"Cheerless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... days hovering around that collection of law-enforcers, in imminent risk of capture. Each night in the open was more cheerless than the preceding one, and each day brought the same sense of futile effort at its close. Twice during that time the Police camp moved, and we had to be wary, for they scoured the surrounding territory ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... glories of our line: Our ancient castles echo to the clumsy feet of churls, The spinning Jenny houses in the mansion of our Earls. Sing not, sing not, my Angeline! in days so base and vile, 'Twere sinful to be happy, 'twere sacrilege to smile. I'll hie me to my lonely hall, and by its cheerless hob I'll muse on other days, and wish—and wish ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Colonel Ingersoll as follows: "I do not say that there is no God: I simply say I do not know. I do not say that there is no life beyond the grave: I simply say I do not know!" What pleasure could any man find in taking from a human, heart a living faith and putting in the place of it the cold and cheerless doctrine "I do not know"? Many who call themselves agnostics are really atheists; it is easier to profess ignorance than ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... away and destroyed, but the old chests still remain. There are seven in all, and they bear traces of great antiquity. Many have been strongly bound with iron, but all are now in a state of decay. This lonely cheerless room, strewn with antique fragments and suggestive of the boy-poet's day-dreams, is certainly the most interesting relic in Bristol. Its comfortless neglect is a true epitome of the life of him who first shaped his course ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... I pushed past, and left them looking at each other as, followed by Le Brusquet, I gained the door to the Queen's apartment. As we came up De Lorgnac himself appeared, and passed us into the anteroom. I well remembered that cheerless tomb through which I had passed a month ago; but now it was all glittering bright. The door of the Queen's cabinet was closed; but to the right folding doors—that I had not observed before—were open, giving a glimpse, ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... the thoughts of the Catamarans as they sat pondering upon that important question,—how they were to find food,—cheerless as the clouds of night that were now rapidly descending over the surface of the sea, and shrouding them ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... Buy all that is necessary to work skilfully with; adorn your house with all that will render it comfortable. Do not look at richer homes, and covet their costly furniture. If secret dissatisfaction is ready to spring up, go a step further and visit the homes of the suffering poor; behold dark, cheerless apartments, insufficient clothing, and absence of all the comforts and refinements of social life, and then turn to your own with a joyful spirit. You will then be prepared to meet your husband with a grateful heart, and be ready to appreciate the toil of ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... the diagram. On the whole, it is the best form of close-side tent I have found. It admits of a bright fire in front, without which a forest camp is just no camp at all to me. I have suffered enough in close, dark, cheerless, damp tents. ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... wandered, returning with a dogged persistence to that one thought, "Where is the last d'Artin?" "Where could I find him?" My restless eyes roamed round the cheerless room, coming always back to rest upon a long dust-covered mirror set in the wall ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... here to strangers, words nor looks impart The various movements of the suffering heart; Nor will that heart with those alliance own, To whom its views and hopes are all unknown. What, if no grievous fears their lives annoy, Is it not worse no prospects to enjoy? 'Tis cheerless living in such bounded view, With nothing dreadful, but with nothing new; Nothing to bring them joy, to make them weep, - The day itself is, like the night, asleep; Or on the sameness if a break be made, 'Tis by some pauper to his grave convey'd; By smuggled ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... whose lands surround thee: on this side, Gaetulian cities, an unconquered race, Numidians, reinless as the steeds they ride, And cheerless Syrtis hold thee in embrace; There fierce Barcaeans and a sandy space Wasted by drought. Why tell of wars from Tyre, A brother's threats? Well know I Juno's grace And heaven's propitious auspices conspire To find for Trojans here ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... the abstract lines of the face have little nobleness and the colour is wan. For with Botticelli she too, though she holds in her hands the "Desire of all nations," is one of those who are neither for God nor for his enemies; and her choice is on her face. The white light on it is cast up hard and cheerless from below, as when snow lies upon the ground, and the children look up with surprise at the strange whiteness of the ceiling. Her trouble is in the very caress of the mysterious child, whose gaze ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... through endless lines of dingy houses; and I nothing, an atom in the confusion, a grain of dust on the great chariot wheel of society, a lonely and obscure struggler in the mighty current of human life, which rolled along the sullen channels of the most cheerless, however it might ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... pattering on the skylight, now lighter, now heavier, till within an hour of sunset, when it ceased, and a light breeze began to unroll the thick fogs from off the landscape, volume after volume, like coverings from off a mummy,—leaving exposed in the valley of the Lias a brown and cheerless prospect of dark bogs and of debris-covered hills, streaked this evening with downward lines of foam. The seaward view is more pleasing. The deep russet of the interior we find bordered for miles along the edge of the bay with a many-shaded fringe of green; and the smooth ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... As the Spaniards huddled round their wretched bivouacs, with such scanty fuel as they could glean, and almost without food, they waited in gloomy silence the approach of morning. Yet the morning light, which gleamed coldly on the cheerless waste, brought no joy to them. It only revealed more clearly the extent of their wretchedness. Still struggling on through the winding Puertos Nevados, or Snowy Passes, their track was dismally marked by fragments of dress, broken harness, golden ornaments, ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... air they breathed was rank with fetid odors bred of the gaunt dark warehouses that lined their way; the lights were few; beneath the looming buildings the shadows were many and dense. Here and there dreary and cheerless public houses appeared, with lighted windows conspicuous in a lightless waste. From time to time, as they hurried on, they encountered, and made wide detours to escape contact with knots of wayfarers—men debased and begrimed, with dreary and slatternly women, ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... years when my income has been sufficient to warrant me in buying any thing I desire for personal comfort, I often think of the cheerless experiences of that winter. And I can truthfully say that my heart goes out to the homeless and destitute, and I am always willing to extend a helping hand to those who show a ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... overcome by emotion. Bernard, having relighted the candle, stood gazing at her with an abashed air. In a moment or two the shovelling ceased, and they could hear the old man, totally unconscious of the witnesses to his good deed, slowly ascending to his cheerless ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... he shook himself free from his cheerless retrospect. There was a thing or two he wanted to get from his desk, and his time was growing very short. He found what he wanted, and then, just as he was about to close the drawer, his eye fell on ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... was stiff and sore; the branches of fir under her hurt her through the canvas and one blanket which covered them. She turned, twisting into a position of less discomfort. The creek babbled and splashed; its voice merged with the wilds into a bleak, cheerless duet. ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... had been taken off, he was set down on the floor near a warm chimney in rather a bare and cheerless attic, and left to ...
— The Story of a White Rocking Horse • Laura Lee Hope
... one," cried Monime, "why must you think of leaving our lovely Alexandria, of going back to cold, cheerless Rome? What good thing does Rome send out but stern ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... company; first, that his accommodations are generally better, and the charges not subject to the caprice of the landlord; and, secondly, for the sake of society; for what on earth can be more horrible than to be shut up in a lone room, a stranger in a provincial town, to eat, drink, and pass the cheerless hour, a prey to solitude ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... two benedictines,' cried Frank, and they relapsed into their chairs. But a half-hour passed and the grey cloud was thicker and the rain more heavy. The cheerless leaden river flowed slowly under drifting skies. Beyond an expanse of shining pavement the great black ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... blossom, the whole would present a harmonious effect. It would be hard to conceive of a more attractive sight than that presented by all those bulbs in full bloom in early April, when every thing else looked barren and cheerless. They were admired by every one who saw them. Bulbs of this character bloom and pass away in season to allow room for other plants to be set out. These may be set between the rows of bulbs, and not disturb them in the least. ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... day, the thrice blessed words of St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Corinthians, which they hear at the burial of those whom they love and lose. Oh, blessed news for us, and for those we love; those without whose company the world to come would be lonely and cheerless to us. For now we can say, Tell me not that as the beast dies, so dies the man. Tell me not that as Adam died because of sin, so must I die, and all I love. Tell me not that it is the universal law of nature that all things born in time must die in time; ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... mercantile house, started from that city in the early train for Boston, whither he had been despatched to arrange some business matters that needed the presence of a representative of the firm. It chanced to be his first journey of any extent; but the day was cheerless and gloomy, and the novelty of travel, which would otherwise have been attractive, was not especially agreeable. After exhausting the enlivening resources of a package of morning papers, which at that time overflowed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... all to come. Not yet (with us) have the kindly old bars, reverend in their attenuation, been restored to their time-honoured throne; not yet have the dingy festoons of pink and white paper disappeared from the garish mantel. Still desolate and cheerless shows the noble edifice. The gaunt chimney yawns still in sick anticipation of deferred smoke. The "irons," innocent of coal, and polished to the tip, skulk and cower sympathetically into the extreme corner of the fender. The very rug seems ghastly and grim, wanting the kindly play of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... summer, will never become too dry for the health of the vine. It is a sad spectacle to see the hopes of a whole summer frustrated by one cold night; to see the vines which promised an abundant crop but the day before, browned and wilted beyond all hopes of recovery, and the cheerless prospect before you, that it may occur every spring; or to see the finest crop of grapes, when just ripening, scorched and wilted by just one night's frost, fit for nothing but vinegar. Therefore, look well ...
— The Cultivation of The Native Grape, and Manufacture of American Wines • George Husmann
... an A-tent; but, if you prefer two, be sure that one at least is nicely fitted and well provided with tapes or buttons, or both: otherwise you will have a cheerless tent in windy and rainy weather. The door-flap is usually made of a strip of cloth six to nine inches wide, sewed to the selvage of the breadth that laps inside; the top of it is sewed across the inside of the other breadth, and reaches to ...
— How to Camp Out • John M. Gould
... pleasure and pain! I had heard of it as I had heard of manna or of ambrosia, but no further. How unmeaning a sound it was at that time! what solemn chords does it now strike upon my heart! what heart-quaking vibrations of sad and happy remembrances! It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and cheerless; and a duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy Sunday in London. My road homeward lay through Oxford Street, and near the "Pantheon" I saw a druggist's shop. The druggist (unconscious minister ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... disappointment, no desolation, no despair. The path before him was a very humble one, indeed, but he resolved to tread it royally. Because the high places and the beautiful things of earth were not for him was no reason why he should sit and mourn his fate in cheerless inactivity. He determined to be up and doing, with the light and energy that he had, looking constantly ahead for more. He knew that in America there is always something better for the very humblest toiler to anticipate, and that, with courage, hope, and high endeavor ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... ordains We seek the black Cocytus' stream, That languid strays thro' dreary plains, Where cheerless fires perpetual gleam; Where the fell Brides their fruitless toil bemoan, And Sisyphus uprolls ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... small animals pattered across his path to people the solitude in place of human companions. The boy had few comrades. He wandered about playing his lonesome little games, and, when these were finished, returned to the small and cheerless cabin. Once, when asked what he remembered about the War of 1812 with Great Britain, he replied: "Only this: I had been fishing one day and had caught a little fish, which I was taking home. I met ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... no cheerfulness, or happiness, or even melancholy pleasure among the inmates of Ferdia's camp that night: they were all cheerless, and sorrowful, and low in spirit; for they knew that whenever those two champions, those two slayers of hundreds met, one of the two must fall in that place, or that both of them should fall: and if one only was to fall they ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... gets awfully pessimistic about the future of the universe; but I don't wonder, with such a cheerless life as he leads. He looked today as though his own nervous system was shattered. He had been splashing about in the rain since five this morning, when he was called to a sick baby case. I made him sit down and have some tea, and we had a nice, cheerful talk ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... before the magistrate on January 30. To avoid excitement, both on the part of the prisoner and the public, the court sat in one of the corridors of the Town Hall. The scene is described as dismal, dark and cheerless. The proceedings took place by candlelight, and Peace, who was seated in an armchair, complained frequently of the cold. At other times he moaned and groaned and protested against the injustice with which he was being treated. But the absence of any audience rather ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... of cheerless gloom, How glowing is the dye Of the crimson robe thou dost assume, Though it only be to die; Like the red men who, long years ago, Reposed beneath thy shade, And wore a smiling lip and brow On the pyre ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... continued on my way to Mr. Lovyes' house. It was a long building of a brownish granite, under Merchant's Point, at the northern extremity of Old Grimsey Harbour. Mr. Lovyes was sitting over his walnuts in the cheerless solitude of his dining-room—a frail old gentleman, older than his years, which I took to be sixty or thereabouts, and with the air of a man in a decline. I unfolded my business forthwith, but I had not got far ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... he passed there in inaction and exile, locked up in the cheerless bay, with the feverish desire to go out and fight and slay, for ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... painfully resumed his seat the old look returned. As the close of the Conference approached, I saw him several times with his head bent over the back of the pew. It was on an evening very near the close. The rays of the westering March sun shone through the windows with a cold, cheerless light. His name was called. He raised his head. His face was flushed. He struggled to his feet and with his crutches hobbled around the aisle to the front of the pulpit, where he stood, balancing himself on his crutches. And then the story ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... had a chill which was followed by a fever and there was much pain and swelling in the knee that was hit. A ranch house, if it happens to be a "stag camp" as ours was, is a cheerless place in which to be sick, but everything considered, I was fortunate in that it was not worse. By the liberal use of hot water and such other simples as the place afforded I was soon better; but not until after several months' ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... sages were men of acute and patient thought; but their attempt to solve the problem of the divine and human natures, of human destiny and duty, has ended in total failure. Each system baseless, and all mutually conflicting; systems cold and cheerless, that frown on love and virtuous exertion, and speak of annihilation or its equivalent, absorption, as our highest hope: such is the poor result of infinite speculation. "The world by wisdom knew ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... in our neighborhood had fallen into the unillumined dumps. An ominous mournfulness, far sadder than the pensiveness of twilight, drew over the sky. Clouds, that donned brilliancy for the fond parting of mountain-tops and the sun, now grew cheerless and gray; their gay robes were taken from them, and with bended heads they fled away from the sorrowful wind. In western glooms beyond the world a dreary gale had been born, and now came wailing like one that for all his weariness may not rest, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... pleasure. But they unquestionably are The child on a holiday will eat a bun with only three currants in it with three times more pleasure than he will eat a frankly plain bun A suet pudding without currants or raisins is prison fare, barren to the eye and cheerless: let but an infrequent currant or raisin peep from the mass and it is a pudding for a birthday. So universal is the passion for currants as an aid to pleasure that during the past three weeks the only matter that rivalled in general ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... better, if the apartment boasted a larger dining room. But there are three girls in my Sunday School class that can't possibly go home this year, and I've no doubt you boys could find somebody that won't be invited anywhere. Thanksgiving is such a cheerless place in a boarding house! If we ask a few young people in for a party in the evening, it will liven things up a bit for them, and I think it will be pretty good fun for us, ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... hope of securing results denied to their kind by a common destiny; but Faust proves infinitely the meaner of the two, since he desires only to restore his youth, that he may engage in the mere mad joy of a lusty existence for a few years, while Septimius seeks some mode, however austere and cheerless, of prolonging his life through centuries of world-wide beneficence. Yet the satanically refined egoism which lays hold of Septimius is the same spirit incarnated in Goethe's Mephistopheles,—der ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... arm about her waist beneath it; but she was conscious that she rather suffered this than derived any satisfaction from it. She strove to assure herself that she was jaded with the journey, which was, in fact, the case, and that the lowering sky, and the cheerless waste they were crossing, had occasioned the dejection she felt, which was also possible. There was not a tree upon the vast sweep of bleached grass which ran all round her to the horizon. It was inexpressibly lonely, a lifeless desolation, with only the ploughed-up ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... Except the little his father had left him he had scarcely a shilling in the world, and the future looked very dreary and desolate on that first evening in April, when the once fashionable and fastidious Neil McPherson took possession of his cheerless rooms on Abingdon Road, and threw himself down upon the hair-cloth sofa with an ache in his head and an ache in his heart as he thought of all the past, and remembered the sweet-faced girl who had once been there, and who had left there ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... ground and known as the forest of Waltham. Although light still lingered, a gloom was gathering over the countryside, and within the precincts of the forest the first shades of evening warned the horsemen that ere many hours the cheerless twilight which prevailed in England at that period of the year, would find them outside the ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
... the agony and the struggle of which she is the innocent victim, if the devotion, the disguise, and the hope of Leonora, the wife, were not for ever before us, the interest of the prison-opera would flag and wane into a cheerless and incurable melancholy. This Mme. Schroeder-Devrient took care that it should never do. From her first entry upon the stage, it might be seen that there was a purpose at her heart, which could make the weak strong and the timid brave; ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... Him, and sent back to life to do honor to His death. Not by ointments and spices, however precious, nor at the rock-hewn tomb, could they best remember their Lord; but out in the world, which that morning had seemed so cold and cheerless, and in their lives, which then ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... the cheerless, mist-laden skies, the engine well throttled back and running as smoothly as any engine could. To make sure that all was in perfect working order, they circled for ten minutes over the town, trying the different controls, then turned ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... came to Pollyanna then. What to her was perilously near a second deluge—but according to Mrs. Carew was merely "the usual fall rains"—brought a series of damp, foggy, cold, cheerless days, filled with either a dreary drizzle of rain, or, worse yet, a steady downpour. If perchance occasionally there came a day of sunshine, Pollyanna always flew to the Garden; but in vain. Jamie was never there. It was the middle of November now, and even the Garden itself was ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... Byron in disguise, and idly "disclaimed" all connection, it was true that he had intended to draw a fictitious character, a being whom he may have feared he might one day become, but whom he did not recognize as himself. He was not sated, he was not cheerless, he was not unamiable. He was all a-quiver with youth and enthusiasm and the joy of great living. He had left behind him friends whom he knew were not "the flatterers of the festal hour"—friends whom he returned to mourn and nobly celebrate. Byron was not Harold, but Harold was an ideal ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... night. The moon shines and the stars glimmer in the midst of a serene but cheerless sky; the sharp whistlings of the north wind, that fatal, dry, and icy breeze, ever and anon burst forth in violent gusts. With its harsh and cutting breath, it sweeps Montmartre's Heights. On the highest point of the hills, a man is standing. His long shadow is cast upon the stony, moon-lit ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... gasps, like a great deal of bath-water running out of an ill-constructed tub. Mr. Silver also wept, as a business man may, in a series of sniffs interspersed with silk handkerchief; you know the kind. Altogether it was a most cheerless affair. I seemed to be the only person present who was not in tears; but I really didn't see anything to cry about, so far as I was concerned, though I felt ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... line and in bivouac spent the most cheerless Christmas Day within their memories. Not only in the storm-swept hills but on the Plain the day was bitterly cold, and the gale carried with it heavy rain clouds which passed over the tops of mountains ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... cheerless morning. Gusts of fine, sprinkling rain drove hither and thither on a blustering wind, while overhead hung a leaden sky with patches of black cloud ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... hours of the night as they slowly passed. Then the dawn came. The side-lights showed fainter and fainter in the water; the light on the mast shed no rays on the deck, but twinkled uselessly behind its glass. Then the mate turned his gaze from the wet, cheerless deck and heaving seas to the figure in the boat dragging behind. The skipper, who returned his gaze with a fierce scowl, was holding his wet handkerchief to his temple. He removed it as the mate looked, and showed a ghastly wound. Still, neither of them spoke. The ...
— Sea Urchins • W. W. Jacobs
... The van of the army was narrow and kept to the path, but the men behind were straggling all over the hillside. Another minute and he would be discovered. The thought was cheerless. It was true that he was an islander and friendly to the Persian, but up on the heights who would listen to his tale? He would be taken for a spy, and one of those thirsty spears would drink his blood. It must be farewell to Delphi for the moment, he thought, or farewell to Lemnos for ever. ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... consuls reside in summer, with many of the wealthier Khaniotes, and the only place in the vicinity where the summer can be passed in comfort. A few houses are fitted with European improvements, but the greater part are the simple and cheerless residences of the Cretan peasant, furnished with the merest necessities of existence. Even here, in the most prosperous of the villages I have been in, life is, for most of the people, only a struggle against ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... always spoke kindly, referring to him as "Pa Hawkins." His nature was not suited to farm life, however, and he finally made up his mind to see more of the world, hence without ever having disclosed his resolution to any one, he quietly walked away one dark and cheerless night, carrying in a small box under his arm all that he then possessed, and leaving behind him the friends of his childhood in the only place he had ever known as his home, thus entering upon the active struggle of life at thirteen years of age, without friends, ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... over the hills to Ain al Baidah in cold and cheerless guise. The villagers crowded round to stare at us in the familiar fashion. But there were grim looks and dark scowls among them, and, failing the truculent and determined bearing of Salam and the presence of the kaid we should have had a lively ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... gorging themselves on the solid eatables, a frost at Christmas is very pleasant. Poor people cowering in their rags before the door of a union, cold, hungry, and forlorn, or munching their dry bread in some cheerless garret, may not perhaps so fully appreciate its advantages; but then we all know that poor people never are contented, and seldom understand the fitness of things. Here in Paris, the numbed soldiers out in the open fields, and the women and children, who have no fires and hardly ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... soothing, rest-giving darkness that night, but instead there was a hazy, cheerless, unnatural light, so even was there no rest-giving darkness—ignorance—for Nekhludoff's soul. Everything was clear. It was plain that all that is considered important and useful is really insignificant and wicked, and that all that splendor and luxury were ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... row on board the ship, he said, between Captain Dinks and Moody, he was about to slip forward to join Snowball in the galley to have a warm, for he found it cold in his pantry; and, besides, he had no one to speak to there, and he felt dull and cheerless. ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... repulsive piece of work it certainly is; crude and cheerless, but marked with signs of unmistakable power. At the time when I made the extracts for the Appendix, I thought that Cyril Tourneur might possibly be the author. On further reflection, it seemed to me that the stronger passages are much in Marston's manner. The horrid scene ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... a brown glen, in the cheerless depths of which a brown watercourse, a shade lighter, was running, and occasionally foaming like brown beer. Beyond it heaved an arid bulk of hillside, the scant vegetation of which, scattered like ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... you alone will be the theme of my constant meditations—my fervent prayers. In my hopeless solitude, I may perhaps feel one glimpse of consolation;—the idea that you may be happy, and that even in the glittering scenes of ambition, you will sometimes revert to the cheerless abode of Theodora. This will afford me some solace in my affliction. And when the hand of death releases me from my odious chains, your tears will tenderly fall on the grave of her, whose greatest crime was that ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... deep sleep with a light heart. For Jerry Foster, as he faced his own certain death, had seen certain things. It was the end—that was one fact he couldn't evade. But he grinned cheerfully, all by himself in that strange cheerless room, as he thought of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... Harry called from the lab, with the usual despondent message that he would not be home for supper. Melinda said a few resigned things about cheerless dinners eaten alone, hinted darkly what lonesome wives sometimes did for company, and Harry said he was very sorry, but this might be it, and Melinda hung up on ...
— Teething Ring • James Causey
... immediately before the battle. The reinforcement was numerically small; but the gallant spirit of the men who composed it must have made it of tenfold value to the Athenians: and its presence must have gone far to dispel the cheerless feeling of being deserted and friendless, which the delay of the Spartan succours was calculated to create among the ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... a man is in any trouble or anxiety; if so, in this respect it may be said to be next door to the beer-barrel, or to the use of spirits. If one man may soothe his feelings with this narcotic, another may stimulate them, when he is low and cheerless, with alcohol. The Apostle James says, "Is any merry, let him sing psalms." He does not say, Is any afflicted or low, let him smoke and drink! No; "let him pray," and depend upon God. Many a lesson which might be learned from God on our knees, is let slip altogether because we think ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... prairie-dogs? To what use could we ever hope to put these great deserts or those endless mountain ranges, impenetrable and covered to their very base with eternal snows? What can we ever hope to do with that Western coast, a coast of three thousand miles, rock-bound, cheerless, uninviting, and not a harbour on it. Mr. President, I will never vote one cent from the public treasury to place the Pacific Coast one inch nearer to Boston than it ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... It was a cheerless-looking house, painted a garish yellow, having staring windows, and devoid of a front porch, or slightest attempt at shade to render its uncomely front less unattractive. Hampton could scarcely refrain from forming a mental picture of the woman ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... this carpet of slime, there are no weeds, or as we might call them sea-vegetables, for they cannot live altogether without light, so the creatures which have their home in what to us would seem this cheerless, miserable retreat, must live on one another. They are differently built from surface fish, because they have always resting upon them the weight of an enormous pile of water. Picture a pyramid of water two miles high resting ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... granting that we were still in the neighborhood of the island, why should not Augustus have visited me and informed me of the circumstance? Pondering in this manner upon the difficulties of my solitary and cheerless condition, I resolved to wait yet another twenty-four hours, when, if no relief were obtained, I would make my way to the trap, and endeavour either to hold a parley with my friend, or get at least a little ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... event left him alone in the world. There was none willing to assume the burden of bringing up the lonely little pilgrim, and he was sent to the poorhouse. It was a hard fate for the tender child to be removed from the endearments of a mother's love, and placed in the cheerless asylum which public charity provides for the ...
— Try Again - or, the Trials and Triumphs of Harry West. A Story for Young Folks • Oliver Optic
... hot day on the coast railway of Maine. Notwithstanding the high temperature, the country seemed cheerless, the sunlight to fall less genially than in more fertile regions to the south, upon a landscape stripped of its forests, naked, and unpicturesque. Why should the little white houses of the prosperous ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... river could, at least, be crossed by a bridge. A few gaunt willows creep timorously down its sandy sides; at the very bottom, which is dry and yellow as copper, lie huge slabs of argillaceous rock. A cheerless position, there's no denying, yet all the surrounding inhabitants know the road to Kolotovka well; they go there often, and are ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... familiar furniture in its accustomed place, endeavoring to make the house look as if all were well. But they could not bring back the one who had made this house home, and to the children it was a dreary, lonely place. Fearfully they crept out-of-doors, only to find it as cheerless there. ...
— The Hero of Hill House • Mable Hale
... there was a garden behind it, and a billiard saloon, but these luxuries were not gratuitous; poor Freckle could not even pay his one sou per diem to cook his rations, so that the Prisoners' Relief Association had to make him a present of it. He spent his time between his bare, cheerless bedroom and the public hall. There were many Americans in the place; but none of them were friendly with him when he was found to have no cash. Yet he heard them speak together of their countrymen who had lain in the same jail years before. Yonder ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... here, then. I should make a miserable sick nurse. I will ask young Fenton, here, if it is reasonable to expect me to bury myself in such a cheerless place when it will do ...
— The Erie Train Boy • Horatio Alger
... said, and how we hugged one another, and how desperately we tried to be cheerful, I need not relate. I was utterly miserable. My only friend, the only friend I had, was going from me, leaving me in this cheerless place all alone. I would have given worlds to return with her. Mr Ladislaw stood by as ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... perks His restless black eye here and there, in search Of crumbs, or shelter from the icy breath Of wild winds rushing from the Polar sea: For now November, with a brumal robe, Mantles the moist and desolated earth; Dim sullen clouds hang o'er the cheerless sky, And ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... know, and need to know, so little; avoiding the bright, crowded, and momentous fields of life where destiny awaits us. Upon the average book a writer may be silent; he may set it down to his ill-hap that when his own youth was in the acrid fermentation, he should have fallen and fed upon the cheerless fields of Obermann. Yet to Mr. Matthew Arnold, who led him to these pastures, he still bears a grudge. The day is perhaps not far off when people will begin to count "Moll Flanders," ay, or "The Country Wife," more wholesome and more pious diet than ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... realize the hideous ferocity of such a state of society as this; the women were as bad as the men, furious beldames, dangerous as wild beasts, without pity, without shame, without remorse; and finding life so cheerless, so hopeless, so very very dark and miserable, that when there was nothing to be gained by killing any one else they ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... less the degrading humiliation to which was submitting itself a strong brigade of British troops, whose arms were still in the soldiers' hands, and over whose ranks hung banners blazoned with victories that shall be memorable down the ages. On the sombre and cheerless Christmas Day Pottinger rose in the council of men who wore swords, and remonstrated with soldierly vigour and powerful argument against the degrading terms which the chiefs had contumeliously thrown to them. He produced letters from Jellalabad and Peshawur giving information ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... this example, his men worked with a will at this cheerless task, and in spite of darkness, heat, thirst, and the suffocating atmosphere, never was a well sunk more quickly. At the same time it was not half completed when so serious a fire broke out on the roof that the entire remaining stock ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... cheerful crackling noises the while; but its warmth and brightness are as evanescent as love's young dream. And your solid log has a certain irritating inertness. It is an absentee fuel, spending its fire up the chimney, and after its youthful clouds of glory turns but a cheerless side of black and white char towards the room. And, above all, the marital mind is strangely exasperated by the log. Smite it with the poker, and you get but a sullen resonance, a flight of red sparks, a sense of an unconquerable toughness. It is worse than coke. The crisp ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... of Lady Anne's confidence for the moment had almost deserted her. The girl's face was invisible and the interior of the passage looked cheerless. Nevertheless, she answered briskly. ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... washed her face, and made an effort to powder away the evidence of her grief. Then she went bravely down and faced the silent crowd in the breakfast room. No one was eating anything. The very air smote chill and cheerless as she entered. As if he had been lying in wait for her, Fisher pounced upon ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... and all that allowed them as so much taken from the family; and they seek in every way to get from them as much and to give them as little as possible. Their rooms are the neglected, ill-furnished, incommodious ones,—and the kitchen is the most cheerless and comfortless place in the house. Other families, more good-natured and liberal, provide their domestics with more suitable accommodations, and are more indulgent; but there is still a latent spirit of something like contempt for the position. That they treat ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... chill was gathering in the air, and he fancied she spoke through set teeth. The charm was melting away and the moon, rising above the tops of the maples, seemed cheerless and cold. But he could not be unfriendly; she had had a lot to upset her. He had read about Claybrook in the paper and while the news had caused him no discomfort—if anything quite the contrary—still, it was different now. She was alone in that bleak, staring house, alone with ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... forest chamber into a snug home-like place, and fills the mind with agreeable, home-like feelings and meditations. It seemed as if the spirit, in the one case, were set loose and etherealized to enable it to spread itself over the plains of cold, cheerless, illimitable space, and left to dwell upon objects too wide to grasp, too indistinct to comprehend; while, in the other, it is recalled and concentrated upon matters circumscribed and congenial, things of which it has long been ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... hours of the westward journey from Winnipeg to Regina in daylight, the daylight of a wet and cheerless Sunday. The car was half-empty, in possession of a family of small children and some theatrical ladies and gentlemen from the United States, travelling on 'one night stands,' who were collectively called 'The World-Renowned Barbary Pirates.' We jogged limply from little village to little ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... scattered over the face of the angry deep. Scarcely could their souls cling to their bodies while they struggled with the winds and waves. When the long, long night came to an end, in the grey and cheerless dawn Finola swam to the rock of Carricknarone. But no swans were there, only the greedy gulls that sought after wreckage, and the terns that ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... me down gently, Honor," he said, with a rather cheerless smile. "And you may as well save yourself the trouble. Only—this is where you must not misunderstand me, please,—no shadow of blame attaches to Ladybird if she isn't happy. I had no right to bring her ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... the welcome shone. Its gleams and sparkles positively pursued him as he turned his face towards the road and his own dark, cheerless house. Perhaps he had better, on the whole, keep one lamp burning in the lower part after this, to show that the ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of all that is or could be good and great and lovely in human experience; and yet, if He did not rise again from the tomb, it would, after all, be only a dead thing—like a splendid specimen of carved marble in some grand museum, exquisite to look upon, and of priceless value, but cold and cheerless, lifeless ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... in the month of January, a drizzling rain storm blowing from the south-west, a cheerless sky, a dull, threatening atmosphere, together with almost impassable roads,—these are the chilling and uninviting circumstances with which, if we pay regard to truth, we must introduce our narrative to our readers. It is usual, with writers of fiction and romance, to preface their literary ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... gathered o'er New Brunswick, and the snow was falling, as in that clime it only knows how to fall. The atmosphere was like the face of Sterne's monk, "calm, cold, and penetrating," and the faint tinkling of the sleigh bells came mournfully on the ear as a knell of sadness—so utterly cheerless was the scene. Another hour passed, and our journey was ended. The open door of the hospitable dwelling was ready to receive us, and in the light and heat of a happy home, toil and trouble ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... umbrellas, and their smoke and drizzle and dirt, he could not help saying to himself, "My poor Sheila!" It was not a pleasant place surely to live in always, although it might be all very well for a visit. Indeed, this cheerless day added to the gloomy fore-bodings in his mind, and it needed all his resolve and his pride in his own diplomacy to carry out his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... tell whether the thing has been found that people have gone to look for by the sound of their feet as they return. Mabel's feet said "No go" as plain as they could speak. And her face confirmed the cheerless news. ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... smouldered, emitting foul odours; wells were completely choked, fountains were dried at their sources. The statues of monarchs which had adorned the Exchange, were smashed; that of its founder, Sir Thomas Gresham, alone remaining entire. The ruins of St. Paul's, with its walls standing black and cheerless, presented in itself a most melancholy spectacle. Its pillars were embedded in ashes, its cornices irretrievably destroyed, its great bell reduced to a shapeless mass of metal; whilst its general air of desolation was heightened by the fact that a few monuments, which had escaped destruction, ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... waning moon, When skies proclaim night's cheerless gloom, On tower, fort, or tented ground, The sentry walks his lonely round; And should a footstep haply stray Where caution marks the guarded way, Who goes there? Stranger, quickly tell, A friend. The ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... below, Outward fightings, inward fears; Ate the cheerless bread of woe,— Drank the bitter wine of tears:— Now receive and love them! By Thy holy Saints' departures, By the witness of Thy martyrs, Spread Thy wings above them. On the souls in gloom who ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... custom among the grandees of Asia, to entertain story-tellers of both sexes, who like the bards of ancient Europe, divert them with tales, and little histories, mostly on the subject of bravery and love. These often amuse the women, and beguile the cheerless hours of the harem, by calling up images to their minds which their eyes are forever ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... out of the ruined tower; the thistle waves its beard to the wandering gale; and the strings of his harp seem, as the hand of age, as the tale of other times, passes over them, to sigh and rustle like the dry reeds in the winter's wind! The feeling of cheerless desolation, of the loss of the pith and sap of existence, of the annihilation of the substance, and the clinging to the shadow of all things as in a mock embrace, is here perfect. In this way, the lamentation of Selma for the loss of Salgar ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing moil of a galley slave, brought me to my sixteenth year; a little before which period I first committed the sin of rhyme. You know our country custom of coupling a man and woman together as partners in the labours of harvest. ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... to build that side, the back of a house being frequently obstructed. In the case of house No. 1 there was a clear take-off on the north side, also with the stable. Houses are generally built to face the road, quite irrespective of the aspect, which custom is the origin of many cheerless dwellings. I think that house-martin fledglings and eggs are capable of enduring the utmost heat of our English summer, and the nests found deserted were abandoned for some other reason. More likely that the ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... on the land—glorious, beautiful moonlight. On Hagar's peaceful grave it falls, and glancing from the polished stone shines across the fields upon the old stone house, where all is cheerless now, and still. No life—no sound—no bounding step—no gleeful song. All is silent, all is sad. The light of the household has departed; it went with the hour when first to each other the lonesome servants ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... then, that the settlement was drawn up, Sally had slowly climbed the stairs to the floor above, and once in her little sitting-room, with the door closed behind her, she had seated herself upon the settee near the fireplace and gazed into the cheerless, unlighted fire with ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... is rarely navigated by ships from our world. [14] Then, besides the danger of a boisterous and unknown sea, who would relinquish Asia, Africa, or Italy, for Germany, a land rude in its surface, rigorous in its climate, cheerless to every beholder and cultivator, except a native? In their ancient songs, [15] which are their only records or annals, they celebrate the god Tuisto, [16] sprung from the earth, and his son Mannus, as the fathers and founders of their race. To Mannus ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... stood in considerable perturbation of mind on the cheerless third-floor landing that Sunday afternoon Mrs Love found small matter for comfort in her memory of the Friday evening. She remembered that old Mrs Duncomb had spoken complainingly of the lonesomeness which had come upon ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... A dull, cheerless day in the early part of December was merging into a stormy night as the west-bound express over one of the transcontinental railways, swiftly winding its way along the tortuous course of a Rocky Mountain canyon, suddenly paused before the long, low depot of a typical ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... passed rapidly under the arched canopy of beeches, the leaves of which, just touched by the first frost, were already falling from the branches, and, stamping their muddy feet on the outer steps, advanced into the vestibule. The wide corridor, flagged with black-and-white pavement, presented a cheerless aspect of bare walls discolored by damp, and adorned alternately by stags' heads and family portraits in a crumbling state of decay. The floor was thus divided: on the right, the dining-room and the kitchen; on the left, drawing-room and a billiard-hall. A stone ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... they drove up to the prison gate; and a mist beginning to gather above North Hessary, as at this time of year it often does after a clear morning. My grandfather, looking out from under the tilt of the cart, felt as he'd never felt before what a cheerless place it must seem to a new-comer, and his heart melted a little bit further towards the lad he ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... because of ignorance, to live an unsanitary and unhygienic existence. The care of home and children, and maybe the unappreciative and inconsiderate attention of a careless and vindictive husband, add to the incidental worries,—fraying her nerves and disposition,—of the ordinary routine of a cheerless, hopeless life. Add to this experience the enormous drain of frequent child bearing upon her vitality, and we have a picture with which every physician ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... to go away, but it was not easy for me to do that. I was dispirited and I dreaded the big, cheerless, chill rooms that I was so weary of. Sometimes when I had an ache or a pain as a child, I used to huddle up to my mother or my nurse, and when I hid my face in the warm folds of their dress, it seemed to me as though I were hiding from the pain. And in the ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov |
