Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Bleak   Listen
adjective
Bleak  adj.  
1.
Without color; pale; pallid. (Obs.) "When she came out she looked as pale and as bleak as one that were laid out dead."
2.
Desolate and exposed; swept by cold winds. "Wastes too bleak to rear The common growth of earth, the foodful ear." "At daybreak, on the bleak sea beach."
3.
Cold and cutting; cheerless; as, a bleak blast.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Bleak" Quotes from Famous Books



... on the Dovre Fjelds of Norway. It must be rather a dull business in that region, taking into consideration the barren plains, the bleak winds, and desolate aspect of the country. No sweet hawthorn bushes are there, beneath which ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne

... The fancied fabric melts away; Each Gothic arch, memorial-stone, And long, dim, lofty aisle, are gone; And lingering last, deception dear, The choir's high sounds die on my ear. Now slow return the lonely down, The silent pastures bleak and brown, The farm begirt with copsewood wild, The gambols of each frolic child, Mixing their shrill cries with the tone Of Tweed's ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott

... Flemish coast were blockaded by a Dutch fleet and the Channel was guarded by the English, and the Spaniards, accustomed to the quieter seas of the south, did not know how to navigate in this squally and bleak northern climate. What happened to the Armada once it was attacked by ships and by storms I need not tell you. A few ships, by sailing around Ireland, escaped to tell the terrible story of defeat. The others perished and lie at the bottom ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

... long stretch of banked-up sand on the north side of the bar, where, amid the shelter of the coarse, tufted grass the delicate, graceful creatures will sit three months hence on their fragile white and purple-splashed eggs. The boobies are but visitors, for their breeding-places are on the bleak, savage islands far to the south, amid the snows and storms of black Antarctic seas. But here they dwell together, in unison with the gulls, and were the wind not westerly you could hear their shrill cries and hoarse croaking as they ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke

... was outwardly suppressed, the influence of her late employer and of his somber teachings. Somewhere with her was associated the idea of punishment, vindictiveness, revenge. I remembered again suddenly my odd notion that she sought to keep her present mistress here, a prisoner in this bleak and comfortless house, and that really, in spite of her obsequious silence, she was intensely opposed to the change of thought that had reclaimed Mabel to a ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood

... coming from Lucerne they had approached their inn by this path, and, feeling that they knew it, had hitherto neglected it in favor of untrodden ways. But at last the list of these was exhausted, and Rowland proposed the walk to Engelberg as a novelty. The place is half bleak and half pastoral; a huge white monastery rises abruptly from the green floor of the valley and complicates its picturesqueness with an element rare in Swiss scenery. Hard by is a group of chalets and inns, with the usual appurtenances of a prosperous Swiss resort—lean brown guides in baggy ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James

... tender Dryads folded he forgets The pallid witness of those nameless things, In renovated senses lapt, and joins The full, keen joyance of the day, so they From sights and sounds of battle smeared with blood, And shrieking souls on Acheron's bleak tides, And wail of execrating kindred, slid Into oblivious slumber and a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... because he had a constitutional aversion to piling up agony ahead of him; besides, Dill could see for himself that the loss would be heavy, though just how heavy he hadn't the experience with which to estimate. As March came in with a blizzard and went, a succession of bleak days, into April, Billy knew more than he cared to admit even to himself. He would lie awake at night when the wind and snow raved over the land, and picture the bare open that he knew, with lean, Double-Crank stock drifting ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower

... sphere,—action to bless and to refine and to exalt all around her, and to pour whatever else of ambition was left unsatisfied into sympathy with the aspirations of man. Despite her father's fears of the bleak air of England, in that air she had strengthened the delicate health of her childhood. Her elastic step, her eyes full of sweetness and light, her bloom, at once soft and luxuriant,—all spoke of the vital powers fit to sustain a mind of such exquisite mould, and the emotions ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... and powerful. You live in a beautiful home where the bleak winds never penetrate. Your hunger is always appeased with the choicest foods. Your heart is kept warm by all these blessings, and would bleed at the sight of distress among your red children. Father, we are poor and weak. ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau

... breviary. The drive turned and turned again in great sloping curves; more divines were passed, and then there came a terrace with a balustrade and a view of the open country. The high red walls of the college faced bleak terraces: a square tower squatted in the middle of the building, and out of it rose the octagon of the bell-tower, and in the tower wall was the great oak door studded with ...
— Celibates • George Moore

... declared by a thousand spiritual utterances, as that of Heaven. It is well for us to dwell with thankfulness on the unfolding of the flower, and the falling of the dew, and the sleep of the green fields in the sunshine; but the blasted trunk, the barren rock, the moaning of the bleak winds, the roar of the black, perilous, merciless whirlpools of the mountain streams, the solemn solitudes of moors and seas, the continual fading of all beauty into darkness, and of all strength into dust, have these ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin

... think it was the first stopping place after we left East St. Louis, and we were put on board the cars and secreted in the gentlemen's smoking car, in which there were only a few rebels. We arrived in Springfield about twelve o'clock at night. When we took the cars it was dark, bleak and cold. It was the 18th of March, and as we were without bonnets and clothing to shield us from the sleet and wind, we suffered intensely. The old trader, for fear that mother might make her escape, carried my brother, ...
— The Story of Mattie J. Jackson • L. S. Thompson

... summer afternoons, When from the blue horizon to the shore, Casting faint silver pathways like the moon's Across the Ocean's glassy, mottled floor, Far clouds uprear their gleaming battlements Drawn to the crest of some bleak eminence, When autumn twilight fades on the sere hill And autumn winds are still; To watch the East for some emerging sign, Wintry Capella or the Pleiades Or that great huntsman with the golden gear; Ravished in hours ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger

... tossing the bright golden ears into wagons that were placed between the rows for that purpose, while others were hauling the grain to their barns to store it away for the winter's use. The broad corn leaves rustling in the wind seemed to whisper, "Winter is coming with his cold, bleak storms to rob the earth of her summer splendor; but he will bring his beautiful coverlet of snow to protect her fields and to prepare them ...
— How John Became a Man • Isabel C. Byrum

... on the bleak sea-beach, A fisherman stood aghast, To see the form of a maiden fair, Lashed close to ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow

... moorland lay dark and mute. The mist was around them. They seemed to stand on an islet of the clouds. In front the day-break was bursting the confines of the bleak racks of cloud. Then the day came in its wondrous radiance, and flooded the world in a vast ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine

... around it Threatening peaks, while stern seas bound it, With cold winters, summers bleak, Curtly smiling, never meek, 'Tis the giant we must master, Till he work our will the faster. He shall carry, though he clamor, He shall haul and saw and hammer, Turn to light the tumbling torrent,— All his din and rage abhorrent Shall, if we but do our duty, Win ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson

... the mountain the two children shrank back into their mufflers, before the sweep of the wet, chill wind; but the mill was in sight—beyond the slope of bleak pastures outlined with stone walls—sunk deep in the valley beside a rapid mountain stream, a dim bulk already glimmering with points of light. Toward this the two little workwomen slopped ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer

... grew suddenly bleak and fierce, and his right hand flashed out to Daughtry's wrist, prisoning it in withered fingers ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London

... Anglo-Saxon poems is adapted to men of this stamp. Their souls delight in the bleak boreal climes, the north wind, frost, hail, ice, howling tempest and raging seas, recur as often in this literature as blue waves and sunlit blossoms in the writings of men to whom these exquisite marvels are familiar. Their descriptions are all short, save when they refer to ice ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... bleak has charms to me, When winds rave thro' the naked tree; Or frosts on hills of Ochiltree Are hoary gray; Or blinding drifts wild-furious flee, Dark'ning ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... wonders that my Lord Dacre and all his company do say they saw that night, six times, of spirits and fearful sights. And universally all their company say plainly the Devil was that night among them six times.' In that gaunt and bleak Border country the traveller overtaken by night may feel a disquieting awe even in these days when the rising moon is no longer a lamp to guide enemies to the attack. Four hundred years ago, when it lay blood-stained and scarred with a thousand fights, bearing no crops ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen

... was fair, this woman! Warm and flaxen waved her hair; Her blue Breton eyes made summer In that bleak December air. ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman

... as the chances of defeat. Twice we found women on board; and though I have seen towns sacked, and of late days in France some very horrid public tumults, there was something in the smallness of the numbers engaged, and the bleak dangerous sea-surroundings, that made these acts of piracy far the most revolting. I confess ingenuously I could never proceed unless I was three parts drunk; it was the same even with the crew; Teach himself was fit for no enterprise till he was full of rum; and it was one ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Lord Timon the rich, Lord Timon the delight of mankind, to Timon the naked, Timon the man-hater! Where were his flatterers now? Where were his attendants and retinue? Would the bleak air, that boisterous servitor, be his chamberlain, to put his shirt on warm? Would those stiff trees that had outlived the eagle turn young and airy pages to him, to skip on his errands when he bade them? Would the cool brook, when it was iced with winter, ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb

... on an outer rock, where they were retrieved subsequently. Then he beached his boat, and with many hands at work we soon had our belongings ashore and our three craft above high-water mark. The spit was by no means an ideal camping-ground; it was rough, bleak, and inhospitable—just an acre or two of rock and shingle, with the sea foaming around it except where the snow-slope, running up to a glacier, formed the landward boundary. But some of the larger rocks provided a measure of shelter from the wind, and as we clustered round the blubber-stove, ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton

... month of November, 1539. The winter in these regions, though short, had often days of such excessive cold that men upon the open prairie, exposed to bleak winds called northers, often perished from the severity of the weather. De Soto resolved to establish himself in winter-quarters at Anhayea. With his suite he occupied the palace of the chief. The other houses were appropriated to the soldiers for their barracks. He threw up strong fortifications ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott

... the land where I often have wended My way o'er its mountains and valleys of snow; Farewell to the rocks and the hills I've ascended, The bleak arctic homes of the buck and the doe; Farewell to the deep glens where oft has resounded The snow-bunting's song, as she carolled her lay To hillside and plain, by the green sorrel bounded, Till struck by the blast of ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale

... Rupert[3] 'gainst traitors contending, Four Brothers enrich'd with their blood the bleak field For Charles the Martyr their country defending, Till death their attachment ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron

... was a raw day of Autumn's bleak beginning, When nights are equal, but not so the days; The Parcae then cut short the further spinning Of seamen's fates, and the loud tempests raise[et] The waters, and repentance for past sinning In all, who o'er the great deep take their ways: They vow to amend their lives, and yet they don't; ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... customs, in an exquisite social sense, in the culture of the humorous and the imaginative, in impressibility to every touch of noble and useful enthusiasm. It would be easy to dilate upon the causes which seem to have produced this choice joyous spirit in so unexpected a region as the far, bleak North: but that would be a lengthened subject; and we must content ourselves at present with the fact. And, instead of branching out into general vague illustrations of what I mean by this lyric joyousness, I shall localise it, and embody the meaning in a sketch, light and imperfect ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... the only house visible from the cove. As you turned the southern point, a village was seen down the coast; and about half way between that and the pines was a wooden house, brown and weather-beaten, standing unsheltered on the bleak shore. Back of this house, shutting out all prospect but that of the ocean, was a tall cliff, covered with ragged yellow pines and stunted cedars, from which on stormy nights many a quivering flame had shot upward, luring ships to their ruin. Still, with this grim protest against the ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens

... were bleak and wintry enough on the marsh for even a hare to take to the timber for comfort. During most of that winter Garron peddled the skins of rabbits he snared on the marsh, and traded and bought their pelts, and he lived poor that no one might suspect his wealth. He and his mate rose, like the wild ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith

... out than the country to the right, and the various groups of trees, disposed upon the sides of the elevations that bounded the western side of the valley, were most ornamental. On the opposite side, the country was less inviting, and the hills were bleak and bare. At length a clear horizon appeared to the south, the direction in which the river was flowing; Captain Sturt landed to survey the country, and beneath him was the great object of his search, the termination of one of Australia's longest and ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden

... the most remote districts of the south of Scotland, where an ideal line, drawn along the tops of lofty and bleak mountains, separates that land from her sister kingdom, a young man, called Halbert, or Hobbie Elliot, a substantial farmer, who boasted his descent from old Martin Elliot of the Preakin-tower, noted in Border story and song, was on ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott

... countries, the humblest and least powerful nations, became its strongholds. It was little Geneva in the midst of mighty foes plotting her destruction; it was Holland on her sand-banks by the northern sea, wrestling against the tyranny of Spain, then the greatest and most opulent of kingdoms; it was bleak, sterile Sweden, that gained victories ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White

... carried him up to the bleak tor side, and dug his grave there; the black cat following us to look. Five feet deep we laid him, having dug down to solid rock; and having covered him over, went silently back to the hovel. Joan had not ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch

... only roads. In seaside towns it could be a mark for for sailors at sea; such was the Truro meeting-house. Then, too, our Puritan ancestors dearly loved a "sightly location," and were willing to climb uphill cheerfully, even through bleak New England winters, for the sake of having a meeting-house which showed off well, and was a proper source of envy to the neighboring villages and the country around. The studiously remote and painfully inaccessible locations ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle

... again. A snowy mantle covered the hills and valleys, and the bleak winds moaned through the naked trees. The merry sleigh-bells jingled in the streets, and merrier lads and lasses filled the village school-house. The skating grounds never presented more attractions to Nat and ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer

... from Nice. H. Carenio; coach daily to and from Menton, 14m. S. The road now ascends the Col di Brouis, 2871 ft., whence passengers in this direction have their last view of the Mediterranean. The descent is now made through bleak and barren mountains to Giandola, 39 m. N.E. from Nice, 1247 ft., at the base of lofty frowning rocks. Inns: trangers, Poste. Coach daily between this and Ventimiglia. To the E., on the Roja, are Breglio, pop. 2580, and the ruins of the castle of Trivella. The road now ascends a narrow defile ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black

... from the afternoon reception at the Embassy. His temper seemed to crave the bleak wet air of the cold streets, and he did not hurry himself. He intended to dine at home that evening, and he anticipated some kind of disagreement with his father. The two men were too much alike not to be congenial, but too combative ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford

... romantic, new-born love in her heart, she was unable to answer for a moment. Her breath was snatched away; but as she struggled to regain it and to speak, a bleak picture of the future without him rose before her eyes. She couldn't give him up, and go on living, after the glimpse he had shown her ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... a bleak, cold March day, in an early year of this century, a woman, scantily clad, led a boy about eight years old, along the high-road towards the old city of Exeter. They crept close to the hedge-side to shelter themselves ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren

... payment began, but it was not, had never been, the real Mary-Clare who had paid. Something had retreated during the bleak years, that which remained fulfilled the daily tasks; kept its own council, laughed at length, and knew a great joy in the baby Noreen, seemed a proof that God was still with her while she held to ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock

... the loveliest residences in all Scotland. It is built on the extremity of a long tongue of land which stretches out between two salt-water lochs—Loch Beg, the "little," and Loch Mhor, the "big" lake. The latter is grand and gloomy, shut in by bleak mountains, which sit all round it, their feet in the water, and their heads in mist and cloud. But Loch Beg is quite different. It has green, cultivated, sloping shores, fringed with trees to the water's edge, and the least ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

... which has just been described, seems indeed a subject worthy of the talents of a skilful painter. The fancy of the artist would represent the dreary and frightful appearance of the ice-covered sea, stretching away as far as the eye could reach, a bleak and boundless waste; the dark and broken clouds driving across the fitful sky; the ship motionless amidst the islands and mountains of ice, her shrouds and sails being fringed and stiffened with the frozen spray. On the deck would appear the form of Hudson himself, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester

... too, in ruin! Its silly wa's the win's are strewin'! An' naething, now, to big anew ane, O' foppage green! An' bleak December's winds ensuin', Baith snell ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... early sensibility to be an unerring sign of a soul formed for the fine arts; and Canova used to say that he was in love when but five years old. But these instances, however, prove nothing. Calf-love, as it is called in the country, is common; and in Italy it may arise earlier than in the bleak and barren regions of Lochynagar. This movement of juvenile sentiment is not, however, love—that strong masculine avidity, which, in its highest excitement, is unrestrained, by the laws alike of God and man. In truth, the feeling of this kind of love is ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... their strange architecture and peculiar ornamentation, suggest some different race as their builders. The present surroundings are of the gloomiest character. The country is barren and desert. The valley in which the ruins are located is high and narrow, but surrounded by bleak hills. The soil is dry and sandy, and almost devoid of vegetation. The cold winds, blowing almost constantly, sweep before them great clouds of sand. A small stream flows through this dreary waste, which, during the rainy season, ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen

... my companion, "that you did not make the acquaintance of our hills during the bleak winter, when their charms were hidden in the snow, and they had nothing better to offer their worshipper than rain and sleet and nipping winds. They would have lost your ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various

... environments of these groups and segments of older civilizations were quite as dissimilar as those among which the nations of Europe developed. The cold and bleak hills of New England no more resemble the rich river bottoms of the South than the sand dunes of Prussia resemble the fertile plains of Andalusia. Geographical differences tend to produce economic differences. If to these be added inherited antagonisms like those of Puritan ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker

... taken by the antelope-stalkers; then, suddenly again, whirled about and began frantically signalling to the column. They saw him quickly swing his battered trumpet from behind his back and raise it to his lips, sounding some call. Floating across the wind, over the bleak and barren prairie, came almost together the muffled sound of two rifle-shots, then the stirring ...
— Under Fire • Charles King

... the bleak garret expressively and shrugged his shoulders again. "I think you are wrong, Mr. Beecot. ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume

... east-and-west valley which opens from the hollow of Luz and closes beyond them in a col over which goes the road. These baths are much higher than Luz, and the way is a steady incline throughout. The valley soon shows itself in marked change from the fertile basin we have quitted; it grows bleak and less cultivated; rubbly slopes of shale and slate cover the hills; the vegetation becomes scanter. We are nearing now the Pic du Midi de Bigorre, the summit seen so plainly from Pau, far eastward of the Pic du Midi d'Ossau. It ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix

... traces of his once celestial strains. 735 Arcadia's sons, the dwellers at the foot Of mount Cyllene, where AEpytus sleeps Intomb'd; a generation bold in fight, And warriors hand to hand; the valiant men Of Pheneus, of Orchomenos by flocks 740 Grazed numberless, of Ripe, Stratia, bleak Enispe; Mantinea city fair, Stymphelus and Parrhasia, and the youth Of Tegea; royal Agapenor these, Ancaeus' offspring, had in sixty ships 745 To Troy conducted; numerous was the crew, And skilled in arms, which every vessel brought, And Agamemnon had with barks himself Supplied them, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer

... down before us in weird, uncanny dances of their own. The evening was full of eerie sounds—the creaking of fir boughs, the whistle of the wind in the tree-tops, the vibrations of strips of dried bark on the rail fences. But we carried summer and sunshine in our hearts, and the bleak unloveliness of the outer world only intensified ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... of the thermometer from 53 degrees, at 6.5 A.M. to 68 degrees in the afternoon in an open verandah. The place, however, is not a cheerful one, for the aspect on every side except to the E. and NE. is dreary, marshes and the usual bleak grassy hills being alone visible. My favourite spot in this direction would be the Nungbree hill, the altitude of which, at least of that part over which the road to the village runs, is 5,439, (or probably 5,700,) temperature of the air being **, and water boiling at 202.5 degrees. ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith

... thus definitely adopted, and no old one left to fall back upon. And Madison Avenue, after dark, shows little to reassure a new playwright who carries in his pocket a note ending with the words, "before deciding to put on another play I have been considering." It was Bleak Street, that night, for young Stewart Canby, and a bleak, ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington

... weather was perfect, but the years and professional cares had done their fatal work, and our lagging spirits refused to respond to the jocund call of the day. Again we approached, with an absurd shrinking, the bleak old house. The bleak old house was not there; nay, it was there, but transformed. It was painted red. Blossoming vines clambered over it; French windows descended to meet its wide verandas; striped awnings sheltered its rooms from the July sun. The lawns, ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan

... Hayne sat there thinking, partly of what the doctor had said, but more of what had occurred during the late afternoon. Midnight was called by the sentries. He went to his door and looked out on the broad, bleak prairie, the moonlight glinting on the tin roofing of the patch of buildings over at the station far across the dreary level and glistening on the patches of snow that here and there streaked the surface. It was all so cold and calm and still. ...
— The Deserter • Charles King

... Poutrincourt was charmed, and forthwith obtained from De Monts a private grant of the surrounding country. He established his demesne here, naming the place Port Royal, while Champlain and De Monts, continuing their way around the Bay of Fundy, came at length to the bleak island of St. Croix, where they founded ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan

... said to have 1000 inhabitants. It is so situated among rocks, that it is almost hidden from view. On a rock opposite the town are the ruins of the fortress Bogus. Now the scenery begins to be a little more diversified, and forests are mingled with the bleak rocks; little valleys appear on both the shores; and the river itself, here divided by an islet, frequently expands to a considerable breadth. The peasants' cottages were larger and better than those in Norway; they ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer

... to taxes been led mainly by those who faced bleak economic futures or the loss of once-powerful positions and declining family status, one could agree with those who say that the reaction of Virginians to the Currency, Sugar, Stamp, or Tea Acts was primarily ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education

... very often, but when it did, a nameless something seemed to cover us, and in passing, left a shadow which turned our happy evenings cold and bleak. ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay

... past the bleak pulpit of saint Mark's, under the railway bridge, past the Queen's theatre: in silence. Hoardings: Eugene Stratton, Mrs Bandmann Palmer. Could I go to see LEAH tonight, I wonder. I said I. Or the Lily of Killarney? Elster Grimes Opera Company. Big powerful ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... delicious. The drive has been more prosaic, more commonplace, or approaching to it, than we have before traveled in this hill country. This October coloring would make far tamer scenery beautiful, but I can fancy it very bleak and dismal when 'blow, blow November's winds,' whereas here, at the Franconian Notch, you feel as it were housed and secured by nature's vast fortresses and defences. The 'Eagle's Cliff' is on one side of you, and Mount Cannon (called so from a resemblance of a rock on the summit ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... resemblance to a lion in Landor's features), John Forster, who afterwards wrote his life, and Charles Dickens, who named a child after him and touched off his merrier turbulent side most charmingly as Leonard Boythom in "Bleak House". But his most constant companion was a Pomeranian dog; in dogs indeed he found comfort all his life, ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas

... Hard and bleak, keen and cruel, Short-hilted, long-shafted, I froze into steel: And the blood of my elder, His hand on the hafts of me, Sprang like a wave In the wind, as the sense Of his strength grew to ecstasy, Glowed like a coal At the throat of the furnace, As he knew me ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley

... heredity had played him; and his attitude toward Gabrielle was much the same. He knew that he couldn't and didn't want to keep pace with her enthusiasms any more than he could keep pace with the baronet's potations. He had been born on a bleak downland, and some of its characteristics had got into the thin, cold humour that was his blood. He was incapable of the generous passions of the people of Roscarna; but I think he was a good man, for all that. Even Mrs. Payne, who had reason ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young

... we hove-to under a close-reefed maintopsail for fear of the ice throughout the long hours of Antarctic blackness. We were in no temper to think of ghosts, and yet though no one had delivered the news authoritatively, it had come by this wild bleak time to be known that Captain Griffiths and Miss Le Grand were engaged. Mrs. Burney told me so one day in the cuddy, and with a wicked flash of her dark eye wondered that people could think of making love ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell

... the orders of one of His Majesty's naval officers, commanding on the southwest coast of America, it was soon ascertained that it was a most dangerous land to approach and to continue near. Its sterility and bleak and forbidding appearance, from all the accounts published respecting it, are scarcely equalled, certainly are not surpassed, in the most inhospitable countries near the North Pole; while ships are suddenly exposed to most violent storms, from which there is little chance of escaping, ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson

... however, that there is a really worthy class which such a qualification would exclude,—ploughmen, labourers, and country mechanics, who reside permanently in humble cottages, the property of the owner of the soil, and who, though their course through life lies on the bleak edge of poverty, are God-fearing, worthy men, at least morally qualified to give, in the election of a teacher, an honest and not unintelligent voice. And yet, hitherto at least, we have failed to see any principle which a British statesman would recognise as legitimate, on which this class ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller

... Fort. This was a squat, ungainly pile of rugged gray stone, symmetrically built, but aggressively ugly in its very regularity, since it insulted the graceful curves of Nature everywhere discernible. It stood nakedly amidst the bare, bleak meadows glittering with pools of still water, with not even the leaf of a creeper to soften its menacing walls, although above them appeared the full-foliaged tops of trees planted in the barrack-yard. It looked as though the grim walls belted a secret orchard. What with ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume

... housie, too, in ruin! Its silly wa's the win's are strewin'! And naething now to big a new ane O' foggage green! And bleak December's winds ensuin' Baith ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus

... does no less befriend that part of the earth from which it removes, in order to temper it, than that it approaches to favour it with its beams. Its kind, beneficent aspect fertilises all it shines upon. This change produces that of the seasons, whose variety is so agreeable. The spring silences bleak frosty winds, brings forth blossoms and flowers, and promises fruits. The summer yields rich harvests. The autumn bestows the fruits promised by the spring. The winter, which is a kind of night wherein man refreshes and rests himself, ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon

... the traveller, "we visited the far-famed Niger or Quorra, which flows by the city about a mile from our residence, and were greatly disappointed at the appearance of this celebrated river. Bleak, rugged rocks rose abruptly from the centre of the stream, causing strong ripples and eddies on its surface. It is said that, a few miles above Boussa, the river is divided into three branches by two small, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne

... not deny that, looking round upon the dreary region, and seeing nothing but bleak fields and naked trees, hills obscured by fogs, and flats covered with inundations, he did for some time suffer melancholy to prevail upon him, and wished himself again ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... miles, the road winds through a bleak valley called Smithem Bottom, till recently the favourite resort of the cockney gunners for rabbit-shooting; but whether from the noise of their harmless double-barrel Nocks, or the more dreadful carnage of the Croydon poachers, these animals are now exceedingly ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... a haunter of the tree-clad valleys, of the prattling brooks with the meadowsweet drooping over them, and of the lone, bleak hills where the great ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce

... little streams hurrying along, swollen with the January thaw which had taken all the snow from the hills. She had heard her elders say about her so many times that she could not stand the cold, that she shivered at the very thought of cold weather, and certainly nothing could look colder than that bleak country into which the train was now slowly ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield

... extra-planetaries on a bleak, friendless world like Irwadi, he'd regularly gambled away and drank away his monthly paycheck in the interstellar settlement which the Irwadians had established in the Old Quarter of Irwadi City. But last month he'd managed to come ...
— Equation of Doom • Gerald Vance

... my face, When thinking what bleak fate befell The only sister of our race— A thing too horrible ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various

... On the bleak mountain thus I was the pitifulest atom of loneliest humanity, yet felt no loneliness. The face of the earth frowned in angry fury, the awfulness of the raging elements dwarfed all else to utter annihilation. But even at such a time, coming all too seldom in the lives of most of us, when standing ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle

... bleak for even child-comfort, Aunt 'Ritta, the cook, let us heat bricks in the kitchen fire, and showed us how to wrap them in rags to keep in the warmth. Clad in my red cloak, a wadded hood of the same color tied over my ears, and my feet ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland

... the capital is much like many another modern city, somewhat bleak, cosmopolitan of population, with strong national lines of demarkation, and a caste system almost as fixed as that of India, but with none of the romance the reader of Prescott, Mme. Calderon, and the rest expects. Since anarchy fell upon the land, even the Sunday procession ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck

... to say that can, at this advanced stage of the trial, ward off that sentence of death, for I might as well hurl my complaint (if I had one) at the orange trees of the sunny south, or the tall pine trees of the bleak north, as now to speak to the question why sentence of death should not be passed upon me according to the law of the land; but I do protest loudly against the injustice of that sentence. I have been brought to trial upon a charge ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various

... me at her plight, So suddenly confessed: Dismissing late distaste for life, I craved its bleak unrest. ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy

... ivrywhere. In anny part iv this fair land iv ours it shud be th' right iv anny man to get a divoorce, with alimony, simply be goin' befure a Justice iv th' Peace an' makin' an affydavit that th' lady's face had grown too bleak f'r his taste. Be Hivens, I'd go farther. Rather than have people endure this sarvichood I'd let anny man escape be jumpin' th' conthract. All he'd have to do if I was r-runnin' this Governmint wud be to put some clothes in ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne

... Sarah's words had struck the key-note to the feelings of the whole company. In the heart of every one arose a strong desire to sink out of this cold, bleak, terrifying open air into the comfortable motherly arms of the encircling waters. For a few minutes Captain Jim Hubbell had experienced a sense of satisfaction at finding himself once more upon the deck of a vessel floating upon the open sea. He felt that he was in ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton

... the Dnieper, the Volga, and their the Euxine or other seas. tributary streams, (30) which form so many (54) natural outlets into the Euxine or other seas; (44) while the cold and Lastly, the cold bleak plains shivering plains which stretch stretching towards Archangel and towards Archangel and the shores towards the shores of the White of the White Sea are (48) covered Sea, and covered with immense with immense forests ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott

... Mountains crosses the Canadian border another range edges in toward it from the south. Between these ranges lies a space of from twenty to forty miles; and midway between them flows a clear, wonderful river through dense forests. Into the river empty other, tributary, rivers rising in the bleak and lofty fastnesses of the mountains to right and left. Between them, in turn, run spur systems of mountains only a little less lofty than the parent ranges. Thus the ground plan of the whole country ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White

... I might wander, It should be toward the sun; The blessed South Should fill my mouth With ripeness just begun. For bleak hills, bare, With stunted, spare, And scrubby, piney trees, Her gardens rare, And vineyards fair, And her rose-scented breeze. For fearful blast, Skies overcast, And sudden blare and scare Long, stormless moons, And placid noons, And—all ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... limbs; he took three times as long as he once would to mount each well-known ridge, and as he went he glanced backward from time to time to know if he were pursued. Away up the head of the little branch were the Shoshones, bleak, forbidding; no enemies were there, and the Park was beyond it all—on, on he must go. But as he climbed with shaky limbs, and short uncertain steps, the west wind brought the odor of Death Gulch, that fearful little valley where everything was dead, where ...
— The Biography of a Grizzly • Ernest Seton-Thompson

... the turn now for the young people to be happy. Cold and bleak it is here on the Fife coast, but they are among roses and sunshine and so God bless them, I say, and keep us and every one from cutting short their turn of happiness. You had your bride time, Madame, and when Angus McAllister first took me to his cottage in Strathmoyer, ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr

... a solitary, lonesome, dreary-looking spot on that bleak winter day; and life inside those tiny houses was restricted and full of limitations. Denas thought of them all, but she weighed and measured the life without taking into account the love that sat on each hearthstone—the love that turned the simple houses into homes and the plain, hard-working ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... to-day if she knows that she is shut up alone in that nearly empty house. How the storm will beat upon Allan's windows all the winter! How the wind will howl around the big, desolate place! And think of the real Theodora waiting among all kinds of rude surroundings on that bleak Fife coast. There must have been a mistake with that girl, uncle. She was meant for lofty rooms and splendid clothing, and to be waited upon hand and foot. Don't you think souls must often wonder at the ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr

... stay, e'en as thou art, All cold, and all serene— I still might press thy silent heart, And where thy smiles have been! While e'en thy chill, bleak corse I have, Thou seemest still mine own; But there I lay thee in thy grave— And I am ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various

... remarkably wide streets and a number of well-built churches, not all of the Establishment, however. The solid old houses, consisting entirely of the local stone, are not uninteresting and are in keeping with the dour and bleak scenery of the island. The mistake of importing alien red bricks of a most aggressive hue has not been made here. Those that flame from the hill slope above Portland station only succeed in emphasizing the general bleakness of their surroundings. ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes

... gates of the Orgreaves, and gazed at the facade of the house—not at her window, because that was at the side—and it was all dark. The Orgreaves had gone to bed: he had expected it. Even this perfectly futile reconnaissance had calmed him. While dressing in the bleak sunrise he had looked at the oval lawn of the Orgreaves' garden, and had seen Johnnie idly kicking a football on it. Johnnie had probably spent the evening with her; and it was nothing to Johnnie! She was ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... and escape. Far from morbid naturally, she did her best to deny the thought, and so simple and unartificial was her type of mind that for weeks together she would wholly lose it. Then, suddenly it would return upon her with a rush of bleak reality. It was not only in her mind; it existed apart from any mere mood; a separate fear that walked alone; it came and went, yet when it went—went only to watch her from another point of view. It was in ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood

... Here, on one bleak, late November Monday morning, in front of the new school-house, stood Bart Ridgeley, who appeared then and there pursuant to a stipulation made with him, to keep their first school. He undertook it with great doubt ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle

... of hills on every side, all covered with moss, ferns, and heather, with scarcely a tree of any kind to be seen, except those that fringed the shores of the lake down in the valley. The view from the summit was very extended, but the wind blew there so bleak and cold that the whole party were very glad to leave it and come down, after a very brief survey ...
— Rollo in Scotland • Jacob Abbott

... spurs, but none of the latter was of great height. The towering peaks rose more to the north and west. There was variety and yet sameness in the vast undulating expanse, with its wealth of wood, of rocks, some bleak and dark of color, and others fringed with vegetation, of swelling hills, many of which elsewhere would have been called mountains, and beautiful valleys, with numerous streams hidden through most of their flow, all seeking an outlet ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis

... serious and absurd. With so free a design, no thought that occurred to him would need to be dismissed without expression; and he could draw at full length the portrait of his own bedevilled soul, and of the bleak and blackguardly world which was the theatre of his exploits and sufferings. If the reader can conceive something between the slap-dash inconsequence of Byron's "Don Juan" and the racy humorous gravity and brief noble touches that distinguish the vernacular poems of Burns, he will ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Little or no tobacco has ever been raised in those states, while corn has been one of the chief products. In Virginia, where tobacco has been the principal crop, the land has deteriorated, the rich soil has been exhausted, and become more sterile than were the bleak hills of New England when the Pilgrim reached her shores; while in New England, where corn has been produced in abundance, and but very little tobacco, the soil has been improved until it has become almost or quite as rich as that of Virginia was at any time since its settlement. In this day the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various

... and Challis, looking somewhat out of place, smoking a heavy wooden pipe in the disused, bleak drawing-room, waited, almost silent, until his visitor should come to ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford

... the vast plains and prairies: bushwood and herbage—the dry grass—the tall reed—the twining parasite—or the giant of the forest, charred and blackened, but still proudly erect—alike attest and bewail the conquering fire's onward march; and the bleak desert, silent, waste, and lifeless, which it leaves behind seems forever doomed to desolation: vain fear! the rain descends once more upon the dry and thirsty soil, and from that very hour which seemed the date of cureless ruin, Nature puts forth ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes

... and noble Bosch—pride of all beauty-loving Hollanders. The palace with its brilliant mosaic floors, its frescoed ceilings, and gorgeous ornaments, filled Ben with delight; he was surprised that some of the churches were so very plain—elaborate sometimes in external architecture but bare and bleak within with their blank, ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge

... The blueberry plains looked bleak and bare enough now. It had rained incessantly for days, growing ever colder and colder as it rained. The sun came out at last, but it shone in a wintry sort of way,—like a duty smile,—as if light, not heat, were its object. A keen wind ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin

... interrogation which often looked out of her eyes. They had passed Boulogne, and through the dawn, vague as an opal, appeared a low range of hills, and as these receded, the landscape flattened out into a bleak, morose plain. ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore

... for the capture of the Holy City were in preparation. I have a grateful recollection of this building, for in it the military attaches and I stayed before the Official Entry into Jerusalem, and its roof saved us from one inclement night on the bleak hills. On the 20th November the Turks did their best to keep the place under German ownership. The hill on which it stands was well occupied by men under cover of thick stone walls, the convent gardens on the opposite side of the highway was packed with Turkish infantry, and across the deep ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey

... was in the bleak December, And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor. Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore— For the rare and radiant ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe

... Aleppo is about 120 English miles. And this journey added to discomfort, hardship, and to hardship—lack of food for the mission party. It necessitated travelling three miles into the hills, and when a lofty bleak plain was reached, the muleteers made it clear that they were to ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking

... other rivers that run between bleak, rocky banks—banks a thousand feet high, whose bald, naked "bluffs" frown at each other across the deep chasm, in the bottom of which roars the troubled water. Often these banks extend for hundreds of miles, so steep at all points that one cannot ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid

... got on the roof first, and handed up the ladies; and they all stood looking out over the country. It was not a cold, bleak, snowy day, as Christmas in northern latitudes has a right to be. The winter had been mild—one of a series of mild winters, overturning the old traditions of frosts and snow-storms that lasted for months, and to a great extent stopped ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various

... fire, her Cottage-home; Yet o'er the moorland will she roam In weather rough and bleak; And when against the wind she strains, Oh! might I kiss the mountain rains That sparkle on ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth

... branch - the Plymouth Company - also sent out an, expedition, and tried to found a colony at the mouth of the Kennebec River. But it was a failure. Some of the adventurers were so discouraged with the cold and bleak appearance of the land that they sailed home again in the ship which had brought them out. Only about forty-five or so stayed on. The winter was long and cold, and they were so weary of it, so homesick and miserable, that when in the spring a ship came out with provisions ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall

... thus seasonably into a good state of cultivation. Mr. Griswold is a Vermonter, a practical farmer, and an energetic man, and doubtless turns his agricultural experience to good account, great as is the difference between the bleak hills of New England, and this equatorial region. His lady, an interesting woman, is just recovering ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge

... house on that beautiful stretch of Michigan Avenue which overlooked the lake. But the real insult was that this publishing house, instead of having a building, or at least a floor, all to itself, simply had a place penned off in a bleak, dirty building such as one who had done work in sociological research instinctively associated with a box factory. And the thing which fairly trailed her visions in the dust was that the partition penning them off did not extend to the ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell

... inhabitants; and lastly, by a general air of poverty which all the opulence of manufactures cannot remove." He considers that "at an uncertain period during the occupancy of the Lacies, the first principle of population" (in these forests) commenced; it was found that these wilds, bleak and barren as they were, might be occupied to some advantage in breeding young and depasturing lean "cattle, which were afterwards fattened in the lower domains. Vaccaries, or great upland pastures, were laid out for this purpose; ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts

... faded out, and the little figure, too, had vanished, leaving that one breast desolate, save when a lightsome shadow flitted across its ever-verdant memory. The summer cottage looked dreary, with its closed blinds, and the autumn leaves rustling about it in the bleak winds; but the little tombstone still gleamed in the sunlight, that cast a pleasant and warm halo upon it, and the birds and squirrels sung and leaped about in the beauteous grove as blithesome and glad as if life's rolling ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith

... dak-bungalow standing on a high stone plinth. The untidy khansamah—the custodian of the rest-home—hurried on to the verandah to greet the unexpected visitor and show his "boy" where to put the sahib's bedding and baggage in a bleak room with a cane-bottomed wooden bed ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly

... wind doth blow, Bleak in the morning early; All the hills are covered with snow, And winter's ...
— The Real Mother Goose • (Illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright)

... bleak, stern hour, whose severe moments I would annihilate, is passed by others in ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury

... to bed," snapped Scrap; and it sounded as moving, as forlorn, as that line spoken years and years ago by an actress playing the part of Poor Jo in dramatized version of Bleak House—"I'm always moving on," said Poor Jo in this play, urged to do so by a policeman; and Mrs. Fisher, then a girl, had laid her head on the red velvet parapet of the front row of the dress ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim

... with my hand in thine, Grave and low, and sweet and slow, As the wood bird over head, Brooding notes, half sung half said,— "In the world so bleak and wide, Hearts make Edens of their own; Wilt thou linger by my side,— Wilt thou live for me alone, Making bright the winter weather, Thou ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean

... 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 ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... Irish girl went with the last snow, and on one of those midsummer-like days that sometimes fall in early April to our yet bleak and desolate zone, our hearts sang of Africa and golden joys. A Libyan longing took us, and we would have chosen, if we could, to bear a strand of grotesque beads, or a handful of brazen gauds, and traffic them for some sable maid with crisped locks, whom, uncoffling from the captive train ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells

... March!" said Merrihew, his thought traveling back to his own bleak country, where winter is so long and summer ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath

... Marie. Do, dear, wish it, for I'm not successful. I played hard at my game, because playing it made me forget other things. Almost anybody playing a game long enough becomes half-expert at it. But successful? No, no, dear. So far I seem to have travelled only unending roads through bleak countries; and I'm dreading to ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly

... Venice an appreciation that will live in my mind with every delight of that dearest place in the world. But all the same you remain for me a dearest of friends, whether I see you framed by your Venice, or brightening up our bleak London, should you come there. In Venice, however, should I live and you be there next autumn, it will go hard with me if I do ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting

... Day by day we perfect ourselves in the art of seeing nature more favourably. We learn to live with her, as people learn to live with fretful or violent spouses: we dwell lovingly on what is good, and shut our eyes against all that is bleak or inharmonious. We learn, also, to come to each place in the right spirit. The traveller, as Brantome quaintly tells us, 'fait des discours en soi pour ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the land opposite, where there had once been a forest fire, the red weeds that follow conflagrations grew strong and rank in the summer time and little saplings sprouted up among the charred and wrecked trunks of the brule. But at this time it all looked very bleak and desolate. ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick

... a bleak Day. Hear the Rain, how he pours, and the Hail, how he rattles; and see the Snow, how he drifts along, and of the Mud, how deep he is! Ah the poor Fishwife, it is stuck fast in the Mire; it has dropped its Basket of Fishes; and its Hands have been cut by the Scales as it seized some ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... sank, he gave a stroke or two down the river, and disappeared after her. This was followed by another cry of horror and despair, for somehow, the idea of desolation which marks, at all times, a deep, over-swollen torrent, heightened by the bleak mountain scenery around them, and the dark, angry voracity of the river where they had sunk, might have impressed the spectators with utter hopelessness as to the fate of those now engulfed in its ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton

... sampling the impromptu dessert, assured his hostess that her husband's eulogy had been only too moderate. He vowed he had never eaten such apple sauce. But Mrs. Merriam still looked bleak. She knew she could make a better deep-dish peach pie than Mrs. Allen could. And, then, to give the minister apple sauce and nabiscos!—the first time he had eaten at her table ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin

... night of great anxiety and fear, they left Sally's room while it was yet dark. It was bitterly cold; the winter stars shone keen and glittering in the bleak sky. Hetty threw on a heavy cloak, ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous

... Glenister, accompanied by these two, slipped out into the whirling storm, and a half-hour later the rest followed. One by one the Vigilantes left, the blackness blotting them up an arm's-length from the door, till at last the big, bleak warehouse echoed hollowly to the voice of the wind ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach

... again no more the woodland maids, Nor pastoral songs delight—Farewell, ye shades— No toils of ours the cruel god can change, Tho' lost in frozen deserts we should range; Tho' we should drink where chilling Hebrus flows, Endure bleak winter blasts, and Thracian snows: Or on hot India's plains our flocks should feed, Where the parch'd elm declines his sickening head, Beneath fierce-glowing Cancer's fiery beams, Far from cool breezes and refreshing ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson

... traversed a distance of sixty miles. He succeeded at length in retracing his course, and anchored on the southern shore of Frobisher's Bay, in the Countess of Warwick's Sound. But the desire for gold, the bleak winds, barren shores, and drifting icebergs, all combined to dispel the hopes of making a successful settlement, and the adventurers turned their faces homeward, carrying once more a cargo of ore, which proved, like the first, to be ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews

... the beacon on Pendle Hill in Lancashire. Two were stationed on either side of the north-eastern extremity of the mountain. One looked over the castled heights of Clithero; the woody eminences of Bowland; the bleak ridges of Thornley; the broad moors of Bleasdale; the Trough of Bolland, and Wolf Crag; and even brought within his ken the black fells overhanging Lancaster. The other tracked the stream called Pendle Water, almost from its source amid the neighbouring hills, and ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... clumsily busying himself about the preparation of an illy-cooked meal, and later sitting smoking in the desolate silence. She saw him go forth to his daily toil with all the lightness gone from his step, to return at nightfall, with a heaviness born of more than mere physical fatigue, to the same bleak bareness. ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett

... pale and bleak. Madame Desvarennes opened her window and cooled her burning brow in the fresh morning air. The birds were awake, and were singing on the trees in ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet

... greenroom in the Westervelt, the reading took place on the open stage, which was bleak and draughty. The company sat in a funereal semicircle, with the author, the star, and the manager in a short line facing them. All the men retained their overcoats, for the morning was miserably raw, and at Helen's positive command kept their heads covered; and the supernumerary women sat ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland

... saw Diego Ramirez and the Iledefonsos, with an interval of a fortnight between the sightings—a cluster of bleak rocks, standing out of surf and broken water, taking the relentless battery of huge seas that swept them from base to summit. Once, in clear weather, we marked a blue ridge of land far to the norrard, and Old Martin and Vootgert nearly came to blows as to whether ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone

... deserted," says one, as he taps on the door a second time. "No, that cannot be!" returns the other, peering through a small window into the barrack-like room. It was from this window the light shone, and, being a bleak November night, a wood fire blazed on the great hearth, shedding its lurid glows over everything around. It is the pale, saline light of wreckwood. A large binnacle lamp, of copper, hung from the centre of ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams

... ever find out we may see for ourselves already.—A little tribe of valiant fair-haired men, whether all Teutons, or, as Mr. Latham thinks, Sclavonians with Teuton leaders, still intimately connected with our own English race both by their language and their laws, struggling for existence on the bleak brown bogs and moors, sowing a little barley and flax, feeding a few rough cattle, breeding a few great black horses; generation after generation fighting their way southward, as they exhausted the barren northern ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley

... in hand, Telling the thoughts tongue could not speak; Was it unmanly that our eyes O'erflowed with love upon the cheek? I hear thy cheery voice outspeak, 'Courage, the months will quickly fly, And ere November chill and bleak We meet at ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... that lies In ten degrees of more indulgent skies, Nor at the coarseness of our heaven repine, Though o'er our heads the frozen Pleiads shine: 'Tis liberty that crowns Britannia's isle, And makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains smile. 140 Others with towering piles may please the sight, And in their proud aspiring domes delight; A nicer touch to the stretched canvas give, Or teach their animated rocks to live: 'Tis Britain's care ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville

... as most of the Macleods of that family had been. And if you ask about the graves of Roderick and Ronald, what is one to say? They are known, and yet unknown. The two lads were in one of the Highland regiments that served in the Crimea. They both lie buried on the bleak plains outside Sevastopol. And if the memorial stones put up to them and their brother officers are falling into ruin and decay—if the very graves have been rifled—how is England to help that? England is the poorest country in the world. There was a talk some ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black



Words linked to "Bleak" :   inhospitable, cutting, bare, stark, desolate, cold, raw, barren, black



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com