"Comfortless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the graver and more decent sort, seem not seldom to be nearly destitute of religious resources. The Sunday is with them, to say the best of it, a heavy day; and that larger part of it, which is not claimed by the public offices of the church, dully drawls on in comfortless vacuity, or without improvement is trifled away in vain and unprofitable discourse. Not to speak of those who by their more daring profanation of this sacred season, openly violate the laws and insult the religion of their country, how little do many seem to enter into the spirit of ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... over at last, and the tired household was left to rest, and they awoke to a comfortless house next day. The boys helped to take out the boards and benches that had been used as seats, and to move back to their places the furniture that had been removed, and then the children went to ...
— The Inglises - How the Way Opened • Margaret Murray Robertson
... cold in the morning, there was no one to heat the stove, the watchman disappeared; the children came in as soon as it was light, bringing in snow and mud and making a noise: it was all so inconvenient, so comfortless. Her abode consisted of one little room and the kitchen close by. Her head ached every day after her work, and after dinner she had heart-burn. She had to collect money from the school-children for wood and for the watchman, and to give it ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... she drooped her weary head, Within that comfortless manger, It might have been a palace bed, With canopy of gold instead, So little did she ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... that she drew out something he had hardly dared think he possessed, but which made him more of a man. Once he harked back to the dust flower, saying that as its humble and heavenly bloom brightened the spots bereft of beauty so she cheered the lonely and comfortless places in his heart. He had said these things not as one who is in love, but as one who is grateful, only that between gratitude and love she had purposely kept from ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... spring and early summer with prairie-flowers; and a range of wooded hills in whose depths the richest coal-deposits lie lends a picturesque aspect to the scene, and partly compensates for the dreary look of the town itself, the comfortless appearance of many of the miners' houses and the great heaps of slag and refuse coal at the mouth of the mines. Mules hitched to little cars serve to draw the coal out of several of the mines, but the largest ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... All comfortless he stands; then, with a sigh: "'Tis so—Heaven wills it, and my hour is nigh. I deem'd Deiphobus had heard my call, But he secure lies guarded in the wall. A god deceived me; Pallas, 'twas thy deed, Death and black fate approach! 'tis ...
— The Story of Troy • Michael Clarke
... be pleased,'" she said; "'the old lady and gentleman will not object, I think; you will escape from a disorderly, comfortless home into a wealthy, respectable one; and you love Edgar, and Edgar loves you. All seems smooth and easy; where is ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... deny to do that good which thou oughtest, with what thy God hath given thee; then consider, that though he love thy soul, yet he can chastise; First, Thy inward man with such troubles, that thy life shall be restless and comfortless. Secondly, And can also so blow upon thy outward man, that all thou gettest shall be put in a bag with holes (Psa 89:31-33; Hag 1:6). And set the case he should licence but one thief among thy substance, or one spark of fire among thy barns, how quickly might that be spent ill, and against thy ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... period of feverish sleep I was awakened by a strange murmur, which, mixing with my dreams, had given me the comfortless idea of hearing the roar of the multitude at some of the horrid displays of the guillotine; and as I half opened my unwilling eyes, still heavy with sleep, I saw a long procession of figures, in flowing mantles and draperies, moving down the huge hall. A semicircle of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... helpers in building up new institutions. But away from these institutions and out of touch with the life of the towns, we find a class of people whose condition in itself is a Macedonian cry. Their windowless, stoveless, comfortless log cabins; their so-called schools, in which on the roughest benches conceivable, and without a desk, a slate, or a blackboard, with a teacher with unkempt hair, ragged and dirty clothes, possibly bare feet, who perhaps can scarcely ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 11, November, 1889 • Various
... depicted, but also in the use of symbolism after the manner of Zola: for the switching station, with its purposeless turmoil, its disquietude, its pulling and hauling, is a symbol for the noisy life in general, and in particular for the comfortless, hapless marriage in which a delicately organized artistic soul is worried to death. The fate of the woman who becomes the victim of a man is the theme of the succeeding novels, A Mother's Rights (1897) and Half Beast ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... To-morrow the Borysthenes May see our coursers graze at ease Upon his Turkish bank,—and never Had I such welcome for a river As I shall yield when safely there.[275] Comrades, good night!"—The Hetman threw 860 His length beneath the oak-tree shade, With leafy couch already made— A bed nor comfortless nor new To him, who took his rest whene'er The hour arrived, no matter where: His eyes the hastening slumbers steep. And if ye marvel Charles forgot To thank his tale, he wondered not,— The King had been ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... carrying of the cross, but it was also a happy wayfaring. It was a hard journey but not comfortless. Many of the pilgrims walked thousands of miles in Russia before finally embarking on the pilgrim boat. They walked solitarily, not in great bands, and they were poor. From village to village, from the Far North, Central ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... down here upon this bad and comfortless bed, and keep yourself quiet for a little. Maybe you'll get better soon. Oh, why did you drink, and ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... a detailed account of how we spent that night would be classed as wildly interesting; if memory serves me right, it was a bleak, hungry, comfortless passage of time, and I am willing to let it go at that. We managed to secure a buffalo steak for breakfast. No man needed to starve in that country during those days of plentiful game; but we were handicapped by the necessity of doing ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... snatch a few hours of rest, intending, when all was quiet, to steal away under cover of darkness. But when they rose at dead of night, and prepared to march, a shout from the Syracusan camp warned them that the enemy were on the alert, and they were compelled to return to their comfortless bivouac. Three hundred, however, persisted in their intention, and forcing their way through the Syracusan lines, gained for themselves a brief ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... valley I descry, Gleaming vermilion, as if they from fire Had issu'd." He replied: "Eternal fire, That inward burns, shows them with ruddy flame Illum'd; as in this nether hell thou seest." We came within the fosses deep, that moat This region comfortless. The walls appear'd As they were fram'd of iron. We had made Wide circuit, ere a place we reach'd, where loud The mariner cried vehement: "Go forth! The' entrance is here!" Upon the gates I spied More than a thousand, who of old from heaven Were hurl'd. With ireful ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... These shall the fury Passions tear, The vultures of the mind, Disdainful Anger, pallid Fear, And Shame that skulks behind; Or pining Love shall waste their youth, Or Jealousy, with rankling teeth, That inly gnaws the secret heart; And Envy wan, and faded Care, Grim-visaged, comfortless Despair, ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... war—dead sick of it. He is weary of the interminable procession of comfortless nights and days. He is weary of the sight of maimed and bleeding men—of the awful suspense of waiting for death. In the words of his pathetic little song, he does "want to go 'ome." But there is that within him which says, ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... if they remain true to each other, I would confidently back Terapia politics and manoeuvres against those of Buyukdere. The French palace is a spacious building, with beautiful and extensive gardens. That inhabited by the English ambassador, on the contrary, is small, comfortless, and with only ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... was a hole in the wall immediately beneath the eaves of the house that served the purpose of a window, over which a sack was nailed. "We are poor folk," said the landlord as they glanced round this comfortless garret, "but many great people have slept well here, as doubtless you will also," and he ...
— Fair Margaret • H. Rider Haggard
... sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... black solitude, our little circle of light maintained its independence, nor yielded to the invasion which had swallowed up all around it. Here was our Camp of Refuge, and here we felt snug, and secure, and at home; whilst all without our magic circle was comfortless and desolate. ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... Once more, after many months of waiting we rejoice in the gleam of its waters. The broad valley, which has so long been paved with white, is bottomed with amethyst now, the fainter reflection of the azure sky above. The trees which have so long stood comfortless again see their doubles in the waters below. The huge gray trunks of the water elms and the silver maples, the red rags of the birches and the delicate tracery of their spray, the ruby gold of the willows, the shining white of the sycamores, ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... revealed to him this wonderful secret. But the agony of those last few hours, and the gloomy words of the priest who leant over his bedside, had found their way in between the joints of the dying man's armour of secrecy. Word by word, the story had been wrested from him. In the cold and comfortless hour of death, the strong, worldly man felt his physical weakness loosen the iron bands of his will, and he became for a time almost like a child in the hands of the keen, swiftly-questioning priest. He had not found much comfort in the mumbled prayers and absolution, which were all ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... half of the paper to try and distract her mind from the noises over the hedge. But every head-line seemed to dart at her sore consciousness as if it were a snake's head with a sting in it. Murder. Unrest. Strikes. Dissatisfactions. Change. The whole outlook was indescribably comfortless and depressing to her. She felt something akin to the vague, apprehensive misery—beyond reason or common sense—which people feel during the rumble ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... them. To realize this, lose yourself, good reader, wander off a great distance from everywhere, and be benighted in a wild country, with nothing but your rifle and hunting-knife. You will then find yourself dinnerless, supperless, houseless, comfortless, sleepless, cold and miserable, if you do not know how to manage for yourself. You will miss your dinner sadly if you are not accustomed to fast for twenty-four hours. You will also miss your bed decidedly, and your toothbrush in the ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... in the cold night air; her old friends the stars, whose names she had learned before she knew her letters, did not leave her comfortless. They had unconsciously contributed to her gift for seeing life in long vistas. "When you are looking at the stars," Professor Kelton used to say, "you are not thinking of yourself." It was not of herself that ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... she was bending tenderly over the white, wrinkled face, which lay upon the small, scanty pillow. John thought "how small and scanty they were," while he almost shuddered at the sound of his footsteps upon the uncarpeted floor. Everything was dreary and comfortless, and his conscience reproached him that his old father should die so poor, when he counted his money ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... Garret not resigned? It was a cruel mistake, but it might have been worse, for hearts are deceitful, and what is false and baneful is apt to prove an edge-tool. Here was permanent estrangement, comfortless formality, cold, compulsory esteem; but there was no treachery in the household, no malignant hate, no ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... divine intervention, and of the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence, its denial of design and claim to explain everything by natural law, are also points of resemblance. Finally, the lesson he draws from this comfortless creed, not to sit with folded hands in silent despair, nor to "eat and drink for to-morrow we die," but to labour steadily for our greater good and to cultivate virtue in accordance with reason, equally free from ambition and sloth, is strikingly like ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... peril and dangers of this service at best, even in peace times, seamanship is a comfortless and cheerless calling. But in war, to the ordinary perils of the sea are added unusual hardships which reach their maximum in the dangers and perils of the war zone—the attack without warning of the invisible ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... destroys the seeds of which prosperity is the fruit. Wastefulness throws away the pennies, and so must go without the dollars which the pennies make. Years of health and strength spent in hand-to-mouth indulgence inevitably bear fruit in a comfortless old age. ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... "Where all is comfortless, there is at least this comfort. I had her life in my hands. By acting as I did, I have saved that life. This reflection shall be ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... from ages immemorial. The look of comparative civilization about these domiciles, doubtless the effect of the Portuguese and the slave trade, distinguishes them from the barbarous circular huts of the Kru-men, the rude clay walls of the Gold Coast, and the tattered, comfortless sheds of the Fernandian "Bube." They have not, however, that bandbox-like neatness which surprises the African traveller ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... distracted from the sermon, afterwards declared that it was an excellent and edifying exhortation, but I doubt if anyone else in Carlisle church tasted it much or gained much good therefrom. Certainly we of the King household did not. We could not even remember the text when we reached home. Felicity was comfortless. ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... beard and chin on thy breast; turn thy eyes and thy thoughts toward the middle of thy belly, the region of the navel; and search the place of the heart, the seat of the soul. At first, all will be dark and comfortless; but if you persevere day and night, you will feel an ineffable joy; and no sooner has the soul discovered the place of the heart, than it is involved in a mystic and ethereal light." This light, the production of a distempered fancy, the creature of an ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... smile upon them, and they saw but mirrors of their own sad lineaments—some laughed in mockery of their sorrows, as though they thought that mirth would come for asking; others, grown brutal by being caged, made up in noise what they lacked in peace. How comfortless they seemed! The only solace that the eye could trace ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 27, 1841 • Various
... their feet and made way for us good-naturedly enough; and we seated ourselves on the vacated bench, feeling—at least I may answer for myself—forlorn enough in the great dingy, dirty, comfortless hole into which we had been so unceremoniously thrust. Our new friend seated himself alongside Mr Southcott, and, first informing that gentleman that the company in which we found ourselves were the crews of sundry British merchantmen which had been captured by the Spaniards, ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... watching him for a minute or two. Man and horse were sharply outlined against the moonlit grass. Jernyngham looked very lonely as he rode out into the wilderness. He could hardly have been happy, Prescott thought, in his untidy and comfortless house at the farm; but, after all, it had been a home, and now he was rudely flung adrift. It was true that the man was largely responsible for the troubles that had fallen upon him, but this was no reason for refusing him pity, and Cyril had his strong ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... waste long nights in pensive discontent; To speed to day, to be put back to-morrow, To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow To have thy prince's grace, yet want her peers, To have thy asking, yet wait many years. To fret thy soul with crosses, and with care. To eat thy heart, thro' comfortless despair; To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run To spend, to give, to want, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... had already made a woman's survey of Mlle. d'Esgrignon's room; the cold, bare, comfortless chamber, that might have been a nun's cell, was like a picture of the life of the heroic woman before her. The Duchess saw it all—past, present, and future—with rising emotion, felt the incongruity of her ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... country they had to live in hovels and mud-wall cabins which bred death and disease and all the woeful miseries of mankind. One would not kennel a dog or house any of the lower animals in the vile abominations called human dwellings in which tens of thousands of God's comfortless creatures were huddled together in indiscriminate wretchedness. Added to that, most of them had not a "haggart" (a few perches of garden) on which to grow any household vegetables. They were landless and starving, the last ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... Archie rose and, without waking anybody, slipped out and made his way to his comfortless shanty. Those who love the forest know in how many tones it speaks, varying with the season and the force of the wind. When in full leaf and swayed by a summer breeze the sound is of falling water, of a phantom Niagara; in the winter, when the trees are bare, the Northwest blast ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... very religious man, and I'm cautious what I say. At noon, paid him a visit, and said, "Why, all the people are dead to day." He replied, "It's only for one day." I never saw a poor devil look so comfortless. He is an inveterate, eternal smoker, like all who boast to be of the same nation as the Imperial Osmanlis, the pipe is never out of his mouth; he therefore suffers more than any person in Ghadames. He was still busy, or affected to be, to kill time, weighing gold with his servants. I said, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... and desertion cloud the soul of friendship and trust, then it is that the heart turns toward the sheltering love of the Eternal, and finds rest in its silent peace. And whosoever comes to this Love is not turned away comfortless, is not pierced with anguish nor surrounded with gloom; and is never deserted in the ...
— The Way of Peace • James Allen
... not numerous nor were they well qualified for their work. School houses were at a great distance from most of the homes. They were both comfortless and cheerless. The snows were deep in winter and the weather was inclement. In summer, even little hands ...
— A Sketch of the History of Oneonta • Dudley M. Campbell
... and comfortless the room, so was Miss Sophie's lonely life. She rented these four walls from an unkempt little Creole woman, whose progeny seemed like the promised offspring of Abraham,—multitudinous. The flickering life in the ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... trust in him; if his names were pondered and considered, we would believe in him. Satan knows this, and therefore his great sleight and cunning is to hold our minds fixed on the consideration of our misery and desperate estate. He keeps the awakened conscience still upon that comfortless sight, and he labours to represent God by halves, and that it is a false representation of God. He represents him as clothed with justice and vengeance,—as a consuming fire, in which light a soul can see nothing but desperation written; and he labours to hold out the thoughts ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... dens in Spain, in Tetuan, and in Corsica—especially in Corsica, but then they are unpretentious inns in unfrequented villages, whereas in India you find in world-famous cities such as Agra or Delhi the most comfortless dens calling themselves hotels—hotels where you hardly dare eat half the food for fear of typhoid, and will not eat the rest because ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... captive by their clerical visitor. And well it might be so, for he was their true friend. And it mattered little to him that their dwelling was rude and comfortless, their clothing old and worn, and their manners uncultured. He loved them for his Master's sake, and for their souls' sake: for this he had left the elegances of his eastern home, and come out into the wilderness. He was a true man, and a true minister of Jesus Christ—seeking not a name, wealth, ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... all his abuses, excited the displeasure of her family, and they cast her from them to suffer and struggle on as best she might. She knew not as she had a relative in the world. She surely had no friend, save Willie, her little boy, with whom she dwelt in the comfortless abode we ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you forever; even the Spirit of truth; whom the world can not receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you." ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... her, and bear her merrily away. The organ-grinder, meanwhile, cheered by a copper shower from some adjacent balcony, turned the handle of his instrument more vigorously, letting loose stirring valse-tune and march upon the sultry air. Such music was, of necessity, somewhat comfortless hearing to Richard, debarred alike from deeds of arms or joy of dancing. His impatience increased. It was a little inconsiderate of his mother surely to detain Constance for so long! But just then the sound of women's voices reached him through the half-open door. The two ladies were leisurely descending ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... come. He soon discovered that he meant the miserable De Vallance, whom, as he had served in prosperity, he would not desert in his utmost need, though he alike detested his private and despised his public character. He described him as alone, pennyless, comfortless, without resources in himself, or help from others. His worthy son had not yet discovered the place of his confinement; he knew not what was become of his son, and among all the crimes which tortured his conscience, the supposed death of Eustace was most insupportable. Hopeless of pity, yet desperate ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... agreed to separate, and examine the country to the right and left for an hour precisely, meeting at one of the villages in the road, if no advance of the enemy were discernible within that time. We parted, and I commenced as comfortless an expedition as it would be easy to imagine. The Flemish cross-roads, never very passable, were now deep in mire; the rivulets, of which they are generally the conduits, had been swelled by the storm of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... blazing fire in an empty house. Most of all, they were terrified eyes. Maggie went back to her chair. After that, she sat there during the slow evolution of Eternity; Eternity unrolled itself before her, on and on and on, grey limitless mist and space, comfortless, lifeless, hopeless. She had been for many weeks leading a thoroughly unwholesome life in that old house with those old women. She did not herself know how unhealthy it had been, but she knew that she missed the wide fields and downs of Glebeshire, the winds that blew from ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... one so nearly allied to these dangerous people had found his little violet under the leaves where he had hoped that she was safely hidden. A sharp pang shot through his heart as the dread possibility rose before him of his delicate little girl being carried away to share the comfortless prison of his sister. Such treatment would most likely kill her very soon. For himself he would have ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... you seen the delightless abode, Where Penury nurses Despair; Where comfortless Life is a load, Age wishes no longer to bear. Ah! who, in this lazerhouse pent, His lone wailings sends up to the skies? 'Tis the Man whose young prime was mispent; 'Tis he ...
— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield
... awful wail that suddenly smites the stillness as with a blow? It seems like the wailing of all the lost souls of the war. It sounds like the crying of the more than five million sorrowing women there are left comfortless in Europe. It is the siren. An air-raid is on. The "alert" is sounding. The bombs begin to fall. The Boches have gotten over even before the barrage is up. Hell breaks loose for an hour. No battle on the front ever heard more terrific cannonading than the next hour. The barrage ...
— Soldier Silhouettes on our Front • William L. Stidger
... deceived thee in a mother's hopes, Posterity, the bliss of marriage? Thou hast no tongue to answer no or ay, But in red letters write,[373] For him I die. Curse on his traitorous tongue, his youth, his blood, His pleasures, children, and possessions! Be all his days, like winter, comfortless! Restless his nights, his wants remorseless![374] And may his corpse be the physician's stage, Which play'd upon stands not to honour'd age! Or with diseases may he lie and pine, Till grief wax blind his eyes, as grief doth ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... be Marjory's. If you can forgive the past, Hugh, make this your home. You shall not regret it, I promise you. I do believe I have laid that old ghost of jealousy at last. All I have is to be Marjory's. My old age would be comfortless indeed if I were doomed to spend it here alone. Perhaps that is what I deserve, but do give the old place a trial. The ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... ceremony to the bridegroom; the elderly members of his family would also exert their influence upon him, because it was believed that if they died prior to its performance their disembodied spirits would continue a comfortless existence about the scene of their mortal habitation, but if afterwards that they would go straight to heaven. When the rite was to be held a feast was given, the villagers sitting round a lighted lamp placed on a water-pot ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... eight, with one small grated window, facing the door. On the right of the window was a narrow bed, filling up that side of the cell; on the left was a rusty stove; that was all; there was no chair, no table, no strip of carpet on the cold stone floor; all was comfortless, desolate. ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... big boys with empty sacks over their heads and shoulders, gossiping gloomily against barn walls, and ill-conditioned pigs grunting for admission at closed kitchen doors, all looked soaked through and through together. Nothing, in short, could be more dreary and comfortless than our walk for the first two hours. But, after that, as we approached "Lizard Town," the clouds began to part to seaward; layer after layer of mist drove past us, rolling before the wind; peeps of faint greenish-blue sky appeared and ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... King," he said, "Our Lord does not leave us comfortless when He sends us sorrow. This is a great honour, greater than the crown that you bear, to bear the crown of thorns. That bitter passion of Christ that He bore for our salvation is wrought out in the Body which is His Church, ...
— The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary • Robert Hugh Benson
... However, I can only leave you to manage these things as you think best—or feel pleasantest to yourself. I am saddened by another kind of disorder, France is in everything so fallen back, so desolate and comfortless, compared to what it was twenty years ago—the people so much rougher, clumsier, more uncivil—everything they do, vulgar and base. Remnants of the old nature come out when they begin to know you. I am drawing at a nice tallow-chandler's ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... between those days when she lived happy and envied in that beautiful Chateau de Sairmeuse, of which she believed herself the mistress, and at the present time, when she found herself lying in the comfortless room of a miserable country inn, attended by an old woman whom she did not know, and with no other protection than that of an old soldier—a deserter, whose life was in constant danger—and that of ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... should see A brother languishing in sore distress, And I should turn and leave him comfortless When I might be A messenger of hope and happiness— How could I ask to have what I denied In my own ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... no descriptive lists, and it was necessary that these men should be measured and described as to stature, complexion, &c.—Capt. Shortland therefore ordered them to be shut up in the prison No. 6. This was a more cold, dreary and comfortless place than No. 7. Their bed was nothing but the cold damp stones; and being in total darkness they dare not walk about. These 30 men had been imprisoned at Barbadoes; and they had supposed that when they arrived at this famous birth place of liberty, they ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... but it gave Capless and comfortless one Happiness, bright as the brave, Beautiful light of the sun. Soft may the sanctified sod Rest on the father who led Bob from the gutter, unshod— ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... the high-road," said the Moon, "is an inn, and opposite to it is a great waggon-shed, whose straw roof was just being re-thatched. I looked down between the bare rafters and through the open loft into the comfortless space below. The turkey-cock slept on the beam, and the saddle rested in the empty crib. In the middle of the shed stood a travelling carriage; the proprietor was inside, fast asleep, while the horses were being watered. The coachman stretched himself, though I am very sure that he had been most ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... the chest of drawers, and over it the enlarged photograph of her mother, in an oxydized frame, with a bunch of dyed grasses at the back. Now these and all other tokens of her presence had vanished and the room looked as bare and comfortless as when Zeena had shown her into it on the day of her arrival. In the middle of the floor stood her trunk, and on the trunk she sat in her Sunday dress, her back turned to the door and her face in her hands. She had not heard Ethan's call because she was sobbing and ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... seventh. This picture of the world is certainly not attractive; in it all change and becoming, all life and all activity is offered up on the altar of monotonous being. Happily Herbart is inconsistent enough to enliven this comfortless waste of changeless being by the relatively real or semi-real manifoldness ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... into the interior court. This hotel was the finest in Poitiers, where all the rich and noble travellers were in the habit of alighting, and there was an air of gaiety and prosperity about it very pleasing to our comedians, in contrast with all the comfortless, miserable lodgings they had been obliged to put up with for a long time past. The landlord, whose double, or rather triple chin testified to bountiful fare, and the ruddy tints of his face to the excellence of his wines, seemed to be ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... faithful comrade, are together still. Next to my heart I have carried you many a weary league; many a dreary and, but for you, comfortless night we have bivouacked together. Time and roughing it have made their marks on both of us. Scars mar your polished face, now changed from spotless white to rich autumnal russet; and mine, too, the sun, and wind, and other smoke ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... than to hear of a miser denying himself the necessaries of life a little too far and ridding us of his presence altogether. Our confidence in the average virtue of humanity assures us that his place will be supplied by a better man. The details of his penurious habits, the comfortless room, the scanty bedding, the cheese-rinds on his table, and the fat banking-book under his thin bolster, only inspire disgust: if he were pinched to death he did it himself, and so much the better for the world in general and his ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... the days of the Shogun three-quarters of the 300 houses were inns. Now two-thirds of the houses have become uninhabitable, or have been sold, taken down and rebuilt elsewhere. The Shinto shrines are neglected and some are unroofed, the Zen temple is impoverished, the school is comfortless and a thousand tombstones in the ancient burying ground among the trees are half ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... o'clock came,—three, four, five o'clock,—and no Vavasor. Hour after hour she listened to the chime of the gaudy timepiece decorating their shabby apartment; and while the night advanced, in all its chilly, lonely, comfortless protraction, shivered as she added new logs to the dying embers, and as she hoped or despaired of his return, alternately replaced the veilleuse by candles, the candles by a veilleuse. She had ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various
... comfortless than some of these shanties, reeking with smoke and dirt, the common receptacle for children, pigs, and fowls. But I have given you the dark side of the picture; I am happy to say all the shanties on the squatters' ground were not like these: on the contrary, ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... primitive and comfortless in its appointments and furniture as well could be. The walls were of dressed stone and loomed up bare and grisly to a lofty ceiling that was covered with a perfect labyrinth of curiously carved beams, the work of some unknown artist of long ago. ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... after a very comfortless night there was a visible alteration for the worse in many of the people which gave me great apprehensions. An extreme weakness, swelled legs, hollow and ghastly countenances, a more than common inclination to sleep, with an apparent debility of understanding, seemed to me the ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... January, 1798, that I rose one morning before daylight, to walk ten miles in the mud, to hear this celebrated person preach. Never, the longest day I have to live, shall I have such another walk as this cold, raw, comfortless one, in the winter of the year 1798. 'Il y a des impressions que ni le temps ni les circonstances peuvent effacer. Dusse-je vivre des siecles entiers, le doux temps de majeunesse ne pent renatre pour moi, ni s'effacer jamais dans ma memoire.' When I got there, the organ was playing the hundredth ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... instances were mentioned, of recent occurrence, which show that it is still strong: I will quote one only. A colored gentleman informed me that last winter a near female relative being about to take a journey by railway to Philadelphia, she was compelled, though in delicate health, to travel in the comfortless, exposed car, expressly provided for negroes, though he offered to pay double fare for a place in the regular carriage. A lady, not of the proscribed class, who has long resided in New York, mentioned ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... undeveloped mind which betrayed itself in petty inconsistencies, fill us with pity and surprise us, yet encourage us too by proving how right and wise we were to try our own experiments. If we had listened to advice and done as we were told, the woman's-sphere-is-home would have been as ugly and comfortless a place for us to-day as it used to be when Beth was forced by the needs of her nature to poach for diversion, cook for kindness, and clean, and fight, and pray, and lie, and love, in her brave struggle against the hard and ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... afternoon following this, a chill November day, with the roads sloshy, and a grey, comfortless sky that made one's spirits sink. It was about three o'clock, and Liza was coming home from work; she got into Vere Street, and was walking quickly towards her house when she saw Mrs. Blakeston coming towards her. ...
— Liza of Lambeth • W. Somerset Maugham
... cried and broke from her and went limping out into the frosty night with its comfortless ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... idea that when a man is in love something special ought to be done for him. He remained, therefore, till the Foreign Secretary returned from his royal service, and had by that time fixed the period of his marriage. It was to take place in the cold comfortless month of March. It would be a great thing, he had said, to have Hampstead present at it, and it was Hampstead's intention to start on his long travels early in April. "I don't see why people shouldn't be married in cold weather as well as in hot," said Vivian. "Brides ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... father and I went to the theater to rehearse "Romeo and Juliet." In the evening the house was very fair, considering how much the hot weather is against us; but of all the comfortless people to act to, commend me to an Edinburgh audience. Their undemonstrativeness, too, is something more than mere critical difficulty to be pleased; there is a want of kindliness in the cold, discourteous way in which they allow a stranger ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... settled, his mother looked for some evenings on the vacant chair, where he had so long sat in the place of her beloved Mark; and the chair seemed so comfortless and desolate, thus left all to itself, that she ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and bloodshed. The rich man can stay all night at his club, or if he goes home the decorous butler or vally can tend to him and protect his family if need be; he won't stagger in at midnight to a comfortless room, where his wife and little ones are herded in cold and starvation and are alone and at his mercy, and the rich man's carouse at his club won't keep his wife and children hungry ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... a miserable hour to meet such a death—so cold, so comfortless, shivering in my light dress clothes upon this gridiron of torment upon which I was stretched. I tried to brace myself to it, to raise my soul above it, and at the same time, with the lucidity which comes to a ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... refuge within their camp when the constantly veering gusts bore the smoke and flame outward, and then fleeing out of it when the stifling column was driven inward; but finding no peace nor rest anywhere, among those shifts and commotions of the battling elements,—they wore away the long and comfortless hours of that dreary night, till the return of morning light, which, after many a vain prayer for its speedier appearance, at length gradually broke over ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... which reached the slave's ears in various ways, his utter helplessness upon the best farms and under the most humane masters and overseers, in Maryland and other Northern Slave States, together with the impression that the journey was of great extent, and comfortless even to a slave, all combined to make a voyage down the river or down South an era in the life of the poor slave to which he looked forward with the most intense and bitter ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... provisions endured by a wandering horde of savage men sunk in equal barbarism. When we follow men home, who have been cooperating with other civilized men in continuous labour throughout the livelong day, we should not, without experience, expect to find their homes dreary, comfortless, deformed with filth, such homes as poverty alone could not make. Still less, when we gaze upon some pleasant looking village, fair enough in outward seeming for poets' songs to celebrate, should we expect to find scarcity of fuel, scantiness of food, prevalence of fever, the ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... of its visible continuance at any moment. I will not press this conjecture; but will only add, that if it be so, I think Giotto was perfectly right; and that a picture thus conceived might have been deeply impressive, had it been more successfully executed; and a calmer, more continuous, comfortless grief expressed in the countenances of the women. Far better thus, than with the horrible analysis of agony, and detail of despair, with which this same scene, one which ought never to have been made the subject of painting at all, has been gloated ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... Waldron Settlement that smiling day brought little hope, and no enjoyment. A favorite child was lost from a goodly family, and ill feelings were agitated, and all hearts ran after him through thicket and field, over hill and valley, like shepherds after a lost lamb. Comfortless and faint, the family assembled at the morning altar, and one general sob of grief, and one leaping pulse of anxiety went round. They kneeled for prayer; and the venerable father bore their petitions before the Lord. He prayed for grace to sustain them in ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... cocoa, and we hadn't enough to go round at a sip each. The cookers were tightly packed on a truck at the rear, and there was no hope from that quarter. And then once again, just as on other occasions where a chance of a hot mug of tea seemed hopeless, and where we were apparently doomed to a comfortless time, the Y.M. was at hand. There, as we glided into Calais station, we espied a long covered-in counter displaying the familiar sign of the red triangle. The order quickly came down, and was more quickly put into execution, that ...
— One Young Man • Sir John Ernest Hodder-Williams
... condition, and, in order to oversee its management to any advantage, I resolved to transfer my business in the mission to an agent, and move on the place with my wife. Then came a fatal hour for me. Into my darkened soul, into the comfortless, emptiness of my life, entered the power ...
— Sister Carmen • M. Corvus
... in laced hat, embroidered waistcoat, and trunk-hose. But above all examples of this artist's intrepidity, commend me to the print entitled 'Christian Finds it Deep.' 'A great darkness and horror,' says the text, have fallen on the pilgrim; it is the comfortless deathbed with which Bunyan so strikingly concludes the sorrows and conflicts of his hero. How to represent this worthily the artist knew not; and yet he was determined to represent it somehow. This was how he did: Hopeful is still shown to his neck above the water of death; ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and we had managed, on those occasions, to interest or amuse each other; but now we were helpless. Both were in sorrow, and neither could console his brother. And there we were, looking mournfully on each other in the face of death, speechless and comfortless. I am horrified when I think of the dreadful position in which I was placed on those solemn occasions. It seemed to me as if I had been enchanted all those dreary days by some malignant demon, and made the sport ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker |
