|
|
|
More "Firmament" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in fearful mockery where one moment before had stood the proud pinnacle. An enormous mass of rocks fell into the lake below, and the vapors rose in a rival cloud. High in the firmament they curled and twisted, their wreathing forms together telling a ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... treasures of ingots and old coin, lest it should be demanded at their hands for the defence of their country. The profanation and plunder of the monasteries and churches excited the most tragic complaints. The dome of St. Sophia itself, the earthly heaven, the second firmament, the vehicle of the cherubim, the throne of the glory of God, [71] was despoiled of the oblation of ages; and the gold and silver, the pearls and jewels, the vases and sacerdotal ornaments, were most wickedly converted to ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... beer-barrel on skids. His face, that infallible index of the mind, presented a vast expanse, unfurrowed by any of those lines and angles which disfigure the human countenance with what is termed expression. Two small gray eyes twinkled feebly in the midst, like two stars of lesser magnitude in a hazy firmament, and his full-fed cheeks, which seemed to have taken toll of everything that went into his mouth, were curiously mottled and streaked with dusky red, like a ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... almightie Jove, in wrathfull mood,[*] To wreake the guilt of mortall sins is bent, Hurles forth his thundring dart with deadly food, 75 Enrold in flames, and smouldring dreriment, Through riven cloudes and molten firmament; The fierce threeforked engin making way Both loftie towres and highest trees hath rent, And all that might his angry passage stay, 80 And shooting in the earth, casts ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... 1602, of Enderby about 1605, of Thornby about 1616, were all accomplished by a lessening of the land under the plough. Moore, writing in 1656, says: 'Surely they may make men as soon believe there is no sun in the firmament as that usually depopulation and decay of tillage will not follow inclosure in our inland countyes.'" (p. 117). Letters from the Council were written in 1630 complaining of "'enclosures and convercons tending as they generallie doe unto depopulation.... ...
— The Enclosures in England - An Economic Reconstruction • Harriett Bradley
... for a period of years, it was instructive as well as ornamental. Three of the bedrooms were on the ground floor and were small apartments. The upstair rooms were much larger, were situated in the roof, and were lit by skylight windows which commanded a limited view of the firmament above but none whatever of the green earth below. These upper rooms were reached by an almost perpendicular staircase surmounted by a trap door, a mode of access convenient enough for the young and active, but not suitable for those of us who had passed their meridian. ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... Jove, and for consent Thundering he shook the firmament; Our umpire Time shall have his way, With Care I let the creature stay: Let business vex him, avarice blind, Let doubt and knowledge rack his mind, 90 Let error act, opinion speak, And want afflict, and ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... dull form of erroneous thinking. They exist very easily in the same room with the microscope and even in railway carriages: what banishes them in the vacuum in gentlemen and lady passengers. How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth, from the farthest firmament to the tender bosom of the mother who nourished us, make poetry for a mind that had no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... desired to see with my own eyes, and hear with mine own ears, this adoration of the Christ, at which my teachers scoff. But I was caught up in a mighty wave of organ-music that surged from this low earth heavenwards to break against the footstool of God in the crystal firmament. And suddenly I knew what my soul was pining for. I knew the meaning of that restless craving that has always devoured me, though I spake not thereof, those strange hauntings, those dim perceptions—in a flash I ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... into the sky, as into an enormous furnace. Gigantic rolling clouds of flame were sweeping before the roaring wind like some vast prairie fire across the firmament. As they passed overhead, the reflection of the lurid light on them was smitten earthwards, and passed with them, making everything it traversed clear as noon—the lion on the swinging sign of the public-house just across the water, the delicate ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... when it began to become dark, we walked on the terrace to enjoy the appearance of the firmament, glittering with ten million stars; to which a slight touch of early frost gave tenfold lustre. As we gazed on this splendid scene, Miss Geddes, I think, was the first to point out to our admiration a shooting or falling star, which, she said, drew a long train after it. Looking to ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... once, for us Those deathless clusters flung, the self-same mind, With all its ancient elements of might, Among us now its ancient glory hides; But, from its smothered power, and buried wealth, A golden future sparkles, decked from deeper founts, A new and lovelier firmament, A thousand realms of song undreamed of now, That shall make Romance a forgotten world, And the young heaven of Antiquity, With all its starry groups, ...
— The Bride of Fort Edward • Delia Bacon
... be, and made heaven and earth, and light for to shine, and departed light and darkness, and called light, day, and darkness, night; and so was made eventide and morrowtide one day, that had no morrowtide. The second day He made the firmament between waters, and departed waters that were under the firmament fro the waters that were above the firmament, and called the firmament heaven. The third day He gathered waters that be under the firmament into one place and made the earth unheled, and named the gathering of waters, seas, and ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... on vit briller d'un eclat ephemere Le front tout radieux d'un ministre influent; Mais pour faire palir l'etoile d'Angleterre, Un SOLEIL tout nouveau parut au firmament, Et ce soleil du peuple franc Admire de l'Europe entiere Sur la terre est nomme BONAPARTE ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... to live in Him, whatever else it may mean—and it means a great deal more—is most certainly to live in His love. A man can as soon pass out of the atmosphere in which he breathes as he can pass out of the love of God. We can no more travel beyond that great over-arching firmament of everlasting love which spans all the universe than a star set in the blue heavens can transcend the liquid arch and get beyond its range. 'There is no difference' in the fact that all men, unthankful and evil as they are, are grasped and held in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... sluggard if he chanced to nap. So all night long we watched, until the sun Stood high in heaven, and his blazing beams Smote us. A sudden whirlwind then upraised A cloud of dust that blotted out the sky, And swept the plain, and stripped the woodlands bare, And shook the firmament. We closed our eyes And waited till the heaven-sent plague should pass. At last it ceased, and lo! there stood this maid. A piercing cry she uttered, sad and shrill, As when the mother bird beholds her ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... Europe. Like most of the lesser apartments, it is lined with white Italian marble, and in spite of its enormous dimensions the roof is unsupported by pillars. Ancient flags captured in war decorate the walls, and in the middle of the marble floor is a representation of the firmament inlaid in copper. The Nieuwe Kerk (St Catherine's), in which the sovereigns of Holland are crowned, is a fine Gothic building dating from 1408. Internally it is remarkable for its remains of ancient stained glass, fine carvings and interesting monuments, including one to the famous Admiral ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... was devoted to observation of the heavenly bodies, it is not surprising that they should have mapped out the apparent course of the moon and the visible planets in their nightly tour of the heavens, and that they should have divided the stars of the firmament into more or less arbitrary groups or constellations. That they did so is evidenced by various sculptured representations of constellations corresponding to signs of the zodiac which still ornament the ceilings ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... it dropt the flagstone. One could read That Agathe lay there; but still the girl Lay by him, like a precious and pale pearl, That from the deep sea-waters had been rent— Like a star fallen from the firmament! He hides the grave-tools in an aged porch, To westward of the solitary church; And he hath clasp'd around the melting waist The beautiful, dead girl: his cheek is press'd To hers—Life warming the cold chill ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... SUN.—A photometric experiment of Huygens, resumed by Wollaston, a short time before his death, teaches us that 20,000 stars the same size as Sirius, the most brilliant in the firmament, would need to be agglomerated to shed upon our globe a light equal ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... Light of our firmament, guide of our Nation, Pride of her children, and honored afar, Let the wide beams of thy full constellation Scatter each cloud that would darken a star! Up with our ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... The first commandment: "I am the Lord, thy God," corresponds to the first word at the creation: "Let there be light," for God is the eternal light. The second commandment: "Thou shalt have no strange gods before me," corresponds to the second word: "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters." For God said: "Choose between Me and the idols; between Me, the fountain of living waters, and the idols, the stagnant waters." The third commandment: ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... what the comet meant That rode, blood-red and dire, Across the midnight firmament This year on ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... on a lovely morning at sunrise. The brilliant sun, rising in a flood of light, pierces through the thin haze of morning, converting the countless myriads of dewdrops that hang on tree and bush into sparkling diamonds, and burnishing the motionless flood of water, till a new and mighty firmament is reflected in the wave; as if Nature, rising early from her couch, paused to gaze with admiration on her resplendent image reflected in the depths of her own matchless mirror. The profound stillness, ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... merely in the light of an instrument for raising up members of the state. And surely it may be said of them that they nobly fulfilled this duty. The catalogue of heroes and sages which shine in Grecian history bright and numerous as stars in the firmament, are so many testimonials to the faithfulness of Grecian women in ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... peculiarity, proving that the road to heaven is not independent of the popular will. The great Hall of Justice, an edifice of which the Bivouackers are exceedingly proud, is constructed in the same recumbent style, the architect, with a view to protect himself from the imputation of believing that the firmament was within reach of his hand, having taken the precaution to run up a wooden finger-board from the centre of the building, which points to the place where, according to the notions of all other people, the ridge of the roof ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... he has enabled us to appreciate Vieuxtemps. They will not be compared by the reverent worshipper at the shrine of art. The plant needs the sunshine and the dew. It was pleasant to feel that genius abides in one man and realize that one star differeth from another in glory. Surely the firmament of art is wide enough and yet deep enough to ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... of the Mississippi—one swing in the pure ether for every swing over the green grass; or let me oscillate in it beneath the cool dome of St. Peter's; or drop me in it, as in a balloon, from the zenith, with the whole firmament to rock and expatiate in; and I would not exchange my coarse canvas hammock for the grand state-bed, like a stately coach-and-four, in which they tuck in a king when he passes a ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... sun shone, and the friendly winds blew out of a cloudless heaven; by night the moon ruled a firmament powdered with stars of multitudinous splendor. The conditions inspired Dunham with a restless fertility of invention in Lydia's behalf. He had heard of the game of shuffle-board, that blind and dumb croquet, ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... behind it, you will be as near as I can help you to guessing the exact colour. And, but for a solitary star and the red lamp of a steamer lying off the creek's mouth, this blue covered the whole firmament and ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... exciting the other, and adding not a little to the Babel of tongues. At this state of affairs the ladies took their departure, though not without several gentlemen rushing after them to bring them back. "Are ye after leaving us without a sun in the firmament!" exclaimed one. "The stars are going out, and we shall be in darkness presently," cried another. "A garden without roses is a sorry garden, by my faith!" exclaimed a third. "What shall we do without those beautiful eyes beaming out on us?" shouted a fourth. However, in spite ...
— Ben Burton - Born and Bred at Sea • W. H. G. Kingston
... gloom retired from the face of the heavens, the stars looked down gloriously from their sapphire thrones, and a silvery gush played amidst the swaying foliage, where the rain-drops glistened on their leaflet platforms like so many diamonds. Then the lucid milky-way, whose loveliness flushes the firmament, bent itself across the concave above, one broad flame of pure transparent white, as if some burning orb had fled along the sky with so swift a flight, that, for a moment, it had left its lustre in the vault of heaven. Gradually ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... the day wore on, a flood of mellow light suffused the western portion of his chamber. From such vantage ground, Mr. Perrault, of an evening, could observe the movements of the heavenly bodies, the position of the planets and the various phenomena of the firmament; the study of which had great attractions for him, and created in his mind a gratitude to the great architect for all His vast works and beneficent care. On entering the visitor found himself in the reception room, of about twenty-four feet square, with a large bay window ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... formless void between sky and sea. Swollen and angry, the sun lifted up its enormous, ensanguined portent. And the discountenanced moon withdrew hastily into the immeasurable fastnessness of a cloudless firmament, yet failed therein to find complete concealment. Keen, sweet airs of dawn raked the decks, now to port, now to starboard, as the Assyrian twisted and writhed on ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... hypochondriac fancies represent Ships, armies, battles in the firmament; Till steady eyes the exhalations solve, And all to its ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth; and it was so." And it tells us, with regard to the FAUNA, that God said, "Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... illumination of the shore of the Bruchium rendered it as bright as day. The huge dome of the Serapeum on the Rhakotis, covered with lamps, towered above the flat roofs of the city like the starry firmament of a smaller world which had descended to earth. Every temple and palace was transformed into a giant candelabrum, and the rows of lamps on the quay stretched like tendrils of light from the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... gay, little seaport town. When it began to sink slowly towards the West a few little fluffy clouds appeared on the horizon, and from a distance, although the sky remained clear and blue, the sea looked quite dark and slaty against the brilliance of the firmament. ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... conscious edges of relations on which such thunders of soul and fate hang, ready to be unleashed at a look. But there is another class of persons, with whom the fire of affection is harmless. Like those weird heat-lightnings that play in the firmament on summer evenings, it retains the lambent warmth and luminous loveliness, without the blasting violence. Of the intellectual and sensual regions, only the former is surcharged; the latter is either exhausted, or separated by an insulation ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... gigantic distinction! A thought that could never be soul to any action, would be more valuable to him than the perception of some vitality of relation demanding the activity of the whole being. He would call thoughts the stars that glorify the firmament of humanity, but the stars of his firmament were merely atmospheric—pretty fancies, external likenesses. That the grandest thing in the world is to be an accepted poet, is the despotic craze of a vast number of the weak-minded and half-made of both sexes. It feeds poetic ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... a field-glass in his hand and shout "balloon!" at the top of his voice. The desired effect—of bringing the whole street out of bed to see the balloon—was easily produced. The star-gazers would thus spend an hour or so minutely examining all the stars in the firmament in their endeavours to select the one that most resembled a balloon. This was not easily done—the stars being much alike to the stupid naked eye—but they would near the point of agreement on the question; and then the confounded night-patrol would come along with his gun, and the observers would ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... hand convulsively, and they both gazed at the firmament, whence the stars seemed to shed gentle poetry ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac
... described. The walls were incrusted with the most precious gems, so joined together as to form one smooth and perfect surface. The lofty dome appeared to be self-supported, and was studded with gems, lustrous as the stars of the firmament. There was neither wood, nor any other common or base material to be seen throughout the edifice. There were no windows or rather openings to admit the day, yet a radiant light was spread throughout the place, which ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... shall be in eternal restless change Self-fed and self-consumed. If this fail, The pillared firmament is rottenness, &c. ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... of each group: 2. Angels—9. Winds (spiritus)—18. Earth—26. Children of men. The classification in the groups is evidently influenced by the 1st chapter of Genesis. In v. 4 the Waters above the firmament (Gen. i. 7) are {80} divided from the Wells, Seas, Floods of vv. 21, 22. The former appear here as Heavenly Powers, the latter as creatures of ...
— The Prayer Book Explained • Percival Jackson
... down the rocks at the risk of being himself dashed to pieces; he listened, he groped about, but he heard and saw nothing—the cries had ceased, and the tempest continued to rage. By degrees the wind abated, vast gray clouds rolled towards the west, and the blue firmament appeared studded with bright stars. Soon a red streak became visible in the horizon, the waves whitened, a light played over them, and gilded their foaming crests with gold. ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... has been called, obtains a remarkable support in what would at first seem to militate against it—the existence in our firmament of several thousands of solar systems, in which there are more than one sun. These are called double and triple stars. Some double stars, upon which careful observations have been made, are found to have ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... had always been accepted in the little colony that Harmony was a real musician, a star in their lesser firmament. ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... only, however; the golden flashes vanished one by one; the yellow became orange, the orange deepened into crimson, and the crimson in its turn slowly merged into a cold cobalt blue as the light died out of the western sky; and finally the stars came out one by one until the entire firmament was thickly studded with them. It was ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... coverings taken altogether was the adornment and protection of the tabernacle, that it might be an object of respect. Taken singly, according to some, the curtains denoted the starry heaven, which is adorned with various stars; the curtain (of goats' skin) signified the waters which are above the firmament; the skins dyed red denoted the empyrean heaven, where the angels are; the violet skins, the heaven of ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... saw, they say, Immortal Alps look down, Whose bonnets touch the firmament, Whose sandals touch ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... prevailed to bring down the last of the Caesars, yet the ancient frame of government still subsisted. The political heaven, though shaken, was not yet wholly removed, while the Senate, Consuls and other official dignitaries continued to shine as political luminaries in the firmament of power. But as the last of the Caesars fell from power in the year 476, so the last vestige of imperial dominion in the west was removed in 566, when Rome, the queen of the nations, was by the emperor of the east reduced to the humble condition of a tributary dukedom. Most of the saints ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... born in Chaldaea as early as the time of Abraham. The glories of the firmament were impressed upon the minds of the rude primitive races with an intensity which we do not feel, with all the triumphs of modern science. The Chaldaean shepherds, as they watched their flocks by night, noted the movements of the planets, and gave names to the more ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... his familiar Mazurka, Op. 7, No. 1, and repeated it with quite different nuances. One survivor of this audience remarked subsequently in a letter to a friend: "My emotion was so great I was compelled to retire to recover myself. I have heard all the celebrated stars of the musical firmament, but never has one left such ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... peopled, crowded, thick, studded; galore. thick coming, many more, more than one can tell, a world of; no end of, no end to; cum multis aliis[Lat]; thick as hops, thick as hail; plenty as blackberries; numerous as the stars in the firmament, numerous as the sands on the seashore, numerous as the hairs on the head; and what not, and heaven knows what; endless &c. (infinite) 105. Phr. their name is "legion"; acervatim[Lat]; en foule[Fr]; "many- headed multitude" [Sidney]; "numerous as glittering gems of morning dew" ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... that is done under its mantle. It was a moonlight night— mild Luna shedding a balmy light on surrounding objects, and, if possible, rendering my heart more sensitive than ever. One solitary glimmering star showed by its paly quiverings the impress of evening, while not a cloud obscured the vast firmament of heaven. On such an evening Antonio could do nothing but converse of my absent friend; he dwelt on the indescribable grace of your person, the lustre of your eye, and the vermilion of your lips, until exhausted ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... should think more of himself. For the modesty which was once the chief charm of his nature, he is likely to substitute great assumption, and you must remember, mademoiselle, that he who has discovered one world will want to discover two; you will have the whole firmament for rival; in short, could you ever be happy with a man ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... powerful retracting telescope with him, through which he gazed at the starry heavens during the long nights; at the planets with their moons and rings, on which in winter white spots are visible, while in summer a red light surrounds them; and then at that great enigma of the firmament, the moon, which when looked at through the glass appears like a shining ball of lava, with its transparent ridges, its deep craters, bright plains and dark shadows. It is a world of emptiness. Nothing is there except the souls of those who violently separated themselves from their body to get ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... his cap, a gesture which he never failed to execute when he had something particularly important to say, he added humbly and sonorously as he glanced at the grey firmament: ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... love-haunted heart and melancholy. The night had found (to him a night of wo) Upon a mountain crag, young Angelo— Beetling it bends athwart the solemn sky, And scowls on starry worlds that down beneath it lie. Here sate he with his love—his dark eye bent With eagle gaze along the firmament: Now turn'd it upon her—but ever then It trembled to the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... song of gratitude and cheerful prayer Still shall go forth my pretty babes to greet, As on life's firmament, serenely fair, Their little stars arise, with aspects sweet Of mild successive radiance: that small pair, Ellen and Mary, having gone before In this affection's welcome, the dear debt Here shall be paid to gentle Margaret: Be thou indeed ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... minds, 'Where is he who abideth forever?' they lifted up their eyes, and saw, as they thought, beyond sun, and moon, and stars, and all which changes, and will change, the clear blue sky, the boundless firmament of heaven. That never changed, that was always the same. The clouds and storms rolled far below it, and all the bustle of this noisy world; but there the sky was still, as bright and calm as ever. The Almighty Father must be there, unchangeable in the unchangeable heaven; bright, and ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... kisses, Lesbia, miss, you ask would be enough for me? I cannot sum the total number; nay, that were too tough for me. The sands that o'er Cyrene's shore lie sweetly odoriferous, The stars that sprent the firmament when overly stelliferous— Come, Lezzy, please add all of these, until the whole amount of 'em Will sorely vex the rubbernecks attempting to ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... perfectly flat on her back in a reasonably comfortable nest of grass and leaves. Staring inquisitively up into the sky she thought she noticed a slight black and blue discoloration towards the west, but more than that, much to her relief, the firmament did not seem to be seriously injured. The earth, she feared had not escaped so easily. Even way off somewhere near the tip of her fingers the ground was as sore—as sore—as could be—under her touch. Impulsively to her dizzy eyes the hot tears ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... black figure in the midst of the two white ones was that of his son Siegfried, reputedly so fond of Debussy. As the group receded and faded, a fragment of a music-hall song floated away from it into the firmament. ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... rose to power supreme, without grave cause for blame? But Harold stood free from the enmities his father had provoked, and pure from the stains that slander or repute cast upon his father's name. The sun of the yesterday had shone through cloud; the sun of the day rose in a clear firmament. Even Tostig recognised the superiority of his brother; and after a strong struggle between baffled rage and covetous ambition, yielded to him, as to a father. He felt that all Godwin's House was centred in Harold alone; and that only from his brother (despite his own daring valour and despite ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... day and blew the firmament, Phebus of gold his stremes doun hath sent To gladen every flour with his warmnesse; He was that time in Geminis, I gesse, But litel fro ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 78, April 26, 1851 • Various
... his holy place, Praise him for his mighty firmament, Praise him for his deeds of power, Praise ...
— The Children's Bible • Henry A. Sherman
... impeachment that the profession of arms has ever been susceptible to the charms of woman. The relation of Mars to Venus is not simply a legend of history, is founded on no mere mythology—their relationship is as sure as the firmament, and their orbits are sometimes ...
— California, Romantic and Resourceful • John F. Davis
... the cave and bed of the ascetic. Here, like the inspired seer of Patmos, he could congratulate himself on having shaken off communion with mankind. Cliffs shattered by the warfare of the elements—a restless and irresistible sea, intersected by perilous reefs—and the blue firmament—were the only visible objects to distract the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 395, Saturday, October 24, 1829. • Various
... firmament, is not so gret a lord, ne so myghty, ne so riche, as the gret Chane: nought Prestre Johan, that is Emperour of the highe Ynde, ne the Sowdan of Babylone, ne the Emperour of Persye. Alle theise ne ben not in comparisoun ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 9 - Asia, Part 2 • Richard Hakluyt
... which cross the lustrous golden floor like Frauenhofer's lines on the spectrum, began to change and lose themselves. A purple glory of intermingled colors darkened the violet curtains of the sea-chambers, reddening all glints and tinges with an angry fire. Instead of that lustrous, golden firmament, the thallassphere darkened to crimson and opal. The walls grew purple, the floor as red as blood: the deep itself was purpled with the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... admiration had been born, educated, and lifted to the niches prepared for them by popular appreciation, but all far below the place where Patti sat enthroned. Stars of great brilliancy had flashed across the firmament and gone out in darkness, but the refulgence of Patti's art remained undimmed, having only grown mellower and deeper and richer with time. Truth is, Mme. Patti was then, and is still, twenty-five years ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... gods came into being in long succession, but, at length, enmity arose between them and Tiamat, who created monsters to oppose them. Merodach, a solar deity, vanquished Tiamat, cut her body in two, and with one-half of it made a firmament supporting the upper waters in the sky, etc., etc." The Babylonian gods, like even those of the classics, were criminals fit ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... Frances would be with this spot!" said Howard. "It is like the calm, tranquil mirror of her own mind, which seems formed to reflect only the upper world, with its glorious firmament. I think we have before us two excellent prototypes of our wives:—while the clear, peaceful lake represents yours, this happy, joyous, busy little stream may be likened to my Charlotte, who goes on her way rejoicing, and diffusing life ...
— Rich Enough - a tale of the times • Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee
... from the camp they found the whole firmament illuminated. The flames whirled up in long light spires, and the air was filled with sparks and cinders. A bright glare was thrown upon the city, revealing every battlement and tower. Turbaned heads were seen gazing from every roof, ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... willows,—pools which seemed to abound with the finny tribe, for large trout frequently sprang from the water, catching the brilliant fly which skimmed along its deceitful surface. The scene was delightful. The sun was rolling high in the firmament, casting from its orb of fire the most glorious rays, so that the atmosphere was flickering with their splendour, but their fierceness was either warded off by the shadow of the trees or rendered innocuous by the refreshing coolness which rose ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... I lackey'd with the fawning crowd, Scoundrels in office, and would bow To cyphers great in place; but now Upright I stand, as if wise Fate, To compliment a shatter'd state, Had me, like Atlas, hither sent To shoulder up the firmament, 720 And if I stoop'd, with general crack, The heavens would tumble from my back. Time was, when rank and situation Secured the great ones of the nation From all control; satire and law Kept only little ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... I understand him) Mr. Meredith connects man with the Universal, and teaches him to arrive at it and recognise it by strongly reminding him that he is a child of Earth. 'You are amenable,' he says in effect, 'to a law which all the firmament obeys. But in all that firmament you are tied to one planet, which we call Earth. If therefore you would apprehend the law, study your mother, Earth, which also obeys it. Search out her operations; honour your mother as legitimate children, and let your honour ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... a summer night Transparent o'er the Neva beamed The firmament in mellow light, And when the watery mirror gleamed No more with pale Diana's rays,(17) We called to mind our youthful days— The days of love and of romance! Then would we muse as in a trance, Impressionable ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... diffus'd o'er all, From which all fortunes, names, and natures fall; Then from those wombs of stars, the Bride's bright eyes, At every glance a constellation flies, And sows the court with stars, and doth prevent In light and power, the all-ey'd firmament: First her eye kindles other ladies' eyes, Then from their beams their jewels' lustres rise; And from their jewels torches do take fire, And all is warmth, and light, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... dismay; while the other nobles, like adroit courtiers, fixed their looks, with awakening admiration, upon Kaunitz, in whom their experienced eyes were just discovering the rising luminary of a new political firmament. ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... by no cloud on the ethereal firmament; and Lois was not quite so conscious as she had been of the beauty around her. The silence lasted a good while; she wondered if her neighbour's thoughts were busy with the lady he had just set down, to such a degree that he forgot to attend to his new companion? Nothing could be more ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... God toiled to mould A nerveless stone to His intent— From peace to war, from heat to cold, It triumphed against the Omnipotent: God strove until His strength grew old, Then cried "Thy help, My firmament!" ...
— Eyes of Youth - A Book of Verse by Padraic Colum, Shane Leslie, A.O. • Various
... stellar firmament there are sometimes two suns which determine the path of one planet, and in certain cases suns of different colours shine around a single planet, now with red light, now with green, and then simultaneously illumine and flood it with motley colours: so we modern men, owing ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... which often leads to a higher appreciation. At last we learned why the Elysian [Footnote: In Arabic El-Lizzat, the Delight, or from the old Egyptian Aahlu,] Fields, the Fortunate Islands, the Garden of the Hesperides—where the sea is no longer navigable, and where Atlas supports the firmament on a mountain conical as a cylinder; the land of evening, of sunset, where Helios sinks into the sea, and where Night bore the guardians of the golden apples—were such favourites with the poets. And we came to love every feature of the place, from the snowy Pike of Teyde flushing ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... intelligent shall shine as with the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... glittering, frosted—a symphony in metals—silver, aluminium, lead—rendered buoyant for the nonce, ethereal—as though the world were really gone Christmas mad, and, having a sudden attack of topsy-turvydom in its inside, had taken to showering its treasures about the firmament, instead of keeping them snugly put away in mines below ground. A sheet of snow, and bitter white rain driving still. A huge building looming black, its many eyes staring into the dark—lidless, bilious, vacant. This is a hospital. Or is it a factory, disguised ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... description of the river scenery is so graphic, that I cannot do better than transcribe it throughout: "The River Hall descends like the slope of a mountain; the ceiling stretches away—away before you, vast and grand as the firmament at midnight." Going on, and gradually ascending and keeping close to the right hand wall, you observe on your left "a steep precipice, over which you can look down by the aid of blazing missiles, upon a broad black sheet ...
— Rambles in the Mammoth Cave, during the Year 1844 - By a Visiter • Alexander Clark Bullitt
... primum mobile of our court (Buckingham), by whose motion all the other spheres must move, or else stand still: the bright sun of our firmament, at whose splendour or glooming all our marygolds of the court open or shut. There are in higher spheres as great as he, but none so glorious. But the king is in progress, and we are far from court. Now to hear certainties. ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... maintained them.... If we cherish the virtues and the principles of our fathers, heaven will assist us to carry on the work of human liberty and human happiness. Auspicious omens cheer us. Great examples are before us. Our own firmament now shines brightly upon our paths. Washington is in the upper sky. These other stars have now joined the American constellation; they circle round their center, and the heavens beam with new light. Beneath this illumination let ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... the firmament With living sapphires: Hesperus that led The starry host, rode brightest, till the moon, Rising in clouded majesty, at length Apparent queen unveiled her peerless light, And o'er the dark ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XIII, No. 376, Saturday, June 20, 1829. • Various
... which had been of continuous peril and toil, and on the 30th they ended their exploration at a ranch, from which the way was easy to Salt Lake City. "Now the danger is over," writes Major Powell in his diary; "now the toil has ceased; now the gloom has disappeared; now the firmament is bounded only by the horizon; and what a vast expanse of constellations can be seen! The river rolls by us in silent majesty; the quiet of the camp is sweet; our joy is almost ecstasy. We sit till long after midnight talking of the Grand Canon, talking ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... north. At this stage of illumination they are strikingly beautiful in a good telescope, reminding one of the ripple-marks left by the tide on a soft sandy beach. Like most other objects of their class, they are very evanescent, gradually disappearing as the sun rises higher in the lunar firmament, and ultimately leaving nothing to indicate their presence beyond here and there a ghostly streak or vein of a somewhat lighter hue than that of the neighbouring surface. The Mare Nectaris, again, in the south-western quadrant, presents some fine examples of concentric ridges, which are ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... centre and source of good—is every where radiant with beauty. From the shell that lies buried in the depths of the ocean, to the twinkling star that floats in the more profound depths of the firmament—through all the forms of material and animated existence, beauty, beauty, beauty prevails! In the floral kingdom, it appears in an infinite variety—in an unstinted and even a richer profusion ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... does not go up without pulling; ascension is my soul's pace and measure, but precipitation my body's. And even angels, whose home is heaven, and who are winged too, yet had a ladder to go to heaven by steps. The sun which goes so many miles in a minute, the stars of the firmament which go so very many more, go not so fast as my body to the earth. In the same instant that I feel the first attempt of the disease, I feel the victory; in the twinkling of an eye I can scarce see; instantly the taste is insipid and fatuous; instantly the appetite is dull and desireless; instantly ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... night as it was—not a breath of wind, and the moon, full orbed, dull and yellow, hangs like a lamp in the dark blue sky. Low down on the horizon are great masses of rain clouds, ragged and angry-looking, and the whole firmament seems to weigh down on the still earth, where everything is burnt and parched, the foliage of the trees hanging limp and heavily, and the grass, yellow and sere, mingling with the hot, white dust of ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... uncertainty of my daily affairs; and I am trying with all my might to put off composition of all sorts until some approach to the certainty of next week's dinner shall remove this remnant of haste, and leave me that repose which ought to fill the artist's firmament ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... To this bold enterprise, as men of might, And valour eminent, and such this day, I trust, will honour you. Let each his spade, And pick-axe, vig'rously, in this hard soil, Where I have laid, the curved line, exert. For now the morning star, bright Lucifer, Peers on the firmament, and soon the day, Flush'd with the golden sun, shall visit us. Then gallant countrymen, should faithless Gage, Pour forth his lean, and half-starv'd myrmidons; We'll make them taste our cartridges, and know, What rugged steel, ...
— The Battle of Bunkers-Hill • Hugh Henry Brackenridge
... come. The doomsday was at hand. The stars of heaven were falling upon the earth like the figs cast by the fig-tree which the wind has shaken. The sun, the great luminary of the universe, had become as sackcloth of hair. The moon was blood-red. The firmament was as a scroll rolled away. The archangel Michael, the prince of the heavenly host, appeared glorious and terrible against the sky. With one foot on the sea and one foot on the land he blew from the arch-angelical trumpet the brazen death of time. The three ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... the deep-flowing Oceanus. There is the land and the city of the Cimmerians, shrouded in mist and cloud, and never does the shining sun look down on them with his rays, neither when he climbs up the starry heavens, nor when again he turns earthward from the firmament, but deadly night is outspread over miserable mortals. Thither we came and ran the ship ashore and took out the sheep; but for our part we held on our way along the stream of Oceanus, till we came to the place which Circe had declared ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... sat content, Her young unlessoned back to a morning gay, To a solemn noon, to a cloudy firmament, And looked upon a world in ...
— A Father of Women - and other poems • Alice Meynell
... was still in the earth's shadow. The firmament—black interstellar space with its blazing white, red and yellow stars—lay spread around us. The moon, with nearly all its disc illumined, hung, a great silver ball, over our bow quarter. Behind it, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... and a braine of inuention for the good of the common-wealth; his place is powerful, while his seruice is faithfull, and his honour due in the desert of his employment. In summe, he is as a fixed planet mong the starres of the firmament, which through the clouds in the ayre, shewes ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... for long intervals; if he would make progress he must learn to understand that the moral world only becomes beautiful when we relinquish our ridiculous standards of what is right and wrong, just as the firmament became a thousand times more wonderful and beautiful when Galileo discovered that the earth moved. Had Kant lived before the astronomer he would have been a great metaphysician, but he would not have written the celebrated passage "Two things ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... a solid dome or roof. This firmament, the sky, was supposed to be the floor of Heaven. The firmament had four corners and rested on the mountains, as the eye could plainly see. When God's car was rolled across the floor we heard thunder, and his movements were always accompanied by lightnings, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... the commercial end of Wonota's improvement. Nor did Ruth overlook the chance the Osage maid had of becoming a money-earning star in the moving picture firmament. But she desired to help the girl to something ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... modern ideas are, indeed, surprising enough. For instance, in talking about the stars and describing their course through the firmament, she makes use of a comparison that is rather startling. She says: "Just as the blood moves in the veins which causes them to vibrate and pulsate, so the stars move in the firmament and send out sparks as it were of light like the ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... certain that the hills decay and that rivers as the dusty years proceed run feebly and lose themselves at last in desert sands; and in its aeons the very firmament grows old. But evil also is perishable and bad men ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... Fraternity, out of old Catholicism, does, it is true, very strangely in the vehicle of a Jean-Jacques Evangel, suddenly plump down out of its cloud-firmament; and from a theorem determine to make itself a practice. But just so do all creeds, intentions, customs, knowledges, thoughts and things, which the French have, suddenly plump down; Catholicism, Classicism, Sentimentalism, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... to the unbounded satisfaction of all, a violent tempest suddenly cleared the sky, and on the 13th of December, shortly after midnight, the Moon, verging towards her last quarter, revealed herself sharp and bright on the dark background of the starry firmament. ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... suffering to make you see your false friends in their true character, and then cause you to turn to new friendships with the whole strength of your heroic soul. Sire, I offer you my hand, and, if you will accept it, I will lead you into a career as brilliant as the star-spangled firmament, and as fragrant as the laurels of the south. You shall see at least half the world at your feet. ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... lich to beste he hath fielinge, And lich to Trees he hath growinge; The Stones ben and so is he: Thus of his propre qualite The man, as telleth the clergie, Is as a world in his partie, And whan this litel world mistorneth, The grete world al overtorneth. The Lond, the See, the firmament, Thei axen alle jugement 960 Ayein the man and make him werre: Therwhile himself stant out of herre, The remenant wol noght acorde: And in this wise, as I recorde, The man is cause of alle wo, ...
— Confessio Amantis - Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins, 1330-1408 A.D. • John Gower
... declares that Christ is "God of God, Light of light." Not only with God, but with His saints is the idea of visible light intimately associated. The prophet Daniel tells us that "They that are learned shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that instruct many unto justice, as stars to all eternity." (XII, 3.) And it is Christ Himself who says: "Then shall the just shine as the sun, in the kingdom of their Father." (Matt., ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... the decades drifted by, and the spectacle of the marvelous child's meteor flight across the war firmament of France and its extinction in the smoke-clouds of the stake receded deeper and deeper into the past and grew ever more strange, and wonderful, and divine, and pathetic, I came to comprehend and recognize her at last for ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... Herzog and his daughter, resounded in the calm starry night. In the villa everything was quiet. Pierre breathed with delight; he instinctively turned his eyes toward the brilliant sky, and in the far-off firmament, the star which he appropriated to himself long ago, and which he had so desperately looked for when he was unhappy, suddenly appeared bright and twinkling. He sighed and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... will, as he hath revealed it, to his Prophets and Apostles? But we learn it, so far as in us lieth, by their teaching, and from the very nature of the world. For the Scripture saith, 'The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth his handiwork;' and, 'The invisible things of him from the creation Of the world are clearly understood by the things that are made, even ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... profession of teaching, and who in themselves are great benefactors of the Negro race. The following educators have wrought much in the matter of elevating their race in all the essentials of right-living. The most conspicuous figure just now in the firmament of Negro educators is President Booker T. Washington, who has at his command both the hand and the heart of the American people. The far-reaching influences of his work at Tuskegee, Alabama, where, perhaps, more than 1,300 Negro youths are taught all the useful and honorable methods of labor, are ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... She thought in an almost undefined way of mother's words as she held the fluttering thrushes to her lips and kissed their downy breasts. Then had come the unlooked-for interruption. Polly's life seemed cloudless, and all of a sudden there appeared a speck in the firmament—a little cloud which grew rapidly, until the whole heavens were covered with it. Mother had gone away for ever, and there were now nine children in ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... have harnessed the spotted deer to your chariot; the red deer yoked between them, (aids to) drag the car: the firmament listens for your coming, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... solitary thinkings; such as dodge Conception to the very bourne of heaven, Then leave the naked brain: be still the leaven, That spreading in this dull and clodded earth Gives it a touch ethereal—a new birth: Be still a symbol of immensity; A firmament reflected in a sea; 300 An element filling the space between; An unknown—but no more: we humbly screen With uplift hands our foreheads, lowly bending, And giving out a shout most heaven rending, Conjure thee to receive our humble ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... hero as being most remarkable was the magnitude and dazzling brightness of the host of stars that covered the black firmament. It seemed as if they were magnified in glory, and twinkled so much that the sky seemed, as it were, to tremble with light. A feeling of deep solemnity filled Fred's heart as he gazed upwards; and as he thought upon the Creator of these mysterious worlds—and remembered ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... moon hung in a pale-green sky, looking down on a dozen roads each crawling like a black snake with the close press of retreating troops. As I was making my way back to Gradisca the whole firmament leaped into sudden brilliance and every feature in every face among the throngs around me on the road stood out for several seconds under a ghastly light. Then followed from behind Monte Michele, a deep, rolling roar. It was the first of the explosions of ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... effluence from the Creator.[168] According to an Etruscan saga quoted by Suidas, God created the world in six periods of 1,000 years each. In the first, the heavens and the earth; in the second, the firmament; in the third, the seas; in the fourth, the sun, moon, and stars; in the fifth, the beasts of the land, the air, and the sea; in the sixth, man. According to a passage in the Persian Avesta, the supreme Ormazd created the visible world by his word in six periods or ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... all move beautifully; and beautifully do the joyous light-words of the skies dance their eternal cotillion of glory. From the mote that plays its little frolic in the sunbeam, to the world that blazes along the sapphire spaces of the firmament, are visible the ever-varying features of the enrapturing spirit of Beauty. All this great realm of dazzling and bewildering beauty was made by God. What shall we say then, is he not a lover of Beauty? Is it irreverence thus to speak? No; ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... Jonathan Oldstyle essays, showed an indisposition as editor of the Burrite paper to vituperate and lampoon in return, William P. Van Ness, the famous and now historic "Aristides," appeared in the political firmament with the suddenness and brilliancy of a comet that dims the ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... of the Aurora Borealis, and we have already had some fine displays during this voyage, but I never witnessed anything like this. Truly the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament sheweth His handiwork! Undulating bands of bright white light are swiftly scintillating across the sky, now curving upwards from the horizon, now stretching in broad stripes right over the zenith. Sometimes the Aurora is stationary and the smooth surface ...
— With the Harmony to Labrador - Notes Of A Visit To The Moravian Mission Stations On The North-East - Coast Of Labrador • Benjamin La Trobe
... piece to support as we went by him, ascending the inclined artillery road, whence we presently came out upon the ramparts, with the vast sweep of star-set firmament above, and below us the city's twinkling lights on one side, and upon the other two great rivers at their ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... shell is the Ocean, Colored with gold from the glow of the morning. Saga is Spring-time, Writ on the green of the fresh springing field, with flowers for letters. Balder, the kingly, is pictured there, throned on the sun at midsummer, Which pours from the firmament riches untold,— personified goodness; For lights are the good, radiant, resplendent, but the evil are darkness. Constantly rising the sun groweth weary; the good also falter, Giddy with walking precipitous heights; sighing they downward Sink to the land of the shades,—down to ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... that other, when Parmenio came to him in the plain of Arbela and showed him the innumerable multitude of his enemies, specially as they appeared by the infinite number of lights as it had been a new firmament of stars, and thereupon advised him to assail them by night; whereupon he answered, "That he would not ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... to save himself.-However, she took the incident not only without displeasure but with apparent satisfaction, saying she was very glad to renew her acquaintance with him. She had not seen him since the time of his spouting, "The spacious firmament on high"—"Ye shepherds so cheerful and gay," etc.,—all of which she remembers hearing. Ah—I have never recollected till this instant that I ought to have gone to her the next day !-how shocking!—and now that I have the consciousness, I can do nothing, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... and mighty arcs of fire spanning the whole heavens, and gripping them as with the glittering jewelled hand of some monstrous keeper of the skies whose mutterings came to us below. Or the scene changed again, and it was as though elves of the zenith had brought their golden caskets above the firmament, and there had burst them open, so that all the jewels of the light rained upon sea and land, and burnt each other with their own beauty as they fell; and the earth answered them back with her shining face. One of the supreme moments of life, truly, to bathe in this shower of multi-coloured ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... upward into the deep arch of the firmament and had lifted his hands to pray, a cloud, though no wind was stirring, hurried across the zenith and hid the brightening stars. The blue sky was still visible, except directly overhead, where this black mass of cloud was sweeping swiftly northward. Aloft ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... none of these, but desire only to satisfy that exalted yet mysterious feeling which lurks in everyone's breast, becoming manifest when the greatest works of the firmament are beheld, then by all means visit this the "Evergreen State" and drink in the glories which no book, howe'er so well written, and no picture, whoe'er the artist, can portray with any degree of fullness ...
— The Beauties of the State of Washington - A Book for Tourists • Harry F. Giles
... rose With rallying shout through the starred firmament, And with a mighty war-cry both the hosts Encountering closed. Nor longer then did Jove Curb down his force, but sudden in his soul There grew dilated strength, and it was filled With his omnipotence; his whole of might Broke from him, ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... in every other direction; the white wilds of the desert are now scarcely visible under the black vault of the firmament. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... wholly attentive to the service of his mistress, and his dexterity, experience, and merit therein challenged a room in the Queen's favour which eclipsed the other's over-seeming greatness, and made it appear that there were others steered and stood at the helm besides himself, and more stars in the firmament of ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... Indian commentators and comparative mythologists agree that he is a solar deity. His chief exploit is that he took (or perhaps in the earlier version habitually takes) three strides. This was originally a description of the sun's progress across the firmament but grew into a myth which relates that when the earth was conquered by demons, Vishnu became incarnate as a dwarf and induced the demon king to promise him as much space as he could measure in three steps. Then, appearing in his true form, he strode across earth ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... forced by his own friends into that cry, is, I fear, still possible. Kentucky, at any rate, did not secede in bulk. She still sent her Senators to Congress. and allowed herself to be reckoned among the stars in the American firmament. But she could not escape the presence of the war. Did she remain loyal, or did she secede, that was equally ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... bodies from the firmament, and set a miraculous rainbow there, and under its arch was enacted for the swineherd and the servant girl such a betrothal masque of fantasies and illusions as gave full scope to the art of Miramon, ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... slant just over one's head to break in the enemy's trenches seventy-five feet away. A swift rafale of some fifty "seventy-five" shells passed whistling like the great wind of the Apocalypse, which is to blow when the firmament collapses. Looking through the rifle slit, after the rafale was over, I could see puffs of smoke apparently rising out of the carpet of dead leaves. The nervous man, the other sentry, held up his finger for us not to make the ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... red lightning ripped open the black wardrobe of the firmament, and he saw the salted sea driven by the fury of the hurricane into great billows of foam. Sinking back upon his pillows his last words were: "Thank God, I have been a lighthouse builder, and though the light of my life is fast fading, the beams of my lighthouse are ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... subduer of hostile cities, with the permission of Drona, advanced for the combat. On the other side, Karna, having been embraced by Duryodhana with his brothers, taking up his bow and arrows, stood ready for the fight. Then the firmament became enveloped in clouds emitting flashes of lightning, and the coloured bow of Indra appeared shedding its effulgent rays. And the clouds seemed to laugh on account of the rows of white cranes that were then on the wing. And seeing Indra thus viewing the arena from affection ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... guard marched up soon after, and he shouldered his rifle and fell. He arrived at the place which had been so fatal to his comrades, and bidding his fellow soldiers "good night," assumed the duties of his post. The night was dark, thick clouds overspread the firmament, and hardly a star could be seen by the sentinel as he paced his lonely walk. All was silent except the gradually retreating footsteps of the guard; he marched onwards, then stopped and listened till he thought he heard the joyful sound of ...
— Heroes and Hunters of the West • Anonymous
... persistence of her fancy even in her forlornest hours. Ada or Addie was too common for the last of the Clarks. She should at least have something poetic for name. For who could say? She might some day become an heiress and shine in that social firmament so much desired by her mother. In that event she should not be handicapped by a vulgar name. As Addie had resumed her maiden name after Scarp had been sent to prison, the little girl was destined to grow up as Adelle Clark,—the last member of the Alton branch of the Clarks, ultimate heiress to ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... crowns lost in shadow. He could have fancied himself in a hothouse roofed with black glass, for there were flagstones under foot, and no sky could be seen, no breeze could stir overhead. The few stars whose glimmer twinkled from afar belonged to our firmament; they quivered almost on the ground, and were, in ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... wild shrieking! Night—closed, on a Union rent! And still the lawyer sat dreaming Of its once bright firmament. ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... much of the evil life lived in our Russian monasteries and convents, and the warm welcome given to every charlatan who grows his beard, forgets to wash, lifts his eyes heavenwards, and begs, I had, I confess at the outset, but little faith in this new star in Holy Russia's firmament now introduced to me by His Excellency ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... set out for their march, oh, how the trumpets sounded, their armour glittered, and how the colours waved in the wind! The Prince's armour was all of gold, and it shone like the sun in the firmament; the captains' armour was of proof, and was in appearance like the glittering stars. There were also some from the court that rode reformades for the love that they had to the King Shaddai, and for the happy deliverance of the ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... "Thy wondrous song in melting strains To our mute hearts swift entrance gains; By magical yet unfelt force, We see creation's mighty course: The firmament appears in space— God breathes upon the water's face. One flashing word bids primal light appear, Revolving stars begin their vast career; Upheaving mountains now are seen, Tall trees and tender herbage green; Young animals to being rise, And animate ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... zenith. The woods and the fields roundabout lay clearly visible; and, beyond the inundation of light which filled them, the view plunged into the limitless horizon. Then Peter cast his eyes upon the firmament, filled at that hour with myriads of stars. 'All that is mine,' he thought. 'All that is in me, is me! And that is what they think they have taken prisoner! That is what they have shut up in a cabin!' So he smiled, and turned in to sleep among ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... God found in the hollow of His hand This ball of Earth among His other balls, And set it in His shining firmament, Between the greater and the lesser lights, He chose it for the ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Enchanted Garden, and fell flat upon the ground, "when his eyes were so fast locked up by magic art, and his waking senses drowned in such a dead slumber, that it was as impossible to recover himself from sleep as to pull the sun out of the firmament." ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... but this broad earth stood deep and dim, idle 105 and useless, alien even to God himself; on it the King whose purpose never falters turned his eyes and beheld the place void of joy; he saw dark clouds, black under the firmament, throng in the eternal night, dun and 110 waste, until this world-creation came to pass through the word of the King of Glory. First the everlasting Lord, protector of all things, created heaven and earth; as the almighty King put forth the ...
— Genesis A - Translated from the Old English • Anonymous
... good telescope, reminding one of the ripple-marks left by the tide on a soft sandy beach. Like most other objects of their class, they are very evanescent, gradually disappearing as the sun rises higher in the lunar firmament, and ultimately leaving nothing to indicate their presence beyond here and there a ghostly streak or vein of a somewhat lighter hue than that of the neighbouring surface. The Mare Nectaris, again, in the south-western quadrant, presents some fine examples ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... mother's words as she held the fluttering thrushes to her lips and kissed their downy breasts. Then had come the unlooked-for interruption. Polly's life seemed cloudless, and all of a sudden there appeared a speck in the firmament—a little cloud which grew rapidly, until the whole heavens were covered with it. Mother had gone away for ever, and there were now nine children in the ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... hazard resting! An unaimed bullet—a stop in the heart's pulsation—and the star we followed has gone out, God knows whither. The hope of fifteen thousand men lies broken and sightless, dead of purpose, far from home. They assure us that nothing in this world perishes, nor in the firmament above it: but we look up at the black space where a star has been quenched and know that something has failed us which ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... ignorant and coarse amongst the priests spoiled everything. The Blessed Sacrament was exposed for a whole week in the churches, and it ended by an announcement to Israel, that their cry had reached the firmament, that David had grown cold to Bathsheba (they did not add, nevertheless, that David preferred another to Bathsheba with his whole heart). But the Duchesse de Fontanges gave offence neither to the Archbishop of Paris nor to the Jesuits. Her mind ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... believe we may answer fearlessly—If you cannot see it, we cannot help you. If the heavens do not declare to you the glory of God, nor the firmament show you His handy-work, then our poor arguments will not show them. "The eye can only see that which it brings with it the power of seeing." We can only reassert that we see design everywhere; and that the vast majority of the human ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... the glory of heaven, because true faith she had 345 In the Almighty ever; now at last she doubted not Of the meed which long she yearned for. For that to the dear Lord be Glory for ever and ever, who made both wind and air, The heavens and roomy lands, likewise the rushing streams, And joys of firmament too by means of his mercy ...
— Elene; Judith; Athelstan, or the Fight at Brunanburh; Byrhtnoth, or the Fight at Maldon; and the Dream of the Rood • Anonymous
... the other indefinite; we look up to the dome of heaven and calmly acquiesce in the abstract idea of infinity; but we only realize the impossibility of conceiving it by the flight of imagination from star to star, from firmament to firmament. Even so Lombard Architecture attained perfection, expressed its idea, accomplished its purpose—but Gothic never; the Ideal is ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... that they all set out upon their voyage, and a beautiful sight it was to look upon. Their snow-white sails upon the deep sea shone like stars upon the blue of the firmament; and now they all followed close upon the leader's ship, and their little boats danced lightly and joyfully over the trackless waves, which lifted up their breasts to waft them over: and so they started. But I looked again in a little while, and ...
— The Rocky Island - and Other Similitudes • Samuel Wilberforce
... and rejoicing like a strong man to run a race. The red clouds with yellow edges dissolve in hazy dimness; the islands, with grayish-white ruffs of mist about them, cast ill-defined shadows on the glistening waters, and the whole down-bending firmament becomes pearl-gray. For three or four hours after sunrise there is nothing especially impressive in the landscape. The sun, though seemingly unclouded, may almost be looked in the face, and the islands and mountains, with ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... contributions—many of them elaborate treatises—numbered sixty-nine, forming a series of extraordinary importance to the history of astronomy. As a mere explorer of the heavens his labours were prodigious. He discovered 2,500 nebulae, 806 double stars, passed the whole firmament in review four several times, counted the stars in 3,400 "gauge-fields," and executed a photometric classification of the principal stars, founded on an elaborate (and the first systematically conducted) ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... produced many remarkable women; perhaps no other country can boast such an array of illustrious names; they shine from the pages of French history like fixed stars from the firmament. Among them, down the long vista of a hundred years, brilliant and beautiful, shines the name of Madame Roland, the spirit of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... land-labourer, is the one living and memorable figure, and he, alas! cannot possibly be more near than a collateral. It was on August 12, 1678, that he heard Mr. John Welsh on the Craigdowhill, and "took the heavens, earth, and sun in the firmament that was shining on us, as also the ambassador who made the offer, and the clerk who raised the psalms, to witness that I did give myself away to the Lord in a personal and perpetual covenant never to be forgotten"; and already, in 1675, the birth of my direct ascendant ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... [i.e., Ra] himself, and therefore in his name which I bear, I can tread on all my enemies. O great Ra, who climbest the heavenly vaults and who sailest in thy boat across the firmament with undisputed authority, do thou save me from that austere god whose eyebrows are as menacing as the balance that weighs the deeds of men. Save me, I pray thee, from these guardians of the passages who will, if they-may, impede my progress. O Tmu, who livest in the august abode, god of ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... up and owns that she does see yonder star; and then off he starts and drivels on about that star for full five minutes, and says he will cease to write to her when that pale star has fallen from its place amid the firmament of heaven. ...
— Stage-Land • Jerome K. Jerome
... Italian Federation of Palermo; Permanent Inspector and Sovereign Delegate of the Grand Central Directory of Naples for Europe (Universal High-grade Masonry), and, according to his latest portrait, Member of the New Reformed Palladium. That such a luminary could withdraw from the firmament of the Fraternity and not take after him the third part of the stars of heaven, above all that the Italian Grand Master could have the effrontery to affirm that he had never heard of him and had only discovered ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... as among the parts of his creation. Taking the discourses of the Lord Jesus, as the little child took the stars, for "gimlet-holes in heaven to let the glory shine through," we find in the prodigal the largest of them all. It differs from other stars in the same firmament by its bulk and its brightness. Never man spake like this man; and nowhere else has even this man spoken more fully or more winsomely of man's need and God's mercy. Both the departure and the return—both the fall and the rising again, are depicted here. The lesson sweeps the whole horizon ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... the 1st June, which began by telling me it had been twice begun and twice flung into the basket, so great was his indisposition to write as the time for departure came; and which ended thus. "The fire-flies at night now, are miraculously splendid; making another firmament among the rocks on the seashore, and the vines inland. They get into the bedrooms, and fly about, all night, like beautiful little lamps.[105]. . . I have surrendered much I had fixed my heart upon, as you know, admitting you have had reason for not ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... PERPETUAL RECOGNITION OF THE LIVING CHRIST.—"Because I live, ye shall live also." There are many life-verses in this Gospel which shine like stars in the firmament of Scripture. Amongst them, in the first chapter, that, in the Word as manifested to men, was life; and in the fifth chapter, that, "as the Father had life in Himself He gave to the Son to have life also in Himself." The Father is the fountain of life. Eternal life is ever rising ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... and looked. In the clear, starlight night I could just discern the mighty outline of the mountains of Mur. Above them the firmament was suffused with a strange red glow. I formed my own conclusion at ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... government still subsisted. The political heaven, though shaken, was not yet wholly removed, while the Senate, Consuls and other official dignitaries continued to shine as political luminaries in the firmament of power. But as the last of the Caesars fell from power in the year 476, so the last vestige of imperial dominion in the west was removed in 566, when Rome, the queen of the nations, was by the emperor of the east reduced to the humble ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... away, even the high gods themselves. The war trumpet sounded; riding upon the rainbow, came the gods, clad in steel, to fight their last battle on the last battle-field. Before them flew the winged vampires, and the dead warriors closed up the train. The whole firmament was ablaze with the northern lights, and yet the darkness triumphed. It was a terrible hour. And, close to the terrified woman, Helga seemed to be seated on the floor, in the hideous form of a frog, yet trembling, ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... struck our hero as being most remarkable was the magnitude and dazzling brightness of the host of stars that covered the black firmament. It seemed as if they were magnified in glory, and twinkled so much that the sky seemed, as it were, to tremble with light. A feeling of deep solemnity filled Fred's heart as he gazed upwards; and ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... born, Ganesa, the elephant-headed god of wisdom, and Indra, the god of the firmament, both chiefs of inferior divinities, the number of which, if all the objects of adoration of the Hindus be included, ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... surrounding objects, and, if possible, rendering my heart more sensitive than ever. One solitary glimmering star showed by its paly quiverings the impress of evening, while not a cloud obscured the vast firmament of heaven. On such an evening Antonio could do nothing but converse of my absent friend; he dwelt on the indescribable grace of your person, the lustre of your eye, and the vermilion of your lips, until ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... There were many maples and oaks. Day by day the roofs of the houses in the village became more evident, as the maples shed their crimson and gold and purple rags of summer. The oaks remained, great shaggy masses of dark gold and burning russet; later they took on soft hues, making clearer the blue firmament between the boughs. Daniel watched the autumn trees with pure delight. "He will go to-day," he said of a flaming maple after a night of frost which had crisped the white arches of the grass in his dooryard. All day he sat and watched the maple cast its ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... a prophet, least of all regarding the weather. But I think it may not be doubted that the fine weather, at least, has passed for Darwinism. So having carefully scanned the firmament of science for signs of the weather, I shall for once make a forecast for Darwinism, namely: Increasing cloudiness with heavy precipitations, indications of a violent storm, which threatens to cause the props ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... Pillar; much less that he was twelve cubits or twelve hundred cubits high; or that his dimensions equalled those of Teneriffe or Atlas; because these, and if they were a million times as high, it would be the same, are bounded. The expression is, 'His stature reached the sky!' the illimitable firmament!—When the imagination frames a comparison, ... a sense of the truth of the likeness from the moment that it is perceived grows—and continues to grow—upon the mind; the resemblance depending less upon outline of form and feature than upon expression and effect, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... Surrendered them at Ulm a month ago, Is now forgotten! Ay; this Trafalgar Will botch up many a ragged old repute, Make Nelson figure as domestic saint No less than country's saviour, Pitt exalt As zenith-star of England's firmament, And uncurse all the bogglers of her weal At this ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... his dreams. Something seemed to happen in the very heavens above; the moon reached down from the sky, swiftly and tenderly, and was so dazzling that the shepherd boy had to turn his face away. He knew that in the blue spaces of the firmament overhead the moon was embracing the Seven Sisters. Then he ran, ran like the wind, for already the water was shrieking down the streets of the town. As he went he could see lights begin to jump in dark windows ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... destroy it, is a God to whose character there cleaves a fatal suspicion of indifference to good, of moral apathy. If I have not a God to trust in that hates evil because He loveth righteousness, then 'the pillared firmament itself were rottenness, and earth's base built on stubble'; nor were there any hope that this damnable thing that is killing and sucking the life-blood out of our spirits should ever be destroyed and cast aside. Oh! it is short-sighted wisdom, and it is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... my heart,—but their dependence claimed my care.—Memories of Evelyn alone possessed me. I secured full files of London papers, and watched for notices of her appearance. At last they came. A new star, the papers said, had suddenly appeared, unheralded, in the theatrical firmament, and rapidly culminated in the zenith. She was understood to be an American lady, formerly an actress, who had returned to the stage on account of domestic difficulties. Some papers intimated that her husband was a brute, who had forsaken her; others, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... rate, Ikey toiled and snipped and basted and pressed and patched and sponged all day in the steamy fetor of a tailor-shop. But when work was done Ikey hitched his wagon to such stars as his firmament ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... the question: "What is greatness?" A great man adds to the sum of knowledge, extends the horizon of thought, releases souls from the Bastille of fear, crosses unknown and mysterious seas, gives new islands and new continents to the domain of thought, new constellations to the firmament of mind. A great man does not seek applause or place; he seeks for truth; he seeks the road to happiness, and what he ascertains he gives to others. A great man throws pearls before swine, and the swine are sometimes changed to men. ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... domesticated in two hemispheres by the household lore of Shakspeare and Otway, Byron and Rogers, Cooper and Ruskin. The ancient temple of St. Mark, the bronze horses of Lysippus, the arched galleries of the Palace, the waters of the Adriatic, the firmament above, and the stones beneath seem instinct with the fame of commercial grandeur, maritime triumphs, and diplomatic prowess; the cheerful arcades that shade the caffes remind us of the "harmless comedy of life" which Goldoni recorded; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... "commissions of experts." But the fruit which took long to mature ripened at last, and Greece had many of her claims allowed. Thus in reorganizing the communities of the world the personal factor played a predominant part. Venizelos was, so to say, a fixed star in the firmament, and his light burned bright through every rift in the clouds. His moderation astonished friends and opponents. Every one admired his expose of his case as a masterpiece. His statesman-like setting, in perspective, the readiness with which he ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... rara avis, our new star of the literary firmament, has come to a complete collapse. Something has snuffed her out; ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... excellent Arthur,' of Thomas Carlyle, a writer who had the art of making not only his own narrative, but the sources of it, attractive. Even 'Carrion-Heath,' in the famous introductory chapter to the Cromwell, is invested with a kind of charm, whilst in the stormy firmament of the French Revolution the star of Arthur Young twinkles with a mild effulgency. The autobiography of such a man could hardly fail to be interesting.[A] The 'good Arthur' was born in 1741, the younger son of a small 'squarson' who inherited from his father ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... company, a third was beginning to come, and it had led to a more friendly intercourse. Mary sent him away, very happy with some books for them, some new Spanish reading for himself, an astronomical book, and her little celestial globe—for the whole firmament of stars had been by no means lost on him. That interview was her Christmas treat. Well for her that she did not hear Robson say, 'That young man knows how to come over the ladies. I shall keep a sharper look-out after him. I know no harm of him, ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... child in the vicinity of Pleasant River was on the way to the circus,—Boomer's Grand Six-in-One Universal Consolidated Show; Brilliant Constellations of Fixed Stars shining in the same Vast Firmament; Glittering Galaxies of World-Famous Equestrian Artists; the biggest elephants, the funniest clowns, the pluckiest riders, the stubbornest mules, the most amazing acrobats, the tallest man and the shortest man, the thinnest woman and the thickest woman, on the habitable globe; and no connection ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the twelve months of the year. He distinguished the winds by twelve special terms, whereas before his time they had but four designations. He paid great attention to astronomy. Being troubled one day at no longer seeing in the firmament one of the known planets, he wrote to Alcuin, "What thinkest thou of this Mars, which, last year, being concealed in the sign of Cancer, was intercepted from the sight of men by the light of the sun? Is it the regular ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... watched her swift flight. He set his teeth and was off after her. A thrill of pleasure possessed him, the joy of swift movement. Near the foot was an abrupt fall to a frozen brook and then a sharp ascent. He rolled over at Leila's feet seeing a firmament of stars and ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... great quenchless lights; men whose minds are the storehouses of knowledge, and whose utterances by word and pen have moved the quickest and most forceful lives in the world. It would be easy to call the long roll of these names shining like stars and constellations in the firmament of thought—princes and kings of intellect who acknowledge that Jesus Christ is not only superior to them morally ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... same room with the microscope and even in railway carriages: what banishes them in the vacuum in gentlemen and lady passengers. How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth, from the farthest firmament to the tender bosom of the mother who nourished us, make poetry for a mind that had no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... these soaring thoughts winged to "wander through eternity," to come down and work out the terms of a tedious apprenticeship to the senses. And yet, what were thoughts unlocalized and unembodied? Mere comets or vague nebulosities in the firmament, without a ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... down in torrents, enveloping everything in mist and moisture. Suddenly the sun blazes forth with indescribable brilliance and shines through an atmosphere, clear as crystal, from which every particle of dust has been washed away. Fleecy clouds sail majestically across the vaulted firmament. Then follows a gorgeous sunset in which changing colours run riot through sky and clouds—pearly grey, jet black, dark dun, pale lavender, deep mauve, rich carmine, and brightest gold. These colours fade away into the darkness of the night; the ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... remained in Paris and waited. He waited for the brilliant star that was soon to climb the firmament for him, and shed the fulness of its rays over the whole world. Perhaps, the secret voices which whispered in his breast of a dazzling future, and a fabulous career of military glory, had already announced the rising of ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... landscape, running up to a low ridge on the skyline four miles away, was spouting smoke in all directions—sometimes black, sometimes green, and sometimes, where bursting shell and brick-dust intermingled, blood-red. Beyond the ridge all-conquering British aeroplanes occupied the firmament, observing for "mother" and "granny" and signalling encouragement or reproof to these ponderous but sprightly relatives as their shells hit or missed ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... incline to Worship some star. The Greeks Worshiped the sun, And moon under the Name of Isis and Osiris, but I am more like the Arab look to the stars for something sublime and unchanging among all the bright lights that hang and move in the firmament. The North Star Appears to be the most important. The Axis on which our Earth daily turns. The point from which all Mariners calculate their course in mid ocean, and safely guides Them from continent to continent. Without the North ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... these modern ages. The trial has been hard, brother; it has lasted throughout eighteen centuries; but it will last no longer. Look, my brother! see that rosy light, there in the east, gradually spreading over the firmament! Thus will rise the sun of the new emancipation—peaceful, holy, great, salutary, fruitful, filling the world with light and vivifying heat, like the day-star that will soon ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... representation of the twelve apostles of the Lamb, they being in one important sense permanent fixtures in the church. According to chapter 1:20, stars are sometimes used to represent Christian ministers, the analogy as light-givers being obvious. "They that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars forever and ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith
... I spend my summers high in air; At least there are no privet-hedges there. But even then I have no doubt the smell From slopes celestial of asphodel Would fill the firmament ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... to the dispersing, gossiping crowd: "Hold on—hold on, you people! I've got news for you. Folks, this is O'Ryan's night. It's his in the starry firmament. Look at him shine!" he cried, stretching out his arm toward the heavens, where the glittering galaxy hung near the zenith. "Terry O'Ryan—our O'Ryan—he's struck oil—on his ranch it's been struck. Old Vigon found it. Terry's got his own at last. O'Ryan's ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... encompass what was out there. This was a spaceship! A small globular thing of white metal. He could see a rim of it, like a flat ring some ten feet beneath him. A spaceship, and obviously it had left the Earth! There was a black firmament—dead-black monstrous abyss with white blazing points of stars. And then, down below and to one side there was just an edge of a great globe visible. The Earth, with the sunlight edging its sweeping crescent limb—the Earth, down there with ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... found portrayed, as if a passenger in a boat, with extended wings; holding in its claws the globe of the sun, or elevated in the firmament, as the type of the creating power of the sun-god Ra, in the meridian. Other deities are sometimes shown praying ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... piece of work. It was most emphatically the sort of writing that the world needed. This new author was a genius of the rarest and best sort. Mr. Ward predicted boldly that this new star in the literary firmament was destined to rank among those of the first magnitude. Already, among the banker's closest book friends, the new book was being discussed, and praised. He would bring a copy for Auntie Sue and Betty Jo to read. It was not only the book of the year;—it was, in Homer ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... 'Oh! I love—I love—' I saw a tear start in her eye. She continued: 'I wish I were a little bird, so that I could mount up into the firmament.' ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... third days in Genesis would be confirmed by the demonstration of the truth of the nebular hypothesis; whether it is corroborated by what is known of the nature and probable relative antiquity of the heavenly bodies; whether, if the Hebrew word translated "firmament" in the Authorised Version really means "expanse," the assertion that the waters are partly under this "expanse" and partly above it would be any more confirmed by the ascertained facts of physical geography and meteorology than it was before; whether the creation of the whole ...
— The Interpreters of Genesis and the Interpreters of Nature - Essay #4 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the unbounded satisfaction of all, a violent tempest suddenly cleared the sky, and on the 13th of December, shortly after midnight, the Moon, verging towards her last quarter, revealed herself sharp and bright on the dark background of the starry firmament. ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... when the root of a forget-me-not caught the drop of water by her hair and sucked her in, that she might become a floweret, and twinkle brightly as a blue star on the green firmament of earth. ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... the heart and the knowledge of the race against Jesus Christ and His religion. They stretched Galileo on the rack for inventing a telescope which gave new beauty to the psalm, 'The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth His handiwork.' ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... verification, when the atmosphere became for an instant faintly luminous with the evanescent, quivering glimmer of the silent, summer lightning. The flash trembled but for a moment in the sky, and was gone again; but in that moment I saw that the firmament was packed with vast masses of dense, heavy, threatening, highly, charged electric cloud, the weird, contorted shapes of which clearly indicated that they were being powerfully acted upon by the mighty antagonistic forces that they carried within their bosoms, and gave ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... the same word as the Scottish braw. Cf. Shakespeare, Sonn. 12. 2: "And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;" Ham. ii. 2. 312: "This brave o'erhanging firmament," etc. It is often used of dress, as also is bravery ( finery); as in T. of S. iv. 3. 57: "With scarfs and fans and double change of bravery." See also Spenser, Mother Hubberds Tale, 858: "Which oft maintain'd his masters braverie" (that ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... mold Does in herself all selves enfold — Kingdoms, destinies, and creeds, Great dreams, and dauntless deeds, Science that metes the firmament, The high, inflexible intent Of one for many sacrificed — Plato's brain, the heart of Christ: All love, all legend, and all lore Are in the ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... Undeserved defeat, but what of that? That didn't soften the smart any. And to think of the circumstances! the first statesman of the age, the capablest man, the best-informed man in the entire world, the loftiest uncrowned head that had moved through the clouds of any political firmament for centuries, sitting here apparently defeated in argument by an ignorant country blacksmith! And I could see that those others were sorry for me—which made me blush till I could smell my whiskers scorching. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... through the leaves. A vista of trees arose on either hand, each one seemingly more massive, more aged than its fellow; some bowed in retrospection, some erect with hope and looking skyward for the new star in their country's firmament. ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... mist at this height above the Charles. The night was still, and the moon westering. The light had a glimmering, metallic essence, as from a cosmic mirror in the firmament. Long shadows of trees and shrubbery lay across the grass. Clear in the moonlit foreground stood an elm, the pride of Tory Hill—springing as a single shaft for twice the measure of a man—springing and spreading there into four giant branches, each of which sprang and spread ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... she; "bleezing at the windows and the rigging, and out at the lum, like a killogie." Upon the which, we all went to the door, and there, to be sure, we did see that the Breadland was burning, the flames crackling high out o'er the trees, and the sparks flying like a comet's tail in the firmament. ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... of honest and happy people in the world who ignore society altogether," answered Beth. "It strikes me that your social stars are mighty few in the broad firmament ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... succeeded were many: episodes from profane and sacred histories; simulacra of the great saints. A war between giants and pygmies was shown with all its accompanying horrors. The firmament dripped crimson. The four cryptic creatures of Ezekiel's vision came out of the north, a great cloud of "infolding fire" and the colour was amber. A cyclopean and dazzling staircase thronged by moving ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... and made all dim. And only the cold light of the firmament lit thoughts in me restless as the sea on which I tossed, whose moon was dark, yet walked in ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... being at Portsmouth. He had kept in closer touch with the romancer than any of his other friends had since their graduating days, and he had been from the first a believer in his coming literary renown. So, when The Scarlet Letter shone eminent in the firmament of book-land, it was his triumphant "I-told-you-so" that was among the earliest to be heard. And when my father cast about for a more congenial place than Salem to live in, it was to Bridge that he applied for suggestions. He stipulated that the place ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... however, the incomparable advantages, furnished in speed, by the dry plate photography which made my father realize early as anyone, the boundless possibilities thus opened in human attainment for the penetration of the Sidereal firmament. He had made a great number of photographs at Irvington, and the photographic laboratory was a charming illustration of my father's ingenuity and precision. At Mt. Cook we enjoyed a marvellously clear atmosphere ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... that grand fundamental maxim of the Constitution, that no subject of England shall be taxed but by his own consent. To maintain this principle is the common cause of the Whigs on the other side of the Atlantic, and on this. It is the alliance of God and Nature, immutable, eternal, fixed as the firmament of heaven. Resistance to your acts was necessary as it was just; and your vain declarations of the omnipotence of parliament, and your imperious doctrines of the necessity of submission will be found equally impotent to convince or enslave ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... a five-act tragedy in almost as many hours; the greatest of all popularities past or present, and perhaps one of the greatest men that ever ranked among popularities: Lope himself, so radiant, far-shining, has not proved to be a sun or star of the firmament; but is as good as lost and gone out, or plays at best, in the eyes of some few, as a ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... on the horizon. All large towns had a square in their centre, where the religious dances were performed. From the square a certain number of regular roads or streets always ran in the direction of the four quarters of the firmament. There are great varieties in the construction of the houses. Small insignificant huts often stand close to a palace having twenty or twenty-five windows in one front. Private dwellings in the mountainous parts are built of unhewn stone, cemented with a very strong ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... the little woman, her eyes brightening. She caught at the word as though she had descried a new star in the firmament. "I wish I could have them. They cost so much to buy. I might have my washerwoman come and help with the cooking. She cooks pretty well, and I could help her beforehand, but she couldn't wait on table, to save her life. I wonder if you know much about menus. Could ...
— The Mystery of Mary • Grace Livingston Hill
... and fade, And Orient planets cool with dying fires, Columbia's brilliant star can not be stayed, And, heaven-drawn, towards higher arcs aspires; A Star of Destiny whose searching rays Light all the firmament's remotest ways." ...
— Breakfasts and Teas - Novel Suggestions for Social Occasions • Paul Pierce
... truth and belief, between God and his children. The clergyman was not a hypocrite—far from it! He was in some measure even a devout man. But in his whole presentation of God and our relation to him, there was neither thought nor phrase germane to sunrise or sunset, to the firmament or the wind or the grass or the trees; nothing that came to the human soul as having a reality true as that of the world but higher; as holding with the life lived in it, with the hopes and necessities of the heart ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... the sweet singer; then pluming his breast, He winged the blue firmament free, Repeating, as homeward he flew ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... of the pestilence; and then another, a tale of the exodus. These three wonderful events, following each other, were the blessings coming from Omniscience and Omnipotence by which the black clouds were driven from the Irish firmament. If one through it all could have dared to hope, and have had from the first that wisdom which has learned to acknowledge that His mercy endureth for ever! And then the same author going on with his series would give in his last ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... beginning to feel a little lively. It is when the sun has gone quite down, and the stars begin to twinkle upon the water, that the ball really opens. Then the gay tumult seems to extinguish every other sound, and to fill the firmament. Oh! they must have a high time of it, these little green-backed frogs that make so much noise throughout the warm nights of June. Sometimes I creep into my canoe and paddle by the light of moon or stars as noiselessly ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... Colorado, the passage of which had been of continuous peril and toil, and on the 30th they ended their exploration at a ranch, from which the way was easy to Salt Lake City. "Now the danger is over," writes Major Powell in his diary; "now the toil has ceased; now the gloom has disappeared; now the firmament is bounded only by the horizon; and what a vast expanse of constellations can be seen! The river rolls by us in silent majesty; the quiet of the camp is sweet; our joy is almost ecstasy. We sit till long after midnight talking of the Grand ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... bring, Where swallows poised on lightest wing; The breeze by which the supple reed Was bent,— The setting sun whose glory filled The firmament? ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... but it does not take us far towards great poetry, to have the sea called "whale-road" or "swan-road" or "gannet's-bath"; though we are getting nearer to it when the sun is called "candle of the firmament" or "heaven's gem." On the whole, the poem is composed in an elaborate, ambitious diction which is not properly governed. Alliteration proves a somewhat dangerous principle; it seems mainly responsible for the way the poet ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... thyme and blooming linden, a glistening veil lay over the forest-clad mountains, there was a stillness over everything, but not the quiet of sleep. It seemed as though all nature retained her breath, as if she felt disposed to allow her image to be imprinted upon the firmament. ...
— The Ice-Maiden: and Other Tales. • Hans Christian Andersen
... sonatas for the clavier, and Bach, B. Pasquini wrote, as mentioned in the last chapter, sonatas in three movements, yet we have no knowledge that Bach was acquainted with them. Kuhnau, in fact, however interesting a phenomenon in the musical firmament, is not necessary to explain the appearance of Bach. Joh. Sebastian Bach was undoubtedly acquainted with the "Bible" Sonatas. He must have admired them, but he may have been afraid of the freedom of form ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... women, like Dame Quickly, Katharina, Tamora, Gertrude and Lady Macbeth, he gives us the beautiful, faithful, loving characters of Isabella, Juliet, Desdemona, Perdita, Helena, Miranda, Imogen, Ophelia and Cordelia, whose love-lit words and phrases shine out in the firmament of purity and devotion like ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... two separated fields of cloud, there glided down a ray of unspeakable lustre. But it was not solar light, and there was no heat. The general effect was sad, supremely melancholy. Instead of the shining firmament, spangled with its innumerable stars, shining singly or in clusters, I felt that all these subdued and shaded fights were ribbed in by vast walls of granite, which seemed to overpower me with their weight, and that all this space, great as it was, would not be enough for the march of the humblest ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... Mississippi—one swing in the pure ether for every swing over the green grass; or let me oscillate in it beneath the cool dome of St. Peter's; or drop me in it, as in a balloon, from the zenith, with the whole firmament to rock and expatiate in; and I would not exchange my coarse canvas hammock for the grand state-bed, like a stately coach-and-four, in which they tuck in a king when he passes a night at ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... perceived that in this strange world the light was not derived from any one fixed point, such as our sun, but came in a steady and evenly diffused brightness from every part of the clear and luminous vault of heaven. But, notwithstanding that the heat under that cloudless sky and glowing firmament must have been very great, yet to the inhabitants of that world, whose bodies are composed of quite other elements than ours and have a much higher temperature, the atmosphere, hot as it would appear to us, seems always ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin
... knowledge of the doctrine that Jesus was the incarnate God, come to visit his people—a very unlikely thing to man's wisdom, yet an idea that has notwithstanding ascended above man's horizon, and shown itself the grandest idea in his firmament? ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... the crannies of the tiled roof. Ere it reached these, however, it had to pass through a great multitude of pendent herrings. Hung up by the gills, layer above layer, nearly to the roof, their last tails came down as low as the laird's head. From beneath nothing was to be seen but a firmament of herring tails. These fish were the last of the season, and were thus undergoing the process of kippering. It was a new venture in the place, and its success as yet ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... mowing and reaping machines. The flame that is creeping from its lair to spring at the roofs of the crowded city is betrayed to its watchful guardians by the American telegraphic fire-alarm, and the conflagration that reddens the firmament is subdued by the inundation that flows upon it from an American steam-fire-engine. In the realm of air, the Frenchman who sent a bubble of silk to the clouds must divide his honors with the American who emptied the clouds themselves of their electric ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... be a fixed star in the firmament of fictional characters as surely as David Harum or Col. Sellers. He is a source of infinite delight, while this story of Mr. Kester's is one of the finest examples of ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... dear Maria, at the common fact (one sees it in every street, in every village), that parental love is oftenest at its zenith in the nursery, and then falls lower and lower on the firmament of human life, as the child gets older and older? Look at all dumb brutes, the lower animals of this our earth; is it not thus by nature's law with them? The lioness will perish to preserve that very whelp, whom she will rend a year or two hence, meeting the young lion ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... did such a work in these Ages as will render him long memorable, more or less. He kindled the infinite dry dung-heap of things; set it blazing heaven-high;—and we all thought, in the French Revolution time, it would burn out rapidly into ashes, and then there would a clear Upper Firmament, if over a blackened Earth, be once more vouchsafed us. The flame is now done, as I once said; and only the dull dung-heap, smokily burning, but not now blazing, remains,—for it was very damp, EXCEPT on the surface, and is by ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... was sad and excruciatingly melancholy. Instead of a noble firmament of blue, studded with stars, there was above me a heavy roof of granite, ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... the glory o' God, an' the firmament showeth his handy-work.' I used, whan I was a lad, to study astronomy a wee, i' the houp o' better hearin' what the h'avens declared aboot the glory o' God: I wud fain un'erstan' the speech ae day cried across the nicht to the ither. But I was sair disapp'intit. The things the astronomer tellt ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... on the text "In the beginning God created heaven and earth," says: "By heaven he does not mean the visible firmament, but the empyrean, that is, the fiery or intellectual firmament, which is not so styled from its heat, but from its splendor; and which was filled with angels directly it ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... neither deny nor am careful to distinguish, seeing that they all tend to the same Divine point, and have reference to heavenly hopes; delights they are in seeing the narrow, black, miserable earth fairly compared with the bright firmament, reachings forward unto the things that are before, and joyfulness in the apparent though unreachable nearness and promise of them. But there are other modes in which infinity may be represented, which are confused by no associations of the kind, and which would, ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... in a treatise by itself, I shall put off its exposition till that time. After this, on the second day, he placed the heaven over the whole world, and separated it from the other parts, and he determined it should stand by itself. He also placed a crystalline [firmament] round it, and put it together in a manner agreeable to the earth, and fitted it for giving moisture and rain, and for affording the advantage of dews. On the third day he appointed the dry land to appear, with the sea itself round about it; and on ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... self-congratulation. He was rapidly becoming rich, and there were bright prospects of even greater triumphs, with proportionately greater reward. He had made Gideon a national character, a headliner, a star of the first magnitude in the firmament of the vaudeville theater, and all in six short months. Or, at any rate, he had helped to make him all this; he had booked him well and given him his opportunity. To be sure, Gideon had done the rest; ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... a world unknown, On nothing we could call our own. Around the glistening wonder bent The blue walls of the firmament, No cloud above, no earth below,— A universe of sky ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... dark, the weather somewhat thick, the stars pale over the trucks, and hidden in the obscurity a little way down the dusky slope of firmament. Windsails were wriggling fore and aft like huge white snakes, gaping for the tops and writhing out of the hatches. The flush of sunset was dying when I came on deck. I saw the captain slowly pacing the weather side of the poop with Miss Le Grand. He seemed ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... public life and started a boarding-house, as you may still remember, and I was with her a good while, and almost every day added a few stars to the firmament, as Mr. Dog calls it. Once she flung the milk-pitcher at my head, and when it hit and broke, it seemed to add some to the Milky Way. Several of those fancy designs up there I can remember making. ...
— Hollow Tree Nights and Days • Albert Bigelow Paine
... tosses it about like a Titan. "The spirit of the hills is action, that of the lowlands, repose; and between these there is to be found every variety of motion and of rest, from the inactive plain, sleeping like the firmament, with cities for stars, to the fiery peaks which, with heaving bosoms and exulting limbs, with clouds drifting like hair from their bright foreheads, lift up their Titan hands to heaven saying, 'I live for ever.'" We learn, too, a wonderful ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... with weeping, have I waited and wished for the parting away of the tedious clouds, that, with my telescope, I might gaze on the wonders and beauties of the worlds above. But never did I bend a more anxious eye to the darkened firmament, than in my solitary wanderings over the Georgia hills that memorable night. But all in vain; no North Star appeared to point with beam of hope to ...
— Daring and Suffering: - A History of the Great Railroad Adventure • William Pittenger
... river, seen through which the trees were the ghosts of trees, and the water was the ghost of water. This earth looked spectral, and so did the pale stars: while the cold eastern glare, expressionless as to heat or colour, with the eye of the firmament quenched, might have been likened to ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... and guests with lavish liberality, superbly indifferent to the cost of his boundless extravagance and considering not at all the day of reckoning that must come later for the Bourbon dynasty in France. To glow with commanding brilliance, like the Sun, in the center of his royal firmament, to overwhelm his subjects with his grandeur, and to dazzle the eyes of other nations—that was the ambition that Louis cherished ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... a force which greatly increased the difficulties of navigation. I still insisted, as long as it was possible to do so, on holding on our course. After sunset, the strength of the wind abated. The night came without a cloud, and the starry firmament gave us its pale and glittering light. In an hour more the capricious wind shifted back again in our favor. Toward ten o'clock we sailed into the desolate harbor ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... in every constitution a certain solstice, when the stars stand still in our inward firmament, and when there is required some foreign force, some diversion or alternative, to prevent stagnation. And, as a medical remedy, travel seems one of the best. Just as a man witnessing the admirable effect of ether to lull pain, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... lives in a long rambling bungalow furnished with folding chairs and tables, and in every way marked by the provisional arrangements of camp life. He seems to have just arrived from out of the firmament of green fields and mango groves that encircles the little station where he lives; or he seems just about to pass away into it again. The shooting-howdahs are lying in the verandah, the elephant of a neighbouring landowner is swinging ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... have looked on that delicious summer night at Belmont when they saw "how the floor of heaven is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold," and when the blissful lover, radiant with happiness and exalted by the sublime, illimitable, unfathomable spectacle of the star-strewn firmament, murmured, in such heaven-like cadence, of the authentic music ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... entrenched camp, to encounter their assailants. There was a fierce action for a few moments, the shouts of the combatants, the heavy discharge of cannon, the rattle of musketry; the tramp of heavy-aimed foot soldiers, the rush of cavalry, being distinctly heard. The firmament trembled with the shock of the contending hosts, and was lurid with the rapid discharges of their artillery. After a short, fierce engagement, the north-western army was beaten back in disorder, but rallied again, after a breathing-time, formed again ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... their armies and the disgrace of their policy—even they could bless the convulsion in which he had his origin), "for if the heavens thundered and the earth rocked yet when the storm had passed how pure was the atmosphere it cleared, how bright in the brow of the firmament was the planet it revealed to earth." An hundred years have passed since Washington, crowned with the honors of the successful chieftain, having led his country through the turmoil of seven years of blood ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... Zeppelin had crossed the Danube, and all the church bells began to peal. Suddenly darkness and silence reigned, and the whole town, like some great angry animal, sullen and morose, prepared for the enemy attack. Nowhere was there light or sound. The town, with a wonderful starry firmament overhead, waited in expectation. Fifteen, twenty minutes went by, when suddenly a shot was fired and, as though it were a signal, firing broke out in every direction. The anti-aircraft guns fired incessantly, ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... never hurt; Surprised by unjust force, but not enthralled. But evil on itself shall back recoil, And mix no more with goodness. If this fail, The pillared firmament is rottenness, And ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... star pass out of range, becoming a comet. But if the velocity of the vortex into which the incrusted star settles be equivalent to that of the surrounded vortex, it will hold it as a captive, still revolving and "wrapt in its own firmament." Thus the several planets of our solar system have been captured and held by the sun-vortex, as have ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... in the furthest saloon?" asked the learned man. "Was it there as in the fresh woods? Was it there as in a holy church? Were the saloons like the starlit firmament when we ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... thickening cloud of arrows filled the firmament on high, Darker, deeper, dread and deadlier, grew ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... Divil an' all his angils an' the Firmament av Hiven fly away wid the 'Mister,' an' the sin av making me swear be on your confession, Dinah Shadd! Privit, I tell ye. Wid Privit Mulvaney's best obedience, that but for me the last time-expired wud be still pullin' hair on their ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... far the ground is very firm beneath us, without either inspiration, teaching, or any aid whatever. Since, then, there must be a world Maker, let us judge of His nature by His work. We cannot observe the glories of the firmament, its infinite extent, its beauty, and the Divine skill wherewith every plant and animal hath its wants cared for, without seeing that He is full of wisdom, intelligence, and power. We are still, you will perceive, upon solid ground, ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... The spacious firmament on high, With all the blue ethereal sky, And spangled heavens—a shining frame— Their great Original proclaim. Th' unwearied sun from day to day. Doth his Creator's power display. And publishes to every land The work of ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
