"Sterile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... discussed across the floor of the House of Commons. The self-elected champions of the Christian faith who then ride into the lists are of a kind well calculated to make Piety hide her head for very shame. Rowdy noblemen, intemperate country gentlemen, sterile lawyers, cynical but wealthy sceptics who maintain religion as another fence round their property, hereditary Nonconformists whose God is respectability and whose goal a baronetcy, contrive, with a score or two of bigots thrown in, ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... these you will find to-day, fading out of use in the Uffizi, where, in a palace that has become a museum, they are most out of place: thus they have robbed the peasants for the sake of the gold of the tourists, the sterile ejaculations of ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... be squeezed, cut down, made so small before it can fit into that little receptacle of our egoism, that it will speedily be a dead, dry thing: thoughts once thought, feelings once felt, now neither thought nor felt, merely lying there inert, as a dead fact, in our sterile self. Do we not see this on all sides, examples of life into which all the dignified things have been crammed and all the beautiful ones, and which despite the statues, pictures, poems, and symphonies within its narrow compass, is yet so far ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... came from Alexandria, Bubastis and Sais, women who had long been barren, hoping to obtain children by the intercession of the holy man and the virtues of his pillar. They rubbed their sterile bodies against the stone. There followed a procession, as far as the eye could reach, of chariots, palanquins, and litters, which stopped and pushed and jostled below the man of God. From them came sick people ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... from the palms, one at each end of the cross, the muscles, carved sparely in the old wood, looking all wrong, upside down. And the icy wind blew them backwards and forwards, so that they gave a painful impression, there in the stark, sterile place of rock and cold. Yet I dared not touch the fallen body of the Christ, that lay on its back in so grotesque a posture at the foot of the post. I wondered who would come and take the broken thing away, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... only real test of true religion. The deep humility, the trustful appeal, the feeling of dependence, the consciousness of weakness, of sin, and the longing for deliverance from them—these are all very different from the pompous phrases of empty praise and sterile admiration; they are things which flow from the heart, not the fancy, which lighten its weight of sorrow and self-reproach, brighten it with hope and good resolutions, in short, make it happier and better—what no mere imaginative ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... that gradually became less and less interesting, until, in the end, we all pronounced it the tamest and least inviting region we had yet seen in Europe. I do not say that the country was particularly sterile, but it was common-place, and offered fewer objects of interest than any other we had yet visited. Until now, our destination was not settled, though I had almost decided to go to Nuremberg, and thence, by Ratisbonne and the Danube, ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... highways and lanes of story, character and experience. The best novelist is the one who fears not to tell you the truth, which is more wonderful than fiction. It is always the best hearts that bend to mistakes. Absolute virtue is as sterile as granite rock; absolute vice is as poisonous as a stagnant pond. No healthy interest or speculation can linger about either. Enter into the struggle and know human nature; don't stay outside ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... large, prominent structure, stands out on the slope of a sterile mountain side, the road sweeping up to its level in a long, elliptic curve. We find much people here congregated, and omnibuses and footfarers are still arriving and departing. Among the throng are three veritable Capuchin monks, thickly weighted with enfolding hoods and ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... call the theoretical side of his labours—labours from which the youngest and least impressionable planeur might well have shrunk. He had traced through cold and heat, across the deeps of the oceans, with instruments of his own invention, over the inhospitable heart of the polar ice and the sterile visage of the deserts, league by league, patiently, unweariedly, remorselessly, from their ever-shifting cradle under the magnetic pole to their exalted death-bed in the utmost ether of the upper atmosphere ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... "or rather I have not said, I have called out to you from the depths of my soul, that I love you! I love with all the accumulated power of the expectations, dreams, and impatient longings of a sterile life of eight-and-twenty years, passed in watching and not seeing, in seeking and not finding, what some presentiment taught me to expect, and you have revealed to me. But, alas, I have known and ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... of the work of the laborers and their livestock; wonderful antidote against pestilence; universal refuge for the cure of all diseases and pains; singular protector of the women who invoke him in their dangerous hours of giving birth, and of the sterile ones who seek the comfort of his protection." This is what is said in the frontispiece of his novena, Manila 1918. "By merely invoking his name or by adoring his saintly relic, and by drinking the water where it is passed, the saint can accomplish ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... that all who apply themselves to polite literature do not always find from their own funds a sufficient supply to insure success. For such he labours; and teaches to gather, in the gardens of others, those fruits of which their own sterile grounds are destitute; but so artfully to gather, that the public shall not perceive their depredations. He dignifies this fine art by the title of PLAGIANISM, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the clerical simile, let us peep within the sheathing spathe, or, better still, strip it off altogether. Doctor Torrey states that the dark-striped spathes are the fertile plants, those with green and whitish lines, sterile. Within are smooth, glossy columns, and near the base of each we shall find the true flowers, minute affairs, some staminate; others, on distinct plants, pistillate, the berry bearers; or rarely both male and female florets seated on the same club, as if Jack's elaborate ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... from the light and fiery dreams of love Spring heavy sorrows and a sleepless life, Visions not dreams, whose lids no charm shall close Nor song assuage them waking; and swift death Crushes with sterile feet the unripening ear, Treads out the timeless vintage; whom do thou Eschewing embrace the luck of this thy life, Not without honour; and it shall bear to thee Such fruit as men reap from spent hours and wear, Few men, but happy; of whom be thou, O son, Happiest, if thou submit thy soul to fate, ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of the Southern groups were the poorer farmers, who lived on the semi-sterile lands which the planters refused to occupy or in the pine barrens of the eastern Carolinas, and the landless class which hung on to the skirts of slavery. Unambitious, ignorant, and improvident, frequently the "ne'er-do-wells" of the old families, ignored by the ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... his influence is likely to possess with the next and following generations is another and rather sterile question, which we are not now concerned to discuss. The unrestrained eccentricities which Mr. Carlyle's strong individuality has precipitated in his written style may, in spite of the poetic fineness of his imagination, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... We shall have occasion hereafter to notice his criticism on the great work of Sebastian, in our National Gallery. We are surprised that he should consider Sebastian del Piombo deficient in ideal colour, and that the lines of Daniel of Volterra are meagre and sterile of idea—his celebrated Descent from the Cross being in its lines, as tending to perfect the composition, and to make full his great idea, quite extraordinary. Poor Vasari, who can never find favour with our author, is considered the great ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... contrary, have made any one of a million other universes just as well as this. You can deduce no single actual particular from the notion of it. It is compatible with any state of things whatever being true here below. And the theistic God is almost as sterile a principle. You have to go to the world which he has created to get any inkling of his actual character: he is the kind of god that has once for all made that kind of a world. The God of the theistic writers lives on as purely abstract heights as does the ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... this argument, as I see it and will present it, invalidated in any degree by the case of such individuals as the sterile worker-bee; any more than the argument, rightly considered, is invalidated by any instance of a worthy, valuable, happy life, eminently a success in the highest and in the lower senses, lived amongst mankind by a non-parent of either sex. On the contrary, it is in such cases ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... country near the river Orinoco; the only part of the continent of America that Columbus had seen. Tombut, in the same latitude, is the most sterile part of Africa. America embraces a greater compass of latitude by many degrees than the other continent; and yet its inhabitants present a much less variety in their physical and moral character. When shall we be able to account ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... to whar they're at. Leanin' over Sarah Ann's off-shoulder, bein' the one furthest from that onmitigated Jenks, I says, "Sweetheart, how can you waste time talkin' to this yere hooman Sahara, whose intellects is that sterile they wouldn't raise cow-pease?" ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... hotel, bright with the latest fastidiousness in modern decoration and art-furniture, and gay with pictured canvases and color, seemed to mock the sullen landscape, and the sterile crags amid which the building was set. An attempt to make a pleasance in this barren waste had resulted only in empty vases, bleak statuary, and iron settees, as cold and slippery to the touch as the ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... they go from one home to the other as they will. Parents are not as willing as before to let go their children; for whereas my grandmother had fifteen, I have none, and few of us have many. We are made sterile by your civilization. Tetuanui and I were happy and able to persuade the mothers of twenty-five to give their infants to us because we were childless and were chiefs and well-to-do. Our race is passing so fast through the miseries the white has brought us that little ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... why this neglect of a territory, which would seem so tempting to the colonist? For the Gran Chaco is no sterile tract, like most parts of the Navajo country in the north, or the plains of Patagonia and the sierras of Arauco in the south. Nor is it a humid, impervious forest, at seasons inundated, as with some portions of the Amazon valley and the deltas ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... common interests and sympathies, went quite as far as their evident superiority in arms and resources toward establishing the deep-founded and highly valued peace, without which the handful of white men could never have made good their footing upon that stern and sterile coast. ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... seminary and college naturally developed this into a snobbish assumption that he was of finer clay than the commonality, and in some way selected by fortune for her finer displays and luxurious purposes. I have termed this a "sterile selfishness," to distinguish it from that grand egoism which in large minds is fruitful of high accomplishments and great deeds, and to denote a force which, in the sons of the average "rich" men of the county seats, is apt to expend itself ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... as was my convalescence, by the loss of the Sahara depots. When I got the news, my principal concern wasnt for the incalculable damage to Consolidated Pemmican. My initial reaction was amazement at the ability of the devilgrass to make its way so rapidly across a sterile and waterless waste. In the years since its first appearance it had truly adapted itself to any climate, altitude, or condition confronting it. A few months before, the catastrophe would have plunged me ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... low fellow, to be heard of at the bar of the Black Badger. Mr. Toots selects this man as his instructor in fencing, betting, and self-defence. The Chicken has short hair, a low forehead, a broken nose, and "a considerable tract of bare and sterile country behind each ear."—C. Dickens, Dombey and ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... breast, and drawing the silken hair through his caressing fingers, from which he suffered it to fall like golden rain,—ever dearest and best adored, let us fly from the unsympathetic world and the sterile coldness of the stony-hearted, to the rich warm Paradise of Trust and Love.' Miss Twinkleton's fraudulent version tamely ran thus: 'Ever engaged to me with the consent of our parents on both sides, and the approbation of the silver-haired ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... and other beasts of prey, and to men who after many efforts will be compelled to abandon their life, and the human race will die out. In this way the fertile and fruitful earth will remain deserted, arid and sterile from the water being shut up in its interior, and from the activity of nature it will continue a little time to increase until the cold and subtle air being gone, it will be forced to end with the element of fire; and then its surface will be left ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... for the elder sister. The agony of Norah's grief had forced its way outward to the natural relief of tears. It was not so with Magdalen. Tearless and speechless, she sat in the room where the revelation of her father's death had first reached her; her face, unnaturally petrified by the sterile sorrow of old age—a white, changeless blank, fearful to look at. Nothing roused, nothing melted her. She only said, "Don't speak to me; don't touch me. Let me bear it by myself"—and fell silent again. The first great grief which had darkened the ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... Scattering their buds and dew upon These acres of my home, Some rapture in my rags awakes; I lift void eyes and scan The skies for crows, those ravening foes, Of my strange master, Man. I watch him striding lank behind His clashing team, and know Soon will the wheat swish body high Where once lay sterile snow; Soon shall I gaze across a sea Of sun-begotten grain, Which my unflinching watch hath sealed ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... from that time the two Trevannions might have been seen upon a ship, steering westward from the Land's End, and six months later both disembarked upon the beach of Callao,—en route first for Lima, thence up the mountains, to the sterile snow-crested mountains, that tower above the treasures of Cerro Pasco,—vainly guarded within the bosom of ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... existence will he have if you rob him of the fruits of his ambition, if you take him from the splendour of a great political career, if you close the doors of public life against him, if you condemn him to sterile failure, he who was made for triumph and success? Women are not meant to judge us, but to forgive us when we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment, is their mission. Why should you scourge him with rods for a sin done in his youth, before he knew you, before he knew himself? ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... within such limits, and in such sense, as they permit; or, on the contrary, does it tend to heighten respect for civic law, for pledged word, for the habit of self-surrender to the public good, and for all those other ideas and sentiments and usages which have been painfully gained from the sterile sands of egotism and selfishness, and to which we are indebted for all the untold boons conferred by the social union ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... sunlight and gleams of blue, that they had worked their way up through the cloud-layers. In process of time, indeed, they got clear of the mists altogether, and emerged on to the higher valleys of the Alps—vast, sterile, the white snow-plains glittering in the sun, except where the rocks showed through in points of intense black. There were no longer any pines. They were in a world of snow and barren rocks and brilliant sunlight, with a cold luminous blue sky overhead; ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... softened earth the peasant sows his crop with almost no labor. The Nile, then, brings both water and soil to Egypt; if the river should fail, Egypt would revert, like the land on either side of it, to a desert of sterile sand where the rain never falls. The Egyptians are conscious of their debt to their stream. A song in its honor runs as follows: "Greeting to thee, O Nile, who hast revealed thyself throughout the land, who comest in peace to give life ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... utilise a space whence the performance could not otherwise be seen, and was generally occupied by actresses, etc.], where she could not be seen by the public. The husband met with no sympathy from the public; he had always been a characterless and sterile writer, had published only two books, written in a diametrically opposite spirit, flatly contradicting one another. As long as he was able to go out he had dyed his red hair black. He was an insignificant man in every way, and by his first ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... dared not close my eyes or when I woke I would have vanished into the Jay Allison I hated. For a moment I saw the room with his eyes; to him it would not seem cosy and clean, but—habituated to white sterile tile, Terran rooms and corridors—dirty and unsanitary as ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... named the New Forest.[1] It was said that William destroyed many churches and estates in order to form this forest, but these accounts appear to have been greatly exaggerated. The real grievance was not so much the appropriation of the land, which was sterile and of little value, but it was the enactment of the savage Forest Laws. These ordinances made he life of a stag of more value than that of a man, and decreed that anyone found hunting the royal deer should have both ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... of soils, you may be able to find land that will grow something that no one supposes it will grow. This will be particularly useful in the case of land thought to be valueless. The lands about Miles, Michigan, were considered sterile until some one found out that they would grow mint, a valuable crop, which made the land salable ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... for this remark, their halting-places during the past few days having been in very sterile spots, where the tall forbidding rocks were relieved by very little that was green, and patches ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... method of insuring freedom from malaria should be to obtain a permanent immunity, that is, to be able to modify the composition of the infected soil in such a way as to make it sterile as regards malaria, without taking from it the power of furnishing products useful for the social economy. But all the elements indispensable for obtaining such a result fail us utterly just here. We do not yet know what ought to be, in general terms, the composition of a soil incapable ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... and calms the soul are exchanged for what is harsh and void and negative. It encourages a stern and ignorant spirit of condemnation; it throws altogether out of gear the healthy movement of the conscience; it invents virtues which are sterile and cruel; it invents sins which are no sins at all, but which darken the heaven of innocent joy with futile clouds of remorse. There is something horrible, if we will bring ourselves to face it, in the fanaticism that can ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... victory, but the whole number of their troops on the island available for military service at any one time rarely reached eight thousand men. A campaign in the Monte Cristi district which might have ended the war was rendered sterile by the lack of troops. Finally the Spaniards, unable to garrison the towns they won, were reduced to the possession of Santo Domingo City and a few other places near the seacoast, all practically in a state of siege. Meanwhile the military operations ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... the rows are from each other, but sometimes in squares. Pride in appearance and convenience in vineyard operations make perfect alignment imperative. Many varieties of grapes, especially of American species, are partially self-sterile, so that some varieties must have others interplanted with them for cross-pollination. This is usually done by setting alternate rows of the variety to be pollinated and the cross-pollinator. All self-fertile varieties are set in solid blocks ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... insects; these are very unlike those of their parents, and cannot, apparently, be transmitted to offspring by individuals of the previous generation, in whom such structure and instincts appeared, inasmuch as these creatures are sterile. I do not say that the difficulty is wholly removed, inasmuch as some obscurity must be admitted to remain as to the manner in which the structure of the larva is aborted; this obscurity is likely to remain till we know more of the early history ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... botanists and zoologists who have specially studied the subject, shows that bees improve the quality and tend to increase the quantity of fruit. They aid in the fertilization of flowers, thus preventing the occurrence of sterile flowers, and, by more thoroughly fertilizing flowers already perfect, render the production of sound and well developed fruit more sure. Many botanists think if it were not for bees, and other insects, many plants would ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... width, separates them from the mainland. Far too wide to be crossed by the strongest swimmer amongst them—too wide for them to be descried from the opposite side, even through a telescope! And the inland is a mere strip of sea-washed rock, running parallel to the coast, cliff-bound, table-topped, sterile, treeless—and, to ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... corporate union is manifestly rising, the wave of extended British influence is flowing northwards, the various nationalities and states of this vast country are educating themselves by experience to see the folly and sterile weakness of isolation, and are learning to realise the inherent strength, and vitality of mutual co-operation, based on a self respecting, yet unselfish responsibility to ...
— A Winter Tour in South Africa • Frederick Young
... done, the liberty permitted to the husband, the liberty permitted to the wife, if the wife shall continue her work or profession or remain at home dependent on the husband's earnings, whether the marriage shall be fruitful or sterile—these are but a few of the questions left undecided. And thus to leave unguided each wife and each husband, with their own idea of what is good to do and what is evil, makes for narrowness and waste of effort; while further, our ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... production precedes population; I, on the contrary, maintain that population precedes, and is indeed the cause of, production. They teach that man breeds up to the capital, or in proportion to the abundance of the food, he possesses: I assert, that he is comparatively sterile when he is wealthy, and that he breeds in proportion to his poverty; not meaning, however, by that poverty, a state of privation approaching to actual starvation, any more than, I suppose, they would contend, that extreme and culpable ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... finer and more delicate than the common red ceader, it's fruit and smell are the same with the red ceader. the tops of these hills which produce the pine and cedar is of a different soil from that just described; it is a light coloured poor sterile sandy soil, the base usually a yellow or white clay; it produces scarcely any grass, some scattering tuffts of sedge constitutes the greater part of it's grass. About 5 P.M. my attention was struck by one of the Party runing at a ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... earth's surface is more irremediably sterile, none more hopelessly lost to human occupation, and yet, an eminent geologist has said, it is the wreck of a region once rich and beautiful, changed and impoverished by the deepening of its draining streams—the most striking and suggestive example of over-drainage of which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... the keen eye of Benjamin Franklin, its effects in the way of climate are so great that we must attribute the fitness of northern Europe for the uses of civilized man to its action. But for the heat which this stream brings to the realm of the North Atlantic, Great Britain would be as sterile as Labrador, and the Scandinavian region, the cradle-land of our race, as uninhabitable as the ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... western front the nature of the ground makes an attack absolutely unfeasible. The place chosen by the French was the Champagne region, in the neighborhood of the great army review ground of Chalons. It is a rolling, sterile country, dotted with sparse roads. There is a thin loam over a subsoil of chalk—excellent for the defensive, but also permitting the rapid movement of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... thronged with pretty women eating American ices, with military men drinking tea and nibbling Austrian pastry, the hour when the flower women along the Stephansplatz did a rousing business in roses, when sterile women burned candles before the Madonna in the Cathedral, when the lottery did the record ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... one way, would decide that they were true species; while another, who should cross them in the reverse way, would, with equal justice, according to the rule, pronounce them to be mere races. Several plants, which there is great reason to believe are mere varieties, are almost sterile when crossed; while both animals and plants, which have always been regarded by naturalists as of distinct species, turn out, when the test is applied, to be perfectly fertile. Again, the sterility ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... result of the long years of repression has been the sterility of women's lives. Sterility is a deadly sin. To-day so many of our activities are sterile. The women of our richer classes have been impotent by reason of their soft living; the women of our workers have had their vitality sweated out of them by their filthy labours; they could bear only dead things. ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... had given no attention to my direction. I had lost twenty-five hundred metres in height. The trenches were now plainly visible, and the brown strip of sterile country where they lay was vastly broader. Several times I felt the concussion of shell explosions, my machine being lifted and then dropped gently with an uneasy motion. Constantly searching the air, I gave no thought to my position with reference ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... a new animal, arising from the coming together of many unfamiliar elements and it is well known that the reproduction of abnormal growths, whether animal or vegetable, is irregular and not to be depended upon, even when they are not absolutely sterile. ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... the sea-coast suffered from want of water, as little or no rain fell there, and the few streams, in their short and hurried course from the mountains, exerted only a very limited influence on the wide extent of territory. The soil, it is true, was, for the most part, sandy and sterile; but many places were capable of being reclaimed, and, indeed, needed only to be properly irrigated to be susceptible of extraordinary production. To these spots water was conveyed by means of canals and subterraneous aqueducts, executed on a noble scale. ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... of these pageants seen from the Moon, and of the inhabitants of our satellite as if they really existed. The sterile and desolate aspect of the lunar world, however, rather brings us to the conclusion that such inhabitants are non-existent, although we have no authorization for affirming this. That they have existed seems to ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... imagined the most perfect judicial system; had you found the most upright and enlightened judges, there will always remain some room for error or prejudice. Why interdict to yourselves the means of reparation? Why condemn yourself to powerlessness to help opprest innocence? What good can come of the sterile regrets, these illusory reparations you grant to a vain shade, to insensible ashes? They are the sad testimonials of the barbarous temerity of your penal laws. To rob the man of the possibility of expiating his crime by his repentance or by acts of virtue; to close ...
— Phrases for Public Speakers and Paragraphs for Study • Compiled by Grenville Kleiser
... attractions of the Holy Cause; and, above all, he failed not to describe, with glowing colours, the beauties who, in the gorgeous East, distinguished with a prodigal favour the warriors of the Cross. Dowries, unknown in the more sterile mountains of the Rhine, accompanied the hand of these beauteous maidens; and even a prince's daughter was not deemed, he said, too lofty a marriage for the heroes who ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... village of Evionnaz appeared in the midst of this sterile region. The hardest heart would have been moved to see this hamlet, lost among these horrible solitudes. The old man sped on, and plunged into the deepest gorge of the Dents-du-Midi, which pierce the sky with ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... walks towards the Smith town hills, and along the banks that overlook the river. The summit of this ridge is sterile, and is thickly set with loose blocks of red and grey granite, interspersed with large masses of limestone scattered in every direction; they are mostly smooth and rounded, as if by the action of water. As they are detached, and merely occupy the surface of the ground, ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... often had he maintained an opposite opinion—seeming contemptuous, indolent, invulnerable, unconscious of her beauty, amused rather than attracted by her brilliant spirit. Every instinct of the coquette, jealous of her own power and wretched from the sterile suffering of wounded pride, resented bitterly the unpardonable ease which he had appeared to enjoy in her society. Now, however, that he appealed to her womanliness by a humble surrender, her better, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... on the other hand, one believes that social revolution has actually occurred, to speak of Trades Unions continuing the struggle in which they conquered something like three years ago, is to urge them to a sterile fanaticism which has been neatly described by Professor Santayana as a redoubling of your effort when you have ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... have made a fresh start; at any rate his work has now a freshness and vivacity which in his younger days he could never impart. The case of Guerin is odder still. A passionate admirer of Watteau, he would seem to have locked himself up in a rather sterile devotion to the eighteenth century master. One must suppose that there was something dead in his appreciation, something recognized but unfelt, and therefore not really understood. This deadness came through into his work. Lacking genuine inspiration, struggling in consequence to impart ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... heads; when the slow rains weep down upon us, and the very clouds look cold above. Then, like Hamlet the Dane, we take no pleasure in the life that weighs so wearily upon us, and deem "this goodly frame, the earth, a sterile promonotory; this most excellent canopy, the air, this brave, overhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, a foul and pestilent ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... but must search for it next time I go to Varallo. Torrotti presently says that the country being sterile, the people are hard pressed for food during two-thirds of the year; hence they have betaken themselves to commerce and to sundry arts, with which they overrun the world, returning home but once or twice a year, with their hands well filled with that which they have garnered, ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... readily enough acquit myself, with good sound legal proofs, of any such singularity as stands charged in this soft impeachment—and that without appeal to The Cleveland Plain Dealer of eleven years ago ("slushy and disgusting"), or to The New York Post ("sterile and malodorous ... worse than immoral—dull"), or to Ainslee's Magazine ("inconsequent and rambling ... rather nauseating at times"). These devotees of the adjective that hunts in pairs are hardly to be discussed, I suppose, in connection with any rewards ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... answered Durkin absently. Life, at that moment, was confronting him so grimly, so flat and sterile and uncompromising in its secret exactions, that he had no heart ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... our spirits rose. We straightened in our saddles, we breathed deep, we joked. The country was scorched and sterile; the wagon-trail, almost paralleling the mountains themselves on a long easy slant toward the high country, was ankle-deep in dust; the ravines were still dry of water. But it was not the Inferno, and that one fact sufficed. After a ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... must carry our warm cloak of human sympathy and understanding for vast tracts of land will prove to be a sterile desert—swept by icy storms of popular prejudice and personal greed and unless we come well prepared we shall forsake our faith in humanity and that, dear boys, would be the worst thing that could ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon
... excited the enterprise of Leif, son of Eric Rauda (or Redhead), the first settler of Greenland. A vessel was fitted out, and Leif and Biorn departed alone in quest of this unknown land. They found a rocky and sterile island, to which they gave the name of Helleland; also a low sandy country covered with wood, to which they gave the name of Markland; and, two days afterwards, they observed a continuance of the coast, ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... not angle in that gulf; but I have fished up an island in Maracaybo, or Venezuela Gulf. It is called Curacoa, and is arid and sterile. There is very little water, and only one well in the island, and the water is sold at a high price. Its capital is Williamstadt, one of the neatest cities in the ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... enter?—or rather is there not some deep innate principle,—some strong motive of aggrandizement or preservation,—some real Enceladus,—the cause of this furious volcano of destructive agitation? If, indeed, the struggle be for the possession of a sterile waste in the heart of the continent,—useless either as a slave-breeding or a slave-working country,—clearly, whatever the politician might say to the contrary, the patriot and the merchant would soon apply to the struggle the principle, that sometimes the game is not worth the candle. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... 1/2 inch pieces. Add water and sugar, the orange juice and grated peel. Cook all together, stirring frequently to prevent scorching, for 30 minutes, or until clear. Put in sterile jelly ...
— Pennsylvania Dutch Cooking • Unknown
... channel. The southern portion of it is a thickly-populated village, but the principal part of the island is laid out as a park, of which the people of Stockholm are justly proud. It was originally a sterile tract of land: the first improvements converted it into a deer park for the royal use; but Gustaf III. and Charles (XIV.) John, as Bernadotte was styled, turned it into a public park. It is laid out in walks and avenues beautifully shaded with oaks and other ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... which the wretched Svend hid was probably the last representative of great forests that grew where now is sterile moor. In the bogs trunks of oak and fir are found lying as they fell centuries ago. The local names preserve the tradition, with here and there patches of scrub oak that hug the ground close, to escape the blast from the North Sea. There is one such thicket near the hamlet of Taulund—the name ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... of the steamer. The two rivers seem to touch, but not to blend, so proud and haughty is this chieftain from the north. On the mountains above Tadousac one could see banks of sand left by the ancient seas. Naked rock and sterile sand are all the Tadousacker has to make his garden of, so far as I observed. Indeed, there is no soil along the Saguenay until you get to Ha-ha Bay, and then there is not much, and ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... the sun, almost like mushrooms, on being asked why the earth no longer yielded crops of that nature, replied: "Because it is old, and has lost its fertility." Has labor, once so fecund, likewise become sterile? Why does the tenant no longer acquire through his labor the land which was formerly acquired by the ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... sustain him now. He has laid up this food for the last hours, for this crisis of his soul. All souls must lay up something spiritual, even as they must lay up food for the winter of life, for the bleak bright hours of the soul's sterile fight. ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... REMEDY.—Nature in her wise economy has prepared for overproduction, for during the period of pregnancy and nursing, and also most of the last half of each menstrual month, woman is naturally sterile; but this condition may become irregular and uncertain on account of stimulating ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... turf not good enough to use for edging, so after removing this have it broken into bits and put in a heap by itself. When the earth beneath is loosened, examine it carefully. If it is good old mellow loam without the pale yellow colour that denotes the sterile, undigested soil unworked by roots or earthworms, have it taken out to eighteen inches in depth and shovelled to one side. When the bad soil is reached, which will be soon, have it removed so that the pit will be three ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... fire. offerhus (-et, —), sacrificial temple. offerkniv (-en, -ar), sacrificial knife. offerlund (-en, -ar), sacrificial grove. offerfrest (-en, -er), sacrificial priest. offersten (-en, -ar), sacrificial stone. offerng|a (-an, -or), sacrificial incense. offr|a (-ade, -at), to sacrifice. ofruktbar, sterile, unfruitful. ofta, often. ofrd (-en), misfortune, disaster. ofrsonlig, unrelenting, unforgiving. ofrsont, unpropitiated. ohmnad, unavenged. ohrd, unheard, unheeded. oknd, unknown. om, about, if, concerning, for, during, ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... human organisms the feelings are dwarfed, as the thought may be in certain sterile imaginations. Thus, just as some minds have the faculty of comprehending the connections existing between different things without formal deduction; and as they have the faculty of seizing upon each formula separately, without combining them, or without the power ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... had their quickening effect upon Johnny's intellect. A brilliantly wicked thought struck him. As he was passing a perfectly bare spot on the road he managed, without being noticed, to cast his glittering flake of gold on the sterile ground at the other side of the road, where the minister's path would lie. Then, at a point where the road turned, he concealed himself in the brush. The Reverend Mr. Staples hurried forward as he lost sight of the boy in the sweep of ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... unequal, narrow, keeled, membranous, 1-nerved, persistent, acute, mucronate and the second glume awned shortly. Floral glumes narrow or broad, acute, obtuse or minutely 2-toothed and awned, paleate; sterile glumes are small, without palea. There are two lodicules and anthers are rather small. Grain is ...
— A Handbook of Some South Indian Grasses • Rai Bahadur K. Ranga Achariyar
... show 9.33 children per family.[98] It must be remembered that this average, which is even higher than that found in Russia, the most prolific of European countries, is not quite the same as the number of children per marriage; but it indicates very great fertility, while it may be noted also that sterile marriages are comparatively rare among French Canadians, although among English Canadians the proportion of childless families is found to be almost exactly the same (nearly 20 per cent) as among the infertile Americans of Massachusetts. The ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... of Serapis as its basis and laid its scene in the land of their ancestry, but inconsistently retained the sign of the cross and the phraseology connected there with, which, having special reference to the Nile River and its annual inundation, had no application whatever to the sterile land of Judea. Selecting what they conceived to be the best from other versions of the Gospel story, and assuming the title of Eclectics, they designated their system as the Eclectic Philosophy. In proof of the ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... never talk? Or would you confine talking to the weather or the contents of the public prints? Would you have our ideas get hard and sterile for want of being moved? Do you advise that, like some tactful persons we—you—yes, you—all know and detest—we systematically let every subject drop ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... Lady Garnett and her intimates, of persons (the phrase of Steele's recurred to her as meeting it appropriately) "who had seen the world enough to undervalue it with good breeding," must seem to her at last a little sterile when she was conscious—never more than now—of how clearly and swiftly the healthy young blood coursed through her veins, dissipating any morbid imaginations that she might feel inclined to cherish. She looked out at life, in her conviction that so ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... earnings in the conscious hope that he could go back to New England and ask Nancy Wentworth to marry him. The West was prosperous and progressive, but how he yearned, in idle moments, for the grimmer and more sterile soil that had ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... by them must be purchased extravagantly dear. It is, indeed, surprizing how this immense city, said to contain three millions of inhabitants, is contrived to be supplied at any rate, considering the very sterile and unproductive state of the country for many miles around it. It might not, however, be a matter of less astonishment to a Chinese, nor less difficult for him to conceive, in what manner our own capital ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... any size, do not put two trees of the same variety close together. Some varieties are self-sterile, yet quite capable of cross-fertilisation from the pollen of other varieties. Bees should be kept close at hand to fertilise ...
— The Book of Pears and Plums • Edward Bartrum
... herself, were laborious and covetous; their good fortune had made no change in their mode of living, but they were as frugal and as eager to accumulate as ever. In their hands, money was inert and sterile, or it served to foster their vices. To take it from them would, therefore, be a benefit both to them and to myself; not even an imaginary injury would be inflicted. Restitution, if legally compelled to it, would be reluctant ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... evergreen and persistent for several years (except in Larix), scattered along the twigs, spirally arranged or tufted, linear, needle-shaped, or scale-like; sterile and fertile flowers separate upon the same plant; stamens (subtended by scales) spirally arranged upon a central axis, each bearing two pollen-sacs surmounted by a broad-toothed connective; fertile flowers ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... things they took for granted and the general misery of explaining! He couldn't tell them how he had tried to work, how it was partly what he had moved into rooms for, only to find himself, almost for the first time in his life, stricken and sterile; because that would give them a false view of the source of his restlessness, if not of the degree of it. It would operate, indirectly perhaps, but infallibly, to add to that weight as of expected performance which these very moments with Mrs. Stringham ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... space, where the stars were like diamonds. Not in the light of swirling, angry, red suns, not upon the surface of any planet, so drab when you drew too near. Only in the sterile purity of remote space where he could maintain and nourish the essential purity of his day-dreams. But of course one could not explain this to the Board of Examiners; least ...
— The Marooner • Charles A. Stearns
... appearance only. It is true that Isaac Hecker had learned from him the claims of most of the great forms of Protestantism, and got his personal testimony as to the emptiness of them all. Brownson was a competent witness, for he had been an accepted disciple of every school, from sterile Presbyterianism to rank Transcendentalism. Although of a certain testiness of temper, he bore malice to no man and to no body of men. His testimony was in the presence of patent facts, and his condemnation ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... development fertile in prose story-telling,—short fables and tales, novels philosophic and religious, historical and satiric, novels of love, novels of adventure. Yet, strange to say, while the instinct was prolific in the Hellenic domain of the Roman Empire, it was for the most part sterile in Italy, though Roman life was saturated with the influence of Greek culture. Its only two notable examples are Petronius Arbiter and Apuleius, both of whom belong to the first two centuries of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... everywhere when in command. He established educational institutions; ordered that the rivers be examined in order to study the feasibility of changing their courses so as to furnish water to arid and sterile areas; distributed land among the Indians; suppressed the duties on mining machinery; ordered the planting of trees, and showed in a thousand ways his untiring energy, all the while keeping in active diplomatic correspondence and in constant communication with his friends and ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... between English and French squadrons had been fought within the distance of a few miles. By this eruption the vegetation on the north part of the island, comprising one third of the whole territory, was destroyed, and the soil rendered sterile, being covered to a great depth with cinders and ashes. All the lands in the immediate vicinity were also rendered unfit for cultivation. What is remarkable, but few lives were lost. The unfortunate Caribs, however, who comprised about one hundred families, dwelt in this ungenial and ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... to give Christian burial to the dead men, even if we had had the proper tools to open the earth. With a sigh, we left the birds their prey, and once more continued our journey through the wildest part of the sterile country between ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... died as a maker one may still live as a critic, and I will confess I am all for laxness and variety in this as in every field of art. Insistence upon rigid forms and austere unities seems to me the instinctive reaction of the sterile against the fecund. It is the tired man with a headache who values a work of art for what it does not contain. I suppose it is the lot of every critic nowadays to suffer from indigestion and a fatigued appreciation, ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... eloquence to marble lips. Nor does the chisel occupy alone The powers of sculpture, but the style as much; Each province of her art her equal care. With nice incision of her guided steel She ploughs a brazen field, and clothes a soil So sterile with what charms soe'er she will, The richest scenery and the loveliest forms. Where finds philosophy her eagle eye, With which she gazes at yon burning disk Undazzled, and detects and counts his spots? In London. Where her ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... exhibitions of a vigorous, but undisciplined mind. His songs are rather easy than lively. His imitations are distinguished by grace and spirit. His 'Nothing' is a tissue of clever conceits, like gaudy weeds growing on a sterile soil, but here and there contains a grand and ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... acting stimulants, none is better than camphor in saturated solution in sterile oil as may be obtained in ampules. Alcohol is absolutely contraindicated in the latter condition. In the former kind of heart attack, vasodilation from a large close of whisky or brandy may be of value. The dose should be large to cause immediate ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... these gates. Count them—Gibraltar, Malta, Aden. But she commands the entrance to the Red Sea, not by one, but by several strongholds. Midway in the narrow strait is the black, bare rock of Perim, sterile, precipitous, a perfect counterpart of Gibraltar; and on either side, between it and the mainland, are the ship-channels which connect the Red Sea with the great Indian Ocean. ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... poorest and most miserable population in Ireland, is rented at nearly half the amount paid by the independent yeomanry of Down; while, amongst the inland counties, the splendid plains of Roscommon, and the productive lands of Longford, yield less income than the cold and, comparatively speaking, sterile soil of Tyrone. Now, it is not too much (indeed it is under the mark) to say, that two acres in any of those counties we have quoted, in Leinster, Munster, or Connaught, will feed more cattle, and grow more corn, than three acres in either of the northern ones; and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... fire of German guns. That any human being should be there passed all belief. From a shell-hole in a high wall I looked across the field of battle, where many of our best had died. The Tower Bridge of Loos stood grim and gaunt above the sterile fields. Through the rain and the mist loomed the long black ridge of Notre Dame de Lorette, where many poor bodies lay in the rotting leaves. The ruins of Haisnes and Hulluch were jagged against the sky-line. And here, on New—Year's eve, I saw no sign of human life and heard no sound of it, but ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... was changed materially for the better; though the hand, which had impressed so much of the desert on the surrounding region, had laid a portion of its power on this spot. The appearance of vegetation was, however, less discouraging than in the more sterile wastes of the rolling prairies. Clusters of trees were scattered in greater profusion, and a long outline of ragged forest marked the northern boundary of the view. Here and there, on the bottom, ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... problem; the want of a touchstone by which to test the overwhelming mass of conflicting information which poured in upon them; their constitutional lack of moral courage, and the circumstance that they were striving to reconcile contradictories. Without chart or compass they drifted into strange and sterile courses, beginning with the Prinkipo incident and ending with the written examination to which they naively subjected Kolchak in order to legalize international relations, which could not truly be described as either war or peace. Neither the causes of Bolshevism in its ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... could speak truth and draw the bow, what might they not do when the hour and the man arrived? They were not a big nation. No; but they were a great nation, even while they were eating barley-bread and paying tribute to their conquerors the Medes, in the sterile ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... baronial hall: the castle, of grey granite in the Norman style, having its own gasometer, all the light was gas; this struck me as a remarkable feature inside: on the outside was one quite as memorable. Those sterile-looking isles of the North Sea are so swept by stormy winds as to be absolutely treeless: insomuch that it is jocularly said, that for cutting down a tree at Kirkwall, the penalty is death! simply because no trees exist ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... other springs were pushing here. Egotism, egotism, egotism! Its name, he thought, was surely Ostermore. And again, as once before, under the like circumstances, he found more pity than scorn awaking in his heart. The whole wasted, sterile life that lay behind this man; the unhappy, loveless home that stood about him now in his declining years were the fruits he had garnered from that consuming love of self with which ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... their brows of burnished silver, their eyes of the most precious jewels, their lips of coral, their throats of ivory and transparent crystal? Are not their tears liquid pearls, and where they plant the soles of their feet do not jasmine and roses spring up at the moment, however rebellious and sterile the earth may previously have been? Then what is their breath but pure amber, musk, and frankincense? Yet to whom do all these things belong, if not to the poets? They are, therefore, manifest signs and proofs of ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... perverted and the whole being is disorganized. In a word, all that Jesus connotes by "the Kingdom of God" is "taken from them" (Matt. 21:43), and nothing left but "outer darkness" (Matt. 22:13). The vision of God is not for the impure (Matt. 5:8). Meanwhile sin is not a sterile thing, it is a leaven (Matt. 16:6). If our modern medical language may be applied—and Jesus used the analogy of medicine in this very case (Mark 2:17)—sin is septic. In the first place, all sin is anti-social—an invasion "ipso facto" of the rights of others. The man who sins ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... under General Hodgson, took its course across the Channel. Great things were expected as the result of this expedition, but it only enacted the old story of "The mountain in labour." The point against which this force was directed was the sterile rock of Bellisle, which, at the expense of two thousand lives, was captured. Thus disappointed, the people complained of the obstinacy of Pitt, and asked, sarcastically, what could be done with it? Nevertheless, if it was no use to England, it was a place of importance ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... offices, in which the others do not share. Some bear the Medusae buds, which in due time become laden with eggs, but, as I have said, wither and die after the eggs are hatched. Others put forth Hydroid buds only, while others again are wholly sterile. About the outskirts of the community are more simple individuals, whose whole body seems to be hardly more than a double-walled tube, terminating in a knob of lasso-cells. They are like long tentacles placed where they can most easily seize the prey that happens to approach ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... not seem conclusive; for the only reference to the subject in the preface is as follows: 'What could my sterile and uncultivated genius produce but the history of a child, meagre, adust, and whimsical, full of various wild imaginations never thought of before; like one you may suppose born in a prison, where every inconvenience keeps its residence, and every dismal ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... extremely interesting. But an atelier is not made to let monkeys loose in. No more is thought a ground for acrobatic evolutions. A man worthy of the name, thinks as he is, as his tastes are: he goes about it with his whole heart, and not with that fitful and sterile curiosity which, under pretext of observing and noting everything, runs the risk of never experiencing a deep and true emotion or accomplishing ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... Gairsoppa Falls I should have thought that it would have been difficult to find anywhere in the world scenes more varied and beautiful. But the beauties of the falls of Cauvery are set in comparatively speaking sterile surroundings of rock and scrubby jungle, trees and shrubs scattered over ground partly undulating, and partly over hills of moderate height and uninteresting form. Then the grandeur arising from their great ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... sterile, I think," said the ex-girl-soldier of the Battalion of Death, buttering a crescent. She ate it with the delightful appetite of flawless health, and poured ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... mud and stone, and flat roofed with the trunk of the date tree. Around it is a wall, beyond which nothing is to be seen but a vast sandy plain, extending more than sixty miles. Within the walls, it is equally sterile, it literally yields nothing; here, "all is barren," and the water is far from sweet, yet 4,000 souls live, though the sheikh keeps up no standing army. Mr. S. sails thence into the Shut-ul-Arab, [River of the Arabs,] ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 560, August 4, 1832 • Various
... strongly magnified. It will be seen that they are placed side by side and are perpendicular to the surface of the gills. Upon each of these basidia are in some species two, usually four, slender projections upon which the spores are produced. In Figure 2 a number of sterile cells will be seen which resemble the basidia except that the latter bear four sterigmata upon which the spores rest. Among these basidia and sterile cells will frequently be seen an overgrown bladder-like sterile basidium which projects beyond the rest of the hymenium, and whose use is not as ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... of the time of James II., containing, I am told, some good pictures and old furniture, is shut up, as are the model stables, ample enough for a great stud; and so another centre of local industry and activity is made sterile. ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... live up to similar views, Hamlet 'lost all his mirth.' This is the cause of his heavy disposition; of his having 'foregone all custom of exercise'—so 'that this goodly frame, the earth,' seems to him 'a sterile promontory,' a mere place of preparation for gaining the next world through penance and prayer. Verily, 'this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,' appears to him no better 'than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.' ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... all the emigration, they had been reposing for several days in this delightful valley, in order to recruit their animals on its luxuriant pasturage after their long journey, and prepare them for the hard travel along the comparatively sterile banks of the Upper Columbia. At the lower end of this extensive bottom, the river passes through an open canon, where there were high vertical rocks to the water's edge, and the road here turns up a broad valley to the right. It was already ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... competition dwell 'twixt lip and smile? Are we not part and parcel of yourselves? Like strands in one great braid we intertwine And make the perfect whole. You could not be Unless we gave you birth: we are the soil From which you sprang, yet sterile were that soil Save as you planted. (Though in the Book we read One woman bore a child with no man's aid, We find no record of a man-child born Without the aid of woman! Fatherhood Is but a small achievement at the best, While motherhood is heaven and hell.) This ...
— Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days • Annie L. Burton
... in determining locality enabled him to choose the right direction, and after quite a walk we ascended a considerable hill, from which we were delighted to discover in the distance a small column of smoke—a remarkable sight on that sterile shore. We hastened toward it, Thorwald with high expectations of an important discovery, and I with a heart beating with joyful ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... superstition to saints and by sorcery to the devil; a clergy sunk in sensual sloth or fevered with demoniac zeal: these still ruled the intellectual destinies of Europe. Therefore the first anticipations of the Renaissance were fragmentary and sterile. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... foggy atmosphere I had left at Calcutta. On the following morning I was travelling over a flat and apparently rising country, along an excellent road, with groves of bamboos and stunted trees on either hand, few villages or palms, a sterile soil, with stunted grass and but little cultivation; altogether a country as unlike what I had expected to find in India as well might be. All around was a dead flat or table-land, out of which a few conical hills rose in the west, about 1000 feet high, covered with a low ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... means of making a fortune; when honours are no longer synonimous with honour; then society presents only disorder and anarchy, then people renounce obscure virtue, and laborious acquisition to follow the easy ways of corruption; then enlightened men, for whom public esteem is a sterile recommendation, the true servants of the king, the faithful friends of their country, are forced to disappear, to withdraw from employments, and the interest of the public, as well as that of humanity, is miserably sacrificed ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... pleasanter man. Dunno but what he's about the pleasantest man I ever did see." He was not letting his wife see in his averted face the struggle that revealed itself there—the struggle of stalwart achievement not to feel flattered at the notice of sterile elegance, not to be sneakingly glad of its amiability, but to stand up and look at it with eyes on the same level. God, who made us so much like himself, but out of the dust, alone knows when that struggle will end. The time had been when Lapham could not have imagined ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... to later Irish poets, much as a mediaeval Japanese painter left his style as an inheritance to his family, and was careful to use a traditional manner and matter; yet did something altogether different, changed by that toil, impelled by my share in Cain's curse, by all that sterile modern complication, by my 'originality' as the newspapers call it. Morris set out to make a revolution that the persons of his 'Well at the World's End' or his 'Waters of the Wondrous Isles,' always, to my mind, in the likeness of Artemisia and her man, ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... hillsides, around the leafing hazel "gay-circles of anemones dance on their stalks." In the more open places the little wind flower, with its pretty leaves and solitary white blossoms, blooms in cheerful companionship with its fellows, and the more sterile parts of the hillside are snowed with the white plumes of the plantain-leaved everlasting. Downy yellow violets and the common blue violets grow everywhere and down on the sand near the river the birdfoot violet, with its quaintly cut leaves and handsome ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... to their lot. Their complexions are much fairer, and their countenances, manners, and whole appearance, are greatly superior in all respects to the natives of the plain. Their countries likewise differ entirely; as instead of the sterile sands which are everywhere interspersed over the plain, the mountain is covered through its whole extent with verdure, and is everywhere furnished with rivulets and springs of fine water, which unite ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... the coast of Brittany; more particularly I had a prescience of those twilights of the Antarctic winter when, in about the latitude of Magellan, we were to go in search of protection towards those sterile shores that are as inhospitable and as absolutely deserted as the waters ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... countries, with all their possessions, fail to enjoy peace and happiness. On the contrary, they are so acutely unhappy that many of them have come to regard acquisition and accumulation as a sterile rat-race. Consequently multitudes of people, young and old, have turned their backs on civilization, separating themselves from their affluent homes with their glut of consumer goods to live at non-civilized or pre-civilized levels. These individuals ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... ourselves in a bowlder-strewn basin amid rocky, sterile hills, evidently the offshoots and spurs of the Jeb-el-Gharr, which stood out a purple serrated mass on our left, and here we saw for the first time for many a month rain clouds piling up above the rocky heights. Their tops, catching the rosy glow from ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... of the Sierras nears the summit, and the pines begin to show sterile reaches of rock and waste in their drawn-up files, there are signs of occasional departures from the main road, as if the weary traveller had at times succumbed to the long ascent, and turned aside for rest and breath again. The tired ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... of my patron with the deepest astonishment. Humanity and general kindness were fundamental parts of his character; but in relation to me they were sterile and inactive. His own interest required that he should purchase my kindness; but he preferred to govern me by terror, and watch me with unceasing anxiety. I ruminated with the most mournful sensations upon the nature of my calamity. I believed that no human being was ever placed in a ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... speculates amiss! Measuring, in her folly, things divine By human, laws inscrib'd on adamant By laws of Man's device, and counsels fix'd For ever, by the hours, that pass, and die. How?—shall the face of Nature then be plow'd Into deep wrinkles, and shall years at last On the great Parent fix a sterile curse? 10 Shall even she confess old age, and halt And, palsy-smitten, shake her starry brows? Shall foul Antiquity with rust and drought And famine vex the radiant worlds above? Shall Time's unsated maw crave and engulf The very heav'ns that regulate ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... regions—the Nan-Shan and the Altyn-Tagh—were once upon a time covered with cities that could well vie with Babylon. A whole geological period has swept over the land, since those cities breathed their last, as the mounds of shifting sand, and the sterile and now dead soil of the immense central plains of the basin of Tarim testify.... In the oasis of Cherchen some 300 human beings represent the relics of about a hundred extinct nations and races—the very names of which ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... with mercy like a moss The barren violence of its primal wars, Sterile although they be and void of rule, You know my shapeless crags have Wed ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... Wall Street, and only a Jew, or a long-headed Sage, or that surprising and surpassing genius in finance, Jay,[2] can wrestle with them on equal terms. Ah! these Yankees have "parts"—lean bodies, sterile soil, but such brains that they grew a Webster. [Applause.] Well, this Connecticut man invited me to his quarters. When I got back to my regiment I had a shabby overcoat instead of my new one, I had a frying-pan worth twenty cents, that ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... that Longshaw has been compared to hell; for this it is unlearned in the ways of agriculture, never having seen corn except as packing straw and in quartern loaves; for this, on the other hand, it comprehends the mysterious habits of fire and pure, sterile earth; for this it lives crammed together in slippery streets where the housewife must change white window-curtains at least once a fortnight if she wishes to remain respectable; for this it gets up in the mass at six a.m., winter and summer, and goes to bed when the public-houses ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... despite the Governor's prohibition, was addicted to roving over the cliffs by herself, finding kinship in the sterile crags and futile restlessness of the ocean. She had learned that although change of scene lightened the burden, only death would ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... giving publicity to the tartaric nausea that rankled at his gloomy heart, forward the corroding philippic, and bid defiance to my contradiction? No, no; he knew full well that with his scanty stock of English ammunition scattered over the sterile floor of his literary magazine, he could not have the effrontery, impudence, or presumption to enter the list of philosophical and scientific disputation with one who has traversed the thorny paths of literature, explored its ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... ready to fix his interest once more upon the Sinks. He was surprised when they emerged from a cluster of small, sage-covered knolls, directly upon the edge of what at first sight seemed to be another dry river bed—sprawled wider, perhaps, with irregular arms thrust back into the less sterile land. They rode down a steep, rocky trail and came ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... it must not for a moment be supposed that nothing more is meant than the little town or city; by Cintra must be understood the entire region, town, palace, quintas, forests, crags, Moorish ruin, which suddenly burst on the view on rounding the side of a bleak, savage, and sterile-looking mountain. Nothing is more sullen and uninviting than the south- western aspect of the stony wall which, on the side of Lisbon, seems to shield Cintra from the eye of the world, but the other side is a mingled scene of fairy beauty, artificial elegance, savage grandeur, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... whizzed past the windows of the cab and then the steel link-mesh fence took up, the fence surrounding the New Kansas National Spaceport. Behind it, further from town, some of the concrete had been poured and the horizon was a remote, sterile gray sweep. ...
— The Last Place on Earth • James Judson Harmon
... therefore called the island La Trinidad. Steering to its eastern extremity, he saw a rock resembling a galley under sail off a headland, which, in consequence, he called Punta de la Galera. No safe anchorage appearing, he coasted westward in search of a harbour and water. Instead of a sterile land, he saw the country covered with groves of palm-trees, cultivated in many places, and enlivened by hamlets and scattered habitations, while streams came rushing ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... spoken as becomes a philosophic and moral legislator, and so much the worse for the narrow minds and corrupt hearts unable to comprehend him.—Thrown back upon himself, his wounded vanity seeks inward nourishment and takes what it can find in the sterile uniformity of his bourgeois moderation. Robespierre, unlike Danton, has no cravings. He is sober; he is not tormented by his senses; if he gives way to them, it is only no further than he can help, and with a bad grace. In the rue Saintonge in Paris, "for seven months," says his secretary,[31105] ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... there lived in a lonely hut on Mount Mitchell in North Carolina this identical Grimmel and his brothers. Their father, John Boyer, was a hunter. When he died the two elder sons, Richard and Hugh, remained with their mother, farmed a sterile tract on the Black Mountains and trapped bears and wolves through the great southern ranges of the Appalachian chain. Twice in the year they came down to the hamlet at Gray Eagle to exchange their peltry for such goods as they needed. They were, in short, Grimmel's elder brothers, who ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... the flocks and herds of the squatter. Agricultural settlements will follow; towns and villages will be established, gold-fields probably discovered, and waves of population will overflow and will fertilize vast tracts of country which we have hitherto concluded to be a sterile desert. These events will owe their initiation to the adventurous pioneers who first crossed the continent from sea to sea. Theirs was the arduous effort; theirs the courage, endurance, and sustaining hope; theirs the conflict with danger and the great triumph ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... twenty-five years hence, who can doubt the feasibility of paying every dollar then with more ease than we now pay for useless luxuries? Why, it looks as though Providence had bestowed upon us a strong box in the precious metals locked up in the sterile mountains of the far West, and which we are now forging the key to unlock, to meet the very contingency that ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... least a gloomy and discouraging expression, which saddens the soul of the most careless spectator. The ragged ranges of forest, almost untrodden by civilized man, the thin and feeble undergrowth, the unbroken silence, the birdless thickets,—all seem to indicate a peculiarly sterile destiny. One thinks, as he presses forward, that some gloomy Fate finds harbor in the place. All around, far as the eye may see, it looks in vain for relief in variety. There still stretch the dreary wastes, ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... and the simple, typical objects, forces, and laws of nature constitute the basis of all knowledge. These elements we desire to master. But to make them attractive to children, they should not be presented in bald and sterile outlines, but in typical forms. All actions and human relations ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... men who dwelt in the rude log cabins of that frost-bitten and sterile region had been serving as volunteers in the army, fighting for a cause which was none of theirs and which they did not at all understand or try to understand. They fought upon instinct alone. It had always been the custom of the mountain dwellers ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston |
