What is "drear"

Usage examples of "drear".

Drear shadows drooped and thickened above the Pass of Dariel,--that terrific gorge which like a mere thread seems to hang between the toppling frost-bound heights above and the black abysmal depths below,--clouds, fringed ominously with lurid green and white, drifted heavily yet swiftly across the jagged peaks where, looming largely out of the mist, the snow-capped crest of Mount Kazbek rose coldly white against the darkness of the threatening sky.

Returning from drear Hell, He chose a lonely seat of unhewn stone, Blackened with lichens, on a herbless plain.

Since she can mimic not his lips, more dear Than those for whose disdain she pined away Into a shadow of all sounds:--a drear Murmur, between their songs, is all the woodmen hear.

Far off and faint as a requiem plaint Floats the deep-toned voice of the mystic bell Piercingly -- thrillingly, Icily -- chillingly, Near -- and more near, Drearer -- and more drear, Soundeth the wild, weird, ding, dong, dell!

I dwelt in the drear expanses of the Cactus Mountains, employed as a common labourer at the celebrated Norton Mine, whose discovery by an aged prospector some years before had turned the surrounding region from a nearly unpeopled waste to a seething cauldron of sordid life.

Are not thy views of unregretted death Drear, comfortless, and horrible?

Gathers upon the sea, and vast waves burst, I turn from the drear aspect to the home Of Earth and its deep woods, where, interspersed, When winds blow loud, pines make sweet melody.

Though she had slept late, in fact till noon and something after, her sleep had been queerly haunted and unhappy, she could not remember how or why, and she had awakened already ennuye, with a mind incoherently oppressed, without relish for the promise of the day--in a mood altogether as drear as the daylight that waited upon her unclosing eyes.

MOONLIGHT Even as the moon grows queenlier in mid-space When the sky darkens, and her cloud-rapt car Thrills with intenser radiance from afar,-- So lambent, lady, beams thy sovereign grace When the drear soul desires thee.

Vess drives out of the redwoods into a drizzling dawn, first iron gray and then somewhat paler, through coastal meadows the same drear shades of metal as the sky, back onto Highway 101, into forests again, but of pine and spruce this time, out of Humboldt County into Del Norte County, ever more isolated terrain, eventually leaving 101 for a route that leads north-northeast.

Folly sing a song to cheer All poor rogues that languish here, Doomed in dismal dungeon drear, Doomed in dungeon dim.

Where they had been was now a drear line of weary factory buildings, their lower windows cinderblocked or bricked up and those beyond reach of vandals' stones painted over in patchwork squares of gray and faded blue.

I did not see my life pass before my eyes, but rather saw the sum of my life imprinted upon that unimportant landscape, and understood that in this cunning design with its drear prospect and trivial monster, all the wastage and impotence of my days, all my misused intellect and defrauded ambitions, all my torpid compulsions and arousals, all my puerile dreams and dissipated hopes and contemptible passions had found their proper resolution.

No refuge in the drear immensity, Where lies the Past, wreck'd 'neath a sandy sea, Where o'er its glories blighting billows roll.

They looked out over a drear landscape of moor and heather, marked here and there by columns of smoke rising, the marks of the harrying parties coming down on one clump of wretched bothies or another.