, breaths of bleak and whistling straits; Drifts of driving cloud above him, like a troop of fierce-eyed Fates! So he reached the water-shallows; then he stayed his steps, and heard Daphne drop upon the grasses, fluttering like a ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... do not think that at this time I cared much for novel reading. Scott seemed to me on a par with Burke's speeches; that is to say, too impersonal for my very personal taste. Dickens I knew by heart, and "Bleak House" I thought his greatest achievement. Thackeray left no deep impression on my mind; in no way did he hold my thoughts. He was not picturesque like Dickens, and I was at that time curiously eager for some adequate philosophy of life, and his social satire seemed very ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... Rothesay, do not quit your easel; Miss Van-brugh will accompany me through the garden, and besides, I wish to speak to her about her clematis. We cannot make them grow in S—shire; the Hall is perhaps too cold and bleak." ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... precipice. The thought that a man could fall and be killed in such a place moved me with a fresh misery. What that meant I could not tell. Were we not away from such things as mouldering flesh and broken bones? It seemed not; and I climbed madly away from them. Quite suddenly I came to the top, a bleak platform of rock, where I fell prostrate on ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... materials, at the Tower, to write a history; Lafayette, at Olmutz, lived in perpetual expectancy of release; Moore and Byron, children, flowers, birds, and the Muses cheered Leigh Hunt's year of durance: but in this bleak fortress, innocent and magnanimous men beheld the seasons come and go, night succeed day, and year follow year, with no cognizance of kindred or the world's doings,—no works of bard or sage,—no ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... herbage—the dry grass—the tall reed—the twining parasite—or the giant of the forest, charred and blackened, but still proudly erect—alike attest and bewail the conquering fire's onward march; and the bleak desert, silent, waste, and lifeless, which it leaves behind seems forever doomed to desolation: vain fear! the rain descends once more upon the dry and thirsty soil, and from that very hour which seemed the date of cureless ruin, Nature puts forth ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... something about a "gun-happy flitter pilot," but, Raf noted with bleak eyes, the com-tech kept his own hand close to his belt arm. Only Lablet stood watching the oncoming alien ship with placidity. But then, as Raf had learned through the long voyage of the spacer, a period of time which had left few ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... hour we arrived at Arras on Wednesday, the 22nd March, I cannot tell; but we drove straight to the prefecture, a very considerable mansion, surrounded with spacious grounds and gardens, which to me, nevertheless, had a bleak, flat, and desolate air, though the sun was brightly shining. We stopped at the furthest of many gates on the high road, while madame sent in to M. — (I forget his name) the note with which we had been favoured by M. Lameth. The answer was a most courteous ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... also mentioned in Bleak House in the communication from Kenge and Carboys to Esther Summerson as her halting-place in London. Here she was met by their clerk, Mr. Guppy, who later, in his declaration of love to her, reminded her of his services on that occasion—"I think you must have seen that I was struck with those ...
— The Inns and Taverns of "Pickwick" - With Some Observations on their Other Associations • B.W. Matz
... mingled in all the scenes of life a not undistinguished actor in them; having shared in war and in love; having by my own genius and energy won my way from poverty and obscurity to competence and splendour. As I looked out from my chariot windows as it rolled along over the bleak bare roads, by the miserable cabins of the peasantry, who came out in their rags to stare as the splendid equipage passed, and huzza'd for his Lordship's honour as they saw the magnificent stranger in the superb ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Chandler, Esq., the Bay State's general counsel, and as secrecy was important, a special train was to take the party the twenty-five miles out of Boston. By an unavoidable accident I missed the train, and in driving over the road in a bleak rain-storm, caught a violent cold. I was about three hours late, but when I arrived we went to work with a will and by seven o'clock, shortly before dinner, our contracts had been dictated to the ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... be at such a time. One bright day in early winter Honora, returning from her walk across the bleak plains in the hope of letters, found newspapers and periodicals instead, addressed in an unknown hand. It matters not whose hand: Honora never sought to know. She had long regarded as inevitable this acutest phase of her martyrdom, and the long nights of tears when entire paragraphs of the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... little frozen hands played a trick on old Boreas—it showed her a way between the pillars, and only just her skirt was caught by one and whirled over her head as she dodged into her alley. It peeped after her halfway down its dark depths, where it seemed colder even than in the bleak street, but there it had to ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... station there was a quarter of an hour to wait. Hilda dismissed Florrie, with final injunctions, and followed her trunk to the bleak platform. The old porter was very kind. She went to the little yellow bookstall. There, under her hand, was a low pile of The Five Towns Chronicle. Miracle! Miraculous George Cannon! She flushed with pride, with a sense of ownership, as ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... French "auberge" for an inn has been used as an illustration, though the first syllable may be doubtful. The principal difficulty appears to consist in the prefix "Cold;" for why, it may be asked, should a bleak and "cold" situation be selected as a "harbour"? The fact probably is that this spelling, however common, is a corruption for "COL.". Colerna, in Wiltshire, fortunately retains the original orthography, and in Anglo-Saxon literally ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... from Lord Timon the rich, Lord Timon the delight of mankind, to Timon the naked, Timon the man-hater! Where were his flatterers now? Where were his attendants and retinue? Would the bleak air, that boisterous servitor, be his chamberlain, to put his shirt on warm? Would those stiff trees that had outlived the eagle turn young and airy pages to him, to skip on his errands when he bade them? Would ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... you have no desire to do so, consider this as not written, for I married you in order to love you in God and according to the need of my heart, and in order to have in the midst of the strange world a place for my heart, which all the world's bleak winds cannot chill, and where I may find the warmth of the home-fire, to which I eagerly betake myself when it is stormy and cold without; but not to have a society woman for others, and I shall cherish and nurse your little fireplace, put wood on it and blow, and protect it against all that ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... hommes were not supposed to see anything which went on in the world without; les hommes might, however, look their fill on a little washing-shed, on a corner of what seemed to be another wing of the building, and on a bleak lifeless abject landscape of scrubby woods beyond—which constituted the view from the ten windows on the right. The authorities had miscalculated a little in one respect: a merest fraction of the barb-wire pen which began at the ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... was perhaps bracing, but it was bleak: and there were times when Richard regretted his acceptance of the Prince's offer, and yearned after family ties, equality, and freedom. Simon and Guy had never been kind to him, but at least they were his brothers, and with them disguise and constraint would be over—he should, too, ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... strange architecture and peculiar ornamentation, suggest some different race as their builders. The present surroundings are of the gloomiest character. The country is barren and desert. The valley in which the ruins are located is high and narrow, but surrounded by bleak hills. The soil is dry and sandy, and almost devoid of vegetation. The cold winds, blowing almost constantly, sweep before them great clouds of sand. A small stream flows through this dreary waste, which, during the rainy season, is a raging torrent. "No birds sing, ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... It was in the bleak December, And each separate dying ember Wrought its ghost upon the floor. Eagerly I wished the morrow; Vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow Sorrow for the lost Lenore— For the rare and radiant ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... began on October seventh, but the wind had so far abated that we were able to resume our journey. It was a bleak and dismal day. Save for now and then a small grove of spruce trees in some sheltered nook, and these at long intervals, the country was destitute and barren of growth. Below our camp, upon entering the lake, there was a wide, flat stretch of sand wash from the river, ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... "Bleak House" was issued in parts in 1852. "Little Dorrit," originally intended to be called "Nobody's Fault," ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... heavy snows of a recent winter, a child harper trudged wearily down the Fifth avenue, on his way to the Five Points, where he was to pass the night. It was intensely cold, and the little fellow's strength was so exhausted by fatigue and the bleak night wind that he staggered under the weight of his harp. At length he sat down on the steps of a splendid mansion to rest himself. The house was brilliantly lighted, and he looked around timidly as he seated himself, expecting the usual command to move off. No one noticed him, however, ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... for each and all of these, Have our frail spirits found their ease. The gale that stirs the autumnal trees Seems tuned as truly to our hearts As when, twelve weary months ago, 'Twas moaning bleak, so high and low, You would have thought Remorse and Woe Had taught the innocent air their ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... think. For the naked reality of a forest life came before him as never previously. The halo of distance had faded, as he stood beside the rude fireplace, fashioned of four upright limestone slabs in a corner, reaching to a hole in the roof, down which the wind was howling just now. It was rather a bleak look-out, notwithstanding the honeyed promises of the old ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... of civilization in the quaint old cities. It was none the less heart-sickening. He found traces of the war, that we had almost forgotten, fresh at every step; still it seemed as if the hand of Nature was much more bounteous than at the bleak North. Yet Bishop Heber's old missionary hymn rang continually through his mind. Even amid the Florida orange-groves, and the great cotton-fields, some cause brought about baleful results, ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... my companion, "that you did not make the acquaintance of our hills during the bleak winter, when their charms were hidden in the snow, and they had nothing better to offer their worshipper than rain and sleet and nipping winds. They would have ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... troops pelted each other with fragments of rock. At last, toward 5 P.M., the Greek 6th Division found the enemy in front of them retiring; they pushed onward fighting for every yard. The men were dead-weary; they had slept for days upon bleak and waterless mountain summits—frozen at night, they were grilled at noon, but they pushed ever onward. At last, when victory seemed within their grasp, when their foe was seen to run, a general ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... They should always keep their warm wool coats until the cold spring winds are over. Some farmers are very thoughtless about this, and their sheep and lambs suffer and die from cold. It would make your heart ache to see, as I have often seen, the little dead lambs in the bleak pastures." ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... room below it seemed almost luxurious. Two windows gave a clear view above the little oak copse, the lines of empty freight cars on the siding, and a mile of low meadow that lay between the cottage and the fringe of settlement along the lake. Through another window at the north the bleak prospect of Stoney Island Avenue could be seen, flanked on one side by a huge sign over a saloon. Near this window on a lounge ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... order to temper it, than that it approaches to favour it with its beams. Its kind, beneficent aspect fertilises all it shines upon. This change produces that of the seasons, whose variety is so agreeable. The spring silences bleak frosty winds, brings forth blossoms and flowers, and promises fruits. The summer yields rich harvests. The autumn bestows the fruits promised by the spring. The winter, which is a kind of night wherein man refreshes and rests himself, lays up all the treasures ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... yesterday had been turning at every moment to the Advocate for light and warmth as to the sun, now hastened to disavow all respect or regard for him. He scoffed at the slender sympathy van der Myle was finding in the bleak political atmosphere. He had done his best to find out what he had been negotiating with the members of the council and was glad to say that it was so inconsiderable as to be not worth reporting. He had not spoken with or seen the King. Jeannin, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... bit housie, too, in ruin! It's silly wa's the win's are strewin! An' naething, now, to big a new ane, O' foggage green! And bleak December's winds ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... objects. Outside, the same disorder was manifest in the great farm-wagon, left standing where it had last been used, and the neglected out-buildings fast going to decay. About the whole place there was an aspect of peculiar gloom, and the house itself stood on this bleak hill looking out over the lonesome landscape with a sort of tragic melancholy in its ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... delicious. The drive has been more prosaic, more commonplace, or approaching to it, than we have before traveled in this hill country. This October coloring would make far tamer scenery beautiful, but I can fancy it very bleak and dismal when 'blow, blow November's winds,' whereas here, at the Franconian Notch, you feel as it were housed and secured by nature's vast fortresses and defences. The 'Eagle's Cliff' is on one side of you, and Mount Cannon ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... said Karl, "I have seen used, but they only catch small trout, and now and then a bleak. I have seen Englishmen use them ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... There was evidently more than one way of looking at a question. The farm-houses seemed very low and mean to her, as she looked at them from the window. There were no fences, excepting now and then the inhospitable barbed wire. The door-yards were bleak to her eyes, without the ornamental shrubbery which every farmer in her part of the country was used to tending. The cattle stood unshedded in their corrals. The reapers and binders stood ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... moorland lay dark and mute. The mist was around them. They seemed to stand on an islet of the clouds. In front the day-break was bursting the confines of the bleak racks of cloud. Then the day came in its wondrous radiance, and flooded the world in ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... horse and saw on his shoulders, returning from work. As night draws on, you begin to see the gleaming of fires on the ceilings in the houses which you pass. The comfortless appearance of houses at bleak and bare spots,—you wonder how there can be any enjoyment in them. I meet a girl in a chintz gown, with a small shawl on her shoulders, white stockings, and summer morocco shoes,—it looks observable. Turkeys, queer, solemn objects, in ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... opposition. I arrived in this world on a chilly autumn day and was duly presented to my father's gaze. He was quite inexperienced about babies and it's recorded of him that he stared at me aghast and said: 'My gad, what a bleak-looking object!' That inspired some by-standing lunatic to observe that I doubtless took after the month, and my father promptly exclaimed: 'October! What a jolly fine name for her. We'll call her October!'" Miss Ocky sighed resignedly. "They let him get away ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... the foot of a bleak and inhospitable mountain An insignificant stream winds its uncared way; Although inferior to the Yangtze-kiang in every detail Yet fish glide to and fro among its crannies Nor would they change their home for the depths of the ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... by day we perfect ourselves in the art of seeing nature more favourably. We learn to live with her, as people learn to live with fretful or violent spouses: we dwell lovingly on what is good, and shut our eyes against all that is bleak or inharmonious. We learn, also, to come to each place in the right spirit. The traveller, as Brantome quaintly tells us, 'fait des discours en soi pour se soutenir ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... solid structure, and we fancy that the builders did not have far to bring the stone of which it is composed. The great granite cliffs which rise from the sea must be an inexhaustible quarry. The building is low and broad, to withstand the bleak winds. A less substantial structure, perched on this plateau, would be swept over the cliffs into the sea. There is something about it suggestive of the sturdy character of the Norman peasants themselves, ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... give us the date of his explorations in Peru, but he tells us that they occupied him two years, during which he "crossed and recrossed the Cordillera and the Andes from the Pacific to the Amazonian rivers, sleeping in rude Indian huts or on bleak punas in the open air, in hot valleys or among eternal snows, gathering with eager zeal all classes of facts relating to the country, its people, its present and its past." It must not be inferred from this description that he claims the honors of a pioneer or discoverer. Many previous ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... let me drink my fill of love to-night! Nay, sweet, not yet, not yet. How still it is, and yet methinks the air is full of music. It is some nightingale who, wearying of the south, has come to sing in this bleak north to lovers such as we. It is the nightingale. ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde
... southern skies, we have the wild winds rushing impetuously forth from their caves in the icy north, and the sun of the land of the Chepewyans, knowing his uselessness, and the inability of his beams to rend the fetters which ice has thrown around our bleak hills and verdureless plains, stays with us but for a little season, leaving us for many weary days to be lighted only by the glare of the moon and stars, on the field of ice and snow. Yet the Chepewyan is not without his pleasures, as those who live in the land of the sun have their ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... perhaps, that the author mispels the name of Varden in 'Barnaby Rudge,' and the name of Bucket in 'Bleak House.' Spelling is not of much consequence."—Mr. Arthur Machen in ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 9, 1919 • Various
... looks wintry and bleak enough,' the old man answered, with a grunt. 'I don't see ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... great earth-camp of Clovelly Dykes, or the smaller bold stronghold of Countisbury. At least, conjecturally this is so, and it is pleasant to believe it, for it links the Devon of our own day, the Devon of rich valleys and windy moors, the land of streams and orchards, of bleak, magnificent cliff and rock-guarded bay, of shaded combe and suave, fair villages, in an unbroken tradition of name and habitation with the men of that silent ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... Mrs. Richie said, "one." Her voice was bleak; the gayety had dropped out of it; for an instant she looked ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... almost gone out. She felt as she had felt only once before in her life, and that had been ten years previously, when her only child had died suddenly. She wished passionately that she were back in Calcutta with her husband. She hated the bleak English winter, the cruel ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... autumn, those gay northerners, the birds, return to their southern plantations. The mountains are left bleak and sere. Solitude settles down upon them in drizzling mists. The traveller is beset, at perilous turns, by dense masses of fog. He emerges for a moment into more penetrable air; and passing some gray, abandoned house, sees the lofty vapors plainly eddy by its desolate door; just as from the ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... approach to sea-side cliffs that we saw was at Whitby, on the Yorkshire coast, where the abbey of St. Hilda stood, after whom the American maiden in The Marble Faun was named. But the German Ocean was bleak and cold, and my experiences in it were even more harrowing than elsewhere; I can imagine nothing more dispiriting to a small boy than to be dragged down over a harsh beach in an old-fashioned British bathing-machine, its damp floor covered with gritty sand, with a tiny ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... Tom, well may the words of Dickens in Bleak House serve as a text for to-day: "There is not an atom of Tom's shrine, not a cubic inch of any pestilential gas in which he lives, nor an obscurity or degradation about him, nor an ignorance, nor a wickedness, nor a brutality of his committing, but shall work its retribution, through ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... a girl living in a bleak house on the edge of a wild, lonely moor," began Migwan. "All winter long the storms howl around the house like angry spirits of the air. To amuse themselves in these long winter evenings this girl and her sisters make up stories about ...
— The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin • Hildegard G. Frey
... which hurried men from habitations to which they were but little attached, to seek security and repose under any climate that, however in other respects undesirable, might afford them refuge from the fury of their enemies. Thus the bleak and barren regions of the North, not being peopled by choice, were peopled as early, in all probability, as many of the milder and more inviting climates of the Southern world; and thus, by a wonderful disposition of the Divine ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke |
