"Wilderness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her deprecation of their praise, waited with the others until the two guides were ready. Then, in the same order as before, they moved forward, descended the slope, and came into a strange wilderness of stark gray alders that stretched away in every direction. And threading, circling, crossing each other everywhere among the alders ran the trails of deer and wild boar, deep and fresh in the ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... could do but take her to my mother as quickly as possible. There was a wilderness of hills to cross before we struck the trail through Mohawk Valley. That afternoon the snow began to fall in great dry flakes, thickening steadily. The girl walked when she could, but most of the time I carried her. I had the power of a Shaman, though the Holder of the Heavens ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... returning boat and sat, filled with pleasant fatigue, against the rail in the bow, listening to the Italians' fiddle and harp. Blinker had thrown off all care. The North Woods seemed to him an uninhabitable wilderness. What a fuss he had made over signing his name—pooh! he could sign it a hundred times. And her name was as pretty as she was—"Florence," he said it to himself a ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... earthly; then the tents came sharply into focus, and after them the ring of impenetrable trees. The trees whispered a chorus, myriads strong, in a chromatic scale that sang but faintly of the open country. There were palpable miles of wilderness, and none other lodge but this, yet the psychological necessity for escape was stronger in Vanheimert than the bodily reluctance to leave the insecure security of the bushrangers' encampment. He was their prisoner, whatever they might say, and the sense of captivity ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... slavery beyond the sea and the mountains. Such incessant alarms must annihilate the pleasures and interrupt the labors of a rural life; and the Campagna of Rome was speedily reduced to the state of a dreary wilderness, in which the land is barren, the waters are impure, and the air is infectious. Curiosity and ambition no longer attracted the nations to the capital of the world: but, if chance or necessity directed the steps of a ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... the scapegoat of the Hebrew ordinance, we put all the iniquities of the children of the house, and all their transgressions in all their sins, and then banish them with maledictions into the foul outer wilderness and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... stillness came suddenly a far-off, muffled, crashing sound. Just once it came, then once again the stillness of the wilderness night, the stillness of vast, untraversed solitude. The Boy lifted his eyes and glanced across the thin reek of the camp-fire at Jabe Smith, who sat smoking contemplatively. Answering the glance, the woodsman ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... opening chapter of this recital, and received with dull ears the ecclesiastical order which removed him still farther from the world and doomed him to a living burial in the crumbling town of Simiti, in the wilderness of ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... with all life's material comforts, is the main thing, and is enough. It may be argued that our republic is, in performance, really enacting to-day the grandest arts, poems, &c., by beating up the wilderness into fertile farms, and in her railroads, ships, machinery, &c. And it may be ask'd, Are these not better, indeed, for America, than any utterances even of greatest rhapsode, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... already in the enjoyment of a competency in their own part of the country. They take their wives along with them, and make them share the countless perils and privations which always attend the commencement of these expeditions. I have often met, even on the verge of the wilderness, with young women, who after having been brought up amidst all the comforts of the large towns of New England, had passed, almost without any intermediate stage, from the wealthy abode of their parents ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... that any of them have lived there. My great grandfather was a German and a native of the Odenwald country. He married an English lady, and would have lived in England had she not been willing to come to Odenwald which was, in those early days, a wilderness. She knew that he longed to return to his native land, and said, 'Whither thou goest I will go.' When my great-grandfather died, she returned to England with her two sons and her daughter. One of these sons ...
— Pixy's Holiday Journey • George Lang
... religion of blood! I am thrilled as I see the suggestive color in sacramental cup, whether it be of burnished silver set on cloth immaculately white, or rough-hewn from wood set on table in log-hut meeting-house of the wilderness. Now I am thrilled as I see the altars of ancient sacrifice crimson with the blood of the slain lamb, and Leviticus is to me not so much the Old Testament as the New. Now I see why the destroying angel passing over Egypt in the night spared all those houses that had blood sprinkled on their ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... discourses, the drift of which Crusoe's limited education did not permit him to follow, he found comfort in hearing the sound of his own voice, and in knowing that it fell pleasantly on another ear in that lonely wilderness. ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... was farther south than it has ever been at any other time. Except in Louisiana and Missouri, not over thirty thousand inhabitants were to be found west of the Mississippi. The vast outer ranges of the Louisiana purchase remained a mysterious wilderness. Indianapolis in 1827 contained twenty-five brick houses, sixty frame, and about eighty log houses; also a court-house, a jail, and three churches. Chicago was laid out in 1830. Thither in, 1834 went one mail per week, from Niles, ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... no slim, black-clad figure moved among the wilderness of neglected flowers. Virginia tethered her mare, ascended the two or three stone steps, and struck the mailed glove of iron which formed the knocker on the oak of the door. Its echoes went reverberating through ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... nonsense verses underneath the bough, A little "booze", a time to loaf, and thou— Beside me howling in the wilderness, Would be enough for ...
— Poems for Pale People - A Volume of Verse • Edwin C. Ranck
... Heaven's fated face, And from the world that her discovered wide, Fled to the wasteful wilderness space, From living eyes her open shame to hide, And lurked in rocks and caves long unespied. But that fair crew of knights, and Una fair, Did in that castle afterwards abide, To rest themselves, and weary powers repair, Where store they found of all ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... of my soul at my condition would break out upon me on a sudden, and my very heart would die within me to think of the woods, the mountains, and deserts I was in; and how I was a prisoner, locked up with the eternal bars and bolts of the ocean, in an uninhabited wilderness, without redemption. In the midst of the greatest composures of my mind, this would break out upon me like a storm, and make me wring my hands, and weep like a child. Sometimes it would take me in the middle of my work, and I would immediately ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... ("Sandy") Green, Tommy Gregory and Will Smith. The adventures of these lads among the Pictured Rocks of Old Superior, among the wreckers and reptiles of the Florida Everglades, in the caverns of the Great Continental Divide, and among the snows of the Hudson Bay wilderness have been recorded under appropriate ...
— Boy Scouts in the Coal Caverns • Major Archibald Lee Fletcher
... that it should not be profaned in the sight of the nations, among whom they were, in whose sight I made myself known unto them.... So I caused them to go forth out of the land of Egypt, and brought them into the wilderness. And I gave them My statutes, and showed them My judgments, which if a man do, he shall live in them. Moreover also I gave them My sabbaths, to be a sign between Me and them... but the house of Israel rebelled against Me." As they had acted in Egypt, so they acted ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Far in the wilderness of waves, Where vision dieth 'mid endless motion, Where only the madden'd storm-wind raves, And sinketh its chains in the soundless ocean; Far from the ken and the power of men, And lone as though Earth were in chaos again, The Stormy Petrel cleaveth ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... Ashwell, it's just like the manna in the wilderness," gasped Judith,—"I mean I'm so grateful," she explained incoherently, "although the Jews were not always properly grateful, were they? But I am. I didn't see how I could hunt up all those references with ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... Further, Gregory says (Hom. xx in Ezech.) that "he who renounces this world, and does all the good he can, is like one who has gone out of Egypt and offers sacrifice in the wilderness." Now it belongs specially to religious to renounce the world. Therefore it belongs to them also to do all the good they can. and so it would seem that each of them is bound to fulfil all ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... Hippolytus' Commentary on Daniel [see Georgiades in the journal [Greek: Ekkl. aletheia] 1885, p. 52 sq.] very interesting accounts of such undertakings in the time of Septimius Severus. A Syrian bishop persuaded many brethren with wives and children to go to meet Christ in the wilderness; and another in Pontus induced his people to sell all their possessions, to cease tilling their lands, to conclude no more marriages etc., because the coming of the ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... is enclosed by a chain of mountains, reaching to——. To the east, the country is yet but very thinly inhabited. We are almost insulated, and the houses are at a considerable distance from each other. From the mountains we have but too much reason to expect our dreadful enemy, the Indians; and the wilderness is a harbour, where it is impossible to find them. It is a door through which they can enter our country at any time; and as they seem determined to destroy the whole frontier, our fate cannot be ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... historic art, the less we have of such art the better. However, Mr. Bayliss is full of the most ardent faith and speaks quite gravely of genuine portraits of St. John, St. Peter and St. Paul dating from the first century, and of the establishment by the Israelites of a school of art in the wilderness under the now little appreciated Bezaleel. He is a pleasant, picturesque writer, but he should not speak about art. Art is ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... frequently heard of the number of rattle and other snakes to be met with on the banks of the lake, but these have been nearly exterminated by the settlers. During my stay in the suburbs I only found a few water-snakes, basking in the sun amongst the wilderness of aquatic plants that cover the surface of the water ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... ruins of Pompeii, the tale of its destruction, show how well and how lazily the upper classes and even the masses lived.[1] The legions were scarce needed except for petty wars along the frontier. The defeat inflicted by the German barbarians was avenged, and the northern wilderness seems to have come very near to sharing the fate of Gaul.[2] But the long campaigns were costly and apparently valueless. No taxes flowed into the treasury from the poor half-subjugated savages; and the emperor Tiberius ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... shared the delusion that is so blissfully prevalent among parents and guardians of wayward youth in England, that to send them to Canada will work a complete reformation, believing that Canada is a good, kind wilderness where iced tea is the strongest drink known, and where no more exciting game than draughts is ...
— The Black Creek Stopping-House • Nellie McClung
... seek quiet and rest in those earthly realms where delusions and desires are engendered, for if thou dost, thou wilt be dragged through the rough wilderness of life, ...
— A Letter to a Hindu • Leo Tolstoy
... by Friday, and on Saturday Felicity sailed on the Mauretania, her suite of three rooms a wilderness of flowers. Marchmont, calling at the apartment to escort her to the boat, found the dance-room swathed in sheeting, its heavy carpet rolled into a corner. Evidently, this was to be no brief "sojourn." The heavy Einsbacher was at the dock to see her off, together with a small pack of nondescript ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... cascade—all swelled into a soft and continuous chorus, hardly heard by the country policemen, accustomed as they were to the sounds of a woodland at night, but of surprising volume and variety to the man whose forests lay in the paved wilderness of London. ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... of the country, there were, indeed, thinkers whose philosophy did not always tally with what was taught by the orthodox,[11] but as a rule even when these men escaped the ban of the censor, or the sword of the executioner, they were but us voices crying in the wilderness. The great mass of the gentry was orthodox, according to the standards of the Seido College, while the common people remained faithful to Buddhism. In the conduct of daily life they followed the precepts which had for centuries been taught ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... be urged that this is reckoning without the Balkans. I submit that the German thrust through the wooded wilderness of Serbia is really no part of the war that has ended in the deadlock of 1915. It is dramatic, tragic, spectacular, but it is quite inconclusive. Here there is no way round or through to any vital centre of Germany's antagonists. It turns nothing; it opens no path to Paris, London, or Petrograd. ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... before this change had passed over the original wilderness, that the lads whom we have mentioned were strolling, in holy time, upon the banks of the ...
— The Runaway - The Adventures of Rodney Roverton • Unknown
... comrades, Patrizio Patrizzi and Ambrogio Piccolomini, he went forth into the wilderness. For the human soul, at strife with strange experience, betakes itself instinctively to solitude. Not only prophets of Israel, saints of the Thebaid, and founders of religions in the mystic East have done so; even the Greek Menander recognised, although he sneered at, the phenomenon. ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... a wild forest. "Maria, what will become of us here?" said Juan. "I am very hungry," said the little girl. "I don't think that I can get you any food in this wilderness," said the kind brother, "but let me see!" He then looked around. By good luck he found a guava-tree with one small fruit on it. He immediately climbed up for the guava, and gave it to his hungry sister. Then the two children resumed ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... to wonder how he came to be there, in the wilderness, as it must often have seemed to him, for he had travelled much, and was city-bred, his people having left the seacoast and settled inland in his grandfather's time. One day, as I stood by his desk waiting for ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... her son, "I believe the wilderness will be new to all the party. The Miss Bertrams have never seen ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... conclusion of my essay, I I am sensible that the vast field of American mythology remains for most part untouched—that I have but proved that it is not an absolute wilderness, pathless as the tropical jungles which now conceal the temples of the race; but that, go where we will, certain landmarks and guide-posts are visible, revealing uniformity of design and purpose, and refuting, by their ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... history of times long gone by appealed to the imagination, and conspired to give a Mrs. Radcliffe-like, Castle-of-Udolpho-sort of romance to the manor-house. Really, when the wind swept through the overgrown espaliers of that neglected but luxuriant wilderness, the terraced garden; when the screech-owl shrieked from the ivy which clustered up one side of the walls, and "rats and mice, and such small deer," were playing their pranks behind the wainscot, it would have formed as pretty a locality for a ...
— Country Lodgings • Mary Russell Mitford
... gathered and thrown to its last rest on the bosom of the waters, to be borne towards the eternal ice-fields of the Pole, or lie rotting on barren, rock-bound shores, where only the cries of the wilderness awaken the echoes. There was no reverence, no ceremony. The perils of existence were too near, too real in the ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... was visible about the premises; there was no sound of human activity and no dog barked. Nayland Smith drew a long breath, glanced back along the way we had come, then went on, following the wall, I beside him, until we came to the gate. It was unfastened, and we walked up the stone path through a wilderness of weeds. Four windows of the house were visible, two on the ground floor and two above. Those on the ground floor were heavily boarded up, those above, though glazed, boasted neither blinds nor curtains. ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... for supper. I had camped out several times in the early part of my expedition; but that was in comparatively more settled and civilized regions, where there were no wild animals of consequence in the forest. This was my first camping out in the real wilderness; and I was soon made sensible of the loneliness and wildness ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... from the horizon when the road, after passing over a slight rise, swung in a wide arc through the woods and thus unveiled a most extraordinary landscape. It was all the more incredible because so utterly out of keeping with what Rolla had just passed through. She had been in the wilderness; now— ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... which tell of fortified York and the sieges of two centuries since—he stood on this spot, and searched for her again, and searched in vain. Others were looking idly down at the desolate activity on the wilderness of the iron rails; but she was not among them. The captain glanced doubtfully at the darkening sky, and ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... further advanced in knowledge, imperfect as it is, and unsatisfactory to the thinking mind. Even now I begin to long to hear what you are doing in England and France. My thoughts fly from this wilderness to the polished circles of the world, till recollecting its vices and follies, I bury myself in the woods, but find it necessary to emerge again, that I may not lose sight of the wisdom and virtue which ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... by 'Tympani' (as we call him, the same being a nervous little Frenchman who playeth our drums), and then the stag dieth in a celestial concord of flutes, oboes, and violins. Oh, how far off my soul was in this thrilling moment! It was in a rare, sweet glen in Tennessee; the sun was rising over a wilderness of mountains, I was standing (how well I remember the spot!) alone in the dewy grass, wild with rapture and with expectation. Yonder came, gracefully walking, a lovely fawn. I looked into its liquid ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... OF CORONADO TO CIBOLA. The large army marched slowly through the wild regions of the Gulf coast. Coronado soon became impatient and pushed ahead of the main body with a small following of picked horsemen. They went through the mountainous wilderness of northern Mexico and across the desert plains of southeastern Arizona. After a march lasting five months, over a distance equal to that from New York to Omaha, Coronado came upon the Seven Cities of Cibola; but the real Seven Cities of Cibola as Coronado found them ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton
... it happened to be neither; it was in fact a means to a wicked end. On the fading end of a superior suburb, where the streets of fine villas and mansions thinned off and dwindled, and were lost among the gum trees of the original wilderness, Nickie ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... brook grew wild and lively, and following its course became a matter of some difficulty. Sometimes there was no edge of footing beside the stream; they must take to the stones and rocks which broke its way, or cross it by fallen trees, and recross again. The woods made a thicket of wilderness and stillness and green beauty and shady sweetness, invaded just now by an ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic—the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... that the Moravians were unable to establish themselves on this tract, where their industry would soon have made an oasis in the wilderness, but one thing after the other interfered, and the "second company" which arrived early in the following year, found them ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... discharge me in disgrace. I'll go and see him all right, but if we fail to come to terms I won't be much disappointed. I'll keep everlastingly at it until I strike my gait, just as Grant did when he was fighting the battles of the Wilderness. And I'm going to get there, I ...
— Dick the Bank Boy - Or, A Missing Fortune • Frank V. Webster
... for me, whose knowledge of cookery never extended beyond the Edinburgh student's fare of mince collops and Prestonpans beer, to attempt a description of this monster-feast—the mountains of beef and dumplings, the wilderness of pasties and tarts, the orchardfuls of fruit, the oceans of strong ale—the very fragments of which would have been enough to carry a garrison through a twelvemonth's siege. After having "satiated themselves with eating and ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... papers, and I should find him at the house when I got there, and you would know and Cora would know, and the wedding would stop and my name be made a by-word the world over. Instead of the joy awaiting me a moment since, I should have to go away with him into some wilderness or distant place of exile where my maiden name would never be heard, and all the memories of this year of stolen delights be effaced. Oh, it was horrible! And all in a minute! And Cora sat there, pale, calm and beautiful as ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... the long ascent, and turned aside for rest and breath again. The tired eyes of many a dusty passenger on the old overland coach have gazed wistfully on those sylvan openings, and imagined recesses of primeval shade and virgin wilderness in their dim perspectives. Had he descended, however, and followed one of these diverging paths, he would have come upon some rude wagon track, or "logslide," leading from a clearing on the slope, or the ominous saw-mill, half hidden in the forest it was slowly decimating. The woodland hush ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... king; We dwell a while with Sita here In Dandak forest wild and drear. On woodland roots and fruit we feed, And lives of strictest rule we lead. Say why would ye our lives oppress Who sojourn in the wilderness. Sent hither by the hermits' prayer With bow and darts unused to spare, For vengeance am I come to slay Your sinful band in battle fray. Rest as ye are: remain content, Nor try the battle's dire event. Unless your offered lives ye spurn, O rovers ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... better consult some of the firm upon the subject, before we decide upon permanent ones. In the meantime, you and Willy must mind and keep in doors when I am not with you, or I shall have one or other of you lost in this great wilderness of a city. I shall return in two or three hours. I will order something for dinner as I go along: I have your purse. Good-by: God ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... reside within its precincts. Its boarding-houses are musical, and the notes of pianos and harps float in the evening time round the head of the mournful statue, the guardian genius of the little wilderness of shrubs, in the centre of the square.... Sounds of gruff voices practising vocal music invade the evening's silence, and the fumes of choice tobacco scent the air. There, snuff and cigars and German pipes and flutes, and ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... not get dark so quickly," Tavia sobbed, for, indeed, the girl was almost crying—the matter had become very serious—darkness, snowdrifts and wilderness. ...
— Dorothy Dale's Queer Holidays • Margaret Penrose
... upon us now, patient reader. We are among the antipodes in that vast and wonderful region where the kangaroo reigns in the wilderness, and gold is sown broadcast in the land. The men we see are, to a large extent, the same men we saw before leaving the shores of Old England, but they are wonderfully changed! Red flannel shirts, long boots, leathern belts, felt hats, ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... at once, six beautiful animals came towards him. He was one of their kind, so they came close; the scent of the wilderness was already on him, and they shrank away. Surely some sinister genius had directed Alcatraz to the one most valuable point of attack on all the ranch, for these were the six brood mares for whose purchase Marianne ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... were liberal, and a grave was provided. It would seem that in the wilderness of unreclaimed lands which lie along the public works of Pennsylvania, there might be found a resting-place for an infant stranger, without the eleemosynary aid which had been sought—but, alas! who does not desire when they "bury their ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... The voice of fame and fear announced the revolt of the Greeks and the rapid approach of their Bulgarian ally; and Calo-John, not depending on the forces of his own kingdom, had drawn from the Scythian wilderness a body of fourteen thousand Comans, who drank, as it was said, the blood of their captives, and sacrificed the Christians on the altars ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... could. "To-morrow, at eleven, I shall give you an audience here on the deck. We shall have time. This is a wilderness. You can not get away, and I hope no one will find you. That is my risk. And oh! Helena," I added, suddenly, feeling my heart soften at the pallor of her face—"Oh, Helena, Helena, try to think gently of me as you can, for all these miles I have followed ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... The stillness of the place was of that sort which almost seems to be palpable; that can be seen and felt. A humid chill arose apparently from the terrace, with its stone pavings outlined in moss, and crept up from the wilderness below and down from the ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... Oklahoma, you've had dinner at Pardee's. Someone—a business acquaintance, a friend, a townsman—has said, "Oh, you stopping at the Okmulgee Hotel? WON—derful, isn't it? Nothing finer here to the Coast. I bet you thought you were coming to the wilderness, didn't you? You Easterners! Think we live in tents and eat jerked venison and maize, huh? Never expected, I bet, to see a twelve-story hotel with separate ice-water faucet in every bathroom and a bath to every room. What'd you think of the ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... gives a knock, And breaks our rest, to tell us what's a clock. Yet by some object every brain is stirr'd; The dull may waken to a humming-bird; The most recluse, discreetly open'd, find Congenial matter in the cockle-kind; The mind in metaphysics at a loss, May wander in a wilderness of moss;[427] 450 The head that turns at super-lunar things, Poised with a tail, ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... like one of those streams that, starting impetuously from its mountain source, flows on awhile clearly and rapidly, and then begins to wander and slacken its pace, till finally it is lost in the dreariness and desolation of some marshy wilderness, and so never reaches its destination, the open sea. There is no people in the world so abused and defrauded as the bulk of the Southern whites. If you pity the oppressed of another race, then pity still more those of your own blood who are suffering a worse slavery, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... constantly exercised veto at Westminster upon the doings at Dublin. You see the position. A legislative body in Dublin passes a Bill. The idea is that that Bill is to lie upon the table of the two Houses of Parliament in London for forty days—forty days in the wilderness. What does that mean? It means this, that every question that had been fought out in Ireland would be fought out over again by the Irish members in our Parliament. It means that the House of Lords here would throw out pretty nearly every Bill that was passed at Dublin. What would ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... EXPEDITION in Canada, in 1870, is often quoted as one of the most laborious on record, 1200 troops travelling 1200 miles through a very dense wilderness, and having all their supplies to carry. They were ninety-four days out, and none of them had liquor. They were constantly wet through, sometimes for days together, and all the while at the severe labor of rowing, poling, tracking, and portaging, yet they ...
— Object Lessons on the Human Body - A Transcript of Lessons Given in the Primary Department of School No. 49, New York City • Sarah F. Buckelew and Margaret W. Lewis
... with a careless shrug. "I doubt if the assertion would hold water. At the same time Buddha has an enormous number of followers in China, Tibet, India, and Ceylon; they, too, have traditions of a Holy Mother and Child, of a fast in the wilderness, and here, even now, crucifixion is the ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... to it, do now much shudder at the threshold of both these careers, and not a few desperately turn back into the wilderness rather, to front a very rude fortune, and be devoured by wild beasts as is likeliest. But as to Parliament, again, and its eligibility if attainable, there is yet no question anywhere; the ingenuous soul, if possessed of money-capital enough, is predestined by the parental and all manner ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... into the skies and they roared out above the wilderness that was everywhere between the great cities of earth. Funny nobody thought of leaving the cities and exploring the jungles of the outside. But, of course, it wasn't necessary. They had everything they needed within ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... me about Robert Bruce and his men hiding here, and rolling huge stones on the heads of the English soldiers who marched along the bank of the lake in search of the "outlaws." It seemed as if nothing terrible could have happened in so sweet a wilderness; but that was not the only horror. There were other wild deeds in history, and in the story of the "Raiders," memories of hunts for Covenanters, and great killings. But now all is peace, and I should have thought ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... singular being, known as the Wild Woman of Navidad, who has baffled the search of the hunters for several years, has lately been caught by a party who were out after deer. It appears that she was a negress who fled to the wilderness after Fannin's defeat, fifteen years ago, since which time she has lived in the woods, subsisting on acorns and ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... forces, and these do not originate in man. They may be retained a long time among a people; they are not natural to them. They are given to them; they are given originally by God. They are the fruit of his revelations. Neither in the wilderness nor in the crowded city are they naturally produced. A perfect state of nature, without light from Heaven, is extreme rudeness, poverty, ignorance, and superstition, where brutal passions are dominant and triumphant. The vices of savages are as ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... night were ne'er sae dark, And I were ne'er sae weary, O! I'd meet thee on the lea rig, My ain kind dearie, O! While in this weary world of wae, This wilderness sae dreary, O! What makes me blythe, and keeps me sae? 'Tis thee, my kind ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... town destroyed by the Genoese in 1354. To the west is a stony space where wild irises grow and bloom profusely in the crevices of the rocks, and from which there is a fine view over the sea northwards to the highlands of the Karst. Between this flowery wilderness and the church is an open grassy space enclosed by a wall, and with a few trees round its edges, which was probably the atrium. Opening upon this is the narthex, an open portico level with the tower which stands at the west end of the north aisle, with a stone seat ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... them was up to the wharf's flooring, yet their low, light-draught hulls, with the freight decks that covered them doubled in carrying room by their widely overhanging freight guards, were hid by the wilderness of goods on shore. Hid also were their furnaces, boilers, and engines on the same deck, sharing it with the cargo. But all their gay upper works, so toplofty and frail, showed a gleaming white front to the ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... draw a lesson from this. If you have never been bushed, your immunity is by no means an evidence of your cleverness, but rather a proof that your experience of the wilderness is small. If you have been bushed, you will remember how, as you struck a place you knew, error was suddenly superseded by a flash of truth; this without volition of judgment on your part, and entirely by force of a presentation ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... Even the more innocent exhibitions, where brutes were the sufferers, could not but tend to destroy all the finer sensibilities of the nature. "Five thousand wild animals, torn from their native abodes in the wilderness and the forest," have been turned out for mutual slaughter in one single exhibition at the amphitheatre. Sometimes the lanista, or person who exhibited the shows and provided the necessary supplies, by way of administering specially to the gratification of the populace, made it known, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... beard upon the kitchen door-sill; and the old dog howls all day and night, like fifty thousand scalpers. Suan saith, if you was to come back, the lad might run home after you. 'Tisn't the lad I cares about so much, but poor old Sawyer, at his time of life, swallowed up in the wilderness." ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... superior character were erected in the corner of an arable field, abutting on the highway. As left by the builders a more uninviting spot could scarcely be imagined. The cottages themselves were well designed and well built, but the surroundings were like a wilderness. Heaps of rubbish here, broken bricks there, the ground trampled hard as the road itself. No partition from the ploughed field behind beyond a mere shallow trench enclosing what was supposed to be the garden. Everything bleak, unpromising, cold, and unpleasant. ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... sportsman and lover of nature, to reveal many of the secrets of the woods, such as all Boys Scouts strive to know. And, besides, each book is replete with stirring adventures among the four-footed denizens of the wilderness; so that a feast of useful knowledge is served up, with just that class of stirring incidents so eagerly welcomed by all boys with red blood in their veins. For sale wherever books are sold, or sent prepaid for 50 ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... looks like success, or miss the philosophy-clothes that were never found. And indeed we may all be well content with the doings of this manikin that turns out to be so lively an ego. Henry Adams was worth a wilderness of philosophies. Perhaps we should have liked the book better if he could have taken himself more frankly, as a matter of course, for what he was—a man of wide experience, of altogether uncommon attainments, of extraordinarily incisive mental power; and if, resting on this assumption, he ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... This estimate doubtless includes countries bordering on the upper Nile not embraced in Wilkinson's statistics.] Whether man found the valley of the Nile a forest, or such a waste as I have just described, we do not historically know. In either case, he has not simply converted a wilderness into a garden, but has unquestionably produced extensive climatic change. [Footnote: Ritter supposes Egypt to have been a sandy desert when it was first occupied by man. "The first inhabitant of the sandy valley ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... sad Ezekiel's sighs, the rebel's end. Thy robes forc'd off, like Samuel's when rent, Do figure out another's punishment. Nor grieve thou hast put off thyself awhile, To serve as prophet to this sinful isle; These are our days of Purim, which oppress The Church, and force thee to the wilderness. But all these clouds cannot thy light confine, The sun in storms and after them, will shine. Thy day of life cannot be yet complete, 'Tis early, sure, thy shadow is so great. But I am vex'd, that we at all can guess This ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... stream I stood; Then one interminable wood, In its unbounded breadth sublime, And in its loneliness profound, Spread like a leafy sea around. To one of foreign land and birth, Nursed 'mid the loveliest scenes of earth, But now from home and friends exiled, Such wilderness were doubly wild;— I thought it so, and scarce could I My tears repress, when standing by The river's brink, I thought of mine Own native stream, the glorious Rhine! For, near to it, with loving eye, My mother watched my infancy; ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... A little wilderness, surrounding a beautiful piece of the smoothest turf, and itself bounded by such high hedges as we have described, had been selected as the stage most proper for the exhibition of the intended dramatic picture. It afforded many ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... a-howlin' round the ranches after dark, And the mocking-birds are singin' to the lovely "medder lark"; Where the 'possum and the badger, and rattle-snakes abound, And the monstrous stars are winkin' o'er a wilderness profound; Where lonesome, tawny prairies melt into airy streams, While the Double Mountains slumber in heavenly kinds of dreams; Where the antelope is grazin' and the lonely plovers call— It was there that I attended ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... like a face in the footlights. His long chin and high cheek-bones were lit up infernally from underneath; so that he looked like a fiend staring down into the flaming pit. I had an unmeaning sense of being tempted in a wilderness; and even as I paused a burst of ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... beads and trinkets—his rifles, and powder, and lead; and there, in return, he disposes of the spoils of the prairie collected in many a far and perilous wandering. There the emigrant rests on the way to his wilderness home; and the hunter equips himself before starting forth on ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... little hands covering her eyes so as not to see the cruel wild bush in which she was lost. It seemed a long time before she summoned up courage to uncover her weeping eyes, and look once more at the bare, dry earth, and the wilderness of scrub and trees that seemed to close her in as if she were in a prison. When she did look up, she was surprised to see that she was no longer alone. She forgot all her trouble and fear in her astonishment at seeing a big ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it,—or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... reside? Burns and Wordsworth were content with the farm country, but for poets whose theories were not so intimately joined with experience such an environment was too tame. Bowles would send his visionary boy into the wilderness. [Footnote: See The Visionary Boy.] Coleridge and Southey went so far as to lay plans for emigrating, in person, to the banks of the Susquehanna. Shelley felt that savage conditions best foster poetry. [Footnote: See the Defense of Poetry: "In the infancy of society ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... furnished the tables of the Egyptians with the most exquisite fish of every kind, and the most succulent flesh. This it was which made the Israelites so deeply regret the loss of Egypt, when they found themselves in the wilderness: "Who," say they, in a plaintive, and at the same time, seditious tone, "shall give us flesh to eat? We remember the flesh which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers and melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick.(393) We sat by the flesh-pots, and we did ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... talk for Yank. In fact, the only time that taciturn individual ever would open up was in explanation of or argument about some expedient of wilderness life or travel. It sounded entirely logical. So we ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... economized a bit, and so have gone on eating regularly to the end of the journey. I reflected that stewed terrapin, for instance, might possibly be considered an extravagance under the circumstances; and a fellow sentenced to honest toil and exiled to the wilderness should not, it seemed to me then, cause his table to be sprinkled, quite so liberally as I had done, with tall glasses—nor need he tip the porter quite so often or so generously. A dollar looked bigger to me, just then, than a wheel of ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... thankful that men in their bitterness do not now fly, as of old, to monastery or to hermitage; for, did they do so, Society would send forth her gilded cards to the wilderness. ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... than the deep murmur of the surge That struck the ear; whilst through the lurid gloom Gigantic phantoms seem to lift in air Their misty arms; yet, yet—bear boldly on— The mist dissolves;—seen through the parting haze, Romantic rocks, like the depictured clouds, Shine out; beneath a blooming wilderness Of varied wood is spread, that scents the air; Where fruits of "golden rind," thick interspersed 130 And pendent, through the mantling umbrage gleam Inviting. Cypress here, and stateliest pine, Spire o'er the nether shades, as emulous Of sole distinction where all nature ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... on he fares, and to the border comes Of Eden, where delicious Paradise, Now nearer, crowns with her enclosure green, As with a rural mound, the champain head Of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild, Access denied; and overhead upgrew Insuperable highth of loftiest shade, Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm, A sylvan scene, and, ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... are privileged to learn that the forces of the Wilderness are as gods, distributing benefits, and, from such as have earned them, taking even handed reprisals. Only the Greeks of all peoples realized this in its entirety, and them the gods repaid with the pure joy of creation which is the special ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy |
