"Barren" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Jordan, passes over its waters, and spreads himself over the fair southern regions of Palestine. This land was already occupied, and tolerably well inhabited. Mountains, not extremely high, but rocky and barren, were severed by many watered vales favorable to cultivation. Towns, villages, and solitary settlements lay scattered over the plain, and on the slopes of the great valley, the waters of which are collected in Jordan. Thus inhabited, thus tilled, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... remembering We called you once Dead World, and barren thing. Yes, so we called you then, You, far more wise Than to give life ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... energy. He has not subdued them nor built a new world from them; he has merely followed them like will-o'-the-wisps away from the world he knew. Now, possessing neither world, he sits by the edge of a barren road that vanishes into a no-man's land, where is no future, and whence there is no way back ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... The wither'd woods grow white with hoary frost, By driving storms their verdant beauty lost, The trembling birds their leafless covert shun, And seek, in distant climes a warmer sun: The water-nymphs their silent urns deplore, Ev'n Thames benum'd's a river now no more: The barren meads no longer yield delight, By glist'ring snows made painful to ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... reminds me of the Dead Sea, situated in Palestine, which covers from 450 to 500 square miles; for its waters are no less than 1300 feet below the Mediterranean. We are told by many who have visited this sea, that neither fish nor shells are to be found in it, and that its shores, frightfully barren, are never cheered by the note of any bird. The inhabitants in its vicinity, however, are not sensible of any noxious quality in its vapor; and the accounts of birds falling down dead in attempting to fly over it are entirely ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... moor, Barren, and wide, and drear, and desolate, She roam'd a wanderer thro' the cheerless night. Far thro' the silence of the unbroken plain The bittern's boom was heard, hoarse, heavy, deep, It made most fitting music to the ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... up her hands with a peculiar gesture toward her shallow, barren bosom, and then her brother found himself silenced. At the same time he was a little irritated, for there was an imputation in her speech that she had been carrying the burden which his own shoulders should have supported. ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... birds she met if they had seen him, but they answered that they had flown over all the country around, for hundreds of miles, without seeing him. She was very sorrowful, and at last, worn out with grief and weariness, lay down to sleep under a tree which was barren of leaves, except for three large ones at ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,
... was not altogether barren, for two niches were found where there seemed to be every likelihood of crystals existing within the caves, whose mouths they seemed to be, and after a certain time devoted to refreshing they turned ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... musing on this disagreeable theme, after my return from the cerro, and endeavouring to sketch out some plan for the safety of my betrothed during my absence; but my thoughts proved barren. ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... attempt to inaugurate friendly relations with 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 than those ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... has sallied forth into the world, like poor Slingsby, full of sunny anticipations, finds too soon how different the distant scene becomes when visited. The smooth place roughens as he approaches; the wild place becomes tame and barren; the fairy tints that beguiled him on, still fly to the distant hill, or gather upon the land he has left behind; and every part of the landscape seems greener than the spot he ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... sufficiently cheerless. The house was situated on an obscure road in a remote part of the town, surrounded by level and sandy fields; and the monotony of the prospect only broken by scattered clumps of dwarf-pine and shrub-oak; a few stunted apple-trees, the remains of an orchard which the barren soil had refused to nourish; some half ruinous out-houses, and a meagre kitchen garden enclosed with a common rough fence, completed the ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... dark morning, Jaffery and I unlocked the study-door and entered the gloom-filled, barren room. The curtains were drawn apart, and the blinds drawn up, and the windows framed squares of unilluminating yellow. It was bitterly cold. The fire had not been laid since the morning of the tragedy and the grate was littered with dim grey ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... a desert, walled in by barren, snow-clad mountains. There was not a tree in sight. There was no vegetation but the endless sage-brush and greasewood. All nature was gray with it. We were plowing through great deeps of powdery alkali dust that rose in thick clouds and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Egypt asserts its claim to the "Hala'ib Triangle," a barren area of 20,580 sq km under partial Sudanese administration that is defined by an administrative boundary which supersedes the treaty boundary ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... is much concerned over the question of prostitution and its effect upon the coming race, through the transmission of syphilitic taint to an innocent wife, who is thereafter barren, or who bears syphilitic children. The folly of the double standard, purity insisted on for the wife, unchasity condoned in the husband; all these subjects are sure to be brought up, and the nurse who goes prepared ...
— Making Good On Private Duty • Harriet Camp Lounsbery
... ask, why should we obey this or that law of God, man or our moral nature, if it bars the way to our enjoyment? "Let us eat and drink for to-morrow we die"; and eating and drinking they go out into a wild and barren land of sorrow. Again men seek happiness through the abundance of things; as if a human soul, born in the image of God, could be ...
— Studies in the Life of the Christian • Henry T. Sell
... long and so carefully repressed in her heart every attempt of the forbidden fruit to put forth a single blossom, that the soil seemed at last to have become incapable of bearing it. If, in one corner of this barren but sacred spot, some green and tender verdure of affection did exist, it was, with a partial and petty reserve for my twin-brother, kept exclusive, and consecrated to Aubrey. His congenial habits of pious silence and rigid devotion; his softness of temper; his ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he stood watching the line of light descending and making the beauties of the volcanic island start out of the gloom. The bands of cloud which hung round the sharp slope became roseate, golden, orange, and purple, and soon after the lad was gazing below the barren, glowing rocks at patches of golden green, then at the beginning of billows and deep valleys running down, the former of wonderful shades of green, the latter of deep dark velvety purple, across which silvery ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... barren war of the schools came a fact at last, and its bearer was a gorgeous figure of a man-at-arms (who, later, got into trouble by talking too much), who came swaggering down the road from the New Inn, blowing smoke into the air, with his hat on one side, and his breast-piece loose; and declared ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... "has been superseded in my heart by the divine Ossian. Through what a world does this angelic bard carry me! With him I wander over barren wastes and frightful wilds; surrounded by whirlwinds and hurricanes, trace by the feeble light of the moon the shades of our noble ancestors; hear from the mountainous heights, intermingled with the roaring of waves and cataracts, their plaintive tones stealing from cavernous recesses; while the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the black reveries; for he was in the throes of his second severe attack of "Tosca"—the Herzeleide of the Russians: that national melancholy, borne of barren steppe and dreary waste, to which every giant intellect that race has known, has sooner or later become a prey, from the great Peter down to the littlest Romanoff; and from which more than the first ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... count the clock that tells the time, And see the brave day sunk in hideous night; When I behold the violet past prime, And sable curls, all silvered o'er with white; When lofty trees I see barren of leaves, Which erst from heat did canopy the herd, And summer's green all girded up in sheaves, Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard, Then of thy beauty do I question make, That thou among the wastes of time must ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare
... impossible to keep them at home. The hulks which might have served had also failed; the faultiness of their internal management had been fully proved. The committee had recommended the erection of more penitentiaries. But the costly experiment of Millbank had been barren of results. The model prison at Pentonville, in process of construction under the pressure of a movement towards prison reform, could offer but limited accommodation. A proposal was put forward to construct convict barracks in the vicinity of the great arsenals; but this, which contained ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... waited on her hostess with an attention which was intended to mitigate her late severity. Although a fuller acquaintance of Mrs Moffatt had increased neither liking nor respect, it had developed a sincere pity for a woman whose life was barren of purpose, of interest, apparently of love also. It was not in Cornelia's nature to see anyone suffer and not try to help, and if it had been her own mother on whom she was waiting she could not have shown more care ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... war, and an army was sent towards Algidus, where the enemy lay. But Gracchus, who was a skilled soldier, cunningly pretended to be afraid of the Romans, and retreated before them, drawing them gradually into a narrow valley, on each side of which rose high, steep, and barren hills. ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... over which they had to pass en route was destitute of water. The red men told them additionally that the valley (meaning the Sacramento) was beautiful, and that the streams were full of beaver. All of this information the trappers found was true. For four days they travelled over a barren country, where not one drop of water could be found. At each night's camping-place, small allowances of water from the tanks was distributed by the commander to each man and animal. A guard was then stationed over the remainder to ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... Reuben's creek; as Reuben Fields, one of our men, was the first of the party who reached it. At a short distance above this we encamped for the night, having made twenty miles. The country, generally, consists of low, rich, timbered ground on the north, and high barren lands on the south: on both sides great numbers of buffaloe are feeding. In the evening three boys of the Sioux nation swam across the river, and informed us that two parties of Sioux were encamped on the next river, one consisting ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... court is over, cannot you look at us, even should you return to the manor? The two girls followed you to the stagehouse, saw you seated and drive off. Frederick's tooth prevented his attendance. My heart is full of affection, my head too barren to express it. I am impatient for evening; for the receipt of your dear letter; for those delightful sensations which your expressions of tenderness alone can excite. Dejected, distracted with out them; elated, giddy even to folly with them; my mind, never at medium, claims ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... go from your task. An end work must have. One does not keep house for its own sake. It is absorption in the process—the refusal to allow it to be forgotten or utilized freely, that makes the work barren. It is like becoming so absorbed in a beautiful frame that you are unconscious of the picture—unconscious that there is a picture. Things must serve their purpose if they are to convince of their beauty. Try living in a room with a wonderfully fitted fireplace; its mantel of exquisite ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... innumerable experiments of medical scientists. The labors of Ferrier, Fritsch, Hitzig and Charcot, become a part of the new system, as they lend corroboration; and the annals of pathology furnish numerous corroborative facts. These are not barren, abstract sciences, but bear upon all departments of human life—upon education, medical practice, hygiene, the study of character, the selection of public officers, of partners, friends, and conjugal companions,—upon religion and morals, the administration of justice and government, penal ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... worked up a part of these materials into a more durable and acceptable form for our schools. We need to make an abundant use of this and other history for our boys and girls, not by devoting a year in the upper grades to a barren outline of American annals, but by a proper distribution of these and other similar rich treasures throughout the ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... password of the universe. Who knows it, he is free of every camp. Equality, your level, endless cornfield, However fat and fair and golden-stalked, Would set us pining for the snow-topped peaks And barren glaciers. Life ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... not even a question of breakfast. Nothing could be more barren than this region strewn with pieces of quartz. Not only hunger, but thirst began to assail the travelers. A burning atmosphere heightened their discomfort. Glenarvan and his friends could only go half a mile an hour. Should this lack of food and water continue till ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... central breeding-place of man in what is, geographically, little more than a blind alley. In the next place, Physical Anthropology, not only in respect to human palaeontology, but in general, is as barren of explanations as it is fertile in detailed observations. The systematic study of heredity as it bears on the history of the human organism has hardly begun. Hence, it would not befit one who is no expert in relation to such matters to anticipate the verdict of a science that needs only public ...
— Progress and History • Various
... Freud has resisted the tendency to represent this principle of Love as the only principle in nature. Unity somehow exercises an evil spell over metaphysicians. It is admitted that in real life it is not well for One to be alone, and I think pure unity is no less barren and graceless in metaphysics. You must have plurality to start with, or trinity, or at least duality, if you wish to get anywhere, even if you wish to get effectively into the bosom of the One, abandoning your ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... they had imagined possible, so close that, from the highest lookout on the Ark, they were able with their telescopes to see very clearly where the water washed the barren mountainsides at what seemed to be ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... a few thousand miles into space, and circling there rapidly to avoid falling back upon the greater sphere. Imagine that flying island devoid of soil, of trees or vegetation, of water or air, of everything but barren, uncrumbled, homogeneous rock, and you have some idea of the unadorned desolation of Phobos, into which we were slowly sailing, or falling. There was not even the slightest trace of sand or scraps of rock, such as time must have abraded from even the hardest surfaces, ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... pebbles, I observed fragments of quartz and granite. Several specimens containing iron pyrites were also found. The cliffs in the vicinity of our landing are composed of slate, and the land over which I travelled seemed almost as barren as a macadamized road; but on searching closely several species of hyperborean plants were found, such as saxifrages, anemones, grasses, lichens and mushrooms. The mosses and lichens were but feebly developed, and the phanerogamous plants were in the same state ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... first advised against the expedition, and they now renewed their expostulations. Scarcely any grass; no water except at long distances; a barren, difficult, dangerous country: such was the meaning of their dumb show. On the summit of a lofty bluff which commanded a vast view toward the north, they took their leave of the party, struck off in a rapid trot toward the ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... the blind loud mills of barren blear-eyed learning Where in dust and darkness children's foreheads bow, While men's labour, vain as wind or water turning Wheels and sails of dreams, makes life a leafless bough, Fell the light of scorn and pity touched with yearning, Next, from words that shone ...
— Studies in Song, A Century of Roundels, Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets, The Heptalogia, Etc - From Swinburne's Poems Volume V. • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... reform it altogether. And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them; for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too; though, in the mean time, some necessary question of the play be then to be considered: that's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it. Go, make you ready. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... 7th of July General Bonaparte left Alexandria for Damanhour. In the vast plains of Bohahire'h the mirage every moment presented to the eye wide sheets of water, while, as we advanced, we found nothing but barren ground full of deep cracks. Villages, which at a distance appear to be surrounded with water, are, on a nearer approach, discovered to be situated on heights, mostly artificial, by which they are raised above the inundations of the Nile. ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... mushrooms? Some bits of mycelium are still alive and yield the desultory few, but every mushroom that they yield is preying on their vitality, and after a time they too shall die and the bed be completely barren, for the mycelium is altogether dead, and without mycelium mushrooms are an impossibility. We can keep mushroom mycelium in active growth the year round, and year after year, providing we never let it bear mushrooms. This is done by taking the mycelium, ...
— Mushrooms: how to grow them - a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure • William Falconer
... of November 28 we sighted land. It was only a barren rocky knoll, and according to our determination of the position it would be the island called Bligh's Cap, which lies a few miles north of Kerguelen Island; but as the weather was not very clear, and we were unacquainted with the channels, we preferred to lie-to for the ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... Alcibiades, that I may become a demagogue, deceiving the mob with flattery, and win for myself houses, and lands, and gold, and slave-girls, and fame, and power, even to a tyranny itself? For in this way I might have made my tongue a profitable member of my body; but now, being hurried up and down in barren places, like one mad of love, from my longing after fair youths, I waste my speech on them; receiving, as is the wont of true lovers, only curses and ingratitude from their arrogance. But tell me, thou proud Adonis-This ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... vast waste of human energy on barren spots, the difficulty of achieving any good, the incredible facility of doing mischief; two strong games played out, twice won, and then twice lost; the hatred of a statesman—a blockhead with a painted face and a wig, but in whom the world believed—all these things, ...
— Z. Marcas • Honore de Balzac
... be Confederate naval officers. The cargo of this second vessel consisted almost entirely of remarkably heavy cases marked "machinery." The two vessels, once out of English waters, showed great fondness for each other, and proceeded together to a deserted, barren island near Madeira. Here they anchored side by side; and the mysterious gentlemen, now resplendent in the gray and gold uniform of the Confederacy, stepped aboard the "Shenandoah." Then the cases were hoisted out of the hold of the smaller ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... nerves temporarily shattered, Arthur Ferris saw all his cardboard fortifications suddenly strewn around him by adverse gales. His barren title of vice-president of the company now availed him nothing. The president, manager, and directors all practically shunned him, waiting for the word as to who would manage the controlling ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... around, desperately, but could find no sign of anything. The base slept. Sorely troubled, he returned to find the colonel just coming back from an equally barren search: ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... pocket-handkerchiefs dipped in the blood of martyrs? How could I believe, on this same writer's hearsay, that "the Spirit of the Lord caught away Philip" (viii. 39), transporting him through the air; as oriental genii are supposed to do? Or what moral dignity was there in the curse on the barren fig-tree,—about which, moreover, we are so perplexingly told, that it was not the time for figs? What was to be said of a cure, wrought by touching the hem of Jesus' garment, which drew physical virtue from him without his will? And how could I distinguish ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... Isles to Point Drummond runs waving in a south-eastern direction, and forms bights and broad, cliffy heads. It appeared to be of moderate elevation, and barren; but the further parts of it could not be well distinguished on ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... I am indeed in a dry and barren land, where no water is. Rivers of waters run down mine eyes, because nothing is to be heard in our Sodom but blaspheming the name of my God, and I not honoured as the instrument of doing any great service. It is true, ...
— The Life of Col. James Gardiner - Who Was Slain at the Battle of Prestonpans, September 21, 1745 • P. Doddridge
... breakfast Dick, leading Charley by one hand and taking his gun in the other, set out to explore the island. On reaching the top of the nearest height, which was of no great elevation, being a mass of barren rock thrown up by some convulsion of nature, he looked around him. The island was of small size, a couple of miles perhaps in length and about a quarter as broad, with deep indentations, bays, or small gulfs. The larger portion was barren, but here and there were spots overgrown ...
— Charley Laurel - A Story of Adventure by Sea and Land • W. H. G. Kingston
... here is a coat that belonged to Dannox, who was about your size. Please exchange the clothes you now have on for these. I apprehend no trouble in reaching her door, for the household is in gloom and the halls seem barren of life." ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... brother, who had heard wonders of the extent, power, riches, and splendour of the kingdom of Bisnagar, bent his course towards the Indian coast; and after three months' travelling, joining himself to different caravans, sometimes over deserts and barren mountains, and sometimes through populous and fertile countries, arrived at Bisnagar, the capital of the kingdom of that name, and the residence of its maharajah. He lodged at a khan appointed for foreign merchants; and ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... cold and still, and the sky covered with one uniform grey cloud. The snow lay in uncompromising whiteness thick over all the world; a kindly shelter for the young grain and covering for the soil; but Fleda's spirits just then in another mood saw in it only the cold refusal to hope and the barren check to exertion. The wind had cleared the snow from the trees and fences, and they stood in all their unsoftened blackness and nakedness, bleak and stern. The high grey sky threatened a fresh fall of snow in a few hours; it was just now a lull between two storms; and Fleda's ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... in whose heart lies the poet's solitude now rose before us at the foot of the lofty Mount Ventoux, whose summit of snows extended beyond. We left the river and walked over a barren plain across which the wind blew most drearily. The sky was rainy and dark, and completed the desolateness of the scene, which in nowise heightened our anticipations of the renowned glen. At length we rejoined the Sorgues and entered a little green valley running up into the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... the barren moor, And call her on the hill, 'T is nothing but the heron's cry, And plover's answer shrill; My child is flown on wilder wings, Than they have ever spread, And I may even walk a waste ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... or self-seeking, is essentially barren and unproductive, both in regard to the lives of others and our own lives. Only so far as we are, in some real sense, laying down our lives for others, denying (not that which belongs to us, but) ourselves, for their sake, can we hope to influence other persons ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... the adjacent islands. In the soft and mild climate and productive valleys of this region and under the warm suns and beside the limpid seas of the smiling islands, the mobile Ionic spirit found inspiration and blossomed into song while yet the rocky Attic soil was barren of literary growth. But with the conquering inroads of the Persians literature fled from this field to find a new home among "those busy Athenians, who are never at rest themselves nor are willing to let ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... barred by a three-foot-high crackling fence of red-gold flame; a flame which nosed hungrily against the barren rocks of the knoll-foot; as if seeking in ravenous famine the fuel their bare surfaces ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... for, by example, a man seems to advise and teach himself. It does its work unperceived, and therefore with less opposition from the passions, which take not the alarm. Its influence is communicated with pleasure. Nor does virtue here appear barren and dry as in discourses, but animated and living, arrayed with all her charms, exerting all her powers, and secretly obviating the pretences, and removing the difficulties which self-love never fails to raise. In the lives of the saints we see the most perfect maxims of the ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... hypocrisy between man and wife be banished the bosoms of each. Nor, probably, would the reproach of barrenness rest, as it now too often does, where it is least deserved.—Nor would there possibly be such a person as a barren woman. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... children crowned her with honour. The barren woman was despised. All that is changing. This movement is adding ...
— The Master of Mrs. Chilvers • Jerome K. Jerome
... in the wilderness," continued the minister. "You have fed with the swine and the goats. You have found no nourishment there. All was bleak, and barren, and desolate there. The living waters were dried up, and the bread of life was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... by Duryodhana of sinful soul and how also we bore it with patience. That Duryodhana, O Madhava, will behave with justice towards the Pandavas is what I cannot believe. Wise counsels will be lost on him like seed sown in a barren soil. Therefore, do without delay what thou, O thou of Vrishni race, thinkest to be proper and beneficial for the Pandavas, or what, indeed, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... pleasure of companionship with others nor the vigour of rude male health nor filial piety. Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust. His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul capable of simple joys and he was drifting amid life like the barren shell ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... they met a Western miner named George Brown, who told them stories of a lonely desert island off the coast of Lower California, where he was about to open a copper-mine for the company for which he was general manager. The more he talked of this lonesome isle and of how barren and desolate it was the more Mrs. Stevenson was fascinated with it, and when he finally invited them, in true Western fashion, to accompany him thither, she joyfully accepted. In the early part of January ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... times, and with great effect, but always in his joy, as an embodiment of that glory of nature to which the Renaissance was a return. But in an early engraving of Mocetto there is for once a Dionysus treated differently. The cold light of the background displays a barren hill, the bridge and towers of [42] an Italian town, and quiet water. In the foreground, at the root of a vine, Dionysus is sitting, in a posture of statuesque weariness; the leaves of the vine are grandly ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... actually had read the articles and could see nothing alluring in a prospect that contemplated barren, snow- swept wildernesses in the Andes. "The only advantage I can see in living up there," he said, with a sly wink at Barnes, "is that one has all the privileges of death without being put to ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... thus succeeded to the throne without being elected by the Senate and the Assembly of the Curiae. The reign of this king is almost as barren of military exploits as that of Numa. His great deeds were those of peace; and he was regarded by posterity as the author of the later Roman constitution, just as Romulus was of the earlier. Three important ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... most flourishing Trees, one might find forty Kernels; but as it is not likely one should ever meet with more, so, on the other hand, it is not probable one should ever find less than fifteen, except they are abortive, or the Fruit of a Tree worn out with Age in a barren Soil, ...
— The Natural History of Chocolate • D. de Quelus
... was last, save Walter, to reach the station platform, gave one comprehensive glance around the barren place. ...
— Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch • Annie Roe Carr
... all the boats with the flesh of the whale, it was none the less obvious that members of the party were starting out for home, perhaps disposed to this by the discomfort of life in rough weather with no better shelter than they could find on this somewhat barren coast. These natives nearly always hunt in districts where they know there can be found a barabbara or so, and such huts are used as common property by all who find them, although the loose title of ownership probably rests in the man or family who first erected them. When so large ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough
... they got U. S. Grant. So, up to the coming of Grant, their record, in the main, was a series of bloody disasters, and their few victories, like Antietam and Gettysburg, were not properly and energetically followed up as they should have been, and hence were largely barren of adequate results. Considering these things, I have always somehow "felt it in my bones" that if Mr. Lincoln had not sent the brief telegram above mentioned, I would now be sleeping in some (probably) unmarked and unknown grave away ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... But, scorched and barren, in its arid well, We found our dreams' forgotten fountain-head; And by black, bitter waters, crushed and dead, Among wild weeds, Truth's ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... Background: These uninhabited, barren, sub-Antarctic islands were transferred from the UK to Australia in 1947. Populated by large numbers of seal and bird species, the islands have been designated ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... swinging breakers split and roar, Then is the moment of our glory, In shadow of a promontory, To trip and skip it to and fro, Even as the flashing bubbles go. Or on the bleaker banks that lie, For the salt seething wash, too high, Where rushes grow so sparse and green, With baked and barren floors between. We glance about in mazy quire, With much of coming and retire; Nor let the limber measure fail, Till, down behind the ocean bed, The night dividing star is sped, And Cynthia stoops the marish vale, Wound in clouds and vigil pale, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... a union based on a common faith, in the happiness of struggling and suffering together in accomplishment. But she had only believed in that endeavor, that faith, while they were gilded by the sun of love: and as the sun died down she saw them as barren, gloomy mountains standing out against the empty sky: and her strength failed her, so that she could go no farther on the road: what was the good of reaching the summit? What was there on the other side? It was a gigantic phantom and a snare!... Jacqueline could not ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... half-past four. I was placed in a coupe before the engine, in order that I might see the road; and in this somewhat formidable position ran over about forty miles of the Desert in about an hour and a half. It is a wonderful sight this strange barren expanse of stone and gravel, with here and there a small encampment of railway labourers, after passing through the luxuriant Valley of the Nile, teeming with production and life, animal and vegetable. In ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... In this barren field, hopeless to romancers like Scott, there never was such another explorer as Jane Austen. Her demure observation is marvelously keen; sometimes it is mischievous, or even a bit malicious, but always sparkling with wit or running ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... againe To see a second triumph of my glories. You rise, and I grow tedious; let me take My farwell of you yet, and at the place Where I have oft byn heard; and, as my life Was ever fertile of good councells for you, It shall not be in the last moment barren. Octavius[195], when he did affect the Empire And strove to tread upon the neck of Rome And all hir ancient freedoms, tooke that course[196] That now is practisd on you; for the Catos And all free sperritts slaine or els proscribd That durst have stir'd ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... a glittering shallow ford. Here she stayed, leaning on the wooden bridge, hearing small pebbles grinding on one another; seeing jewel-flashes of ruby, sapphire and emerald struck from them by the low sunlight; smelling the scent that is better than all (except the scent of air on a barren mountain, or of snow)—the scent of running water. She watched the grey wagtails, neat and trim in person, but wild in bearing, racing across the wet gravel like intoxicated Sunday-school teachers. Then, in a huge silver-willow that brooded, dove-like, over the ford, a blackcap ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... am almost ashamed to say itbut I even brought my mind to give acre for acre of my good corn-land for this barren spot. But then it was a national concern; and when the scene of so celebrated an event became my own, I was overpaid.Whose patriotism would not grow warmer, as old Johnson says, on the plains of Marathon? I began to trench the ground, to see what might be discovered; and the third ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... will welcome thee, for thy beauty will add lustre to his court, and we shall be married with all speed. I warrant the Countess of Salisbury will be a person of importance at the English court, and thou shalt have a retinue such as in this barren country ye little dream of. Thou shalt have both lords and knights to ride in thy train, and twenty little page boys to serve thee on bended knee; and hawks, and hounds, and horses galore, so thou wouldst join in the chase. Think of it, lady, and consider ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... also saw the advent of the best professors of the age, golden-mouthed men who spoke in the language of poetry, rhetoric and philosophy, and who turned from the wearisome competition of their own circles and the barren fields of their former labours to find a flattering attention, a pleasing dignity, and the means of enjoying a full, peaceful and leisured life in the homes of Roman aristocrats, thirsting for knowledge ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... terrible country!" said a lady tourist to me once in Cetinje, "nothing but barren grey rocks; and what poverty! I declare I shan't breathe freely till I am out of ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... the mountains come close, not as high as those toward the south, but still respectable heights, snow-covered in winter. They array themselves in fantastic shapes, with colors changing from hour to hour. One thinks of the desert as a barren sandy waste, minus water, trees and other vegetation, clouds, and all the color and beauty of nature of more favored districts. Not so. Water is scarce, it is true, and springs few and far between, and the vegetation is in proportion; for what little there is is mostly dependent ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... of which we of the present age have no conception. Poetry, as it exists for us, is a pretty rococo fancy; to the worshippers and framers of myths it was a truth of tremendous significance. To such minds a Rose freshly blowing was a symbol, not merely of Divinity in a barren, abstract manner, but of Divinity in its most vivid and fascinating forms. It was GOD, male and female, manifested as love, as perfume, and as light. Believing that every flower on earth was the ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Though sighed no groves in summer gale, To prompt of love a softer tale; Though scarce a puny streamlet's speed Claimed homage from a shepherd's reed; Yet was poetic impulse given, By the green hill and clear blue heaven. It was a barren scene, and wild, Where naked cliffs were rudely piled; But ever and anon between Lay velvet tufts of loveliest green; And well the lonely infant knew Recesses where the wallflower grew, And honeysuckle loved to crawl Up the low ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... constitutes my initial point of travels; but, as I have described it from my journal, in a separate form, it will not be necessary here to do more than say that it was successfully accomplished. After spending the fall of 1818, and the winter of 1819, in a series of adventures in barren, wild, and mountainous scenes, we came out on the tributary waters of the Arkansas, down which we descended in a log canoe. On the Strawberry River, my ankle, which I had injured by leaping from a wall of rock while hunting ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... inhuman policy of Weyler not less than four hundred thousand self-supporting, simple, peaceable, defenseless country people were driven from their homes in the agricultural portions of the Spanish provinces to the cities, and imprisoned upon the barren waste outside the residence portions of these cities and within the lines of intrenchment established a little way beyond. Their humble homes were burned, their fields laid waste, their implements of husbandry ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... field. As when a vultur on Imaus bred, Whose snowy ridge the roving Tartar bounds, Dislodging from a region scarce of prey To gorge the flesh of lambs or yeanling kids, On hills where flocks are fed, flies toward the springs Of Ganges or Hydaspes, Indian streams; But in his way lights on the barren plains Of Sericana, where Chineses drive With sails and wind their cany waggons light: So, on this windy sea of land, the Fiend Walked up and down alone, bent on his prey; Alone, for other creature in this place, Living or lifeless, to be found was none; None yet, ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... through the Highlands of the Hudson. The great garrison flag was still slowly fluttering earthward, veiled partially from the view of the throng of spectators by the snowy cloud of sulphur smoke drifting lazily away upon the wing of the breeze. Afar over beyond the barren level of the cavalry plain the gilded hands of the tower-clock on "the old Academic" were blended into one in proclaiming to all whom it might concern that it was five minutes past the half-hour ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... the change of temperature both of air and water, soon announced that we were approaching that equatorial divider of our globe, called "the Line," and in about one degree of latitude above it (1 deg. 16' N.) we made the islets of Saint Paul, a barren pile of rocks of about one mile and a half in length, and of inconsiderable breadth, standing solitarily and desolately here in mid ocean. Made their longitude by the mean of three chronometers; observation 29 deg. 19' 57'' west; about one degree different ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... know it is through thy intercession I relent. Give her two short periods of the sun, and charm with thy music from her that which Venusta cannot wrench by threatenings. If thou canst, girl; but, for my own part, I should as surely expect a fisher to take fish by casting net on a barren rock as that thou wilt be successful with ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... keep on, and we would follow with the ship. We were now about 4 leagues within the outer small rocky islands, but still could see nothing but islands within us; some 5 or 6 leagues long, others not above a mile round. The large islands were pretty high; but all appeared dry and mostly rocky and barren. The rocks looked of a rusty yellow colour, and therefore I despaired of getting water on any of them; but was in some hopes of finding a channel to run in beyond all these islands, could I have spent time here, and either get to the main of New Holland, or find out some ...
— A Voyage to New Holland • William Dampier
... agreement, of differences, of residues, and of concomitant variations. The course which he marked out so laboriously and so ingeniously for Induction to follow was one which was found to be impracticable, and as barren of results as those deductive philosophies on which he lavished his scorn. He has left precepts and examples of what he meant by his cross-examining and sifting processes. As admonitions to cross-examine and to sift facts and phenomena they are valuable. Many of the observations and ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... land that was henceforth to be their home. Cold, indeed, was the welcome which they received from their adopted country; and cheerless was the view that met their gaze, as they landed on a massy rock of granite, at the foot of a precipitous cliff, and looked along the barren, inhospitable shore, and over the dark waters which they ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... of cover And revel lustfully; The barren rock, a star! The body is a flame! Rubies here and things of gold, Priceless pearls and things of silver, Scatter, O divinely naked Land, Scatter, ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... the microscope, there are symptoms, and it is not deniable. How should it? Leafy May, hot June, by degrees comes October, sere, yellow; and at last, a quite leafless condition,—not Favonius, but gray Northeast, with its hail-storms (jealousies, barren cankered gusts), your main wind blowing. "EMILIE FAIT DE L'ALGEBRE," sneers he once, in an inadvertent moment, to some Lady-friend: "Emilie doing? Emilie is doing Algebra; that is Emilie's employment,—which will be of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... his mouth a red, red rose! Out of his heart a white! For who can say by what strange way, Christ brings his will to light, Since the barren staff the pilgrim bore Bloomed in ...
— The Ballad of Reading Gaol • Oscar Wilde
... silent night, in prognostic of the breeze that has 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 Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... not contrast forcibly, in the mind of a man who had the want to be amused and interested, with the cold pride of Katherine, the dull atmosphere in which her stiff, unbending virtue breathed unintellectual air, and still more with the dressed puppets, with painted cheeks and barren talk, who filled up the common world, ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... would Our Viands had bin poyson'd (or at least Those which I heau'd to head:) the good Posthumus, (What should I say? he was too good to be Where ill men were, and was the best of all Among'st the rar'st of good ones) sitting sadly, Hearing vs praise our Loues of Italy For Beauty, that made barren the swell'd boast Of him that best could speake: for Feature, laming The Shrine of Venus, or straight-pight Minerua, Postures, beyond breefe Nature. For Condition, A shop of all the qualities, that man Loues woman for, besides that hooke of Wiuing, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... arose with bright transcendent ray, Up from behind a bleak and barren reef; His face resplendent with beatitude, Solar effulgence and combustive gleam; Bathing the scene in such a wealth of light That none could marvel that primeval man, Rude and untaught, whene'er the sun appeared, Fell ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... sound in all the world. Mysterious, remote, the desert stared back at her, mocking her little grief. More terrible to her than her danger in Kut-le's hands, more appalling than the death threat that had hung over her so long, was this sense of awful space, of barren nothingness with which the desert oppressed her. Instinctively she turned to look for human companionship. Kut-le and Alchise were not to be seen but Molly nodded beside Rhoda's blankets and the thin hag Cesca was curled in the grass ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... as green emeralds are found in the Cordillera of the Cubillari. The Esmeraldas mines in Equador are said to have been worked successfully at one period by the Jesuits. The Peruvians obtained many emeralds from the barren district of Atacama, and in the times of the Conquest there were quarries on the River of Emeralds ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various |
