"Barren" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have vanished. Man will have gained in gentleness and morality seeing he no longer lives on the murder and destruction of living beings. Then also will the difference drop away between fertile and barren districts; perchance deserts may then become the favorite homes of man being healthier than the damp valleys and the swamp-infected plains. Then also will Art, together with all the beauties of human life reach full development. No longer will the face of earth be marred, so to speak, with ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... while Polly's big handsome "dad," in white linen yachting togs, pointed out the ship house and the wharf, the tower and garden patch,—all the improvements that queer old Great-uncle Joe had made on these once barren rocks. Polly's dad had known about the old captain and his oddities all his life. Indeed, once in his very early years as he now told his young listeners, he had made a boyish foray in Great-uncle Joe's ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... and barren, so Kuterastan made a few animals, birds, trees, and a hill. Then he sent Agocho, the Pigeon, to see how the world looked. Four days later Agocho returned and said all was beautiful, but that in four days more the water on the opposite side would rise and flood ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... eastward. Bennie had never known such grueling work and heartbreaking fatigue; and the clouds of flies pursued them venomously and with unrelenting persistence. At first they had to cut their way through acres of brush, and then the land rose and they saw before them miles of swamp and barren land dotted with dwarf trees and lichen-grown rocks. Here it was easier and they made better time; but the professor's legs ached and his rifle wore a red bruise on his shoulder. And then after five days ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... vileness and the greatness of man.—Let man now know his value. Let him love himself, for there is in him a nature capable of good; but let him not for this reason love the vileness which is in him. Let him despise himself, for this capacity is barren; but let him not therefore despise this natural capacity. Let him hate himself, let him love himself; he has within him the capacity of knowing the truth and of being happy, but he possesses no truth, either ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... lashed, Returned unheeding of its helpless Prey— The lone survivor of that Yesterday— The one of Many whom the withering Gale Hath left unpunished to record their Tale. But who shall hear it? on that barren Sand None comes to stretch the hospitable hand. That shore reveals no print of human foot, Nor e'en the pawing of the wilder Brute; And niggard vegetation will not smile, All ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... Mo. 24th. The great parting is over: the love and mercy of our heavenly Father sustained my dearest father and mother beyond expectation. On this occasion, when I have been helped back from a sad, lone wandering on barren mountains, I may learn, more deeply than ever before, the safety, the sweetness, of dwelling in the valley of humiliation. Oh, let me dwell there long and low enough. I ask not high enjoyments nor rapturous delights; but I ask, I pray, when I can pray at all, for quiet, watchful, ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... Medicis, "I have merely come to make your fortune; that is to say, I offer you a superb opportunity of making your entry into the artistic world. Art, you know, is a barren route, of ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... hill just outside the Tower, in the center of a large, barren square, is a little inclosed park with trees and shrubbery. Here stood the scaffold where almost all of the executions were held. The place is now green and fruitful, but it is said that on the site of the scaffold within the Tower, grass ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... of our excursion to Stonehenge had a significance for me which renders it memorable in my personal experience. As we drove over the barren plain, one of the party suddenly exclaimed, "Look! Look! See the lark rising!" I looked up with the rest. There was the bright blue sky, but not a speck upon it which my eyes could distinguish. Again, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... but known that the Englishman he had just parted from was Harry Forsyth, what a lucky opportunity he would have esteemed it for making a bargain, and securing at least some profit out of what threatened to be the barren crime ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... slates, limestones, etc. But one thing is not the same. Life grows ever less diversified in character as the sediments are traced downwards. Mammals and birds, reptiles, amphibians, fishes, die out successively in the past; and barren sediments ultimately succeed, leaving the first beginnings of life undecipherable. Beneath these barren sediments lie rocks collectively differing in character from those above: mainly volcanic or ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... stranger to turn aside from the path he was pursuing, and he continued his ascent till he gained a rocky pinnacle, from whence he could watch the sun dipping into the ocean; and hence he could look down, on one side, over a confused mass of barren hills and fertile valleys, rocks, and precipices, heights crowned with trees, peaks bare and rugged, and glens with sparkling torrents dashing and foaming amid them; while on the other side, towards ...
— Mountain Moggy - The Stoning of the Witch • William H. G. Kingston
... of the United States of America, was born on February 12, 1809, in a log cabin on a barren farm in the backwoods of Kentucky, about three miles west of a place called Hodgensville in what is ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... the better to do, coming from a distance, would ride one horse to the place as to a hunting meet, and reserve a better and fresher for the retreat, which, in the earlier stages of Methuen's advance, was probably intended from the first. So far do they push the endeavour to leave a barren result to the victor that they carry away upon their horses, as far as may be and at some risk, not only their wounded but their dead; and of the {p.146} latter those that cannot be removed are concealed. The singularity of this point of honour, and the tenacity of its observance, ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... my brethren in our prison-chamber, they expected that, according to our custom, something should be spoken out of the Word for our mutual edification. I felt myself, it being my turn to speak, so empty, spiritless, and barren, that I thought I should not have been able to speak among them so much as five words of truth with life and evidence. At last I cast mine eye upon this prophecy, when, after considering awhile, methought I perceived something of that jasper in whose light you find this holy city descended; ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... certain mental incoherence, a bewildering activity of vision. More than once before in the course of his laborious, monotonous, and, as men go, very virtuous life had this same thing happened to him—the tides of the obvious and accustomed suddenly receding and leaving him stranded, as on some barren sand-bank, uncertain whether the ship of his individual fate would lie there wind-swept and sun-bleached till rusty rivets fell out and planks parted, disclosing the ribs of her in unsightly nakedness, or whether the kindly tide, rising, would float her off into blue water and she ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... to be honest, it was the observant Hans who made this discovery from various indications which had escaped my notice. I need not stop to detail them, but one of these was that at certain places the water-holes on a high, rather barren land had been dug out, and in one or more instances, lined with stones after the fashion of an ancient well. Evidently we were following an old trade route made, perhaps, in forgotten ages when Africa was more civilised ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... her brother. The correspondence which she read in that way was of a nature which exasperated her desire for vengeance almost to frenzy. For not only did she acquire the evidence of a happiness shared by them which humiliated in her the woman barren in all senses of the word, a stranger to voluptuousness as well as to maternity, but she gathered from it numerous proofs that the Countess cherished, with regard to her, a scorn of race as absolute as if Venice had been a city of the United States.... That part of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... a series of terraces which are generally soggy and covered with tussock (pleurophyllum) and with scattered cushions of Azorella. The summit of the ridge is a barren waste, over which loose rocks are scattered in every direction, while a wavy effect due to the action of wind is plainly visible over the surface of the ground. The steep, descending sides are very soft and sodden, supporting a scanty growth of vegetation, ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... be glad of an age of faith for the rest to my soul, if for no other reason. I was harking back to the Stoics not only because they were good to animals, if they were good, but because they seemed to have the same barren devotion to duty which has survived my faith as well as my creed. But why, if I neither expect happiness nor dread misery, should I still care to do my duty? And I ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... thou drive me from myself, to search For foreign aids?—to hunt my memory, And range all o'er a waste and barren place, To find a friend? The wretched have no friends. Yet I had one, the bravest youth of Rome, Whom Caesar loves beyond the love of women: He could resolve his mind, as fire does wax, From that hard rugged image melt him down, And mould him in ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... a strict point of law, the severall witnesses are brought and examined face to face, and that all matters be nicely and thorowly sifted by the objects and trials of the successe of every accident. Verily the knowledge we have of our owne affaires is much more barren and feeble. But this hath sufficiently been handled by Bodin, and agreeing with my conception. Somewhat to aid the weaknesse of my memorie and to assist her great defects; for it hath often been my chance to ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... separates the dross from the gold, purifies the human character, through the furnace of affliction. Those who bear fruit He purgeth, that they may bear more fruit. Through the sacred law, He speaketh to the unfruitful in tones of Sinai: and, in [10] the gospel, He saith of the barren fig-tree, "Cut it down; why cumbereth it ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... worth the effort necessary. But Friedrich's London Minister, in this case, was a person of no significance or intimacy; and the King's Letters, though strangely exact, clear and even elucidative on English Court-Politics and vicissitudes, seemed to be nearly barren as to Prussian.] Hitherto, with one exception to be mentioned presently, his main business seems to have been that of introducing, on different Court-Days, a great number of Travelling English, who want to ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the screen of bush broke off, leaving the barren shoulder overlooking the valley. It was where the hard-beaten, converging cattle-paths hurled themselves over the brink to the ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... and successor, was a crime against the ancestors,—the cult being thereby threatened with extinction. No excuse existed for remaining childless: the family law in Japan, precisely as in ancient Europe, having amply provided against such a contingency. In case that a wife proved barren, she might be divorced. In case that there were reasons for not divorcing her, a concubine might be taken for the purpose of obtaining an heir. Furthermore, every family representative was privileged ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... of new races of wheat, fertilised the Hopetoun with the Talavera; in the first and second generations the produce was intermediate in character, but in the fourth generation "it was found to consist of many varieties; nine-tenths of the florets proved barren, and many of the seeds seemed shrivelled abortions, void of vitality, and the whole race was evidently verging to extinction."[224] Now, considering how little these {105} varieties of wheat differ in any important character, it seems ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... graceful flower fresco, little of importance has been found. The comparative absence of metal-work at Knossos can be explained by the greed of the plunderers who sacked the palace; but Phaestos is almost barren, not of metal-work alone. All the more interesting, therefore, was the discovery, made in 1908, of the largest inscribed clay tablet which has yet been found on any Minoan site. This was a disc of terra-cotta, 6.67 inches in diameter, and ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... heavens, why? Why?" I was beginning to get angry. "Let me see: I am to make myself odious to Mr. Jelnik, and I am to refuse to allow a physician to run his car through a barren strip of weeds and sand, because they are her relatives and she hated her relatives. I am to vex the souls of harmless Christians with bill-posters of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and I'm to pay taxes on a lot that's been turned into a cemetery for a hound dog. I'm ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... to the giver." "True," said the father, "and really for a man to have a force with which he could serve his friends and take vengeance on his foes, and yet neglect the supplies for it, would be as disgraceful, would it not? as for a farmer to hold lands and labourers and yet allow fields to lie barren for lack ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... late, to interpose their great power in the Church and State, to save our country from the terrible calamities which the sin of slavery was bringing upon us." But there is no evidence that this appeal produced the feeblest ripple in the lives of the two first; and upon the two last it was equally barren of result. Dr. Channing, indeed, did not take the trouble to hear any one of the three lectures of the young philanthropist. Dr. Beecher, however, was at the pains to be present at the first lecture given at Julien Hall. But he betrayed no real interest ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... philosopher, who 'holds the mirror up to nature,' has not of late, as a rule, missed his reward. The historian, who in his dogged, patient, toilsome fashion holds the mirror up to the life of bygone ages, has received among us scant recognition, and generally is rewarded with but barren honour. What has been done and still is doing will be best understood by briefly reviewing the progress of that movement, which has brought about the great revival of English Historical study, and under the influence of which the opinions and convictions ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... night's riot ('It's not our habit, Sir! It's not our habit!'); up among the mountains where the officers of the law track and carefully bring into justice the astounded malefactor; and behind the orderly prairies to the barren grounds, as far as a single white man can walk, the relentless spirit of the breed follows up, and oversees, and controls. It does not much express itself in words, but sometimes, in intimate discussion, one is privileged to catch a glimpse of the ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... note at Garman's and the present had been like a nightmare. He had wandered in the jungle and laughed aloud at himself for a sentimental fool. Garman was right: dreams, ideals, high hopes were only illusions, only lies, fairy-like mirages to lead a man into the barren desert of experience. The note in his pocket proved it. He read the note over ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... brilliantly-illuminated room. His costume, simply made, yet of the richest materials of the time; his wig, highly powdered though of modest proportions; his every item of apparel appeared alike of great simplicity and barren of pretentiousness. As much might be said for the garb of his brother, who stepped close behind him, a figure less self-contained than that of the man who now occupied the absorbed attention of the public mind, even as he now filled the ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... go to the public entertainments of the village. A sewing society, a Sunday-school picnic, or a fair attracts her. These are simple pleasures, but taken with such a spirit as hers, they are innocent and wholesome, even if they seem barren to ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... constituted as they are, and proceeding as they proceed. Would it be wise to estimate what the world of Europe, as well as the world of Asia, had to dread from Genghiz Khan, upon a contemplation of the resources of the cold and barren spot in the remotest Tartary from whence first issued that scourge of the human race? Ought we to judge from the excise and stamp duties of the rocks, or from the paper circulation of the sands of Arabia, the power by which Mahomet ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... yet scarce come, if not the rustlings of schemes and orders of existence near though unseen?" Perchance the range of the abode and destiny of the soul after death is all immensity. The interstellar spaces, which we usually fancy are barren deserts where nonentity reigns, may really be the immortal kingdom colonized by the spirits who since the beginning of the creation have sailed from the mortal shores of all planets. They may be the crowded aisles of the universal temple trod by bright throngs of worshipping angels. ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... my lad; you've fallen into everybody's mistake, as a matter of course. Those fine long shoots will grow into big branches; those little twigs with the points, as you call them, are fruit spurs, covered with blossom buds. If I cut them out I should have no plums next year, but a bigger and a more barren tree. No, my boy, I don't want to grow wood, ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... steady as thy Maker's will is thy bright obedience. Thou fulfillest thy destiny—but man, man—I and such as I—alas! we but resemble these useless waves which foam out their little moment and vanish on the barren sand. Alas! shall it never be that we shall find a solution of the mystery of our being? How aimless, how useless, appears our existence. Confined to this narrow stage, how vain are our mighty energies, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... a cage of white leghorn fowls, colored with aniline dyes, could be shown even in these barren times as "Royal South American Witherlicks"; that Joachim could be converted into a passable zebra, and "Plug" Avery still had in his van the celluloid lemon peel as well as the glass cube that created the illusion of ice in the pink lemonade. The village painter ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... mountain-tops, and torn to pieces by wind and storm; the only glimpse of peace is derived from the view on either side of the sea, which sometimes shows itself on the horizon, a misty line, half silver, half ether. This barren wilderness again softens into gracefully-swelling hills turned towards Florence. The fair olive tree and the dark cypress mingle their foliage with the luxuriant chestnut boughs, and the frequent marble villa flashes ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 394, October 17, 1829 • Various
... old man when we first met him. He died before we left that part of the country. His last illness was preceded by a drunken spree, during which some rougish boys painted a barren fig-tree on his bald head. He died soon afterward. Notwithstanding the efforts of those who prepared the body for burial, his head went to its last resting-place still marked by some of the paint that portrayed him ...
— Trials and Triumphs of Faith • Mary Cole
... barren lands; the earth is worth what man is worth"—that is the last word of modern agriculture. Ask of the earth, and she will give you bread, ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... thy inland seas, The eternal forest girdling either shore, Its belt of dark pines sighing in the breeze, And rugged fields, with rude huts dotted o'er, Show cultivation unimproved by art, That sheds a barren chillness ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... ways. Any instruction in housekeeping would be gratefully received, and a sewing class, where cutting and making plain clothing were taught, would be eagerly accepted. A mothers' meeting once a week would be more helpful to those barren minds than words can express. The work is right there, all ready and waiting for some loving, self-denying Christian woman to take up. Who in the far-off Northland will say, "Lord, here am I, send me," and who will reach deep in their pockets and say, "I will give a tenth, yea, even ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 9, September, 1889 • Various
... every form of Christian service, Mrs. Ahok was especially eager to share the joy of her new-found faith with the women of her own class, the wealthy aristocratic ladies whose secluded lives were so barren and empty, and to whom it was so difficult for a missionary to obtain access. She threw herself with whole-hearted eagerness into the work of the Church of England Zenana Society, whose mission is to these ...
— Notable Women Of Modern China • Margaret E. Burton
... 100,000 A.D. The forest went down, and it seemed that only rocks were here. A barren vista was visible off to the river and the distant sea. The familiar conformations of the sea and the land were changed. There was a different shore-line. It was nearer at hand now; and it ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... was the first to adorn the city with those shady public walks which shortly afterwards became so popular with the Athenians, for he planted rows of plane-trees in the market-place, and transformed the Academy from a dry and barren wilderness into a well-watered grove, full of tastefully-kept paths and pleasant walks under the shade of ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... of the Lamb as it had been slain; and that the work of your prayerless science;—the issues, these, of your enlightened teaching, and of all the toils and the deaths of the Covenanters on those barren hills, of the prophetic martyrs here in your crossing streets, and of the highest, sincerest, simplest patriot of Catholic England, Sir Thomas More, within the walls of England's central Tower. So is ended, with prayer for the bread of this ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... dungeon-like rooms. The furniture was scant, and the rooms, with the exception of those devoted to herself, her husband and the children, which were covered with crimson drugget, were carpetless. A more barren, inhospitable looking house could not be imagined, and the moment Tina entered it, her spirits sank to zero. The atmosphere of the place frightened her the most. It was not that it was merely forlorn and cheerless, but there was a ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... With borders of birch-trees Winds sadly and drearily Into the distance; On either hand running Low hills and young cornfields, Green pastures, and often— More often than any— Lands sterile and barren. And near to the rivers 10 And ponds are the hamlets And villages standing— The old and the new ones. The forests and meadows And rivers of Russia Are lovely in springtime, But O you spring cornfields, Your growth thin and scanty ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... a long, detailed and exceedingly dull description of the step-by-step procedure followed by a Confederation exploratory ship making a first landing on a barren planet. There was a description of the atmosphere, the soil surface, the land masses and major water bodies. Physically, the planet was a desert, hot and dry, and barren of vegetation excepting in two or three areas of jungle along the equator. "The planet is inhabited ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... young Dolores is pictured in these letters. She approaches the early development of her rare beauty. Padre Francisco has his daily occupation in his church and school. The higher education of pretty Dolores is his only luxury. Were it not for this, he would abandon the barren spiritual field and return to France. Already in the canyons of the Mariposa, Fresno, and in the great foot-hills, miners are scratching around the river beds. Hostile settlers are approaching from the valley the Don's boundaries. ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... some persons from the islands that I must not expect to find every where a green and tropical verdure; for much of the country was barren, unfruitful lava. I was up on deck bright and early, to see this far-off part of the world. There was "Diamond Head" before me, an extinct volcanic mountain, of a sort of reddish dust-color, with its top fallen in, and without ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson
... God, and consequently our usefulness, depends upon it. God will not give us his grace to enable us to be truly good and to make ourselves useful, unless we learn this lesson. And unless we have the grace of God, we cannot be useful. Like barren fig-trees we shall be useless ...
