"Dispiriting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Hawkins saw that flight was their only chance, and, gathering his men together in two small tenders, he 'crawled out under the fire of the mole and gained the open sea.' The position of affairs was dispiriting in the extreme. Many men and three good ships were lost, besides treasure worth more than a million pounds, that had been won, by running innumerable dangers, during the past year. His ships were overcrowded, the store of food and ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... you so much as to marry you without loving you, and I shall never love any more," said Vixen, with a sad steadfastness that was more dispiriting than the ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... its only plantations. The sullen pool—its ghost-like guardian—the dreary heath around, the rude features of the country beyond, and the apparent absence of all human habitation, conspired to make a scene of the most dispiriting and striking desolation. I know not how to account for it, but as I gazed around in silence, the whole place appeared to grow over my mind, as one which I had seen, though dimly and drearily, before; and a nameless and unaccountable presentiment of fear and evil sunk like ice into ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... time of our stay on the cape was drawing to a close. Only three days more remained, and they were to be occupied in collecting our books, packing trunks, and all the unpleasant little duties that become so tedious and dispiriting when, like a drop curtain, they announce the end of ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... His fall, instead of dispiriting his followers, roused them to fury! No one asked or gave quarter; it was a fight to the death, and when finally we succeeded in breaking through the royalist horse, half of our number lay lifeless on the plain. Some there were—St. ...
— For The Admiral • W.J. Marx
... even so, as I have shown, a careful examination of all the available evidence generally reveals the reasons for his confidence; and failures due to this cause are far less disastrous, because less dispiriting to the nation, than those which are the outcome of sluggishness or cowardice. Of those unpardonable sins Pitt has never been accused even by his severest critics. After the repulse of his pacific overtures by the French Directory ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... hand showed her that some church or other stood within a few steps of the hotel archway, and saying nothing to Mrs. Goodman, she quietly cloaked herself, and went out towards it, apparently with the view of disposing of a portion of a dull dispiriting evening. The church was open, and on entering she found that it was only lighted by seven candles burning before the altar of a chapel on the south side, the mass of the building being in deep shade. Motionless outlines, which resolved themselves into the forms of kneeling women, were darkly visible ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... the cause of this gentleman's long absence, which had given rise to such gloomy and dispiriting surmises. ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... knew them, and explain to each other carefully and in detail how it was impossible for Bruce with the kind of a "rig" he was putting in, to handle enough dirt to wash out a breast-pin. Yet they toiled none the less faithfully for these dispiriting conversations, doing the work of horses, often to ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... various merchants failed to make the customary display within and without their establishments; if our streets were not strung with signs of gorgeous hues and thronged with hurrying purchasers, we would quickly discover how firmly the chill hand of winter lays upon the heart; how dispiriting are the days during which the sun withholds a portion of our allowance of light and warmth. We are more dependent upon these things than is often thought. We are insects produced by heat, ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... sense of responsibility, we might say, is omnipresent. It does not cease with the recitation: it follows him to his study, and haunts him with the recollection of absurd blunders made by young men who should have done better—the dispiriting reflection that despite his best efforts the stupid and indifferent will not learn. If to this normal wear and tear and these every-day annoyances we add the participation in what is pleasingly styled enforcement of discipline—that is, protracted faculty-meetings, interviews ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... the fore and main booms, and the fore and main gaffs. The wind was favourable, and I had thought to tow them back under sail, but the wind baffled, then died away, and our progress with the oars was a snail's pace. And it was such dispiriting effort. To throw one's whole strength and weight on the oars and to feel the boat checked in its forward lunge by the heavy drag behind, ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... those who continually find fault. Everyone who did war work can not fail to remember how easy it was to work for, or with, some people, and how impossible to get anything done for others. And just as the "heads" of work-rooms or "wards" or "canteens" were either stimulating or dispiriting, so must they and their types also be to those ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... idea itself—the idea is as nearly nude as our limited senses and our modern respectability permit. And the idea being what it is, it follows that the play, after the drama once commences, is not only immoral, but also dispiriting and boring, and, to my thinking, inconsequential and pointless. The first act, the exposition, is from beginning to end magnificent: never were the lines on which a drama was to develop more gorgeously, or in more masterly fashion, set forth. Had Wagner seen that Amfortas was merely a hypochondriac, ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... are made glorious to her, and honourable to all that are related to her, by the use she has made of them; and by the patience and resignation with which she supports herself in a painful, lingering, and dispiriting decay! and by the greatness of mind with which she views her approaching dissolution. And all this from proper motives; from motives in which a ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... his body had departed. Every muscle, cord, and