"Barren" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which come up from the washing; whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them. ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... matter, you have all been canny enough to have means enough to balance all that barren moorland. You are a richer man than ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hunting grounds they suffered the usual hardships of plains travel. The weather, as in most Texas winters, alternated between the extremes of heat and cold. There had been little rain; in consequence water was scarce. Twice they were forced to cross wild, barren wastes, where the pools had dried up, and they suffered terribly from thirst. On the first occasion the horses were in good condition, and they travelled steadily, with only occasional short halts, ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... once he raised his voice to such a pitch that we were able to hear what he said. "Come back, dear daughter, come back to shore; I forgive thee all; let those men have the money, for it is theirs now, and come back to comfort thy sorrowing father, who will yield up his life on this barren strand ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... secured by rigid protective laws. Lastly, the Post-Pliocene deposits have yielded the remains of the singular living animal which is known as the Musk-ox or Musk-sheep (Ovibos moschatus). At the present day, the Musk-ox is an inhabitant of the "barren grounds" of Arctic America, and it is remarkable for the great length of its hair. It is, like the Reindeer, a distinctively northern animal; but it enjoyed during the Glacial period a much wider ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... incident is that of Hobhouse recording in his journal the bare and barren fact that outside the city wall in Persia they once saw two dogs gnawing a human body. Byron saw the sight, but made no mention of it at the time. He waited, the scene sealed up in his brain-cells. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... Day there is something wonderful in the Narrowness of those Minds which can be pleased, and be barren of Bounty to those who please them, makes me in pain that I am not a Man of Power: If I were, you should soon see how much I approve your Speculations. In the mean time, I beg leave to supply that Inability with the empty Tribute of an honest Mind, by telling you plainly I love and thank you ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... island had been but a barren, uneven rock, the resting-place for gulls; but now its summit has been made flat by a coating of concrete. There is just enough earth between the concrete and the rocky edges of the island to support a circle of cocoanut trees, a great almond tree, and a queer-looking banian tree, ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... empire in every direction until, as the record says: "A small territory in the desert, under the government of a woman, extended its conquests over many rich countries and several states. Zenobia, lately confined to the barren plains about Palmyra, now held sway from Egypt in the south, to the Bosphorus and the Black Sea in ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... history had come to repeating itself. The boy studied Leloo as he lay quiet upon the edge of the blanket. He had heard of the great white wolves that inhabit the drear lone lands that lie beyond the arctic coast—larger even than the grey caribou wolves of the barren lands. He knew, now, that these ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... House," remarked Mr. Adams of Barren. "None of us is much on talk, but if we had you, I guess we could ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... memories that bless and burn! O barren gain and bitter loss! I kiss each bead, and strive at last to learn To kiss the cross ... to kiss ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... in the course of the geological transformations of our planet, were great artificial quarries of granite, and marble, and basalt. Wheat was almost as rare a product of the soil as cinnamon, yet the granaries of Christendom, and the Oriental magazines of spices and drugs, were found chiefly on that barren spot of earth. There was the great international mart where the Osterling, the Turk, the Hindoo, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean traders stored their wares and negotiated their exchanges; while the curious and highly-prized products of Netherland skill—broadcloths, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... result of fancy; of the mythological history of that god, famous throughout Egypt. They made him a personification of the inundations of the NILE; ISIS, his wife and sister, that of the irrigated portion of the land of Egypt; their sister, Nephthis, that of the barren edge of the desert occasionally fertilized by the waters of the Nile; his brother and murderer Tipho, that of the sea which ...
— Vestiges of the Mayas • Augustus Le Plongeon
... though the wind were blowing the dust off the silver clouds that floated overhead, the first snow was falling over the barren lands stretching between the Danube and the Black Sea. A lowland wind, which had already hardened and tightened the marshes, was blowing the snow skywards. The fine silvery dust, caught between the two air currents, danced lustily, blown hither and thither until it took hold of folds and rifts ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the mountains which extend to Ethiopia, one way, and the Mauritanian sea on the other side. To the east is Numidia, to the north the Mediterranean, to the west the river Malvarius, to the south Astryx, near the mountains which divide the fruitful country from the wild and barren sands which lie southwards towards the Mauritanian sea, by others called the Tingitanean. To the east is the river Malon[82], to the north the hills of Abbenas and Calpri. Another mountain also closes the end of the Mediterranean ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... finally, when all but one man slept. That one we were enable to tune sharply to. After that we could reach him at any time. He was the commander. We saw him operate the ship, we saw the ship, saw it glide over the barren, rocky surface of that world. We saw other men come in and go out. They were strange men. Short, squat, bulky men. Their arms were short and stocky. But their strength was enormous, unbelievable. We saw them bend solid bars ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... object to be attained in his judgment by such a move. There we lay entirely idle from the 9th to the 19th. We had at last reached the point when we had but three days' rations on hand. Something must be done. We were in a barren country, with a large force of the enemy in front of us, a large and now impassable river between us, and no news from our train or from our base of operations for twelve days. What were we to do? Colonel Weer called a council of war, at which he stated that the Arkansas ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... of other ways Phil daily taught his chum. Larry evinced considerable interest in the matter so long as his comrade was speaking; but that was about as far as it went. He did not have the spirit in him; and the seed fell on barren ground. Larry would never in all his life make a genuine woodsman. But if he kept on, he might in time get a job in a restaurant over the grill, so Phil assured him, as he complimented Larry on ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... legend says that an angel once rested by a fair fountain. In a favoured hour he infused it with a mysterious power, so that if only some drops of its water were scattered in a barren plain, a fountain of sweet water would spring up. Any traveller who henceforth came to the spring might, after refreshing himself, take some portion from it, and carry with him the secret of unfailing springs, and suffer ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard
... similar spit being on the other about a hundred and fifty yards away, while the whole wore the aspect of a volcanic crater, one side of which had been washed down by the sea, the black jagged rock and barren aspect being suggestive of this having been once ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... its southern slopes, wears a terribly forbidding aspect. There is nothing of the grandeur of snow, or glaciers, or deep forests, to excite curiosity or adventure; no trace of gardens or waterfalls. From base to summit all seems gray, barren, silent—dead, bleached bones of mountains, overgrown with scrubby bushes, like gray moss. But all mountains are full of hidden beauty, and the next day after my arrival at Pasadena I supplied myself with bread and eagerly set out to give myself to ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... necessaries for a far journey for his studies' sake? For many far abler citizens did no such thing for their children. But yet this same father had no concern how I grew towards Thee, or how chaste I were; so that I were but copious in speech, however barren I were to Thy culture, O God, who art the only true and good Lord of ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... omelette, oysters, turtle eggs and sundry fruits and confections with the zest created by seven hours of active exercise in the open air. Then came the reaction, inclining every one more to repose than research, and the hours would probably have been dreamed away barren of adventures, had it not been for our indomitable professor. We had missed him but a moment, when suddenly he reappeared, holding at arm's length what seemed in the distance about a dozen brown, scaly snakes a yard long, all strung together. Simultaneously ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... sweetest draught that had ever passed his lips. Slaking his thirst, which had begun again to be painfully severe, he arose with a heart overflowing with gratitude—could he only get Rose to that narrow and barren rock, it would seem to be an earthly paradise. Mulford next made his scanty, but, all things considered, sufficient meal, drank moderately afterward, and then turned his attention and energies toward the boat, which, though now aground and fast, might soon float on ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... the South Seas. The continent of New Guinea appeared a high country, extremely full of trees and plants of a vast variety of kinds, so that, in sailing 400 leagues along its coast, they did not observe one barren spot. Our author thinks that it probably contains many precious commodities, as rich metals and valuable spices, especially as most of the countries hitherto discovered under the same parallel are not deficient in such riches. He was afterwards assured, that ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... unintelligible to her, and her's to them, and it is hard work trying to make objects for oneself in quite a new place, and with a pre-occupying sorrow in the mind all the time. It was not only hard work to Helen, but it seemed labour in vain— bringing soil by handfulls to a barren rock, where, after all, no plant will take root. Miss Clarendon thought that labour could never be ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... Ireland was not exceptional in that way. Where she was exceptional, bless her sweet heart, lay, as we shall see, in the fact that while all the rest were sunk in ignorance and foulest barbarism, and mentall utterly barren,—she alone had the grace to combine her Kilkenny Cattery with an exquisite and wonderful illumination of culture. While she tore herself to pieces with one hand, with the other she was holding up the torch of learning,—and a very real learning too, —to benighted Europe; and then (bedad!) she ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... them; except after the manner of a strict point of law, the severall witnesses are brought and examined face to face, and that all matters be nicely and thorowly sifted by the objects and trials of the successe of every accident. Verily the knowledge we have of our owne affaires is much more barren and feeble. But this hath sufficiently been handled by Bodin, and agreeing with my conception. Somewhat to aid the weaknesse of my memorie and to assist her great defects; for it hath often been my chance to ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... promising business? Original genius disdains the unmeaning drudgery. A mind that has one feature resembling the ancients, will scarcely stoop to be their translator. The persons then, to whom the performance must be committed, are persons of cool elegance. Endowed with a little barren taste, they must be inanimate enough to tread with laborious imbecility in the footsteps of another. They must be eternally incapable of imbibing the spirit, and glowing with the fire of their original. But we ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... and we stood out now on the barren, stony patch close to the fir-trees, with the sun casting our shadows in a curious dumpy way on the earth, and our ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... solitary sports are seen, Indignant spurns the cottage from the green; Around the world each needful product flies, For all the luxuries the world supplies: While thus the land adorn'd for pleasure—all In barren splendor feebly waits ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... hesitated to open the desk of her brother. The correspondence which she read in that way was of a nature which exasperated her desire for vengeance almost to frenzy. For not only did she acquire the evidence of a happiness shared by them which humiliated in her the woman barren in all senses of the word, a stranger to voluptuousness as well as to maternity, but she gathered from it numerous proofs that the Countess cherished, with regard to her, a scorn of race as absolute ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Lacy surprised.... Attempt on Lafayette at Barren hill.... General Howe resigns the command of the British army.... Is succeeded by Sir H. Clinton.... He evacuates Philadelphia, and marches through the Jerseys.... A council of war which decides against attacking the British on their march.... Battle of Monmouth.... General ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
... immense. Below, in the barren fields that surrounded the citadel, eight persons were waiting, silent, ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... over farce, first of all, then the comedy-of-intrigue, and finally the comedy-of-manners; he tried his hand at the historical play; and he was the chief librettist of the leading French composers of opera, both grand and comic. He might lack style; he might be barren of poetry; he might be void of philosophy; his psychology might be pitifully inadequate; his outlook on life might be petty;—but he was pastmaster of the theater, and from him were hidden none of the ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... Bennie had never known such grueling work and heartbreaking fatigue; and the clouds of flies pursued them venomously and with unrelenting persistence. At first they had to cut their way through acres of brush, and then the land rose and they saw before them miles of swamp and barren land dotted with dwarf trees and lichen-grown rocks. Here it was easier and they made better time; but the professor's legs ached and his rifle wore a red bruise on his shoulder. And then after five ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... will put me back. To be sure," added he, with a deprecating glance, "it is not much to be first among so few. But as Janet used to say, Pride is an ill weed and grows easily—flourishes even on a barren soil; and in the pleasure and excitement of study, it is not difficult to forget that it is only ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... ravines were darkened with hot shadows, but the bald slopes presented areas, shining with infinitesimal particles of quartz and mica, to a savage sun and an almost unendurable sky. From somewhere to the barren north the wind came like a breath of flame, ash-laden and drying. There was nothing of the cool, damp river breeze in this. They were in the hideous heart of the desert to whom death was monotony, resisting foreign life, ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... call such delightful places desert islands!" repeated Johnny. "I always thought a desert was a barren wilderness, where there was nothing to be seen but sand, and rocks, ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... that any tongue (not excepting our old barbarous Saxon, which, a bit of an antiquary as I am, I abhor,) is more harmonious than French. It was curious absurdity, therefore, to pitch on the most unpoetic language in Europe, the most barren, and the most clogged with difficulties. I have heard Russian and Polish sung, and both sounded musical; but, to abandon one's own tongue, and not adopt Italian, that is even sweeter, and softer, and more copious, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... barren, lies on a high tableland in the heart of Asia. The average height of this desolate tableland—some 15,000 feet above sea-level—is higher than the highest mountains of Europe. People are right when they call it the "roof of the world." Nothing, ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... were not always unaccompanied,—he took pleasure in excursions less solitary. Often, when the sea lay before them like a lake, the barren dreariness of the opposite coast of Cephallenia contrasting the smiling shores on which they dwelt, Viola and himself would pass days in cruising slowly around the coast, or in visits to the neighbouring isles. Every spot of the ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... slipt from her like a robe, And left her woman, lovelier in her mood Than in her mould that other, when she came From barren deeps ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... GEORGE SMITH (of Coalville), and others—are actually to be found contending for the barren honour of having invented that terrible nuisance of a catch-phrase, "Three Acres and a Cow!" Strange and morbid perversion of ambition! As well fight for the deep discredit of having been the first to hit upon such kindred controversial horrors as the boring ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 3, 1887 • Various
... back on a tributary. River flooded. A new range. Rudall's Creek. Reach the range. Grass-trees. Wild beauty of scene. Scarcity of water. A pea-like vetch. Name the range. A barren spot. Water seen from it. Follow a creek channel. Other creeks join it. A confined glen. Scrubby and stony hills. Strike a gum creek. Slimy water. A pretty tree. Flies troublesome. Emus. An orange tree. Tropic of Capricorn. Melodious sounds. Carmichael's Creek. Mountains to the north. Ponds of ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... preceded by my guide, who urged his horse with the remorseless rapidity of one who seeks by the speed of his progress to escape observation. Over roads and through bogs we splashed and clattered, until at length traversing the brow of a wild and rocky hill, whose aspect seemed so barren and forbidding that it might have been a lasting barrier alike to mortal sight and step, the lonely building became visible, lying in a kind of swampy flat, with a broad reedy pond or lake stretching ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... Eddystone at a short distance from us. Two attempts were ineffectually made to gain soundings, and the extreme density of the fog precluded us from any other means of ascertaining the direction in which we were driving until half past twelve, when we had the alarming view of a barren rugged shore within a few yards, towering over the mast heads. Almost instantly afterwards the ship struck violently on a point of rocks, projecting from the island; and the ship's side was brought so ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... detach a page of these and ask, "Is it poetry? have the 'hog-hook,' the 'killing-hammer,' 'the cutter's cleaver,' 'the packer's maul,' met with a change of heart, and been converted into celestial cutlery?" I answer, No, they are as barren of poetry as a desert is of grass; but in their place in the poem, and in the collection, they serve as masses of shade or neutral color in pictures, or in nature, or in character,—a negative service, but still indispensable. The point, the moral of the poem, is really backed up and driven ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... its form, An' wild winds rush madly raand, But it whistles to the storm, In the barren home it's faand; Natur fits it to be poor, An 'twor vain ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... artificially disposed to exclude the scorching rays and to admit the genial warmth of the sun. These delights were enhanced by the memory of past hardships; the comparison of their native soil, the bleak and barren hills of Scythia, and the frozen banks of the Elbe and Danube added new charms to the felicity of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... barren, sterile place I plucked, and read the lesson they conveyed, That in our lives, albeit dark with shade And rough and hard with labor, yet may grow The flowers ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... smiling valleys and noble forests. 4. As you advance onward and upward, you will get among bolder and more rugged scenes. The sides of the mountains are very steep, sometimes well wooded to quite a height, but sometimes quite barren. 5. In crossing a river you must be content with three ropes for a bridge. You will find the streets of the towns to ...
— McGuffey's Third Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... century, many of the Waldenses of Pragela and Dauphiny, emigrated to Calabria, and settling some waste lands, by the permission of the nobles of that country, they soon, by the most industrious cultivation, made several wild and barren spots appear with all the ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... because it is not given To taste on Earth the peace of Heaven. 'Twas not that in the narrow sphere Where Nature fixed my wayward fate There was no friend or kindred dear 45 Formed to become that spirit's mate, Which, searching on tired pinion, found Barren and cold repulse around; Oh, no! yet each one sorrow gave New graces to the narrow grave. 50 For broken vows had early quelled The stainless spirit's vestal flame; Yes! whilst the faithful bosom swelled, Then the envenomed arrow came, And Apathy's unaltering eye 55 Beamed coldness ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Burton thought with a sudden thrill that the girl with the sweet eyes yesterday had worn a bit of box in her dress. Here and there, under the straying boughs of the shrubbery, bloomed a late scarlet poppy from some scattered seed of which such old soil might well be full. It was a barren, neglected garden enough, but still full of charm and delight, being a garden. There was a fine fragrance of grapes through the undergrowth, but the whole place was completely ruined; a little snake slid from the ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... hears, at my Lord Chancellor's, where they have cut down the trees before his house and broke his windows; and a gibbet either set up before or painted upon his gate, and these three words writ: "Three sights to be seen; Dunkirke, Tangier, and a barren Queene." ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... barren moor for miles around. The water still falls into the 'cup of stone,' which appeared to be of very long standing. Within ten yards of the well is a small tree, at the same side of the road as the well, on the right hand ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... remarked in a happy epigram, had been "a line surrounding the shadow of a man, cast by the sun on the wall." He traced the history of painting in Italy during its stagnation after the decay of ancient art, when each painter copied only his predecessor, which lasted until Giotto, born among barren mountains, drew the movements of the goats he tended, and thus advanced farther than all the earlier masters. But his successors only copied him, and painting sank again until Masaccio once more ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... beloved! The conviction that it is to ensure the peace of my now only friend on earth, my faithful Pembroke, that I resign the hope of ever beholding thee again in this life, will bring me one comfort, at least, in my barren exile!" ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... went on, "what has my life been up to the present moment? A cold, barren, sterile arena, in which I have always fought for others, never for myself. Sometimes for a king, sometimes for a woman. The king has betrayed me, the woman disdained me. Miserable, unhappy wretch that I am! Women! Can ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... resemblance in colour, it is possible the two kinds would never have been brought into comparison. It is easy, however, to prove them also distinct species—by simply observing that their habits are altogether unlike. The ursus arctos is a tree-climbing wood bear: the Barren Ground species is not. The former prefers a vegetable diet—the latter likes better fish, flesh, and insects—though he will also fill his stomach with a farrago of ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... dirty eaves hanging from its more aspiring neighbour on the right, supports itself against the cabin on the left, about three feet above the ground. Can that be the habitation of any of the human race? Few but such as those whose lot has fallen on such barren places would venture in; but for a moment let us ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... of beasts, to be sure, but Earth alone has an intelligent, thinking, reasoning population, and your scientists and novelists would do better trying to comprehend their own planet than in groping through space to unravel the mysteries of barren and unimportant worlds." ...
— The Master Key - An Electrical Fairy Tale • L. Frank Baum
... think, have been his best. What he says about Sterne is true. His observations on literary men, and their social obligations and individual duties, seem to me also true and full of mental and moral vigour. . . . The International Copyright Meeting seems to have had but a barren result, judging from the report in the Literary Gazette. I cannot see that Sir E. Bulwer and the rest DID anything; nor can I well see what it is in their power to do. The argument brought forward about the damage accruing to American national literature ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... necessary knowledge to say whether he has made out his case or not for art and for literature. There was certainly a great awakening and, inspired by high ideals, men turned with a true instinct to the belief that there was more in life than could be got out of barren scholastic studies. With many of the strong men of the period one feels the keenest mental sympathy. Grosseteste, the great Clerk of Lincoln, as a scholar, a teacher and a reformer, represents a type of mind that ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... his way across a vast desert moorland, and came, after three days, into the barren hill country and among the rugged mountains of the South. There an earthquake had split the rocks asunder, and opened dark and bottomless gorges, and hollowed out many a low-walled cavern, where the light ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... mills of barren blear-eyed learning Where in dust and darkness children's foreheads bow, While men's labour, vain as wind or water turning Wheels and sails of dreams, makes life a leafless bough, Fell the light of scorn and pity touched with yearning, Next, from words that shone as ...
— Studies in Song, A Century of Roundels, Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets, The Heptalogia, Etc - From Swinburne's Poems Volume V. • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Conniston's face in the gray gloom of the day about him. He passed through the slim finger of scrub timber that a strange freak of nature had flung across the plain, and once more was a moving speck in a wide and wind-swept barren. In the afternoon he made out a dark rim on the southern horizon and knew it was timber, real timber, the first he had seen since that day, a year and a half ago, when the last of the Mackenzie River forest had faded away behind him! It gave him, at last, something tangible ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... country from the terrible calamities which the sin of slavery was bringing upon us." But there is no evidence that this appeal produced the feeblest ripple in the lives of the two first; and upon the two last it was equally barren of result. Dr. Channing, indeed, did not take the trouble to hear any one of the three lectures of the young philanthropist. Dr. Beecher, however, was at the pains to be present at the first lecture given at Julien Hall. But he betrayed no real interest in the subject. He ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... the waste places of these peaks and gorges, and amid this race of stern and rugged peasants. Here were women who, without knowing it even, lived the contemplative life in union with God, while they dug the barren slopes of a little plot at some prodigious elevation. They were Leah and Rachel, Martha and Mary in one; and these women believed guilelessly, entirely, as man believed in the middle ages. These beings, with their rough-hewn feelings, ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... domain of four acres or thereabout, by the measurement of after years, bordered to the north by a fathomless chasm,—the ditch the base-ball players of the present era jump over; on the east by unexplored territory; on the south by a barren enclosure, where the red sorrel proclaimed liberty and equality under its drapeau rouge, and succeeded in establishing a vegetable commune where all were alike, poor, mean, sour, and uninteresting; and on the west by the Common, not then disgraced by jealous ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... congregated here, because the country, from want of rain, may be considered as barren. But within eight or nine degrees of latitude from the Cape, we find the largest and most minute of creation. We have the ostrich and the little creeper among the birds. Among the beasts we have the elephant, weighing four thousand pounds, and ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Jersey cow who has just had twin calves, a heifer and a bull. The heifer was born about five minutes before the bull and seems to be the stronger. My neighbors tell me to fatten both for the butcher, for they say the heifer will be barren. The mother is a young cow, as this is her second calf. Kindly inform if this is one of nature's laws or if there is a possibility of the heifer turning out ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... enter into their method of life and conform to their rules, and this proves a happiness to both nations; for, according to their constitution, such care is taken of the soil that it becomes fruitful enough for both, though it might be otherwise too narrow and barren for any one of them. But if the natives refuse to conform themselves to their laws they drive them out of those bounds which they mark out for themselves, and use force if they resist, for they account it a very just cause of war for a nation to hinder others from possessing ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... ugly and as silent as the grave, save for the winds that moan through her portholes and corridors, she lies rusting in sun and storm, a gloomy presence that fills the soul with awe. Even the birds of the air shun her barren decks; less fastidious bats have taken up their abode in the heart of her, and spiders great and small are at work on ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... distance of two and a half miles across the valley is an abrupt rocky mountain range of most irregular and picturesque formation, covered with scanty brushwood here and there, or rising into barren pinnacles and plateaux of rock. In outline and appearance this portion of the landscape was wonderfully like the Trosachs. A patch of blue sea was caught in between the overhanging cliffs of Balaklava as they closed in the entrance to the harbor on the right. The camp of the marines, pitched ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... of our cruising proved utterly barren of results, but the time was by no means wasted, for, having sedulously exercised the crew in the working of the guns and in cutlass drill every day during our passage across from Port Royal, I now rigged up a floating target and gave them a little firing practice, taking care ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... very high and rugged, which is fortified naturally by the crags that girdle it. Its ascent is steep and intricate. The Indians retire there as to a sacred place. It cannot be taken except by hunger or thirst, and the crag or island is dry and barren, so that not a drop of water can be found on it. Numerous birds resort thither, and there are also a great number of beehives [53] amid the hollows of the rocks, and a quantity of honey is produced, as well as wax, without its costing any care or labor. The Indians gather that ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various
... Leamington, presents nothing to their study but gravel, and gas-lamp posts; the modern addition of a vermilion letter-pillar contributing indeed to the splendour, but scarcely to the interest of the scene; and a child of any sense or fancy would hastily contrive escape from such a barren desert of politeness, and betake itself to investigation, such as might be feasible, of the natural history of ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... these words Napoleon pithily summed up his enterprise; and whatever may be thought of the means which he adopted, the design is not without grandeur. Granted that Britannia ruled the waves, yet he ruled the land; and the land, as the active fruitful element, must overpower the barren sea. Such was the notion: it was fallacious, as will appear later on; but it appealed strongly to the French imagination as providing an infallible means of humbling the traditional foe. Furthermore, it placed in Napoleon's hands a potent engine of ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... producing it fresh in zero weather, then there is no good reason why they should not be gratified. Its feasibility is already established on a small scale, and there seems to be no discernible limit to the demand for a first-class article during the six months when the pastures are barren. The farmer who has the capital can readily provide a barn that will make his cows nearly as comfortable and healthy in winter as in summer, and shelter all the food they need to keep up a constant flow of rich milk. We have not attained, perhaps, all the ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... stones and lava covered the mountain slopes, which had been cultivated for many centuries. These were the most recent strong displays of volcanic energy in Central America, though former great outflows of lava are indicated by great fields of barren rock, which extend ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... shall finish our work in a much shorter period than was anticipated; very likely in ten or twelve months. The country up here is beautiful; everything green and pleasant; and if you saw it now, you would not believe that in two months' time it could have such a parched and barren appearance as it will then assume. I hope to be able, either from the Darling or from Cooper's Creek, to send you some details of our proceedings. Please to ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... Proceeding with their investigations, they found that, while a large part of the island was covered with rich soil, bearing fruit-trees and shrubs in abundance, the remainder of it was mountainous, rugged, and barren. They also ascertained that, although the place had been inhabited in times long past, there seemed to be no inhabitants at that time to dispute their taking possession. Satisfied with the result of their investigations, they descended ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... Tom were routed out, and all saw the rugged outline of the great island—a continent itself, as large as the United States and much the same shape—stretching away to the southward and slowly dwindling into low, sandy, barren shores as ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... less intolerable than servitude under the victors. He defeated them in a decisive action, which they fought under Galgacus; and having fixed a chain of garrisons between the friths of Clyde and Forth, he cut off the ruder and more barren parts of the island, and secured the Roman province from the incursions of the barbarous inhabitants. During these military enterprises he neglected not the arts of peace. He introduced laws and civility among the Britons; taught them to desire and raise all the conveniences of life; reconciled ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... unnatural hope, I think, of organizing at one time or another all these disappointed and faithful swains into a celibate brotherhood; and perhaps of driving by the interesting monastery with her husband and calling his attention modestly to the fact that these poor monks were filling their barren lives with deeds of piety, trying to remember their Creator with such assiduity that they might, ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... us, nor yet our affection for our child: with these joys 'a stranger intermeddleth not.' And as religious teaching without love, and conducted under the exclusive influence of fear, may and must be barren—nay, worse than barren—we ask you to leave this part of our duty as a parent entirely to ourselves. Our duty it is, and to you we delegate no part of it; and this, not because we deem it unimportant, but because we deem it important in the highest degree, ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... persuading the laborers to leave. Indeed, many of the fugitives themselves looked upon me with jealousy, and expressed their indignation at my efforts to have them removed from peace and plenty to a land that was cold and barren, to ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... treaty-port in the province of Fuh-kien, China, situated on the slope of a hill, on the south coast of a small and barren island named Hiamen, in 24 deg. 28' N. and 118 deg. 10' E. It is a large and exceedingly dirty place, about 9 m. in circumference, and is divided into two portions, an inner and an outer town, which are separated from each other by a ridge ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... a temporal mercy when he prayed for rain, and it is clear that God answered him. Elisha works a miracle to produce a temporal mercy when he healed the barren ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... resorted to various elaborate round about methods that did credit to the ingenuity of his mind. But he made at every cunning cast a barren water-haul. Either she was not thinking of him at all or what she thought swam too deep for any casts he knew how to make in those hidden and unfamiliar waters. Or, perhaps she did not herself know what she thought, being too busy with the baby and the household to have time ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... agreeable spectacle, so on the other hand it is not less true that its immediate tendency is, to clip the wings of the thinking principle within us, and plunge the members of the community in which we live into a barren and ungratifying mediocrity. Hence it should be the aim of those persons, who from their situation have more or less the means of looking through the vast assemblage of their countrymen, of penetrating "into the seeds" of character, and determining "which ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... was accustomed to walking, made the journey afoot, which enabled him to see with his own eyes the misery that was then prevailing in the provinces as well as in Paris. It was horrible. On every side he saw only barren and devastated fields, and ragged, starving villagers, trembling with fear. The revolution which had promised these poor wretches deliverance and comfort, had as ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... The ground beneath was burned and scarred, the battle cloud rolled dark, the minies sang beside his ear. Now he was in a barren place, tasting of powder, smelling of smoke, now lit, now darkened, but vacant of human life, and now he was in a press of men, grey forms advancing and retreating, or standing firing, and now he was where fighting had been and there was left a wrack ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... sent to jail; lying on rotten straw in mud cabins, with scarcely any covering; feeding on unripe potatoes and yellow weed, and feigning sickness, in order to get into hospitals. He continued:—"This is the condition of a country blest by nature with fertility, but barren from the want of cultivation, and whose inhabitants stalk through the land enduring the extremity of misery and want. Did we govern ourselves? Who did this? You, Englishmen!—I say, you did it? It is ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... that room like a man condemned to die. Fort Ungava in Labrador,—a thousand miles away, over a barren, savage country, and in winter too; for it would be winter there immediately! It was an exile to Siberia, and far worse than Siberia; for there are many there to share the fellowship of misery, and I was likely to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... these ostents, as their old custom was, They call th' Etrurian augurs: amongst whom The gravest, Arruns, dwelt in forsaken Leuca[640] Well-skill'd in pyromancy; one that knew The hearts of beasts, and flight of wandering fowls. First he commands such monsters Nature hatch'd Against her kind, the barren mule's loath'd issue, To be cut forth[641] and cast in dismal fires; 590 Then, that the trembling citizens should walk About the city; then, the sacred priests That with divine lustration purg'd the walls, And went the round, in and without the town; Next, an inferior troop, ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... Central North-America is to an extraordinary degree worked out everywhere in careful detail, in moderate hill and valley, in undulating prairie and fertile plain,—not tossed into barren mountain-masses and table-lands, like that vast desert plateau which stretches through Central Asia,—not struck out in blank, like the Russian steppes and the South American llanos, as if Nature had wanted leisure to elaborate and finish. Indeed, these primary conditions of fertility and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... change? Ah, barren quest, Foredoomed to fail ere half begun! Though left behind, my England pressed In hot pursuit of me, her son; London was brought again to view By hordes of maidens out for pillage, When from the train I stepped into A flag day in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 22, 1920 • Various
... to the sailors of the fane was the wild and barren Bennet Islet. Less than one degree south of it lay Tsalal Island, then fertile, habitable and inhabited, and on which Captain Len Guy had hoped to meet his fellow-countrymen. But what would this unknown island, five degrees ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... trenches extending to the boundary of Switzerland rested its right flank on the sea. The whole coast north of that was lined with German batteries, snugly concealed in the rolling sand dunes and masked by the waving grasses of a barren coast. From British ships thirty miles out at sea, for the waters there are shallow and large vessels can only at great peril approach the shore, the seaplanes were launched. Just south of Nieuport a land base ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... that faith, and hope, and piety, by which our fathers were supported in dreary and barren enterprises, and which drew their life and fragrance from heaven more ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... that I am contemplating another visit to the South Sea Islands, where I wish to make some further investigations. I dare say, however, that these will be barren of results, as the fountain of Life-water is buried for ever, nor, as I think, will any human being stand again in the Hades-like halls of Nyo. It is probable also that it would prove impossible to rediscover the island of Orofena, if indeed that volcanic land still remains above the waters ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... enmity of the Magyar is disconcerting. By crossing the Danube, Serbia has become genuinely part of Europe; she has turned her back on the Balkans and the eternal strife on barren empty hills. The new Serbia can afford to forget and forgive Bulgaria, now a remote sort of country. She can retort to Greece concerning Salonica—We have no need of that port now, for we no longer aspire to be a power on the Aegean, ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... defence, 'Gainst such dull rogues as now and then write sense. Thy style's the same, whatever be thy theme, As some digestion turns all meat to phlegm. He lyes, dear Ned, who says, thy brain it barren, Where deep conceits, like vermin breed in carrion. Thy stumbling founder'd jade can trot as high As any other Pegasus can fly. So the dull Eel moves nimbler in the mud, Than all the swift-finn'd racers of the flood. As skilful divers to the bottom ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... asked, are the motives of Christianity so little necessary to the practice of it, its principles to its conclusions, that the one may be spared and yet the other remain in undiminished force? Still then, its Doctrines are no more than a barren and inapplicable or at least an unnecessary theory, the place of which, it may perhaps be added, would be well supplied by a more simple ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... not unused to the meagreness, crudity, and hardness of such a place; but there I had come to take the warm welcome of his hands and look once more into his face before time should part us. He flung his arms about me, with a look of the South in his eyes, full of happy dancing lights, and the barren scene was like Italy made real for one instant of ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... and golden globe, Feathered carrot, burrowing deep, Steadfast wait in charmed sleep; Treasure-houses wherein lie, Locked by angels' alchemy, Milk and hair, and blood, and bone, Children of the barren stone; Children of the flaming Air, With his blue eye keen and bare, Spirit-peopled smiling down On frozen field and toiling town— Toiling town that will not heed God His voice for rage and greed; Frozen fields that surpliced lie, Gazing patient at the sky; Like some marble carven nun, With ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... inhabiting the water lie under a disadvantage in having to come continually to the surface to breathe. With fishes, members of the shark family would not tend to supplant the lancelet; for the lancelet, as I hear from Fritz Mueller, has as sole companion and competitor on the barren sandy shore of South Brazil an anomalous annelid. The three lowest orders of mammals, namely, marsupials, edentata, and rodents, coexist in South America in the same region with numerous monkeys, and probably interfere little with ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... to them that ask Him." It is because of our lack of any living or effectual belief in the Holy Spirit, and because of our consequent failure to seek His inspiration and to submit ourselves to His influence, that the Christianity of men to-day is often so barren and so poor a thing; and the corporate life of Christendom languishes for the same reason. The Church is meant to be a fellowship, a brotherhood: the most real and living brotherhood on earth. Men find ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... conceit with gathering sadness, had its revenge! The Day entered into league with his sins, and that Face which the Night had vouchsafed him to see he had been forced to surrender to the royal power of the Day, and behold it shining lonesomely afar, in barren magnificence. "How have I endured it?" she moans, "How do I still endure it?" Nay, he comforts her, "We are now become the initiate of the Night. The malevolent Day, the cruel, can divide, but no longer deceive ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... at home and been content to till the barren soil of his father's rocky farm, not his handsome face, or polished manners, or adoration of herself as the queen of queens, could have won a second thought from Geraldine, for she hated farmers, who smelled of the barn and wore cowhide boots, and would sooner have died than ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... that, on the memorable morning when Aladdin's Palace was set down in Africa after its magic night's ride from the Chinese capital, a housemaid must have gone to the window, thrown back the hangings and looked out, astounded, on the barren mountains, when she expected to see only the courtyard of the palace and its swarm of Chinese life. She then recalled that the building rocked gently in the night, and that she heard a whirling sound as of wind. ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... Alarcos is my husband, Or shall the sceptre from our line depart. Listen, ye saints of Spain, I'll have his hand, Or by our faith, my fated womb shall be As barren as thy ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... in a dry and barren spot, and happen to strike a vein of living water, it bubbles up, overflows, and moistens the surrounding earth, clothing it with beautiful verdure and smiling flowers. So it is in the resurrection. The life which had ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... their excursion in the dark, wainscotted, low- ceilinged coffee-room of an old-fashioned inn, once the mother of many coaches, and now barren and deserted, but with a strange cunning in the matter of buttered toast which had come down from more prosperous days. It was a new waiter who served them, and he imagined them to be lovers and scented ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... love, and are justly proud of; a region famous for the production of shrewd, intelligent, brave, active, honest, enterprising men:—but it covers no very large space on the map; the soil is in general barren, the country poor accordingly, and of necessity thinly inhabited. There are in England single Towns, even of a third or fourth rate importance, that contain a larger population than is included within ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... with my brethren in our prison-chamber, they expected that, according to our custom, something should be spoken out of the Word for our mutual edification. I felt myself, it being my turn to speak, so empty, spiritless, and barren, that I thought I should not have been able to speak among them so much as five words of truth with life and evidence. At last I cast mine eye upon this prophecy, when, after considering awhile, methought I perceived something of that ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... wore on, the demoralizing influence of the inaction in the camps of the South increasing toward its close. The affair at Leesburg, occurring on the 20th of October, was another brilliant success, but equally barren of results. It showed that the men would still fight as readily and as fiercely, and that their officers would lead them as gallantly, as before; it put a few hundred of the enemy hors de combat and maintained "the right of way" by the river to the South. But it was the ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... giant-seeming, yet less so than the human personality of which they remain the symbol. Twenty-four hundred years ago, out of solitary meditation upon the pain and the mystery of being, the mind of an Indian pilgrim brought forth the highest truth ever taught to men, and in an era barren of science anticipated the uttermost knowledge of our present evolutional philosophy regarding the secret unity of life, the endless illusions of matter and of mind, and the birth and death of universes. ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... caprice suggested. His natural parts were excessively lively, but his education had been wholly neglected, and he never attempted to repair in after-life the deficiencies occasioned by that early neglect. He had therefore not the slightest tincture of letters, his mind was barren of information, and he not only took no interest in intellectual pursuits, but he regarded with aversion, and something like contempt, those who were peculiarly devoted to them. On the other hand, he was an acute man of the world, eagerly entering into all the interests, great and small, of his ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... to be an Eclogue, so pastoral a life have we been leading lately among these pleasant Nordland valleys. Perhaps it is only the unusual sight of meadows, trees and flowers, after the barren sea, and still more barren lands we have been accustomed to, that invests this neighbourhood with such a smiling character. Be that as it may, the change has been too grateful not to have made us seriously reflect on our condition; and we have ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... little danger of sinking into barren formulae, into glib aesthetic prattle about Renascence, in a movement of which one expression is the purification of those plaguy, if picturesque, Closes, which are the foul blot upon the beautiful Athens of the North. Those sunless courts, entered by needles' eyes of ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... lesson you have learned. Remember the kindness of your old master. Remember the love of your old sweetheart. Your life is barren and bitter, but there is yet time for repentance. (Bell tolls twice.) The signal! My hour is past. On the stroke of six my brother, the Spirit of the Christmas Present, will visit you. Remember! Repent! Believe! ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... President of the Royal Society, that he 'clasped his hands together, and remained for some time in an attitude of silent admiration.' Burns himself, as Prof. Veitch has rightly indicated, has little of the later feeling and regards barren nature with the unfavourable eyes of the farmer and the practical agriculturist, nor has the travelled Goldsmith more to shew. Writing from Edinburgh, he laments that 'no grove or brook lend their music to cheer the stranger,' while at Leyden, 'wherever I turned my eye, ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... scorn, to righteous indignation, to sympathy with humanity. I find in him the highest art, and not that indifference to the great facts and deep currents and destinies of human life, that want of enthusiasm and sympathy, which has got the name of "art for art's sake." Literary fiction is a barren product if it wants sympathy and love for men. "Art for art's sake" is a good and defensible phrase, if our definition of art includes ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... hut on the barren seacoast Riger had pushed inland, where ere long he came to cultivated fields and a thrifty farmhouse. Entering this comfortable dwelling, he found Afi (grandfather) and Amma (grandmother), who hospitably invited him to sit down with them and share the plain but bountiful ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... with huge, irregular fragments of coral rock, and seamed with gullies. The line of the forest here receded some distance from the shore, leaving a broad rounded point, embracing a large area of low and barren ground, covered thinly with a growth of stunted shrubs, and a few straggling, solitary looking trees. The lagoon was at this point quite shallow, and low rocks and coral patches appeared above the surface, at short distances ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... book to go forth to the world with the knowledge that the publication of the companion volume is—through force of circumstances—for the present postponed, without at least a passing reference to what in the authoritative biography of Mr. Gladstone is called the "barren controversy" which arose in 1892, as to whether the present Duke of Devonshire, in 1880, tried to form a Government. That controversy was assuredly "barren" to my brother in everything but the testimony of a good conscience. He was assailed by almost the whole Press of the country ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... coast, where the ships could anchor and be sheltered from the north wind. But the soldiers began to grumble and be discontented, and to say that it was time to return with their spoil, and not linger upon those barren shores until they had brought the whole Mexican nation about their ears. Fortunately at this juncture five Indians made their appearance in the camp, and were taken to the general's tent. They were quite different from ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... insignificant. The contemptuous eye of the world scarcely deigned to notice it. Yet the famous vessel that bore Caesar and his fortunes, carried but an ignoble freight compared with that of the Mayflower. Though landed by a treacherous pilot upon a barren and inhospitable coast, they sought neither richer fields nor a more congenial climate, but liberty ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... the captain's sister, and little Mrs. Bridger. The first named had been intently watching the officers as, after the dismissal of their companies at the barracks, they severally joined the post commander, who had been standing on the barren level of the parade, well out toward the flagstaff, his adjutant beside him. To her the abrupt announcement caused no surprise. She had seen that Mr. Blakely was not with his troop. The jeweled hands slightly twitched, ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... of a few main thoroughfares, and strangers seldom visit more than one or two of the principal towns on the coast. Bari and Brindisi are known to tourists, as they are in the line of travel to and from Greece, but the inland towns are isolated in a barren priest-ridden country in which strangers are not welcome. The hardships which it is necessary to face deter all but the most adventurous even of the Italians, familiar with the language and manners ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 04, April 1895 - Byzantine-Romanesque Windows in Southern Italy • Various
... retirement to France, where he later rendered more brilliant and far more effective service. On 12 July yet another effort was made to capture Krithia without substantial success; and the much-tried armies on that forbidding and barren field then sat down to await the reinforcements demanded and the new plan which was maturing for the solution ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... death the shipmen soon are brought; For then the keel, as by a giant's hand, Is drawn unto that mockery of a land, And presently unto its sides doth cleave; When if they 'scape swift death, yet none may leave The narrow limits of that barren isle, And thus are slain by famine in a while Mocked, as they say, by night with images Of noble castles among groves of trees, By day with sounds ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... Foppington, Western and Tom Jones, my Father and my Uncle Toby, Millament and Sir Sampson Legend, Don Quixote and Sancho, Gil Blas and Guzman d'Alfarache, Count Fathom and Joseph Surface—have all met and exchanged commonplaces on the barren plains of the haute litterature—toil slowly on to the Temple of Science, seen a long way off upon a level, and end in one dull compound of politics, criticism, ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell |
