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More "Immensity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hand, forcing her slowly, slowly, against her will, to rise up from her chair, to tell the story, to speak the truth. Her brain reeled. She could hear the fatal words ringing through the room in the familiar tones of her own voice, distinctly, one by one, omitting nothing in the immensity of her self-accusation. She could feel the icy horror creeping through bone and marrow, as the truth tortured her in the utterance of it. She could see Greifenstein's grey face transformed with rage and hatred, she trembled under the inhuman ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... were futile and impotent; he had no patience with them. The offended and astonished Belarab, d'Alcacer with his kindly touch and friendly voice, the sleeping men, the men awake, the Settlement full of unrestful life and the restless Shallows of the coast, were removed from him into an immensity of pitying contempt. Perhaps they existed. Perhaps all this waited for him. Well, let all this wait; let everything wait, till to-morrow or to the end of time, which could now come at any moment for all ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... work, sir. I don't have a dull moment. And—" here his voice sank with the immensity of the tidings with which it was charged—"you'll be very glad to ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... observed by an able writer, that it is impossible to trace the path of a sunbeam through our atmosphere without feeling a desire to know its nature, by what power it traverses the immensity of space, and the various modifications it undergoes at the surfaces and interior of ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey
... the logic of this reasoning, fell silent. After an interval the sun set in a film of yellow light; then the afterglow followed; and finally the stars pricked out the true immensity of the prairies. ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... sudden scrape of Adam's chair behind me, and whirling about, saw his pistol a-swing above my head, felt the vicious, staggering blow, and reeling to the door, sank weakly to my knees, and thence seemed to plunge into a black immensity and knew no more. ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... golden streets and glittering domes of the materialistic Heaven of a personal God. Below him are all the various objects out of which the world's pantheons have been manufactured: around, above—Immensity. And so also, far down the ascending plane of thought that leads from the earth towards the Infinite, the philosophic Buddhist describes, at different plateaux, the heavens and hells, the gods and demons, ...
— The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons • H.S. Olcott
... of a languid, exhausted embarrassment, bowed to Mrs Fyne, and went out of the cottage to be confronted outside its door by the bespangled, cruel revelation of the Immensity of the Universe. The night was not sufficiently advanced for the stars to have paled; and the earth seemed to me more profoundly asleep—perhaps because I was alone now. Not having Fyne with me to set the pace I let myself ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... figure of a new faith. "From the surface of the earth I raised my ideas to all the existences in nature, to the universal system of things, to the incomprehensible Being who embraces all. Then with mind lost in that immensity, I did not think, I did not reason, I did not philosophise; with a sort of pleasure I felt overwhelmed by the weight of the universe, I surrendered myself to the ravishing confusion of these vast ideas. I loved to lose myself in imagination in ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... and amused; how the burden of taxation falls; how justice is executed; how much or how little liberty the people enjoy. And these things I learned to a great extent from my social intercourse with those cultured reformers of America. Among these people I had not the depressing feeling of immensity and hugeness which marred my enjoyment when I arrived at New York. My literary lectures on the Brownings and George Eliot were much appreciated, especially in the East, where I found paying audiences in the fall or autumn of the year. These lectures have been delivered many times in Australia; ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... apprehensions. And the impossibility of amending or correcting these faculties, reduces me almost to despair, and makes me resolve to perish on the barren rock, on which I am at present, rather than venture myself upon that boundless ocean, which runs out into immensity. This sudden view of my danger strikes me with melancholy; and as it is usual for that passion, above all others, to indulge itself; I cannot forbear feeding my despair, with all those desponding reflections, which ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... and held his peace. He was simple, modest, unobtrusive and unpretentious. He was so big that he never knew the greatness of his work, any more than the author of Hamlet knew the immensity of his. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... was no darkness of sin or punishment in the original state of man and the angels, but there was a certain natural obscurity in the human and angelic intellect, in so far as every creature is darkness in comparison with the immensity of the Divine light: and this obscurity ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... and twenty millions of inhabitants. Query—How many millions doth Africa contain? Supposing the Africans, collectively and individually, to expend 5l. a head in raiment and furniture yearly when civilized, &c. an immensity ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... have had any doubt as to their happiness, and the master himself was under no illusion; he knew that when he disappeared the world would say: "Ouf!"... What a wilderness of thought surrounds the Imperator! Over the immensity of the sands, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... had given him a breathing space. He could lurk unchallenged by the passers-by, and watch the course of things. His eye followed up the intricate dim immensity of the twilight buildings, and it came to him as a thing infinitely wonderful, that above there the sun was rising, and the world was lit and glowing with the old familiar light of day. In a little while he had recovered his breath. His clothing ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... departed. When she had gone Sobakevitch inclined his head in an attitude of willingness to listen to Chichikov's business. Our hero began in a sort of detached manner—touching lightly upon the subject of the Russian Empire, and expatiating upon the immensity of the same, and saying that even the Empire of Ancient Rome had been of considerably smaller dimensions. Meanwhile Sobakevitch sat with his ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... imperfect knowledge. It takes forms as various as the authors whom it misjudges. In the case of Shakespeare, when we attempt to estimate him, to gauge him, to see him from all sides, we become almost painfully conscious of his immensity. We can build no watch-tower high enough to give us a bird's-eye view of that "globe of miraculous continents." We are out of breath when we attempt to accompany him ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... entire solar system were wiped out of being, there would be left no noticeable void among the countless systems of worlds and suns and stars; in the immensity of space the sun with all his revolving planets is not even as a drop to the ocean or a grain of sand to the composition of the earth. There are millions of other suns of larger dimensions with larger attendants wheeling around them in the illimitable fields of space. ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... response from Men or Nature, is always what we call silent; cannot speak or come to light, till it be seen, till it be spoken to. Every noble work is at first 'impossible.' In very truth, for every noble work the possibilities will lie diffused through Immensity; inarticulate, undiscoverable except to faith. Like Gideon thou shalt spread out thy fleece at the door of thy tent; see whether under the wide arch of Heaven there be any bounteous moisture, or none. ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... had grown the soul that was melted within me. The west wind had slackened the springs of my intelligence. A cold gray light poured down from the heavens, and the murky clouds that passed overhead gave a boding look to the land; all these things, together with the immensity of the sea, said to me, "Die to-day or die to-morrow, still must we not die?" And then—I wandered on, musing on the doubtful future, on my blighted hopes. Gnawed by these gloomy thoughts, I turned ...
— Christ in Flanders • Honore de Balzac
... an emotion which supports the American visitor even against the immensity he shares, and he is able to reflect that New York would not look so relatively little, so comparatively thin, if New York were a capital on the same lines as London. If New York were, like London, a political as well as a commercial capital, she would have the national edifices of Washington ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... it that the thirty-one-story block is trying to say about us? The thirty-one-story block is the masterpiece of mass, of immensity, of numbers; with its 2427 windows and its 779 offices, and its crowds of lives piled upon lives, it is expressing the one supreme and characteristic thing that is taking place in the era in which we live. The city is the main fact that modern civilization stands for, and crowding is the logical ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... the guard, opening and shutting his hand in ironical adieu, and looking smaller and smaller as our tender drifted away and the vast liner loomed immense before us. He may have contributed to its effect of immensity by the smallness of his presence, or it may have dwarfed him. No matter; he filled no slight space in our lives while he lasted. Now that he is no longer there, was he really a bad little boy, merely and simply? Heaven knows, which alone knows ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... against the French government lightly, nor too readily impute a disposition to disturb the amicable relations at present subsisting between the two countries, I answer that no one more earnestly desires peace than I do. There is no one entertains a higher estimate than I do of the resources—the immensity of the resources—possessed by that country both in peace and in war—no man living estimates more highly than I do the wisdom of her statesmen and the skill of her generals—no man is more ready than myself to concede ...
— Maxims And Opinions Of Field-Marshal His Grace The Duke Of Wellington, Selected From His Writings And Speeches During A Public Life Of More Than Half A Century • Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington
... and his having, seen Mr. Flack before was comfortable to him now: it made mere placidity of his personally foregoing the young man's society in favour of Delia and Francie. He had not hitherto been perfectly satisfied that the streets and shops, the general immensity of Paris, were just the safest place for young ladies alone. But the company of a helpful gentleman ensured safety—a gentleman who would be helpful by the fact of his knowing so much and having it all right there. If a big newspaper ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... than the one she then carried in her bosom; though it had ever been pictured to her in its deepest colors, and threatened her as a reward for all her misdemeanors. Her vileness and God's holiness and all-pervading presence, which filled immensity, and threatened her with constant annihilation, composed the burden of her vision of terror. Her faith in prayer is equal to her faith in the love of Jesus. Her language is, 'Let others say what they will of the efficacy ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... bewildered. He began to catch a glimpse in Jean Valjean of some indescribably lofty and melancholy figure. An unheard-of virtue, supreme and sweet, humble in its immensity, appeared to him. The ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... into one landscape, and made the most formal partitions of cultivation, hedge-rows of pollard willows, conduct the eye into the depths and distances of his picture; and thus, more than by any other means, has given it that appearance of immensity which is so striking. As I have slipped into the subject of painting, I feel anxious to inquire whether your pencil has been busy last winter in the solitude and uninterrupted quiet of Dunmow. Most likely you know that we ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... observed a wild duck swimming on the waves, a single solitary wild duck. It is not easy to conceive, how interesting a thing it looked in that round objectless desert of waters. I had associated such a feeling of immensity with the ocean, that I felt exceedingly disappointed, when I was out of sight of all land, at the narrowness and nearness, as it were, of the circle of the horizon. So little are images capable of satisfying the obscure feelings connected ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the battle of the twentieth century for humanity. Her rector was her captain. It was he who had cut her cables, quelled, for a time at least, her mutineers; and sought to hearten those of her little crew who wavered, who shrank back appalled as they realized something of the immensity of the conflict in which her destiny ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... praise; and vast as was the volume of sound, the hands that invoked it had it so completely under control—voluntary control as yet—that it did not swamp her sense; her spirit floated on the wide stream with harmonious waves towards the measureless immensity of music at its source. To reach that centre without a circle,—that perfection which imperfection shadows not,—that unborn, undying principle, which art tries humbly, falteringly, to illustrate,—was never given to man on earth; and tries he to attain ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... imagination to see her there as he had seen her that first day—a happy girl, looking at him with the long, straight glance of unawakened youth. A great wave of protecting love went out to meet that vision. Self was lost in its immensity. As he had found her, so, please God, she was still and so he ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... to the next point, finding only the tracks of R.C.'s boots. Everywhere I peered for the bear I had sighted, and at intervals I yelled. For all the answer I got I might as well have been alone on the windy rim of the world. My voice seemed lost in immensity. Then I rode westward, then back eastward, and to and fro until both Stockings and I were weary. At last I gave up, and took a good, long rest under a pine on the rim. Not a shot, not a yell, not a sound but wind and the squall of a jay disrupted the peace ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... stood detached from the main activity. There, washing his face in a tin basin on a back porch, David had his fried supper, sat for a while outside in the gathering dusk, gazing at the crude-oil flares, the passing dark figures beyond, the still obscured immensity of mountain and forest. And then he went up to a pine sealed room, like the heated interior of a packing box, where ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... star that hangs in the sky has its own ring of planets, and that in every one of these some strange drama of life and death is proceeding. It is a dizzy thought! But if it be true, is it not better to face it? The mind shudders, appalled at the immensity of the prospect. But do not such thoughts as these give us a truer picture of ourselves, and of our own humble place in the vast complexity of things, than the excessive dwelling upon the wistful dreams of ancient law-givers and prophets? Or is it better to delude ourselves? Deliberately ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... mind that had assailed her when they started on the homeward journey, the conflicting thoughts and contrary emotions, were explained. But she knew herself at last and knew the love that filled her, an overwhelming, passionate love that almost frightened her with its immensity and with the sudden hold it had laid upon her. Love had come to her at last who had scorned it so fiercely. The men who had loved her had not had the power to touch her, she had given love to no one, she had thought that she could not love, that she was devoid of ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... ducks quacking down in the "Moggason," and he, too, felt the silence and immensity of the plain outside. It was enormous, incredible in its wildness. "I believe we're going to like it out ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... staggering consciousness could realize was an immensity, an immeasurable uprearing that brought with it the same throat-gripping vertigo as comes from gazing downward from some great height—then a blur of white faces—intolerable shinings of hundreds upon thousands of eyes. Huge, incredibly huge, a colossal amphitheatre of jet, a stupendous ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... present. Does man groan because he cannot comprehend the mind outside himself which manifests itself in the sun? Well, did not Prometheus draw the celestial rays into the pin-point of a flame which man can order, and which does him service? Is the fire a little thing beside the immensity ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... to their faith to assign its birth to the sixteenth century, are beginning to be awake to the powerful instrumentality of the Christian Church in the regeneration of mankind, and the production of modern civilization. Few, indeed, even with the light of history, can form an adequate idea of the immensity of the task assigned to Christianity in shedding light over the chaos that followed the overthrow of Rome, in reducing it to order, and preparing the nicely fitted ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... stupendous idea this gives of the immensity of creation, and of the bounty of Divine Providence in furnishing such a profusion of life in a region so remote from ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... better calculated to foster this mood of his than the one to which his business now brought him—Buenos Aires on the Plate. Leaving Liverpool with steel and cotton, there was an immensity of ocean to be traversed, until one came to the river mouth. Then fifty leagues of hard sailing ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... but see how big it is up there;" they cast their eyes up, and, taking the blue vault for creation, were impressed with its immensity. "I know where to find you here, but up there you might be ever ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... elevated above themselves, and, in their union with God, become godlike, by a most lofty and supereminent similitude with God, so that the mind can conceive no greater. Thus, like very gods, they shine to all eternity in the divine brightness. By these same acts they expand themselves into immensity, so as to be co-equal and co-extensive, as far as may be, to so great a good, that they may take it in, and comprehend it all. They linger not outside, as it were upon the surface of it; but they go down into its profound depths, ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... immensity of the sorrow surrounding you, I think you have a right to rejoice, and the more so as your consort, her Majesty the Queen, shares this rare ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... may include other worlds, retains the belief that the actual occurrences related in the gospel took place only on this globe. Others may have heard the story, or, as he beautifully says: "The wonder- working God, who has strewed the field of immensity with so many worlds, and spread the shelter of his omnipotence over them, may have sent a message of love to each, and reassured the hearts of its despairing people by some overpowering manifestation of tenderness.... Angels from paradise may have sped to every planet their delegated way, and ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... a confession, which is, that only since I had left the Emperor, had I fully comprehended the immensity of his greatness. Attached to his service almost from the beginning of the Consulate, at a time when I was still very young, he had grown, so to speak, without my having perceived it, and I had above all seen ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... been gathered into one place, I suppose—unless it may have been in the treasury of some Eastern sovereign—since the very beginning of the world. At a single glance I knew that the great treasure of gold, which had seemed to me overwhelming because of its immensity, was as nothing in comparison with this other treasure wherein riches were so concentrate and sublimate that I had the very essence of them: and I reeled and trembled again as I hugged the thought to me that by my finding of it I was made ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... that each of its sides was originally 755 feet in length and its height 481 feet, or 60 feet higher than the cross of St. Paul's, and that gangs of men, 100,000 in each, were engaged for twenty years in its construction, some idea of its immensity may be formed. At one time the pyramids were covered with polished stone, but this has all been removed and has been used in building the mosques of Cairo, and to-day its exterior is a series of steps, each 4 to 6 feet in height, formed by the ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... regions. He afterwards followed him to St. Petersburg, and there, after some vicissitudes of fortune, Morok became one of the imperial couriers—these iron automata, that the least caprice of the despot hurls in a frail sledge through the immensity of the empire, from Persia to the Frozen Sea. For these men, who travel night and day, with the rapidity of lightning there are neither seasons nor obstacles, fatigues nor danger; living projectiles, they must either be broken to pieces, or reach the intended ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... alarming expression in her eyes if we did, that made the medical men uncertain how to act. She had tasted no food since the child died; she was hopeful to the last: it was impossible, she said, that her child could die; her faculties could not comprehend the immensity of the anguish in store for her. So there she sat like stone—cold, and silent, and wan, as the effigy she watched. Who dared to awaken ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... rang with this inexplicable affair,—inexplicable because no one knew the secret of it, namely, the immensity of the dowry. Had that dowry been known Veronique could have chosen a husband where she pleased; but even so, she might ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... unnatural increase of trade, which, as its cause failed, must in some degree return to its ancient and natural bounds.—3rd, When the merchants met from all parts, and compared their accounts, they were alarmed at the immensity of the debt due to them from America. They found that the Americans had over-traded their abilities. And, as they found too that several of them were capable of making the state of political events an excuse for their failure in commercial punctuality, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... breath or two they hesitated before opening the heavy double door in the side of the hull, savoring to the full the immensity of the moment. ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... Luby—"Very well, my lord, I will leave that. I believe in this way the Irish People has done an immensity of good. It taught the people not to give up their right of private judgment in temporal matters to the clergy; that while they reverenced the clergy upon the altar, they should not give up their consciences in secular ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... striking account to my pages.[15] "Then, with frightful velocity, the actual shadow of the Moon is often seen approaching, a tangible darkness advancing almost like a wall, swift as imagination, silent as doom. The immensity of nature never comes quite so near as then, and strong must be the nerves not to quiver as this blue-black shadow rushes upon the spectator with incredible speed. A vast, palpable presence seems ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... Divine Substance, Immensity, Incomprehensibility, Invisibility, explicated, as far as our weak reason ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... haphazard; they are large instances, as it were, of big and visible things. They only give the rudest idea of the immensity and complexity of insect life in our own country. My friend the sparrow is, I believe, a friend likewise to man generally. He does a little damage, I admit; but if he were to resort to living on damage solely in his enormous ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... She remembered the immensity of the reward offered for this man, and realized that if she could win a portion of it, it would be of wonderful help to her as a matter of pin-money, and it might influence some man to take pity on ...
— Five Thousand Dollars Reward • Frank Pinkerton
... existence, of God and of our own souls, and our knowledge of right and wrong, are immediate, and are independent of the senses. We are in direct communication with the "Over-soul," the infinite Spirit. "The soul in man is the background of our being—an immensity not possessed, that cannot be possessed." "From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all." Revelation is "an influx of the Divine ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea—mark how closely they hug their ship and only ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... to impress the student is the immensity of the tribute of mortality exacted by this disease, from those in the maturity of life, and in large measure at the period of greatest usefulness. During thirty years, from 1881 to 1910 inclusive, there perished in England and Wales from cancer no ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... bunch of red and yellow flowers. Flickering shadows danced gaily around us, as if exulting in their power of movement, in contrast with the creeping advance of the moon shadows. From time to time strange sounds floated through the air. The broad expanse of sea horizon seemed lost in immensity. In the sky overhead not a cloud was visible. I felt as if I were lying on the earth's extreme edge, gazing into infinite space, that riddle that haunts the soul. The majestic beauty of the night intoxicated me, while my whole being seemed absorbed in ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... in the basin; of straining bootlaces; and of the creaking of a loose board in the floor every time Mary Ellen stepped on it. Scarcely a word was spoken. Now that what we had so long strained towards was at hand we stood breathless before the immensity of it. The long year and nine months at Mrs. Handsomebody's fell like a heavy curtain between us and the past. Our father's face had grown hazy to us. I think The Seraph only pretended to remember. His coming had been held over our ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... through the immensity of space. What are these bodies? Do they unite us? No; they keep us apart and asunder even while we touch. Realms and oceans, worlds and ages, open before two spirits bent on heaven. What a choir surrounds us when we resolve to live unitedly ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... voice we must begin by keeping still. We must listen. The whole world is a tongue of which the spirit is the meaning. God engraved its fiery capitals in the immensity of the heavens, and traced its delicate smaller letters on the flower, on the grass, on the human soul, as rich, as incommensurable as the abysses of space. Whosoever you are, brother, before letting yourself utter one word, lend your ear to that voice that seeks you, I might almost ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... to most the fetters imposed by social conventions, by inherited or implanted standards of seemliness and decorum, suffice to steady them in the path of outward propriety. Of how great and absorbing a passion Lord Nelson was capable is shown by the immensity of the sacrifice that he made to it. Principle apart,—and principle wholly failed him,—all else that most appeals to man's self-respect and regard for the esteem of others was powerless to exert control. Loyalty to friendship, the sanctity which man is naturally fain to see in the ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... We picked out a comparatively clean spot on the deck, near the bow; we lay down on our backs and relaxed our beings into infinite patience. We had been thus for perhaps an hour; I was looking up at a little white cloud that seemed receding, receding into the blue immensity behind it. Suddenly a noise like thunder roared in my ears. The little cloud gave a great leap back into its place; the roar dwindled into the voice of Miller, in plaintive, disturbed drawl. 'What the deuce are the niggahs doing?' he ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... legal duty, nor of selfish enjoyment, but lies far down in the unconscious abysses of the heart and being itself:—as Christ—to compare (for He Himself permits, nay commands, us to do so in His parables) our littleness with His immensity- -as Christ, I say, showed, when He chose first to manifest His glory—the glory of His grace and truth—by increasing for a short hour the pleasures of ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... knowing that as this night was the first time for him to awake to consciousness of a vague, wonderful other self, so it was one wherein he began to be aware of an encroaching presence of physical things—the immensity of the star-studded sky, the soaring moon, the bleak, mysterious mountains, and limitless slope, and plain, and ridge, and valley. These things in all their magnificence had not been unnoticed by him before; only now they spoke a different ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... princes of the West, and strengthen your written testimony by the authority of your seal. As for me, I shrink not from taking upon me a task for the salvation of my soul; and with the help of the Lord I am ready to go and seek out all of them, solicit them, show unto them the immensity of your troubles, and pray them all to hasten on the day of your relief.'" The patriarch eagerly accepted the pilgrim's offer; and Peter set out, going first of all to Rome, where he handed to Pope Urban II. the patriarch's ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Thyself? But further, my daughter, contemplate the elements themselves—Earth, Water, Air, and Fire, with all the wonderful things which they contain in infinite variety—men, beasts, birds, fishes, and sea-monsters. And all of these give praise and honour to the unfathomable immensity that is in Thee. Who is it, Lord, who preserves all these things, who nourishes them? It is Thou who providest for all, each in his own way, for great and small, rich and poor. Thou, O God, doest this; Thou ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... bitterness of death is past, my dear friend. Only look to Jesus. He died for you—died in your place—died under the frowns of Heaven, that we might die under its smiles. Regard neither unbelief nor doubt. Fear neither sin nor hell. Choose neither life nor death. All these are swallowed up in the immensity of Christ, and are triumphed over in His Cross. Fight the good fight of faith. Hold fast your confidence in the atoning, sanctifying blood of the Lamb of God. Confer no more with flesh and blood. Go, meet the Bridegroom. Behold He cometh! Trim your lamp. Quit yourself like a soldier of ...
— Fletcher of Madeley • Brigadier Margaret Allen
... nearly the shortest, in the whole range of Slavonic fiction. I refer to "War and Peace," by Tolstoi, and to "Taras Bulba," by Gogol. Both of these extraordinary works give us chiefly an impression of Immensity—we feel the boundless steppes, the illimitable wastes of snow, and the long winter night. It is particularly interesting to compare Taras Bulba with the trilogy of the Polish genius, Sienkiewicz. The former is tiny in size, the latter a leviathan; but the effect produced is the ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... of thinking of the wonder that ever we were brought to ground our arms at the Master's feet. Will the winning of others be easier than was the victory won over ourselves? Now that we battle against what once we were and did, we should understand from memory the immensity of the task. Once realised, it should never be forgotten. There is no miracle in all the Gospel history greater than the miracle of a ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... great deal regarding the decline of our shipping interests, and so far as our shipping in the foreign trade is concerned it is unfortunately true," says The Boston Commercial Bulletin. "But few people realize the immensity of our coastwise commerce. The Custom House figures on the shipping of the port of New York for 1897 show that there were 4,614 arrivals of vessels from foreign ports, 7,095 from Eastern domestic ports, and 3,798 from Southern domestic ports. Of the foreign, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... reared and piled in the grey of the air. It is nothing if not fantastic. Even by day that same mad grouping and jostling of monumental devices, gathered together from the ends of the world, gives to the place a cheerful half-pagan character; now, in its confusion and immensity, it might be some city of dreams, tossed up in cloud and foam and frozen into marble; some aerial half-way limbo where life slips a little from the living and death from ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... being impressed by the immensity of the landscape, endless sweeping undulation after undulation spreading before us, but not a real mountain in sight. It was like a solid ocean of magnified proportions. Just above the horizon-line a large accumulation of globular clouds of immaculate white intensified ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... describe at all the scene which the top of the mountain presented, and impossible to describe it adequately. One was not occupied with the thought of description but wholly possessed with the breadth and glory of it, with its sheer, amazing immensity and scope. Only once, perhaps, in any lifetime is such vision granted, certainly never before had been vouchsafed to any of us. Not often in the summer-time does Denali completely unveil himself and dismiss the ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... for confirmation or denial of these stories. Dr. Waller was his senior in the service by ten years at least, and a type of the old-time officer and gentleman of whom such as Flint stood ever in awe. He preferred, therefore, as he thought, to keep the doctor at a distance, to make him feel the immensity of his, the post commander's, station, and so, as Wilkins dare not disavow the sayings of his wife, even had he been so minded, ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... to grasp the immensity of the task actually executed by Marx. First, consider his scientific work. During all the period of these many battles every leisure moment was spent in study. While others were engaged in organizing what they were pleased to call the "Revolution" and waiting about for it to start, ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... Jewish religion reduced to an abstraction and taking the form of the Eleatic philosophy. Like Parmenides, he is overpowered and intoxicated with the idea of Being or God. The greatness of both philosophies consists in the immensity of a thought which excludes all other thoughts; their weakness is the necessary separation of this thought from actual existence and from practical life. In neither of them is there any clear opposition between the inward and outward world. The substance of Spinoza has two attributes, which ...
— Meno • Plato
... cynical robber, loved the sea. His ardent temperament, greedy for impressions, never tired of contemplating its infinite, free and powerful immensity. It offended him to receive such a reply to his question concerning the beauty of the sea that he loved. Seated at the tiller, he cleaved the water with his oar and gazed tranquilly before him, filled with the desire to thus continue rowing forever ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... and the mere gossip of society is intolerable to loving natures. Consequently, two isolated beings who know each other thoroughly ought to seek their enjoyments in the higher regions of thought; for it is impossible to satisfy with paltry things the immensity of the relation between them. Moreover, when a man has accustomed himself to deal with great subjects, he becomes unamusable, unless he preserves in the depths of his heart a certain guileless simplicity and unconstraint which often make ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... wholly alive; but she is alive for evil. We whose purpose is good, whose cause is justice and whose triumph is indispensable if honest industry and human right are not to disappear from mankind, are as yet not fully alive to the immensity and necessity of our task. We must awaken, or be awakened, ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... other invention of the mirror with a memory, and especially that application of it which has given us the wonders of the stereoscope, is not so easily, completely, universally recognized in all the immensity of its applications and suggestions. The stereoscope, and the pictures it gives, are, however, common enough to be in the hands of many of our readers; and as many of those who are not acquainted with it must before long become as familiar with it as they are now with friction-matches, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... uninspired; courageous, witty, a soldier; lucid, critical of method only, he corresponded to the movement which, all around him, was ushering in the Bourbons: the hardening of Goujon's and de l'Orme's luxuriance into the conventions of the great colonnades and the sombre immensity of the new palaces; the return of one national faith to a people weary of so many random quarrels; the mistrust of an ill-ordered squirearchy; the firm founding of a ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... hour sat in the dying glow of the birch. For the first time since he had come from Miriam Kirkstone's he had the opportunity to think, and in thinking he found his brain crowded with cold and unemotional fact. He saw his lie in all its naked immensity. Yet he was not sorry that he had lied. He had saved Conniston. He had saved himself. And he had saved Conniston's sister, to love, to fight for, to protect. It had not been a Judas lie but a lie with his heart and his soul and ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... practically ready for opening, so long a delay took place in settling outstanding claims that the track became almost derelict. For these were anxious days for railway promoters. The rosy promise of rich revenues from remote Welsh lines failed to mature, and Mr. Savin, heavily weighted with the immensity of his undertakings, and crushed by the costly construction of his great hotels, sank under the burden. He faced his financial embarrassments with characteristic pluck, but it was a dark hour in the annals of British finance ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... people in their need. In this there was expiation such as Heaven might accept; this would release her from the burthen of life that weighed upon her, and would reunite her to her mother; in this way she could show her lover and the bishop and all the world the immensity of her self-sacrifice, which was in nothing behind that of "the other"—the much-vaunted daughter of Thomas! She would do the great deed before Paula's eyes, in sight of all the people. But Orion must know whose image she bore ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of North London was flying by; the very pace gave us a sense of its immensity and its meanness. It was, as it were, a base infinitude, a squalid eternity, and we felt the real horror of the poor parts of London, the horror that is so totally missed and misrepresented by the sensational novelists ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... Tourgueneff's severity as regards Jack, nor in the immensity of his admiration for Rougon. The one has charm, the other force. But neither one is concerned ABOVE ALL else with what is for me the end of art, namely, beauty. I remember having felt my heart beat violently, ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... seek to go clear of it? Somehow, the presence of this similitude of land made the sea appear as enormous as space itself. Whilst it was all clear horizon the immensity of the deep was in a measure limited to the vision by its cincture. But this ice-line gave the eye something to measure with, and when I looked at those leagues of frozen shore my spirits sank into deepest dejection at the thought of the ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... beaten silver waters cut By the prow of our ship, Send off stars of phosphorous To vie with the stars overhead. Nothing but sky and the starlight, And a stretch of limitless sea, Nothing but peace and dominion,— Silence, immensity. ...
— A Little Window • Jean M. Snyder
... external and internal, I will say nothing, for what can now be said that has not been said before, and far better than I could say it? Almost every one nowadays has formed his own idea of what this great church is like—of its exceeding vastness and extent, the immensity of its over-arching dome, and its gorgeous and profuse decorations. Yet when they at length come to visit this preconceived and idealized vision, perhaps their feeling is almost one of vague disappointment. Like Hilda in the "Marble Faun," we at first prefer ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... once as a thing complete and perfect. Complete and perfect—yet surely spoiled a little by the gallery that dwarfs the arches and seems to introduce a useless detail into what till then must have been so simple. One soon forgets so small a thing in the immensity and solemnity of the whole, that seems to come to one with the assurance of the sky or of the hills, really without an afterthought. And indeed I find there much of the strange simplicity of natural things that move us we know not why: the autumn fields ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... and the creek bed almost dry—unless one should reckon the three parched cottonwood trees beside the stream, a little way down from the canon, and the flat-roofed adobe house near by, and the empty corral behind built of aspen poles. In that immensity of mountain and mesa the house looked like a brick of sun-baked mud, the corral like a child's device of straws, the three cottonwoods like three twigs stuck in the earth. Or, at any rate, that is how they appeared to a horseman regarding them from ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... new-comer to London from the country, are always somewhat disagreeable, if he comes to work. The immensity of the city must especially strike him as he crosses it for the first time and passes through its different areas. The general turn-out into a few great thoroughfares, on Saturday nights especially, gives ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... toiler, and the one who will yet bring them together in complete accord, was born one Christmas night while the curtains of heaven swung, stirred by the wings angelic. Owner of all things—all the continents, all worlds, and all the islands of light. Capitalist of immensity, crossing over to our condition. Coming into our world, not by gate of palace, but by door of barn. Spending His first night amid the shepherds. Gathering after around Him the fishermen to be His chief ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... have only a few days before us, what right have we to imitate what our eye cannot see, understand, or follow? By what standard are we to judge her, if we look away from the passing hour? For instance, considering only the imperceptible speck that we form in the worlds, and disregarding the immensity that surrounds us, we are wholly ignorant of all that concerns our possible life beyond the tomb; and we forget that, in the present state of our knowledge, nothing authorises us to affirm that there may not be a kind of more ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... wild. Independence seemed a long way behind, California so remote that it was like thinking of Heaven when one was on earth, well fed and well faring. Their immediate surroundings began to make their world, they subsided into the encompassing immensity, unconsciously eliminating thoughts, words, habits, that did not ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... stretched themselves out under their blankets, and the doctor remained alone in the immensity ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... would be stranger than fiction. But you must remember that the bulk of readers have no personal acquaintance with you, or the characters you describe. The consequence is that they fancy there is an immensity of romance mixed up with the facts, and they are irritated by the inability to distinguish between them. I am confident, from all I have heard, that this was the source of the comparatively cold reception of Lavengro. ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... prodigiously where its rock gates stood open to grant the party admission to the sanctum of the hills. Sheer granite walls, austere and frowning, rose in sculptured immensity on either side, but the trail under foot was scored between some scattered wild-peach shrubs, interspersed with occasional bright-green clumps of manzanita. The air was redolent of warmth and fragrance that might with fitness ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... inhabited by Jeanbernat. It stood within the park, which it overlooked. But the old keeper had apparently blocked up that side of his dwelling, and had cleared a little garden by the road. And there he lived, facing southwards, with his back turned upon the Paradou, as if unaware of the immensity of verdure that ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... morning a walk to the kirkyard at Pittendurie. He was going to bid Sophy a last farewell. Henceforward he must try and prevent her memory troubling his life and influencing his moods and motives. It was a cold, chilling morning, and the great immensity of the ocean spread away to the occult shores of the poles. The sky was grey and sombre, the sea cloudy and unquiet; and far off on the eastern horizon, a mysterious portent was ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... arrangement which often proceeds from the bosom of the whimsical god at other times known as blind Circumstance. That his few minutes of hope, between the reading of the first and second letters, had carried him to extraordinary heights of rapture was proved by the immensity of his suffering now. The sun blazing into his face would have shown a close watcher that a horizontal line, which he had never noticed before, but which was never to be gone thereafter, was somehow gradually forming itself in the smooth of his ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... eyes that he parted from her, whom he never expected to see again in this life; and on reaching his American home, he addressed her in words of touching tenderness:—"I stretch out my arms towards you, notwithstanding the immensity of the seas which separate us, while I wait the heavenly kiss which I firmly trust ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... and wearied out indeed: so that it was deep in the morning before he achieved his second let-go, about half way of entrance, I all the while crying and complaining of his prodigious vigour, and the immensity of what I appeared to suffer splitting up with. Tired, however, at length, with such athletic drudgery, my champion began now to give out, and to gladly embrace the refreshment of some rest. Kissing me then with much affection, and recommending me to my repose, he presently ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... not life but death without a love, All ceaseless darkness where she is denied! We know not our existence till we hide Our soul within another's there to be Its very being: like a river wide Love rolls its endless volumes to the sea, Losing itself within its own immensity. ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... in its dark chambers, and raves against its bounds as a beast of prey. Awe and fear are the sentiments it inspires; in Aryan tongues its synonyms are the desert and the night.[194-1] It produces an impression of immensity, infinity, formlessness, and barren changeableness, well suited to a notion of chaos. It is sterile, receiving all things, producing nothing. Hence the necessity of a creative power to act upon it, as it were to impregnate its barren germs. Some cosmogonies find this in one, ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... were a great thought into whose heart she was trying to see. Now and then she stroked herself, getting strange comfort out of the presence of her body. She had that old unhappy feeling of having two selves within her. And this soft night full of the quiet stir of the sea, and of dark immensity, woke in her a terrible longing to be at one with something, somebody, outside herself. At the Ball last night the 'flying feeling' had seized on her again; and was still there—a queer manifestation of her streak of recklessness. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... "preparatory to making an early start the next morning, when the door burst open, and Anna, tear-stained and sobbing, threw herself into the room and, hurling herself to the bed, flung herself at his feet, which, owing to his immensity of stature, were protruding slightly over the end of the mattress. 'Take me with you!' she cried repeatedly. 'No, no, no!' replied the Tsar, equally repeatedly. At length, worn out by her pleading, the ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... tablet and pencil once more to the summerhouse. It was unusually beautiful out there—just the kind of evening to harmonize with her uplifted mood. Day was ending in still and brilliant serenity. The western sky an immensity of benign light, and draped with clouds ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... the general. After severe loss the bold associates resolved to give up the assault, and to march onward to Italy past the camp. For six successive days they continued to defile—a proof of the cumbrousness of their baggage still more than of the immensity of their numbers. The general permitted the march to proceed without attacking them. We can easily understand why he did not allow himself to be led astray by the insulting inquiries of the enemy whether the Romans had no commissions for their wives at ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the scenes and images of that agitating day began to move before my memory in orderly procession, and for the first time I appreciated, with a stunning sense of horror and a perfect rapture of thanksgiving, the value of my escape and the immensity of the danger which had threatened me. It may have been miserable weakness—I think it was. But I was young, nervous, and afflicted with a troublesome sort of conscience, which occasionally went ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... men tell each other their secrets. At last, seven years later, after the Revolution of 1830, when the mob invaded the Archbishop's residence, when Republican agitators spurred them on to destroy the gilt crosses which flashed like streaks of lightning in the immensity of the ocean of houses; when Incredulity flaunted itself in the streets, side by side with Rebellion, Bianchon once more detected Desplein going into Saint-Sulpice. The doctor followed him, and knelt down by him without the slightest notice or demonstration of surprise from his friend. They both ...
— The Atheist's Mass • Honore de Balzac
... narrowing, for others it is the place that affords the widest scope; for some the world is narrow, for others the world is extremely broad—in fact, so broad that they never are able to get free from its immensity. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... Although strong, they were quickly broken open by well-directed blows of the pickaxes; and upon the lids being raised there burst upon Jim's eyes such a vision of wealth that he was positively dazed by the immensity of it. The particular chest which he opened was full, from bottom to top, of solid gold ingots, black with age on the surface, but showing the dull red metallic lustre of gold when scraped with a knife. There must have been half ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... overtake him, or even leave him behind. If I may be allowed a comparison: other mental existences suggest the idea of a river, flowing onwards, amidst varying scenes, and in a widening bed, to lose itself in the sea. Mr. Browning's genius appears the sea itself, with its immensity and its limits, its restlessness and its repose, the constant self-balancing of ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... the diffused light of an even gray sky. The reeds by the marshy shore were frost-glittering and clattered faintly. Marshy islands were lost in snow. Hummocks and ice-jams and the weaving patterns of mink tracks were blended in one white immensity, on which Carl was like a fly on a plaster ceiling. The world was deserted. But Carl was not lonely. He forgot all about Gertie as he cached his skees by the shore and prowled through the woods, leaping on brush-piles and shooting ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... over Kentucky that year in a golden halo of enchantment. The beech-trees ran the gamut of glory, and every shrub and weed had its hour of transient splendor. A soft haze from burning brush lent the world a sense of mystery and immensity. Day after day on the south porch at Hillcrest Mac Clarke lay propped with cushions on a wicker couch, while Nance Molloy sat beside him, and all about them was a stir of whispering, dancing, falling leaves. The hillside was carpeted with them, the brook below the pergola was strewn with bits ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... had broadened his views. The chatter of his Iroquois and Algonquin friends was now easier of interpretation. The riddles of the wilderness were more easily read. He now realized how possible it was, in this continent of unsurveyed immensity, to journey for weeks, after leaving the white man's domain hundreds of miles behind, and then reach only the rim of another kingdom of even far greater fertility. He also realized that beyond these laughing lands lay a rugged world of desolation, bounded in ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... vista of surpassing beauty, for from this point we could perceive the distant curve of the shore, shadowed by dark forests, while the lake itself, silvered by the setting sun stretched afar to the horizon, unbroken in its immensity except for an island lifting its rock ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... regarding the decline of our shipping interests, and so far as our shipping in the foreign trade is concerned it is unfortunately true," says The Boston Commercial Bulletin. "But few people realize the immensity of our coastwise commerce. The Custom House figures on the shipping of the port of New York for 1897 show that there were 4,614 arrivals of vessels from foreign ports, 7,095 from Eastern domestic ports, and 3,798 from Southern domestic ports. Of the foreign, 2,313 were ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... grandsires, and calling up, when they so choose it, our ghosts from the grave, to live, love, quarrel, swindle, suffer, and struggle on blindly as of yore. And when the amused speculator shall have laughed sufficiently at the immensity of our follies, and the paltriness of our aims, smiled at our exploded superstitions, wondered how this man should be considered great, who is now clean forgotten (as copious Guthrie before mentioned); ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... narrative, or in the effort to convey the idea of length, or height, or depth, or immensity, the Hawaiian had a way of prolonging the vowel sounds of a word, as if by so doing he could intimate the ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... silence, for that crowd of Pygmies was the people of Rome, who at a word from him would proclaim him Caesar and master of the world. The immensity of the sky was above him, the far horizon partly hidden in gloom, but down there were the people whose voice was raised to deify their chosen hero in the intervals of demanding the ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... dangerous of follies. Open your window, Octave; do you not see the infinite? You try to form some idea of a thing that has no limits, you who were born yesterday and who will die to-morrow? This spectacle of immensity in every country in the world, produces the wildest illusions. Religions are born of it; it was to possess the infinite that Cato cut his throat, that the Christians delivered themselves to lions, the ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... of the great city now, when viewed at night from Highgate archway on the north, or looking down the Thames from Westminster Bridge, is something never to be forgotten. It gives one a realizing sense of the immensity of "this province covered with houses," which cannot be got so well in any other way. It bring to mind, too, those lines expressive of the contrasts of wealth and poverty, success and failure, ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... absurd is perfectly at liberty to form his own pictorial image of what I am endeavouring to make clear. He may, if he pleases, visualize "the soul" as a sort of darkened planet from which the attributes of the complex vision radiate to the right or to the left, as the thing moves through immensity. All I ask is that these attributes should be thought of as converging to a point and as finding their "base" in some thing which is felt to exist but ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... the crowds of people that thronged the street and rudely jostled her. If she saw them at all, it was only to regard them as so many purchasers of molasses candy. With her brain almost reeling with the immensity and magnificence of her scheme, she reached Temple Street. After a little search, she found the number of Mrs. Gordon's residence on a splendid house, whose grandness quite abashed her. But her courage revived as she thought of the purpose that had brought ...
— Poor and Proud - or The Fortunes of Katy Redburn • Oliver Optic
... agriculturist than that of a direct impost; for the payment is conditioned by the size of the crops and is independent of the changing value of money. The chief objection to the tax, considered in itself and apart from its accompanying circumstances, was the immensity of the revenue which it yielded; the sums exacted by an Oriental despot were unnecessary for the economical administration of Rome; and the Roman administration of half a century earlier might have reduced the tithe to a twentieth as it had actually ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... stuff, and more ancient than the paper pyramids of the green portfolio. Yet it was not till I came to the base of the great Pyramid that reality began to weigh upon my mind. Strange to say, the bigness of the distinct blocks of stones was the first sign by which I attained to feel the immensity of the whole pile. When I came, and trod, and touched with my hands, and climbed, in order that by climbing I might come to the top of one single stone, then, and almost suddenly, a cold sense and understanding of the Pyramid’s enormity came down, ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... the artist finds to his hand, and what does the architect discover? First of all, that if he had only come here before he might have saved himself an immensity of thought and trouble, for he would have found such suggestions for ornament in wood carving, for panels, doorways, and the like, of so good a pattern, and so old, that they are new to the world ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... of the first-born! Utterly beneath our notice are the most magnificent temples raised by human ingenuity and vanity, when compared with that of the Holy City. Its foundation, the immutability of God-its extent, his divine immensity-its walls, the omnipotence of Jehovah-its treasury, the unsearchable riches of Christ-its worshippers, the countless myriads of the nations of those that are saved-its duration, ETERNITY. It is the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... into the very bosom of night, descending ever lower and lower, exploring depth after depth, until at last they had worked their way through the narrow and winding passages, and stood in the sublime silence of the immensity ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... this fiend fields of exertion great enough for the absorption of its tireless energies, and none of them is more hopeful than the great world of books, if the demon is docile enough to be coaxed into it. Then will its erratic restlessness be sobered by the immensity of the sphere of exertion, and the consciousness that, however vehemently and however long it may struggle, the resources set before it will not be exhausted when the life to which it is attached shall have faded away; and hence, instead of dreading ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... is largely over a vast extent of plain without foliage or vegetation. Occasionally we passed small towns with a few planted trees. The latter part of the way seemed almost like a desert; there being little to observe, one had time to reflect, and, in some inscrutable manner, the immensity of China, its extreme age, its teeming population, and its unreality, judged by Western standards, began to dawn on me. I had previously failed to realize that I was actually in China. Having seen the Chinese at several points before reaching Hong-Kong, that city with its English environment ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... confession, which is, that only since I had left the Emperor, had I fully comprehended the immensity of his greatness. Attached to his service almost from the beginning of the Consulate, at a time when I was still very young, he had grown, so to speak, without my having perceived it, and I had above all seen in him, from the nature ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... The Desert is a fifth part of the African Continent! Yet this gentleman dogmatizes and theorizes on all geological formations, and can tell the whole history of the geology of our planet, from the first moment when it was bowled by the hand of The Omnipotent in the immensity of space, of suns and systems! If such presumption and self-willed ignorance discover themselves in great men, what are we to expect of ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... in the Court was its immensity. "Though it comes from Bernini's entrance court to St. Peter's in Rome, it is much bigger. There are those who think it's too big. But it justifies itself by its splendor. The use of the double row of columns is particularly happy. The double columns were greatly favored by the Romans. ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... shall language be dumb! Thy vision shall grasp— As one doth the glittering hasp Of a sword made splendid with gems and with gold— The wonder and richness of life, not anguish and hate of it merely. And out of the stark Eternity, awful and dark, Immensity silent and cold,— Universe-shaking as trumpets, or cymbaling metals, Imperious; yet pensive and pearly And soft as the rosy unfolding of petals, Or crumbling aroma of blossoms that wither too early,— The majestic music of God, where He plays On the organ, ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... themselves to the Hebrides, where the great stationary fishery is, proceed towards the north of Ireland, where they meet with a second interruption and are obliged to make a second division; the one takes to the western side and is scarcely perceived, being soon lost in the immensity of the Atlantic, but the other, which passes into the Irish sea, rejoins, and feeds the inhabitants of most of the coasts that border on it. The brigades, as we call them, which are separated from the greater columns, are often capricious in their motions, and do not show an invariable attachment ...
— Stories about the Instinct of Animals, Their Characters, and Habits • Thomas Bingley
... domain, but as an independent republic, owning all its lands, amounting to 237,504 square miles, or 152,002,560 acres, a vast empire in itself. I remember hearing a distinguished senator, in the course of the debate on its admission into the Union, describe its immensity by saying, "A pigeon could not fly across ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... of the half-dozen greatest organs in the world. It has more than 7,000 pipes. The heaviest of them weigh as much as 1,200 pounds apiece. Though mere size is not the essential quality of a fine instrument, it is hard to ignore the real immensity of this. The echo organ alone is larger than most pipe organs. This complementary instrument, which is played from the console of the main organ, is placed under the roof of the hall, above the center of the ceiling. Its tones, floating down ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... a thundrous midnight, with black air That burns, rain-drops that blister, breaks a spell, Draws out the excessive virtue of some sheathed Shut unsuspected flower that hoards and hides Immensity of sweetness. ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... And leave the struggling solar rays behind, The slightest throb pervades immensity, And ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... claims that the track became almost derelict. For these were anxious days for railway promoters. The rosy promise of rich revenues from remote Welsh lines failed to mature, and Mr. Savin, heavily weighted with the immensity of his undertakings, and crushed by the costly construction of his great hotels, sank under the burden. He faced his financial embarrassments with characteristic pluck, but it was a dark hour in the annals of British finance far beyond the boundaries of ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... her own little tent, and presently they heard her peaceful snoring. The sound had the effect of giving body to the immensity of stillness that surrounded them and held them. Sitting beside Clare, looking out at the fire through the netting, Stonor felt his safeguards slipping fast. There they were, the two of them, to all intents alone in the world! How natural for them to ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... breezes, very slight and searching, flit across, and shiver as they pass from Apennine to plain. The slowly moving population—women in veils, men winter-mantled—pass to and fro between the buildings and the grey immensity of sky. Bells ring. The bugles of the soldiers blow retreat in convents turned to barracks. Young men roam the streets beneath, singing May songs. Far, far away upon the plain, red through the vitreous moonlight ringed ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... The immensity of the size of these and many others, would induce the supposition that they could not have been raised by a race of people as indolent as the Indians have been, ever since a knowledge was had of them. Works, the construction of which would now ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... you what answer you have made to this question hitherto? Whose friendship have you chosen? If, knowing what you know, you have not yet begun to act according to the immensity of the knowledge that is in you, then he who builds his house and lays up his treasure on the edge of a crater of molten lava is a sane, sensible person in comparison with yourselves. I say this as no figure of speech or bugbear with which to ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... fanciful science, if science it may be called. "It demonstrates nothing while it defends every thing. It confutes, according to Knight's own ideas: it alleges a few scattered facts in favour of astrological productions, which may be picked up in that immensity of fabling which disgraces history. He strenuously denies, or ridicules, what the greatest writers have said of this fanciful art, while he lays great stress on some passages from obscure authors, or what is worse, from authors of no authority."—The most pleasant part, however, ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... slumbering in an armchair, and she therefore departed. When she had gone Sobakevitch inclined his head in an attitude of willingness to listen to Chichikov's business. Our hero began in a sort of detached manner—touching lightly upon the subject of the Russian Empire, and expatiating upon the immensity of the same, and saying that even the Empire of Ancient Rome had been of considerably smaller dimensions. Meanwhile Sobakevitch sat with ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... longer, you accept it at once as a thing complete and perfect. Complete and perfect—yet surely spoiled a little by the gallery that dwarfs the arches and seems to introduce a useless detail into what till then must have been so simple. One soon forgets so small a thing in the immensity and solemnity of the whole, that seems to come to one with the assurance of the sky or of the hills, really without an afterthought. And indeed I find there much of the strange simplicity of natural things that move us we know not why: the autumn fields of which ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... yet bring them together in complete accord, was born one Christmas night while the curtains of heaven swung, stirred by the wings angelic. Owner of all things—all the continents, all worlds, and all the islands of light. Capitalist of immensity, crossing over to our condition. Coming into our world, not by gate of palace, but by door of barn. Spending His first night amid the shepherds. Gathering after around Him the fishermen to be His chief attendants. With adze, and saw, and ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... bear no comparison with the Stadthouse at Amsterdam! The city, however, as a whole, presents a combination of magnitude and grandeur, which we should in vain look for elsewhere, although with all its immensity it has not yet realized the quaint prediction of James the First,—that London would shortly be England, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 536, Saturday, March 3, 1832. • Various
... civilized humanity by a combination of props and jugglers' arts, but a justice coming of the recognized needs of majorities, which will base the column on a broad plinth for safety-broad as the base of yonder mountain's towering white immensity—and will be the guarantee for the solid uplifting of our civilization at last. 'Right, thou!' he apostrophized—the old Ironer, at a point of his meditation. 'And right, thou! more largely right!' he thought, further advanced in it, of the great Giuseppe, the Genoese. 'And ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... knowledge of right and wrong, are immediate, and are independent of the senses. {446} We are in direct communication with the "Oversoul," the infinite Spirit. "The soul in man is the background of our being—an immensity not possessed, that cannot be possessed." "From within or from behind a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all." Revelation is "an influx of the Divine ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... drag from the entrails of the earth the olden monuments, gather together their ruins and collect into a body of proofs all the indications of physical changes that can guide us back to the different ages of nature. It is the only way of fixing certain points in the immensity of space, and of placing a certain number of memorial-stones on the endless ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... about the room, putting the touches of perfection to the festival. There were roses everywhere; on the table, on the mantelpiece; the room was sweet with the smell of them; there was a rose on each child's plate. The tremulous movements of her hands betrayed the immensity and the desperation of her passion to please. The very waiter was touched by her, and smiled secretly in sympathy as he saw her laying her pretty lures. When he had gone she arranged the table all over again and did it better. Then she stood looking at ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... Grammar is no longer confused with language, nor the anatomy of words and sentences with their life and use. Figures of speech, by which the vagueness of theories is often concealed, have been stripped off; and we see language more as it truly was. The immensity of the subject is gradually revealed to us, and the reign of law becomes apparent. Yet the law is but partially seen; the traces of it are often lost in the distance. For languages have a natural but not a perfect growth; like other creations of nature into which the will ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... for no reason clear to himself, flushed. He offered no explanation at first. Here he spent many an hour when the time was his for idling, lying on the grass, looking out over the immensity of the wilderness; here he came many a night to sleep under the stars, far from the other boys, when his soul craved solitude; here upon many a Sunday, when work was slack, did he come to smoke alone, loaf alone, read from the few books on the ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... thing occurs. This tuning-fork produces a sound which, by exciting our retina, gives us a sense of movement. This visual sensation of vibration is a purely subjective one, the external cause of the phenomenon is the sound. The outer world is a concert of sounds which rises in the immensity of space. Matter is ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... utmost bounds of the township. That was a real mental adventure, and it took some time for me to adjust myself to my new suit. Then I went to the county fair, where were gathered people from all the townships, and my poor mind had a mighty struggle trying to grasp the immensity of the thing. I felt much the same as when I was trying to understand the mathematical sign of infinity. And when I came upon the statement, in my geography, that there are eighty-eight counties in our State, the mind balked absolutely and refused to go on. I felt as did the ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... over to speak to his advocate, who turns a whiskered, professional, anxious head to caution and remind him. tells a large, terrible story and awakes a recurrent shudder. We see the gray court-room, we feel the personal suspense and the immensity of justice. The "Saltimbanques," reproduced in L'Art for 1878, is a page of tragedy, the finest of a cruel series. M. Eugene Montrosier says of it that "The drawing is masterly, incomparably firm, the composition superb, the general impression ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... see the gray mist creeping down Upon the sea. The bright blue waves are hidden from my sight; Ah me, ah me, Thou too, O Sea of God's Immensity From me art screened; But till the mists be lifted up I wait, Wait patiently and long, then will I plunge Beneath Thy waves O ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... subconsciously. All the confusion of mind that had assailed her when they started on the homeward journey, the conflicting thoughts and contrary emotions, were explained. But she knew herself at last and knew the love that filled her, an overwhelming, passionate love that almost frightened her with its immensity and with the sudden hold it had laid upon her. Love had come to her at last who had scorned it so fiercely. The men who had loved her had not had the power to touch her, she had given love to no one, she had thought that she could ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... philosopher as Hume, his work is quite as philosophical as Hume's history, and he has been more faithful in the use of his materials. Guizot, while pointing out his errors, says he was struck, after "a second and attentive perusal," with "the immensity of his researches, the variety of his knowledge, and, above all, with that truly philosophical discrimination which judges the past as it ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... the immensity and grandeur of the sight and sounds struck upon him with a strange force. Never before had he felt so far apart from man and so near to that dread Spirit round Whose feet thousands of rolling worlds rush on, at Whose word they are, endure, ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... what are we To plume ourselves in foolish pride? Within that dim immensity How many suns and earths have died! The tiny mote on which we stand, However fair and finely planned, Is nothing ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... no other writer besides Sterne, perhaps, since the days of the Spanish humourist, have the vast incongruities of human character been set forth with so masterly a hand. It is in virtue of the new insight which his humour opens to us of the immensity and variety of man's life that Cervantes makes us feel that he is great: not delightful merely—not even eternally delightful only, and secure of immortality through the perennial human need of joy—but great, but immortal, ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... for the feeling of insignificance and forlornness which is apt to overwhelm us when we begin to realise the immensity of the material universe, a little closer thought should make it obvious that nothing in the nature of mere bulk or bigness furnishes even a reasonable presumption, let alone a convincing argument, against the survival of the soul; it is indeed difficult to perceive ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... blank space of North London was flying by; the very pace gave us a sense of its immensity and its meanness. It was, as it were, a base infinitude, a squalid eternity, and we felt the real horror of the poor parts of London, the horror that is so totally missed and misrepresented by the sensational novelists who depict it as being a matter of narrow streets, filthy ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... whole evening he ventured one single remark which I didn't catch because his articulation was imperfect, as of a man who had forgotten how to speak. I was the only person who seemed aware of the sound. Willems subsided. Presently he retired, pointedly unnoticed—into the forest maybe? Its immensity was there, within three hundred yards of the verandah, ready to swallow up anything. Almayer conversing with my captain did not stop talking while he glared angrily at the retreating back. Didn't that ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... they have made that power increase afterwards to infinity. Before this fall they represent him only as an angel of limited existence, as they represent the rest. After his fall, he becomes, by their account, omnipresent. He exists everywhere, and at the same time. He occupies the whole immensity of space. ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... flashing comet, examines into the physical characteristics of the Sun and Moon, and records the various phases of the distant planets. But if such be his feeling, it is certainly tempered with awe and wonder as he contemplates the phenomena of the heavens,—the beauty of the stars, the immensity of their orbits, the regularity with which each bright world performs its appointed course, the simplicity of the laws which govern its motions, and the mystery which attends its far-off existence. It has been, said that "an undevout astronomer is mad;" and if Astronomy, ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... each other as if trying to grasp the immensity of the proposition; then they pulled off their hats, and giving a shout threw them into the air while both roared the ...
— The Outdoor Chums - The First Tour of the Rod, Gun and Camera Club • Captain Quincy Allen
... At this time she had a cult for Mary Stuart and enthusiastic veneration for illustrious or unhappy women. Joan of Arc, Heloise, Agnes Sorel, the beautiful Ferroniere, and Clemence Isaure stood out to her like comets in the dark immensity of heaven, where also were seen, lost in shadow, and all unconnected, St. Louis with his oak, the dying Bayard, some cruelties of Louis XI, a little of St. Bartholomew's Day, the plume of the Bearnais, and always the remembrance of the plates ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... the flag, and, after the first shouts and cheers, a deep intense silence followed. The soldiers felt the immensity of the event, but as at the taking of Richmond, they could not comprehend it all at once. It yet seemed incredible that the enemy, who for four terrible years had held them at bay, was about to lay down his arms. But it was true. The messenger, bearing ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... things evolve; and as Man looks upon this tarn and cannot see The mighty river flowing hence, but has To hear report of its immensity; So faith should teach him patiently to wait While little things of life lead on ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats
... hot, golden sand, over which she would gallop wildly on her steed; anticipates an old age of cap and spectacles; revels in the hurricane, and would rise in and fly and whirl with it adrift far out in the immensity of space. She tells us, "Of genius and light I'm a blithe, millionaire," and elsewhere she longs for the everlasting ice of lofty mountains, the immortal silence of the Alps; sings of her "sad twenty years," "how all, all goes when love is gone and spent." She imagines herself springing into the ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... Norway for the following year; and he would travel about in the desultory, dilettante sort of fashion that suited him best now. He would probably go to America, and see Niagara and all the wonders of the New World, that was so young and fresh in its immensity. Indeed, he would go anywhere and everywhere, until his trouble became a thing of the past, and he had strength to live and work for the good of his fellow-creatures; but he felt that such work was not possible to ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... a page of philosophizing on time and eternity, immensity and space, and "monads who may develop or fulfil their destiny in other worlds than this," a reminiscence, perhaps, of the lectures on such topics at which Mr. Curtis says Isaac used to "look in," hoping to "find an answer to his questions." Such speculations are a trait ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... and the earth is wonderful, and man, who, by force of intellect, has sought to comprehend the immensity of one and unravel the formation of the other, is hardly less wonderful than either. Still the great mystery remains unriddled; our researches have brought us no nearer the beginning, and the first cause of all continues ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... misconceptions, and the truth of the Mississippi had been partly revealed to him. What the Tug was to the Big Sandy, what the Big Sandy was to the Ohio, the Ohio was to the Mississippi. What he had looked to as the end was but the beginning, and Rasba was lost in the immensity of the river that was a mile wide, thousands of miles long, and unlike anything the mountain preacher had ever dreamed of. If this was the Mississippi, what ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... directing, guiding all, Thou art! Direct my understanding then to Thee: Control my spirit, guide my wandering heart: Though but an atom midst immensity, Still I am something fashioned by Thy hand! I hold a middle rank 'twixt heaven and earth, On the last verge of mortal being stand, Close to the realms where angels have their birth, Just on ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... on alliance with the priesthood, at the expense of the independence and the equipoise of nations. The exploits of Magellan and Cortez, upsetting all habits of perspective, called up vain dreams of the coming immensity of Spain, and roused the phantom of universal empire. The motive of domination became a reigning force in Europe; for it was an idea which monarchy would not willingly let fall after it had received a religious and an international consecration. For centuries it was constantly asserted as ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... vastness, one has only to recall two Russian novels—one the longest, and the other very nearly the shortest, in the whole range of Slavonic fiction. I refer to "War and Peace," by Tolstoi, and to "Taras Bulba," by Gogol. Both of these extraordinary works give us chiefly an impression of Immensity—we feel the boundless steppes, the illimitable wastes of snow, and the long winter night. It is particularly interesting to compare Taras Bulba with the trilogy of the Polish genius, Sienkiewicz. The former is tiny in size, the latter a leviathan; ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... senses, within which limits it is able to think and to reason. Such is the power of the highest animals. Overlying this is the spirit which man shares with higher natures, by which thought transcends the range of the senses, and man thinks of immensity, eternity, infinity, immortality, the beautiful, the holy, and God—it is certain that man's mind possesses both these classes or sets of thought." Now in regard to the higher of these elements, there are very many well authenticated ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... doth belie Thy soul's immensity; Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep Thy heritage, thou eye among the blind, That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep, Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,— Mighty prophet! Seer blest! On whom those truths do ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... again revenged himself for that close column which had been rewarded by an uncertain guinea, by holding up his former editor to ridicule. With mischievous delight he describes the amusement that is to be found in N.P. Willis's society, 'amusement at the immensity of N.P.'s blunders; amusement at the prodigiousness of his self-esteem; amusement always with or at Willis the poet, Willis the man, Willis the dandy, Willis the lover—now the Broadway Crichton—once the ruler of fashion and heart-enslaver ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... temper of the party you praise, but I see well that for all his purple cloaks I shall not like him, unless he is at least a poor Greek like me. I cannot deny it, O friend, that the vast shadow of the Phenomenal includes thee, also, in its pied and painted immensity,—thee, also, compared with whom all else is shadow. Thou art not Being, as Truth is, as Justice is,—thou art not my soul, but a picture and effigy of that. Thou hast come to me lately, and already thou art seizing thy hat and cloak. It is not that the soul puts forth friends, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... which divide Terra del Fuego from the continent are comparatively no more than a mountain stream in a hilly country, so that that island may without any impropriety be deemed a part of it. The Andes are not one continuous chain of mountains; but an immensity of piles raised one on another, at different elevations of which are extensive plains, termed "Pampas," some of which appear as boundless as the horizon, and totally divested of herbage. On one of these plains, called the Pampa of Diesmo, in the province ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... moon arises in calm and silent grandeur, and diffusing her silver light over the dark forest, imparts to every object a new and softened aspect. Night comes;—nature sleeps, and the etheral canopy of heaven, arched out in awful immensity over the earth, sparkling with innumerable witnesses of far distant glories, infuses into the heart of man humility and confidence,—a divine gift after such a day of wonder and delight!—Mag. Nat. Hist. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, No. - 537, March 10, 1832 • Various
... grief since morning, and now she burst out sobbing and thus sought relief. Hers was an infinite sorrow: it overwhelmed her with its depth and immensity. Labordette wanted to comfort her as touching Georges, but she silenced him with a gesture and ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... beheld a mightier grandeur reposing on its breast, or soaring to its summit, than had before been seen there. If his theme were a lovely lake, a celestial smile had now been thrown over it, to gleam forever on its surface. If it were the vast old sea, even the deep immensity of its dread bosom seemed to swell the higher, as if moved by the emotions of the song. Thus the world assumed another and a better aspect from the hour that the poet blessed it with his happy eyes. The Creator had bestowed ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... flight to spread, and search the air. He could see the individual ships darting here and there over the immensity of the city, but none knew better than he how fruitless their effort was. And the marauders had not ceased their ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... companions said that the first thing that came into her mind was the old text, "Be still, and know that I am God." To be still on such an occasion is the easiest thing in the world, and to feel the surge of solemn and reverential emotions is equally easy; is, indeed, almost inevitable. The immensity of the scene, its tranquillity, its order, its strange, new beauty, and the monumental character of its many forms—all these tend to beget in the beholder an attitude of silent wonder and solemn admiration. ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... discovery to uphold this theory to the present time, is undoubtedly that of the so-called 'canals'—their straightness, their enormous length, their great abundance, and their extension over the planet's whole surface from one polar snow-cap to the other. The very immensity of this system, and its constant growth and extension during fifteen years of persistent observation, have so completely taken possession of his mind, that, after a very hasty glance at analogous facts and possibilities, he has declared them to be 'non-natural'— therefore ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... are in France good men, pure books, true wit. But there is an immensity that is bad, and more hurtful to our farmers, clerks and country milliners, than to those to whose tastes it was originally addressed,—as the small-pox is most fatal among the wild men of the woods,—and this, from the ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... was with tears in his eyes that he parted from her, whom he never expected to see again in this life; and on reaching his American home, he addressed her in words of touching tenderness:—"I stretch out my arms towards you, notwithstanding the immensity of the seas which separate us, while I wait the heavenly kiss which I firmly trust one ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... never had any ultimate doubt again of his own purpose. Still, it brought him no serenity; and I suppose there is no writer in the world whose letters and diaries are so full of cries of anguish and hopelessness. He was crushed under the sense of the world's immensity; his own observation was so microscopic, his desire to perceive and know so strong, his appetite for definiteness so profound, that I feel that Carlyle's terror was like that of a mite in an enormous cheese, longing to explore it all, lost in the high-flavoured dusk, and conscious of ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... unbelievably swift, roaring upon its whistle, tore a great, gray-painted motor lorry, packed with khaki-clad infantrymen. It was going at a hideous speed, leaping its tons of weight insanely from rock ridge to traffic-churned slough in the road; there was only time to note its immensity and uproar and the ranked faces of the men swaying in their places, and it was by, and another was bounding into sight behind it. A hundred and odd of them, each with thirty men on board—three battalions to reinforce ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... amphibious joy among the tepid waves he seemed to cast off that sense of unease which had pursued him of late. It was good to inhale the harsh salty savour—to submit himself to these calming voices—to float, like a careless Leviathan, in the blue immensity; good to be alive, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... comparison: other mental existences suggest the idea of a river, flowing onwards, amidst varying scenes, and in a widening bed, to lose itself in the sea. Mr. Browning's genius appears the sea itself, with its immensity and its limits, its restlessness and its repose, the constant self-balancing ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... tier they rise to dizzy height— The cells of men who know the world no more. Silence intense from ceiling to the floor; While through the window gleams a lone blue light Which stabs the dark immensity of night. Felt shod and ghostly like a shade of yore, The guard comes shuffling down the corridor; His key-ring jingles . . . and ...
— Bars and Shadows • Ralph Chaplin
... the most perfect and most inclusive of all; whose path is among associate planets; whose meek handmaiden is the moon; whose mediate sovereign is the sun; whose life is eternity; whose thought is that of a god; whose enjoyment is knowledge; whose destinies are lost in immensity; whose cognizance of ourselves is akin with our own cognizance of the animalculae which infest the brain, a being which we in consequence regard as purely inanimate and material, much in the same manner as these ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... hurdles, and the rude huts or tents of his shepherds, might always be removed with very little difficulty and expense; and if his and his neighbours' flocks should happen to come into contact, such is the immensity of the wilderness which would lie before him, that he might exclaim in the language of Abram to Lot: "Let there be no strife I pray thee between me and thee, and between my herdsmen and thy herds-men; for we be brethren. Is not the whole land ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... larger than the earth. 'Numbers so enormous,' says M. Arago, 'not being often employed in ordinary life, and giving us no very precise idea of the magnitudes which they imply, I recall here a remark that will convey a better understanding of the immensity of the solar volume. If we imagine the centre of the sun to coincide with that of the earth, its surface would not only reach the region in which the moon revolves, but would extend nearly as far again beyond.' ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... spend a half-day or more in visiting the charmingly interesting city and its cathedral, or what there is of it, for it exists only as a luminous height sans nave, sans tower, and sans nearly everything, except a choir of such immensity that to see it is to marvel if not to admire. It is indeed as Hope has said, "a miracle of loftiness and lightness; appearing as if about to soar into ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... each other. Some ideas sprang forth and went to live in the world of intellect. I began to see that there were two worlds, two universes,—the visible universe, and the invisible universe; that the earth had, like man, a body and a soul. Nature illumined herself for me; I felt her immensity when I saw the oceans of beings who, in masses and in species, spread everywhere, making one sole and uniform animated Matter, from the stone of the earth to God. Magnificent vision! In short, I found a universe within my patient. When I inserted my knife ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... in turn every minute, with their purple hills beyond and deep-shadowed valleys lit up ever and anon by a gleam of sunshine as we sailed gaily on; the blue sky above our heads seeming in the clear atmosphere to recede further and further back into the immensity of space as we proceeded while the blue water around us became bluer and, more intense in tone, except where here and there the crest of a breaking wave flecked it ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... come to us: nay, twenty millions, Nichol suggests, I know not on what grounds. And yet in the minutest details such perfection! A million of perfectly formed creatures in a drop of water! I do not doubt that it is this overwhelming immensity of things that leads some minds to find a sort of relief, as it were, in the idea of an Infinite Impersonal Force working in all things. But it is a child's thought. Nay, does not the very fact that my mind can take in so vast a range of things lead me better to ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... The Divine Substance, Immensity, Incomprehensibility, Invisibility, explicated, as far as our weak reason ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... Captain Harren," he said. "I suppose you have no conception of our business, no realization of its scope—its network of information bureaus all over the civilized world, its myriad sources of information, the immensity of its delicate machinery, the endless data and the infinitesimal details we have at our command. You, of course, have no idea of the number of people of every sort and condition who are in our employ, of the ceaseless yet inoffensive surveillance we ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... grasps it! It is a joy greater than the sweetness of affection! I pant with stupefaction before the immensity of God!" ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... admiration and astonishment, I still read Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon with more amusement and more satisfaction. The original poets were not, however, without excuse. They found the limits of nature too straight for the immensity of their genius, which they had not room to exert without extending fact by fiction: and that especially at a time when the manners of men were too simple to afford that variety which they have since offered in vain to the choice of the meanest writers. In doing this they are ...
— Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon • Henry Fielding
... thus appear, that not only does gravitation keep our earth in its place in the solar system, and the solar system in its place in our astral system, but it also may be presumed to have the mightier duty of preserving a local arrangement between that astral system and an immensity of others, through which the imagination is left to wander on and on without limit or stay, save that which is given by its inability to grasp ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... complete. I never felt anything so great or so instantaneous. I know not what shape, what analogy, what secret of relation it was that made me see in this flower a limitless beauty.... I shall never inclose in a conception this power, this immensity that nothing will express; this form that nothing will contain; this ideal of a better world which one feels, but which it would seem ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... cross the lower reaches of the barren grounds as soon as possible and proceed northward by way of the basin of the Great Slave Lake, where they would find a wooded country reaching far to the north. A glance at the map will show the immensity of the task before them. The distance from Fort Churchill {52} to the Slave Lake, even as the crow flies, is some seven hundred miles, and from thence to the Arctic sea four hundred and fifty, and the ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock
... infinitely increased. French literature came out of a little, ceremonious, antiquated drawing-room into the open air. With the flood of new words, a thousand influences which had never been felt before came into operation. Strangeness, contrast, complication, immensity, curiosity, grotesqueness, fantasy—effects of this kind now for the first time became possible and common in verse. But, one point must be noticed. The abolition of the distinction between words that were 'bas' and 'noble' ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... told in a restricted space, yet with no confusion, the space is so admirably filled and its shape so marked by the very lines that enrich and relieve it. It is as if the design had determined the space rather than the space the design. If you had a tracing of the figures in the midst of an immensity of white paper you could not bound them by any other line than that of the actual frame. One of the most remarkable things about it is the way in which the angles, which artists usually avoid and disguise, are here sharply accented. A ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... after what he had discussed with Edith upstairs. She would rather that he had asked his question, forced her to the issue. That at least would have shown some comprehension of her state. But he had taken the issue for granted, refused to face the immensity of it all. She had had her first taste of sacrificial flames, and her spirit was prepared to go through fire to reach him. And he presented himself as already folded and protected; satisfied with some inferior and independent secret ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... out for the Front. After I have been there for three months I am supposed to get a leave—this should be due to me about the beginning of December, and you can judge how I shall count on it. Think of the meeting with R. and E., and the immensity of the joy. ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... very immensity of the bold thought, so vast that for a moment he could not realize it in its entirety, the Billionaire fell to pacing ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... greater to my eye The swimming lights of yonder fishing-boat Than worlds that burn in night's immensity— So huge, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... water-mountains, bounding from their deep bases (ten miles deep, I am told), are not there on thy behalf! Meseems they have other work than floating thee forward:—and the huge winds, that sweep from Ursa Major to the tropics and equator, dancing their giant-waltz through the kingdoms of chaos and immensity, they care little about filling rightly or filling wrongly the small shoulder-of-mutton sails in this cockle skiff of thine! Thou art not among articulate-speaking friends, my brother; thou art among ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... was not until I sat down in the quiet of my room that the scenes and images of that agitating day began to move before my memory in orderly procession, and for the first time I appreciated, with a stunning sense of horror and a perfect rapture of thanksgiving, the value of my escape and the immensity of the danger which had threatened me. It may have been miserable weakness—I think it was. But I was young, nervous, and afflicted with a troublesome sort of conscience, which occasionally went mad, and insisted, in small ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... of the troops; and this an unnatural increase of trade, which, as its cause failed, must in some degree return to its ancient and natural bounds.—3rd, When the merchants met from all parts, and compared their accounts, they were alarmed at the immensity of the debt due to them from America. They found that the Americans had over-traded their abilities. And, as they found too that several of them were capable of making the state of political events an excuse for their failure in commercial ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the port side, and saw nothing but an immensity of quiet waters. But to starboard, on the bottom appeared a large protuberance, which at once attracted my attention. One would have thought it a ruin buried under a coating of white shells, much resembling a covering of snow. Upon examining the mass attentively, I could recognise ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... Barbara, Hector, Eustace, Janet, Hudson, William, and myself—and all save one were promising, in appearance at least. But our father knew his offspring, and when we stood, an alien and miserable band in front of Castle Garden, at the foot of the great city whose immensity struck terror to our hearts, he drew all our hands together and made us swear by the soul of our mother, whose body we had left in the sea, that we would keep the bond of brotherhood intact, and share with mutual confidence whatever good fortune this untried country might hold ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
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