— The Life of Jesus Christ for the Young • Richard Newton
... Epworth in 1726, or the case of the Fox family at Hydesville near Rochester in 1848, which was the starting-point of modern spiritualism. Nothing sensational came of our journey, and yet it was not entirely barren. On the first night nothing occurred. On the second, there were tremendous noises, sounds like someone beating a table with a stick. We had, of course, taken every precaution, and we could not explain the noises; but at the same time we could not swear that some ingenious practical joke had ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... elbows on the rail, stared abroad defiantly and without a single clear thought in my head. I had a vague feeling that the descent of the sun towards the waters, going on before my eyes with changes of light and cloud, was like some gorgeous and empty ceremonial of immersion belonging to a vast barren faith remote from consolation and hope. And I noticed, also, small things without importance—the hirsute aspect of a sailor; the end of a rope trailing overboard; and Castro, so different from everybody else on board that his appearance seemed to create a profound solitude ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... I firmly believe, will descend, which do not keep in sight that the spiritual means the moral. In trying to make it mean exclusively the intellectual, they will degrade it to mean the merely logical and abstract; and when that is found to be a barren and lifeless phantom, a mere projection of the human brain, attributing reality to mere conceptions and names, and confusing the subject with the object, as logicians say truly the Neoplatonists did, then in despair, the school will try to make the spiritual something real, ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... has been shorn of its beauty to gratify man's unsatiable love of clearing; and the ignorant clod is not the only despoiler, for peer and peasant rival the great Liberal Leader in wielding the axe, the one to pay his debts, the other because he is only a clod; and Mother Earth is made barren, and her heart dry and hard, and she cannot give nourishment to the ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... of 2000 miles, we enjoyed bright, clear weather, a pleasant, sometimes an even too low temperature, and peaceful seas, a condition which the captain assured me was constant, the low temperature being due to the South Polar or Humboldt current. The absolute barren condition of this whole coast is also indirectly due to this current, the temperature of the sea being so much below that of the land that evaporation and condensation do not take place. After passing some guano islands on December 9th ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... thrilling pursuit of the dog mail had continued since early dawn. For never more than a minute or two at a time had there been a rest. Over mountain and lake, through dense forest and across barren plain man and dog had sped without food or drink, snatching up mouthfuls of snow here and there—always their eyes upon the fresh trail of the flying mail. Even the fierce huskies seemed to understand that the ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... of two palm-trees in Italy, the male growing at Brundusium, the female at Otranto (related by Jovianus Pontanus in an excellent poem, sometimes tutor to Alphonsus junior, King of Naples, his secretary of state, and a great philosopher) "which were barren, and so continued a long time," till they came to see one another growing up higher, though many stadiums asunder. Pierius in his Hieroglyphics, and Melchior Guilandinus, Mem. 3. tract. de papyro, cites this story of Pontanus for a truth. See more in Salmuth Comment. in Pancirol. de Nova ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... gladden them and give them life. Years ago, when Chadron's importance was beginning to feel itself strong upon its legs, and when Nola was a little thing with light curls blowing about her blue eyes, the house had grown up under the wand of riches in that barren place. ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... not do it; But, vice versa, send the audience to it. And, oh!— But no— Illustrious Mac- Beth, or -ready, And thou, small quack, Of plaudits greedy! Our pen, deserted by the tuneful Muses, To write on such a barren theme refuses. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 7, 1841 • Various
... it under foot, get it off the face of the earth immediately, at any cost or risk. It had no business to exist: if nobody else would make way with it, he must. He often saw places that he would have liked to devastate, to blot out of existence if he could, just because they were barren and unsightly. Once, when he was a very little child, he suddenly seized a book of his father's,—an old, shabby, worn dictionary,—and flung it into the fire with uncontrollable passion; and, on being asked why he did it, had nothing to say in ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... teacher: Sweet is the lore which Nature brings. Our meddling intellect Misshapes the beauteous forms of things. We murder to dissect. Enough of Science and of Art: Close up those barren leaves; Come forth, and bring with you a ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... the Mandersons. You thought that my unwholesome imagination would begin at once to play with the idea of Mrs. Manderson having something to do with the crime. Rather than that I should lose myself in barren speculations about this, you decided to tell me exactly how matters stood, and incidentally to impress upon me, who know how excellent your judgment is, your opinion of your niece. Is that ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... naefdon nan bearn, fortham | 7. And they had no child, because the Elizabeth waes unberende; and hig | that Elizabeth was barren; and they on heora dagum butu forth-eodon. | in her days were ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... than a century ago, the old world laughed at the new. Writers of the old world called our American eagle, "a paper bird, brooding over a barren waste;" yet in what they then called a barren waste, railroads now carry more of the products of the earth, than all the railroads of all the lands, of all the peoples on the ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... the country presents the same sterile, uninteresting appearance as that between Calais and Paris—no hedges, no trees, except tall, stupid-looking poplars, and no chateaux or farm-houses. I am at a loss to know why a country should look so ill which I do not believe is either barren or ill cultivated. Lyons is a magnificent town. It was dark when I arrived, or rather moonlight, but I could see that the quay we came along was fine, and yesterday morning I walked about for an hour and was struck with the grandeur of the place; it is like a great and magnificent ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... Spirit, maketh the Spirit cover his face with a vail and hide it. There is here ordinarily a reciprocal or mutual influence. Our grieving him makes him withdraw his countenance, and his withdrawing his countenance maketh us to wither and grow barren. ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... you have the best of me; Men have not robbed you of your birthright—work, Nor ravaged in old days a peaceful field, Nor wedded heiresses against their will, Nor sinned, nor slaved, nor stooped, nor overreached, That you might drone a useless life away 'Mid half a score of bleak and barren farms And half a dozen bogs." "O rare!" I cried; "His wrongs go nigh to make him eloquent: Now we behold how far bad actions reach! Because five hundred years ago a Knight Drove geese and beeves out from a Franklin's yard Because three hundred years ago a squire— Against her will, and ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... of fate, she had passed through her youth alone, and drew near to the confines of age, a childless woman. The tender ambitions that she had received at birth had been, by time and disappointment, diverted into a certain barren zeal of industry and fury of interference. She carried her thwarted ardours into housework, she washed floors with her empty heart. If she could not win the love of one with love, she must dominate all by her temper. Hasty, ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Island, is the most isolated and desolate spot imaginable during this weather. The frigid monotony of winter has settled down upon that region, and now it is haunted only by sea fowl. The bleak, barren promontory whereon stands the light is swept clean of its summer dust by the violent raking of cold hurricanes across it, and coated with ice from the wind-dashed spume of the great breakers hurled against ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... made himself terrible to the Spaniards of Mexico and the West Indies, and had won treasure within sight of the walls of Panama. Now for the first time the foot of a white man trod the barren rocks of Cape Horn and the keel of an English ship cut the Pacific waves. Here were treasure-laden Spanish galleons to take and rich Spanish cities to raid, and the hearts of the adventurers were full ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... and prospector of Arizona knows that there have been, and are found to this day nuggets of pure gold and silver on the summit of barren hills, in localities and under geological conditions which are not to be reckoned as possible natural phenomena. Whence came the golden nuggets on the summit of Rich Hill at Weaver, where a party of men gathered ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... power, or potentiality, of consciousness. For if you maintain that a thing possesses the power of producing an effect while yet that effect is never and nowhere seen to be produced by it, you may as well proclaim at a meeting of sons of barren women that their mothers possess eminent procreative power! Moreover, to prove at first from the Vedanta- texts that Brahman is the material cause of the world, and from this that pots and the like possess potential consciousness, and therefrom the existence ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... never taken. For some unaccountable reason Charles, who had sold Oliver's Dunkirk to the French for half a million of money, stuck out for Poleroone. What Cromwell had taken he was not going to give up! On the other hand, neither would the Dutch give up Poleroone. This dispute, about a barren island, delayed the settlement of the peace preliminaries; but eventually the British plenipotentiaries did get out to Breda, in May 1667. Our sanguine king expected an immediate cessation of hostilities, and that his unpreparedness would thus be huddled up. All of a sudden, at the beginning ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... South and east the barren summits of brown hills shaped a depression in which the city lay. North, clean-white and regular, the wall of Agrippa was printed against the cold blue of the sky. Below on three lesser mounts and overflowing the vales between was ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... as much jungle experience as any man of his age in India, a careful observer, and a finished sportsman, tells me that the biggest boar he ever saw was only thirty-eight inches high; while the biggest pig he ever killed was a barren sow, with three-inch tusks sticking out of her gums; she measured thirty-nine-and-a-half inches, and fought like a demon. I have shot pig—in heavy jungle where spearing was impracticable—over thirty-six ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... was barren where it lay; Flowers bloomed beyond, utterly sweet and fair; And even its own dull heart might think to stay In livelong thirst of a clear river there, Flowing from unseen hills to unheard seas, Through a still vale ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... and with Manuel telling as much as he thought wise of the adventures which he had encountered while Niafer was dead, they left this peculiarly irrational part of the forest, and fared out of the ruined November woods; and presently, in those barren fields that descend toward the sand dunes of Quentavic, came face to face with Queen Freydis and the Princess Alianora, where these two royal ladies and many other fine ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... some other place, nobody dares look upon it, but all turn their faces from it; for not only is the sight of it terrible and hurtful to mankind, but it makes even the trees, by which it happens to be carried, become barren and cast their fruit. This image, therefore, they say, the priestess produced at that time, and, holding it directly in the faces of the Aetolians, made them lose their reason and judgment. But Aratus mentions no such thing in his commentaries, but says, that, having put ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... this comparatively barren age in the history of English poetry to a cluster of Scottish bards. The first of these is ROBERT HENRYSON. He was schoolmaster at Dunfermline, and died some time before 1508. He is supposed by Lord Hailes to have been preceptor ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... wall. In the teeth of the gale the old man crawled out of the hole, extended his length on the ground, and began to drag his stiff and trembling frame, with hands, elbows and knees, across the fifty feet or so of barren soil that lay between the hole and the cottage. He heard the crash of bricks before he had accomplished half the distance; without pausing to look he crawled rapidly on till he crossed the threshold, and ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... applied to women. In closing she said: "Forty-three years in asking Congress for this amendment of the Federal Constitution to enfranchise women they have followed an entirely legal and constitutional method of procedure, which has been so absolutely barren of results that in the past nineteen years the committees have made no report whatever, either favorable or unfavorable. How much longer do you expect women to treat with respect National and State constitutions and legislative bodies that stand thus an impenetrable barrier between them and ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... die Voelker der Erde in Sold, Baue Waelle aus Barren von Gold, Bedecke die Meerflut mit Bug bei Bug, Du rechnetest klug, doch nicht klug genug. Was schiert uns Russe und Franzos'! Schuss wider Schuss, und Stoss um Stoss. Wir kaempfen den Kampf mit Bronze und Stahl Und schliessen Frieden irgend ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... Andes; or like those indurated coral islands, which are daily raising their sterile heads above the level of the great ocean, and teaching by analogy the process of fertilization. At that period, so remote and so obscure, all must have been silent, barren, and relatively motionless! But, the atmosphere and the rains having, by decomposition and solution, pulverized the rocks, and reduced them into the various earths which now fertilize the surface, from the inorganic ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... and precipitous cliffs. Still, many of the portions which can be cultivated are of extraordinary fertility; and the contrast is very great between the richly-cultivated plains and valleys, and the leafy forests, with the barren, scorched, and burnt sides of the peak and its surrounding heights. I ought to have said that the houses of Santa Cruz are of several stories, with the verandahs one above another, looking into the interior courts, in which grow not only bananas, but all ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... (who ever could have imagined him so jocose), said quite gravely, "Probably the wife of the barren fig-tree." ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... bow being repaired, there was nothing more to keep the Southern Cross and her escort in the dreary river, and with no regrets at leaving such a barren, inhospitable country behind them, the pole-seekers weighed anchor early the ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... been pressed close by primitive wants, and to whom a life of hard toil has never been illuminated by any enthusiastic religious faith. To them pain and mishap present a far wider range of possibilities than gladness and enjoyment: their imagination is almost barren of the images that feed desire and hope, but is all overgrown by recollections that are a perpetual pasture to fear. "Is there anything you can fancy that you would like to eat?" I once said to an old labouring man, who was in his last illness, and who had refused all the food ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... this time saw the land bearing west-south-west distant 14 or 15 leagues, made the signal of seeing it to the Investigator: by 8 A.M. perceived it was islands, three in number. At noon one island bore west by north distant 6 or 7 miles. This island appears very barren and rocky, and an island that, from its appearance took to be the Isle of Pines, next Watering Island south-south-east distant 16 or ...
— The Logbooks of the Lady Nelson - With The Journal Of Her First Commander Lieutenant James Grant, R.N • Ida Lee
... a kyteful o' pride's yon'er! and yet I would be nane surprised the morn to hear that the Nechabudnezzar was a' gane to pigs and whistles, and driven out wi' the divors bill to the barren ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... floor showed us from where we had derived our light. Enormous open windows with heavy iron bars made the high and barren room the roosting place of hundreds of pigeons. The wind blew through the iron bars and the air was filled with a weird and pleasing music. It was the noise of the town below us, but a noise which had been purified and cleansed by the distance. The rumbling of heavy carts and the clinking ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... and Pine Barren stage coach, profoundly oblivious—after the manner of all human invention—of everything but its regular function, toiled dustily out of the higher plain and began the grateful descent of a wooded ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... watched with growing impatience our gradual approach to Loch Scavaig, which in the bright afternoon looked scarcely less dreary than at night, especially now that the 'Diana' was no longer there to give some air of human occupation to the wild and barren surroundings. The sun was well inclined towards the western horizon when the 'Dream' reached her former moorings and noiselessly dropped anchor, and about twenty minutes later the electric launch belonging ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... herself, she began, with her clear and blue (vers) eyes, to look around on those who brought her the news, and said, 'Ha! my lords, what have I done to the king that he should quit me? in what have I offended him? what defect finds he in my person? I am not barren, I am not illegitimate, nor come of a low race. I am wealthy as he is by my means. I have always obeyed him; and if we speak of lineage, I spring from the Emperor Otho the First and King Lothaire; ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... admire the lake. I'd drain the lake if I could—I hate the lake. There's nothing so gloomy as a lake pent up among barren mountains. I can't conceive what possessed my people to build our house down here, at the edge of a lake; unless it was the fish, and precious fish it is—pike! I don't know how people digest it—I can't. I'd as soon think of eating ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... product of the soil it is on, till provisions being spent, they send to forage many a mile among friends or enemies, it matters not. Meanwhile the neighbouring fields, trampled and beaten down, become barren and dry, affording no sustenance but clouds ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... broadside to broadside, and only about a half pistol-shot apart. No idea that the Englishman had any hostile designs seems to have occurred to Commodore Barren; but some of the younger officers noticed that the ports of the "Leopard" were triced up, and the tompions taken out of the muzzles of the cannon. The latter fact was of the gravest import, and should ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... were routed out, and all saw the rugged outline of the great island—a continent itself, as large as the United States and much the same shape—stretching away to the southward and slowly dwindling into low, sandy, barren shores as ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... themselves to be reverenced as Prophets which fore-tell Futurity. They will needs be look'd upon to have an unlimited Power. They boast of being able to make it Wet or Dry; to cause a Calm or a Storm; to render Land Fruitful or Barren; and, in a Word to make Hunters Fortunate or Unfortunate. They also pretend to Physick, and to apply Medicines, but which are such, for the most part as have little Virtue at all in 'em, especially to Cure that Distemper ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... behest Of noble knighthood,—but the love of life, Compassion, and soul-sickness of the strife. "If any be that loved him!" Oh, to die Far from green-swarded Camelot, and lie Among these bleak and barren hills alone, His end unwept for and his grave unknown,— Never again to see the glad sunrise That brightened all his world in those ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... had a feeling, which she could hardly have defined, that it was a common and plebeian thing to believe in it, and if she ever heard it ridiculed she joined in the cry without mercy. But it was an excitement and an interest in a life so barren of both that she could not afford to throw it away. She had not intelligence enough to be disgusted or shocked by it. If pressed to explain the amount of her faith in the whole business, she would probably have said she thought "there was something ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... external scheme of his sonatas and for the manner of writing for strings. He poured copiously his streams of fresh and strong melody into forms which, in the hands of those he professed to imitate, were barren, lifeless things. Many of these sonatas might almost be called rhapsodies; certainly a great many movements are rhapsodical. In set forms one has learnt from experience what to expect. In the dance measures and fugues, ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... Washington. He also spoke of his visits to London, and, while he admitted that Englishmen thought their architecture beautiful, he took exception, and claimed that the great St. Paul's, though beautiful to the English eye, was a cold barren building, blacked with smoke inside and out, a place where you could not be comfortable, nor hear the speaker at any distance. We regret that we are not able to give a verbatim account ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... same root as the gladness. The two do not clash against each other, or reduce the emotion to a neutral indifference, but they blend into one another; just as, in the Arctic regions, deep down beneath the cold snow, with its white desolation and its barren death, you will find the budding of the early spring flowers and the fresh green grass; just as some kinds of fire burn below the water; just as, in the midst of the barren and undrinkable sea, there may be welling up some little ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... his half-shaped blocks of oak, with birds and leaves and heads partly traced upon them; but he found himself powerless to complete his own designs. Between him and them stood the image of Phebe, a poverty-stricken, work-worn woman, toiling with her hands, in all weathers, upon their three or four barren fields, which were now the only property left to him. It had been pleasant to him to see her milk the cows, and help him to fetch in the sheep from the moors; but until now he had been able to pay for the rougher ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... women, and they were shooters, and could well kill a deer, both at the stalk and at the trest; and they daily bare bows and arrows, horns and wood-knives, and many good dogs they had, both for the string and for a bait. So it happed this lady the huntress had abated her dog for the bow at a barren hind, and so this barren hind took the flight over hedges and woods. And ever this lady and part of her women costed the hind, and checked it by the noise of the hounds, to have met with the hind at some water; and so it happed, the ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume II (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... hand and grasp whatever object my ambition might desire? Alas! there was in my heart always something too soft for the aims and cravings of my mind. I felt that I was wasting the young years of my life in a barren and wearisome pursuit. What to me, who had outlived vanity, would have been the admiration of the crowd! I sighed for the sympathy of the one! and I shrunk in sadness from the prospect of renown to ask my heart for the reality of love! For what purpose, too, ...
— Falkland, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Do I not own their strength and speed? A proper man I dash away, As their two dozen legs were mine indeed. Up then, from idle pondering free, And forth into the world with me! I tell you what;—your speculative churl Is like a beast which some ill spirit leads, On barren wilderness, in ceaseless whirl, ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... way of reply, painstakingly analyzed the chief deficiencies of Sandy's immediate relatives, and was beginning upon his grandparents when Sandy reached barren ground in the shape of three long paragraphs of snow, cold, and sunrise artistically blended with prismatic adjectives. He waded through the first paragraph and well into the second before he mired in a hopeless jumble of unfamiliar polysyllables. Sandy was not the skipping kind; ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... Mitchells would have fired at successive Sharpes. Five generations of Claverhouses would have butchered five generations of Camerons. Those marvellous improvements which have changed the face of Scotland would never have been effected. Plains now rich with harvests would have remained barren moors. Waterfalls which now turn the wheels of immense factories would have resounded in a wilderness. New Lanark would still have been a sheepwalk, and Greenock a fishing hamlet. What little strength Scotland could under such a system ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... ponies, are his real intimate companions and occupy his entire mind. In contrast with this we have the omnipresent game of tag which is, doubtless, also founded upon the chase. It gives the boy exercise and momentary echoes of the old excitement, but it is barren of suggestion and ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... scaled the peak and found no shelter in fame's bleak and barren height. Lead me, my Guide, before the light fades, into the valley of quiet where life's harvest mellows ...
— Stray Birds • Rabindranath Tagore
... are shown an old ivy-clad house, half hidden in trees, and adorned with weather- stained frescoes of the saints, and near it a chapel much damaged by the violence of the River Po, which flowed hard by; not far off, the priest ploughs his few barren roods with borrowed cattle. This is no reminiscence of the Roman elegists, but true modern sentiment; and the parallel to it—a sincere, unartificial description of country life in general—will be found at the end of this part of ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... there are not many such moments of opportunity, because the days are evil; like a barren desert, in which, here and there, you find a flower, pluck it while you can; like a business opportunity which comes a few times in a life-time; buy it up while you have the chance. Be spiritually alert; be not unwise, but understanding what the will of God is. "Walk ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... ask Him." It is because of our lack of any living or effectual belief in the Holy Spirit, and because of our consequent failure to seek His inspiration and to submit ourselves to His influence, that the Christianity of men to-day is often so barren and so poor a thing; and the corporate life of Christendom languishes for the same reason. The Church is meant to be a fellowship, a brotherhood: the most real and living brotherhood on earth. Men find to-day the realization of brotherhood in a regiment: they ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... derision. Think not we long remain blind to the idiotic folly of our founders, who forswore every delight of life for the pleasures of dying martyrs by hunger, by thirst, and by pestilence, and by the swords of savages, while they vainly strove to defend a barren desert, valuable only in the eyes of superstition. Our Order soon adopted bolder and wider views, and found out a better indemnification for our sacrifices. Our immense possessions in every kingdom of Europe, our high military fame, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... another, still truer and sweeter. Our lives may be all a succession of romances, if we will make them so. I think now I will never doubt the future; for I find, that, when I have given up my dearest hopes, my best-beloved friends, and accepted the gloomy belief that all life besides is barren,—then comes some new experience, filling my empty cup with a still ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... journals, Mr. O. P. Q. Philander Smiff, and again, in a lower social scale, Mr. Alfred Sloper, became recognised by a later generation. This unfortunate gentleman of the Bar—a gentleman always, in spite of his weakness of intellect and character—was shown in all the difficulties germane to his barren profession, and in all the ludicrous situations that came natural to the man. Many of his quaint aphorisms are still remembered, such as that, elsewhere recorded—"As my laundress makes my bed, so I must ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... purpose of putting obnoxious people out of the world, it has also, though far more rarely, been employed with the benevolent intention of helping others into it. In other words, it has been used to facilitate childbirth and to procure offspring for barren women. Thus among the Bataks of Sumatra a barren woman, who would become a mother, will make a wooden image of a child and hold it in her lap, believing that this will lead to the fulfilment of her wish. In the Babar Archipelago, when a woman desires to have a child, she invites ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... the death of a plant, in its natural course, proceeds from the want of that balsamick saline juice; which, I have said, makes it swell, germinate, and augment itself. This want may proceed either from a destitution of it in the place where the plant grows, as when it is in a barren soil or bad air, or from a defect in the plant itself, that hath not vigour sufficient to attract it, though it be within the sphere of it; as when the root has become so hard, obstructed and cold, as that it hath lost its vegetable functions. Now, both ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... however, so far as the land is formed by the deposits of the Nile, that this scene of verdure and beauty extends. On the east it is bounded by ranges of barren and rocky hills, and on the west by vast deserts, consisting of moving sands, from which no animal or vegetable life can derive the means of existence. The reason of this sterility seems to be the absence of water. The geological formation ...
— Alexander the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... royal troops marched and counter-marched to the call of bugles that have gone silent these hundred years and more. It is a road of varied fortunes, like many of those who have passed over it; it is sometimes rich in all manner of priceless possessions, and again it is barren, poverty-stricken, and desolate. It climbs long hills, sometimes in a roundabout, hesitating, half-hearted way, and sometimes with an abrupt and breathless ascent; at the summit it seems to pause a moment as if to invite the traveller to survey the splendid ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... encouraged you to talk in detail, because I wanted to be sure I was right in the position I was taking; but you've given me a different viewpoint. Why James, think it over yourself in the light of what you just have told me. Nellie never has been a mother at all! Her heart is more barren than that of a woman to whom motherhood is physical impossibility, yet whose ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... covering the treacherous sandy bottom, and from the other side came the more distant gleam of alkali plains; to the right arose the bluffs, here both steep and rugged, completely shutting off the view, barren of vegetation except for a few scattered patches of grass. Suddenly a man rode out of a rift in the bank, directly in front, and held up his hand. Surprised, startled, the driver instantaneously clamped on his brake, and brought his horses to a quick stop; the conductor, ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... why these somewhat abstruse disquisitions were necessary for our immediate purpose, and I can promise those who have hitherto followed me on this rather barren and rugged track, that they will now be able to rest, and command, from the point of view which we have reached, the whole panorama of the mythology ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... China. Pitt set great store by the embassy which he at this time sent out to Pekin under the lead of Lord Macartney. In happier times this enterprise might have served to link East and West in friendly intercourse; and Europe, weary of barren strifes, would have known no other rivalries ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... in my fair mistress's presence I did not, as you barren gallants do, Fill my discourses ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... the strait the lake widened out. On the side the priest was driving the shore was empty and barren. On the other side there were pleasant woods and interspaces and castles. Castle Carra appeared, a great ivy-grown ruin showing among thorn-bushes and ash-trees, at the end of a headland. In bygone times the castle must have ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... sports; I point to the sublime scenes around us, and remind them that the Almighty mind, that formed these wonders, dictated the book which is their daily study. He piled the grey cliffs on each other, some awfully barren, others cloathed with verdure, to shew that fertility and desolation, like joy and grief, are at his disposal. He, through fringed rocks, hollowed a cavern, whence burst the majestic cataract, whose course no mortal hand shall ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... once done may prove practically irreparable. So important are these investigations that I herewith attach as an appendix to my message certain photographs showing present conditions in China. They show in vivid fashion the appalling desolation, taking the shape of barren mountains and gravel and sand-covered plains, which immediately follows and depends upon the deforestation of the mountains. Not many centuries ago the country of northern China was one of the most fertile and beautiful spots in the entire world, and ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... may become its tyrant; and oppress our little reputations with more ease than you now protect them. But these, my lord, are designs, which I am sure you harbour not, any more than the French king is contriving the conquest of the Swissers. It is a barren triumph, which is not worth your pains; and would only rank him amongst ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... back of the bay was in flames during our stay, which proved, if a proof were required, that this arid and barren extremity of Australia is not destitute of inhabitants; and although we saw none, it is probable that they were not ignorant of our presence, but from timidity intentionally avoided us. The heat was very great; on board, the thermometer did not stand ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... intention, give evidence of their truth; and I now called up a tradition, which I owed to my friend the maniac, respecting the manner in which the Mackenzies of Fairburn and the Chisholms of Strathglass had divided this barren tract between them. It had lain, from the first settlement of the country, an unappropriated waste, and neither proprietor could tell where his own lands terminated, or those of his neighbour began; but finding that the want of a proper line of demarcation led to ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... of which the mercantile department is connected with the domicile, like the gingerbread and candy shops of an after-date. The signs have a singular appearance to a stranger's eye. These are not a barren record of names and occupations yellow letters on black boards, but images and hieroglyphics, sometimes typifying the principal commodity offered for sale, though generally intended to give an arbitrary designation to the establishment. Overlooking the bearded Saracens, ...
— Dr. Bullivant - (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... heat of the last week was gone, and the melancholy sky was dark with lowering clouds. Arthur inquired for the road which led to Skene, and set out to walk the three miles which separated him from it. The country was grey and barren. There was a broad waste of heath, with gigantic boulders strewn as though in pre-historic times Titans had waged there a mighty battle. Here and there were trees, but they seemed hardly to withstand the ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... Conservidayoc lay in a westerly direction from Vilcabamba, yet on Raimondi's map all of the rivers which rise in the mountains west of the town are short affluents of the Apurimac and flow southwest. We wondered whether the stories about ruins at Conservidayoc would turn out to be as barren of foundation as those we had heard from the trustworthy foreman at Huadquina. One of our informants said the Inca city was called Espiritu Pampa, or the "Pampa of Ghosts." Would the ruins turn out to be "ghosts"? Would ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... The first archbishop fled, And York lay barren for a hundred years. Why, by this rule, Foliot may claim the pall For ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... moors know the mysterious way in which the quiet country lanes suddenly emerge upon wide and desolate expanses; know how they lead us on, past ruined factories and deserted quarries, up the barren slopes of forlorn hills; know how, as one sees in front of one the long white road vanishing over the hill-top and losing itself in the grey sky, there comes across one's mind a strange, sad, exquisite feeling unlike any other feeling in the world; and we who ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... of them; twenty-six were, comparatively speaking, large; seven were of medium size, and two were extremely small—so small and thin that Ailie wondered they did not die of sheer delicacy of constitution on such a barren spot. The greater part of the surface of the bank was covered with the fine sand already referred to, but there were one or two spots which were covered with variously-sized pebbles, and an immense number of beautiful ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... woman's feet. What have I not done to aid him! At his instance, I went to the archbishop, to implore one of the princes of the Church for succour. I knelt to an ecclesiastic. I did a ludicrous and a shameful thing, knowing it in advance to be a barren farce. I obeyed his wish. The tale will be laughable. I obeyed him. I would not have it on my conscience that the commission of any deed ennomic, however unwonted, was refused by me to serve Alvan. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and myself. Wanderers possessed of a singularly barren species of freedom, without ties, without any sheet-anchor of family or of profession to embarrass our movements, without call to live in one place rather than another. All along this sun-blessed Riviera you will find them swarming, thick as flies, displaying the ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... records show that Ulster was formerly the most sterile, barren, unpromising part of Ireland, and that the change was entirely due to the two centuries of unremitting labour which the Scots settlers and their descendants had bestowed on the land; but, waiving this point, I asked him why the Unionist, that ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... slipping along beneath his horse's hoofs, like the unwinding of coils of brown ribbon, "is like that witch-face slope that we saw awhile ago. It seems to occur at long intervals in patches. You see down that declivity how little grows, how barren." ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... hill came to a distinct end, and the second rose higher and more rough. Its face was torn and barren, and what timber there was grew low down almost at its foot. The valley was narrowing, and the rich prairie grass was changing to a lank tangle of weedy tufts. There was a suspicion of moisture, too, in the spongy tread. The sun further lost power here, between these narrowing crags, ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... you have all been canny enough to have means enough to balance all that barren moorland. You are a richer man than ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... all so universally strive to make the lives of children happy? Is it not because we know that happiness in the present will give a sort of reflected happiness even in the saddest future? Is it not because we know how in life's bitterest moments, its most barren and desolate paths, we feel a warmth about our heart, a smile upon our lips, when we remember the old home days with their eager childish interests and hopes, their vividly recollected pleasures, their sheltered luxuriance of fatherly and motherly love? ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... like to try a motor, I said," replied Cora. "They say that Jim Peters tries everything on Cedar Lake, even to running a shooting gallery. But see! He is reading a letter! Where ever did he get a letter on this barren island?" ...
— The Motor Girls On Cedar Lake - The Hermit of Fern Island • Margaret Penrose
... small importance, and the rest of the world is looking on while lives are being thrown away in a struggle that seems as if it would linger on until the once beautiful island of Cuba becomes a desolate waste of ruined towns and barren fields. ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 25, April 29, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... they have received the disgraceful overtures which I know have been made to them. The seeds of sedition have been unscrupulously scattered throughout India, even amongst the hills of the frontier tribes. We are grateful that they have fallen on much barren ground, but we can ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... man worked patiently and fruitlessly over his "inventions." They came to naught, but they lightened his otherwise barren existence. There was not a day or night in which his mind was wholly free ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... -stricken, straitened, necessitous, penniless, eleemosynary; emaciated, skinny, lean, spare, meager, bony, gaunt, thin, haggard, scrawny, angular, peaked, rawboned, pinched; inferior, mean, shabby, seedy, tacky, worthless; barren, sterile, effete infecund, inarable, exhausted, infertile; miserable, wretched, faulty, defective; despicable, contemptible, abject, sordid, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... vacate; go away &c 293. Adj. absent, not present, away, nonresident, gone, from home; missing; lost; wanting; omitted; nowhere to be found; inexistence &c 2 [Obs.]. empty, void; vacant, vacuous; untenanted, unoccupied, uninhabited; tenantless; barren, sterile; desert, deserted; devoid; uninhabitable. Adv. without, minus, nowhere; elsewhere; neither here nor there; in default of; sans; behind one's back. Phr. the bird has flown, non est inventus [Lat.]. absence makes the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... abed with fresh morning smiling in through the open window, for the first time he looked forward, following the face he had pursued through his dreams, into the future. Its chambers he found ghastly barren. He visualised it as a vast unfurnished house. To the merry eye with which two days ago he had looked upon the world, the picture, had he then conjured it, would have given him no gloom. He would have thought it a fine thing, this empty ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... of the stream, and afforded me a fine view of the valley of the Cust, cleared and burnt by a recent fire, which extended for miles and miles, purpling the face of the country, up to the horizon. Rich flax and grass made the valley look promising, but on the hill the ground was stony and barren, and shabbily clothed with patches of dry and brown grass, surrounded by a square foot or so of hard ground; between the tussocks, however, there was a frequent though scanty undergrowth which might furnish support for sheep, though it ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... deny the possibility of an eternal energy; if he admits the existence of immaterial phenomena in the form of consciousness, he must admit the possibility, at any rate, of an eternal series of such phenomena; and, if his studies have not been barren of the best fruit of the investigation of nature, he will have enough sense to see that, when Spinoza says, "Per Deum intelligo ens absolute infinitum, hoc est substantiam constantem infinitis attributis," the God so conceived is one that only a very great fool would ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... promised her in marriage; and he requested that she might either be compelled to marry him or else be dealt with "according to law," i.e. "either to die the death," or else to "endure the livery of a nun, and live a barren sister all her life." Hermia refused to submit to an "unwished yoke," and fled from Athens with Lysander. Demetrius, seeing that Hermia disliked him but that Hel'ena doted on him, consented to abandon the one and wed the other. When Egeus was informed thereof, ...
— 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.
... from our travelling as we did, without speaking or understanding the language, with no servant and no carriage, taking the common conveyances of the country. Our fare, chiefly fish, black bread, and brandy. The country round Falkenborg is barren, with ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury |
