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More "Pinnacle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the lone, the admired, the lost The gracious old, the lovely young, to May The fair, December the beloved, These from my blue horizon and green isles, These from this pinnacle of distances ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... half-way down when I reached a cleared place an hour or so later, and turned to look back. The sharp angle of the Devil's Ledge was the highest point visible, the very pinnacle of the mountain, and there, clear against the burnished steel of the morning sky, on the very edge, clear in the rare atmosphere was a small figure. It stood for a second, a black point distinctly outlined, and ...
— Elsket - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page
... heaps of sand. The air gets so clear around you, and the great black wings flap close against your face; and you sit astride where the bells are, with some quaint stone face beside you that was carved on the pinnacle here a thousand years and more ago, and has hardly been seen of man ever since; and the white clouds are so near you that you seem to bathe in them; and the winds toss the trees far below, and sweep by you as they go down to torment the trees and the sea, the men that work, and the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... who has preserved to the end of his career the statesman's tact of discriminating between the possible and the impossible, and has not broken down in the task which for greatly gifted natures is the most difficult of all— the task of recognizing, when on the pinnacle of success, its natural limits. What was possible he performed, and never left the possible good undone for the sake of the impossible better, never disdained at least to mitigate by palliatives evils that were incurable. But where he recognized that fate had spoken, he always obeyed. Alexander ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... are mortal and fallible, be wary how we condemn one whose head was rendered giddy by his very pinnacle of ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... curled up on his divan in the elm, was thinking over the extraordinary good fortune that had befallen him. Yet such was his sagacity that even when thus about to attain almost the topmost pinnacle of his ambition, he did not forget the instability of affairs, but sought to confirm his position, or even to advance it. He reflected that Kapchack was not only cunning beyond everything ever known, but he was just now a prey to anxieties, and consumed with ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... them a line of stunted firs edged limits of perpetual snow, and rocks and glistening fields of crag-broken white carried the eye on upward to the dazzling pinnacle of the Col de la Reine, splitting the ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... again its sobering sensation struck me, and I found myself staring up at its top, a full 800 feet high, the bottom being an ornate and elaborate temple. The middle, which supplied most of its height, was a long, round tower, and at top there was a spherical pinnacle which had what looked to ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... on the morning they cleared the ground for the first post Charnock felt daunted as he beat his numbed hands. The sky was clear; a hard, dazzling blue, against which the white peaks were silhouetted with every ridge and pinnacle in sharp outline. They twinkled like steel in places, but there were patches of delicate gray, and here and there a dark rock broke through its covering. The bottom of the gorge was soft blue, and the river a streak of raw ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... the many topsy-turvy things in topsy-turvy China that this prosaic people is so addicted to picturesque and significant terms. I found the names of some of the monasteries quite as interesting as anything else about them. From the "Pinnacle of Contemplation" you ascend to the "Monastery of the White Clouds," stopping to rest in the "Hall of the Tranquil Heart," and passing the "Gate to Heaven" you enter ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... rough stone, older, I suppose, than Charlemagne and without any ornament. In its lower courses I thought I even saw the Roman brick. It had once two towers, northern and southern; the southern is ruined and has a wooden roof, the northern remains and is just a pinnacle or ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... own groans. Nor is this said by way of paradox; daily experience shows the truth of these observations. It is almost impossible to elevate the spirits of a man groaning under ideal calamities; but nothing is easier than to render him wretched, though on the pinnacle of felicity: as it would be an herculean task to hoist a man to the top of a steeple, though the merest child ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... receiving visits and speaking of business, he avoided thinking of the unexpected resistance. How was this! She—the woman for whom the highest favor, the pinnacle of happiness had been the possibility of remaining at the head of his house, in the brilliancy of wealth and general respect, dared—had the shamelessness to oppose his will! He felt such contempt that, in thought, he threw that woman on the ground to trample her; in spite of this, that, ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... "I heard it from the Chamois, who have a habit of bounding about everywhere, as you know. Your dear husband reached the middle of the Glacier in safety, when—being hampered by a satchel and a green cotton umbrella—he fell in attempting to jump an ice-pinnacle, and sprained his foot so severely that he was unable to move. Though he bleated loudly for help, no one came except some huntsmen who were in search of Chamois. They picked him up, and dragged him to the Inn on the other side of the valley, where he was locked up ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... crush your well-earned and well-deserved fame. But it was the Lilliputians upon Gulliver. Our countrymen have recovered from the alarm into which art and industry had thrown them; science and honesty are replaced on their high ground; and you, my dear Sir, as their great apostle, are on its pinnacle. It is with heartfelt satisfaction that, in the first moments of my public action, I can hail you with welcome to our land, tender to you the homage of its respect and esteem, cover you under the protection of ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... prophet. From that hour, As leisure offer'd, close to Mr. Spring's Box-office door, I've stood and eyed the builders. They had a plan to render less their labours; Workmen in olden times would mount a ladder With hodded heads, but these stretch'd forth a pole From the wall's pinnacle, they plac'd a pulley Athwart the pole, a rope athwart the pulley; To this a basket dangled; mortar and bricks Thus freighted, swung securely to the top, And in the empty basket workmen twain ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... the correctness of my restoration. The entrance-chamber and the wings I suppose to have been also covered by similar pyramidal roofs. There would thus have been four distinct pyramids, of which that over the inner chamber must have been the loftiest, the height of its pinnacle above the ground being ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... court-poets, of course, were not allowed to neglect the praise of the queens, and they were called upon to celebrate the royal weddings;[316] nay, in the extravagance of their gallant homage they rose to a level of bad taste the pinnacle of which was reached by Callimachus in his elegy—so well-known through the imitation of Catullus—on the hair of queen Berenice placed among the constellations by the courtesy ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... far too excited to sit down. From the depths of poverty she suddenly felt herself raised almost to a pinnacle of wealth, as ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... they knew they were only of small extent. There was a pinnacle of rock and a single sea might possibly carry them over it; but the peril of being washed off was none the less. Now they could see the huge rise of the combing sea with its frowning black top rushing at the shoal, and smashing ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... vanity. Envy often avails itself of it as a fit instrument subservient to its own purposes. Soon, in fact, the works of Osmyn only were spoken of, and after languishing a long time unnoticed, he saw himself at once raised to the pinnacle, without having passed the steps which lead from misery to fortune, from obscurity ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 495, June 25, 1831 • Various
... as in religion and in politics, which divides one into conflicting many. The law of Cyclic change follows us relentlessly even in the realm of thought. When we have raised ourselves to the highest pinnacle, through some oversight we fall over the precipice. Men have offered their lives for the establishment of truth. A climax is reached after which the custodians of knowledge themselves bar further advance. Men who have fought for ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... air,—who descendest on thy nest in the cleft of the inaccessible rock, who makest the mountain pinnacle thy perch and halting-place, and, scanning with steady eye the orb of glory right above thee, imprintest thy lordly talons in the stainless snows, that shoot back and scatter round his glittering shafts,—I pay thee homage. Thou art my king. I give honor due to ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... If Association is this glorious truth to renovate the nations, then glorious should be its announcement; loud, wide, startling, should be its call; sudden, as from the skies, its appearing. Here on the pinnacle of the temple of peace (or of Salem), shalt thou stand, and cast thyself down among the multitudes like an angel. Some splendid boldness should introduce thy reign. Take no heed of care and caution; count not the cost; risk all in a providential career. ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... in the city of Hereford, which, in 1901, contained 4,565 inhabited houses. Here, no fewer than 218 chimneys had to be repaired or rebuilt. The Cathedral was slightly injured. The finial of a pinnacle of the Lady Chapel was thrown down, a fragment of a stone fell from one of the arches in the south transept, and the three pinnacles of the western front were fractured. Several churches suffered ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... Church of England during the previous century, in the course of which its creed and liturgy were formed. The evidence of these transactions lies wide; much of it is still in the British Museum; and it may be possible to produce something sufficient to sustain Falkland on the pinnacle on which Mr. Arnold and the Dean of Westminster have placed him. But we cannot help surmising that he has in some measure undergone the process which, in an age prolific in historic fancies as well as ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... on by his son. The tower was not finished till four hundred and twenty-five years after the commencement of the building, and then Hueltz, from Cologne, came to effect the undertaking. The tracery of this lofty pinnacle is inimitably beautiful. We ascended the spire, and I can assure you that the prospect amply repays the trouble. We saw the winding, silvery Rhine, the Black Forest, and the long line of the Vosges Mountains. I never felt more keenly my inability to describe a place than when I walked ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... large nor is the chapel, but, nevertheless, my soul expanded as in a basilica, soared up as under some vast dome, and touched the pinnacle of high Heaven where blazes the Sign of Signs in the azure of Paradise, in the ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... fantastic shapes. There seemed to be little hills and valleys; and from among these peeped—and did they only seem to move?—a number of tiny figures in green and gold. One sat astride of a snowy pinnacle, another lay stretched at full length in a hollow, his pretty face only peering out; some were chasing each other among the elfin hills, others were standing at ease, their hands on their hearts, their forms bent gracefully as if in salutation. In the middle rose a white throne, and ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... reproduction. The result was the more or less original elevation that we now see. It consists of a three-light lancet window at the east end of the choir, with a small circular window, with seven cusps, in the gable above, surmounted by a cross, and a stair-turret, terminating in an octagonal pinnacle at each end ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... not concern such criminal cases as the above, as a rule, but marriage contracts do specify death by strangling, drowning, precipitation from a tower or pinnacle of the temple or by the iron sword for a wife's repudiation of her husband. We are quite without evidence as to the executive in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... Othmann came in and examined me about my form of prayer. Oh! it was just then that I had reached the passive state of prayer: I did nothing, Another did everything in my prayer. From that time, having put me down in the gutter, the novice-master raised me up to the pinnacle, whereas I should have been in neither place." On another occasion he told how the change of prayer had happened: "I was on my knees one day after Communion, making a regular thanksgiving, when suddenly God stopped me, and I was told not to pray that way ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... the reader to judge how I relished this piece of information, which precipitated me from the most exalted pinnacle of hope to the lowest abyss of despondence, and well nigh determined me to take Banter's advice and finish my chagrin with a halter. I had no room to suspect the veracity of my friend, because, upon recollection, I found every ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... my own," he mused, "is such a combat of devils, That I believe torpid age or stupid youth would be better Than this manhood of mine that has climbed aloft to discover Heights which I never can reach, and bright on the pinnacle standing In the unfading light, my rival crowned victor above me. If I could hint what I feel, what forever escapes from my pencil, All after-time should know my will was not less than my failure, Nor should any one dare remember me merely in pity. All should read ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... the passionate lover who had committed a crime for Aquilina's sake. His inmost nature had suddenly asserted itself. His brain had expanded, his senses had developed. His thoughts comprehended the whole world; he saw all the things of earth as if he had been raised to some high pinnacle above the world. ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... sky very bright as on some clear winter night of frost, and of all that gigantic amphitheater of mountains which circled behind them from right to left there was hardly a hint. Perhaps here some extra cube of darkness showed where a pinnacle soared, or there a vague whiteness glimmered where a high glacier hung against the cliff, but for the rest the darkness hid the mountains. A cold wind blew out of the East ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... Satan carry our Savior to the pinnacle of the Temple, and show him all the kingdoms ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... leads up to St. James's Church, designed by Vulliamy, and consecrated in 1845; it has a square tower of considerable height, with a pinnacle at each corner. The chancel was added later. St. Gabriel's, in Clifton Road, is an offshoot of this church, but, curiously enough, it does not come within the parochial boundaries. It was built in 1883. ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... resigned to the King's agents, and a great cloud hung over the little town. In a short time the gorgeous shrines and altars were plundered and desecrated; the buildings were sold; and before the eyes of the astonished inhabitants tower and pinnacle, church and chapter-house, gatehouse and cloister, fell a prey to ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... I look back on that night from the pinnacle of more than half a century, that not one man in ten thousand has ever spent one like it. Allied with a horde whose language we could not speak, we had boarded our own ship and now—mutineers, pirates, or loyal mariners, according to your ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... before sunset, when we were near a cluster of crumbling pinnacles that formed the summit, I had ceased to feel anxiety about the mountaineering strength and skill of my companion, and pushed rapidly on. In passing around the shoulder of the highest pinnacle, where the rock was rapidly disintegrating and the danger of slipping was great, I shouted in a warning voice, "Be very careful here, ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... below the aisle windows and round the buttresses of the nave, but are not continued across the nave beneath the lancet windows. The buttresses do not quite rise to the full height of the side walls of the nave, and not a pinnacle is to be met with anywhere. The sill of the west window is about fifteen feet from the ground, and from it three tall lancets about four feet wide rise to a height of nearly thirty feet. They are placed under a comprising ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: A Short Account of Romsey Abbey • Thomas Perkins
... about the garden party, the freshness and unique manner in which it was arranged, and the pretty serving. She heard it again at the Dyckmans', and is now far up the pinnacle of self-complacency. ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Luzon and Samar, and passed for a day through a region of isles. The sea was glassy save when a school of porpoises tore it apart in their pursuit of the flying fish. On its deep sapphire the islands seemed to float, sometimes a mere pinnacle of rock, sometimes a cone-shaped peak timbered down to the beach where the surf fell over. Toward evening, when the breeze freshened slightly, we seemed almost to brush the sides of some of these islets, and they invited us with sparkling pools and coves, with beaches over which the sea wimpled, ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... man with a gun. And the Princess was miles off and forever beyond their reach. When they had settled with him they would no doubt burn the House down, but that would serve them little. From his airy pinnacle he could see the whole sea-front of Huntingtower, a blur in the dusk but for the ghostly eyes ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... Lunas, New Mexico, where he first attracted public attention as a healer. From here he went to Albuquerque, where he treated as many as six hundred persons in a day, many very effectively. After forty days' fast, which was broken by a hearty meal of solid food, he went to Denver and here reached the pinnacle of his fame and success. At the home of a sympathizer, daily from 9 A. M. to 4 P. M., he treated those who came to him, always without any remuneration. From two thousand to five thousand people would congregate in line, reaching nearly around a city block, five or six ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... himself the instruments by which they were won, or rather, I should say, he was the last and perhaps by the nature of the circumstances the most efficient of a list of distinguished men whose task it has been to rescue the Egyptian army from inefficiency and contempt in order to put it on the pinnacle of ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... thus let his own words be the necromantic spell that raises the dead, and brings us into communion with that man who knew what was in men more than any other mere man ever did. Well was it for Shakspere that he was humble; else on what a desolate pinnacle of companionless solitude must he have stood! Where was he to find his peers? To most thoughtful minds it is a terrible fancy to suppose that there were no greater human being than themselves. From the terror of ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... sympathy, and kindness. It's no use, Mrs Willoughby. I've put you on the topmost pinnacle in my mind, and nothing that you can say can pull you down. I think you are the ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... under his arm, his hat upon his head. Just before him Tom lay motionless upon the sward; but the murderer minded him not a whit, cleansing his blood-stained knife the while upon a whisp of grass. Everything else was unchanged, the sun still shining mercilessly upon the steaming marsh and the tall pinnacle of the mountain, and I could scarce persuade myself that murder had actually been done and a human life cruelly cut short a moment ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with its grey familiar towers, a pinnacle or two shining in the sun, the buttresses and terrace walls casting great blue shades on the grass. And Harry remembered all his life after how he saw his mistress at the window looking out on him in a white robe, the little Beatrix's chestnut curls resting at her mother's ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... to young Mrs. Percival. He might be a gentleman, but she feared that he would never be more. There was nothing imposing about him. He had lifted her out of sordid want, but he would not raise her to the pinnacle of greatness. The bland flat face of Mr. Early and his commanding slowness of movement impressed her imagination much as a great stone image might its votary. Here was indeed the truly illustrious. She devoured ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... concentration of power in the Tudor crown, the Dissolution itself, and the Reformation which followed, all left this as they found it, or left it stronger still. To this constitution alone the noble church was indebted for its preservation. The King could grasp all else from pinnacle to basement, but the nave was the parishioners', and that he could not touch. The result is a church surviving entire and substantially as its vanished patrons and banished brethren left it. Therefore if this church is a monument of baronial and abbatial power long departed, it ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury - with some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst Gloucestershire • H. J. L. J. Masse
... people who sat or wandered about in the coolness of the night, they passed through the gates of the kraal unheeded, and walking quickly across the wide stretch of tableland reached the eastern edge of the cliff. Now upon the very verge of this cliff rose a sharp pinnacle of rock fifty feet or more into the air, and upon the top of this pinnacle was that stone shaped like a great chair, in which Suzanne sat day by day, poised like an eagle over the dizzy gulf of space, for the slopes of the mountain swelled five hundred feet beneath, watching for ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... the white men I know, only a hundred or so have the privilege of sitting around in my parlor. As to the mulatto South, if you Southerners have one boast that is stronger than another, it is your women; you put them on a pinnacle of purity and virtue and bow down in a chivalric worship before them; yet you talk and act as though, should you treat the Negro fairly and take the anti-inter-marriage laws off your statute books, these same women would rush into the arms of black lovers and husbands. It's a ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... held by the unassisted excellence of a noble character, by the force of which he had previously won and adorned all the subordinate gradations of office."[201] He adorned this unenvied and unsullied pinnacle of fame by virtues of which the record is ennobling to the mind. "He is," observes another writer, "in every situation, so full of honour, of gentleness, of kindness, and intrepidity, that we doubt ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... as a hermitess on Helmet Rock came into the bar-room at the Cliff House, and there, amidst the crushing thunders and lightnings spilling all over the horizon, she related that she had seen a young seal in a comfortable overcoat, sitting pensively upon the pinnacle of Seal Rock, and had distinctly heard the familiar words of a Methodist hymn. Upon inquiry the tale was discovered to be founded upon fact. The identity of this seal could no longer be denied without downright blasphemy, and in all the old chronicles of that period not a doubt ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... was the intention of Aeschylus to exhibit to us a sudden fall from the highest pinnacle of prosperity and renown into the abyss of ruin. The prince, the hero, the general of the combined forces of the Greeks, in the very moment of success and the glorious achievement of the destruction of Troy, the fame ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... not always on a pinnacle. There have been plenty of times when the mere human want of you has sent me to the dust. Is it wrong to tell you that? But of course not. You know it. But you and I know this; Clay, dear. Love that ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... maman has put my name on the register of the monument; so the great archangel St. Michel will deliver me from all evil. What canst thou do? Canst thou turn children into cats? or canst thou walk across the sea without being drowned? or canst thou stand on the highest pinnacle of the church, where the golden image of St. Michel used to be, and cast thyself down without killing thyself? I will go back with thee to thy house and ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... unsought power as to be indifferent to its honors. Ambition is not for him, for ambition aspires; and what object has he to aspire to? From his contented mediocrity as alderman of a village, the people have insisted on elevating him from one pinnacle of greatness to another, until they have at last made him President of the United States. He might have been Dictator had he pleased; but what, to a man wearied with authority and dignity, would dictatorship be worth? If he is proud of anything, it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... not, as many another mediaeval architect has done, decked his roofs as Nature has decked hers, with the spruce and fir-tree spires, which cling to the hill-side of the crag, old above young, pinnacle above pinnacle, whorl above whorl; and clothed with them the sides and summit of the stone mountain which he had raised, till, like a group of firs upon an isolated rock, every point of the building should seem in act to grow ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... came the far cry of Innocent Smith, apparently from some remote pinnacle. "Come up here; and bring some of my things to eat and drink. It's just the ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... the best of the dull, respectable old house they had inherited, in the dull, respectable old street of the dull, respectable old town. Daisy and Pansy Mytton were, however, bright girls, and to them Arthurine Arthuret was a sort of realised dream of romance, raised suddenly to the pinnacle of all to which they had ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and worthy counsel: veritable autograph letters of the highest value. The Prince had steamed up the salt river, upon which the Sutton harvests were mirrored, and landed on a spot marked in honour of the event by a broad grey stone; and from that day Jonathan Eccles stood on a pinnacle of pride, enabling him to see horizons of despondency hitherto unknown to him. For he had a son, and the son was a riotous devil, a most wild young fellow, who had no taste for a farmer's life, and openly declared his determination not to perpetuate the Sutton farm in the hands ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Nature—the goddess, as she has been called, of a hundred voices—until here and there he can pick out a few simple notes to which his own powers can resound. If, then, at a moment when he finds himself placed on a pinnacle from which he is called upon to take a perspective survey of the range of science, and to tell us what he can see from his vantage ground; if at such a moment after straining his gaze to the very verge of the horizon, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... notice, went forth the palace to the horse and mounting it, turned the pin of ascent, whereupon bird-like it flew with him high in air and soared towards the upper regions of the sky. In early morning his father missed him and, going up to the pinnacle of the palace, in great concern, saw his son rising into the firmament; whereat he was sore afflicted and repented in all penitence that he had not taken the horse and hidden it; and he said to himself, "By Allah, if but my son return to me, I will destroy the horse, that my heart may be at rest ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... also the introduction of incantations and apparitions, of which romantic style of writing she was a professed admirer. The "Indian Emperor" had the most ample success; and from the time of its representation, till the day of his death, our author, though often rudely assailed, maintained the very pinnacle of poetical superiority, ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... sons of the noble patriot, soon "put out his wings," and soared, ultimately, to a pinnacle of honor and renown attained by few among men. In the winter of 1793 and 1794, the public mind had become highly excited from the inflammatory appeals in behalf of France, by Citizen Genet, the French Minister to the United States. A large portion of the anti-Federal ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... pinnacle, as it were, of professional success. The inventor is something else—a wilding in the profession—and as such cannot be considered in a paper of this kind, save only as to say that he is the presiding genius among engineers, the Shakespeare or Milton among his kind, a man whose path to the ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... bulging ridge like a bastion upon the right side of the terrible khor up which the camels were winding. At one point it rose into a small pinnacle. On this pinnacle stood a solitary, motionless figure clad entirely in black, save for a brilliant dash of scarlet upon his head. There could not surely be two such short, sturdy figures or such large, colourless faces in the Libyan desert. His shoulders were ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... infirmities of budding genius; but the poems he contributed to Fox's journal during the following two years (1834-36) show a significant predilection for imagining the extravagances and fanaticisms of lonely self-centred minds. Joannes Agricola, sublime on the dizzy pinnacle of his theological arrogance, looking up through the gorgeous roof of heaven and assured that nothing can stay his course to his destined abode, God's breast; Porphyria's lover, the more uncanny fanatic who murders with a smile; ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... profuse, or that neglect of his private interests which almost inevitably accompanies the absorbing duties of public life, his affairs were always somewhat confused, and Lady Montfort, who wished to place him on a pinnacle, had resolved that he should marry an heiress. After long observation and careful inquiry and prolonged reflection, the lady she had fixed upon was Miss Neuchatel; and she it was who had made Lord Roehampton cross the room and address ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... the highest pinnacle of the rock, and placing me on the top of it, 'Cast thy eyes eastward,' said he, 'and tell me what thou seest.' 'I see,' said I, 'a huge valley, and a prodigious tide of water rolling through it.' 'The valley that thou seest,' said he, 'is the Vale of ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... H. Weise, in "Die Komodien des Plautus, kritisch nach Inhalt und Form beleuchtet, zur Bestimmung des Echten und Unechten in den einzelnen Dichtungen" (Quedlinburg, 1866), follows hard on Becker's heels and places Plautus on a pinnacle of poetic achievement in which we scarcely recognize our apotheosized laugh-maker. Every passage in the plays that is not artistically immaculate, that does not conform to the uttermost canons of dramatic art, is unequivocally damned as "unecht." ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... a wagon go rattling along the road, and the shouting, whistling and singing of boys. It was past noon before he recalled the object with which he had left home that morning. He sat upon the very pinnacle of achievement—that is to say, he sat upon the very highest point in the orchard, his head up, his spirits up, with such a decidedly upward tendency that it was hard for him to make up his mind to ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various
... declaiming in this manner in order to terrify me," said Clara: "but, friend John, I know you and your ways, and I have made up my mind upon all contingencies that can take place. I will tell you more—I have stood on this tottering pinnacle of rank and fashion, if our situation can be termed such, till my head is dizzy with the instability of my eminence; and I feel that strange desire of tossing myself down, which the devil is said to put into folk's heads when they stand on the top of steeples—at ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... be better for us, provided it be practicable, to wrest those Places from the Hands of the Enemy than trust to the Uncertainty of Treaty? I confess we have a Choice of Difficulties. I pray God we may surmount them all! None however reach the Pinnacle of Eminence & Glory but the virtuous & brave. Adieu my dear Sir. I hope to see & live with you shortly; but I shall expect another Letter from you before I ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... oak. Barriers of lofty mountains encompassed it; the woods were fresh and cool in the early morning; the peaks of the mountains were wreathed with mist, and sluggish vapors were entangled among the forests upon their sides. At length the black pinnacle of the tallest mountain was tipped with gold by the rising sun. About that time the Hail-Storm, who rode in front gave a low exclamation. Some large animal leaped up from among the bushes, and an elk, as I thought, his ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... of fawn-color and black, or of the sensitive, priceless aigrettes which spring from my ears? My ear-rings She calls them.... What cat could resist me! Ah! the January nights, the serenades under a frosty moon, the dignified wait on the pinnacle of a roof, the encounter with a rival cat on the narrow top of a wall!... But I feel quite sure of my superior strength. I'll swish my tail, put back my ears, sniff tragically as one does before vomiting, and then lift up my voice—its modulations are infinite. I'll make it strong enough to ...
— Barks and Purrs • Colette Willy, aka Colette
... agnosticism of the later half of last century, had felt her faith, not indeed extinguished, but obscured and darkened. From the perusal of certain writers she had shrunk, perhaps with cowardice. They were put on such a pinnacle that she feared she would find no arguments fit to oppose to theirs. Weakly, she locked the skeleton cupboard. Then she was attacked by a malady which, while leaving her mind free and strong, she knew might be very speedily fatal. ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... but when he asked if she missed him, she gave such a chilly, formal reply that despair fell upon him. On learning his good fortune she almost clapped her hands. Was the joy all for the boys? Then on hearing his destination, she said, "So far away!" in a tone of despair that lifted him on to a pinnacle of hope, but the next minute she tumbled him down again by observing, like one entirely absorbed in ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... of a serpent; whispering in David's ear that a census would be a good thing, while Jehovah whispers a similar suggestion on the other side; asking Jesus to turn pebbles into penny loaves, lugging him through the air, perching him on a pinnacle, setting him on the top of a mountain whence both squinted round the globe, and playing for forty days and nights that preposterous pantomime of the temptation in the desert; getting miraculously ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... new order of experience—of an ecstasy. Something drew me forth with a sense of inexpressible yearning towards the being of this strange old man in the window seat, and for a moment I knew what it was to taste a mighty and wonderful sensation, and to touch the highest pinnacle of joy I have ever known. It lasted for less than a second, and was gone; but in that brief instant of time the same terrible lucidity came to me that had already shown me how the past and future exist in the present, and I realised and understood that pleasure and pain are one and the same ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... era of intellectual indifference to the world set in. She read Milton in a garret and ate very little. When addressed, she gave the impression of being suddenly dragged down from some sublime pinnacle of thought. This was the period of absent-mindedness, of untidiness, of unpunctuality, for she was convinced that these three ingredients compose the spiritual life. But it was not a success. True, ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... intolerable than ever. At last, half mad with irritation, I set off straight up the side of the nearest mountain, in hopes of attaining a zone too high for them to inhabit; and, poising myself upon its topmost pinnacle, I drew my handkerchief over my head—I was already without coat and waistcoat—and remained the rest of the morning "mopping and mowing" at the ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... Abbey and hanged in chains at Tyburn.[1] They were then buried at the foot of the gallows along with he moldering remains of highway robbers and criminals of the lowest sort, but Cromwell's head was cut off and set up on a pinnacle ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... statesmanlike, but it could not be very popular. It was quite impossible to say that it was the duty of the English people to obey the House of Hanover upon any principles which do not concede the right of the people to choose their rulers, and which do not degrade monarchy from its solitary pinnacle of majestic reverence, and make it one only among many expedient institutions. If a king is a useful public functionary who may be changed, and in whose place you may make another, you cannot regard him with mystic awe and wonder; and if you ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... choked. That was supposed to be the very pinnacle of the top secret stuff. But she was right of course. Four of the earlier models had cracked up. No pilots in them at the time—radio controlled. But jobs designed to ...
— The Very Black • Dean Evans
... over by the mare. With a hideous crash the flying roof was hurled against a nearby pinnacle of rock. The wooden wings split upon the immovable obstruction, and on they went ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... immense elevation from the surface of the earth, drawn as it were to a single apex, without any neighbouring mountain for the senses and imagination to rest upon, and recover from their astonishment in their way down to the world—and this point, or pinnacle raised on the brink of a bottomless gulf, often discharging rivers of fire, and throwing out burning rocks, with a noise that shakes the whole island. Add to this, the unbounded extent of the prospect, comprehending the greatest diversity, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 265, July 21, 1827 • Various
... about in search of some place of safety, rapidly, and all eye; till at length I espied a small tuft of grass on the pinnacle of the highest of the small rocks that were scattered about my prison; for such now ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... Courtenay was shouting for some explanation, a great black wall rose out of the deep on the port bow. It was a pinnacle rock, high as the ship's masts, but only a few feet wide at sea level, and the Kansas sped past this ugly monitor as though it were a buoy ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... ran as far north sometimes as the Aleutians; and he had immediately gained official recognition by sticking to his instruments for sixty-eight hours—recorded at fifteen-minute intervals in his log—when the whaler Goblin encountered a submerged pinnacle rock in the Island Passage and flashed ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... High Admiral he took Pepys with him in his advancement. Thus in 1684, Pepys became Secretary of the Navy. When later the Prince of Wales became King James II, Pepys, although his office remained the same, came to quite a pinnacle of administrative power. He was shrewd and capable in the conduct of his position and brought method to the Navy Office. He was a prime factor in the first development of the British Navy. Later ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... genesis of the highest spiritual qualities in Man as the goal of Nature's creative work. This view has survived the Copernican revolution in science, and it has survived the Darwinian revolution. Nay, if the foregoing exposition be sound, it is Darwinism which has placed Humanity upon a higher pinnacle than ever. The future is lighted for us with the radiant colours of hope. Strife and sorrow shall disappear. Peace and love shall reign supreme. The dream of poets, the lesson of priest and prophet, the inspiration ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... what part the United States has to act in these scenes; for it must seem reasonable and probable that a nation which has arisen so suddenly as ours, made such unparalleled progress, and attained to such a pinnacle of greatness and power, must be a subject of divine prophecy, or ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... soon far beneath us, pursuing its headlong course till it reached level ground, where it flowed in the midst of a beautiful but confined prairie. There was something sylvan and savage in the mountains on the farther side, clad from foot to pinnacle with trees, so closely growing that the eye was unable to obtain a glimpse of the hill sides, which were uneven with ravines and gulleys, the haunts of the wolf, the wild boar, and the corso, or mountain-stag; the latter of which, as I was ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... find some glimmer of the thoughts, emotions, and meanings behind. And in the long run such a habit of inquiry must bear fruit in understanding and sympathy. Joseph Conrad (who seems, by the way, to be more read by newspaper men than any other writer) put very nobly the pinnacle of all scribblers' dreams when he said that human affairs deserve the tribute of "a sigh which is not a sob, a smile which is ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... of his work. An American original, unconsciously bringing the revolutionary mind to the climax of all utterances possible to it, has said that 'men are degraded when considered as the members of a political organisation.'[2] Shelley's position was on a yet more remote pinnacle than this. Of mankind he was barely conscious, in his loftiest and divinest flights. His muse seeks the vague translucent spaces where the care of man melts away in vision of the eternal forces, of which man may be but the fortuitous ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... by modern geometers have deposed Euclid from his pinnacle of correctness. It was thought, until recent times, that, as Sir Henry Savile remarked in 1621, there were only two blemishes in Euclid, the theory of parallels and the theory of proportion. It is now known that these ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... no doubt that at the time this is written he has reached the pinnacle of fame in France. He is the man in all France who is most talked about, most admired and most trusted. Were he to die now, as Kitchener died, his place in History would be secure. What will happen before the war is over is another matter. But, having heard the French talk about ...
— A Journey Through France in War Time • Joseph G. Butler, Jr.
... end to all things; and at length Otto was walking by the side of Madame von Rosen, along that mountain wall, her servant following with both the horses, and all about them sunlight, and breeze, and flying bird, and the vast regions of the air, and the capacious prospect: wildwood and climbing pinnacle, and the sound and voice of mountain torrents, at their hand; and far below them, green melting into sapphire ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he, "it is my right. It is Jean's right. You would love to put him on top of the pinnacle of fame, would ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... sceptical could designate as superstition, trace out and attempt to sanction for us a system of morality, in which the sublimest feelings of the Stoic and the Christian are represented but as stages in our progress to the pinnacle of true human grandeur; and man, isolated on this fragment of the universe, encompassed with the boundless desolate Unknown, at war with Fate, without help or the hope of help, is confidently called upon to rise into a calm cloudless height of internal activity and peace, and ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... the tracery which fills them, and the mouldings which surround them, belong to the pointed style; the arches may therefore have been the production of an earlier architect. The windows of the nave are crowned by pediments, each terminating, not with a pinnacle, but with a small statue. The pediments over the windows of the choir are larger and bolder, and perforated as they rise above the parapet; the members of the mouldings are full, ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... building was properly protected. There are many cases where the pinnacles of the same turret of a church have been struck where one has had a rod attached to it; but it is clear that the other pinnacles were outside the cone; and therefore, for protection, each pinnacle should have had its own rod. It is evident also that every prominent point of a building should have its rod, and that the higher the rod the greater is the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... sharply to the left, and follow, first the cobbled Quai des Marbriers, and afterwards its continuation, the Quai Vert. Pacing these silent promenades, which are bordered by humble cottages, you have opposite, across the water, as also from the adjacent Quai du Rosaire, grand groupings of pinnacle, tower, and gable, more delightful even, in perfection of combination and in mellow charm of colour, than those "domes and towers" of Oxford whose presence Wordsworth confessed, in a very indifferent sonnet, to overpower his "soberness of reason." "In Brussels," he says elsewhere in his ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... down when I reached a cleared place an hour or so later, and turned to look back. The sharp angle of the Devil's Ledge was the highest point visible, the very pinnacle of the mountain, and there, clear against the burnished steel of the morning sky, on the very edge, clear in the rare atmosphere was a small figure. It stood for a second, a black point distinctly ...
— Elsket - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page
... forward. If you mix yourself up with K.C.B.'s and raise your platform of ambition, you are just where you were at the A B C of your career. Living on a table-land, you experience no sensation of height. For the intoxicating delights of elevation you require a solitary pinnacle, some lonely eminence. Aut Caesar, aut nullus; whether in the zenith or the ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... up, up, through a yet smaller staircase, till we emerged into another stone gallery, above the jackdaws, and far above the roof beneath which we had before made a halt. Then up another flight, which led us into a pinnacle of the temple, but not the highest; so, retracing our steps, we took the right turret this time, and emerged into the loftiest lantern, where we saw level Lincolnshire, far and near, though with a haze on the distant horizon. There were dusty roads, a river, and canals, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... thoughts, emotions, and meanings behind. And in the long run such a habit of inquiry must bear fruit in understanding and sympathy. Joseph Conrad (who seems, by the way, to be more read by newspaper men than any other writer) put very nobly the pinnacle of all scribblers' dreams when he said that human affairs deserve the tribute of "a sigh which is not a sob, a smile which ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... Threes and fours and twelves, All the volte face of decimals, The whirligig of dozens and the pinnacle of seven, Turn him on his back, The kicking little beetle, And there again, on his shell-tender, earth-touching belly, The long cleavage of division, upright ...
— Tortoises • D. H. Lawrence
... decided, Den?" I asked, for I felt that I should like to climb to the topmost pinnacle of the highest peak in all the world and shout the good news to the four corners ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... Mysteries are unfolded, secrets reveal themselves, hidden things are proclaimed, and courts and juries, awed and abashed, yet elevated and inspired, accept and act upon his conclusions as infallible. For one hour he touches the pinnacle of ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... end of the piazza, honest Balt would sit smoking his evening pipe at the other, watching the achievements of a little wooden warrior, who, armed with a sword in each hand, was most valiantly fighting the wind on the pinnacle of the barn. In the meantime, Ichabod would carry on his suit with the daughter by the side of the spring under the great elm, or sauntering along in the twilight, that hour so favourable ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... service beyond Grace's voice ringing high and clear in the "Magnificat," while for perhaps the first time I caught a glimmer of its full significance, and her face, clean-cut against the shadow where a fretted pinnacle allowed one shaft of light to pass it, looking, I thought, like that of a haloed saint. The rest was all a blurred impression of rolling music, half-seen faces, and gay uniforms, until a tall old man of commanding personality stood ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... consisting of a reddish granite or porphyry. From this height I again saw Harvey's and Croker's ranges and various hills to the southward, but I was disappointed in the view of the western horizon, which was confined to a very flat-topped woody range. I took as many angles as I could from a round pinnacle of porphyry ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... of these last words. You cannot look at the canopy work or the pinnacle work of this cathedral without seeing that they do not merely suggest buds and leaves, but that the buds and leaves are there carven before your eyes. I myself cannot look at the tabernacle work of our stalls without being reminded of the young pine forests which clothe the Hampshire ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... "wisdom, and honor, and riches, and power" to him of whom they are spoken; but it is human wisdom and earthly power, all "under the sun." And now listen to the "song" that should surely accompany this ascription; note the joy of a heart fully and completely satisfied now that the pinnacle of human greatness is attained. Here it is: "Vanity of vanities," saith the Preacher, "vanity of vanities; all is vanity!" The word hahvehl is always translated, as here, "vanity." It is sometimes applied ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... panting, upon that pinnacle, it was first a dazzling confusing view of roofs, chimneys, streets, bridges, places, spires, bell towers. Everything struck your eye at once: the carved gable, the pointed roof, the turrets suspended at the angles of the walls; ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... at a window, looking out at the aged row of cedars, now laden with snow, and thinking of Horace and Soracte. Suddenly, beneath a jutting pinnacle of white boughs which left under themselves one little spot of green, I saw a cardinal hop out and sit full-breasted towards me. The idea flashed through my mind that this might be that shyest, most beautiful fellow whom I had found in September, and whom I tried to make out ...
— A Kentucky Cardinal • James Lane Allen
... the devil? Great King of Cant! if Nature had but made Your mouth without a tongue I ne'er had prayed To have an earless head. Since she did not, Bear me, ye whirlwinds, to some favored spot— Some mountain pinnacle that sleeps in air So delicately, mercifully rare That when the fellow climbs that giddy hill, As, for my sins, I know at last he will, To utter twaddle in that void inane His soundless organ ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... view of the same scene, though the photograph was extremely defective. I could distinctly see the isolated, tree-crowned pinnacle of rock which was ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... resuscitated and the Venetian Republic born to a sublimer destiny. Surely the same indomitable spirit, the same high courage, that had reared that wondrous city out of the sea, was here before me, piling story upon story, pinnacle beyond pinnacle, till our old-world hearts sickened and our unaccustomed brains ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... descendest on thy nest in the cleft of the inaccessible rock, who makest the mountain pinnacle thy perch and halting-place, and, scanning with steady eye the orb of glory right above thee, imprintest thy lordly talons in the stainless snows, that shoot back and scatter round his glittering shafts,—I pay thee homage. Thou art ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... gorge, bringing out details as well as the main massive features of the architecture; while all the rocks, as if wild with life, throb and quiver and glow in the glorious sunburst, rejoicing. Every rock temple then becomes a temple of music; every spire and pinnacle an angel of light ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... trees of Central Europe became pillars; grouped together, apparently haphazard, they reflected a mystical nature pulsing with mysterious life. Spreading and ramifying, growing together in an impenetrable network of foliage, they bore buds, leaves and fruits. Every pinnacle became a sprig, even the pendant icicles reappeared in the gable-boards. But the assimilation of natural objects did not cease there; tiny animals, light as a feather, run over the tendrils, lizards, birds, even the gnomes of ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... do our hair in clash... clashishsher Knoten, Hendy, all of us," said Jimmie judicially, sitting forward with her plump hands clasped on the table. Her pinnacle of hair looked ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... mountains, to an almost inaccessible volcanic ground not far from the stars. Robert on horseback, Wilson and the nurse with baby, on other donkeys; guides, of course. We set off at eight in the morning and returned at six P. M., after dining on the mountain pinnacle.... The scenery, sublime and wonderful,... innumerable mountains bound faintly with the gray sea, and not a ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... has been raised in our days to the pinnacle of fame which is his by right; the festival of his tercentenary was acknowledged by the whole civilised world as the natural utterance of joy and pride of our small country in being able to count among ...
— Rembrandt • Josef Israels
... himself had endeavored to undermine her in the community. Her preoccupying thought was the overthrow of Bonaparte, whose ambition and its triumphs excited the anger of her soul,—a cold, deliberate anger. The obscure and hidden enemy of a man at the pinnacle of glory, she kept her gaze upon him from the depths of her valley and her forests, with relentless fixity; there were times when she thought of killing him in the roads about Malmaison or Saint-Cloud. Plans for the execution of this idea may have been the cause of many of her past actions, ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... at the pinnacle of success. The army is his own; the keys of numerous towns are brought to him. Moscow alone appears to offer resistance. He is mild and amiable, testifies a noble emotion at the intelligence of the death of Boris, pardons a detected conspiracy against ...
— Demetrius - A Play • Frederich Schiller
... elegant Tuileries, the noble Louvre, the magnificent Champs Elysees, the playing fountains, the spacious streets, and the moving masses of people, presented a scene which for variety, splendour, and I may add, solemnity, could not be excelled by any prospect that might have been commanded on the pinnacle of Jerusalem's Temple. In fifty years the mass of this vast multitude will be numbered amongst a bygone generation; and these stately works of art shall perish. What a worm am I amongst such a multitude! yet I am destined to immortality; have but a few years to live in a probationary ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... The mountain air will soon clear it up. We'll go fishing, first thing, at the Pinnacle Falls. The trout are jumping there like bullfrogs. We'll take Stella and Lucy along, and have a picnic on Eagle Rock. Have you forgotten how a hickory-cured-ham sandwich tastes, Yancey, to a ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... dim eyes—all lay down their feverish wishes as they advance in life, forget the bright ideal which they can not reach, and embrace the more imperfect real. We speak not here of the assured Christian. He, from the noblest pinnacle of faith, beholds a promised land, and is eager to reach it; he prays "to be delivered from the body of this death;" but we write of those humbler, perhaps more human souls, with whom increasing age each day ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... gained a jutting crag which seemed almost to overhang the water; and going on farther amongst the wind-brushed pines, we came to another spot which we had previously viewed from above. It was a little round stone oratory perched on the crest of a jutting pinnacle, and linked to the main rock by a narrow causeway which rested on a slender arch. It was lit by a lantern in the roof, and over the altar was the marble effigy of a man ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... not without their value and charm; in the arts may be permitted divers manifestations, such as landscape, animal, and flower painting. The Church is tolerant of all that is good, but on the highest pinnacle stands the Christian painter. Over these matters he had pondered long, and was accustomed to say to himself, "Let not my Christ be ever robbed of my love; the true home of art is within the soul before the altar of the Church; ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... firing. Close on the heels of that came a violent rattling crash, quite close to us, that shook the ground; and, starting out upon the lawn, I saw the tops of the trees about the Oriental College burst into smoky red flame, and the tower of the little church beside it slide down into ruin. The pinnacle of the mosque had vanished, and the roof line of the college itself looked as if a hundred-ton gun had been at work upon it. One of our chimneys cracked as if a shot had hit it, flew, and a piece of it came clattering down the tiles and made ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... a loving loyalty. The attraction to these very women was his unworldliness, his separateness, his devotion to an ideal which in their reason seemed a delusion. And no women would have been more sensitive than they to his fall from his spiritual pinnacle. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... And though, wherever you are, as I have told you before, you are in the same boat, yet I congratulate you on your absence, as well because you don't see what we see, as because your reputation is placed on a lofty and conspicuous pinnacle in the sight of multitudes both of citizens and allies; and it is conveyed to us by neither obscure nor uncertain talk, but by the loud and unanimous voice of all. There is one thing of which I cannot feel certain—whether to congratulate you, or to be alarmed for you on account of the surprising ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... more than adventure. There was a significance in the extraordinary encounter with Keeko that dimmed to the commonplace every thrill he had ever experienced in the past. It had lifted him at a bound to that pinnacle of manhood, which until the moment when woman presents herself upon youth's stage of life can never ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... unconsciously bringing the revolutionary mind to the climax of all utterances possible to it, has said that 'men are degraded when considered as the members of a political organisation.'[2] Shelley's position was on a yet more remote pinnacle than this. Of mankind he was barely conscious, in his loftiest and divinest flights. His muse seeks the vague translucent spaces where the care of man melts away in vision of the eternal forces, of which man may be but the ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... mountain, now across Sonoma from the sea; very quiet, very idle, very silent but for the breezes and the cattle bells afield. And there was something satisfactory in the sight of that great mountain that enclosed us to the north; whether it stood, robed in sunshine, quaking to its topmost pinnacle with the heat and brightness of the day; or whether it set itself to weaving vapours, wisp after wisp growing, trembling, fleeting, and fading ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reaction was Horace Greeley. He was destined many times to make plain that he lived mainly in his sensibilities; that, in his kaleidoscopic vision, the pattern of the world could be red and yellow and green today, and orange and purple and blue tomorrow. To descend from a pinnacle of self-complacency into a desolating abyss of panic, was as easy for Greeley as it is—in the vulgar but pointed American phrase—to roll off a log. A few days after the election, Greeley had rolled off his log. He was wallowing in panic. He began to scream editorially. ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... singularity of their entertainment. The Count, at length, rose from the table, and addressing himself to the company, said, "Gentlemen, I was willing to convince you how well I can rely upon the officers of my artillery; for I ordered them to fire during the time we continued at dinner, at the pinnacle of the tent, and they have executed ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... they were in and out, and here and there, and up and down, as though they had been bred among the valleys of the pass. There would come a ringing laugh from some rock above their head, and Lady Rowley looking up would see their dresses fluttering on a pinnacle which appeared to her to be fit only for a bird; and there would be the courier behind them, with two parasols, and a shawl, and a cloak, and an eye-glass, and a fine pair of grizzled whiskers. They made an Alpine club of their own, refusing to admit their father ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... thirteenth chapter there is an account of one built under the superintendence of Buddha himself, "as a model for all topes in future." They were usually in the form of bell-shaped domes, and were solid, surmounted by a long tapering pinnacle formed with a series of rings, varying in number. But their form, I suppose, was often varied; just as we have in China pagodas of different shapes. There are several topes now in the Indian Institute at Oxford, brought from Buddha Gaya, ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... of black Antarctic seas. But here they dwell together, in unison with the gulls, and were the wind not westerly you could hear their shrill cries and hoarse croaking as they wheel and eddy and circle above the lonely rock, on the highest pinnacle of which a great fish-eagle, with neck thrown back upon his shoulders and eyes fixed eastward to the sun, stands oblivious of their clamour, as creatures beneath ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... and buried. But I want you to realize that during those few minutes I was not John Trenholme, an artist struggling for foothold on the steep crags of the painter's rock of endeavor, but a master of the craft gazing from some high pinnacle at a territory he had won. If you know anything of painting, Miss Manning, you will go with me so far as to admit that my indiscretion was impersonal. I, a poet who expressed his emotions in terms of color, was alone with Aphrodite ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... away. The course of the rivers, as they flow deep down between the mountains, was pointed out to us. The principal one is the Arros River, which from the west embraces most of the mesas, and then, turning south, receives its tributaries, the Tutuhuaca and the Mulatos, the latter just behind a pinnacle. West of the Arros River stretches out the immense Mesa de los Apaches, once a stronghold of these marauders, reaching as far as the Rio Bonito. The plateau is also called "The Devil's Spine Mesa," after a high and very narrow ridge, ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... believing that her husband, who aided in the flight, designed to be rid of her, coinceived a dire revenge. He and some others broke into Abelard's chamber by night, and perpetrated on him the most brutal mutilation. Thus cast down from his pinnacle of greatness into an abyss of shame and misery, there was left to the brilliant master only the life of a monk. The priesthood and ecclesiastical office were canonically closed to him. Heloise, not yet twenty, consummated ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... climbed after him, till they stood together, right on the conical pinnacle, with only just room for them to remain erect, the great boiling crater below on one side, the glorious view of the fairy-like isle, with its ring of foam around, and the vivid blue lagoon, circling the emerald green of the coast. ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... down afar from its grey ramparts on the contending swarm with something of the philosophic composure suitable to a survivor of Pelasgic and Etruscan revolutions. These grey ramparts are in great part still visible, and form the chief attraction of Cortona. It is perched on the very pinnacle of a mountain, and I wound and doubled interminably over the face of the great hill, while the jumbled roofs and towers of the arrogant little city still seemed nearer to the sky than to the railway-station. "Rather rough," Murray pronounces the local inn; and ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... which we looked down were blistered with conical hills, crowned by ancient castles which would have rejoiced the hearts of mediaeval painters, as they did mine. Severac-le-Chateau, perched on its naked pinnacle of rock, was best of all, as we saw it from our bird's-eye view, and then again, almost startlingly impressive when we had somehow whirled down below it, to pass under its old huddled town, before we flew up once more ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... the old guardsman, as he stood perched upon the high pinnacle of rock, was again too much for the muleteers; and one and all of them gave utterance to fresh peals of laughter. His young masters were too much concerned about their faithful Pouchskin to give way to mirth; but on ascertaining that he had only received a few insignificant bruises,—thanks ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... and he had trusted him. The thought was a sudden spur, urging him as nothing else could have done, bringing out all that was best and strongest in his nature. In a few hours he had crashed from the pinnacle on which he had soared in the blindness of egoism down into depths of self-realisation that seemed bottomless, and at the darkest moment when his world was lying in pieces under his feet—this had come. Another chance had been given to him. Craven's jaw set squarely ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... Halla is on a pinnacle of rising ground, about a hundred yards from the Danube, from whose bank the ascent is by a stupendous marble staircase, to the grand portico. The columns are of the finest white stone, and the interior is completely lined with German marbles. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... The bacha had cunningly noted the road it came. In an instant it was in its claws, the poor little creature screaming with terror. So rapid was its flight, that even if we had wished it we could not have killed the bird. Off it went to the pinnacle of the rock from whence it had descended, and there began tearing its prey, which, happily, it soon must have put out of pain. Though we waited some minutes, not another klipdach appeared, and we had to go on some considerable way before we again caught sight ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... of golden eagles had nested on the rough face of a pinnacle that rose from the floor of the valley near its head, some five miles from Breed's home ridge. These mighty birds soared far out over the divide and returned with meat for their fledglings in the nest. Their pealing screams often split ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... monument in the cemetery. It consists of a chapel formed out of the ruins of the Abbey of Paraclete, which was founded by Abelard, and of which Heloise was the first abbess. It is fourteen feet in length, by eleven in breadth, and is twenty-four feet in height. A pinnacle rises out of the roof in a cruciform shape, and four smaller ones exquisitely sculptured stand between the gables. Fourteen columns, six feet high, support beautiful arches, and the cornices are wrought in flowers. The gables of the four fronts have trifoliate windows, and are ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... occasion been asked and given in marriage,—was carried on after a somewhat humdrum fashion, and in a manner that must be called commonplace. How different had it been when Crosbie had made his offer! Lily for the time had been raised to a pinnacle,—a pinnacle which might be dangerous, but which was, at any rate, lofty. With what a pretty speech had Crosbie been greeted! How it had been felt by all concerned that the fortunes of the Small House were in the ascendant,—felt, indeed, with some trepidation, but still with much inward ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... of Whitey's life, the pinnacle of his ambition, the idea of the tip-top of ecstatic happiness that lived in his brain was—Boots. And now he had them. And they were beauties; with tops of soft leather with fancy stitching, inlaid with white enameled leather, and high heels, that a fellow could dig ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... viceroy's guests issuing from the palace-officers of the king's navy and army, officers and men of the Jamaica militia, pale-faced, big-eyed men of the Creole class, mulattoes, quadroons and octoroons, Samboes with their wives in loose skirts, white stockings, and pinnacle hats. There also passed, in the streets, black servants with tin cases on their heads, or carrying parcels in their arms, and here and there processions of servants, each with something that belonged to their mistresses, who would ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... things; and at length Otto was walking by the side of Madame von Rosen, along that mountain wall, her servant following with both the horses, and all about them sunlight, and breeze, and flying bird, and the vast regions of the air, and the capacious prospect: wildwood and climbing pinnacle, and the sound and voice of mountain torrents, at their hand: and far below them, green melting into sapphire on ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Gregory (Hom. xvi in Evang.) says this is to be understood of the Holy Ghost, to wit, that "thither did His Spirit lead Him, where the wicked spirit would find Him and tempt Him." But He suffered from the devil in being "taken up" on to "the pinnacle of the Temple" and again "into a very high mountain." Nor is it strange, as Gregory observes, "that He allowed Himself to be taken by him on to a mountain, who allowed Himself to be crucified by His members." And we understand ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... sides by posterity; or his fame may undergo the inverse treatment, until he settles down to his proper level. Byron's reputation has passed through sharper vicissitudes than have befallen most of his compeers; for though no poet has ever shot up in a brief lifetime to a higher pinnacle of fame, or made a wider impression upon the world around him, after his death he seems to have declined slowly, in England, to a point far below his real merits. And at this moment there is no celebrated poet, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... forty-third and us to pass them quietly, thinking, I suppose, that it was their interest to keep the peace; but not so with the Spaniards, whom they kept in a regular fever, under a smart fire, the whole way. We took up a position at dark, on a pinnacle of the same mountain, within three or four hundred yards of them. There had been a heavy firing all day to our left, and we heard, in the course of the night, of the fall of St. Sebastian, as well as of the defeat of the force ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... obstacles nor temptations induce ye to leave it; bound along if you can; if not on hands and knees follow it, perish in it, if needful; but ye need not fear that; no one ever yet died in the true path of his calling before he had attained the pinnacle. Turn into other paths, and for a momentary advantage or gratification ye have sold your inheritance, your immortality. Ye will never be heard of ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... Testament and the Talmud, both of which many of them know entirely by heart. They all write Hebrew; but I did not see any fine hand-writing amongst them; their learning, seems to be on the same level as that of the Turks, among whom an Olema thinks he has attained the pinnacle of knowledge if he can recite all the Koran together with some thousand of Hadeath, or sentences of the Prophet, and traditions concerning him; but neither Jews, nor Turks, nor Christians, in these countries, have the slightest idea of that criticism, which might ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... his orchard, you will chiefly take care to reform, by your conduct and doctrine, all the churches, that all generations may call your land blessed through your beatitude. This, too, we thirst for with a sincere heart, that the spirit of tempests, which is wont to rage furiously about the pinnacle of honor, may never wrest you from the concern of your sanctification; lest, by reason of any deficiency in you, the deepest abyss of disgrace should succeed to the highest summit of dignity. And this we ardently long for, that, as the regulation ...
— Pope Adrian IV - An Historical Sketch • Richard Raby
... dark whirlwind), but they engaged to fight in opposition, and a clamour arose. Telamonian Ajax first slew a man, the companion of Sarpedon, magnanimous Epicles, striking him with a rugged stone, which, mighty in size, lay highest up against a pinnacle within the wall. Not easily would a man support it with both hands, such as mortals now are, not although being very youthful; but he, raising it aloft, hurled it, and burst the four-coned helmet, and along with it crushed all the bones of the skull: but he, like unto a diver, fell from the lofty ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... rather than betray the man she loves? No human plummet has sounded the depths of a woman's devotion; no surveyor's chain will ever mark the limits of a woman's faithful, patient endurance; and only the wings of an archangel can transcend that pinnacle to which the sublime principle of self-sacrifice ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... quarter-speed, and began to sway softly from side to side as the huge air-planes beat the mist through which they moved, and the antennae of light pierced it. Still up they went, and on—yet swift enough to let Percy see one great pinnacle rear itself, elongate, sink down into a cruel needle, and vanish into nothingness a thousand feet below. The motion grew yet more nauseous, as the car moved up at a sharp angle preserving its level, simultaneously rising, advancing and swaying. Once, hoarse and sonorous, ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... upon its slopes is no earthly light, but rather, as it were, a promise and a beacon—a glow reflected whence we know not, and lying on this alien earth as the sun's light lies on the dead bosom of the moon. Some declare, again, that they have climbed its topmost pinnacle and tasted of the fresh breath of heaven which sweeps around its heights—ay, and heard the quiring of immortal harps and the swan-like sigh of angels' wings; and then behold! a mist has fallen upon them, and they have wandered in it, and when it cleared they were on the mountain ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... obdurate. No, he would not go to the Brookes' again, since Ethel had once objected to his going. And on this pinnacle of austere virtue he remained, thereby reducing Ethel to a state of self-abasement, which spoke well for his chances of mastery in the married life which loomed ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... of consideration. As she never mentioned her husband, it was supposed that she was a widow, and, in consequence of her well-regulated establishment, she received much attention from several Irish and foreign bachelors. In short, my mother obtained almost the pinnacle of her ambition when she was once fairly settled at Cheltenham. I ought to observe that when she arrived there she had taken the precaution of prefixing a name to her own to which by baptismal rite she certainly was not entitled, and called herself ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... night presently." She made no sound. Round them all was peace and declining sunshine. Near by, the topmost pinnacle of Malata, resembling the top of a buried tower, rose a rock, weather-worn, grey, weary of watching the monotonous centuries of the Pacific. Renouard leaned his shoulders against it. Felicia Moorsom faced him suddenly, her splendid black eyes full on his face as though she had ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... porteux. Both alike were terrible to poor Mary; however, she made up her mind to the latter, and all the long way was to her a dream of terror and discomfort, and of trying to admire—what she knew she ought to admire—the wonderful pinnacle-like aiguilles of the Schern cleaving the air. For some time the way lay over the great plateau of the Scisser Alp—a sea of rich grass, full of cattle, where her husband and niece kept on trying to bring their mules alongside of her to ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... making. And now it burst upon him, an apocalypse of giant glories, an empire of absolute being, independent and careless of human presence, affirming itself eternally to its own immeasurable solitudes. "I have reached the top and pinnacle of life," cried the poet; "this is the world wherein all things are made!" And now, indeed, save for the fairy bird, he trod his path alone. Now and then great clouds of mist swept down from the heights, ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... has raised us to a pinnacle of thought beyond even this. It has commanded us to think of countless ages in which that formless void existed before it put on the aspect of its present creation. Millions of years before God called ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... of mind, contentment, pleasant speech, renunciation of desire and anger, virtuous conduct and actions regulated according to the ordinances of holy writ, constitute the perfect way of the virtuous. And those who are constant in virtue follow these rules of virtuous conduct, and having reached the pinnacle of knowledge, and discriminating between the various phases of human conduct, which are either very virtuous or the reverse, they escape from the great danger. Thus, O great Brahmana, having introduced the subject of virtuous ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... be the Earl of Rochester, make good his position finally, stand on the pinnacle where Fate had placed him, and carry this thing through to ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... was dashed lower than earth with a charge of plagiarism in the SCOTSMAN. Report would have it (I daresay, very wrongly) that he was betrayed by one in whom he particularly trusted, and that the author of the charge had learned its truth from his own lips. Thus, at least, he was up one day on a pinnacle, admired and envied by all; and the next, though still but a boy, he was publicly disgraced. The blow would have broken a less finely tempered spirit; and even him I suppose it rendered reckless; for he took flight to London, and ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... found out that the Hirondelle had left Yarmouth, on the Norfolk coast, where she had been lying for two or three days, the day before she was lost, and was then intending to cruise round the coast of Great Britain. The baron was immediately raised from the depths of despair to the highest pinnacle of hope on hearing this, for he felt sure Leon had gone ashore at Yarmouth to place the baby with some Englishwoman, and had remained there some days on purpose. Confiding his new hope to Pere Yvon, he at once decided to start ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 • Various
... and I climbed by a ladder to the top of one of the towers. While there, we looked down into the street beneath, and saw a photographist preparing to take a view of the castle, and calling out to some little girl in some niche or on some pinnacle of the walls to stand still that he might catch her figure and face. I think it added to the impressiveness of the old castle, to see the streets and the kitchen-gardens and the homely dwellings that had grown up within the precincts of this feudal ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Lifted from the depths of disgrace and fear of death to the pinnacle of my day-dreams realized (for it had ever been my fondest dream to be a soldier of fortune, and to serve under the great Bonaparte—one that I had hardly dared to confess to myself) was almost more than brain could stand. More than that, to hear such ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... an all-day winged romp. He made straight for the crest at first and lit upon the tip-top of its highest pinnacle, rising there out of the rocky chaos like an exclamation of gleaming granite. Its top, hollowed by the weathers, made a seat which just fitted him. To the north and to the south, the saw-toothed crest extended for miles to purple disappearances; ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... "Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, is Mount Zion, ... the city of the great King."(2) In full view were the magnificent buildings of the temple. The rays of the setting sun lighted up the snowy whiteness of its marble walls, and gleamed from golden gate and tower and pinnacle. "The perfection of beauty" it stood, the pride of the Jewish nation. What child of Israel could gaze upon the scene without a thrill of joy and admiration! But far other thoughts occupied the mind of Jesus. "When He was come near, ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... first experience with the drug. He says, "I existed by turns in different places and various states of being. Now I swept my gondola through the moonlit lagoons of Venice. Now Alp on Alp towered above my view, and the glory of the coming sun flashed purple light upon the topmost icy pinnacle. Now in the primeval silence of some unexplored tropical forest I spread my feathery leaves, a giant fern, and swayed and nodded in the spice-gales over a river whose waves at once sent up clouds of music and perfume. My ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... the residential districts, the low buildings and the wide streets with the little green lawns showing the care of the individual owner. Then came the apartment houses and the small stores; these rose in gentle slopes, higher and higher, merging at last with the mighty central pinnacle of beauty. The city was designed as a whole, not in a multitude of individually beautiful, but inharmonious units, like some wild mixture of melodies, each in itself beautiful, but ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... in Chippewa all this explanation would have been unnecessary. In that terrifying way small towns have, it was known that of all codfish aristocracy the Widow Weld was the piscatorial pinnacle. ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... and the shelter of our ponchos, to watch the mists drifting, to listen to the swell and lull of the wind and the patter of the cold rain. There were glimpses now and then of the inner Cuchullins, a fragment of ragged sky line, the sudden jab of a black pinnacle through the mist, the open mouth of ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... a long time past been displaying, in a series of complicated and difficult operations in the Mediterranean, those splendid qualities which had already won for him unusual honours and fame, and which were about to raise him to that proud pinnacle which he ultimately attained as England's greatest naval hero. His address and success in matters of diplomacy had filled his superiors and the Government with sentiments of respect; his moral courage in risking reputation and position, with unflinching resolution, by disobeying orders when ...
— The Battle and the Breeze • R.M. Ballantyne
... But the place is picturesque and interesting; one would not like to have missed it. The church of Santiago has a tall, graceful, and slender spire, sure to attract an observant eye, recalling the pinnacle of St. Peter and St. Paul in the capital of Russia. We have said Silao is of little commercial importance, but there are six or eight flour-mills, which seem to be the nucleus about which the principal business interests centre. The place was founded more than three ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... absolutely ignorant of nautical phraseology, promptly ported his helm and at the same moment stopped the engines, by which manoeuvre the Flying Fish glided close past the object so slowly that it was easily distinguishable as a huge pinnacle of rock. ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... the heights, whither the cavalry could not follow; but Captain Outram, vexed at the disappointment, just then remarked an English officer marching in command of some matchlocks—him he persuaded to join the chase. Outram leading, the whole party pushed on, under a severe fire, to the very topmost pinnacle of the rocks, where was flying the consecrated banner, green and white, of the fanatic Mussulmans. This was captured, the standard-bearer was shot, thirty or forty killed, and about ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... I had committed myself. After all what right had I to raise myself on a moral pinnacle now? And what did it matter, anyway? I was flying from the danger of my own infidelities, not to save ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... while the horrors of Louis Napoleon's coup d'etat were, no doubt, only partly known to Mrs. Browning at the time, and were palliated to her by the view she took of Napoleon's character. She had not, it is true, raised him as yet to the pinnacle on which his intervention on behalf of Italy subsequently caused her to place him, but (perhaps owing to what Mr. Kenyon called her 'immoral sympathy with power') she was always disposed to put a favourable ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... by any means. The smooth, picturebook slope had become jagged and bruised while the regular, evenlyrounded apex had turned into a sort of phrygian cap with its pinnacle woundedly askew. The outlines which had been sharp were now blurred, its evenness had become scraggly. The placid surface was vexed; the attempt on its being had hurt. But not mortally, for even with outline altered, it remained; defiant, ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... just as she has reached the very highest pinnacle of her wrongs, meets with anything but a ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... is very wide. A branch of it runs away in a more northerly direction, forming an island which has been covered with fortifications, and is called the citadel. In the centre stands a church with a lofty golden pinnacle. Beneath it lie buried the Russian Czars. Here is also a cottage, built by Peter the Great, where he used to reside while watching the progress of his navy and the uprearing of the now mighty city, called after his ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... and masculine in his striped undershirt and blue overalls, as he worked with his team in the hot sun. Of course, the Princess would not have seen him in those days. Her nose was seeking a higher social level, and the clerks in the White Front dry-goods store formed the pinnacle of her social ideal. But Eli Martin was naturally what in our parlance we call a ladies' man, and he was not long in learning that the wide-brimmed black hat, the ready-made faded green suit and the red string necktie which had swept the girls down before him in the Bethel neighbourhood would accomplish ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... unlike that of any other of our Hill-Thrushes with which I am acquainted. The bird itself is as often found in open rocky spots on the skirts of the forest as among the woods, loving to jump upon some stone or rocky pinnacle, from which it sends forth a sort of choking, chattering song, if such it can be called, or, with an up-jerk of the tail, hops away with a loud musical whistle, very much after the manner ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... its proudest minions? It is E. whose life is once more in your hands—it is E. whom you are to save from being plucked of her borrowed plumes, discovered, branded, and trodden down, first by him, perhaps, who has raised her to this dizzy pinnacle!—The enclosure will reach you twice a-year—do not refuse it—it is out of my own allowance, and may be twice as much when you want it. With you it may do good—with me ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... hands. Say to the Abbot, I will burn the Monastery over his head, if he strikes a stroke till I come—Tell the dog, Julian Avenel, that he hath already one deep score to settle with me—I will set his head on the top of the highest pinnacle of Saint Mary's, if he presume to open another. Make haste, and spare not the spur ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... to say it, for I see Bourne on the pinnacle of prosperity, but still looking sadly for his castles in Spain; I see Titbottom, an old deputy bookkeeper, whom nobody knows, but with his chivalric heart loyal to children, his generous and humane spirit, full of sweet hope and faith and devotion; I see the superb Auriel, so lovely that the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... the man who came everywhere and was found nowhere. Then the king, when an interpreter was brought, asked what work Frode was about. Erik replied, "Frode never waits at home for a hostile army, nor tarries in his house for his foe. For he who covets the pinnacle of another's power must watch and wake all night. No man has ever won a victory by snoring, and no wolf has ever found a carcase ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... the barren bluff the slender woman's figure stands on the pinnacle of night, outlined against a starry sky. The cool night breeze wafts to her burning ear snatches of song and drum. With desperate hate ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... to me From a rock pinnacle to trace Continually The Ocean's face: That I might watch the heaving waves Of noble force To God the Father chant their staves Of the earth's course. That I might mark its level strand, To me no lone distress, ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... volcanic island," decided the professor. "We are in the midst of subterranean disturbances and this is probably one of the effects of some under-sea eruption. The pinnacle of rock rose from the ocean, forced up by some power underneath, just as our ship came over it. That accounts for the sudden rising into the air of the Porpoise. No ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood
... leaning on the curb of the well, the astronomic dial with its zodiac, the grotesque stone mask pouring out the water drawn up from the river below, the stout figure of Hercules supporting the whole thing, and the hollow statue, perched on the topmost pinnacle, that served as a weathercock, like the Fortune on the Dogana at Venice and the Giralda at Seville. As the hands on the clock-face at last pointed to ten and twelve respectively, the little chime of bells struck up a merry tune, while the bronze man with the hammer ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... but by mule or chaise a porteux. Both alike were terrible to poor Mary; however, she made up her mind to the latter, and all the long way was to her a dream of terror and discomfort, and of trying to admire—what she knew she ought to admire—the wonderful pinnacle-like aiguilles of the Schern cleaving the air. For some time the way lay over the great plateau of the Scisser Alp—a sea of rich grass, full of cattle, where her husband and niece kept on trying to bring their mules alongside ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the empire were held by King Wan, he served with that portion the House of Yin. We speak of the virtue of the House of Chow; we may say, indeed, that it reached the pinnacle of excellence." ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... events in the tannery house—for they were the events of his life now. The triumphs over his opponents and enemies fell away, and the pride of power. Such had not been his achievements. She had loved him, and no man had reached a higher pinnacle than that. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... pack and kneel beside his burden on the hard floor of that cathedral. And tears of deep emotion came into my eyes, as I said to myself: "There is a soul worth more than all the material surroundings. That man will live after the last pinnacle has fallen, and not one stone of all that cathedral glory shall remain uncrumbled. He is now a Lazarus in rags and poverty and weariness, but immortal, and a son of the Lord God Almighty; and the prayer he now offers, though amid many superstitions, ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... afar from its grey ramparts on the contending swarm with something of the philosophic composure suitable to a survivor of Pelasgic and Etruscan revolutions. These grey ramparts are in great part still visible, and form the chief attraction of Cortona. It is perched on the very pinnacle of a mountain, and I wound and doubled interminably over the face of the great hill, while the jumbled roofs and towers of the arrogant little city still seemed nearer to the sky than to the railway-station. "Rather rough," Murray pronounces the local inn; and rough indeed ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... for about two hours, and the sun was just setting when we entered a region infinitely more dreary than any yet seen. It was a species of table land, near the summit of an almost inaccessible hill, densely wooded from base to pinnacle, and interspersed with huge crags that appeared to lie loosely upon the soil, and in many cases were prevented from precipitating themselves into the valleys below, merely by the support of the trees against which they reclined. Deep ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... is quite possible that in the meantime his friend may somewhere lose one and enable him to get on level terms again. When two players with plus handicaps are engaged in a match, a bunkered ball will generally mean a lost hole, but others who have not climbed to this pinnacle of excellence are far too pessimistic if they assume that this rule operates in their case also. The second matter in which the philosophic golfer rises superior to his less favoured brother when there is a bunker stroke to be played, is that he fully realises ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... in dreamy contemplation of an air-vision. "The natural beauty of Sampaolo is to my thinking unparalleled. At a distance, as your ship approaches it, Sampaolo lies on the horizon like a beautiful soft cloud, all vague rose-colours and purples, a beautiful soft pinnacle of cloud. Then gradually, as you come nearer, the cloud changes, crystallises; and Sampaolo is like a great wonderful carving, a great wonderful carved jewel, a cameo cut on the sea, with a sort of aureole about it, an opalescence of haze and sunshine. Nearer ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... mount to the very pinnacle; or bouton of the spire; but the ascent was impracticable—owing to the stair-case being under repair. On the summit of this spire, there once stood a statue of the Virgin, above a cross. That statue was taken down at the end of the fifteenth century, and is now placed over ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... inches from the coping. I jumped down and gave another ten minutes to the back-breaking work of carrying more boulders from the water to the wall. Then I widened my cairn below, so that I could stand firmly before springing upon the pinnacle with which I completed it. I knew well that this would collapse under me if I allowed my weight to rest more than an instant upon it. And so at last it did; but my fingers had clutched the coping in time; had grabbed it even as the insecure pyramid ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... quite obdurate. No, he would not go to the Brookes' again, since Ethel had once objected to his going. And on this pinnacle of austere virtue he remained, thereby reducing Ethel to a state of self-abasement, which spoke well for his chances of mastery in the married life which ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... party-quarrel, which took place in one of the Christmas Margamores, (* Big Markets) and fully sustained the anticipations which were formed of him by his relations. For a year or two afterwards no quarrel was fought without him; and his prowess rose until he had gained the very pinnacle of that ambition which he had determined to reach. About this time I was separated from him, having found it necessity, in order to accomplish my objects in life, to reside with a relation in another part ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... hope of marrying and having a home of her own was past, she sank down into a gentle nonentity and dreamed of Cousin Chilian. Not that she had expected to captivate him, but life with some one like that would set one on the highest pinnacle. ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... his cruelty—blind cruelty it may have been—but it dragged her also to the climax of her mood. Like the falling of the Tower of Babel, with its crumbling of dust and its confusion of tongues, she tumbled headlong from her pinnacle ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... bear's favour, for the recent fall of a pinnacle had covered the ledge with shattered blocks of all shapes and sizes, in the shelter of which it could creep towards its prey. Our Eskimos watched the proceeding open-mouthed, with profound interest. To within twenty ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... emotion.' 'No man has ever had his ear closer to the ground and listened more attentively to the tramp of the oncoming multitudes.' He 'held Great Britain's end up' at the International conference. A 'magnificent tribute was paid to him by Earl Balfour' but it 'did not put him alone on a pinnacle'. And then we read of the whirligig of time, of 'clouds of misunderstanding which point to the coming of a storm'; of how 'foreign nations suddenly became aware that a new star had swum into the world's ken'; of how 'the situation of this country is perilous with so ...
— Tract XI: Three Articles on Metaphor • Society for Pure English
... and speaking of business, he avoided thinking of the unexpected resistance. How was this! She—the woman for whom the highest favor, the pinnacle of happiness had been the possibility of remaining at the head of his house, in the brilliancy of wealth and general respect, dared—had the shamelessness to oppose his will! He felt such contempt that, in thought, he threw that ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... toiled halfway up the slope, when my hunter sank into the grass, pointed upward, and whispered, "pan-yang" (wild sheep). There, on the very summit of the highest pinnacle, stood a magnificent ram silhouetted against the sky. It was a stage introduction to the greatest game animal in ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... once throughout her performance. As she withdrew, numbers of bouquets fell on to the stage. But the proud one of Seville did not deign to return to pick them up, and one of the gentlemen in livery was deputed for that purpose. When, however, her measure was encored, she stepped down from her pinnacle and actually condescended to accept an additional bouquet that had been tossed by a fair one ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... experience, to find some glimmer of the thoughts, emotions, and meanings behind. And in the long run such a habit of inquiry must bear fruit in understanding and sympathy. Joseph Conrad (who seems, by the way, to be more read by newspaper men than any other writer) put very nobly the pinnacle of all scribblers' dreams when he said that human affairs deserve the tribute of "a sigh which is not a sob, a smile which ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... they were painting the outside of a house called 'Gothic Lodge'. At one corner it had a tower surmounted by a spire or steeple, and this steeple terminated with an ornamental wrought-iron pinnacle which had to be painted. The ladder they had was not quite long enough, and besides that, as it had to stand in a sort of a courtyard at the base of the tower, it was impossible to slant it sufficiently: instead of lying along the roof of the steeple, it was sticking ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... by the dignity of his calling, then the solemnity of the function, the mystic and tedious pomp, the magnificent monotone of prayer and song in the ancient cathedral, hallowed by so many exalted memories, must have stirred his inmost soul. The pinnacle of all human ambition, the crown of Charles the Great, lay glittering before his longing eyes on the altar of the Prince of the Apostles. The Pope, however, first placed a ring on the finger of the Anointed, as symbol of the faith, the permanence and strength of his Catholic ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... accepted gladly, and during the trip there were many long discussions between the three as to the future of the Circus Boys. They had worked hard during the season and had won new laurels on the tanbark. But they had not yet reached the pinnacle of their success in the canvas-covered arena, though each had saved, as the result of his season's work, nearly ...
— The Circus Boys Across The Continent • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... the morning. I often wonder, Arthur, how and what this change will be. Shall we be even as we are, but still, through unnumbered ages, growing slowly on to the Divine, or, casting off the very semblance of mortality, shall we rise at one wide sweep to the pinnacle of fulfilled time, there to learn the purposes and mark the measure of ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... with a visible effort, after the coffee was come and our pipes lighted, "you can never understand the gratitude and loyalty I bear you. You don't know what a boon it is to be taken up by a man that stands on the pinnacle of civilization; you can't think how it's refined and purified me, how it's appealed to my spiritual nature; and I want to tell you that I would die at your ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... portals, the roofs of the two lateral ones forming terraces, while from the central one, in the very middle of the facade, the steeple boldly sprang. Here again columns resting on piers supported archivaults with simple mouldings. Against the gable, at a point where there was a pinnacle, and between the two lofty windows lighting the nave, was a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes under a canopy. Up above, were other bays with freshly painted luffer-boards. Buttresses started from the ground at the four corners of the steeple-base, becoming less ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... in those days the stopping-place of the majority of the famous men and women visiting New York, represented to the young boy who came to see these celebrities the very pinnacle of opulence. Often while waiting to be received by some dignitary, he wondered how one could acquire enough means to live at a place of such luxury. The main dining-room, to the boy's mind, was an object of special interest. He would purposely sneak up-stairs and sit ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... flowers, more attractive to the eye of the structural botanist than to the aesthete. It blooms in moist places, as most orchids do, since water with which to manufacture nectar enough to fill their deep spurs is a prime necessity. Orchids have arrived at that pinnacle of achievement that it is impossible for them to fertilize themselves. More than that, some are absolutely sterile to their own pollen when it is applied to their stigmas artificially! With insect aid, however, a single plant has produced more than 1,000,700 seeds. No wonder, then, that as ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... brought through, where might be seene massie siluer and gilt plate, some like and as bigge as kilderkins, and washbowles, and entring the dining place, being the greater roome, the prince was set bare headed, his crowne and and rich cappe standing vpon a pinnacle by. Not farre distant sate his Metropolitane, with diuers other of his kindred, and chiefe Tartarian Captaines: none sate ouer against him, or any, at other tables, their backes towards him: which tables all furnished with ghests set, there was for the Englishmen, named by the Russes, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation v. 4 • Richard Hakluyt
... pour out like the steady flowing of a broad stream. The kneeling woman's figure remained plainly discernible, but seemed to be gradually melting into the light which surrounded it. And then— something—I know not what—shook me down from the pinnacle of vision,—hardly aware of my own action, I withdrew my hand from my companion's, and saw—just the solemn grandeur of Loch Coruisk, with a deep amber glow streaming over the summit of the mountains, flung upward by the setting sun! Nothing more!—I heaved an involuntary sigh—and ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... doctrines; she has the security of the piety, the sanctity, of her own professors,—their learning is a bulwark to defend her; she has the security of the two universities, not shook in any single battlement, in any single pinnacle. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the most remarkable trees they met with was the bunya-bunya, a species of pine. It towered like a pinnacle above all the other trees, reaching a height of ...
— The Young Berringtons - The Boy Explorers • W.H.G. Kingston
... Dawson with some interest and more pity. The poor fellow did not realise that Madame had for years moulded him to her hands like potter's clay. She had mastered him by ingenuously pretending that he stood upon a serene pinnacle far removed from her influence. He had preened his feathers ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... facade of Orvieto presents a wilderness of beauties. Its pure white marble has been mellowed by time to a rich golden hue, in which are set mosaics shining like gems or pictures of enamel. A statue stands on every pinnacle; each pillar has a different design; round some of them are woven wreaths of vine and ivy; acanthus leaves curl over the capitals, making nests for singing birds or Cupids; the doorways are a labyrinth of intricate designs, in which the utmost elegance of form ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... intolerable height a pile of boughs that would have made a dozen nests; she had interwoven for the cup to hold her eggs a number of strips of purloined canvas. There lay the three speckled eggs, the hope of the race, while the chiding mother stood on a pinnacle hard by, waiting for the intruder ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... brighter than they appear through the dense atmosphere breathed by inhabitants of the lower parts of the earth. They seemed actually suspended from the dark vault of heaven, and their gentle light shed a fairylike gleam over the snow-fields around the foot of the Matterhorn, which raised its stupendous pinnacle on high, penetrating to the heart of the Great Bear, and crowning itself with a diadem of his magnificent stars. Not a sound disturbed the deep tranquillity of the night, except the distant roar of streams which rush from the high plateau ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... adventure through which he at once reached the pinnacle of success, and became in his profession the most famous figure of his day, was the capture of the Rajah of Kishmoor's great ship, The Sun of the East. In this vessel was the Rajah's favorite Queen, who, together with her attendants, was set upon a pilgrimage to Mecca. The court of ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... basket on Saturday, May 25th. We left the hotel early for a six-mile drive, passing first through the crowded streets, again noting the dusty way of the Imperial City, which wound around near the walls of the Forbidden City, every pinnacle and roof gleaming in the morning light. Leaving the outskirts of the town, the country view was the pleasantest we had seen. Our road lay alongside of the canal, where there were ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... instruction is peculiar to the United States and is comprehensible in an extensive and new country where multiplied and diverse pursuits present themselves on all sides;[6395] where every career may lead to the highest pinnacle; where a rail-splitter may become president of the republic; where the adult often changes his career and, to afford him the means for improvising a competency at each change, he must possess the elements ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the river hills covered with vines and woods rose abruptly, and on the right, tottering on a pinnacle that frowns over the flood, ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... abundance of my sins and my tyranny, for, indeed, I have slain much people unrighteously and this is the requital of my deeds and that which I have wrought whilome of oppression." As he was thus pondering in himself, there came a bird and lighted down on the pinnacle of the prison, whereupon, of his passing eagerness in the chase, he took a stone and threw it at the bird. Now the king's son was playing in the exercise-ground with the ball and the bat,[FN208] and the stone lit on his ear and cut it off, whereupon the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... could tell of one who, amid the dry agnosticism of the later half of last century, had felt her faith, not indeed extinguished, but obscured and darkened. From the perusal of certain writers she had shrunk, perhaps with cowardice. They were put on such a pinnacle that she feared she would find no arguments fit to oppose to theirs. Weakly, she locked the skeleton cupboard. Then she was attacked by a malady which, while leaving her mind free and strong, she knew might be very speedily ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... Allen was borne away from the pinnacle of his imaginary triumph as if dead, Zell following, wringing her hands, and with streaming eyes; but Edith reminded one of some wild, timid creature of the woods, which, though in an extremity of danger and fear, is alert and watchful, as if looking for some avenue of escape. Her searching ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... Rock came into the bar-room at the Cliff House, and there, amidst the crushing thunders and lightnings spilling all over the horizon, she related that she had seen a young seal in a comfortable overcoat, sitting pensively upon the pinnacle of Seal Rock, and had distinctly heard the familiar words of a Methodist hymn. Upon inquiry the tale was discovered to be founded upon fact. The identity of this seal could no longer be denied without downright blasphemy, and in all the old chronicles of that period ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... of the piazza, honest Balt would sit smoking his evening pipe at the other, watching the achievements of a little wooden warrior, who, armed with a sword in each hand, was most valiantly fighting the wind on the pinnacle of the barn. In the mean time, Ichabod would carry on his suit with the daughter by the side of the spring under the great elm, or sauntering along in the twilight, that hour so favorable to the ...
— The Legend of Sleepy Hollow • Washington Irving
... be— if the universe were of Divine making. And now it burst upon him, an apocalypse of giant glories, an empire of absolute being, independent and careless of human presence, affirming itself eternally to its own immeasurable solitudes. "I have reached the top and pinnacle of life," cried the poet; "this is the world wherein all things are made!" And now, indeed, save for the fairy bird, he trod his path alone. Now and then great clouds of mist swept down from the ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... slowly towards a tall ragged pinnacle of granite, which rose up some ten or fifteen feet by itself, when all at once a great black bird hopped into sight, looking gigantic against the sky, gazed down in a one-sided way, and began to utter a series of hoarse croaks, which sounded like ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... drawn as it were to a single apex, without any neighbouring mountain for the senses and imagination to rest upon, and recover from their astonishment in their way down to the world—and this point, or pinnacle raised on the brink of a bottomless gulf, often discharging rivers of fire, and throwing out burning rocks, with a noise that shakes the whole island. Add to this, the unbounded extent of the prospect, comprehending the greatest diversity, and the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 265, July 21, 1827 • Various
... beings represented the high culture of the human race within the boundaries of Caspak? Had natural selection produced during the countless ages of Caspakian life a winged monstrosity that represented the earthly pinnacle ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... This was the signal for the two bears to discover him and rush on with a terrific roar. Blunderbore instantly fetched them each a sounding whack on their skulls, leaped over both their backs, and bounded up the side of the iceberg, where he took refuge, and turned at bay on a little ice pinnacle constructed expressly for ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... twice, in the days that followed, Justine found herself thinking that she had never known happiness before. The old state of secure well-being seemed now like a dreamless sleep; but this new bliss, on its sharp pinnacle ringed with fire—this thrilling conscious joy, daily and hourly snatched from fear—this was ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... voice for the sake of the profane and idle who may chance to stumble across his entertainment. His living auditors, unsolicited for the tribute of worship or an alms, find themselves conceived of in the likeness of what he would have them to be, raised to a companion pinnacle of friendship, and constituted peers and judges, if they will, of his achievement. Sometimes they ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... was shouting for some explanation, a great black wall rose out of the deep on the port bow. It was a pinnacle rock, high as the ship's masts, but only a few feet wide at sea level, and the Kansas sped past this ugly monitor as though it were a buoy in a ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... not be wasted on an incomplete object, she made a second attempt to lay the palace low. Again she was frustrated. The building had soared, by this time, to an ambitious height, and its splendour had reached the limits of the materials at command. The final pinnacle which was required to cope the structure had been mislaid. Hadria was searching for it, when Martha, seizing her chance, struck the palace a blow in its very heart, and in an instant, the whole was ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... bishop, is placed on the pinnacle of one buttress that terminates the splendid facade, or west front of Lincoln Cathedral, and the Swineherd of Stow, with his horn in his hand, on the other. The tradition is in the mouth of every Lincolner, that this effigied honour was conferred on the generous rudester ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... man's life to be lived, and when death was to be met, he met it like a man. It was among such men and surroundings that I spent so many years of my life and there I met men some of whom are famous now, while others never lived long enough to reach the pinnacle of fame, but their memory is held no less sacred by the men who ...
— The Life and Adventures of Nat Love - Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" • Nat Love
... sad. This literature of woe, as Whitman calls it, this Maladie de Rene, as we like to call it in Europe, is in many ways a most humiliating and sickly phenomenon. Young gentlemen with three or four hundred a year of private means look down from a pinnacle of doleful experience on all the grown and hearty men who have dared to say a good word for life since the beginning of the world. There is no prophet but the melancholy Jacques, and the blue devils dance on ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... great freedom, intelligence, and boldness, tremendous and inflexible energy, and burning ambition, but bitter, fantastic, perplexing, and violent, a woman who had waded through a deal of mud before she had reached her present pinnacle of fame, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... black, bulging ridge like a bastion upon the right side of the terrible khor up which the camels were winding. At one point it rose into a small pinnacle. On this pinnacle stood a solitary, motionless figure clad entirely in black, save for a brilliant dash of scarlet upon his head. There could not surely be two such short, sturdy figures or such large, colourless faces ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... were the paths by which an adventurer could climb in the fifth century to that which was still looked upon as the pinnacle of earthly greatness. For however unworthy a man might feel himself to be, and however unworthy all his subjects might know him to be of the highest place in the Empire, when once he had obtained it his power was absolute and the honours rendered to him were little less than divine. ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... its vicissitudes. Of course you know that your Civil War produced a cotton famine in Europe; but it raised this city to the pinnacle of prosperity. A reign of speculation came here, and it was believed that Bombay would be the leading cotton mart of the world. Companies were organized to develop the resources of the country in the textile plant; and the fever raged as high as it did when the South Sea Bubble was ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... ask myself, in my foolish theoretic way, what earthly right we have to lay claim to civilisation. How much better it would be always to speak of ourselves as barbarians. We should then, perhaps, make some endeavour to improve. The barbarian who imagines himself on the pinnacle of refinement is in a parlous state—far more likely ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... mount on a very high pinnacle of virtue and cast off Mr. Durnovo and all his works; but it is much more practical to make what use we can of him. That is a worldly-wise, nineteenth-century way of looking at it; we cannot ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... in a corner of the Orangerie garden, locking her hands together, in a miserable pity for Arthur. She knew well what a shining pinnacle of success and fame Welby occupied in the eyes of the world; she knew how envious were the lesser men—such a man as John Fenwick, for instance—of a reputation and a success they thought overdone and undeserved. But Arthur himself! She seemed to be looking into his face, graven on the dusk, ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... fourth was preparing. I was in high favour. Men of all ranks visited the earl; and dukes, lords, and barons became as familiar to me as gowns and caps had formerly been in the streets of Oxford. I stood on the very pinnacle of fortune; and, proud of my skill, like a rope-dancer that casts away his balancing pole, I took pleasure in standing on tiptoe. Noticed by the leading men, caressed and courted by their dependants, politics ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... believe that his dead parents had any claim upon this foreigner who received him coldly and yet would hear nothing of his departure. Pride had little share in this, for the issues were momentous. It was sufficient to know that a hand had suddenly drawn him from the abyss, had put him on this pinnacle—beyond all, had placed him in Anna Gessner's home as the first-born, there to embark upon a career whose goal lay beyond the ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... be doubted which of the two Napoleon hated most—Wellington, who finally overthrew him at Waterloo, or Sidney Smith, who, to use Napoleon's own words, made him "miss his destiny," and exchange the empire of the East for a lonely pinnacle of rock ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... I reached a cleared place an hour or so later, and turned to look back. The sharp angle of the Devil's Ledge was the highest point visible, the very pinnacle of the mountain, and there, clear against the burnished steel of the morning sky, on the very edge, clear in the rare atmosphere was a small figure. It stood for a second, a black point distinctly outlined, ...
— Elsket - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page
... "The Frost King," and published it in one of the Perkins Institution reports. This was the pinnacle of my happiness, from which I was in a little while dashed to earth. I had been in Boston only a short time when it was discovered that a story similar to "The Frost King," called "The Frost Fairies" by Miss Margaret T. Canby, had appeared before I was born ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... you. You, as a banker, enriched yourself in speculations, each more dishonorable than the other, and you encountered a man who crushed you like a worm under his heel. You fell, but you are of the kind that bounds, and to-day you are once more upon a pinnacle. You vegetated for years, until the moment came when you could once more seize fortune in your grasp. You are no longer Danglars the bankrupt and thief—you are Laisangy, respected and trusted. Know then that I have it in my power to throw you back into the mire from which you ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... prolific and polacious Poet-Laureate! For no poeta nascitur who is fitter To greet Royal progeny with melodious twitter. Seated on the resplendent cloud of official Elysium, Far away, far away from fuliginous busy hum You are now perched with phenomenal velocity On vertiginous pinnacle of poetic pomposity! Yet deign to cock thy indulgent eye at the petition Of one consumed by corresponding ambition, And lend the helping hand to lift, pulley-hauley, To Parnassian Peak this poor perspiring Bengali! Whose ars poetica (as per sample lyric) Is fully ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... consideration. As she never mentioned her husband, it was supposed that she was a widow, and, in consequence of her well-regulated establishment, she received much attention from several Irish and foreign bachelors. In short, my mother obtained almost the pinnacle of her ambition when she was once fairly settled at Cheltenham. I ought to observe that when she arrived there she had taken the precaution of prefixing a name to her own to which by baptismal rite she certainly was not entitled, and called ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... inhabitants, and there was little security for life and property. The aristocracy of the emperors' courts was mainly that of office, and only to a limited degree that of blood and ancient possession. We find persons of mean birth rising to greatness, and persons on the very pinnacle of honour cast down to the ground. There was a succession of emperors called Slave Emperors, as they had originally been slaves in the court, whence they rose to supreme power. When we consider the teaching ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... greatest value, clear opportunities that none but a hopeless blunderer could have disregarded. What men call Chance operated in my favour as though with superb calculation, lifting me to this miniature pinnacle I could never have reached by my own ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... counsellor supreme, not though ye toiled sore. But once I likewise were minded to draw with all my heart, then should I draw ye up with very earth and sea withal. Thereafter would I bind the rope about a pinnacle of Olympus, and so should all those things be hung in air. By so much am I beyond gods and beyond men." [Footnote: Iliad viii. 5.—Translated by Lang, Leaf ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... led me to the highest pinnacle of the rock, and placing me on the top of it, 'Cast thy eyes eastward,' said he, 'and tell me what thou seest.' 'I see,' said I, 'a huge valley, and a prodigious tide of water rolling through it.' 'The valley that thou seest,' ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... great crater. On the beach of this promontory, a quadrant-shaped segment of a small subordinate point of eruption stands exposed. It consists of nine separate little streams of lava piled upon each other; and of an irregular pinnacle, about fifteen feet high, of reddish-brown, vesicular basalt, abounding with large crystals of glassy albite, and with fused augite. This pinnacle, and some adjoining paps of rock on the beach, represent the axis of the crater. ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... rope he skilfully cast it up and over the pinnacle of rock nearest to him. It was now a comparatively easy matter to climb by going hand over hand up the rope and bracing his feet against the side of the ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Ozarks • Frank Gee Patchin
... recorded by Hegesippus and by Josephus. Hegesippus represents him living as a strict Nazirite, always frequenting the Temple, with knees as hard as a camel's because of his perpetual prayers.[1] He tells us that St. James was thrown from a pinnacle of the Temple, stoned, and clubbed to death at the order of the scribes and Pharisees for asserting that Jesus was on the right hand of God. From Josephus we learn that his martyrdom took place when a vacancy in the procuratorship ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... the triumph of Alexander or the fall of Darius. But the peculiar infelicity of the Byzantine princes exposed them to domestic perils, without affording any lively promise of foreign conquest. From the pinnacle of greatness, Andronicus was precipitated by a death more cruel and shameful than that of the malefactor; but the most glorious of his predecessors had much more to dread from their subjects than to hope from their enemies. The army was licentious without spirit, the nation turbulent without freedom: ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... the great sovereign voter as the blessed protective tariff, which, to use your own fantastic expression, you should "cosset on your heaving brisket" for its splendid success as a survivor of its primogenitors. Look at the pinnacle of political success to which the McKinley bill has brought Bill McKinley (excuse the paltry little pun) and sound money (saving your presence) brought Grover Cleveland, and then contemplate the ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Hardie junior. He went about telling how he, an old man, was all but bubbled till this young Daniel came down and foretold all. Thus paternal garrulity combined for once with a man's own ability to place Richard Hardie on the pinnacle of provincial grandeur. ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... those on the west front of Tewkesbury. They have a shaft at each angle, are pierced on each face with two round-headed openings under a round arch, with a string below running round the turret, and are surmounted by pyramidal stone caps ending in pommels and having a rude pinnacle at each corner. The end of the aisle is set back, and displays a window like the three above the door, but without the dividing mullion; and above this a round-headed niche, doubtless once a window that lighted the space over the aisle-vault; ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ripon - A Short History of the Church and a Description of Its Fabric • Cecil Walter Charles Hallett
... almost inaccessible volcanic ground not far from the stars. Robert on horseback, Wilson and the nurse with baby, on other donkeys; guides, of course. We set off at eight in the morning and returned at six P. M., after dining on the mountain pinnacle.... The scenery, sublime and wonderful,... innumerable mountains bound faintly with the gray sea, and ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... came close up to the butte, however, I saw a flutter of skirts on the pinnacle, and it made a difference in my gait; I went up all out of breath, scrambling as if my life hung on a few seconds, and calling myself a different kind of fool for every step I took. I kept assuring myself, over and over, that it was only Edith, and that there was no need to get excited ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... those thirty years he saw much and travelled far; met many men of varied qualities and attainments and character; learned much by personal experience and observation and much from other people's experience; tested almost the pinnacle of earthly splendour in his Indian tour and learned in private something of the suffering which comes to all individuals whether great or little. He created the position of Heir Apparent as now understood; gave it a significance and value never ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... heights was broken just often enough by oases of pine wood; and the plains on which we looked down were blistered with conical hills, crowned by ancient castles which would have rejoiced the hearts of mediaeval painters, as they did mine. Severac-le-Chateau, perched on its naked pinnacle of rock, was best of all, as we saw it from our bird's-eye view, and then again, almost startlingly impressive when we had somehow whirled down below it, to pass under its old huddled town, before we flew up once more to higher ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... life by fairy fans. His last thoughts had been of his vast wealth, his uninterrupted prosperity, and his great power. He was king of kings, and the whole world trembled at his feet. He had attained to the highest pinnacle of glory. Earth had yielded to him its most costly treasures, and had nothing more that she could give. Men had profusely showered upon him their highest flatteries, and ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... of Sutton Benger is very elegant, there is not such another in the county. It much resembles St Walborough's [St. Werburg's] at Bristoll. [The tower of Sutton Benger church, here alluded to, has a large open-work'd pinnacle, rising from the centre of the roof; a beautiful and very singular ornament. See the wood-cut in the title-page of the ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... was obsessed with his thoughts and feelings against the man James. With every passing day his resentment against him piled up, till now he could think of nothing much else but a possible way to dislodge him from the pinnacle of his local notoriety, and so rid the district of ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... stability of his days—a lifetime followed upon high principles and founded on religious convictions that had comforted his sorrows and countenanced his joys. It seemed a trial undeserved, that in his old age he should be thrust upon a pinnacle of publicity, forced into the public eye, robbed of dignity, denied the privacy he esteemed as the most precious privilege that wealth could command. Stability was destroyed; to count upon the morrow seemed impossible. His thought, strung to a new morbidity, unknown till ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... the subtle melody of a passion song. "Howard, dear, I—I'm sitting in sackcloth and ashes. I saw it all—with my own eyes, and I could neither run nor scream. Oh, it was splendid! I never dreamed that any man could rise by the sheer power of his will to such a pinnacle of courage. Does that make amends—just a little? And won't you come to breakfast with us in the morning, and let me tell you afterward how miserable I've been—how I fairly nagged father into bringing this party out here so that I might have an ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... preliminary chart of the schools; and giving as yet account only of that period to which the mere artist looks with least interest—while the work, even when completed, will be nothing more than a single pinnacle of the historical edifice whose ground-plan is laid in the preceding essay, "Progression by Antagonism":—a plan, by the author's confession, "too extensive for his own, or any single hand to execute," yet without the understanding of whose main relations it is impossible to receive ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... are published from the commanders outside congratulating the National Guard who have been under their orders. The Verite, in alluding to them, asks the following questions:—"Why are battalions which are accused by General Thomas, their direct superior, of chronic drunkenness, thus placed upon a pinnacle by real military men? Why do distinguished generals, unless forced by circumstances, declare the mere act of passing four or five cold nights in the trenches heroic? Why is so great a publicity given to such ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... for an all-day winged romp. He made straight for the crest at first and lit upon the tip-top of its highest pinnacle, rising there out of the rocky chaos like an exclamation of gleaming granite. Its top, hollowed by the weathers, made a seat which just fitted him. To the north and to the south, the saw-toothed crest extended for miles to purple disappearances; within its folds, ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... good angel, let neither obstacles nor temptations induce ye to leave it; bound along if you can; if not on hands and knees follow it, perish in it, if needful; but ye need not fear that; no one ever yet died in the true path of his calling before he had attained the pinnacle. Turn into other paths, and for a momentary advantage or gratification ye have sold your inheritance, your immortality. Ye will never ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... own mind these airy flights were always sublime, and especially so when he struck the quotation, which usually closed each missionary speech, that placed the herald of the Gospel on the highest pinnacle of time, and made him "look back over the vista of receding ages" and "forward over the hill-tops of coming time," and "lift up his voice until it should echo from mountain top to mountain top, from valley to valley, from river to river, from ocean to ocean, from isle to isle, and from ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... lived in Chippewa all this explanation would have been unnecessary. In that terrifying way small towns have, it was known that of all codfish aristocracy the Widow Weld was the piscatorial pinnacle. ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... stood in the way of the Princesse des Ursins were got rid of at the same time, so that she was now left mistress of the field. She governed absolutely in all things; the ministers became instruments in her hands; the King and Queen agents to work out her will. She was at the highest pinnacle of power. Together with Orry she enjoyed a power such as no one had ever attained since the time of the Duke ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... remarkable. But the place is picturesque and interesting; one would not like to have missed it. The church of Santiago has a tall, graceful, and slender spire, sure to attract an observant eye, recalling the pinnacle of St. Peter and St. Paul in the capital of Russia. We have said Silao is of little commercial importance, but there are six or eight flour-mills, which seem to be the nucleus about which the principal business interests centre. The place was founded more ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... blessedness in heaven. Wealth, beauty, genius are as naught; and fame, that hollow, gilded bauble, brings not the promised delight, and an aching void remains in the embittered heart. One of our most talented authors, now seated on the pinnacle of ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... his hopes had been high, he had felt a chilling fear that he would never be able to reach the pinnacle of promise; that in the end fate would place before him a barrier—the barrier in the shape of his contract with Stafford, that he ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... atoms, and its place remain forever vacant in the universe, than that we should survive, with such memories of departed glory, and such a burning sense of unutterable infamy and degradation. Fallen—fallen—fallen! from the highest pinnacle to the lowest depth, to rise no more forever! What American would wish to live, and encounter such a destiny? And why fallen? From a cause more damning than our fate. Fallen, let the truth be told, as history ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... his plans survived him. He died in 1318, when the work was carried on by his son. The tower was not finished till four hundred and twenty-five years after the commencement of the building, and then Hueltz, from Cologne, came to effect the undertaking. The tracery of this lofty pinnacle is inimitably beautiful. We ascended the spire, and I can assure you that the prospect amply repays the trouble. We saw the winding, silvery Rhine, the Black Forest, and the long line of the Vosges Mountains. I never ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... builder thrust Heavenward in Southampton town His spire and beamed his bells, Largely conceiving from the dust That pinnacle for ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... almost to mock at the type of a free constitution, presents itself. The eighteenth century witnessed the development of the British Constitution as now known. It embraced in its bosom all British citizens, raising up the nation to the pinnacle of material prosperity, while at the same time and all through it, whole classes of citizens of the British Empire, both in Great Britain and Ireland, were openly, unblushingly, legally, without a thought of mercy or pity—not to mention ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... like it, particularly 'Excelsior.' Beulah, I have written 'excelsior' on my banner, and I intend, like that noble youth, to press forward over every obstacle, mounting at every step, until I, too, stand on the highest pinnacle, and plant my banner where its glorious motto shall float over the world. That poem stirs my very soul like martial music, and I feel as if I should like to see Mr. Longfellow, to tell him how I thank him for having ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... at last on a buttelike pinnacle. The lights of the ship were close over us. And there were moving lights up there, tiny moving spots on the adjacent rocks. The brigands had come out, prowling about to investigate ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... who is miserly, double-faced and spiteful goes everywhere. The morality of this age is assuredly not that which is taught in the Gospel. In my opinion it is better to love too much than not enough. Nowadays dry hearts are stuck up on a pinnacle" (Revue ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... popular. It was quite impossible to say that it was the duty of the English people to obey the House of Hanover upon any principles which do not concede the right of the people to choose their rulers, and which do not degrade monarchy from its solitary pinnacle of majestic reverence, and make it one only among many expedient institutions. If a king is a useful public functionary who may be changed, and in whose place you may make another, you cannot regard ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... was resigned to the King's agents, and a great cloud hung over the little town. In a short time the gorgeous shrines and altars were plundered and desecrated; the buildings were sold; and before the eyes of the astonished inhabitants tower and pinnacle, church and chapter-house, gatehouse and cloister, fell a prey to the hand ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... cross, and the angel perceiving me gazing upon it asked me "if I knew that part." I did not know what to answer. "That is the Church of England," said he. These words made me observe it with more attention than before, and on looking up I could perceive queen Anne, on the pinnacle of the building, with a sword in each hand. With the one in her left, which is called Justice, she preserves her subjects from the men of the city of Perdition; and with the other in her right, which is the sword of the Spirit, or the word ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... arrows, winds rocked us like seas, And close all around crashed the pinnacle-trees; Red bolts flashed so near, the glare blinded our eyes, But onward, still on, for in front shone the prize. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... neck, and there to hang for the space of three hours until he be dead; and thereafter to be cut down by the hangman, his head, hands, and legs to be cut off, and distributed as follows—viz., His head to be affixed on an iron pin, and set on the pinnacle of the west gavel of the new prison of Edinburgh; one hand to be set on the port of Perth, the other on the port of Stirling; one leg and foot on the port of Aberdeen, the other on the port of Glasgow. If at his death penitent, and relaxed from excommunication, then the trunk of his body to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... which of the two Napoleon hated most—Wellington, who finally overthrew him at Waterloo, or Sidney Smith, who, to use Napoleon's own words, made him "miss his destiny," and exchange the empire of the East for a lonely pinnacle of ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... "backed" the regulating captain's warrants, consistently winked at his glaring infractions of law and order, and with the most commendable loyalty imaginable did all in their power to forward His Majesty's service. Even the military, if rightly approached on their pinnacle of lofty superiority, now and then condescended to lend the gangsman a hand. Did not Sloper, Major-General and Commandant at Lewes, throw a whole company into the ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... silence of the thought Upon its bleak and visionary sides, The history of many a winter storm Or obscure record of the path of fire. There the sun himself At the calm close of Summer's longest day Rests his substantial orb; between those heights, And on the top of either pinnacle, More keenly than elsewhere in night's blue vault Sparkle the stars, as of their station proud: Thoughts are not busier in the mind of man Than the mute agents stirring there,—alone Here do I ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... complimentary about the garden party, the freshness and unique manner in which it was arranged, and the pretty serving. She heard it again at the Dyckmans', and is now far up the pinnacle of self-complacency. ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... preserved to the end of his career the statesman's tact of discriminating between the possible and the impossible, and has not broken down in the task which for greatly gifted natures is the most difficult of all— the task of recognizing, when on the pinnacle of success, its natural limits. What was possible he performed, and never left the possible good undone for the sake of the impossible better, never disdained at least to mitigate by palliatives evils that were incurable. But where he recognized that fate had ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... a familiar landmark. A quarter of a mile away, a conical butte rose to a height of a hundred feet above the level of the broken plain, and the Texan walked over and laboriously climbed its steep side. He sank down upon the topmost pinnacle and studied the country minutely. "Just below the edge of the bad lands," he muttered. "The Little Rockies loom up plain, an' the Bear Paws an' Judiths look kind of dim. I'm way off my range down here. This part of the country don't look like ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... detail escaped, her vigilant eye, not an item was forgotten of all the millions of little necessities that the world expected and she must have forthcoming. Nothing that could make the wedding unique, artistic, perfect, was too hard or too costly to be carried out. This was her pinnacle of opportunity to shine, and Mrs. Endicott intended to make the most of it. Not that she had not shone throughout her worldly career, but she knew that with the marriage of her daughter her life would reach its zenith point and must henceforth begin to decline. This event must ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... or pinnacle, my leddy, for nane will ye see: their time's lang ower. But jist taik the sea face o' the scaur (cliff) i' yer ee, an' traivel alang 't oontil ye come till a bit 'at luiks like mason wark. It scarce rises ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... the Saturday noon crowd and yet the same type. Free women, happy women, regular women. Women who can recall a judge or so and still be graceful and dainty. It is very significant that a San Francisco woman stands at the very pinnacle of the city, graceful and alert on that tall ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... to leave this grand pinnacle, we must not tarry longer upon Greylock. Let us now take a trip down the Housatonic valley, close beside the Taconic range. This forms an almost continuous ridge across the State, and its summit is nearly upon the line between our ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... not obvious, but may have been intended to comprae this mountain with the lofty sharp pinnacle on which the hermitage is built near St Jago ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... towns of its size, none of which, in this instance, are any way remarkable. But the place is picturesque and interesting; one would not like to have missed it. The church of Santiago has a tall, graceful, and slender spire, sure to attract an observant eye, recalling the pinnacle of St. Peter and St. Paul in the capital of Russia. We have said Silao is of little commercial importance, but there are six or eight flour-mills, which seem to be the nucleus about which the principal business interests centre. The ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... go any further, Mr. Harlan Thornton. My affection for an old man who has set his heart on your success has brought me into this affair, and I assure you I don't enjoy the situation. You are not asked to betray any one, or desert any high moral pinnacle, or do anything else that the moralists say all these fine things about without knowing what they mean half the time. You are reminded of this: that there's only one General Waymouth. There's a sudden big call for him because factions have got into a row with each other. ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... I append, for I have been examining the mechanism of the gate since I came in, and have made a discovery which dislodges my savant from his pinnacle; namely, that the only fastening on the gate is a huge wooden latch, which not one of us had sense enough to lift; but then who thinks of taking a fort by assault and battery on the latch? Halicarnassus hit upon it by mere accident, and I therefore ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... discipline of an immense society, the boys, the beggars, the chimney-sweeps, the hilarious and the sorrowful, the fine ladies and noble lords, were all duly appreciated by him. If he had been taken up to the pinnacle of a mountain, instead of entertaining one of Wordsworth's sublime contemplations, he would have been very likely to flap his arms and crow like chanticleer. Indeed, in middle age he was accustomed to boast that he had never seen a mountain. Born in London, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... defenceless Christians; both exchanged unbounded empire for absolute seclusion. But Diocletian was born in the lowest abyss of human degradation—the slave and the son of a slave. For such a man, after having reached the highest pinnacle of human greatness, voluntarily to descend from power, seems an act of far greater magnanimity than the retreat of Charles. Born in the purple, having exercised unlimited authority from his boyhood, and having worn from his cradle ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... no opinion. I explained nothing. I let him continue to believe what he believes; because it is the only way to keep you on the pinnacle where he has placed you. Let any other reason for your conduct than an almost infantine ignorance of men and things be suggested and accepted, and down you will come, my poor Jane, and great will ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... of good manners, morals, methods, and [5] means. It points to the scientific spiritual molecule, pearl, and pinnacle, that everybody needs. May the Christlikeness it reflects rest on the dear readers, and throw the light of penetration on the page; even as the dawn, kindling its glories in the east, lightens earth's ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... hill with its dark ascending firs, to its crown of silvery birches, above which, as often as the slowly circling road brought him to the other side, he saw rise like a helmet the gray mass of the fortress. Turret and tower, pinnacle and battlement, appeared and disappeared as he climbed. Not until at last he stood almost on the top, and from an open space beheld nearly the whole front, could he tell what it was like. It was a grand pile, but looked a gloomy one to ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... characters here given, it is probable that these gypseous beds have undergone some metamorphic action. The strata are much hidden by detritus, but they appeared in most parts to be highly inclined; and in an adjoining lofty pinnacle they could be distinctly seen bending up, and becoming vertical, conformably with the underlying porphyritic conglomerate. In very many parts of the great mountain-face [F], composed of thin gypseous beds, there ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... is a power for good or evil; it may be likened to a magazine, holding within its throbbing sides an explosive deposit of untold energy and puissance, capable of all things within the range of the human. While it may lift man to the very pinnacle of goodness, it may also sink him to the lowest level of infamy. Only, in one case, it is spiritualized love, in the other, it is carnal; in one case it obeys the spirit, in the other, the flesh; in one case its true name is charity, in the other, ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... Quai des Marbriers, and afterwards its continuation, the Quai Vert. Pacing these silent promenades, which are bordered by humble cottages, you have opposite, across the water, as also from the adjacent Quai du Rosaire, grand groupings of pinnacle, tower, and gable, more delightful even, in perfection of combination and in mellow charm of colour, than those "domes and towers" of Oxford whose presence Wordsworth confessed, in a very indifferent sonnet, to overpower ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... have been impossible to trace the original course of the streets, but that some gable, pinnacle, or portion of walls, of churches, halls, or mansions, indicated where they had stood. The narrower thoroughfares were completely blocked by rubbish; massive iron chains, then used to prevent traffic at night in the streets, were melted, as were likewise iron gates of prisons, and the ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... on Fate than they who have gone before, and what has come to others in like conditions must come to thee. God himself can not stay it; it is so written in the stars. Power to lead men! Pray that thy prayer shall ne'er be granted—'t is to be carried to the topmost pinnacle of Fame's temple tower, and there cast headlong upon the stones ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... devil!" she said, "and maman has put my name on the register of the monument; so the great archangel St. Michel will deliver me from all evil. What canst thou do? Canst thou turn children into cats? or canst thou walk across the sea without being drowned? or canst thou stand on the highest pinnacle of the church, where the golden image of St. Michel used to be, and cast thyself down without killing thyself? I will go back with thee to thy house and see what thou ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... of this concerted departure only seemed strange afterwards when O'Malley looked back upon it, for at the time it seemed as inevitable as being obliged to swim once the dive is taken. He stood upon a pinnacle whence lesser details were invisible; he knew a kind of exaltation—of loftier vision. Small facts that ordinarily might fill the day with trouble sank below the horizon then. He did not even notice that they went without food, horse, or blankets. It was reckless, unrestrained, ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... momentously! As long as I've known the man (and we played truant together fifty years ago—hookey, we called it then) he's had his heart set on going forth from Radville, "for to admire and for to see, for to view this wide world o'er"; always he has presented himself to me as one poised on the pinnacle of purpose, ready the next instant to dive and strike out into the teeming unknown beyond the barrier hills. But this promise he has never fulfilled. He still maintains that he will surely go—next week—after the hayin's over—as ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... a ride! Falling water was everywhere. We rode above the clouds, under the clouds, and through the clouds! and every now and then a shaft of sunshine penetrated like a search-light to the depths yawning beneath us, or flashed upon some pinnacle of the crater-rim thousands of feet above. At every turn of the trail a waterfall or a dozen waterfalls, leaping hundreds of feet through the air, burst upon our vision. At our first night's camp, in the ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... a description of Eveline's feelings at this hour would be a vain task. In a moment, she was brought down from the pinnacle of hope to the depths of despair; for she saw in all this that had passed the hand of Duffel, her avowed enemy; and, indeed, as the reader has doubtless already concluded, she was in the hands of none others than Bill and Dick, who were bearing ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... having left mediaeval chasubles to grind at war, and though he no longer taught Hogarth, a relation persisted between them; and always not far from O'Hara was to be found Harris, living now on the pinnacle of dandy bliss, twisting ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... combination of events placing in my hands, precisely at the moment of their greatest value, clear opportunities that none but a hopeless blunderer could have disregarded. What men call Chance operated in my favour as though with superb calculation, lifting me to this miniature pinnacle I could never have reached by my ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... my sister Sorais would levy war upon me. So be it. She shall not prevail against me. I, too, have my friends and my retainers. There are many, I say, who will shout "Nyleptha!" when my pennon runs up on peak and pinnacle, and the light of my beacon fires leaps tonight from crag to crag, bearing the message of my war. I will break her strength and scatter her armies. Eternal night shall be the portion of Sorais of the Night. Give me that parchment and the ink. So. Now summon the officer in the ante-room. ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... the whole width of the great table. On its top the frosting was piled high, in fantastic shapes. There seemed to be little hills and valleys; and from among these peeped—and did they only seem to move?—a number of tiny figures in green and gold. One sat astride of a snowy pinnacle, another lay stretched at full length in a hollow, his pretty face only peering out; some were chasing each other among the elfin hills, others were standing at ease, their hands on their hearts, their forms bent gracefully as if in salutation. ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... divided into the neck and body. The neck consists of a hard fleshy substance, much like cartilage, and at the end of it there is a membrane placed transversely, which is called the hymen. Near the neck there is a prominent pinnacle, which is called the door of the womb, because it preserves the matrix from cold and dust. The Greeks called it clitoris, and the Latins praeputium muliebre, because the Roman women abused these parts to satisfy their mutual unlawful lusts, ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... marble, did I say? nay, rather a golden city, paved with emerald. For truly, every pinnacle and turret glanced or glowed, overlaid with gold, or bossed with jasper. Beneath, the unsullied sea drew in deep breathing, to and fro, its eddies of green wave. Deep-hearted, majestic, terrible as the sea,—the men of Venice moved in sway of power and war; pure as her pillars of alabaster, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... by ideal figures, and notably by the memorial to Robert Gould Shaw, a work distinctively American and without a counterpart in the annals of art. It is the spiritual quality of Saint Gaudens's work which sets it apart upon a lofty pinnacle—the largeness of the man behind it, the artist mind and ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... of Atalanta, as some whirlwind falling on the gates, calls out for fire and a spade, as though he would dig up the city. But Periclymenus the son of the God of the Ocean stopped him in his raging, hurling at his head a stone, a wagon-load, a pinnacle[40] rent from the battlement; and dashed in pieces his head with its auburn hair, and crushed the suture of the bones, and besmeared with blood his lately blooming cheeks; nor shall he carry back his living form to his mother, glorious ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... tall masts, completely encircled by the flames, fell hissing into the water. The other, after standing awhile in solitary grandeur, formed a fiery pinnacle ...
— The African Trader - The Adventures of Harry Bayford • W. H. G. Kingston
... standing at a window, looking out at the aged row of cedars, now laden with snow, and thinking of Horace and Soracte. Suddenly, beneath a jutting pinnacle of white boughs which left under themselves one little spot of green, I saw a cardinal hop out and sit full-breasted towards me. The idea flashed through my mind that this might be that shyest, most beautiful fellow whom ...
— A Kentucky Cardinal • James Lane Allen
... was to circle round the loftiest summits of the snow-clad voiceless Andes, while down in the valleys beneath dark clouds rolled fiercely on, and lightnings played across the darkness; nor to perch cool and safe on peak or pinnacle, while below on earth's dull level the hurricane Pampero was levelling house and hut and tree; or the burning breath of the Zonda was sweeping over the land, scorching every flower and leaf, drinking every drop of dew, draining even the blood of moving beings till eyes ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... boys accepted gladly, and during the trip there were many long discussions between the three as to the future of the Circus Boys. They had worked hard during the season and had won new laurels on the tanbark. But they had not yet reached the pinnacle of their success in the canvas-covered arena, though each had saved, as the result of his season's work, nearly twelve ...
— The Circus Boys Across The Continent • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... time when Percival was nineteen years of age that he stood upon a pinnacle of rock and looked down into a certain valley. And it was very early in the spring-time, so that the valley appeared, as it were, to be carpeted all with clear, thin green. There was a shining stream of water that ran down through the ...
— The Story of the Champions of the Round Table • Howard Pyle
... woke again. The Professor's notes were still under my eyes, and I read the words, "Lose yourself and live as if you were one of the others. Exalted on this pinnacle you are prepared for any existence; you have learnt your path through eternity, and the world and its vicissitudes may sweep by you like winds past ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... contrary winds until it seemed as though the spirit of the new ocean had arisen in wrath, forbidding his further progress. He was even driven south of the strait to Cape Horn, where he landed and looked from the southernmost pinnacle of the cape to the mysterious southern sea, declaring triumphantly that he had been farther south than any man in the world and had placed his foot on the extreme of the new continent. Then all at once the weather changed and Drake ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... people were at Pleasure Bay, wandering about under the trees in front of the hotel. Down between them and the bank was a lot of men piling up a heap of round stones and crossing sticks of wood over them till a high sort of a cross-beam pinnacle was built, to which one of the men set fire. Mercy, how it blazed up and flashed through the cracks in the wood! They seemed to enjoy the blaze, and worked like beavers around it—though I don't know how a beaver works, ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... had turned the bend of the wooded gorge, and, looking up the river, saw what resembled a dyke of basalt stretching sheer across the stream, with a ruined castle on a bare and apparently inaccessible pinnacle, another ruin on the opposite end of the ridge, and, between the two, a little church on the brink of a precipice. Houses were clustered at the foot of the rocks by the ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... she missed him, she gave such a chilly, formal reply that despair fell upon him. On learning his good fortune she almost clapped her hands. Was the joy all for the boys? Then on hearing his destination, she said, "So far away!" in a tone of despair that lifted him on to a pinnacle of hope, but the next minute she tumbled him down again by observing, like one entirely ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... generally adopted, and delighted in, throughout the north; and then, with the gradual exaggeration with which every pleasant idea is pursued by the human mind, it is raised into all manner of peaks, and points, and ridges; and pinnacle after pinnacle is added on its flanks, and the walls increased in height, in proportion, until we get indeed a very sublime mass, but one which has no more principle of religious aspiration in it than a child's tower of ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... and once again its sobering sensation struck me, and I found myself staring up at its top, a full 800 feet high, the bottom being an ornate and elaborate temple. The middle, which supplied most of its height, was a long, round tower, and at top there was a spherical pinnacle which had what looked to be a ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... in the warm sunlight come swiftly into view. Some of the spires are of such great height in proportion to their diameter as to appear needle-like. Among those reaching so far heavenward are the slender spire of the Cathedral of Peter and Paul, nearly four hundred feet in height, and the lofty pinnacle of the Admiralty Building. Notwithstanding its giddy towers and looming palaces rising above the level of the capital, the want of a little diversity in the grade of the low-lying city is keenly felt. Like Berlin ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... of Hellas. Akbar started as his grandfather had started, and Baber's faith was not less sincere.[10] But the contact with other races and other creeds diverted or heightened this first purpose of the Mongol, and at the pinnacle of earthly power, Akbar met and yielded to the temptation, which dazzled for a moment even the steady gaze of Napoleon. Apprehending the unity beneath the diversity of the religions of his various subjects, Hindoo, Persian, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... there, in happy early days, on those lowly benches in front of the altar, have I whiled away the tedium of a sermon considering how best I might thread my way up amidst those wooden towers, and climb safely to the topmost pinnacle! ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... increased in volume and in sound, but it was soon far beneath us, pursuing its headlong course till it reached level ground, where it flowed in the midst of a beautiful but confined prairie. There was something sylvan and savage in the mountains on the farther side, clad from foot to pinnacle with trees, so closely growing that the eye was unable to obtain a glimpse of the hill sides, which were uneven with ravines and gulleys, the haunts of the wolf, the wild boar, and the corso, or mountain-stag; the latter of which, as I was informed by a peasant who was driving a car of oxen, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... first rankling sting of humiliation and despair, he could almost have struck a murderous blow at the man whom fortune had set on such a pinnacle of pride and insolence, as it seemed to his galled fancy. He was not in the mood to be either just or generous, and he saw in Ralph Gowan nothing but a man who had both the power and will to rival him, and rob him of peace and hope forever. If Dolly had been with him, in all ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... between the mountains, was pointed out to us. The principal one is the Arros River, which from the west embraces most of the mesas, and then, turning south, receives its tributaries, the Tutuhuaca and the Mulatos, the latter just behind a pinnacle. West of the Arros River stretches out the immense Mesa de los Apaches, once a stronghold of these marauders, reaching as far as the Rio Bonito. The plateau is also called "The Devil's Spine Mesa," ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... was thus being raised to the pinnacle of honor, his former comrade Bazaine was imprisoned in another part of the palace at Versailles, awaiting trial on the charge of treason for the surrender of Metz. In the trial, in which the whole world took a deep interest, the ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... successive attempt. Every one must know the feeling of triumph and pride which a grand view from a height communicates to the mind. In these little frequented countries there is also joined to it some vanity, that you perhaps are the first man who ever stood on this pinnacle or ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... of the ballet since the time of Louis XIV has been the contribution of individual artists, who by giving expression to their own original ideas have thus advanced the art to the pinnacle attained by the modern ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... shown by the Mahomedans as the tomb, and sometimes as the house, of Adam; but such a structure there certainly was, perhaps an ancient Kist-vaen, or the like. John Marignolli, who was there about 1349, has an interesting passage on the subject: "That exceeding high mountain hath a pinnacle of surpassing height, which on account of the clouds can rarely be seen. [The summit is lost in the clouds. (Ibn Khordadhbeh, p. 43.)—H.C.] But God, pitying our tears, lighted it up one morning just before the sun rose, so that we beheld it glowing with ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... last puff was fading away he glided down from pinnacle to narrow shelf, from shelf to cliff, and made his way toward the rocks below to tell the news to ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... turned into a broad and beautiful avenue of poplars, down which we saw, at a distance, the triumphal arch terminating the Simplon road, which we had followed from Sesto Calende. Beyond it rose the slight and airy pinnacle of the Duomo. We passed by the exquisite structure, gave up our passports at the gates, traversed the broad Piazza d'Armi, and found ourselves at liberty to choose one of the dozen streets that led into ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... they progressed, fearful every moment lest the support break beneath them and hurl them down along the sloping side of the pinnacle ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... as they wandered beside a neat little oval pool, the foreground of a thatched and whitewashed inn, with a grassy approach and a pictorial sign—from these humble wayside animals to the crests of high woods which let a gable or a pinnacle peep here and there and looked even at a distance like trees of good company, conscious of an individual profile. I admired the hedge-rows, I plucked the faint- hued heather, and I was for ever stopping to say how charming I thought ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... demand, some speculation to be incurred requiring great means and courage as well, and Roger Scatcherd had been found to be the man for the time. He was then elevated for the moment to the dizzy pinnacle of a newspaper hero, and became one of those "whom the king delighteth to honour." He went up one day to kiss Her Majesty's hand, and come down to his new grand house at Boxall Hill, Sir ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... burst of popular indignation which he knew must follow. Any wrong done to one who stands on the pinnacle of the people's favour is resented by each individual as a personal injury; and among a primitive set of country-folk, who recognize the wild passion in love, as it exists untamed by the trammels of reason and self-restraint, ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Steele, Tickell, Philips, Smith, and a crowd of lesser lights, raised my lord each one on a higher pinnacle; and in return the powerful minister was not forgetful of the douceur which well-tuned verses were accustomed to receive. He himself had tried to be a poet, and in 1703 wrote verses for the toasting-cups of the Kit-kat. His lines to a Dowager Countess of ——, are good enough to make us surprised ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... Moloch horridus. Thermometer 18 degrees. The Finke. Johnstone's range. A night alarm. Beautiful trees. Wild ducks. A tributary. High dark hill. Country rises in altitude. Very high sandhills. Quicksands. New ranges. A brush ford. New pigeon. Pointed hill. A clay pan. Christopher's Pinnacle. Chandler's Range. Another new range. Sounds of running water. First natives seen. Name of the river. A Central Australian warrior. Natives burning the country. Name a new creek. Ascend a mountain. Vivid green. Discover a ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... asked, for I felt that I should like to climb to the topmost pinnacle of the highest peak in all the world and shout the good news to the ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... lain, unmolested and conscious of a certain relief in the exceeding calm; the grey pinnacle of the cathedral, and a few branches of an elm-tree alone meeting her eye through the open window, and the sole sound the cawing of the rooks, whose sailing flight amused and attracted her glance from time to time with dreamy interest. Grace had gone into court ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of force which an admirable poem by Emerson expresses, can be found here; and perhaps some stress and strain may be felt in Browning's effort to maintain his position. It is no "vale of years" of which Rabbi Ben Ezra tells; old age is viewed as an apex, a pinnacle, from which in thin translucent air all the efforts and all the errors of the past can be reviewed; the gifts of youth, the gifts of the flesh are not depreciated; but the highest attainment is that of knowledge won by experience—knowledge which can divide good ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... a sharp pinnacle of rock above the little railway station of Vollmerz, may still be found the scanty ruins of an old castle which played a brave part in German history before it was destroyed in the Thirty ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... humble place of mere accessories to the Enchanted Garden, jealously guarded against Asticot by great high gilded railings and by blue-coated, silver-buttoned functionaries at the gates. Within rose two Wonder Houses gorgeous with dome and pinnacle, bewildering with gold and snow, displaying before the aching sight the long cool stretch of verandahs, and offering the baffling glimpse of vast interiors whence floated the dim sound of music and laughter; and bright, happy beings, ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... wealth, free political organization, immense geographic area, and unprecedented "business" and products—even the most active intellect and "culture"—will not place this Commonwealth of ours on the topmost range of history and humanity—or any eminence of "democratic art"—to say nothing of its pinnacle. Only the production (and on the most copious scale) of loftiest moral, spiritual and heroic personal illustrations—a great native Literature headed with a Poetry stronger and sweeter than any yet. If there can be any such thing as a kosmic modern and original song, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... some hold upon him during his infancy, youth, or early manhood. He now inquires whether Christ is really his destined foe and reluctantly admits he has failed in all his endeavors to tempt him. But one last test still remains to be tried, for Satan suddenly conveys Christ to the topmost pinnacle of the Temple of Jerusalem, bidding him demonstrate his divinity by fearlessly casting himself down, since God has "given his ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... glorious with the sun's returning march, And woods were brightened, and soft gales Went forth to kiss the sun-clad vales. The clouds were far beneath me; bathed in light, They gathered mid-way round the wooded height, And, in their fading glory, shone Like hosts in battle overthrown. As many a pinnacle, with shifting glance. Through the gray mist thrust up its shattered lance, And rocking on the cliff was left The dark pine blasted, bare, and cleft. The veil of cloud was lifted, and below Glowed the rich valley, and the river's flow Was darkened by the forest's shade, Or glistened in ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... fairer still by night: Each rock reflects a softer light, When the whole mount from foot to crest In robes of lambent flame is dressed; When from a million herbs a blaze Of their own luminous glory plays, And clothed in fire each deep ravine, Each pinnacle and crag is seen. Some parts the look of mansions wear, And others are as gardens fair, While others seem a massive block Of solid undivided rock. Behold those pleasant beds o'erlaid With lotus leaves, for lovers made, Where mountain birch and costus throw Cool shadows on the pair below. ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... begun by Sir Charles Russell, who led off with a sneer about my being the most popular man in the county, and, when I adhered to other statements, he added, 'Well, a very popular man. I will not put you on too high a pinnacle.' (Laughter.) Then for an hour and a half he plied me with the best balanced statistical questions I ever heard put in a hostile spirit, and without a note I could answer every one. After considerable hesitation I admitted on consideration that ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... was surrounded by every appropriate circumstance. To be a Majesty, to be a cousin of Sovereigns, to marry a Bourbon for diplomatic ends, to correspond with the Queen of England, to be very stiff and very punctual, to found a dynasty, to bore ambassadresses into fits, to live, on the highest pinnacle, an exemplary life devoted to the public service—such were his objects, and such, in fact, were his achievements. The "Marquis Peu-a-peu," as George IV called him, had what he wanted. But this would never have been the case if it had not happened that ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... usually translated—took precedence of all other officials. A subject could rise no higher without ceasing to yield allegiance. As Mototsune was the first kwampaku, he has been called the most ambitious and the least scrupulous of the Fujiwara. But Mototsune merely stood at the pinnacle of an edifice, to the building of which many had contributed, and among those builders not a few fully deserved all they achieved. The names of such members of the Fujiwara family as Mimori, Otsugu, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... life, indeed, with a kind of large detachment, as though from the height of some soaring pinnacle one might watch, with only half-awakened interest, the doings of the dwellers on the plain; and Owen, who liked to be in the midst of things, to add his quota to the world's doings, found in this attitude of mind ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... New York capitalist, belonged to that older school of American financiers who, having built up large fortunes by taking advantage of the speculative opportunities of their day, look somewhat doubtfully from the pinnacle of a successful old age upon the same adventurous spirit when shown by the active younger generation. George Cartwright was ready to take a chance, certainly. He had taken chances all his life. But George Cartwright distrusted mightily what he called the ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... in Russia, and a foreign religion introduced.' So wrote Catherine II., 'the greatest of the queens, and of the ——,' the friend of Voltaire, the greatest lady-freethinker of her age. But she wrote still farther:—'Secondly, the honour of Russia as a state, which has been brought to the highest pinnacle of her victorious arms with the loss of so much blood, is actually trodden under foot through the newly-concluded peace with her bitterest enemy.' And who is this bitterest enemy of the orthodox Russia? The King of Prussia, Frederick II.! Yes, the King of Prussia was once declared to be ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 238, May 20, 1854 • Various
... at those days when the doctrine of evolution had reached its pinnacle, one sees how the human mind, by its habit of continual crystallisations, had destroyed all the meaning of the process. Witness, for example, that sterile phenomenon, the pagoda of 'caste'! Like this Chinese building, so was Society then formed. Men were living there in layers, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... which appeared to separate high, bright peaks from shadowed vales, by incredible distances. As far as the eye could travel with utmost straining, away to the dark, imposing background of the Djurdjura range, billowed ridges and ravines, ravines and ridges, each pointing pinnacle or razor-shelf adorned with its coral-red hamlet, like a group of poisonous fungi, or the barnacles on a ship's steep side. Such an extraordinary landscape Stephen had never imagined, or seen except on a Japanese ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... in a pot-house on Ault Bea. Next day, the sea was unapproachable; but the next they had a pleasant passage to Poolewe, hugging the cliffs, the falling swell bursting close by them in the gullies, and the black scarts that sat like ornaments on the top of every stack and pinnacle, looking down into the PURGLE as she passed. The climate of Scotland had not done with them yet: for three days they lay storm-stayed in Poolewe, and when they put to sea on the morning of the fourth, the sailors prayed them for God's sake not to attempt the ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the disgust of the dozen and a half of the distinguished fashionable world who were passing up the stairs behind. The doctor was somewhat repressed in his mode of address by the communication which had so lately been made to him. Miss Dunstable was now standing on the very top of the pinnacle of wealth, and seemed to him to be not only so much above his reach, but also so far removed from his track in life, that he could not in any way put himself on a level with her. He could neither aspire so high nor descend so low; and thinking of this he spoke to Miss Dunstable ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... streets with the little green lawns showing the care of the individual owner. Then came the apartment houses and the small stores; these rose in gentle slopes, higher and higher, merging at last with the mighty central pinnacle of beauty. The city was designed as a whole, not in a multitude of individually beautiful, but inharmonious units, like some wild mixture of melodies, each in itself beautiful, ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... adorned it with her smiling grace. I shall do what fate and my people have a right to expect of me, but I do not say that it must be done immediately. I have time enough to wait; for as yet I do not stand on the pinnacle to which I am aspiring. My plans are not yet accomplished. I hope that I shall not die at so early an age as my father. I need ten years more to carry out my purposes. A sovereign ought not to set too narrow limits to his wishes; but mine—they are boundless. ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... were the habit of his life, which was ever profuse, or that neglect of his private interests which almost inevitably accompanies the absorbing duties of public life, his affairs were always somewhat confused, and Lady Montfort, who wished to place him on a pinnacle, had resolved that he should marry an heiress. After long observation and careful inquiry and prolonged reflection, the lady she had fixed upon was Miss Neuchatel; and she it was who had made Lord Roehampton cross the room and ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... Christmas Margamores, (* Big Markets) and fully sustained the anticipations which were formed of him by his relations. For a year or two afterwards no quarrel was fought without him; and his prowess rose until he had gained the very pinnacle of that ambition which he had determined to reach. About this time I was separated from him, having found it necessity, in order to accomplish my objects in life, to reside with a relation in another part ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... Hotels: Ambassadeurs; Europe; Nord. To visit Le Puy, the best plan is to begin with the Cathedral. From the high side of the Place de Breuil, at the N.W. corner, ascend by the streets St. Gilles, Chenebouterie, and Raphal, to the Place des Tables, with a stone pinnacle fountain in the centre. From this ascend by the R. des Tables to the flight of 40 steps, leading up to the tetrastyle portico in front of the church. Forty-one more steps lead up through this portico to the portal ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... With the people filing off at the door he held, who he knew would carry what had passed to the whole town, to be given to the four winds, he could not have looked a Bully more shorn and forlorn, if he had had his ears cropped. Even that unlucky female, Mrs. Sparsit, fallen from her pinnacle of exultation into the Slough of Despond, was not in so bad a plight as that remarkable man and self-made Humbug, Josiah Bounderby ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... of works completed in 1866, as given by Dean Goodwin above, did not include several important and costly gifts. The chief of these were: the carved panels above the stalls, supplied by individual donors; a pinnacle at the south-east corner of the choir (Mr. Beresford Hope); the reredos (Mr. J. Dunn Gardner); the font (Canon Selwyn); the gates of aisles of presbytery (Mr. Lowndes and Dean Peacock); the brass eagle ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting
... strata; that, from one end of France to the other, a sullen hostility prevails against the new institutions; for now the political and social constitution is joined to the ecclesiastical constitution like an edifice to its spire, and, through this sharp pinnacle, seeks the storm even within the darkening clouds of heaven. The evil all springs out of this unskillful, gratuitous, compulsory fusion, and, consequently, from ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... and they then trace out how, urged on by his necessities and aided by his senses, he successively discovered the natural productions necessary for his subsistence and the arts which ministered to his wants, until step by step he mounted to the pinnacle of civilization. But these are merely reveries of the closet, dreams of the inexperienced, and have no real foundation in as far at least as Australia is concerned. That the first natives who were placed on that continent ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... of Fifty-Six seemed to enter into and fill my whole life. I lived but from Saturday to Saturday. The appearance of false shirt-fronts would cast me to the lowest depths of despair; their absence raised me to a pinnacle of hope. It was not till winter softened into spring that Fifty-Six nerved himself to learn his fate. One Saturday he sent me a new white waistcoat, a garment which had hitherto been shunned by his modest nature, to prepare for his use. I bestowed upon it all the resources of my ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... attempt to lay the palace low. Again she was frustrated. The building had soared, by this time, to an ambitious height, and its splendour had reached the limits of the materials at command. The final pinnacle which was required to cope the structure had been mislaid. Hadria was searching for it, when Martha, seizing her chance, struck the palace a blow in its very heart, and in an instant, the ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... glen their level way; Each purple peak, each flinty spire, Was bathed in floods of living fire. But not a setting beam could glow Within the dark ravines below, Where twined the path, in shadow hid, Bound many a rocky pyramid, Shooting abruptly from the dell Its thunder-splintered pinnacle; Bound many an insulated mass, The native bulwarks of the pass, Huge as the tower which builders vain Presumptuous piled on Shinar's plain. The rocky summits, split and rent, Formed turret, dome, or battlement. Or seemed fantastically set With cupola or minaret, Wild crests ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... enters more deeply into that life, the self-forgetfulness comes to him again and as a diviner thing. By and by, as the man walks up the mountain, he seems to pass out of the cloud which hangs about the lower slopes of the mountain, until at last he stands upon the pinnacle at the top, and there is in the perfect light. Is it not exactly like the mountain at whose foot there seems to be the open sunshine where men see everything, and on whose summit there is the sunshine, but on whose sides, and half way up, there ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... certainty that the long wished-for object was absolutely before us. It is impossible to describe the feelings of interest experienced by the sight of these gigantic remains. The eastern transept still rises above the woods, a point, pinnacle, and round tower. Descending the hill towards Hindon we lost sight of the Abbey. A most singular specimen of country life was presented by an old shepherd, of whom we inquired the way. "How far is it to Hindon?" "About four miles." "Is ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... in a letter. And though, wherever you are, as I have told you before, you are in the same boat, yet I congratulate you on your absence, as well because you don't see what we see, as because your reputation is placed on a lofty and conspicuous pinnacle in the sight of multitudes both of citizens and allies; and it is conveyed to us by neither obscure nor uncertain talk, but by the loud and unanimous voice of all. There is one thing of which I cannot feel certain—whether to congratulate you, or to be alarmed for you on account of the surprising ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... broken just often enough by oases of pine wood; and the plains on which we looked down were blistered with conical hills, crowned by ancient castles which would have rejoiced the hearts of mediaeval painters, as they did mine. Severac-le-Chateau, perched on its naked pinnacle of rock, was best of all, as we saw it from our bird's-eye view, and then again, almost startlingly impressive when we had somehow whirled down below it, to pass under its old huddled town, before we flew up once more to higher and ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... of his meditations. He himself had opened out wide horizons of public life before an ambitious poet, with a vacillating will, it is true, but not without aspirations; and the journalists had already shown the neophyte, from a pinnacle of the temple, all the kingdoms of the world of letters and ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... thrust, which had to find its expression and its stay in the buttress. But even the buttress, although it bears witness to the outward and horizontal force of weight, was nevertheless so fashioned with its gable and pinnacle, or its own arched form, as to aid the upward movement. The thinness of walls and partitions, and the piercing of these with arches and windows, by lightening the force of weight, also contributed to increase the vertical movement. At sight of a true Gothic cathedral, we feel ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... must have felt at the pinnacle of grandeur where fortune had placed him was not, however, entirely unmixed with uneasiness and vexation. Except at Berlin, in all the other great Courts the Emperor of the French was still Monsieur Bonaparte; and your country, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... our story. The triumph was complete. The timid and obscure girl found herself on the highest pinnacle of fame. Great men, on whom she had gazed at a distance with humble reverence, addressed her with admiration, tempered by the tenderness due to her sex and age. Burke, Windham, Gibbon, Reynolds, Sheridan, were among ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... look of the old guardsman, as he stood perched upon the high pinnacle of rock, was again too much for the muleteers; and one and all of them gave utterance to fresh peals of laughter. His young masters were too much concerned about their faithful Pouchskin to give way to mirth; but on ascertaining that he had ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... activity having been again stimulated by learning that his essay had gained the premium at Dijon, and by the fact of its great vogue as a published pamphlet, another performance fairly raised Rousseau to the pinnacle of fashion; and this was an opera which he composed, "Le Devin du Village" (The Village Sorcerer), which was performed at Fontainebleau before the Court, and received with unexampled enthusiasm. His profession, so far as he had any, was that of a copyist of music, and his musical taste and facile ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... my form of prayer. Oh! it was just then that I had reached the passive state of prayer: I did nothing, Another did everything in my prayer. From that time, having put me down in the gutter, the novice-master raised me up to the pinnacle, whereas I should have been in neither place." On another occasion he told how the change of prayer had happened: "I was on my knees one day after Communion, making a regular thanksgiving, when suddenly God stopped me, and I was told not to pray that way any more. Question: ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... have a berg as high out of water as it is deep below the surface, for if we imagine a large, solid lump, of any regular shape, which has a very small, sharp, high pinnacle in the centre, the height above water can easily be equal to the depth below. An authentic case on record is that of a berg grounded in the Strait of Belle Isle, in sixteen fathoms of water, that had a thin spire about one hundred feet ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XII, Jan. 3, 1891 • Various
... trial I had ever felt. Our affection was unbounded, and such only as noble hearts can feel. She being gone, the whole world became a desert. There is not a man on earth, whose life affords more various turns of fate than mine. Swiftly raised to the highest pinnacle of hope, as suddenly was I cast headlong down, and so remarkable were these revolutions that he who has read my history will at last find it difficult to say whether he envies or pities me most. And yet these were, in reality, but preparatory ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... them the ray of hope, in the midst of their suffering, that will give them courage to live, and live as healthy human beings, I shall feel amply rewarded for the hard work that had necessarily to be done before the present pinnacle in the art ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... from the crest that divides at Devil's Gap, rises abruptly in a three-faced peak, the pinnacle of which lies to the south. Several hundred feet above the base lie the group of gold-mines behind the mountain, and a short railroad spur blasted across the southern face runs to them from Glen Tarn. Below, the mountain wall breaks in long ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... too weak; mortality Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep, And each imagined pinnacle and steep Of godlike hardship tells me I must die Like a sick eagle looking ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... himself behind it, robed in the black gown he had used in the dissecting-room, and crowned by a conical head-piece about two feet high, manufactured by Edward and himself, and which they had completed by placing on the pinnacle thereof a human skull. The effect of this picturesque costume was heightened by two large red circles around the doctor's eyes—whether obtained from the juice of the pokeberry or the inkstand on Edward's desk ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... People will not let Mr. Hawthorne alone, as they have Mr. Crittendon, because they feel as if they had a right to him, and he cannot well forego their claim. "The Scarlet Letter" seems to have placed him on a pinnacle of fame and love here. . . . It will give you pleasure, I think, to hear that Mr. Cecil read a volume of "The Scarlet Letter" the other day which was one of the thirty-fifth thousand of one publisher. ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... peril, pitfalls to be leaped, some days or weeks of dire uncertainty, men to be won, and factions placated, any or all of these might have appeased the jealous gods. But this instant success would shock Olympus. It cried for contrast by its very flight to the pinnacle. ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... curious sense of loss that made her wish he had not cut himself off from her so completely. When on their last afternoon together he had pleaded so earnestly for her love Grace had been proudly triumphant in the successful accomplishment of what she believed to be her life work. From the lofty pinnacle of achievement she had looked down on Tom pityingly, but with no adequate realization of what she ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... shadows begin to fall, every turret and pinnacle stands out in bold relief. The bands of yellow and red shade into purple, and everything, save the long winding trail, begins to have a weird ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... buried. But I want you to realize that during those few minutes I was not John Trenholme, an artist struggling for foothold on the steep crags of the painter's rock of endeavor, but a master of the craft gazing from some high pinnacle at a territory he had won. If you know anything of painting, Miss Manning, you will go with me so far as to admit that my indiscretion was impersonal. I, a poet who expressed his emotions in terms of color, was alone with Aphrodite and a ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... rooms are finished to the top or not,—and provided with an abundant outlet at the top. This may also be as simple as the dorsal breathing-holes of a tobacco barn, gorgeously imposing as an Oriental pinnacle, or it may be a part of the chimney; only let it be at the very summit, ample, and so arranged that an adverse wind shall not prevent the egress of the rising currents of air. Mind this, too; it is by no means the same thing ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... It, combined with the sneer upon his mouth, told mankind that there was nothing in space which could appall him. Maggie marvelled at him and surrounded him with greatness. She vaguely tried to calculate the altitude of the pinnacle from which he must have ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... dare to patronize me with his foresight and protection—me, who had taught him all he knew, and who was about to offer him a place on my giddy pinnacle of immortal fame! I was intensely angry, but succeeded in controlling myself, for I felt that an untimely explosion of violence might ruin all. I passed my hand over my eyes, as if to blur the glitter that had alarmed ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... was horrified like heaven itself at the fall of its highest angel. Lady Dudley abandoned her place in the British empyrean, gave up her wealth, and endeavored to eclipse by her sacrifices her whose virtue had been the cause of this great disaster. She took delight, like the devil on the pinnacle of the temple, in showing me all the riches of her ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... away; overhead the stars shone out of an ebony sky very bright as on some clear winter night of frost, and of all that gigantic amphitheater of mountains which circled behind them from right to left there was hardly a hint. Perhaps here some extra cube of darkness showed where a pinnacle soared, or there a vague whiteness glimmered where a high glacier hung against the cliff, but for the rest the darkness hid the mountains. A cold wind blew out of the ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... Cecil's allegiance had experienced a certain shock. Some sort of pedestal had hitherto been needful to her existence; she was learning that Dunstone was an unrecognized elevation in this new country, and she had seen a woman attain to a pinnacle that almost dazzled her, by sheer resource and ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the country spreading out before them in gentle undulations. The Ajax would climb a low hill to pass the pinnacle and go bowling down into some miniature valley, over foot-bridges and through grove after grove of pretty trees. It seemed that old Mother Nature had spread on the scenic touches with a master hand in this ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond
... after leaving Norton Sound. Stuart's Island. Cape Stephens. Point Shallow-Water. Shoals on the American Coast. Clerke's Island. Gore's Island. Pinnacle Island. Arrival at Oonalashka. Intercourse with the Natives and Russian Traders. Charts of the Russian Discoveries, communicated by Mr Ismyloff. Their Errors pointed out. Situation of the Islands visited by the Russians. Account of their Settlement at Oonalashka. Of the Natives ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... thousand incoherent journeys take, Whilst all th'advantage by it got, Was but to light earth's inconsiderable spot. The herd beneath, who see the weathercock of state Hung loosely on the church's pinnacle, Believe it firm, because perhaps the day is mild and still; But when they find it turn with the first blast of fate, By gazing upward giddy grow, And think the church itself does so; Thus fools, for being strong and num'rous known, Suppose the truth, like all the world, their own; ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... who are well inside the ring. But let us go back to Lexington. What a pinnacle the man reached, and what a drop he had! It has always seemed to me an extraordinary instance of the human leaven running through us all. What was the real cause of his collapse?" he asked, suddenly. "Was it drugs or drink? I have often wished ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... caught my glance. Mordecai—who, while he was thus speaking in paroxysms of alternate indignation and sorrow, had never for a moment ceased to turn over his books and boxes—had accidentally shaken a pile of tin cases from its pinnacle, and the whole rolled down at my feet. On one of them I saw, with no very strong surprise, the words—"Mortgage—Mortimer Castle." The eyes of both glanced in the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... piano becomes hysterically sad. This literature of woe, as Whitman calls it, this Maladie de Rene, as we like to call it in Europe, is in many ways a most humiliating and sickly phenomenon. Young gentlemen with three or four hundred a year of private means look down from a pinnacle of doleful experience on all the grown and hearty men who have dared to say a good word for life since the beginning of the world. There is no prophet but the melancholy Jacques, and the blue devils dance on ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her fondly, he despatched her to her mother, while he wrapped up his pistols and concealing them in the folds of his coat, hurried from the house with the anxious haste of one who is going to seek his prey. He felt somewhat like that broad-winged eagle which broods on the projecting pinnacle of yonder rocky peak in waiting for the sea-hawk who is stooping far below him, watching when the sun's rays shall glisten from the uprising fins of his favorite fish. But it was not a selfish desire to secure the prey which the terror ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... caravel in which "he followed the course west and northwest to latitude 47 north, there finding a broad inlet between 47 and 48, he entered, sailing therein more than twenty days . . . and found very much broader sea than was at the said entrance . . . a great island with a high pinnacle. . . . Being come into the North Sea . . . he returned to Acapulco." According to the story the old pilot tried to find his way to England in the hope of the Queen recouping him for goods taken by Cavendish, and furnishing him with a ship to essay the Northeast Passage again. The ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... all events, and we accordingly pulled across the water, landing at a part of the beach that looked eminently promising. The first thing was to determine the direction of a line running due south from the topmost pinnacle of the obelisk rock, and after a few trials with the compass, I got this. My next act was to erect a line perpendicular to this along the sandy margin of the basin, which I accomplished with the aid of my sextant, ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... was at its highest pinnacle of glory, Rich, the manager of Covent Garden, engaged Barry and Mrs. Cibber, performers of very great talents, and high reputation, and entered the lists with Garrick in the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. Barry performed the young Montague, and Mrs. Cibber the delicate and elegant ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... climbing wilderness of hills. Scattered amid the upward-sweeping stretches of maple and oak, groves of spruce and pine had the effect of passing rain-clouds. In the clear air, against the clear sky, every tree-top on the indented ridges stood out like a little pinnacle, till with a long, downward curve, both gracious and grandiose, the mountainside fell to the edge of a gem-like, broken-shored lake. It was a world extraordinarily green and clean. Its cleanness was even more amazing ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... who seems to have resided chiefly in Jerusalem, finished his career by martyrdom. Having proclaimed Jesus to be the true Messiah on a great public occasion, his fellow-citizens were so indignant that they threw him from a pinnacle of the temple. As he was still alive when he reached the ground, he was forthwith assailed with a shower of stones, and beaten to pieces with the club of ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... Kitty. She did not give up everything she had learned, but she became aware that she had deceived herself in supposing she could be what she wanted to be. Her eyes were, it seemed, opened; she felt all the difficulty of maintaining herself without hypocrisy and self-conceit on the pinnacle to which she had wished to mount. Moreover, she became aware of all the dreariness of the world of sorrow, of sick and dying people, in which she had been living. The efforts she had made to like it ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... and so it will have to be modified by adding that the mere fact of a place having a fine position is not quite sufficient, because the place must be of such a character that it is capable of having resources and strength added to it; a sharp pinnacle rock in the middle of the Mediterranean, for instance, might have a fine strategic position, and yet be unavailable as a naval base. Even here, however, we must pause to note that energy and will could do much toward making even a pinnacle rock a naval base; for ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... never been a mother, yet I think your sympathetic nature causes you to understand much which you have not experienced, and knowing as you do the great pride I feel in my son's career, and the ambition I have for him to rise to the very highest pinnacle of success and usefulness, I am sure you will comprehend my anxiety when I see him exhibiting an undue interest in a girl who is in every way his inferior, and wholly unsuited to fill the ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Trust Company, the monotony and drudgery of their former life settled down on them with an even greater insistence. The dusty ROOMS FOR RENT sign was tucked into the front window with its usual regularity, for do what she could, Mrs. Clark could not attain that pinnacle of the landlady's aspirations, a houseful of permanent roomers. The young men were inconstant, the middle-aged liable to matrimony, the old to death, and all to penury or change of occupation and residence. So the old fight went on as before during all the twenty-three years of the widow ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... ghostly radiance of starlight and painted walls. Tharon, riding ahead, went unerringly forward as if she traveled the open ways of the Valley floor. She turned from the main canyon toward the left and passed the mouth of Old Pete's snow-bed. Between this and that standing spire and pinnacle she went, with a strong certainty that presently stirred Billy ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... Immediately Fulbert, believing that her husband, who aided in the flight, designed to be rid of her, coinceived a dire revenge. He and some others broke into Abelard's chamber by night, and perpetrated on him the most brutal mutilation. Thus cast down from his pinnacle of greatness into an abyss of shame and misery, there was left to the brilliant master only the life of a monk. The priesthood and ecclesiastical office were canonically closed to him. Heloise, not yet twenty, consummated her work of self-sacrifice at the call of his jealous ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... whisperings of Nature—the goddess, as she has been called, of a hundred voices—until here and there he can pick out a few simple notes to which his own powers can resound. If, then, at a moment when he finds himself placed on a pinnacle from which he is called upon to take a perspective survey of the range of science, and to tell us what he can see from his vantage ground; if at such a moment after straining his gaze to the very verge of the horizon, and after describing the most distant of well-defined ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... a forest spread With silken trees upon thy head; And when I see that other dress Of flowers set in comeliness; When I behold another grace In the ascent of curious lace, Which, like a pinnacle, doth shew The top, and the top-gallant too; Then, when I see thy tresses bound Into an oval, square, or round, And knit in knots far more than I. Can tell by tongue, or True-love tie; Next, when those lawny films I see Play with a ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... Flora cautiously from her sonorous nap, Flame beguiled her with half a doughnut to her appointed chair, boosted her still cautiously to her pinnacle of books, and with various swift adjustments of fasteners, knotting of tie-strings,—an extra breathing hole jabbed through the beak, slipped the canary's beautiful blond countenance over ...
— Peace on Earth, Good-will to Dogs • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... at the great height of the structure he was mounting. Immediately in front of him swayed the naked shoulders of the three captive Atlanteans; he could see rose petals from their crowns fluttering in the strong warm breeze sweeping that man-made pinnacle for the worship of ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... neglect, too, that it was in their glorification of the rationality of the cosmos that they had their greatest effect. Through milleniums of civilization, man's understanding of celestial phenomena had been the very pinnacle of his intellect, and then as now popular exhibition of this sort was just as necessary, as striking, and as impressive. One does not have to go far to see how the paraphernalia of these early great astronomical clocks had great influence on philosophers ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
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