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More "Desolation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... old that she cannot have many homesick years in store, while I—left alone in the world at seventeen, and maybe never to see dear old England again—" The thought brought such an overwhelming sense of desolation that she could not control her tears. Drawing her heavy black veil over her face, she hurriedly made her way to her deck-chair, and sank down to sob unseen, under cover of its ...
— Mildred's Inheritance - Just Her Way; Ann's Own Way • Annie Fellows Johnston
... sense of what marriage was, and I dare say I was not a cheerful companion on the tedious journey. At length, jealousy of my regret for my father and brother got the better of M. de la Tourelle, and he became so much displeased with me that I thought my heart would break with the sense of desolation. So it was in no cheerful frame of mind that we approached Les Rochers, and I thought that perhaps it was because I was so unhappy that the place looked so dreary. On one side, the chateau looked like a raw new building, hastily run up for some immediate purpose, ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... when glaciers were ploughing out its valleys, icebergs were breaking off the icy cliffs and floating out to sea; when not a bird, perhaps, was to be seen save sea-fowl, not a plant upon the rocks but a few lichens, and Alpine saxifrages, and such like—desolation and cold and lifeless everywhere. That ice-time went on for ages and for ages; and yet it did not go on in vain. Through it Madam How was ploughing down the mountains of Scotland to make all those rich farms which stretch from the north side of the Frith of Forth into Sutherlandshire. ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... The desolation of his outlook was appalling. And during his weary hours of solitude the hopelessness of it stirred him to a bitterness that at moments became almost insanely profane. Shadows, too, crept into his mind. ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... time, has gone along, many-streamed; indenting, quarrying, leaving lakelets, quagmires, miscellaneous sandy tumult, at a great rate, on that eastern shore. Making of it one of the unloveliest scenes of chaotic desolation anywhere to be met with;—fallen unlovelier than ever in our own ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... anchor, and I was dimly conscious of a stooping person in uniform staring in at us through the cabin door. But I was far too weary to wake or take any notice. However, the sight must have worked a dream into my sleep, for I remember imagining that official's feelings when he gazed at the mildewed desolation of the ugly cutter's interior, when he contrasted her size with the infernal gale she must have been sailing through to make the harbour, and when he noted that her entire crew consisted of two persons very much out of ordinary yachtsmen's uniform. And then I had visions ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... soured and narrow, as to render him disobliging, suspicious, and equally an object of general dislike and neglect. His heart was a moral desert—no kind affection seemed to stir within it; and the bitter streams which it discharged had spread a moral desolation around him, and left him the solitary victim of his own ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... had withered under the Harmattan breath of Doubt, or passed away in the conflagration of open Infidelity; and now, where the Tree of Life once bloomed and brought fruit of goodliest savour there was only barrenness and desolation. To such as could find sufficient interest in the day-labour and day-wages of earthly existence; in the resources of the five bodily Senses, and of Vanity, the only mental sense which yet flourished, which flourished indeed with ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... the professor gravely. "The land will soon be one wide desolation, for the smiling oases where irrigation could do its part will soon be gone back to ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... water. The great stretches of natural pasture are broken by gray sage-brush plains, and tracts of strangely shaped and colored Bad Lands; sun-scorched wastes in summer, and in winter arctic in their iron desolation. Beyond the plains rise the Rocky mountains, their flanks covered with coniferous woods; but the trees are small, and do not ordinarily grow very close together. Toward the north the forest becomes denser, and the peaks higher; and glaciers creep down toward the valleys from ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... recalled herself. Mrs. Hanway-Harley scented nothing perilous in the situation. In any event, Dorothy would wed whomsoever she decreed; Mrs. Hanway-Harley was deservedly certain of that. While this came to her mind, Richard the enterprising went laying plans for the daily desolation of an ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... stone, when we left this province in the last century. On assuming it anew in the year one thousand eight hundred and thirty-six, the father provincial of the Recollects, Fray Blas de las Mercedes, attested that only ruins and desolation were found. Since that time they have labored without ceasing in the beautifying and adorning of the house of God, restoring the old ruins and building anew; until they have succeeded in making the churches worthy the majesty of the Catholic worship—already ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... encouraged her dear Hector in these projects with her sweetest smile; but a terrible accident, followed by a catastrophe no less horrible, destroyed these delightful dreams and brought desolation to this happy home. ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... in the furnaces have been extinguished; the incompleted iron work that lies about the ground has been given over to the ravages of rust; desolation is ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... inhabitant of that forsaken and dilapidated place offered us some fruit and I asked him the reason of the battered huts and general desolation. He told me with grief in his tones that the village had been devastated by armed enemies. "Many of my brethren were killed and many others were taken away as slaves and the rest have fled to safer and more inaccessible parts, but I could not find it in my heart to abandon this spot where I ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... thinking. Her very walking seemed to her mechanical; intensely alive as her senses were all the time. There was a transient relief at coming into the neighbourhood of a house, and a drear feeling of desolation and increased danger as she left it behind her; but her pace neither faltered nor flagged. She looked round sometimes, but never paused for that. Before the more thickly settled part of the village was reached her step ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... settlers for the establishment and protection of the new Mission on San Francisco Bay. We have a full roster, in the handwriting of Padre Font, the Franciscan who accompanied the expedition, of those who composed it. Successfully they crossed the sandy wastes of Arizona and the barren desolation of the ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... greater God than He—greater, for the reason that we have become greater too. We no longer seek to find Him in our hours of happiness—the only hours when, long ago, we sought to feel His presence. We know that we shall only find Him in our hours of loneliness, in our hours of desolation, in our hours of black despair. Now at last we realise that God is not some Deity apart, but some spirit within us, within every man and woman whose "vision" is turned towards the stars. He is the "Dream" ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... analogous to certain phenomena of the order of grace. St. Ignatius almost invariably speaks, not, as we should, of thoughts that give rise to will-states of "consolation" or "desolation," but conversely, of these will-states giving rise to congruous thoughts. Indeed, nothing is more familiar to us than the way in which the mind is magnetized by even our physical states of elation or depression, to select the more cheerful or the gloomier ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... masses of metal projected dismally from the complex wreckage, vast masses of twisted cable dropped like tangled seaweed, and from its base came a tumult of innumerable voices, violent concussions, and the sound of trumpets. All about this great white pile was a ring of desolation; the smashed and blackened masses, the gaunt foundations and ruinous lumber of the fabric that had been destroyed by the Council's orders, skeletons of girders, Titanic masses of wall, forests of stout pillars. Amongst the sombre wreckage beneath, running water flashed and glistened, and far ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... the ruins of what are pronounced by all scholars to be the highest civilization, and the most ancient in time, of any in the New World. There it arose, flourished, and tottered to its fall. Its glory had departed, its cities were a desolation, before the coming of the Spaniards. The explorer who would visit them finds himself confronted with very great difficulties. Their location is in a section of the country away from the beaten track of travel. Their ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... desolation, As we might long have done On Sundays or on weekdays With love and exultation ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... Kings had an illustrious beginning in the glories of the kingdom of Israel when it was entirely under King David and in the beginning of the reign of Solomon; but the second book has a melancholy outlook in the desolation and division of the kingdom of Israel and of Judea. Then Elijah and Elisha, their prophets, instructed the princes and the people in all that would come to pass, the captivity of the ten tribes, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the good reigns ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... proceeded the sounds of music, and dancing, and merrymaking; the steward's house was lit up from basement to garret, and music and song were there too. All the more striking therefore was the inhospitable desolation into which we now drove. The sea-wind howled in sharp cutting dirges as it were about us, whilst the sombre firs, as if they had been roused by the wind from a deep magic trance, groaned hoarsely in a responsive ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... doubly hallowed to us by the blood of those who died hopeless, but undaunted, in defeat—sacred soil to all of us, rich with memories that make us purer and stronger and better, silent but stanch witnesses in its red desolation of the matchless valor of American hearts and the deathless glory of American arms—speaking in eloquent witness in its white peace and prosperity to the indissoluble union of American states and the imperishable brotherhood of the ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... arid stretches of sand. When the sun has set and the full moon rising makes the silhouettes of the mountains look darker, a vague, indescribable sensation comes over one—an awe-inspiring feeling of insignificance and helplessness amidst scenes of majestic desolation. If religiously inclined, one is prone to utter the words of the wandering Arab of the Sahara, "Nothing exists here but Allah! Allah hu Akbar!—God is greater than all his created witnesses." In summer, the air being almost entirely destitute ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... incidents of alienation, which are too numerous, and too evanescent to admit of detail. But seasons and circumstances of great alarm are not readily forgotten. We have witnessed, and we have felt, my friends, a political convulsion, which seemed the harbinger of inevitable desolation. But it has passed by with a harmless explosion, and returning friends have paused in wonder, at a moment's suspension of friendship. Mingled with the factitious mass, there was a large spice of sincerity which sanctified the whole composition, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... the world, Egypt doubtless was subdued, like the rest of the provinces, and Xenophon positively declares this in the beginning of his Cyropaedia, or institution of that prince. Probably, after that the forty years of desolation, which had been foretold by the prophet, were expired, Egypt beginning gradually to recover itself, Amasis shook off the ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... glorious, madam, is most true. That this island is the sole refuge where liberty has been able to find a home, is also true. The tyranny and oppression of the Congress, which are grinding down the colonies to the powder of desolation and poverty, are not worthy the sacred name. Rebellion pollutes all that it touches, madam. Although it often commences under the sanction of holy liberty, it ever terminates in despotism. The annals of the world, from ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... turned his face. He would join the band, provoke a quarrel with the chief, kill him and be made chief in his stead. Then he would scour the country in a velvet mask and a peaked hat with a feather in it, carrying fire and desolation everywhere. A price would be set on his head, but he would snap his fingers in the face of the Prime Minister. He would rule his followers with an iron hand. But now he was in the midst of the mountains, and there were not the smallest signs of lawless folk, not even a gibbet ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... across the bridge. The year that had passed since Cardo had left her, with its varied experiences and trials, the bitter sense of loneliness and desertion, the pains and the delights of motherhood, the desolation and sorrow of bereavement, all had worked a change in the simple girl's character, that now surprised even herself, and she thankfully realised that her troubles had at all events generated a strength which enabled ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... to play; but with threats that to me were dreadful, and not without sundry nips and pinches, and sly clouts, I was bidden to be still, and stir not from a certain stool apportioned to me in the great Withdrawing-room. Not on this side of the tomb shall I forget the weary, dreary sense of desolation that came over me when, thus equipped, or rather swaddled and hampered in garments strange to me, and of which I scarcely knew the meaning, I was left alone for many hours in a dismal room, whose ancient splendour was now all under the eclipse ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... in sharp peaks and was of many colors, some of them so red that the mountain looked red hot, I imagined it to be a true volcanic point, and had never been so near one before, and the most wonderful picture of grand desolation ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... and some terrific encounters have been had. Is this conflict of opinion to become more and more consolidated and defined, and finally embodied in two great hostile camps, covering the whole earth with an actual war, replete with desolation and carnage—not a war of distinct nationalities, but of the partisans of the two great antagonistic drifts of human development? Is there to be literally the great battle of Armageddon in the world before the incoming of a better age? or has the ignorant wrath of man sufficiently ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... rubbish that life, like the leader in a paper-chase, strews in its trail; all valueless, yet all steeped in the precious scent of past happiness, of good times that were over and done with. She spent those short, dark days in desolation and destruction, and Rinka trotted after her, up and downstairs, in and out of the shuttered bedrooms, and the gaunt, curtainless, carpetless rooms downstairs, wondering what it all portended, vowing, in her little faithful, cunning heart, not to let Christian out of ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... the eye a flow'ret 'mid the desolation drear, Or a spray of pleasant verdure which the gloomy scene might cheer; Nought but frowning crags and boulders, and long sea-weeds, ghastly, dank, With the mosses and pale lichens, to the ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... useful purpose for themselves, to burn the town itself, and then to march on, leaving in the place only a smoking heap of ruins, with the miserable remnant of the population which they had spared wandering about the scene of desolation ...
— Genghis Khan, Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... sat down on a piece of cornice which was imbedded in the rubbish. She seemed pleased in the midst of this desolation. Her father and the nurse joined her with terror depicted on their countenances; they had heard the noise of footsteps in the chapel; more, Juana had seen a shadow glide away; how or where she did not know, but she was sure that ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... Taka, pointing, And there, the last home of a chief, it lay. White shells and snowy pebbles girt him round In his great mould of clay, and all his spears And clubs of war kept vigil, showing still His might in battle. Shrill the parrot's scream Rang on the desolation, and the trees Seemed to withdraw their shadows from the place Sacred to death, the violent crime of war. A little shadow darkened Taka's heart, Could this sweet world contain both death and love? She sought Malua's eyes to be ...
— The Rose of Dawn - A Tale of the South Sea • Helen Hay
... were blazing like huge beacon-fires, and an oppressive silence settled down upon the army as it pursued its march across the wide, solitary plain at sight of that dusky, eddying column that rose from behind the distant hills, filling the heavens with desolation. All that was to be heard in the bright sunlight was the measured tramp of many feet upon the hollow ground, while involuntarily the eyes of all were turned on that livid cloud whose baleful shadows rested on their ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... of a wolf on a near by eminence sounded like a voice to him, mocking, taunting, fiendish. Never, it seemed to him, had any man been thus unhappy. Even the wilderness had failed him! In a land of desolation he sat, ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... produce a bold and free exercise of thought, without kindling the passions to fierce excitement. The storm which burst with all its fury on the Continent, wrapping nations in the flames of civil war, prostrating, withering, and overwhelming civil institutions, and marking its path with desolation did but exert a salutary influence in England. The lightning was seen flashing in the distant horizon, the rolling thunder could be heard afar off, but the fury of the storm fell at a distance; the atmosphere was purified ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... explanation; she had received him as if he had been there the day before, with the addition of a spice of mysterious melancholy. She might have made up her mind that she had lost him as what she had hoped, but that it was better than desolation to try and keep him as a friend. It was as if she wished him to see now how she tried. She was subdued and consolatory, she waited upon him, moved away a screen that intercepted the fire, remarked that he looked very tired, and rang for some tea. ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... the cold, bleak upper rooms of the house, looking out of the windows upon the wide desolation of winter, the waste of snow, the bare forest, the cold, dark waters of the bay—listening to the driving tempest, and singing, full of glee as she always was when the elements were ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... the great empty hall with an involuntary quickening of the breath. How desolate it was, but how beautiful in its desolation! What strange revels had taken place there to the notes of wild music, what girls had danced, what voices had shouted, what moods had been indulged! She thought of the men who had made merry there ... and then ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... of the west, chilling the two children to the bone; and Stonecrop turning his head to the wind broke out into a long wailing whinny, which brought home to the children such a sense of their loneliness and desolation that Elsie looked blankly at Dick and Dick as blankly at Elsie, and neither found ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... went down into that Place of Desolation which some call hell and some the bitter school of sorrow—that place in which each soul is alone with its agony and its sin, that place where no light shines and no voice is heard, where, groping along the edge of destruction, the wanderer ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... imported from the north, but to limit their buildings to native materials of stone or brick and their elevation to two or, at most, three storeys. The skyscraper is at home in New York or Chicago; in Mexico (or in London) it is the abomination of desolation. In San Francisco the outraged earth endeavoured to shake them off a year or so ago in an earthquake! An attractive feature of Mexican houses is the flat roofs, or azoteas. These are often made accessible from the interior and adorned with plants and flowers, and even the heavy rain-storms ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... rights of either prince or people, and lays the foundation for overturning the constitution and frame of any just government, is highly guilty of the greatest crime, I think, a man is capable of, being to answer for all those mischiefs of blood, rapine, and desolation, which the breaking to pieces of governments bring on a country. And he who does it, is justly to be esteemed the common enemy and pest of mankind, and is to be treated accordingly. Sec. 231. That subjects or foreigners, attempting by force on the properties ...
— Two Treatises of Government • John Locke
... bitter cry, since to her after the death of her first mistress, this woman had been all her life. As a child she had nursed her; as a maiden shared her joys and sorrows; as a wife and widow toiled day and night fiercely and faithfully to console her in her desolation and to protect her in the dreadful dangers through which she had passed. Now, to end it all, it was her lot to receive her last breath and to take into her ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... whispered, and began to cry,—not with the passion of her first sorrow, but piteously and low, with a sense of desolation. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... devastation; the ground for more than sixty miles, totally uncultivated and unproductive, remains bare to the present day." This is believed to have been written about 1135, and would give us grounds for believing that the desolation continued for over sixty years. A vivid light is thrown on the destruction wrought at Pickering by the record in the Domesday Book, ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... was melting to nothing, and the fair woman herself was standing on Rainbarrow, her soul in an abyss of desolation seldom plumbed by one so young, Yeobright sat lonely at Blooms-End. He had fulfilled his word to Thomasin by sending off Fairway with the letter to his wife, and now waited with increased impatience for some sound or signal of her return. Were Eustacia still at Mistover the very least ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... each other's arms they admitted the extent of their desolation. Life had been robbed of a magic,—a mystery. The solid friendship of years of mutual trust and understanding was the background of so much lovely folly, so many unrealized possibilities, so many nebulous desires and dreams that the sudden ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... descend amongst the Apis. The whitewashed room in which he receives us is encumbered with the age-old debris which he is continually bringing to light. The parting rays of the sun, which shines low down from between two clouds, enter through a window opening on to the surrounding desolation; and the light comes mournfully, yellowed by the sand and ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... most humane man cannot emancipate himself from the law of his nature, according to which he is more affected by some tragic circumstance which has taken place in his own house or in his own street than by a catastrophe which has carried anguish and desolation over enormous areas in a distant continent. In history, too, there are vast tracts which are almost necessarily unrealised. We judge a period mainly by its great men, by its brilliant or salient ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... was paid to his father's burial mound, where, plunged in melancholy at the desolation around, he poured out his soul to the outraged god. He reminded him that it was the custom of the Northmen to exact blood-fines for kinsmen slain, and surely the blessed gods would not be less forgiving than the earth-born. Passionately he adjured Balder to show ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... protect him from the overpowering beams. Once more he anxiously studied the country, but it gave him little hope. The green of the grass was gone, and most of the grass with it. The brown undulations swept away from horizon to horizon, treeless, waterless, and bare. In all that vast desolation there was nothing save the tired and dusty train at the very ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... the only true Church? Or did he assert both claimants to be of the same Church, and it the only true one, then why the refusal to partake of the Sacraments? Why a division amongst them at all? Have you not heard the aforetime saying, 'Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation'? ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... should forget it, let me now tell you that I am received with the warmest hospitality. Notwithstanding the desolation occasioned by the hurricane (and it is truly distressing), I have invitations which it would require weeks to satisfy. These attentions are almost ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... nor knew any one who did; yet the lad, when he acknowledged this, stood within a stone's throw of the site where milleniums ago was one of the greatest universities of the ancient world and where still, amid the desolation, one could dig and find the old clay tablets on which the children of that ancient time had learned to write. Progress? Regress! While history as a whole, from the Cro-Magnon man to the twentieth century, does certainly ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... occupation; and while thus she continued to "scold and grow fat," her inn, once a popular and frequented one, became gradually less and less frequented, and the dragon of the Rhine-fells did not more effectually lay waste the territory about him, than did the evil influence of her tongue spread desolation and ruin around her. Her inn, at the time of my visit, had not been troubled with even a passing traveller for many months; and, indeed, if I had any, even the least foreknowledge of the character of my hostess, its privacy should ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... of the King's yards, sent up by Sir W. Pen, there is a good stop given to it, as well at Marke-lane end, as ours; it having only burned the dyall of Barking Church, and part of the porch, and was there quenched. I up to the top of Barking steeple, and there saw the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw; every where great fires, oyle-cellars, and brimstone, and other things burning. I became afraid to stay there long, and therefore down again as fast as I could, the fire being spread as far as I could see it; and to Sir W. Pen's, and there ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... of partings, brief and sad probation— When all is brightest, then farewell must come! And the lone mourner weeps in desolation, Earth's fairest seeping in ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... contain more than five millions of inhabitants; but his surprise was decreased when their journey occasionally lay through tracts of streets, consisting often of capacious mansions entirely tenantless. On seeking an explanation of this seeming desolation, he was told that the Hubbabubians were possessed by a frenzy of always moving on, westward; and that consequently great quarters of the city are perpetually deserted. Even as Skindeep was speaking their passage was ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... that, too, without mercy and without compassion, as the sworn and implacable enemy both of God and man. Otherwise this glorious country, which has so long worn the garland and surging robe of liberty, will become a dungeon of desolation from the Atlantic to the Pacific, resounding only with the shrieks of mandrakes ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... whom by watchfulness and care we have saved from the fate of his father, his mother, and his uncles, to place him safe and sound on the throne of his ancestors; this child falls back again into the hands of those whom an adulterous law boldly calls to succeed him; thus, on all sides, murder, desolation, ruin, civil and foreign wars. And why? because it pleases Monsieur Philippe d'Orleans to think himself still major of the king's troops, or commandant of the army in Spain, and to forget that he ceased to be so from the moment he became ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... shoulders; others with nursing infants in their arms, all escorted by a company of heavy-armed troopers, left forever their native city. All made the dismal journey upon foot, save that carts were allowed to transport the children between the ages of two and six years. The desolation and depopulation were now complete. "I wandered through the place, gazing at all this," says a Spanish soldier who was present, and kept a diary of all which occurred, "and it seemed to me that it ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... after all was done that hand could do, She rested, and her desolation came Upon her, and she wept beside ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... village, loveliest of the lawn, 35 Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn; Amidst thy bowers the tyrant's hand is seen, And desolation saddens all thy green: One only master grasps the whole domain, And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain: 40 No more thy glassy brook reflects the day, But chok'd with sedges, works its weedy way. Along thy glades, a solitary guest, The hollow-sounding bittern guards ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... feet That round our corporal walls unheeded beat; Till, all containing, he exalt His stature to the stars, or stars Narrow their heaven to his fleshly vault: When, like a city under ocean, To human things he grows a desolation, And is made a habitation For the fluctuous universe To lave with unimpeded motion. He scarcely frets the atmosphere With breathing, and his body shares The immobility of rocks; His heart's a drop-well of tranquillity; His mind more still is than the limbs ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... in order to ward off a multitude of vexations. Your Excellency must also have observed how quickly they laid down their arms at your summons, of which circumstance the party of the President availed themselves to sack and plunder the towns and villages everywhere in the country; the tears, desolation, and misery of so many villages and estates, accompanied by the blood of the murdered and wounded, remaining eternal monuments ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... bull sprang, as it were, from the soil, and the whole site called forth a superstitious awe. It was left severely alone by the new-comers. Another Knossos grew up on the lower slopes of the hill to the north, and the old Palace site became "a desolation and hissing." Gradually earth's mantle covered the ruined heaps, and by the time of the Romans the Labyrinth had become nothing more than a ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... of something like a year at Lyons (April, 1740—spring of 1741), he made his way back to his old haunts. The first half-hour with Madame de Warens persuaded him that happiness here was really at an end. After a stay of a few months, his desolation again overcame him. It was agreed that he should go to Paris to make his fortune by a new method of musical notation which he had invented, and after a short stay at Lyons, he found himself for the second time in the famous city which in the eighteenth century had become ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... of, he began to experience great changes in his soul. At one time he was deprived of all consolation, so that he found no pleasure in vocal prayer, in hearing Mass, or in any spiritual exercise. At another, on the contrary, he suddenly felt as if all sorrow and desolation were taken from him, experiencing the relief of one from whose shoulders a heavy cloak had suddenly been lifted. On noticing all this, he was surprised, wondering what could be the import of these changes which he had never before experienced, and ...
— The Autobiography of St. Ignatius • Saint Ignatius Loyola
... it ever, when freemen shall stand Between their loved home and the war's desolation; Blessed with victory and peace, may the Heaven-rescued land Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation. Then conquer we must, for our cause it is just, And this be our motto, "In God is our trust": And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... I approve altogether of your abandoning what you justly call vanities. I look upon you as a man, called by sorrow and anguish and a strange desolation of hopes into quietness, and a soul set apart and made peculiar to God; we cannot arrive at any portion of heavenly bliss without in some measure imitating Christ. And they arrive at the largest inheritance who imitate the most difficult parts ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... and paleness of the sweet-smelling foliage you might have guessed it was not far from the middle of April, one way or another; and, by certain allusions to Pittsburg Landing as a place of conspicuous note, you might have known that Shiloh had been fought. There was that feeling of desolation in the land that remains after armies have passed over, let ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... tree, she set out in a southerly direction, toward the point where she believed the plains of Waziri lay, and though she knew that only ruin and desolation marked the spot where once her happy home had stood, she hoped that by coming to the broad plain she might eventually reach one of the numerous Waziri villages that were scattered over the surrounding country, or chance upon a roving band of ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... know—I don't care. What's the difference? any place'd be better than this." For awhile she continued to cry on a ridiculously high, though subdued, whining note, her breath catching at intervals. A feeling of helplessness, of utter desolation crept over Janet; powerless to comfort herself, how could she comfort her sister? She glanced around the familiar, sordid room, at the magazine pages against the faded wall-paper, at the littered bureau and the littered bed, over which Lise's clothes were flung. It was hot and close even now, in ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of the dance had come, than which Wellington could produce no more momentous occasion. For days the students had been decorating Old Warburton Hall, stripping their own rooms to the point of desolation to pile their banners, their flags, and even their mandolins around the big hall, in artistic and effective settings from ceiling to the smallest nook around the chimney corner windows. Judith and Jane were responsible for the "Bosky Dell" created ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... wordless acts began which he knew to be the very heart of prayer. The eyes of his soul flew hither and thither, from Calvary to heaven and back again to the tossing troubled earth. He saw Christ dying of desolation while the earth rocked and groaned; Christ reigning as a priest upon His Throne in robes of light, Christ patient and inexorably silent within the Sacramental species; and to each in turn he directed the eyes of the ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... of desolation for Honora, when George Hanbury and Algernon Cartwright and other young gentlemen were at the seashore learning to sail boats and to play tennis, Peter Erwin came to his own. Nearly every evening after dinner, while the light ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... love of men may replace the sacrifices." He would have preferred his brethren to submit to Rome, and his political foresight was justified when the war of independence closed in disaster. As Graetz has well said, like Jeremiah Jochanan wept over the desolation of Zion, but like Zerubbabel he created a new sanctuary. Jochanan's new sanctuary was ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... surging From sea to land, from land to sea. A chain of deepest action forging Round all, in wrathful energy. There flames a desolation, blazing Before the Thunder's crashing way: Yet, Lord, Thy messengers are praising The gentle movement ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... as often a symbol of malevolence and enmity. It appears among the emblems of Siva-Roudra, the power of desolation and death: it is the bane of Aëpytus, Idom, Archemorus, and Philoctetes: it gnaws the roots of the tree of life in the Eddas, and bites the heel of unfortunate Eurydice. In Hebrew writers it is generally ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... ephemeral French emperor from Algiers. The little man is dim with distance, eclipsed and swallowed up by the shadows and grotesque fragments of the ruin in the midst of which he stands. But his voice—thanks to the inimitable constructive art of the ancient architect, which, even in the desolation of at least thirteen centuries, has not lost its cunning-emerges from the pigmy throat, and fills the whole vast hollow with its clear, if tiny, sound. Thank heaven, there is no danger of Roman resurrection here! The illusion is completely broken, and we turn to gather ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... time, a fair and goodly structure was quite stript of all its ornamental beauty, and made a ruthful spectacle, a very chaos of desolation and confusion, nothing scarce remaining but only bare walls, broken seats, and shatter'd windows ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips
... can take a cab across Liverpool without having a quite complete and unified impression that the pathos is not a pathos of individual cases, but a pathos in bulk. People talk of the Celtic sadness; but there are very few things in Ireland that look so sad as the Irishman in Liverpool. The desolation of Tara is cheery compared with the desolation of Belfast. I recommend Mr. Yeats and his mournful friends to turn their attention to the pathos of Belfast. I think if they hung up the harp that once in Lord Furness's ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... could not help starting up, as a more fearful crash than usual sounded in our ears. Still the wished-for daylight did not appear. The truth was, that since the commencement of the storm but a short time only had elapsed, though in our desolation and solitude it had appeared ...
— Mary Liddiard - The Missionary's Daughter • W.H.G. Kingston
... the window of the cabin to look out he uttered a cry of surprise. The sun was shining and all around could be seen immense stretches of ice and snow. It looked as if they were in the midst of desolation. ...
— The Rover Boys in Alaska - or Lost in the Fields of Ice • Arthur M. Winfield
... marriage, when the Stanifords, upon their arrival home from Europe, paid a visit to South Bradfield. It was in the depths of the winter following their union, and the hill country, stern and wild even in midsummer, wore an aspect of savage desolation. It was sheeted in heavy snow, through which here and there in the pastures, a craggy bowlder lifted its face and frowned, and along the woods the stunted pines and hemlocks blackened against a background of leafless oaks and birches. A northwest wind cut ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... mysterious close relation to infinite love as a stimulus of the most refined sensual excitement, which I then extinguisht in a rapture of tears. I was appalled by this lie in my soul, when I detected and could no more deny it; and the fearfullest desolation of despair, the dismallest solitude of death closed round me again, when the deception had been broken, and the vision would no more descend among the apish toys of my imagination. When after this I wisht to pursue my inquiries beneath the light of truth, ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... For you, of course, DESOLATION, and, for me, consolation. I do not know on what our destinies depend; you see them pass, you criticise them, you abstain from a literary appreciation of them, you limit yourself to depicting them, ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... petition of her heart. I saw in profile a girl's troubled face charged with mystery, a slim, tall, weary figure all in white against the flame, a cheek's pure oval, the tense curve of a proud neck, a mass of severely snodded russet hair. So I recalled her afterward, picture of desolation seeking comfort, but at the moment when I blundered on her my presence seemed profanity and no time was found for appraisement. Abashed I came to a halt, and was for tiptoeing back to the door; but hearing me ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... her head, after each slow repetition of the word, with an air of quiet desolation that he remembered long afterwards. The time came when he remembered it well, long afterwards, within those prison walls; ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... It might have brought to all the world good-will and happiness, and to the men who made it much glory and the great regard of their fellows. Instead, it has wrought havoc and desolation, and its Apache-like trail is strewn with the scalped and mutilated corpses of its victims. The very name Amalgamated conjures up visions of hatred and betrayal, of ambush, pitfalls, and assassination. It stands forth the Judas of corporations, a monument to greed and a ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... ungodly world had trampled both tables under foot, God came to judge it, who is a consuming fire and a jealous God. He so punishes ungodliness that he turns everything into sheer desolation, and neither government nor the governed remain. We may, therefore, infer that the world was the better the nearer it was to Adam, but that it degenerated from day to day until our time, when the offscouring and lowest filth of humanity, as it ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... a seat on the omnibus or a tramp uphill, and we find ourselves abruptly in the village street. Then did each page as I turned it over bring some fresh recollection of one's unspeakable sense of newness and desolation; the haunting fear of doing something ludicrous; the morbid dread of chaff and of being "greened," which even in my time had, happily, supplanted the old terrors of being tossed in a blanket or roasted at a fire. Even less, I venture to think, was ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... feeling of discontent and loneliness came over all our hearts. Little Nelse, who had been Peter's favourite, went round behind the pig-stye, where none might disturb him, and sat down on the projecting end of a trough to "have a cry", in his usual methodical manner. But old "Alligator Desolation", the dog, had suspicions of what was up, and, hearing the sobs, went round to offer whatever consolation appertained to a damp and dirty nose and a pair ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... Circle is winter indeed: there is no sun to gladden with his beams the hearts of the voyagers; but all is wrapt in darkness, day and night, save when the moon chances to obtrude her faint rays, only to make visible the desolation of the scene. The approach of winter is strongly marked. Snow begins to fall in August, and the ground is covered to the depth of two or three feet before October. As the cold augments, the air bears its moisture in the form of a frozen fog, the icicles of which are so sharp as to be painful ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... tornado, with the water at its height, leveling whole towns, descended and beat upon that house, and it fell. In the morning there was no house there, and the waves in their fury rushed madly on. Then these little children "stood and wept on the banks of the river," and the desolation and fear in the careful mother's heart, none but herself and ...
— A Story of the Red Cross - Glimpses of Field Work • Clara Barton
... detractions made to the slander of the Duke of York,[227] declared that, if it were not for the Duke's good advice and counsel, he, my lord the Prince himself, and others in his company, would have been in great peril and desolation." "Moreover," (continued the Prince,) "the Duke, as though he had been one of the poorest gentlemen of the realm who would have to toil and struggle for the acquirement of his own honour and name, laboured, and did his ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... him, although it was beyond our beat, or, rather, I should say, beside it. Not but what we might have grazed there had it been our pleasure, but that it was not worth our while, and scarcely worth Jasper Kebby's even; all the land being cropped (as one might say) with desolation. And nearly all our knowledge of it sprang from the unaccountable tricks of cows who have young calves with them; at which time they have wild desire to get away from the sight of man, and keep calf and milk for one another, although it be in a barren land. At least, ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... victories, one which had almost been a defeat and which left both armies so exhausted that months passed before either was in condition to resume the war. It was the month of June before the armies were again put in motion. Now the wintry desolation was replaced by a scene of green woodland, shining lakes and attractive villages, the conditions being far more ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... think at all, but went from one alarm to another. Now there she sat alone, without her mother, and began to realize that it was all over,—that they would never see nor hear each other again in this world. And such a sense of loneliness, of utter desolation, took possession of Wiseli, that she believed herself uncared for and forgotten by everybody, and feared that she should be left there alone to die in the dark. The poor child laid her head down upon her bundle, and began to cry, bitterly and ...
— Rico And Wiseli - Rico And Stineli, And How Wiseli Was Provided For • Johanna Spyri
... quiver of grief which was felt in all hearts throughout the colony that men learned the fatal news. The banks of the great river repeated this great woe to the valleys; the sad certainty that the father of all had disappeared forever sowed desolation in the homes of the rich as well as in the thatched huts of the poor. A cry of pain, a deep sob arose from the bosom of Canada which would not be consoled, because its incomparable bishop was no more! Etienne de Citeaux said to his monks after the death of his ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... this desolation we looked in vain for any signs of life. It was not until we sought out the house of a captain of dragoons, a friend of my companion the Comte, that we found a human being in these solitudes. The house was, indeed, a melancholy ruin, but by the gate was a lodge, and in the lodge a concierge. ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... the morning of the 19th, having made sail, we steered S.E. by E. along the coast, and soon passed the S.E. point of the bay of St Barbara, which I called Cape Desolation, because near it commenced the most desolate and barren country I ever saw. It is situated in the latitude of 54 deg. 55' S., longitude 72 deg. 12' W. About four leagues to the east of this cape ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... wherever you may go; and if I have left my heart's affections at New Plymouth, you shall see that I have brought with me none the less of courage and fidelity to my leaders and my countrymen. The dearer my home, the more energetic shall be my efforts to preserve it from desolation. Besides,' he added, In an undertone, so that only Standish should hear: 'I much prefer going boldly into the midst of the enemy, even at the risk of my life, to remaining here to assist in constructing ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... can get for nothing. I mean the public rabble, the mob, not the individual. The only time you can trust the public is when their sympathies are aroused over some great public calamity that brings death and desolation. Then the public is of one mind, the public then ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... nature of it is penal, to be a punishment of sin: take away this relation to sin, and death wants the sting. But, in its first appointment, and as it prevails generally over men, aculeata(201) est mors, it hath a sting that pierceth deeper, and woundeth sorer than to the desolation of the body, it goeth into the innermost parts of the soul, and woundeth that eternally. The truth is, the death of the body is not either the first death or the last death: it is rather placed in the middle between two deaths: and it is the fruit of the first, and the root of the last. There ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... associations, by a community of interest; why will ye be led away by a cruel and misguided philanthropy, or by designing demagogues? why will ye strive to inflict the most irreparable injury upon the objects of your misplaced sympathy? reduce to ruins this fair fabric of liberty, and this happy land to desolation? Your own leaders acknowledge that, hitherto, your agitation, far from bettering the condition of the slaves, has only made it worse; and in some respects this is true. So long as you confine yourselves to making or hearing abolition ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... the most heroic courage and endurance. It is a heroic tate, in which love of adventure and zeal for science have combated with and conquered the horrors of an Arctic winter, the six months' darkness in silence and desolation, the excessive cold, and the dangers of starvation. It is impossible here to go into any of the details which rendered the tale of Arctic voyages one of the most stirring in human history. All we are concerned with here is the amount of new ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... crowned by overhanging turrets, embattled, where, instead of banners, now waved long grass and wild plants, that had taken root among the mouldering stones, and which seemed to sigh, as the breeze rolled past, over the desolation around them. The towers were united by a curtain, pierced and embattled also, below which appeared the pointed arch of a huge portcullis, surmounting the gates: from these, the walls of the ramparts extended to other towers, overlooking the ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... thunder of the surge is in his ears, and the roar of the surf under the broken reef will not let him be quiet; "keep back but twelve feet from me," is his last prayer, "and there billow and roar as much as thou wilt."[29] But even the grace of a tomb was often denied. In the desolation of unknown distances the sailor sank into the gulfs or was flung on a desert beach. Erasippus, perished with his ship, has all the ocean for his grave; somewhere far away his white bones moulder on a spot that ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... and its light recedes; ascend, and a higher hill is seen beyond, and a wider space is yet to be traversed. And they tell us, that this is vanity; this the worthlessness of human desire; this the misery and desolation of the human heart. But how little do they know of the throbbings of that heart! How poorly have they studied the secrets of the human breast! How imperfectly do they understand the feebleness and the strength of man's fortitude and will! If the bright object still gleams in the horizon, if ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... The beautiful child, clasped close to his breast, her face buried on his shoulder under his shaggy locks, was a strange contrast to his appearance, but only added to the look of piteous helplessness and desolation, as she hung upon him in her alarm ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... stubborn crew Of errant saints, whom all men grant To be the true church militant; Such as do build their faith upon The holy text of pike and gun; Decide all controversies by Infallible artillery; And prove their doctrine orthodox, By apostolic blows and knocks; Call fire, and sword, and desolation, A godly, thorough reformation, Which always must be carried on, And still be doing, never done; As if religion were intended For nothing else but to be mended: A sect whose chief devotion lies In odd perverse antipathies; In falling out ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... for herself. Anna's affection for her adopted brother was perfectly unconscious and selfless; she never indulged in unwholesome introspection; she never asked herself why her heart ached that night, and a sense of loneliness and desolation ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... confidential; because it narrates a tragic experience that is all too common in actual life; because its tragedy is enhanced by dramatic contrasts, the splendour of the bright, breezy, sunlit garden contrasting with the road of ashen spiritual desolation the soul must take; the splendour of the gorgeous stiff brocade and the futility of the blank, soft, imprisoned flesh; the obstreperous heart, beating in joyous harmony with the rhythm of the swaying flowers, changed by one written word into ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... sad history of the succeeding five years let us draw a veil. We have no heart to picture its suffering, its desolation, its hopelessness. If, in the beginning, there was too much pride in the heart of Mrs. Ellis, all was crushed out under the iron heel of grim adversity. If she had once thought too much of herself, ...
— The Two Wives - or, Lost and Won • T. S. Arthur
... general favorite, but turned to me as to a friend and teacher. He is poor, and it was possible for me to guarantee him a good education. I began to help him from the longings of a lonely life. I wanted a son and a friend in my inward desolation. I craved the companionship of this pure and happy nature. I felt such a reverence for him that I hoped to find the sensuous element in me purged away by his purity. I am, indeed, utterly incapable of doing him harm; I am not morally weak; nevertheless ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Oxford Street, purposely to take a glance at it; it is now occupied by a respectable family, and by the lights in the front drawing-room I observed a domestic party assembled, perhaps at tea, and apparently cheerful and gay. Marvellous contrast, in my eyes, to the darkness, cold, silence, and desolation of that same house eighteen years ago, when its nightly occupants were one famishing scholar and a neglected child. Her, by-the- bye, in after-years I vainly endeavoured to trace. Apart from her situation, she was not what would be called an interesting child; she was neither pretty, nor quick ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... their size and isolation are more beautiful than young ones and are little likely to be injurious to health, and ends them by raising mounds and sticking into them dense belts of quick-growing trees like poplars to hide as speedily as possible the desolation of bricks and mortar he has created. It is this senseless outdoor work of the builder and his nurseryman which stands most in need of revision from time to time in suburban residences, but which rarely receives it from a silly notion, amounting to tree worship, which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... peaks that tower on high. Then leave that hill that gleams with ore, And fair Sudarsan's heights explore. Then on to Devasakha(735) hie, Loved by the children of the sky. A dreary land you then will see Without a hill or brook or tree, A hundred leagues, bare, wild, and dread In lifeless desolation, spread. Pursue your onward way, and haste Through the dire horrors of the waste Until triumphant with delight You reach Kailasa's glittering height. There stands a palace decked with gold, For King Kuvera(736) wrought of old, A home the heavenly artist planned And fashioned ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... when the people, which had thereabout Long wayted, saw his sudden desolation, They gan together in tumultuous rout And mutining to stirre up civil faction For certain losse of so great expectation: For well they hoped to have got great good And wondrous riches by his innovation: Therefore resolving to revenge his blood They rose in armes, and ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... and there were many hills. We could not ask Lord Beaconsfield to do more than walk, which he did sturdily enough, tugging up the long hills, though they were probably the first he had ever seen, for his part of Long Island had been level ground. What must he have thought of that chaotic desolation, where most of the woods and a good many of the fields were set up at foolish angles against other woods and fields and where there was no sign of ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... was not even a sheep in sight, the side of the valley below us being a rugged mass of desolation, only redeemed by patches of whortleberry and purple heath with the taller ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... disobedience, pointed out to you your duty—a duty which you were forced to perform afterwards by necessity. Then be it so; let me perish on these black rocks, as I shall, and my bones be whitened by the chilly blasts which howl over their desolation. But mark me, cruel and vindictive man! I shall not be the only one whose bones will bleach there. I prophesy that many others will share my fate, and even you, admiral, may be of the number,—if I mistake not, we shall lie side ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... ruins. This country was worthy at that period of the name of Green-Land (Groenland) which the Northmen gave to it, but the annual and great increase of the glaciers, has rendered it since that epoch a land of desolation. ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... features of absurdity in the delusion, ferocity in the popular excitement, and destruction along the path of its progress, which belonged to the witchcraft proceedings here, and shows that any people, given over to the power of contagious passion, may be swept by desolation, and ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... this there is nothing presenting any special difficulty to the modern geologist or geographer; but with the early dweller in Palestine the case was very different. The rocky, barren desolation of the Dead Sea region impressed him deeply; he naturally reasoned upon it; and this impression and reasoning we find stamped into the pages of his sacred literature, rendering them all the more precious as a revelation of the earlier ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... set fire to the house and everything within sight that could burn. After which they marched away singing patriotic hymns. When they had gone Liosha crept out of the cave wherein she had hidden, and surveyed the scene of desolation. ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... whole internal trade. They forced the natives to buy dear and to sell cheap. They insulted with impunity the tribunals, the police, and the fiscal authorities of the country. They covered with their protection a set of native dependants who ranged through the provinces, spreading desolation and terror wherever they appeared. Every servant of a British factor was armed with all the power of his master; and his master was armed with all the power of the Company. Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while thirty millions of human ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the hieroglyphs of haggard gum-trees, blown into odd shapes, distorted with fierce hot winds, or cramped with cold nights, when the Southern Cross freezes in a cloudless sky of icy blue. The phantasmagoria of that wild dream-land termed the Bush interprets itself, and the Poet of our desolation begins to comprehend why free Esau loved his heritage of desert sand better than all the bountiful ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... he could not resist the spell that impelled him to the society where Edith might at least be seen, and the circle in which he lived was one in which her name was frequently mentioned. Alone, in his solitary rooms in the Albany, he felt all his desolation; and often a few minutes before he figured in the world, apparently followed and courted by all, he had been plunged in the ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... the desolation which reigned between the Strand and the City in that fatal summer, now drawing to its melancholy close. More than once in her brief pilgrimage Angela drew back, shuddering, from the embrasure of a door, or the inlet to some ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... wide valley with a level plain at its heart, with many clumps of stunted birches and hardy firs. Here was the great grazing for young beasts in the summer, away here in the glen, but now only stillness and desolation. A wide burn rumbled and splashed on its gravelly banks in front of us, and we could hear the deep noise ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... few words whence I had come, what had made me undertake the voyage, and how I safely arrived at the port after twenty days' sailing; when I had done, I prayed him to perform his promise, and told him how much I was struck by the frightful desolation which I ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 1 • Anon.
... Sylvia, Rufus Dawes began to brood over a desperate scheme. The intelligence that the investigation he had hoped for was not to be granted to him had rendered doubly bitter those galling fetters of self restraint which he had laid upon himself. For five years of desolation he had waited and hoped for a chance which might bring him to Hobart Town, and enable him to denounce the treachery of Maurice Frere. He had, by an almost miraculous accident, obtained that chance of open speech, and, having ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... ascended the throne, he proclaimed a new aera of happiness and glory. The annals of the second Justin [23] are marked with disgrace abroad and misery at home. In the West, the Roman empire was afflicted by the loss of Italy, the desolation of Africa, and the conquests of the Persians. Injustice prevailed both in the capital and the provinces: the rich trembled for their property, the poor for their safety, the ordinary magistrates were ignorant or venal, the occasional remedies appear to have ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... whose savage ear The Lapland drum delights to hear, When Frenzy with her bloodshot eye Implores thy dreadful deity— Archangel! Power of desolation! Fast descending as thou art, Say, hath mortal invocation Spells to touch thy stony heart: Then, sullen Winter! hear my prayer, And gently rule the ruin'd year; Nor chill the wanderer's bosom bare Nor freeze the wretch's ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... tongues. Are we for war? let it be levied upon our unruly passions. This is laudable ambition. This is honourable war, producing the peace and happiness of man. This is real glory to God and man, the very opposite to those horrors of desolation which gives joy among the devils of hell—the burning cities, the garments rolled in blood, the shrieks of the wounded, and the sickening miseries of the widows and orphans ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... were no longer regarded as good beings that had come from heaven, but as ruthless destroyers, who, invulnerable to the assaults of the Indians, were borne along on the backs of fierce animals, swifter than the wind, with weapons in their hands, that scattered fire and desolation as they went. Such were the stories now circulated of the invaders, which, preceding them everywhere on their march, closed the hearts, if not the doors, of the natives against them. Exhausted by the ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... religion. Thus he objects to the repetition of a generation in Saint Matthew's genealogy; to Matthew's call; to the quotation of a text from Isaiah, which is found in a psalm ascribed to Asaph; to the calling of the lake of Tiberius a sea; to the expression of Saint Matthew, "the abomination of desolation;" to the variation in Matthew and Mark upon the text, "the voice of one crying in the wilderness," Matthew citing it from Isaias, Mark from the Prophets; to John's application of the term "Word;" to Christ's change of intention about going up to the feast of Tabernacles ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... through the mellow autumn evening with a warmer, kindlier glow in his heart than he had known through all the dreary weeks that had followed his return from the war. For the war had wrought desolation for him in a home once rich in the things that make life worth while, by taking from it his mother, whose rare soul qualities had won and held through her life the love, the passionate, adoring love of her sons, and his twin brother, the comrade, chum, friend of ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... the poop was like the return of wanderers after many years amongst people marked by the desolation of time. Eyes were turned slowly in their sockets, glancing at us. Faint murmurs were heard, "Have you got 'im after all?" The well-known faces looked strange and familiar; they seemed faded and grimy; they had a mingled ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... as they are, always linger in this mortal sphere. The agitation of mind has very much impaired my health. * * * * Why, why was not I taken when my darling husband was called from my side? I have been allowed no rest by those who, in my desolation, should have protected me. * * * * How dearly I should love to see you this very sad day. Never, dear Lizzie, think of my great nervousness the night before we parted; I had been so harassed with my fears. * ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... effectual curtains against prying eyes, added to the sense of loneliness, of insecurity, of unknown dangers lurking behind that crippled archway, or beneath the shadows of the projecting eaves, whence the perpetual drip-drip of soot water came as a note of melancholy desolation. ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... Denifle, La desolation des eglises, monasteres hopitaux en France vers le milieu du xv'ieme ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... after all was out of order, not the fiddlestick; the body, not the mind. I walked out; met Mrs. Skene, who took a turn with me in Princes Street. Bade Constable and Cadell farewell, and had a brisk walk home, which enables me to face the desolation here with more spirit. News from Sophia. She has had the luck to get an anti-druggist in a Dr. Gooch, who prescribes care for Johnnie instead of drugs, and a little home-brewed ale instead of wine; and, like a liberal physician, supplies the medicine he prescribes. ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... sweeping, gentle spurs clothed with wild olive woods containing trees of immense size. The lower reaches of the Zhob and Kundar are hemmed in by rugged limestone walls, serrated and banded with deep clefts and gorges, a wilderness of stony desolation. Looking eastwards from the Kaisargarh, one can again count the backs of innumerable minor ridges, smaller wrinkles or folds formed during a process of upheaval of the Suliman Mountains, at the close of a great ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... for refuge did the inaccessible shore present. Again and again the lieutenant asked himself what would become of him and his comrades, even if they should survive the peril of shipwreck, and gain a footing upon the cliff. What resources could they expect to find upon that scene of desolation? What hope could they entertain that any portion of the old continent still existed ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... done to death under the name of Jesus in the dens of the Inquisition, or slaughtered by thousands in the sack of towns; if our wives and daughters had been shamed, if our houses had been burned, our goods taken, our liberties trampled upon, and our homes made a desolation, then, my reader, is it not possible that even in these different days you and I might have been cruel when our hour came? God knows alone, and God be thanked that so far as we can foresee, except under the pressure, perhaps, of invasion by semi-barbarian hordes, or of dreadful ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... to Save the Famous Ferry Station, the Chief Inlet to and Egress from San Francisco—Fire Tugs and Vessels in the Bay Aid in Heroic Fight—Fort Mason, General Funston's Temporary Headquarters, has Narrow Escape—A Survey of the Scene of Desolation 69 ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... force of habit, still went among the wagons and urged the old arguments against Oregon—the savage tribes on ahead, the forbidding desolation of the land, the vast and dangerous rivers, the certainty of starvation on the way, the risk of arriving after winter had set in on the Cascade Range—all matters of which they themselves spoke by hearsay. All the great West was then unknown. Moreover, Fort Hall was a natural division ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... heart of woe, Flattery wakes no exultation; And Fancy's flash but serves to show The darkness of my desolation! ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... He complained that it was terribly lonely. 'It is the Desolation,' he would quote, 'spoken of by Daniel the prophet.' He would spend hours travelling those eerie shifting corridors of Space with no hint of another human soul. How could there be? It was a world of pure reason, ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... round, knocking at every door and announcing the conflagration. Fusees were introduced at every favourable aperture, and especially into the shops covered with iron of the tradesmen's quarter. The fire engines were carried off: the desolation attained its highest pitch, and each individual, according to his disposition, was either overwhelmed with distress or urged to a decision. Most of those who were left formed groups in the public places; they crowded together, questioned each other, and reciprocally asked advice: many ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... Through the forest vast and vacant, Rang that cry of desolation; But there came no other answer Than the echo of his crying, Than the echo of the ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... were nowhere to be found, Save one brass mausoleum on a mound (I knew it well) spared by the artist Time To emphasize the desolation round. ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... popular, the most sought-after girl at the picnic that afternoon; she was never short of a cavalier to wait on her lightest behest; she was her prettiest, her most charming self. The American whispered to her that a picnic without her would be a desolation and he had half a mind to stop another week at his aunt's—but Gertrude was not enjoying herself. From behind the gorse bushes, from between the moss-grown boulders, from beneath the dark foliage of the Scotch firs, there peeped at ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... edge of a black moor, under shelter of a rocky dip, in a treeless country. It must have been a terrible change for a bachelor about town, like Walter Tyrrel, to come down at twenty-eight from his luxurious club and his snug chambers in St. James' to the isolation and desolation of that wild Cornish manor-house. But the Tyrrels, he knew, were all built like that; Le Neve had been with three of the family at Rugby; and conscience was their stumbling- block. When once a Tyrrel was convinced his duty lay ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... stone, the village, the Vicarage, the church, the churchyard and the gravestones of the dead are alike naked and black, blackened as if fire had passed over them. And in their grayness and their desolation they are one with each other and with the network of low walls that links them to the last solitary farm on the High Moor. And on the breast of the earth they show, one moment, solid as if hewn out of her heart, and another, slender and ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... Beauty in desolation was her pride, Her crowned array a glory that had been; She faltered tow'rds us like a swan that died, But although ruined she was ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... Philip also.... My brother was often at the South Kensington Museum, and, in order to make some sort of secondary life for myself, I paid for a few lessons at the Art Schools. I was coming back from them this evening, when I saw the abomination of desolation walking alive down the long straight street and the rest is as this gentleman ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... her frame. While sharing in the hardships and the hazards of my struggle for life, her heart, sustained by its own deep enthusiasm, triumphed over every obstacle. But she was returning to a house of mourning and of woe, where life would be one blank of desolation and stupor, to be wakened to bitter consciousness by intelligence of our doom. The sense of my responsibility, the full appreciation of the living death which, through my agency, had fallen upon a home as hallowed as ever love and joy consecrated to happiness, had burned up my eyeballs ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... the north-west, the horses being a little fresher than for some days past. Halted at four o'clock, having gone ten miles through a country which, for barrenness and desolation, can I think have no equal; it was a continued scrub, and where there was timber it chiefly consisted of small cypress: we saw no water as usual, but stopped on some burnt grass near the base of a low range of stony hills west of ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... what we could for him. Meantime some of us had gathered bits of boxes and wood, and made a fire and boiled water. Tea-cups, coffee, sugar, and biscuits were found, and we made a splendid feast in the midst of the desolation. Horrid, you will say, to think of food among the dead and wounded. And yet that coffee certainly was very good. Somehow I believe the Boers understand roasting it ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... coffee-drinking and music in the Piazza San Marco, everything fitted into my lazy, idle nature and weakness of body, as if I had been born to the manner of it and to no other. Do you know I expected in Venice a dreary sort of desolation? Whereas there was nothing melancholy at all, only a soothing, lulling, rocking atmosphere which if Armida had lived in a city rather than in a garden would have suited her purpose. Indeed Taglioni seems to be resting her feet from dancing, there, with a peculiar zest, inasmuch as ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... American statesman of a later day, Abraham Lincoln. Compared with Lincoln, Jefferson is indeed a mere amateur in the use of words. Lincoln would not have scattered in his utterances overwrought phrases about "death, desolation and tyranny" or talked about pledging "our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honour." He indulged in no "Flights of Oratory." The passion in the Declaration is concentrated against the King. We do not know what were the emotions of George when he ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... staring vacantly into the darkness, which had come on with that abruptness which begins to be noticeable in September. His elbows were on his knees, and his body was sunk far forward in an attitude of desolation. ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... had seen them both laid side by side in their lonely grave in the west gulch; and those four months would ever be a blot of horrible blackness on his life. Should he ever be able to forget the blank desolation that had closed in upon him night after night as he sat by his lonely hearth or paced the floor, his steps alone breaking the awful stillness? Yet he had forced himself to stay and face it, had continued his work and his method of ...
— A Girl of the Klondike • Victoria Cross
... Mr. Rives, in his "Life of Madison," "the people saw a power which had but lately carried war and desolation, fire and sword, through their own country, and, since the peace, had not ceased to act toward them in the old spirit of unkindness, jealousy, arrogance, and injustice; on the other an ally who had rendered them the most generous assistance ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... suppositions they returned to the willow-tree, but neither there nor for a furlong around did they discover anything. The prince's people had already taken Jurand to Niedzborz, and the whole neighborhood was a complete desolation. The Bohemian observed further, that the dog that ran ahead of the guide and found Jurand would also have discovered the young lady. Then Zbyszko breathed freely, for he was almost sure that Danusia had remained at home. He was even able to explain why she did so. Danusia ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... lighting up the faces of the dead with an unearthly glare. At this moment some drops of rain fell from a passing cloud, like tears from the pitying eyes of an angel, who, sailing through the skies, had stopped for a moment in her flight to look down sorrowfully on the scene of desolation which man, the worm of a day, had caused in a moment of ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... these gentlemen assured me, that having satisfied his curiosity, no earthly consideration should tempt him to undertake a second journey by land to the capital; for that he believed the whole world could not furnish a like picture of desolation and misery. What a contrast is here exhibited to the ease and convenience with which our journey was made! But the whole treatment of the Dutch embassy seems to have been proportioned to the degree of importance which the Chinese attached to ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... of, suddenly drops into a day, making it a memorable date forever; a joy that transmutes itself into exaltation and a higher range of energy. Naturally, we count such an experience divine, and offer our gratitude to God, the giver of all blessings. But a tragedy of sorrow, a darkness of desolation impenetrable and seemingly final, also falls suddenly into a day, and inexpressible amazement and incredulity that it can be real are added to the pain. But it is real. The sunshine has vanished; ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... portraits in which he followed the Naturalists, but his principal works were landscapes. Jagged rocks and mountains, wild dells and lonely defiles, with here and there robbers, hermits, or soldiers, make his most effective pictures. There is a deep sense of desolation, almost of fear, in them which is very impressive. Sometimes he painted serene landscapes and poetic figures; but his best works are not of this sort. His pictures are in the principal public and in some private galleries. He also left about ninety ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... standard of their order; and no one can forget the many peers in Charles I.'s time, such as Falkland, or the Spencers (Sunderland), or the Comptons (Northampton), who felt and owned their paramount duty to lie in public self-dedication, and died therefore, and oftentimes left their inheritances a desolation. 'Thus far'—oh heavens! with what bitterness I said this, knowing it a thing undeniable by W. W. or by Sir George—you, the peerages that pretend to try conclusions with the English, you—French, German, Walloon, Spanish, Scottish—are ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... presence to vex them in their decrepitude than that of some gray custodian, who should come to the gate with clanking keys, and admit the wandering stranger, if he gave signs of a reverent sympathy, to look for a little while upon the reserved and dignified desolation. It is a shame to tempt these sad old cities into unnatural activity, when they long ago made their peace with the world, and would fain be mixing their weary brick and mortar with the earth's unbuilded dust; and it is hard for the emotional traveller to restrain his sense of outrage at finding ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... were fired, and then, to make more sure of attracting the lifeboat men, a tar-barrel, fastened to the end of a spar, was thrust out ahead and set on fire. By the grand lurid flare of this giant torch the surrounding desolation was made more apparent, and at the fearful sight hearts which had hitherto held up began ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... there came upon them, in that cozy, little, two-room apartment, a feeling of desolation and vastness, and a terrible loneliness such as they had never dreamed of in the great twelve-room house in Winnebago. They kept close to each other. They toiled up the winding stairs together and stood a moment on the ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... stone floors; and by another gesture he indicated the fierce thorny growths of the forest in which he hunted those vivid insects,—the luxuriant savannas, the gigantic ferns and palms, the hush and shining desolation, the presence of the invisible fever and death. There was a touch, too, of inexpressible sadness in his half-ignorant mention of the exiles at Cayenne, who were forbidden the wide ocean of escape about them by those swift gunboats keeping their coasts ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... judgment which, with cold, unfeeling cruelty, after long deliberations, should condemn millions of innocent people to extortion, to rapine, and to blood, and should devote some of the finest countries upon earth to ravage and desolation,—does any one think that any servile apologies of mine, or any strutting and bullying insolence of their own, can save them from the ruin that must fell on all institutions of dignity or of authority that are perverted from their purport to the oppression of human nature in others ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Io knew, for anything not close before her eyes, she came to him, as inevitably, as unerringly as steel to the magnet, and was folded in his arms. Io heard his deep voice, vibrant between desolation and passion: ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... very long. We heard the cries of some wild animals, which had been attracted by our fire, and a flock of geese passed over during the night. Even these strange sounds had something pleasant to our senses in this region of silence and desolation. ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... camp, for the reason that solitude at times has its charms. When the lamp outside the tent door was extinguished, and all was enveloped in darkness and fog to an overwhelming degree, a feeling of loneliness and desolation stole over me, though it soon left me when I thought of the glories of the coming day, when all ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... a summer shower. Henry knew instinctively that Ninian's death had killed her. She might live for many years, but she would be a dead woman. She would show very little, nothing, to those who looked to see the signs of woe, but in her heart she would hoard her desolation, keeping it to herself, obtruding her sorrow on no one ... waiting patiently and silently for her day of release, when, as her faith told her, she and her son ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... it—I must hasten. We have no right to peer beyond the boundary God has drawn for us. I saw His hell—I saw His hell, I tell you. It is peopled with the damned—silent, horrible, distorted in the midst of ashes and desolation. It was a memory that, like the snake of Aaron, devoured all others till yesterday—till yesterday, by ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... nothing. No bear swung across the path, no izard showed itself on the cliffs. The keen, sharp air cut our cheeks and warned me that we were approaching the summit of the ridge. On all sides were silence and desolation. ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... be let loose to murder our citizens, and butcher our women and children, this war will be a war of extermination. The first stroke of the tomahawk, the first attempt with the scalping knife, will be the signal of one indiscriminate scene of desolation. No white man, found fighting by the side of an Indian, will be taken prisoner—instant destruction will be his lot. If the dictates of reason, duty, justice, and humanity, cannot prevent the employment of a force which respects no rights and knows no wrong, ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... to-day, as he sat in the sunshine and looked about him, he saw for the first time grandeur in the saw-toothed, snow-covered peaks outlined against the dazzling blue of the western sky. For the first time he saw the awing vastness of the desert, and the soft pastel shades which made their desolation beautiful. He breathed deep of the odorous air and stared about him like a blind man who ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... which has called the world with all its living creatures into one animated being, especially reveals Himself in the desolation of great pestilences. The powers of creation come into violent collision; the sultry dryness of the atmosphere; the subterraneous thunders; the mist of overflowing waters, are the harbingers of destruction. Nature is not satisfied with the ordinary ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... two feet in diameter I observed were broken at no great distance from the ground, and the branches of many of the largest and tallest so much so that the desolation already exhibited equalled that of a furious tornado. The sun was lost to our view, yet not a pigeon had arrived. All on a sudden, I heard a general cry of, ...
— True Stories about Cats and Dogs • Eliza Lee Follen
... count, and deep hatred mounted to his face, as the blood would to the face of any other. "If a man had by unheard-of and excruciating tortures destroyed your father, your mother, your betrothed,—a being who, when torn from you, left a desolation, a wound that never closes, in your breast,—do you think the reparation that society gives you is sufficient when it interposes the knife of the guillotine between the base of the occiput and the trapezal muscles of the murderer, and allows him who has caused ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... anything beyond a gentle word; and yet his loss fell on them both with a great horror in it: they mourned him passionately. He had passed away from them in his sleep, and when in the gray dawn they learned their bereavement, unutterable solitude and desolation seemed to close around them. He had long been only a poor, feeble, paralyzed old man, who could not raise a hand in their defence, but he had loved them well: his smile had always welcomed their return. They mourned ...
— A Dog of Flanders • Louisa de la Rame)
... exhausted when the morning came and still no result. As the former day had ended in fire and desolation, so the present one—it was Wednesday, July 10th—commenced with desolation and fire. The news of Maddaloni's flight was like pouring oil upon the flames. If he had escaped, his effects should atone for it. Already the day before ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... hogs. They drink up all the moisture and corral all the winds from this small strip which lies at their feet. Scarcely once in a year do they spare a drop of rain for these lower planes. And so within sight of their white summits lies this stretch of utter desolation. ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... when she had moaned away the worst of her pain, she fell asleep. When she awoke it was already growing dark, and the knocking at her door, which roused her, was like a call from the peace of dreams to the desolation of reality. When she had turned on the light she received from the hands of the waiting servant that which had become a most rare visitant in the blankness of ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... up its head, and lo! a great blue heron. Seeing us approach, it spread its long wings and flew solemnly across to a dead tree on the other side of the lake, enhancing rather than relieving the loneliness and desolation that brooded over the scene. As we proceeded it flew from tree to tree in advance of us, apparently loth to be disturbed in its ancient and solitary domain. In the margin of the pond we found the pitcher-plant growing, and here ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... have brought captives to their capitals as slaves, but they did not root out every trace of cultivation, or regarded it with haughty scorn. But, when their turn of punishment came, the whole world was filled with mourning and desolation, and all the relations ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... been close shut when the crowd went down the High Street, were partially open as Daniel slowly returned; and light streamed from them on the otherwise dark road. The news of the successful attempt at rescue had reached those who had sate in mourning and in desolation an hour or two ago, and several of these pressed forwards as from their watching corner they recognized Daniel's approach; they pressed forward into the street to shake him by the hand, to thank him (for his name had been bruited ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... were once more on our way through the vast ruined city, which loomed at us on either side in the grey dawning in a way that was at once grand and oppressive. Just as the first ray of the rising sun shot like a golden arrow athwart this storied desolation we gained the further gateway of the outer wall, and having given one more glance at the hoar and pillared majesty through which we had journeyed, and (with the exception of Job, for whom ruins had no charms) breathed a sigh of regret that we had not had more time to explore ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... of lightning would perhaps have pierced the clouds that hung over me: even though it were but a passing ray, it would have enabled me to catch a momentary glimpse of the Beloved of my heart—but this was denied me. Instead, it was night, dark night, utter desolation, death! Like my Divine Master in the Agony in the Garden, I felt that I was alone, and found no comfort on ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... and of the further fact that the damage 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 ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... deserted brick-kiln, surrounded by long uneven mounds and ridges of ice, with three poplars mounting guard over it. Flights of rooks hung over the barren ground, and wheeled in the air with discordant clamor as we passed—the only living moving things in the utter desolation of the scene. As I looked there was an exclamation from one of the workmen, and the engine began to slacken. ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... Here was a scene of chaos—rigging tangled and swinging loosely from masts and yards; sails torn and shreds still clinging to ropes and spars; loose planks of her deck cargo lying all over the place, and a general air of abandon and desolation difficult to describe. ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... waylaid him for his rent (a day overdue), and he was very curt. That was to keep back the "O God, how rotten I feel!" with which, in his room, he voiced the desolation ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... own country, and the whole of the national churches of all countries, from the principles and the examples which lead to ecclesiastical pillage, thence to a contempt of all prescriptive titles, thence to the pillage of all property, and thence to universal desolation. ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... in the room was very low, and the lady received but a momentary impression of a man's figure bowed over a white table. She chose a chair at once with her back towards him, and resting her brow on her forefinger, disposed herself for desolation. ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... surrounded by its sleepy barracks. Suddenly you are in the fires and awful slaughter of Napoleon's wars. The flower of France is being pitilessly cut down for the lust of one man's ambition; and when that is spent, and the wail of the widowed country pierces heaven with its desolation, a costly asylum is built for the handful of soldiers who are left—and the great Emperor has ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... in death, was ages old; its cold desolation showing plainly on the screen. No fires poured now from a hot throat; the molten sea that once had raged within had hardened and choked that vast throat with rock that had frozen to make one enormous plain. Ringed about by the jagged sides of the tremendous volcano, the floor within seemed ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... martyrdoms of the flesh, in weary hours, strange experiences, unhappy tempers, restless struggles, unrequited triumphs,—in the glare of midnight lamps, and of wild, haggard eyes,—in sorrow, want, desolation, despair, and madness. Born in sorrow, the book trails a pathway of sorrow through the ages. And each book in the Parisian library stands for all this,—some that were produced with tears having been always read ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... for some time, but no sign or sound of life could he detect in its silent desolation. "I must have been mistaken," he muttered, with a final glance at the windows of the first story. "There's ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... remains, you read, almost as in a book, the history of the ancient prosperity and power of Ireland, and of its gradual destruction by wars, sieges, famine, and pestilence, till it was brought to its present state of poverty and desolation. ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... make thy officers peace, And thine exactors righteousness; Violence shall no more be heard in thy land, Desolation nor destruction within thy borders; But thou shalt call thy walls Salvation, And thy ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... such desolation there lived a dozen students, in a small nest of studios that I need not say were rented to them at a price within their ever-scanty means. It was marveled at among the boys in the Quarter that any of these exiles lived to see the light of another ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... themselves, and their fratricidal wars, increased the measure of public calamity, so that soon, overrun by foreign enemies and destroyed by her own sons, France became a vast field of disorder and desolation. ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... me," Paul said to himself. "In many ways, of course, it is the best thing that could happen." And yet he found himself thinking of nothing but the utter desolation of Rudham, when May's bright presence should be removed from it, when he could no longer hope for a passing glimpse of her in ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... ever? I know not. He may arise again in his wrath and fill the land with desolation; for that earthquake we felt yesterday was but a wild throe of the giant struggling ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
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