This valley is narrow enough to be called a gorge, and the stony hills on either side presented a picture of utter barrenness and desolation.

As soon as there are no needs and illusion we become conscious of the absolute barrenness and emptiness of existence.

It is impossible not to be affected at thus meeting with these little unsheltered things, at the edge of eternal barrenness.

Not a shrub or a tree relieved their frightful barrenness.

Such dominions fill an Englishman with envious wonder; but when he surveys the naked mountain, and treads the quaking moor; and wanders over the wild regions of gloomy barrenness, his wonder may continue, but his envy ceases.

But the rest of the speakers unite in condemning the extolled simplicity of the French plots, as actual barrenness, compared to the variety and copiousness of the English stage; and their authors' limiting the attention of the audience and interest of the piece to a single principal personage, is censured as poverty of imagination, when opposed to the diversification of characters exhibited in the dramatis personae of the English poets.

And the image of the immense barrenness of her lonely future made the tears gush from her eyes.

[Footnote 19: 'He knew the narrowly religious, the mental barrenness of the poor dissenters, the people of the slums that he observed so carefully, and many of those on the borders of the Bohemia of which he at least was an initiate, and he was soaked and stained, as he might himself have said, with the dull drabs of the lower middle class that he hated.

The lovely creatures twine and nestle and lay their glowing faces to the very earth beneath withered leaves, and what seemed mere barrenness becomes fresh and fragrant beauty.

for which a miraculous barrenness was sent on all the females of Abimelech's tribe, and was bought off only by splendid presents to the favoured deceiver.

The man who now stands before you is devoted to perpetual barrenness and blast!

In the spring of the great age of English song Spenser's note is like the voice of autumn, not the fruitful autumn of cornfield and orchard, but a premature barrenness of wet and fallen leaves

The lonely rock rose in solitary barrenness, a bleak and mournful monument of some rude caprice of Nature, which has thrown it out to stand in cheerless desolation amidst the broad waters of the Atlantic.

Thousands upon thousands of acres are lying in comparative barrenness, which, by adequate shelter, might be converted into productive fields.

The adventures of Ulysses in the Odysseis are imitated in the first six books of Virgil's Æneas, and though the accidents are not the same (which would have argued him of a servile copying, and total barrenness of invention), yet the seas were the same in which both the heroes wandered, and Dido cannot be denied to be the poetical daughter of Calypso.

It frequently happens, that a design which, when considered at a distance, gave flattering hopes of facility, mocks us in the execution with unexpected difficulties; the mind which, while it considered it in the gross, imagined itself amply furnished with materials, finds sometimes an unexpected barrenness and vacuity, and wonders whither all those ideas are vanished, which a little before seemed struggling for emission.