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This belief was strengthened by my noting that Alvarez was frequently absent from home, and this too in the evening, when he was generally wont to shun the bleakness of the English air, an atmosphere, by the by, which I once heard a Frenchman wittily compare to Augustus placed between Horace and Virgil; namely, in the /bon mot/ of the emperor himself, /between sighs and tears/.
It seemed absolutely necessary that somewhere some woman like herself should be compelled to scale this ascent, and she one of those girls in the valley, for instance, might not be nearly so well able as herself to face this bleakness. Thus she might preserve those sportive triflers in their everlasting childhood by the warning of her sad devotion.
My American friends were full of kindly scorn when I announced that I was going to Canada. 'A country without a soul! they cried, and pressed books upon me, to befriend me through that Philistine bleakness. Their commiseration unnerved me, but I was heartened by a feeling that I was, in a sense, going home, and by the romance of journeying.
After two hours spent on the railroad, the train entered a district with the bleakness, but not the beauty, of the neighbourhood of mountains; the fresh September breeze was laden with smoke, and stations stood thick upon the line. As the train dashed up to one of these, a flag was seen waving, and the shout of 'Cheveleigh, Cheveleigh road! greeted them.
Their aspect was more melancholy than usual, whether it were that the bleakness of winter seemed pressing close upon the bleakness of lonely age, or that there was an added weariness in the droop of the thin shoulders and the fixed eyes it was certain that the picture had gained a shadow of depression. For once, Cynthia was not thinking of them as she drew near.
But all this wild and unreal beauty melted away to the oncoming of the dusk; and when the sun was gone and the twilight had put a new quality of bleakness into the air, when the sea rolled in a welter of dark shadows, one sombre fold shouldering another a very swarming of restless giant phantoms when the shining of the stars low down in the unfathomable obscurity of the north and south quarters gave to the ocean in those directions a frightful immensity of surface, making you feel as though you viewed the scene from the centre of the firmament, and were gazing down the spangled slopes of infinity oh, then it was that the full spirit of the solitude of this pale and silent seat of ice took possession of me.
He always had preferred the untamed stretches that lay beyond Stow Lake. Here, as a young boy, he had organized scouting parties when it was still a remote, almost an unforested sand pile. Later, when the trees had conquered its bleakness, Helen and he had spent many a Saturday afternoon tramping briskly through the pines to the ocean. How long ago that seemed, and yet how very near!
Bleakness, wind, squalid streets, a car full of heterogeneous people, some very dull, most very common; a laborious jog-trot all the way. But to redeem it all with the pleasantness of beauty and the charm of significance, this laurel branch.
He spread out his arms in a gesture indicative of horror at the bleakness of the surroundings; at the mournfulness of the decaying village; the dreary hopelessness of the mouldering church and tombs. "I was thinking, my friend," he said. "That was all. It is not surprising ... that one should think." Colville heaved a sigh and said nothing.
Money was spent by them to preserve the family traditions. Nothing else counted. Everything was sacrificed to the gods of yesterday. Little Anne Merryman had shivered all her short life in the bleakness of this domestic ideal. "Why can't I have butter on my bread?" she had demanded in her long-legged schoolgirl days, when she had worn her fair hair in a fat braid down her back.
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