sinew was unstrung. His spine seemed on the point of folding up. A hollow, nervous feeling had settled in the back of his head, and being something new it caused him a mild uneasiness. Moreover, his hands and feet were cold. Dispiriting chills travelled up and down his back at intervals. This might be owing to the change in temperature, as ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... that was not to be his name any longer, stood alone near the peak of a divide, and the mists of early morning lay thick below him. They obliterated, under their dispiriting gray, the valleys and lower forest-reaches, and his face, which was young and resolutely featured, held a kindred mood of shadowing depression. Beneath that miasma cloak of morning fog twisted a river from which the sun would strike darts ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... somewhat dispiriting, to see this ancient archiepiscopal city now sadly deserted. We saw in one of its streets a remarkable proof of liberal toleration; a nonjuring clergyman, strutting about in his canonicals, with a jolly countenance and a round belly, like ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... vegetable patch, at one corner of which a small stable, roofed and buttressed with corn-fodder, leaned against the hill. I drew rein in front of the building, and was about to hail its inmates, when I observed the figure of a man issue from the stable. Even in the gloom, there was something forlorn and dispiriting in his walk. He approached with a slow, dragging step, apparently unaware ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... her Aberdeen terrier, toddling at her side, in her hand a stout ash-stick—regardless of the muddy roads or the wet weather. It was grey, damp, and dismal, one of those days which in the Highlands are often so very cheerless and dispiriting. Yet on, and still on, she went, her mind full of the events of the previous night; full, also, of the dread secret which prevented her from exposing her father's false friend. In order to save her father, should she sacrifice herself—sacrifice ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... capable and more resolute, not only wiser and more experienced, but more noble and distinguished in appearance than they were themselves. What if the assertive attitude of the modern woman, her easy arrogance, and the confidence she places in her own untried powers, may be accounted for by the dispiriting clothes which men have determined to wear, and the wearing of which may have cost them no small portion ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... Creek, a few miles from Camden. The motives assigned by himself for passing through this barren country were, the necessity of uniting with Caswell, who had evaded the orders repeatedly given him to join the army, the danger of dispiriting the troops, and intimidating the people of the country, by pursuing a route not leading directly towards the enemy, and the assurances he had received that supplies would overtake him, and would be prepared for ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
... strainers rather than screens. The air, afflicted to pallor with the hoary multitudes that infested it, twisted and spun them eccentrically, suggesting an achromatic chaos of things. But both the young women were fairly cheerful; such weather on a dry upland is not in itself dispiriting. ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... camps of the Philistines, one always found her in excellent spirits, and quite undamped in her enjoyment of the frequently ponderous rejoicings. In the Bilberry school-room, among dog-eared French grammars and lead-pencilled music, education did not appear actually dispiriting; and now, as she sat by the fire, with the bright, sharp little scissors in lier hand, and the pile of white merino on her knees and trailing on the hearth-rug at her feet, Griffith found her simply irresistible. ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... had dawned with a light snow on the ground, the weather underwent a considerable change during the night, and the next morning broke, gray and threatening. Heavy, sullen clouds dropped low in the sky, and by four o'clock that afternoon a raw, dispiriting winter rain had set in, accompanied by a moaning wind that made the day seem doubly dreary. Promptly at four o'clock Grace saw Tom swing up the walk without an umbrella. His black raincoat, buttoned up to his chin, was infinitely becoming ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... depends upon the moment and the manner in which the first notions of religion are communicated to children: if these ideas be connected with terror, and produced when the mind is sullen or in a state of dejection, the future religious feelings are sometimes of a gloomy, dispiriting sort; but if the first impression be made when the heart is expanded by hope or touched by affection, these emotions are happily and permanently associated with religion. This should be particularly attended to by those who undertake the instruction of the children of the poor, who must ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... cultivation; a land continuing for miles and miles, as far as the eye could see, one expanse of long yellow grass, dotted here and there with groups of bastard palms. In front of the headland rolled the lonely South Atlantic; and, as if such conditions were not dispiriting enough to existence upon the Point, there was yet another feature which at times gave the place a still more ghastly look. A long way off the shore, the heaving surface of the ocean began, in anything like bad weather, to ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... like the exterior; a quarter of a century might have elapsed since the faded paper had been put up, or a stroke of painting executed, in that dispiriting apartment. Meanwhile, all the agencies of travel-stain had been defacing both. An odour of continual meal-times hung about it; likewise of smoke of every grade, from the perfumed havanna to the plebeian pigtail. The little tables were dark with hard work and antiquity; ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... wanderer going southward in the desert and guiding his course by the stars would, according to tradition, arrive at length at a wonderfully fertile oasis, the abode of a divinely beautiful enchantress, yet everything appeared highly uncertain and dispiriting, and was rendered still more so by the avalanches of dust before ...
— The Two Captains • Friedrich de La Motte-Fouque
... consolation to Oswald, and the lively interest she took in every thing they were to see together, inspired her with courage, and she said to him: "You know my lord, that, among the ancients, so far was the aspect of the tombs from dispiriting the living, that they endeavoured to excite a new emulation by placing these tombs on the public roads, in order that by recalling to young people the remembrance of illustrious men, they might silently admonish them to follow their example." ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... passed in the swamp, a wretched, dispiriting, drizzling rain, falling from morn till night, bringing the temperature down to zero. They recommenced their journey at dark despite the weather; preferring to push ahead rather than seek shelter again, with their ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... before the end Great Britain received from her dominions fourfold the help in Europe that she had to lend them overseas. The rally to the British flag was to us one of the most inspiring, and to the Germans one of the most dispiriting, portents in the war; but it took time to bear its fruits, and meanwhile the cause of civilization had to rely upon the gallantry of French armies and the numerically weak British forces fighting on the ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... passes. If we were nobodies who had come out (with more or less direct encouragement from the officials) in the hope of getting commissions, we were turned away like tramps, and told that there was "nothing for us." It was all rather flattening and dispiriting. ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... tales had tried their fate in vain together, at length they were sent forth separately, and for many months with still- continued ill success. I have mentioned this here, because, among the dispiriting circumstances connected with her anxious visit to Manchester, Charlotte told me that her tale came back upon her hands, curtly rejected by some publisher, on the very day when her father was to submit to his operation. But she had the heart of Robert ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Dispiriting item, that on resuming his seat the chastised one is a hero to his fellows for the rest of the day. Item, that Master John James Rattray knows she hurts her own hand more than his. Item, that John James promised to ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... sad as these rooms were, they were yet scrupulously clean. I had nothing to complain of; but the effect was rather dispiriting. Having given some directions about supper—a pleasant incident to look forward to—and made a rapid toilet, I called on my friend with the gaiters and red nose (Tom Wyndsour), whose occupation was that of a "bailiff," or under-steward, of the property, to accompany ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... aware that inactivity is, of all things, the most dangerous and dispiriting to the soldier, who, used to the bustle and array of camps, doth fear nothing so much as a ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... Buddhist doctrine preached in Japan had been of a very dispiriting nature. It taught that salvation could not be reached except by efforts continued through three immeasurable periods of time. But Saicho acquired a new doctrine in China. From the monastery of Tientai (Japanese, Tendai) he carried back to Hiei-zan a creed ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... conveying them to comfort. But with the break in our luck their praises and their patience went in a whiff, and they showed themselves to be such a parcel of wrong-headed, grumbling, disheartened and dispiriting knaves as ever helped to shake a good man's courage. They were as ready to imprecate Captain Amber now as they had been to load him with praises before, and in this they were supported by all the worser sort—and these were the greater part—among ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... with which the soul of the early-dining American is daily cast down between the hours of six and seven in the evening; and instinctively you compare it with the last meal you took in your old house, seeking in vain to decide whether this is more dispiriting than that. At any rate that was not at all the meal which the last meal in any house which has been a home ought to be in fact, and is in books. It was hurriedly cooked; it was served upon fugitive and irregular crockery; and it was eaten in deplorable disorder, ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... and stared about her, hoping to discern them. Right and left, however, the sweep of hillside curved upward to the skyline, lonely and untenanted; behind her the castled rock frowned down on the rugged gorge and filled it with dispiriting shadow. Madame St. Lo stamped ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... peep of day, came gradually to, and had a turn on the verandah before 5.55, when "the child" (an enormous Wallis Islander) brings me an orange; at 6, breakfast; 6.10, to work; which lasts till, at 10.30, Austin comes for his history lecture; this is rather dispiriting, but education must be gone about in faith—and charity, both of which pretty nigh failed me to-day about (of all things) Carthage; 11, luncheon; after luncheon in my mother's room, I read Chapter XXIII. of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... potent enhancer of the pleasure of society. To feel yourself patronised—even, perhaps especially, when you know yourself to be in all respects the superior of the patroniser—may tickle your sense of humour for a while, but in the long run it is distinctly dispiriting. The philosopher, no doubt, is or should be able to disregard the petty annoyances arising from an ever-present consciousness of social limitation, but society is not entirely composed of philosophers, even in America; ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... on the high road to Lille, but at present there is no thoroughfare. It's a dispiriting town, given over to industrial pursuits, and approached by rows of mean little cottages such as you may see on the slopes of the mining valleys of South Wales. Two things stand out in my memory—one, the spectacle of a corporal being tried for his ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... and oversetting, did mere mischief—to the Oeil-de-Boeuf. Complaints abound; scarcity, anxiety: it is a changed Oeil-de-Boeuf. Besenval says, already in these years (1781) there was such a melancholy (such a tristesse) about Court, compared with former days, as made it quite dispiriting to ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... road, and adds, "Let us talk of things rather than of people." The building turns out to be a sugar-refinery, or some equally depressing place, and the unhappy children are initiated into its mysteries. What could be more cheerless and dispiriting? Lucy is represented as a high-spirited and somewhat giddy child, who is always being made ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... told that soon the country would be dry, and gambling-games and dance-halls be prohibited by law, he would have considered the idea too utterly fantastic for belief; the mere contemplation of such a dreary prospect would have proved extremely dispiriting. He—and the other pioneers of his kind— would have been tempted immediately to pack up and move on to some freer locality where a man could retain his personal liberty and pursue his happiness in a manner as ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... sounds like the dreadful roar of the jaguar as it springs on its prey. Now it changes to the terrible and deep-toned growlings of the wild beast as he is pressed on all sides by his foes, and now it seems like his last dying moan beneath a mortal wound. Nothing can be more dismal or dispiriting than the fearful uproar. Hour after hour it goes on during the night, increasing as the dawn approaches. Now the howls come from one direction, now from another, and in far-off parts of the forest. Yet, terrific as they appear, they are produced by animals not much larger than a full-grown fox. ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... hours to wait in Boston before the train on the Old Colony road would go out. We had dinner (I little realized how long it would be before I should eat again), and John tamely suggested driving about to look at some of the places of interest. I assured him that there was nothing so dispiriting as looking at places of interest, and he answered, cheerfully, after some moments of thought, that we could "shut our eyes when we went ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... to regard your countrymen of all denominations. Observe, as he did, how very much that is excellent belongs to both the great parties into which Ireland is divided. If (as some do) you entertain dispiriting views of Ireland, recollect that any country containing such elements as those which roused the genius of Grattan never need despair. ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... spread through the combined fleet on finding the British so much stronger than was expected; from the astonishing and rapid destruction which followed the attack of the leaders, witnessed by the whole of the hostile fleets, inspiring the one and dispiriting the other and from the loss of the admiral's ship ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... windows of most city houses is not calculated to arouse enthusiasm at the best of times, and the day was singularly dispiriting: a sky of lead and a drizzling rain, which emphasized the squalor of the back yards in view. It was all very depressing. Jeffrey's talk, though inconclusive, had stirred in John's mind an uneasiness which was near to apprehension. ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... dignity, nothing of beauty. It is a hard, imperious and dispiriting necessity. He who is condemned to it feels that it sets upon his brow the brand of intellectual inferiority. And that brand of servitude never ceases to burn. In no country and at no time has the laborer had a kindly feeling for the rest of us, for everywhere and always has he heard ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... finally fatal. Nor was this their only trial, for in the midst of this appalling visitation, the gaunt spectre famine reared its ghastly head, and threatened them with new terrors. In circumstances so dispiriting, where despair seemed about to crash the weakened energies of the labourers, and where nothing but activity could preserve them from the loss of life; it was perhaps more honourable to Dr. Ayres' benevolence than to his policy, that he proposed to convey the ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... arrived in due course at longitude 103 deg. 31 min., but saw no island. This was dispiriting; but still ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... dispiriting utterances, Punin sighed expressively, assented, shook his head up and down, and from side to side; Musa maintained a stubborn silence.... She was obviously fretted by the doubt, what I was, whether I was a discreet ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... proceed up the Somme on its left bank. He reached Abbeville on Sunday the 13th of October; but, to his sad (p. 160) disappointment, he found all the bridges broken down, and the enemy stationed on the opposite bank to resist his passage. At this time Henry's situation was most perilous and dispiriting. His provisions were nearly exhausted,—the enemy had laid waste their own country to deprive his army of all sustenance; and no prospect was before them but famine at once, and annihilation from the overwhelming forces of the French. ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... not realize my expectations in Italy was the weather. During my stay in Rome there were dull and dispiriting days, with the Alban hills white to their bottom. Others were clear, with the piercingly cold Tramontana sweeping the streets; but more frequently the sirocco was blowing, accompanied with deluges of rain, and flashes of lightning that made the night luminous as the day, and peals ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... an inspiration for life which this philosophy of naturalism may convey—atheism, its detractors would call it, but none the less a faith and a spiritual exaltation that spring from its summing up of truth. It is well first to realize that which is dispiriting in it, its failure to provide for the freedom, immortality, and moral providence of the more ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... the right, upon what was called Lone Pine Plateau, was a dispiriting failure on the opening day. The dismounted troops of the Third Australian Light Horse, a magnificent body of men, were sent forward to storm the elaborate trenches of the enemy. The attack was made in three lines. The first was mowed down to a man; of the second only ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... heart had been warmer towards his dead son George than to any one else in the world. George had been as fair of face and hair as Andrew was dark; as cheerful and amusing as Andrew was gloomy and dispiriting; as agile and dexterous of mind and body as his brother was slow and angular; as emotional and warm-hearted as the other was phlegmatic and sour—or so it seemed to the father and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... others. Shandy Hall, as he christened his pretty parsonage at Coxwold, and as the house, still standing, is called to this day, soon became irksome to him. The very reaction begotten of unwonted quietude acted on his temperament with a dispiriting rather than a soothing effect. The change from his full and stimulating life in London to the dull round of clerical duties in a Yorkshire village might well have been depressing to a mind better balanced and ballasted than ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... indeed! they find work so dispiriting a business that they put it out of their thoughts as much as they can. And when they grow up, conscious of intellectual feebleness, they have no idea of expressing their resentment at the way they have been used—if they are modest, they ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Adlam's intelligence had been originally bad, or that Pembroke's proceedings at Froome had intimidated them, no symptom of such an intention could be discovered. A desertion took place in his army, which the exaggerated accounts in the Gazette made to amount to near two thousand men. These dispiriting circumstances, added to the complete disappointment of the hopes entertained from the assumption of the royal title, produced in him a state of mind but little short of despondency. He complained that all people had deserted him, and is said to ...
— A History of the Early Part of the Reign of James the Second • Charles James Fox
... they are appointed to solve. These are principles, which, however trite, need to be kept before us and practically sustained at a period when, as is often the case in long and tedious wars, the dispiriting influence of delays and occasional defeats work erroneous conclusions in the minds of the people, leading to unjust accusations against the men in power, and an unwillingness to frankly acknowledge that the evil too often originated where ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... little attention to the general affairs of the country during the past six months, but an examination of them fired his zeal. He accepted the appointment, and returned to his law books and his dispiriting struggle with ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... worthy ushered Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Magnus into "a large badly furnished apartment, with a dirty grate, in which a small fire was making a wretched attempt to be cheerful, but was fast sinking beneath the dispiriting influence of the place." Here they made their repast from a "bit of fish and a steak," and "having ordered a bottle of the most horrible port wine, at the highest possible price, for the good of the house, drank brandy and water for their own." After finishing ...
— The Inns and Taverns of "Pickwick" - With Some Observations on their Other Associations • B.W. Matz
... thing. With one fixed idea in the mind—to wait, to watch for some careless head over the mounded earth, and then to kill—war is drearier than slave labor, more nagging than an imperfect marriage, more dispiriting than unsuccessful sin. The pretty brass utensils of the dwellings had been pillaged. Canvas, which had once contained bright faces, was in shreds. The figures of Christ and his friends that had stood high in the niches ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... that it was only reasonable to dismiss the possibility of going out, and spend the afternoon as he had spent the morning. But he permitted himself a few minutes' relaxation as he smoked his cigarette, and sat down by the window, looking out, in Lucretian mood, on to the very dispiriting conditions that ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... the notes to his translation of the Odes and elsewhere, constitute perhaps the whole recent stock of which a new translator may be expected to take account. In one sense this is encouraging: in another dispiriting. The field is not pre-occupied: but the reason is, that general opinion has pronounced its ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... the path. Fifty yards from the hut it squatted upon its haunches and began to lick its wounded foot. And every now and then it would cease its healing operation to throw up its long muzzle and emit one of those drawn-out howls, so dismal and dispiriting, in which dogs are able to express their ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... business to settle, and I must go hither and thither about the town. Sirocco, of course, dusks everything to cheerless grey, but under any sky it is dispiriting to note the changes in Naples. Lo sventramento (the disembowelling) goes on, and regions are transformed. It is a good thing, I suppose, that the broad Corso Umberto I. should cut a way through the old Pendino; but what ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... a pity that we are not to have our fun, after all. Yet, perhaps it is just as well. I should be very speedily without my light, and the cry of "senza moccolo, senza moccola," must be very dispiriting. Have a good ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... the time when alone they are of any use, if a man is swayed by any other considerations than those of prudence and necessity in the hour of danger. A general who could stab one of his own men in the heat of battle, to prevent him dispiriting the army by news of a loss, proved that his judgment was as clear as ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... employment, want, and suffering, and in a country like England where, without that, there is usually a "surplus population," to be discharged from work is the worst that can befall the operative. And what a dispiriting, unnerving influence this uncertainty of his position in life, consequent upon the unceasing progress of machinery, must exercise upon the worker, whose lot is precarious enough without it! To escape despair, there are but two ways open ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... progress therein is not to be looked for, or that they and their predecessors have hitherto made no advance towards what they and, as they also believe, all men sought and still seek. To them the history of Philosophy for say the last two thousand years is not the dreary and dispiriting narrative of repeated error and defeat, but the record of a slow but secure and steady advance in which, as nowhere else, the mind of Man celebrates and enjoys triumphs over the mightiest obstacles, kindling itself to an ever-brightening flame. Reviewing its own past in history the spirit ...
— Progress and History • Various
... hammocks, and goods were thoroughly soaked by the streams of water which trickled through between the planks. In the morning all was quiet, but an opaque, leaden mass of clouds overspread the sky, throwing a gloom over the wild landscape that had a most dispiriting effect. These squalls from the west are always expected about the time of the breaking up of the dry season in these central parts of the Lower Amazons. They generally take place about the beginning of February, so that this year they ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... had good reasons why some one else should make the trial, they had better still why it should not be themselves. Others, again, condemned the whole idea as insane; among these, as ill-luck would have it, a seaman of the fleet; who was the most dispiriting of all. The height, he reminded us, was greater than the tallest ship's mast, the rope entirely free; and he as good as defied the boldest and strongest to succeed. We were relieved from this dead-lock by our sergeant- ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... passage quoted (c) is made nothing of. There are one or two fine dramatic touches, as, for instance, when Daland asks if his ship is any the worse: "Mein Schiff ist fest, es leidet keinen Schaden," with its bitter double meaning; but on the whole things are very dreary and dispiriting until the south wind blows up and stirs the composer's imagination. The sweet wind carries off the mariners to their home; the water ripples and plashes gently; and to the last bar of the act all is peace and beauty. The music has not, perhaps, the point of, say, the ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... engagement at Ball's Bluff, where Colonel Baker and many brave Union officers and soldiers were killed, while others were sent as prisoners to Richmond, had rather a dispiriting effect on the President. Mr. Lincoln and Colonel Baker had attended the same school, joined in the same boyish sports, and when they had grown to manhood their intimacy had ripened into ardent friendship. Mr. Lincoln had watched with ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... loose groups, among the men, coming and going with apparent aimlessness 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 ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... this morning I have sent into her room several pressing and impertinent letters from her tradespeople, and I put some accounts of the most dispiriting character before her last night. She ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... surmised that the evasive tact which Miss Burton exercised towards his friend was not caused by his relationship to Ida, and yet was compelled to admit that her frank and friendly bearing towards himself was scarcely less dispiriting. Her manner, as a rule, was so plainly that of a friend only, that were it not for occasional and furtive glances which he intercepted, he would deem his prospects little better than Stanton's, in spite of all ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... taught no rule. At first they were quite gravelled but ultimately, by sheer hard thinking, reasoned out the result, and came one after another to assure the trader he was right. Not many people in Europe could have done the like. The course at Hatiheu is therefore less dispiriting to Polynesians than a stranger might have guessed; and yet how bald it is at best! I asked the brother if he did not tell them stories, and he stared at me; if he did not teach them history, and he said, 'O yes, they had a little ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... indulging in any of the various light conversational diversions whereby barbers, Fulton street tailors, and other depressed gymnasts, are occasionally and wholesomely relieved from the misery of brooding over their equally dispiriting avocations. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... daughter so whimsically circumstanced as I am? I have sent my intended husband to look after my lover—the man of my father's choice is gone to bring me the man of my own: but how dispiriting is ...
