"Dismal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... who expected a dark, dismal cavern, was surprised to see a well-lighted and spacious chamber, which received the light from an opening at the top of the rock, and in which were all sorts of provisions, rich bales of silk, stuff, brocade, and valuable carpeting, ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... remarkable, that, while we stood gazing at this kitchen, I was haunted and perplexed by an idea that somewhere or other I had seen just this strange spectacle before.—The height, the blackness, the dismal void, before my eyes, seemed as familiar as the decorous neatness of my grandmother's kitchen; only my unaccountable memory of the scene was lighted up with an image of lurid fires blazing all round ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... grey light of that wintry afternoon the place looked inexpressibly dismal and neglected. Years ago it had, no doubt, been the residence of some well-to-do county family; but in these twentieth-century post-war days, having been empty for nearly ten years, it had gone ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... one of which, moreover, wore such an unaccustomed shape, dashing rapidly along through the black foam-flecked water, with ice in every conceivable form heaped and piled around them, and their bright-hued flags fluttering against the dark and dismal background of a stormy sky; and the skipper of the whaler possesses to this day a spirited water-colour sketch of the scene, executed on the spot by the colonel, which he exhibits with becoming pride whenever he relates the story of his wonderful ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... nation. A little boy in Holland saw water trickling from a small hole near the bottom of a dike. He realized that the leak would rapidly become larger if the water was not checked, so he held his hand over the hole for hours on a dark and dismal night until he could attract the attention of passers-by. His name is still held ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... dismal, wretched, man-forsaken stretch of country it beats anything I ever saw," Walter exclaimed in disgust. "The river itself is about a half mile wide, but it twists, turns, and forks every few yards so as to puzzle a corporation ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... who cares for flowers must lament much at this heavy, dismal time; a wife helps to shorten the long nights. In this way I will shorten long winter without ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... stuck in her heart; bleeding throats of headless John Baptists are perpetually thrust before your eyes. At the Cathedral gate was a papier-mache church-ornament shop—most of the carvings and reliefs of the same dismal character: one, for instance, represented a heart with a great gash in it, and a double row of large blood-drops dribbling from it; nails and a knife were thrust into the heart; round the whole was a crown ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... none the less humorous. It is said, for instance, that in some places newly married couples were compelled to vault the wall of the churchyard, and that on certain nights the peasants were obliged to beat the castle ditch in order to rest the lord's family from the dismal ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... know that you would like it," put in Joanna; "it is not one of the modern novels, and it has only one dismal catastrophe; it is the fine old ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... about such trifles," they said. "We will find you some place less cold and dismal than Mademoiselle Gamard's gloomy house. If we can't find anything you like, one or other of us will take you to live with us. Come, let's play a game of backgammon. To-morrow you can go and see the Abbe Troubert and ask him to push your claims to ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... growing corruption; modern society suffers under a complication of mortal diseases, so widely spread and deeply seated that at present there is no hope of regeneration. The best hope is that its decay may provide the soil in which seed may be sown of a far-distant growth of happier augury. Such dismal forebodings are no novelty. Every age produces its prophecies of coming woes. Nothing would be easier than to make out a catena of testimonies from great men at every stage of the world's history, declaring each in turn that the cup of iniquity was now at last overflowing, and ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... cool wind fanned the dying embers of the fire and softly stirred the leaves. Earlier in the evening a single frog had voiced his protest against the loneliness; but now his dismal croak was no longer heard. A snipe, belated in his feeding, ran along the sandy shore uttering his tweet-tweet, and his little cry, breaking in so softly on the silence, seemed only to make more deeply felt the great vast ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... oval glass plate, with COFFEE-ROOM painted on it, addressed towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of coffee-room now, but where there is such an inscription on glass, and read it backward on the wrong side MOOR-EEFFOC (as I often used to do then, in a dismal reverie,) a shock goes through ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... rabbits which pick up a precarious subsistence by feeding on the scanty herbage; on the roof of this cottage several of the Lesser Black-backs perched themselves in a row whilst I was looking about at the eggs, and kept up a most dismal screaming at the top of their voices. The eggs, as is generally the case with gulls, varied considerably both in ground colour and marking; some were freckled all over with small spots—dark brown, purple, or black; others had larger markings, principally collected at the larger ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... at last extricated herself, and sailed into the open sea; but her three consorts were nowhere to be seen. Iberville steered for Fort Nelson, which was several hundred miles distant, on the western shore of this dismal inland sea. He had nearly reached it, when three sail hove in sight; and he did not doubt that they were his missing ships. They proved, however, to be English armed merchantmen: the "Hampshire" of fifty-two guns, and the "Daring" and the ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... first lines of the Inferno, when the gates of Hell were approached, and the inscription over them appeared, paints the dismal character of the poem, and yet mingled with the sense of divine love and justice with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... on the platform and thought, should I go away or not? When the train came in I decided not to go. At home I had to expect my wife's amazement and perhaps her mockery, the dismal upper storey and my uneasiness; but, still, at my age that was easier and as it were more homelike than travelling for two days and nights with strangers to Petersburg, where I should be conscious every minute that my life was of no use to any one or to anything, ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... drink from the Fountain of Youth," laughed Alice, the day before their departure. "Who knows but what it may preserve us, out in those dismal swamps?" ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
... house was surrounded by pine trees and there was no grass beneath the trees. A rusty tin eaves-trough had slipped from its fastenings at the back of the house and when the wind blew it beat against the roof of a small shed, making a dismal drumming noise that sometimes persisted all through ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... dissatisfied, Ingred and Hereward would have been hardly human if they had not raised some personal grievances of their own to grumble at, and matters would often have been dismal enough at the bungalow but for Mrs. Saxon's happy capacity for looking on the bright side of things. The whole household centered round "Mother." She was a woman in a thousand. Naturally it had hurt her to relinquish Rotherwood, and it grieved her—for the girls' sake—that most of her old acquaintances ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... He journeyed to the cave Tainaron, which was an entrance to the Underworld. Far into that dismal cave he went, and then down, down, until he came to Acheron, that dim river that has beyond it only the people of the dead. Cerberus bayed at him from the place where the dead cross the river. Knowing that he was no shade, the hound sprang at Heracles, but he could neither bite nor tear through ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum
... I could see the vessel lying on shore a wreck, covered with ice. A dismal prospect to me, as at that time I knew not what had become of the men. My own situation was even less enviable; the vessel was frail, and deeply laden with salt: a cargo, which, if it by any means gets wet, is worse ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... period of thoughtful silence when the night was darkest just before the dawn and the rain had settled to a dismal drizzle unrelieved by lightning or by thunder that the five occupants of the room were suddenly startled by a strange pattering sound from the floor below. It was as the questioning fall of a child's feet upon the uncarpeted boards in the room beneath them. Frozen to silent rigidity, ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... dined with S. T. C. at Gilman's a Sunday or 2 since and he was well and in good spirits. I mean to hear some of the course, but lectures are not much to my taste, whatever the Lecturer may be. If read, they are dismal flat, and you can't think why you are brought together to hear a man read his works which you could read so much better at leisure yourself; if delivered extempore, I am always in pain lest the gift of utterance ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... them, are as frigid as the zone itself—there the least quantity of judgment imaginable does the business—and of wit—there is a total and an absolute saving—for as not one spark is wanted—so not one spark is given. Angels and ministers of grace defend us! what a dismal thing would it have been to have governed a kingdom, to have fought a battle, or made a treaty, or run a match, or wrote a book, or got a child, or held a provincial chapter there, with so plentiful a lack of wit and judgment about us! For mercy's sake, let us think no more about it, but ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... I had not, that I might have the pleasure of reading them again. Next to these I like "Caleb Williams." I have almost given up writing poetry. No man can be a Poet and a bookkeeper at the same time. I do find this place most "dismal," and have taken to chewing tobacco with all my might, which, I think, raises my spirits. Say nothing of it in your letters, nor of the "Lord of the Isles." ... I do not think I shall ever go to college. I can scarcely bear the thought of living upon Uncle Robert ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... slowly and to be dismal," she said. "It is very wrong and ungrateful of them. They ought to run about and skip and laugh. Work while you work, and play while you play. That was the motto when I was a little girl. Now, Judy, love, go out with Babs and have ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... the British Fleet in the North Sea had settled down to the monotonous task of holding the coasts of Germany and the channels leading to them in a state of blockade. The work was dismal enough. The ships tossing from day to day on the always unquiet waters of the North Sea were crowded with Jackies all of whom prayed each day that the German would come from hiding and give battle. Not far from the Hook of Holland engaged in this monotonous work were ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... latest measurement was twenty-four feet nine inches; and what was simply appalling, that the register marked six inches rise in less than an hour. It was clear to every one that the critical moment had arrived. There was little to hope, and much to fear. Darkness fell upon as dismal a scene as imagination could well conceive. If the water once overlapped the embankment at the fruit-market, it must very soon pour in in vast volume; for the streets there are considerably lower than the level of the Corso—as it was, several large blocks of ice had floated or ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... was, I was delighted to have secured some sort of companionship, for London, despite its multitudinous places of amusement, and its five millions of inhabitants, is but a dismal caravanserai to be left alone in. Moreover, the Yarraman's officers and I were old friends, and, if the truth must be told, my heart yearned for the sight of a ship and a ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... remember, too, being lifted—weak and miserable with toothache—in my father's arms to catch the first sight of English shores as we neared the mouth of the Thames; and then the dismal inn by the docks where we first took shelter. The dreary room where we children slept the first night, its dingy ugliness and its barred windows, still come back to me as a vision of horror. Next day, like angels of rescue, came an aunt and uncle, ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... dossiers, doctors' records of the condition of their patients—could be revealed, it would be shown that many clever people have a fancy skeleton in their cupboards. By a fancy skeleton we mean, not some dismal secret of crime or shame, but a melancholy and apprehensiveness without any ground in outward facts. With the real skeleton doctors have nothing to do. He rather belongs to the province of Scotland Yard. If a man has compromised ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... homesickness creeping into his letters. She would not have wondered could she have looked in on him while he wrote, buttoned up in his overcoat and with his hat on. His chilly little bedroom, with its dim lamp and worn matting, was a dismal contrast to the cheerful home where he had always spent his winter evenings. Then she noticed that there was nearly always some reference to the restaurant fare, some longing expressed for one more taste of her cooking—the ...
— Flip's "Islands of Providence" • Annie Fellows Johnston
... It was a dismal prospect that lay before me. Until then the future had held its possible secrets, its imaginable revelations of change, which, like the luminous suggestions in dark clouds, allured with a promise of a brief and penetrable gloom. In my darkest hours I had lulled fear by the thought of a haply ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... the rather dismal hotel an hour when a waiter introduced into our private sitting-room, where I stood alone, a tall, dark, middle-aged man, who clicked his heels as he ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... dismal mountains that night it blew tremendous, A-sobbing like a giant and a-snorting like a whale, When he saw beside the sheep-track ('Holy Saints,' says he, 'defend us!') A mighty dainty lady, dressed in green, and sweet and pale, And she rode an ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 7, 1914 • Various
... house just opposite the Abbey, and her windows looked out on a view of towers and cloisters and tall lime trees, with a foreground of monuments. To some people the array of tombstones would have proved a dismal prospect, but she declared it never distressed her in the least. She prided herself greatly on the fact that she had been born in the house where her father, grandfather and great-grandfather had also come into the world and spent their ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... morning visitors, the unmuffled contents of the car. As he entered, he bowed as courteously as possible to the whole circle, and advanced towards Mrs. M'Crule, whose portentous visage he could not fail to recognize. That visage was nearly half a yard long, thin out of all proportion, and dismal beyond all imagination; the corners of the mouth drawn down, the whites or yellows of the eyes upturned, while with hands outspread she was declaiming, and in a lamentable tone deploring, as Ormond thought, some great public calamity; for the concluding ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... small indeed. The internal condition of the priest-ruled districts was generally wretched; heavy ignorance, beggary, and intolerance reduced life to a gross and dismal inertia. Except in their patronage of music, the ecclesiastical princes had perhaps rendered no single service to Germany. The Free Cities, as a rule, were sunk in debt; the management of their affairs had become the perquisite of a few lawyers and ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... me alone, but bound by terrible oaths Not to discover it, he hath reveal'd A dismal Vault, whose dreadful mouth does open A mile beyond the City: in this Cave Lye but two ...
— The False One • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... table) in the Crown Coffee House over the way, in York Street, have an earthy, and, as I may say, a land-lubberly aspect. Cape Horn, to the best of my belief, is a tremendous way off, and there are more bricks and cabbage-leaves between this office and that dismal point of land ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... involved in turning a wheel has a wonderful tendency to benumb the mind. It is a sort of attenuated variety of Ixion's punishment, and contributes a dismal chapter to the history of gaols. The brain gets muddled, the head grows heavy, and the body's centre of gravity seems to settle by degrees in a leaden lump somewhere between the eyebrows and the crown. Bathsheba felt ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... "Dismal old Muscovite!" sighed the king. "A monarch has not a moment to himself for his private studies. Ah, Prigio! why wert thou not born to a private station? But Duty before everything," and wreathing his royal countenance ...
— Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia - being the adventures of Prince Prigio's son • Andrew Lang
... silence, Warwick, but bemoan, And judge, oh judge, my bosom by your own. What mourner ever felt poetic fires! Slow comes the verse that real woe inspires: Grief unaffected suits but ill with art, Or flowing numbers with a bleeding heart. Can I forget the dismal night that gave My soul's best part for ever to the grave! How silent did his old companions tread By midnight lamps, the mansions of the dead Through breathing statues, then unheeded things, Through rows of warriors, and through walks of kings! What awe did the slow solemn ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... dead— The father I never had seen; I remember on dark nights of storm, When our parlor was bright and warm, I would turn away from its glowing light, And look far out in the churchyard dim, And with infinite pity think of him Shut out alone in the dismal night. ...
— Poems • Marietta Holley
... deserted. Lance dismounted and looked in, saw it still dismal with the disorder of the last unfortunate dance. It was evident that there had been no school ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... has plenty of money, and no heirs); and a toothpick case, for his father. Sam is a good fellow to all his relations, and as for his aunt, he adores her. Well, we were to go and make these purchases, and I arrived punctually at my time; but Sam was stretched on a sofa, very pale and dismal. ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... is brilliant by contrast with the dismal source from which it escaped. "Escaped" is the word; for the fear that I should hasten my trial by exhibiting too great a gain in health, mental or physical, was already upon me; and it controlled much of my conduct during the succeeding ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... having taken in hand the question of providing due supervision and police regulation for the Gipsies, with compulsory education for their children, we readily dedicate these local illustrations to the furtherance of his good work. The ugliest place we know in the neighbourhood of London, the most dismal and forlorn, is not Hackney Marshes, or those of the Lea, beyond Old Ford, at the East-end; but it is the tract of land, half torn up for brick-field clay, half consisting of fields laid waste in expectation of the house-builder, which lies just outside of Shepherd's Bush and Notting Hill. ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... Mr Barlow, "are the extracts which I have made from this very extraordinary story; and they are sufficient to show both the many accidents to which men are exposed, and the wonderful expedients which may be found out, even in the most dismal circumstances." "It is very true, indeed," answered Tommy; "but pray what became of these poor men at last?" "After they had lived more than six years upon this dreary and inhospitable coast," ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... to James in prison. He was confined in a cell, and was very uncomfortable. It was a dirty, dismal place, meant to be a place of punishment, indeed. James found it so, and he soon was ready to do almost any thing for freedom of the yard. He sat down and addressed a very humble petition to the Council, confessing ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... of Funchal are low; and covered with white stucco, which looks very neat, but those of the poor have only one window without any glass, and are very dark and dismal inside. The streets are narrow, and some of them very steep. We often passed gardens surrounded by high walls, over which hung lovely flowering vines. Out in the country there were lantanas, geraniums, and fuchsias which seemed ...
— Harper's Young People, March 9, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... religions besides Christianity have done the same things, and Roman and Greek poets and monuments have in like manner avoided the grim, plain word—death, but they have done it for exactly the opposite reason from that for which the Christian does it. They did it because the thing was so dark and dismal, and because they knew so little and feared so much about it. And Christianity does it for exactly the opposite reason, because it fears it not at all, and knows it quite enough. So it toys with leviathan, and 'lays its hand on the cockatrice den,' and my text is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... go. As Lady Augusta was under the impression that she was merely taking the dismal daily constitutional, which was one of her unavoidable penances, it would not do to stay ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... ever so much to tell you, before I come to that part. The office, you know, is in Falcon Court, Fleet Street; such a dismal place, with the houses all crammed together, and a little space in front, not more than large enough to turn a baker's bread-truck in. All the windows are of ground glass, as if the people inside were too busy to see out, ...
— Life in London • Edwin Hodder
... he had got out of range. In the hurry and confusion my wound was not properly attended to, and a brain fever set in, under which I had been suffering for a week; but the kind care of Capt. Hopkins and Mr. Smith, and the strength of my constitution, at last prevailed over the disease. Dismal as was this story, and the prospects it unfolded, my spirits, naturally buoyant, supported me, and I determined that when the ship should arrive in Boston I would leave her and return immediately to Cuba, to make an effort for the release of my friends. Wild as was this resolve, I ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... are the propagators of the dismal doctrine of the Samaneans; who, on the basis of the Metempsychosis, have erected the misanthropic system of self-denial, and of privations; who, laying it down as a principle that the body is only ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... was a good tie, but perhaps not quite the thing. Nothing seemed to go properly with his blue suit—the brown was dull and uninteresting—it lacked character; any one might have worn it, and he flung it back almost scornfully into the box. The black was really best, but how dismal! He seemed to see all his miserable loneliness and disappointment in its dark, sombre colour. No, that would never do! He must be bright, amusing, cheerful—anything but dull and dismal. So he put on the green again, and went down to the drawing-room. Randal ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... and well, she belonged to a Woman's Club, but was by no means the neurotic and dismal type of member who was always thinking of her rights. She took her rights unconsciously, they came natural to her, and she knew exactly how to make the most of them without exciting anything but admiration amongst that great class to whom ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... The dismal calling of a cat outside irritated her, and the loud complacent ticking of the clock seemed to mock her misery; but still she worked on, the busy fingers turning the needles, as the wool unwound itself from the balls which danced upon the floor. There was life in those balls of wool as they spun ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... Remendado and El Dancairo, file down the path, leaving Don Jose alone in the cave. It is a dismal scene: the loneliness of Jose, the menace of death in ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... the Pension Magnotte were for the most part of mature age and unattractive appearance—two or three lonely spinsters, eking out their pitiful little incomes as best they might, by the surreptitious sale of delicate embroideries, confectioned in their dismal leisure; and a fat elderly widow, popularly supposed to be enormously rich, but of miserly propensities. "It is the widow of Harpagon himself," Madame Magnotte told her gossips—an old woman with two furiously ugly daughters, who for the last fifteen years ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... good sense in English, without fee or reward, in common conversation. They will smile when we lay some stress upon it; but in reality it is no such trifle as they imagine. Look into the huts of savages, and see, for there is nothing to listen to, the dismal blank of their stupid hours of silence; their professional avocations of war and hunting are over; and, having nothing to do, they have nothing to say. Turn to improved life, and you find conversation ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... and commanding attention from nobody but one another. Here and there a dead man, his clothing defiled with earth, his face covered with a blanket or showing yellow and claylike in the rain, added his dispiriting influence to that of the other dismal features of the scene and augmented the general discomfort with a particular dejection. Very repulsive these wrecks looked—not at all heroic, and nobody was accessible to the infection of their patriotic example. Dead upon the field of ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... makes one very unhappy to think that people of real eminence and effectiveness can condescend to behave in this affected way in order to win the applause of vulgar readers. One vaguely hopes, indeed, that some of the dismal platitudes that they are represented as uttering may have been addressed to them in the form of questions by the interviewer, and that they have merely stammered a shamefaced assent. It makes a real difference, ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a cold, clear moonlight night in the Hampstead Road, when reaction from solitary reflection made me unbosom myself a good deal to Sidney Heron, in the form of seeking his advice. On previous occasions I had told him something of Fanny and her dismal position, and he had seen her once or ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... lyin' about that there stuff. Anyways, even if he was, it's one of them things a man's got to do. An' I'll rest a whole lot easier in my six by two than what I would if I give Tex the long good-bye first." Unconsciously, the man began to croon the dismal ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... but in the presence of thousands of congregated fiends, who, having been apprised of the new plan about to be presented for peopling the Commonwealth of Hell with recruits from earth, had come up in all directions from their dismal abodes, to hear those plans reported, and witness the awarding of the prize for the one judged most worthy of adoption. Lucifer then mounted his throne, commanded silence, and ordered the competitors to advance ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... their mystical books of devotion, Sefer Chassidim, Rokeach, etc., filled with pietistic reflections on the other world, in which the earth figures as a "vale of tears." Poetry likewise took on the dismal hue of its environment. Instead of the varied lyrical notes of Gabirol and Halevi, who sang the weal and woe, not only of the nation, but also of the individual, and lost themselves in psychologic analysis, there now fall upon ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... head-on eyeing us as we approached him, for we had found it a waste of time to attempt to escape the perpetual bestial rage which seems to possess these demon creatures, who rove the dismal north attacking every living thing that comes within the scope of their ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... day's price at home? Esther could not bear to think it. She sat pondering, chewing the bitter cud of these considerations. She longed to discuss them further, and get rid, if possible, of her father's dismal conclusions; but with him she could not, and there was no other. When her father had settled and dismissed a subject, she could rarely re-open a discussion upon it. The colonel was an old soldier; when he had delivered an opinion, he had in a sort given his orders; ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... untracked oceans; fantastic hyperboles of desire, ambition, jealousy, and rage, employed as motive passions. Enchanted forests; fairy ships that skim the waves without helm or pilot; lances endowed with supernatural virtues; charmed gardens of perpetual spring; dismal dungeons and glittering palaces, supply the furniture of this romance no less than of its predecessors. Rinaldo, like any other hero of the Renaissance, is agitated by burning thirst for fame and blind devotion to a woman's beauty. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... "Under these dismal apprehensions, then, of approaching dissolution, which, I thank my God for his holy guidance, I have made due preparation for, give me leave to tell you, that howsoever I have been censured on account of the family of the Gordons, which I am an unhappy branch of, that I have ever ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... herself to have become. The sound of the streets excited her like martial music, and little gasps of surprise and pleasure broke from her lips as the taxicab turned into Broadway. It was all so different from her other visit when she had come alone to find Oliver, sick with failure, in the dismal bedroom of that hotel. Now it seemed to her that the city had grown younger, that it was more awake, that it was brighter, gayer, and that she herself had a part in its brightness and its gaiety. The crowds on Broadway seemed keeping step to some ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... soul; And eye out-stretched upon some vasty map Of uncouth worlds, which ever onward roll To infinite—like Revelation's scroll. Now falling headlong from his mountain bed Down sulph'rous space, o'er dismal lakes; Now held by hand of air—on wings of lead He tries to rise—gasping—the hands' hold breaks, And downward he reels through shadows of the dead, Who cannot die though stalking in hell's flakes, Falling, he catches his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various
... It is most dismal to read of Englishmen suggesting for the Boers the same old methods that were used in Ireland, "colonization," stamping out the native language, stamping out the love of independence, banishment, depriving of weapons, the greatest severity, no mercy. The Irish ...
— The American Revolution and the Boer War, An Open Letter to Mr. Charles Francis Adams on His Pamphlet "The Confederacy and the Transvaal" • Sydney G. Fisher
... with which this House of the Dead came upon me heightened almost into pain, if not into awe, the dismal impression which the aspect of the deserted home in its neighbourhood had made. I spurred my horse, and soon arrived at the door of my patient, who lived in a fair brick house at the ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... question than they do those other things most real and manifest, the truth of which they suppose as certain, in all the serious affairs of life, and which, nevertheless, as well as Thou, escape our feeble senses? O misery! O dismal night that surrounds the children of Adam! O monstrous stupidity! O confusion of the whole man! Man has eyes only to see shadows, and truth appears a phantom to him. What is nothing is all; and what is all is nothing to him. What do I ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... and enjoyed it, almost wishing that this might be the last scene of the kind which he should attend, and that he might always have the impression of it when he thought of his student life, so different from the dismal meetings that sometimes took place in deserted barns, or in outhouses of country inns. In some ways he preferred the Palmengarten as a fighting ground to the forest glades in which the summer duels were sometimes fought. He felt, as he sat there, chief of his Korps, and looked up to by every one, ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... it is one of the most dismal and desolate parts of the whole march, with its burned forests and its steep grades. Besides, some of the worst muskeg in the country is on each side of this Athabasca divide—it just runs in terraces all up and ...
— The Young Alaskans in the Rockies • Emerson Hough
... soft" painted flesh which he pictured in his youth while he was following Titian as closely as he could. As he grew older and his art more fixed, he followed Michael Angelo more and more. Titian's colouring was that of "an autumn day" but Tintoretto's that of a "dismal night." Yet these very qualities in Tintoretto's work ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... his return to Spain was an Auto da fe, or Act of Faith, in which many victims were led to the stake. The scene was the great square of Valladolid in front of the Church of Saint Francis, and the hour of six was the signal for the bells to toll which brought forth that dismal train from the fortress of the Inquisition. Troops marched before the hapless men and women, who were clad in the hideous garb known as the San Benito—a loose sack of yellow cloth which was embroidered with figures of flames and devils feeding on them, in token of the destiny ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... began to grow rapidly chill. Talk ceased; nobody moved but the unhappy Chuchu, still in quest of sofa-cushions, who tumbled complainingly among the trunks. It required a certain happiness of disposition to look forward hopefully, from so dismal a beginning, across the brief hours of night, to the warm ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... carries a strong iron rod (see the Engraving) with which he strikes every bar in the windows and gates of the gaol; and if any one of them does not vibrate, or ring, he carefully inspects it to ascertain whether it has been cut with a saw, or corroded by any strong acid. This dismal music lasts an hour. The whole expense of the prison to government does not exceed 16s. per day, and the few officers and guards, when Mr. Young was there, manage upwards of four hundred prisoners. He was confined from June 16, to September 7, and his account of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 400, November 21, 1829 • Various
... to a due sense of law and order, we proceeded toward the old boat-house—a dismal, dismantled affair, some half mile or ...
— My Lady Caprice • Jeffrey Farnol
... made into stiff mechanical figures, as dreary as Justice with her scales, or Fame blowing a trumpet on a monument. They belonged to that family of dismal personifications which it was customary to mark with the help of capital letters. Certainly they are a dismal and frigid set of beings, though they still lead a shivering existence on the tops of public monuments, and hold an occasional wreath over the head of a British ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... speech, yet more than once impelled To utter words of confidence and cheer Whereat some dismal publicists rebelled As premature, ill-founded, insincere— Words none the less triumphantly upheld By Victory's verdict, resonantly clear, Words that inspired misgiving in the foe Because ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... well be. Whenever I look at these triumphs of art over the beauties of nature, with all their weary dabs of crimson, green, blue, and yellow, I think of wretched, anaemic girls fading their youth away in some dismal attic over a publisher's, toiling through the whole edition tint by tint, and being mocked the while by Mr. Miller's alliterative erotics. And they are erotics! In one place he writes, "Beautiful art thou, O Broom! on the breezy bosom ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... person as I am, I have changed my mind very often about this country. The first five days I was in violent spirits; then came a dismal cloud of whisk and literature, and I could not bear it. At present I begin, very englishly indeed, to establish a right to my own way. I laugh, and talk nonsense, and make them hear me. There are two or three houses where I go quite at my ease, am never ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... stench and dismal wail Come from the broiling souls, Whilst Satan with his fireproof tail ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... govern that ignorance and depravity whose irregular appetites and malignant passions they have inflamed. The blow was struck which disgraced the nation, released the royal martyr from his crown of thorns, but had no power to prevent his receiving one of glory. "A dismal, universal groan burst from the thousands who witnessed the horrid scene[2], such as was never before heard! May England never utter such another! The troopers rode among the populace, driving them in all directions, ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... undesirable a prospect, that she should pity herself and her luckless fate, and that, when fully realizing the depths of loneliness into which she was to be precipitated for five long, weary months, she should jump at the dismal conclusion that her doll was stuffed with the most inferior variety of saw-dust and wish with lachrymose sincerity that she were dead and buried and out of this world of sorrow. Papa might then wish that he had been more considerate. Perhaps; but at that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... Island got to racing, and I enjoyed it very much, but George Ward and some of the milder sort protested against it, and it was stopped; which I thought rather hard, for we had very little amusement in those dismal days. I was once in a steamboat race when our boat knocked away the paddle-box from the other and smashed the wheel. From the days of the Romans and Norsemen down to the present time, there was never any ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... Pandava camp beheld that Death-Night in her embodied form, a black image, of bloody mouth and bloody eyes, wearing crimson garlands and smeared with crimson unguents, attired in a single piece of red cloth, with a noose in hand, and resembling an elderly lady, employed in chanting a dismal note and standing full before their eyes, and about to lead away men and steeds and elephants all tied in a stout cord. She seemed to take away diverse kinds of spirits, with dishevelled hair and tied together in a cord, as also, O king, many mighty car-warriors divested of their weapons. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... be irremediable. The Indians had all stepped into the bark which was to carry them across, but their dogs remained upon the bank. As soon as these animals perceived that their masters were finally leaving the shore, they set up a dismal howl, and plunging all together into the icy waters of the Mississippi, ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... God! that ghastly gibbet! How dismal 'tis to see The great tall spectral skeleton, The ladder and the tree! Hark! hark! it is the clash of arms,— The bells begin to toll,— "He is coming! he is coming! God's mercy on his soul!" One last long peal of thunder,— The clouds are cleared away. And the glorious ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... A dismal screeching and cackling here attracted the attention of the sisters, who started towards Pucklechurch's cottage, and the fowl-house, (a very foul house by the by) in front of which, on a low wooden stool, sat a tidy old woman, Betty Pucklechurch in fact, in a tall muslin ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with the most heinous offence of which an officer could be guilty, it is no wonder that Calhoun's heart sank within him on that dismal journey to Tullahoma. ...
— Raiding with Morgan • Byron A. Dunn
... fall under such disappointments as are the worst, and the worst to be borne. For, for a man to think to go to heaven because he desires it, and when all is done to fall into hell, is a frustration of the most dismal complexion. And yet thus it will be when desires shall fail, 'when man goes to his long home, and when the mourners go about the streets' (Eccl 12:5). Because, as was said before, else thy desires, and that which ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... year 1729, he felt himself overwhelmed with an horrible hypochondria, with perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom, and despair, which made existence misery. From this dismal malady he never afterwards was perfectly relieved; and all his labours, and all his enjoyments, were but temporary interruptions of its baleful influence. He told Mr. Paradise that he was sometimes so languid and inefficient, that he could not distinguish ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... not been in New York City an hour before they discovered that William W. Blithers was the man to whom they would have to appeal if they expected to gain a fresh hearing with the banks. The agents were in a dismal state of mind. The deal had been blocked no later than the afternoon of the day before and at a time when everything appeared to be going along most swimmingly. Blithers was the man to see; he and he alone could bring pressure to bear on the directorates that ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon |
