"Barren" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... islands, aye from the slums, and frontiers, and mountains in the homeland, and from those near by, from over the alley next to your house maybe, they seem to come. And they are rubbing their eyes, and speaking. With lives so pitifully barren, with lips mutely eloquent, with the soreness of their hunger, they are saying, "You're ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... the country through which we passed to-day, was as fertile and much more picturesque than the Said. The reason for the latter part of this assertion is, that in the Said the view is limited by the ridges of barren and calcined mountains that bound it on both sides, whereas here the view ranges over plains bounded only by the horizon, and interspersed here and there with isolated mountains of most singular forms. ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar • George Bethune English
... so far as the land is formed by the deposits of the Nile, that this scene of verdure and beauty extends. On the east it is bounded by ranges of barren and rocky hills, and on the west by vast deserts, consisting of moving sands, from which no animal or vegetable life can derive the means of existence. The reason of this sterility seems to be the absence of water. The geological formation of the land is such that it furnishes few springs of water, ...
— Alexander the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... Those fine long shoots will grow into big branches; those little twigs with the points, as you call them, are fruit spurs, covered with blossom buds. If I cut them out I should have no plums next year, but a bigger and a more barren tree. No, my boy, I don't want to grow ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... God knows where, and you crumple up, with never a chance to have a go at the chap who has potted you from the trenches, or behind a rock, a thousand yards off. Mine is going to be, except from a spectacular point of view, a very barren sort of year, compared with what yours might be if the fire once touched your eyes. I go where life is cruder and fiercer, perhaps, but you remain in the very ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... reply, painstakingly analyzed the chief deficiencies of Sandy's immediate relatives, and was beginning upon his grandparents when Sandy reached barren ground in the shape of three long paragraphs of snow, cold, and sunrise artistically blended with prismatic adjectives. He waded through the first paragraph and well into the second before he mired ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... from his apparently public-spirited conduct last term, and the attitude of the Philosophers had effectually deprived him of any opportunity of exercising his authority, and left him to the enjoyment of an altogether barren honour. ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... can conceive the beauty, sublimity and inspiration of that scene, especially to one who had for weary months been traversing dusty, treeless and barren plains. The contrast was overwhelming. Tears filled my eyes as I gazed upon the fairy scene. I recall the entrancing picture to-day, in all its splendid detail, so vividly was ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... in a Crown, } Preaching Ingratitude t'a Court and Throne; } But made his Politicks the baneful Root From whence the springing Woes of Israel shoot, When his Great Masters fatal Gordian tyed, He lai'd the barren Michal by his side; That the ador'd Absolons immortal Line Might on Judeas Throne for ever shine. Caleb, who does that hardy Pilot make, } Steering in that Hereditary Track, } Blind to the Sea-Mark of ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... Far North beyond the great forests Wanderhoof has a cousin who looks very much like him, called the Barren Ground Caribou. The name comes from the fact that way up there little excepting moss grows, and on this the Caribou lives. In summer this Caribou is found almost up to the Arctic Ocean, moving southward in great herds as the cold weather approaches. No other animals of to-day get together in such ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... said, "These hills and plains are the most barren I have known. I have searched all day for a grain of some sort, and there is none to ...
— The Madman • Kahlil Gibran
... edge of the barren spot and began to circle around its edge, while Dick did likewise, following his example. They found a footprint at last and took the trail. It did not lead them far before they came to a path on top of the hill that ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... glad hosanna! Bubbles up the earth to bless! Cheers it like the precious manna In the barren wilderness. Here we wondering gaze, assembled Like the grateful Hebrew band, When the hidden fountain trembled, And obeyed the ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... we get away from this barren spot the better," observed Harry. "If the fine weather continues, as I hope it may, we can expect to reach the Auckland Islands ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... taught him many of the hidden secrets of human nature and of Life: he guessed that the time—if not already here—was nigh at hand, when this unfortunate woman would realize the emptiness of her life, and would begin to reap the bitter harvest of the barren seeds which ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... time seemed to stop. The barren moat and green weeds floated beneath him, and the only reminder of his rapid drop was the air, which whistled past his ears. Suddenly, motion was restored again, and they lit with a jarring crash, just at ...
— Millennium • Everett B. Cole
... was the curse of Heaven on the States where it prevailed. Compare the free regions of the Middle States, where a rich and noble cultivation marks the prosperity and happiness of the people, with the misery and poverty which overspread the barren wastes of Virginia, Maryland, and the other States having slaves. Travel through the whole continent, and you behold the prospect continually varying with the appearance and disappearance of slavery. The moment you leave the Eastern States, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... the foot of the tree from which he had cut them, moving backward. Then seating himself comfortably, he held them on end, bottom up, and demolished them at his ease. A good deal of nibbling had to be done before he got anything to eat, because the lower scales are barren, but when he had patiently worked his way up to the fertile ones he found two sweet nuts at the base of each, shaped like trimmed hams, and spotted purple like birds' eggs. And notwithstanding these cones were dripping with soft balsam, and covered with ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... quality as a valley of hope. The vineyards are mentioned with reference to ver. 14, where the devastation of the vine is [Pg 262] threatened. They are brought under notice as the noblest possession, as the finest ornament of the cultivated land, in contrast with the barren wilderness. [Hebrew: mwM], properly "from thence," is correctly explained by Manger: "As soon as she has come out of that wilderness." The explanation of Roediger and others, "From that time," is unphilological; [Hebrew: wM] ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... from the Latins, who also used gravidus,—a word we now apply only to animals, especially dogs and ants,—and enceinte, borrowed from French, and referring to the ancient custom of girding a woman who was with child. Similarly barren of direct reference to the child are accouchement, which we have borrowed from French, and ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... which have been made by the young men. The glamour which at first disguises the inherent barrenness of savage life has had time to pass away, and I see it in all its nakedness as a life not much raised above the necessities of animal existence, timid, monotonous, barren of good, dark, dull, "without hope, and without God in the world;" though at its lowest and worst considerably higher and better than that of many other aboriginal races, and— must I say it?—considerably higher and better than that of thousands of the lapsed masses of our ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... is worth looking at because it shows how far Wagner had then got, the general interest in it has for thirty years been its history. It has led to a deal of unnecessarily acrimonious and barren dispute. Wagner's disagreeable diatribes aimed subsequently at the Jews were, and are, in part attributed to Mendelssohn's behaviour regarding it. It was sent to Mendelssohn; and that industrious gentleman never referred to the subject. Wherefore ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... was clear: to be beautiful, to be petted, to bear children. Such has been their theoretic destiny and if perchance they have been ugly, hurt, and barren, that has been forgotten with studied silence. In partial compensation for this narrowed destiny the white world has lavished its politeness on its womankind,—its chivalry and bows, its uncoverings and courtesies—all ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... for a moment barren of answer was sure that as usual Peter was lying and without any ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... new abode," anounced the enthusiast, smiling with the satisfaction quite undamped by the drops dripping from his hat-brim, as they turned at length into a cart-path that wound along a steep hillside into a barren-looking valley. ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... barren, sub-Antarctic islands were transferred from the UK to Australia in 1947. Populated by large numbers of seal and bird species, the islands have been ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... occurred at every mile of their progress, the view was bounded, on two of the sides, by the gradual and low elevations, which gave name to the description of prairie we have mentioned; while on the others, the meagre prospect ran off in long, narrow, barren perspectives, but slightly relieved by a pitiful show of coarse, though somewhat luxuriant vegetation. From the summits of the swells, the eye became fatigued with the sameness and chilling dreariness of the landscape. The earth was not unlike the Ocean, when its restless waters are heaving ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... mature plants occasionally retain them. There seems to exist correlation between foliage and fruit, for branches exhibiting leaves with never so slight a variation from the type are, according to local observation, invariably barren. The leaves, which, when young, are densely hairy on the underside, on maturity become so rough and coarse that they are used by the blacks as a substitute for sandpaper in the smoothing of weapons. The fruit is small, dark purple when ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... Noblesse land sold was 517,000 dessyatins, and it rose steadily until 1892-96, when it reached the amount of 785,000. As I have already stated, the townward movement of the proprietors was strongest in the barren Northern provinces. In the province of Olonetz, for example, they have already parted with 87 per cent. of their land. In the black-soil region, on the contrary, there is no province in which more than 27 per cent. of the Noblesse ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... Money being a barren product, it is contrary to nature to make it reproduce itself. Usury, therefore, is unnatural, ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... consider our own country in its natural prospect, without any of the benefits and advantages of commerce, what a barren and uncomfortable spot of earth falls to our share! Natural historians tell us, that no fruit grows originally among us, besides hips and haws, acorns and pig-nuts, with other delicacies of the {58} like nature; that our climate of itself, and without the assistance of art, can make no ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... 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. ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... color, that incomparable dissolving-view of harmonious tints, and lithe half-covered forms, and beautiful brown faces, and gracious and graceful gestures and attitudes and movements, free, unstudied, barren ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... very old man when we first met him. He died before we left that part of the country. His last illness was preceded by a drunken spree, during which some rougish boys painted a barren fig-tree on his bald head. He died soon afterward. Notwithstanding the efforts of those who prepared the body for burial, his head went to its last resting-place still marked by some of the paint that portrayed him ...
— Trials and Triumphs of Faith • Mary Cole
... me now: But this sad thought augments my pain, That prayer and largess, fast and vow, And Heavenward service are in vain. Ah me, ah me! with fruitless toil Of rites austere a child I sought: Thus seed cast forth on barren soil Still lifeless lies and comes to naught. If ever wretch by anguish grieved Before his hour to death had fled, I mourning, like a cow bereaved, Had been ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... Works.—It is disappointing that the author has not mentioned some of the steps contemplated in reference to the landscape treatment of the Washington filtration area. Probably every one has been impressed by the barren aspect of the works as they are approached, and as one looks over them. Recently, however, it is stated that some steps have been taken to lay out the grounds, treat the surface in an attractive manner, and make ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXXII, June, 1911 • E. D. Hardy
... you will think that the prologue is over long for the play; but the foundations must be laid before the building is erected, and a statement of this sort is a sorry and a barren thing unless you have a knowledge of the folk concerned. Be patient, then, while I speak to you of the old friends of my youth, some of whom you may hear more of hereafter, while others remained behind in the country hamlet, and yet left traces of our early intercourse upon ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of even twentieth-century resources. Royal ladies work on tapestries, queer things in their way, but certainly not barbaric. Musical notation is improved. Manuscripts are gorgeously illumined. Paintings and mosaics, though of the crudest, reappear on long-barren walls. Civilization begins to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... of life. I have known boys and girls who were forced to read "Rasselas." Now that allegorical production came from the mind of a mature, powerful, most melancholy man, and it is intended to show the barren vanity of human wishes. What an absurd thing to put in the hands of a buoyant youth! The parents however had heard that "Rasselas" was a great and moral book, whereupon the children must be subjected to unavailing torture. It ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... must have found, in the taste of his brother and the energy of Johnson, his happiest prototypes; but he had too frequently to wrestle with barren antiquarianism, and was lost to us at the gates of that paradise which had hardly opened on him. These were the true founders of that more elegant literature in which France had preceded us. These works created a more pleasing species of erudition:—the age ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... him if he gave them an opportunity. But soon that would be all over—no more battle, no more struggle. He turned the corner and saw Scaw House standing amongst its dark trees, with its black palings in front of its garden and the deserted barren patch of field in front of that again. The sun was getting low and the sky above the house was flaming but the trees were sombre ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... barren valley, which has already been alluded to, enters the main valley of Copiapo a little above the town: it runs at first northerly, then N.E., and more easterly into the Cordillera; I followed its dreary course to the foot of the first main ridge. ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... is related of his political campaign in the North, upon the barren banks of the Neva, which, in causing much entertainment to the inhabitants of the fertile banks of the Seine, has not a ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... passed through her youth alone, and drew near to the confines of age, a childless woman. The tender ambitions that she had received at birth had been, by time and disappointment, diverted into a certain barren zeal of industry and fury of interference. She carried her thwarted ardours into housework, she washed floors with her empty heart. If she could not win the love of one with love, she must dominate all ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in the 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
... can glimpse scarce a hint of its original shape and likeness. We see, also, that the very philosophers who caricatured their own eidolon, became intrigued with the logical abstraction of words and were led away into a wilderness of barren deduction—their one inspired vision of a stable premiss ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... elevation. His delightful fancy seemed especially alert on that occasion, and we lived over again with him many a chapter in the history of Rochester, full of interest to those of us who had come from a land where all is new and comparatively barren of romance. ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... journey lengthens: wider grows the field, further advance the seekers, and from the top of unexplored headlands, through morning mists, they descry the outlines of countries till then unknown. They must be followed to realms beyond the grave, to the silent domains of the dead, across barren moors and frozen fens, among chill rushes and briars that never blossom, till those Edens of poetry are reached, the echoes of which, by a gift of fairies or of muses, still vibrate to the melody ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... ago, when it was first ceded to Britain, Hong-Kong was a barren, treeless, granite island, it really is an astonishing place. It is easily the handsomest modern city in Asia, has a population of 400,000, and is by a long way the busiest port in the world. It is an exceedingly pretty place, too, with its rows of fine European ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... supplicant to wait, While ladies interpose, and slaves debate. But did not chance, at length, her errour mend? Did no subverted empire mark his end? Did rival monarchs give the fatal wound? Or hostile millions press him to the ground? His fall was destin'd to a barren strand, A petty fortress, and a dubious hand; He left the name, at which the world grew pale, To point a moral, or adorn a tale. [y]All times their scenes of pompous woes afford, From Persia's tyrant to Bavaria's ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... hammer some sort of unified impression out of the scattered pictures of Spain in my mind, one of the first things I realize is that there are many Spains. Indeed, every village hidden in the folds of the great barren hills, or shadowed by its massive church in the middle of one of the upland plains, every fertile huerta of the seacoast, is a Spain. Iberia exists, and the strong Iberian characteristics; but Spain as a modern centralized nation is an illusion, a very ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... say one word about intellectual liberty? Did he say one word about reason or about justice? Did He make the slightest effort to improve them? All that He did in the world was to give them one poor little miserable, barren command, "Thou shalt not eat of a certain fruit." That's all that amounted to anything; and, when they sinned, did this great God take them in the arms of His love and endeavor to reform them? No; He simply put upon them a curse. When they were expelled He said to ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... rocky descent; it was a blue sheet of water, three or four miles from north to south, and one and a half broad, hemmed in by rounded spurs from Kinchinjhow on one side, and from Donkia on the other: the Lachen flowed from its northern extremity, and turning westward, entered a broad barren valley, bounded on the north by red stony mountains, called Bhomtso, which I saw from Kongra Lama, and ascended with Dr. Campbell in the October following: though 18,000 to 19,000 feet high, these mountains were wholly unsnowed. Beyond ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... returned from London and Liverpool, looking very fatigued and thoughtful. He explained to the rector and other of his acquaintance that all the inquiries he had made at his wife's old lodgings and his own had been totally barren of results. ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... patroness Showed no mercy to Child Willis in the day of his distress. She revoked the presentation, leaving Willis in the lurch, One of undisputed learning preached in Drayton Parslow church. Doubly barren was his triumph, it was not a twelve-month ere Death set up his Court of Arches, Willis did not ...
— Briefless Ballads and Legal Lyrics - Second Series • James Williams
... barren, barren; beggars all, beggars all, Sir John: marry, good air. Spread Davy, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... make-up. There was too much to write about, and I was always over-set! I saw and felt, with you, and regarded it as more poignantly pathetic, the tragedy of that little handful of San Luisanos, herded away in the heart of those barren hills to make way for the white man. And now the white man is almost gone and Father Dominic's Angelus, ringing from Mission San Luis Rey, falls upon the dull ear of a Japanese farmer, usurping that sweet valley, hallowed by sentiment, by historical ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... episode was diminishing rapidly in importance as it slid into the past, and Johnny was facing a problem quite as great, was harboring ambitions quite as dazzling, as when he rode a sweaty horse across the barren stretches of the Rolling R Ranch and dreamed the while of ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... shooting out of the red and rocky soil. Scarcely a house is visible, for the casitas of adobe and wood nestle mostly in sheltered nooks. Beyond Baughl's, the ruins first strike his view; the red walls of the church stand boldly out on the barren mesilla; and to the north of it there are two low brown ridges, the remnants of the Indian houses. The bleak summits of the high northern chain seem to rise in height as he advances; even the distant Trout mountains (Sierra de la Trucha) loom up solemnly towards the ...
— Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier
... it is a place that, in itself, is no bad emblem of a hopeless lot. Solitary, exposed equally to the hot airs of the south and the bleak blasts of the Alps, frequently covered with the spray of the Adriatic, and based on barren sands, the utmost that human art, aided by a soil which has been fattened by human remains, can do, has been to create around the modest graves a meagre vegetation, that is in slight contrast to the sterility of most of the bank. This place ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... ravine is crossed, a hill climbed, and the traveler stands on a plateau not more than half a mile wide but winding for miles toward the big peak Pinatubo and almost imperceptibly increasing in elevation. Low, barren ridges flank it on either side, at the base of each of which flows a good-sized stream. Seven miles of beaten winding path through the cogon grass bring the traveler to the first Negrito rancheria, Tagiltil, one year old, lying sun baked on a southern slope of ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... nothing is gained by reiterating our adherence to the principle, while refusing to provide any means of making our intention effectual. In the amended form the treaties contain nothing except such expression of barren intention, and indeed, as compared with what has already been provided in The Hague arbitration treaty, they probably represent not a step forward but a slight step backward, as regards the question of international arbitration. ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... wonder, and then setting off with a stately flight which reminds one of the cranes on Japanese ware. Through the dense fringe of vegetation, we have occasional glimpses of the hillside farms—their sloping fields sprinkled with stones, their often barren pastures, numerous abandoned tracts overgrown with weeds, and blue-grass lush in the meadows. Along the edges of the Creek, and in little pocket bottoms, the varied vegetation has a sub-tropical luxuriance, ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... rhapsody. It had held a meaning and was remembered. In Valentine there seemed to be flowering a number of faint-hued wants, such wants as had never flowered from his nature before. The fig-tree that had seemed so exquisitely barren began to put forth leaves, and when the warm showers sang to it, it sang ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... what the impelling cause was, but this I know: my heart went out in pity to her, and all that was good within me—good, which I had never before suspected—stirred in my soul, and my past life seemed black and barren beyond endurance. Even Dorothy's marvellous beauty lacked the subtle quality which this simple blind girl possessed. The first step in regeneration is to see one's faults; the second is to regret them; the third is to quit them. The first and second steps ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... intimate relationship between the stomach and the ear, the saucepan and the crotchet, the mysteries of Mrs. Rorer and the mysteries of Mme. Marchesi. It has even occurred to me that one of the reasons our American composers are so barren in ideas is because as a race we are not interested in cooking and eating. Those countries in which music plays the greater part in the national life are precisely those which are the most interested in the culinary art. The food of Italy, the cooking, is celebrated; ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... relating to the crops produced has been enough to cause disbelief in those who have not visited Babylonia[29]." To-day great tracts of undulating moorland, which aforetime yielded two and three crops a year, are in summer partly barren wastes and partly jungle and reedy swamp. Bedouins camp beside sandy heaps which were once populous and thriving cities, and here and there the shrunken remnants of a people once great and influential eke out ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... row around Smith Island," suggested our hero, mentioning a small place in the middle of the stream, so named after a farmer who owned it. It was a rocky and somewhat barren spot, and seldom visited by anybody ...
— Dave Porter and the Runaways - Last Days at Oak Hall • Edward Stratemeyer
... widespread apprehension that the momentous results in our progress as a nation marked by the recent amendments to the Constitution were in imminent jeopardy; that the good understanding which prompted their adoption, in the interest of a loyal devotion to the general welfare, might prove a barren truce, and that the two sections of the country, once engaged in civil strife, might be again almost as widely severed and disunited as they were when arrayed in arms against ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Rutherford B. Hayes • Rutherford B. Hayes
... Mundi A Christmas Carol By the Waters of Babylon Paradise "I will lift up mine Eyes unto the Hills" Saints and Angels "When my Heart is Vexed, I will Complain" After Communion A Rose Plant in Jericho Who shall Deliver Me? Despised and Rejected Long Barren If Only Dost thou not Care? Weary in Well-Doing Martyrs' Song After this the Judgment Good Friday ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... fiery buckler hanging over the city, was utterly gone. As I looked into this unnatural night, the thought smote me that I had brought this judgment on the Holy City, and I formed the determination to fly from my priesthood, my kindred, and my country, and to bear my doom in some barren wilderness. ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... boy and told him of his life: "I have a mother,—Heartsrue is she called. And on the barren moorland is our home. My bow and arrows have I made myself To scare the eagles in the ...
— Parsifal - A Drama by Wagner • Retold by Oliver Huckel
... Dislodging from a region scarce of prey To gorge the flesh of lambs or yeanling kids, On hills where flocks are fed, flies toward the springs Of Ganges or Hydaspes, Indian streams; But in his way lights on the barren plains Of Sericana, where Chineses drive With sails and wind their cany waggons light: So, on this windy sea of land, the Fiend Walked up and down alone, bent on his prey; Alone, for other creature in this place, Living or lifeless, to be found was none; None yet, but store hereafter from ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... outline, is the story of the renascence in Egypt. The mother-land of science and learning, after a wellnigh barren interval of 1,100 years since the Arab conquest, was now developed and illumined by the application of the arts with which in the dim past she had enriched the life of barbarous Europe. The repayment of this incalculable ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... from the recent luxury of canned fruit, have the happiest substitutes, if we will take what the seasons bring to our hands. Not a month in the year is left wholly barren of these relishes for the tea-table. There are berries all the summer, apples and cranberries in the winter, when, just as the last russet disappears, and with it every one's appetite, up springs the pungent and luxuriant rhubarb. Somewhat curious is it concerning this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... bitterly over the death of the "poor orphan laddie," and, in company with two neighboring workmen, or cotters, who passed for Protestant Irishmen, watched around the corpse all night, and on the day of its interment in the pagan cemetery, situated in a barren corner of Gulvert's farm, they lingered for a considerable time around the spot, to the scandal of the religious people who assembled to take a look at the "face of the dead," and who began to suspect ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... alive, who were still content to see the world through the spiritual eyes of Shelley and Keats, and who had not yet learned to belittle Carlyle, there seemed a strange lack of generosity and, indeed, vitality in the literary ideals of the hour. The novel particularly seemed barren and unprofitable to them, more and more an instrument of science than a branch of literature. Laughter had deserted it, as clearly as romance or pathos, and more and more it was becoming the vehicle of cynical biology on ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... and as little waistcoat as possible. He was a man who always used to labour under, the idea that he looked very fierce, and, to make himself look fiercer, he used to brush his hair all up into a pyramid over the barren place on the top of his head, so that the hair used to form a regular pomatumed spike. But he did not look at all fierce, for his fat round face, dull eyes, and tenchy mouth would not let him; but he used to ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... had imagined possible, so close that, from the highest lookout on the Ark, they were able with their telescopes to see very clearly where the water washed the barren mountainsides at what seemed to be ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... It was an irregular little bunch of buildings gathered along an arterial street which, after a run of three hundred yards or so, broke to pieces and scattered its dispersed shanties about a high, barren plain. It stood on the steep bank of a little river, and over against it, on a naked hill, was Uncle Sam's military village,—a fort by courtesy,—where, when not sleeping, black soldiers and white strolled about in the warm sun. When the little street was fairly awake, it presented a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... circling flew; In your embrace you held the restless tide, And shared awhile great Ocean's power and pride. But now how sad, how dreary is the scene In which so much of life hath lately been! Your barren wastes untraversed by a sail, Your only voice the curlew's distant wail; With rocky limbs and furrowed brow you lie Like some lone corpse by living things passed by; Till Night in mercy spreads her clouded pall, And rising winds mourn at ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... must have come to the King on regarding the picture of the Coronation! I divined the thought that he did not complete, and my eyes filled with tears. Oh, how much I feel and imagine all the ennui given to the King by these barren and unfortunate politics! I detest them more even than the King detests them. Ungrateful offspring of the times, they fly away, rarely leaving even a memory. How much I prefer ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... which might be inclined to rise against their governments. Their resolutions were officially communicated to the sympathizing societies in England, and emissaries were secretly encouraged to cross the Channel in the hope of gaining converts. Nor were their exertions barren. Two men were convicted in Scotland of a plot to seize Edinburgh Castle, to massacre the garrison, to imprison the judges, and to rise in arms to compel the government to a change of policy. In London ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... of his character. I saw, too, by his love increasing with his esteem, the solidity of his understanding, and the nobleness of his nature. He went deeper and deeper into my mind, till he came to a spring of gratitude, which rose and overflowed, vivifying and fertilising the seemingly barren waste. I believe it to be true that, after the first great misfortune, persons never return to be the same that they were before, but this I know—and this it is important you should be convinced of, my dear Helen—that the mind, though sorely smitten, ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... this plan, petiots, we had to travel thousands of miles through a country barren of civilization, through endless forests, and across lakes as wide and deep as the sea; we were to overcome obstacles without number and to encounter dangers and hardships at every step, and yet we remained firm in our resolve. It was exile with its train of woes and of misery; it was, ...
— Acadian Reminiscences - The True Story of Evangeline • Felix Voorhies
... which had escaped the waste of the cattle and the sheep of the feuars, and which, feathering naturally up the beds of empty torrents, or occupying the concave recesses of the bank, gave at once beauty and variety to the landscape. Above these scattered woods rose the hill, in barren, but purple majesty; the dark rich hue, particularly in autumn, contrasting beautifully with the thickets of oak and birch, the mountain ashes and thorns, the alders and quivering aspens, which checquered and varied the descent, and not less with ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... discarded things, scraps and fragments of other buildings, put together with care and pains, by some one who had tried to make the most of cast-off material. There was something pitiful and shamefaced about the hut. It shrank and drooped in its barren field, and seemed to cling only by sufferance to the edge ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... our examination. Let us, for instance, suppose, that the people of New Caledonia are the offspring of a nation, who, by living in affluence and in a genial climate, have not been stinted in their growth; the colony which removed into the barren soil of New Caledonia, will probably preserve the habit of body of their ancestors for many generations. The people of Tanna may have undergone a contrary revolution, and being descended of a slender and short race, like the Mallicollese, the richness of their present country may not yet have entirely ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... like a dozen other log cabins tucked away here and there among the foothills of the Bear Paws. It had an air of rakish hominess, as if it would be a fine, snuggy place in winter, when the snow and the wind swept the barren land around. In the summer, it stood open-doored and open-windowed, with all the litter of bachelor belongings scattered about or hanging from pegs on the wall outside. There was a faint trail of smoke ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... mountain, this was not one. Serrated ridges, not much lower than that on which we stood, rose, one beyond another, far as that pure atmosphere could carry the vision, broken into awful chasms deep with ice and snow, rising into pinnacles piercing the heavenly blue with their cold, barren grey, on, on for ever, till the most distant range upbore unsullied snow alone. There were fair lakes mirroring the dark pine woods, canyons dark and blue-black with unbroken expanses of pines, snow-slashed pinnacles, wintry heights frowning upon lovely ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... probable that we 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 remember me ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... on a spot appropriately selected for such a worship—the barren top of a bleak unsheltered eminence—stands the chapel of Notre Dame de la Haine! Our Lady of HATRED! The most fiendish of human passions is supposed to be under the protection of Christ's religion! What is this but a fragment of pure and unmixed Paganism, ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... from the very dawn of consciousness Down at the bottom of the barren rocks, Where scarce a ray of sunshine found him out, In which the poorest beggar of my realm At least to human-full proportion grows— Me! Me—whose station was the kingdom's top To flourish in, reaching my head to heaven, And with ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... Mister Blue-bird! Don't you think it's rather soon For the making of your music, And the striking of a tune?" "I have heard the lone trees calling And the meadows barren long, For the laughter of the lovers And the raptures ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... came upon stretches of straggling wild peach, olive, and lemon trees. Beyond again, tangles of hawthorn were interspersed with patches of dried weeds and grass. But as they neared the mining district the soil was bleak and barren. The mountain rivers were dry, and their beds made yawning gaps as though the earth had violently shuddered at her ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... breaking late and grey and cold, appeared equally difficult, barren, in vain. The kitchen stove, continually neglected, went continually out, the grate became clogged with ashes, the chimney refused to draw. He relit it, on his knees, the dog patiently at his side; he fanned the kindling into flames, poured on the coal, the shining ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... with ghastly smiles to turn it into a jest. But the cemetery of the Capuchins is no place to nourish celestial hopes; the soul sinks forlorn and wretched under all this burden of dusty death; the holy earth from Jerusalem, so imbued is it with mortality, has grown as barren of the flowers of Paradise as it is of earthly weeds and grass. Thank Heaven for its blue sky; it needs a long, upward gaze to give us back our faith. Not here can we feel ourselves immortal, where the very altars in these chapels of horrible consecration ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... the shoe way, but now entirely ruined, and hundreds driven to a starving condition on account of it. Farming is also at a very low ebb with us. Our lands, generally speaking, are mountainous and barren; and our landholders, full of ideas of farming gathered from the English and the Lothians, and other rich soils in Scotland, make no allowance for the odds of the quality of land, and consequently stretch us much beyond what in ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... every sentient being on this earth betook itself to reflection; the words sped into the obscurity, through space, at hazard, no matter where,—"It is only the wind, it is only a little noise," said the barren minds that live upon irony; but the next day, or three months, or a year later, something fell on the surface of the earth, or something rose. What had been the cause of that? The noise that had vanished, ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... short on timber today because our fathers and forefathers abused our forests. If they had planted trees on the lands after the virgin timber was removed, we should now be one of the richest countries in the world in forest resources. Instead, they left barren stretches and desolate wastes where dense woods once stood. It is time that the present owners of the land begin the reclamation of our 326,000,000 acres of cut-over timberlands. Some of these lands still are yielding fair crops of timber due to natural ...
— The School Book of Forestry • Charles Lathrop Pack
... exorcised them with unfailing regularity. The abuse he heaped on Satan must have added largely to the burden of sorrows under which we are assured the fallen angel carries out his appointed work. He had been profuse in his prayers and curses when we entered the barren pathway of the Little Hills behind the plains of Hillreeli, and there were times when I had felt quite sorry for Satan. Oblation offered to the house spirits, the Maalem asked for his money, the half due at the journey's end, sober enough, despite the kief, to count ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... coffee-plants, and an endless number of wild flowers. And this island, that has given me so much instruction and delight, is reckoned the most uninteresting place that we perhaps shall touch at during our voyage. It certainly is generally very barren, but the valleys are more exquisitely beautiful, from the very contrast. It is utterly useless to say anything about the scenery; it would be as profitable to explain to a blind man colours, as to a person who has not been out of Europe, the total dissimilarity of a tropical ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... in the cold and barren regions of the far north. There man, once more partaking of the nature of his surroundings, yields as slowly to the impulses of his passions as does the ice-bound earth to the slanting rays of the summer sun. ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... transition, upon the unusual simplicity of its style both in structure and vocabulary, and how far it may, by reason of its popularity, be influential in modifying and improving the language in both these respects. In the long barren tract between Chaucer and Spenser, the Ship of Fools stands all but alone as a popular poem, and the continuance of this popularity for a century and more is no doubt to be attributed as much to the use of the language of the "coming time" as to the ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... all new to Mary Fortune, this stern and barren country; and its people were new to her, too. The women, for some reason, had regarded her with suspicion and her answer was a patrician aloofness and reserve. When the day's work was done she took off ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... the bitter and melancholy side of things reigns almost exclusively, and Balzac, using Raphael as his mouthpiece, says: "Women one and all have condemned me. With tears and mortification I bowed before the decision of the world; but my distress was not barren. I determined to revenge myself on society; I would dominate the feminine intellect, and so have the feminine soul at my mercy; all eyes should be fixed upon me, when the servant at the door announced my name. ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... it is true, man's search for comfort and security in an alien and hostile world. The simple demand of the human heart is to be recognized and to be loved. Love is the magic touch that transforms all that is barren and cold into all that is rich and warm and fruitful. But man is neither loved nor recognized by the immensities of the universe. And in face of the illimitable stretches of time and space even the stoutest heart involuntarily quakes. ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... days after we left this place, we came in sight of Mount Vernon; but in all the way up the river, I did not see any green fields. The country had to me a most barren appearance. There were none but snake-fences; which are rails laid with the ends of one upon another, from eight to sixteen in number in one length. The surface of the earth looked like a yellow-washed wall; for it ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... House of Commons. My last letter went in twelve days, and so perhaps may this. No it won't, for those letters that go under a fortnight are answers to one of yours, otherwise you must take the days as they happen, some dry, some wet, some barren, some fruitful, some merry, some insipid; some, etc.—I will write you word exactly the first day I see young gooseberries, and pray observe how much later you are. We have not had five fine days this five weeks, but rain or wind. 'Tis a late spring they say here.—Go ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... summer, the sun remains up as if trying to make amends for its long winter's absence—up as far as Point Hope to the village of Tigara, the tourist will find there an interesting and friendly people. His first impression probably is, what a bleak and barren coast! but, should he allow his thoughts to wander back to the remote past, he can imagine how in ages gone by this may have been an Eden with its luxuriant vegetation and a much milder climate. The huge mammoth roamed ...
— Short Sketches from Oldest America • John Driggs
... the Parisians was known all over the town in ten minutes. Madame Hochon came out upon her doorstep to welcome her godchild, and kissed her as though she were really a daughter. After seventy-two years of a barren and monotonous existence, exhibiting in their retrospect the graves of her three children, all unhappy in their lives, and all dead, she had come to feel a sort of fictitious motherhood for the young girl whom she had, as she expressed it, carried in her pouch for sixteen years. ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... devoted to music. It was a substitute for happiness to me, and in the empire of harmony I tried to forget my barren life. A certain trouble happened to me; in a twinkling all the ties which bound me to home were broken, and I fled, with misery and desperation in my heart! Madame, I was then hardly twenty, but virtue, honesty and love were ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... long time that—taking for an example the work in the middle of the narrative—there was a time when the earth emerged from the tumult of waters, that it then got covered with plants, the waters remaining barren of life; but that when the plants had come up all over the ground, then the waters all at once became full of all sorts of sea-shells, fish, and monsters of the ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... Russia's force. During the battle, Kamenski, the general-in-chief, a martinet and disciple of routine, had twice given the order for retreat, and it was Bennigsen's disobedience which made the conflict so indecisive that Russia claimed it as a victory. If a victory, it was a barren one, because a weak and venal administration of the commissary department had deprived the soldiers of sustenance at the critical moment. Kamenski, who was seventy-six years old, was retired on the ground of his health, and Bennigsen succeeded him, but the bad commissary administration ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... concern him. It makes him see beforehand, for instance, all the circumstances of the death of a stranger whom he will only hear of after the event, when this event is irrevocable. It brings a crowd of barren presentiments and conjures up veridical hallucinations that are wholly alien and idle. With psychometric, typtological or materializing mediums, it practises art for art's sake, mocks at space and time, passes through personalities, ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... had expected the Big Burn to be barren land—curdled rock with rivers of frozen quartz, substances boiled up through the crust of the planet by the action of the atomic explosives. That was the way it had been on Limbo—on the other "burned-off" worlds they had discovered where those who had preceded mankind into the Galaxy—the ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... mark of a scholar and a gentleman. Heaven forbid that I should be flippant, but it appeared to me to be a wanton waste of good human energy that men should spend years and years in the perfection of so barren an exercise, when their own civilisation presented problems by the hundred which cried aloud for solution and would have paid the solver handsomely; but people know their own affairs best. If the youths chose it for themselves I should have ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... composed of lava and ashes, or rocky heights and precipitous cliffs. Still, many of the portions which can be cultivated are of extraordinary fertility; and the contrast is very great between the richly-cultivated plains and valleys, and the leafy forests, with the barren, scorched, and burnt sides of the peak and its surrounding heights. I ought to have said that the houses of Santa Cruz are of several stories, with the verandahs one above another, looking into the interior ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... 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 away to its side, and backed by a farther range ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... desert of Nevada a playa lake spreads over an area fifty miles long and twenty miles wide. In summer it disappears; the Quinn River, which feeds it, shrinks back one hundred miles toward its source, leaving an absolutely barren floor of clay, ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... through me he learned the sacredness of color. "Since he loves beauty so, why does he not love me?" I asked myself; and perhaps the feverish hope and suspense only lit up that beauty and fed it with fresh fires. Ah, the July days! Did you ever wander over barren, parched stubble-fields, and suddenly front a knot of red Turk's-cap lilies, flaring as if they had drawn all the heat and brilliance from the land into their tissues? Such were they. And if I were to grow old and gray, they would light down all my life, and I could be willing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... the United States of America, was born on February 12, 1809, in a log cabin on a barren farm in the backwoods of Kentucky, about three miles west of a place called Hodgensville in what is now La ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... mother's love for her only child. For "Willie's" sake the widow Tarbell had turned her back upon the dear New England woods and meadows, upon the tidy village where every man and woman was her friend; for his sake she had come to dwell among strangers in a strange and barren land. The old homestead had been sold, and with the meagre proceeds she had paid their way across the prairies, and had bought a little house and a lot of land on the outskirts of Springtown, while Willie ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... of the gloom into which my position as a prisoner plunged me, the time of my arrest was not utterly barren. My late endeavours towards scientific knowledge had made me more and more conscious of my need of a solid foundation in my knowledge of Latin; therefore I now tried to supply deficiencies to the extent of my ability, ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... itself 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
... their feet down resolutely on all forms of amusement; they would have stopped the lambs from wagging their tails, and shot the birds for singing, if they could have had their way; and in consequence of it, what a barren, cold, flowerless life is our New England existence! Life is all, as Mantalini said, one 'demd horrid grind.' 'Nothing here but working and going to church,' said the German emigrants,—and they were about right. A French traveller, in the year ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... of consulate work had never seemed less inviting. The prospect of ending his Calaxian tour and going back to a half-barren and jittery Earth appealed to ...
— Traders Risk • Roger Dee
... seemed perfectly barren. The sides of the hills were covered with tall weeds, yellow from the blazing sun. Sometimes they met a mountaineer, either on foot or mounted on a little horse, or astride a donkey about as big as a dog. They all carried a loaded rifle slung across their backs, old rusty weapons, but redoubtable ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... used it very recklessly, not always selecting the right person. The parasitic poor relations found their situation so uncomfortable, that they decided, one and all, to detach themselves from the tree upon which they fed and fattened, even at the risk of withering on a barren soil. Night and morning the serfs prayed upon their knees, with many tears and groans, that the Saints might send consolation, in any form, to their ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... soldier's career had forced Castanier to neglect. The solemn words, "You will be happy or miserable for all eternity!" made but the more terrible impression upon him, because he had exhausted earth and shaken it like a barren tree; because his desires could effect all things, so that it was enough that any spot in earth or heaven should be forbidden him, and he forthwith thought of nothing else. If it were allowable to compare such great things with social follies, Castanier's ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... of his parents, did not blind them to the uncertainty that belongs to all premature efforts of the mind; and they so carefully avoided everything like a boastful display of blossoms which, in many cases, have withered away in barren luxuriance, that the circumstance of these compositions was hardly ever mentioned out of their ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... utterly discouraged. In his soul he was asking bitterly what good had come of all his prayerful labours among the people of this pinched, narrow world, as rugged and unbeautiful in form and life as the barren hills ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... we conquered in the fray?' If returning thou shalt find us here in this place, 'tis well; If not, where thou shalt hear of us, go seek us where we dwell. For we must gain our daily bread with the lance and with the brand, Since otherwise we perish here in a barren land. And therefore as methinketh, we must ...
— The Lay of the Cid • R. Selden Rose and Leonard Bacon
... type of the self-reliant American. Her philosophy is one of love and kindness towards all things; her hope is never dimmed. And by the sheer beauty of her soul, and the purity of her vision, she wins from barren and unpromising surroundings those ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... ground once bare, now green and bright and fragrant. There were poultry-yards and pig-pens and marshy quarters for ducks and geese. Here in the farming section of the ranch Madeline found employment for the little colony of Mexicans. Their lives had been as hard and barren as the dry valley where they had lived. But as the valley had been transformed by the soft, rich touch of water, so their lives had been transformed by help and sympathy and work. The children were wretched no more, and many that had been blind could now see, and Madeline had become ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... their labours have ever been gratuitous, and often expensive to themselves;—pelted with hailstones, dripping with rain, torn by storms, blistered with sun-heat, in all parts of the land, over miles of barren hills and wild moor, through dirty lanes and new-ploughed fields, giving ungrudgingly of their strength; Sunday after Sunday leaving the home enjoyments of their family and the sanctuary to carry ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... with folded arms, looking down. "But that is what you won't see; how should you? You will only see dusty, upstart towns, with horrible corrugated-iron hotels, where you will swelter in heat and flies and eat abominable tinned stuffs. It is a barren, comfortless land at present, with a possibility of being useful some day. They want money, energy, brains to develop it thoroughly; and they won't accept them when they are offered, because a few stiff-necked ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... being cried aloud for Max, and there were times when the longing for the warm, human touch of his hand, for the sound of his voice, grew almost unbearable. Yet any meeting between them could be but a barren reminder of the past, revitalising the dull ache of longing into a quick and overmastering agony, and, realising this, Diana recoiled from the possibility with a fear almost bordering ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... flock so high, and rarely muses on such thoughts as come to wanderers beyond the shade of trees and the sound of water among the scorched rocks and the barren lava. The day is always cooled and soothed, in his idyls, with the 'music of water that falleth from the high face of the rock,' or with the murmurs of the sea. From the cliffs and their seat among the bright red berries on ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... feat was not a barren one: it was well worth the effort and loss which it must have cost. London could feed, recruit, and remount an army of even this magnitude with ease. The Tower was held by a royal garrison, but it could do nothing against so great ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... circumstances, wrecks Troy or raids a nutmeg orchard. A story is told of a planter who, in consequence of engaging a bevy of attractive maidens for the year's work, was rewarded by a phenomenal harvest of nutmegs, though the adjacent estates were barren of fruit. Evening shadows darken apace in the woodland world, and work ceases at three in the afternoon, when the store of gathered fruit is brought to the pagger, where drying and liming sheds surround the central warehouse. The nutmeg-pickers sort the ripe nuts in an open ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... was passed, with its great temple in honor of the crocodile-headed god Sebak. Along this part of the river the country was comparatively barren and the villages small and far apart. In the narrow places the river at times ran so rapidly that it was necessary to hire a number of peasants to assist the boatmen to drag the boat against the stream, and the progress made each ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... devoid of good trees cannot be the best residential section; and a park that lacks well-grown trees is either immature or barren. ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... touch. He could almost hear her say, "Tag, Robert!" but he would not look at her. And yet the moment after he knew that it was all make-believe. His anger was a sham, protecting something that was fragile and afraid of pain. Now that she had gone out of the barren little room she had taken with her the sense of a secret, gracious intimacy which had been its warmth and colour. He saw that the sunlight had shrunk to a pale gold finger whose tip rested lingeringly on the windowsill, and he felt tired and cold ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... quite unequal to the undertaking, and accordingly the Western or Latin-speaking provinces of the Empire adopted the conclusions of the East without disputing or reviewing them. "Latin Christianity," says Dean Milman, "accepted the creed which its narrow and barren vocabulary could hardly express in adequate terms. Yet, throughout, the adhesion of Rome and the West was a passive acquiescence in the dogmatic system which had been wrought out by the profounder theology of the Eastern divines, rather than a vigorous and original ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... as well as in form, and took no important step in life without paternal consent. The boys ran rather wild in their youth, but settled down at the approach of middle life; the oldest inheriting the few or barren paternal acres; the younger sons equally noble, and thus debarred from lucrative occupations, pushing their fortunes in the army. The girls were married young or went into a convent. Marriages were arranged ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... at him. When she was alone with her father she was conscious of her poor little barren favoriteship, though she dared not impose upon it. In the candle-light his harsh, rugged features stood out marked with ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... rock, a rock, but you must have known what chance you had of pushing it down when you sent all those light fancies and free-leaves, and refusals-to-hold-responsible, to do what they could. It is a rock; and may be quite barren of good to you,—not large enough to build houses on, not small enough to make a mantelpiece of, much less a pedestal for a statue, but it is real ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... Heaven such journies run, Earth sitting still, when she alone receives The benefit. Consider, first, that great Or bright infers not excellence. The Earth, Though, in comparison of Heaven, so small, Nor glistering, may of solid good contain More plenty than the Sun that barren shines, Whose virtue on itself works no effect, But in the fruitful Earth; there first received, His beams, inactive else, their vigour find, Yet not to Earth are those bright luminaries Officious, ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... a rugged and barren setting for love's interchange, and yet these two young souls faced each other, across the disabled old man, with spirits fused in mutual understanding. Helen's face softened and her eyes expressed the gratitude ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... the modern Pict's ignoble boast,[dy][122] To rive what Goth, and Turk, and Time hath spared:[6.B.] Cold as the crags upon his native coast, His mind as barren and his heart as hard, Is he whose head conceived, whose hand prepared. Aught to displace Athenae's poor remains: Her Sons too weak the sacred shrine to guard, Yet felt some portion of their Mother's pains,[7.B.] ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... said that "Isaac besought the Lord for his wife because she was barren; and He heard him and made Rebecca to conceive" (Gen. 25:21). But from that conception Jacob was born, and he was predestined. Now his predestination would not have happened if he had never been born. Therefore predestination can be furthered by ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... attained the rank and power of kings until about one hundred years before the birth of Cyrus. These pastoral and hunting people, frugal from necessity, brave from exposure, industrious from the difficulty of subsisting in a dry and barren country, for the most sort were just such a race as furnished a noble material for the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... swallowed him. He went out to drive, or to walk, or to work, and was seen no more. Search was vain and inquiry useless—aye, worse, it might involve the inquirer. The writ of habeas corpus was as yet a barren hypothesis. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... attempt at writin a Tail & it is far from bein perfeck, but if I have indoosed folks to see that in 9 cases out of 10 they can either make life as barren as the Desert of Sarah, or as joyyus as a flower garding, my object will have been ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 3 • Charles Farrar Browne |