— The Duenna • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... depression to be set down in a solemn courtyard, lighted by a solitary gas-lamp. This in itself would be quite sufficient to make a weary traveller melancholy, without the tolling of a gruesome bell to announce our arrival. This dispiriting sound seems to affect nobody in the house, except a lengthy young man in a desperate state of unwakefulness, who sleepily resents our arrival in the midst of his first slumber (he must have gone to bed at nine), and drowsily expresses ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... withered, odorless skeleton of a bouquet, that was given him on the day he left home, and who will carry it till he returns, or till it is reddened with his blood. And when I see a man, in the face of ridicule and brutal scoffing, through long marches and weary days of dispiriting labor, clinging with fond tenacity to some little memento of the past, I set him down as a man with his heart in the right place, who will do his country and God good service when there is need. And—it is well to practise what one admires in others—I confess that I have a smoking cap that I ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... employers of labour pursue and punish the subordinate who incurs their displeasure. In the case of a mere operative this secret persecution often worked complete ruin; and even to a man of Amherst's worth it opened the dispiriting prospect of ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... "the fellow's name alone seemed to affect you. Is it possible that, full of triumph and delight as you were just now, the sight merely of that man is capable of dispiriting you? Tell me, have you ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... estate, and passing once more through the tumultuous experiences of that period. And of these, not having enough to eat is by no means the least common. The evidence as to execrable dinners is rather dispiriting, and one may end by saying that if there is a worse fellow than a bully, it is a master who does not see that his boys are supplied with plenty of wholesome food. He, at least, could not venture, like a ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... cathedral as unlike that of Burgos as the severest mood of Spanish renaissance can render it. In fact, it is the work of Herrera, the architect who made the Escorial so grim, and is the expression in large measure of his austere mastery. If it had ever been finished it might have been quite as dispiriting as the Escorial, but as it has only one of the four ponderous towers it was meant to have, it is not without its alleviations, especially as the actual tower was rebuilt after the fall of the original ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... had long dried up those hearts devoted to narrow duties and entrenched behind pious practices. Silent games of cards occupied the whole evening, and the two young girls under the ban of that Sanhedrim enforced by maternal severity, came to hate the dispiriting personages about them with their hollow eyes and ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... I rose early and gazed across the cold misty Thames to the great factories and wharves upon the opposite bank. The outlook was indeed dull and dispiriting, I stood recalling how Moroni had walked with the beautiful girl in the streets of Florence, unwillingly it seemed, for he certainly feared lest his companion be recognized. I also recollected the strange conversation I had heard with my own ears, and the curious attitude which ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... head-land we left on Christmas-day, much dejected; for under our former sufferings we were in some measure supported with the hopes, that as we advanced, however little, they were so much the nearer their termination; but now our prospect was dismal and dispiriting indeed, as we had the same difficulties and dangers to encounter, not only without any flattering views to lessen them, but under the aggravating circumstance of their leading to an inevitable and miserable death; for we could not possibly conceive that the fate of starving ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... as well take leave now. His subsequent career is a most dispiriting study. He hoped against hope for a while that this foreign power or that foreign power would lend him a helping hand to his throne. Expelled from France, he drifted to Italy, and into that pitiable career of dissipation and drunkenness ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... the field; their loss was variously reported from 700 to 1,000, and even 1,500. The opposite force returned less than 100 killed, including Captain Knox, and about as many wounded. The repulse was even more than that at Ross, dispiriting to the rebels, who, as a last resort, now decided to concentrate all their strength on the ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee |
