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More "Vastness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... repetition of nearly the same tone on successive syllables, resembling the repeated strokes of the bell. This element belongs to very grave delivery, especially where emotions of awe, sublimity, grandeur, and vastness are expressed, and is peculiarly adapted to devotional exercises. The following example well ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... not altogether the divine rage of the artist that had wrought this havoc. The confusion argued a power at war with itself rather than with its creations; the very vastness of it all suggested a deity tied as to time, but apparently unshackled as to space. That was it. There really wasn't as much time as there used to be. It was in his free evenings and on Sundays ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... across the yard, her calico wrapper blowing wildly and lashing about her slender legs, to her own house, the doors of which she locked. Presently the other woman followed her, stepping with the ponderous leisure which results from vastness of body and philosophy of mind. The autumn wind, swirling in impetuous gusts, had little effect upon her broadside of woollen shawl. She had not come out on that raw evening with nothing upon her head. She shook the kitchen door of her friend, and smiled with calm reassurance when ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Nearly every one is in Chinese dress (pien-yi) with the Member's badge pinned conspicuously on the breast. The idea speedily becomes a conviction that this after all is not extraneous to the nation but actually of the living flesh, a vital and imperative thing. The vastness and audacity of it all cannot fail to strike the imaginative mind, for the four or five hundred men who are gathered here typify, if they do not yet represent, the four or five hundred millions who make up the ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... While engaged in this examination, the idea flashed across his mind that instead of undertaking such a complicated scheme, it would be better to attempt to stretch a telegraph wire entirely across the ocean, from the shores of Newfoundland to the coast of Ireland. The vastness of this scheme pleased him, and its usefulness to the entire world, if it could be carried out, was clear to his mind from ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... along the lonely track. She heard no sound of hoofs. She tried to whistle a tune to keep herself cheery, but very soon it failed. The silent immensity of the veldt enveloped her. She had a forlorn feeling of being the only living being in all that vastness, except for a small uneasy spirit out of the great solitudes that wandered to and fro and sometimes fanned her with an icy breath that made her start ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... of cattle trucks, puffed away from the coast town next morning, and attached to it were the cars containing the new air squadron. Late that night it had reached one of the huge airdromes, the vastness of which unfolded itself to the astonished gaze of the boys at daybreak of the morning after. They had not dreamed that such acres and acres of hangars existed along the whole front. The war in the air assumed new proportions to them. They were housed in huts, ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... in regions haunted Of twilight, where the world is glacier planted, And pale as Loki in his cavern when The serpent's slaver burns him to the bones, I saw the phantasms of gigantic men, The prototypes of vastness, quarrying stones; Great blocks of winter, glittering with the morn's And evening's colors,—wild prismatic tones Of boreal beauty.—Like the three gray Norns, Silence and solitude and terror loomed Around them where they ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... Works of Nature and Art, as they are qualified to entertain the Imagination, we shall find the last very defective, in Comparison of the former; for though they may sometimes appear as Beautiful or Strange, they can have nothing in them of that Vastness and Immensity, which afford so great an Entertainment to the Mind of the Beholder. The one may be as Polite and Delicate as the other, but can never shew her self so August and Magnificent in the ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... those forms are worshipped in the world and are known to Brahmanas possessed of knowledge. Amongst the gods he has many names all of which are fraught with grave import. Verily, the meanings of those names are derived from either his greatness or vastness, or his feats, or his conduct. The Brahmanas always recite the excellent Sata-rudriya in his honour, that occurs in the Vedas as also that which has been composed by Vyasa. Verily, the Brahmanas and Rishis call him the eldest of all ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... railroads dwindled to insignificance. But the railroads could not affect the navigation of the lake quite so disastrously as that of the river; the lake in such a rivalry had some such advantage as that of the sea from its mere vastness, and from the expanses where the railroads could not follow the steamer in the mere nature of things. The iron horse had his way with the canals, though, and these monuments of a former period of enterprise grow more and more like its sepulcher, where he drank them ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... majestic columns of basalts support a lofty roof, under which the sea rolls its waves, while the vastness of the entrance allows the light of day to penetrate the ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... letters and telegrams have kept you pretty well up to date as to all that has occurred in this most God-forsaken corner of the world. The longer one stays here the more does the spirit of the moor sink into one's soul, its vastness, and also its grim charm. When you are once out upon its bosom you have left all traces of modern England behind you, but on the other hand you are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of the prehistoric people. On all sides of you as you walk are the houses of these forgotten ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... Lower down were six reapers all in a litter, their limbs crossing, their dead, unwinking eyes gazing upwards at the glare of heaven. These things I see as in a photograph. But soon, by the merciful provision of nature, the over-excited nerve ceased to respond. The very vastness of the horror took away from its personal appeal. Individuals merged into groups, groups into crowds, crowds into a universal phenomenon which one soon accepted as the inevitable detail of every scene. Only here and ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... him into vastness, King became aware of frame beds, placed at intervals in a row, each with a mat beside it. And there were several brass basins and ewers for water. Also there were some little bronze lamps; the guide ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... colonnades. There, too, they borrowed from the circle of saints the idea of the repeated Star figure. The colonnade not only encloses the court but is produced along the sides of the Palaces of Agriculture and Transportation to form two corridors of almost Egyptian vastness. These two features, the arches and the colonnades, here at the center of the palace group, strike the Exposition's note of breadth. Their decoration is the key to the festal ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... and made another attempt. Like more than one great barbaric warrior, he admired the Roman empire that had fallen, its vastness all in one, and its powerful organization under the hand of a single master. He thought he could resuscitate it, durably, through the victory of a new people and a new faith, by the hand of Franks and Christians. With this view he labored to conquer, convert, and govern. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... battles, a series punctuated only by names: Liege, Antwerp, Mons, Ypres, Verdun and Arras. And if nothing had happened besides the Titanic conflict of material armaments I believe that we should not yet be anywhere near realizing its vastness and its significance. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... British Christians as reconstructing the churches which had, in the Dioclesian persecution, been levelled to the ground. But in the fifth century Rome, oppressed on every side by enemies, and distracted with the vastness of her conquests, which she was no longer able to maintain, recalled her legions from Britain; and the Romanized Britons being left without protection, and having, during their subjection to the Romans, lost their ancient valour and ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... 1885, indeed, was one of expanding horizons, of many new friends, of quickened pulses generally. The vastness of London and its myriad interests seemed to be invading our life more and more. I can recall one summer afternoon, in particular, when, as I was in a hansom driving idly westward toward Hyde Park Gate, thinking of a hundred things at once, this ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Sky, land, and sea disappear together out of the world when the Placido—as the saying is—goes to sleep under its black poncho. The few stars left below the seaward frown of the vault shine feebly as into the mouth of a black cavern. In its vastness your ship floats unseen under your feet, her sails flutter invisible above your head. The eye of God Himself—they add with grim profanity—could not find out what work a man's hand is doing in there; and you would be free to call the devil to your aid with ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... men who, on finding themselves alone in a pathless forest, become appalled, almost panic stricken. The vastness of an unbroken wilderness subdues them and they quail before the relentless, untamed forces of nature. These are the men who grow enthusiastic—at home— about sylvan life, outdoor sports, but always strike camp and come home rather sooner than they intended. And ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... there was a King and Sovereign lord of the great territory of Manzi who was styled FACFUR, so great and puissant a prince, that for vastness of wealth and number of subjects and extent of dominion, there was hardly a greater in all the earth except the Great Kaan himself. [NOTE 1] But the people of his land were anything rather than warriors; all their delight was in women, and nought but women; and so it ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... into thy heart do Heaven's vengeance upon her! And now for thyself one word, for thou hast put Me from thee, Harmachis, and no more shall I come face to face with thee till, cycles hence, the last fruit of thy sin hath ceased to be upon this earth! Yet, through the vastness of the unnumbered years, remember thou this: the Love Divine is Love Eternal, which cannot be extinguished, though it be everlastingly estranged. Repent, my son; repent and do well while there is yet time, that at the dim end of ages thou ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... practice of the government organs to throw doubt on the extent of its ravages which were published, and the Government, apparently acting on these views, most culpably delayed the measures by which the visitation could be successfully combated. Now, their part was to admit to the fullest extent the vastness of the Famine, and make it the excuse for their want of energy and success in overcoming it. On the same principle, Mr. Labouchere, relying on figures supplied by Mr. Griffith, goes into what appears to be a fair ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... look on the ocean think of its vastness; of the many shores in many climes visited by its waves to ply "their priest-like task of clean ablution;" of cities and empires that rose beside its waters, flourished, decayed, and became a memory; of others that shall rise and also pass ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... mind, that is almost as extraordinary as his extent of information, is its singular activity. His energies never seem to flag—even for an instant; he does not seem to know what it is to be fatigued, or jaded. Some such quality as this, indeed, the vastness and universality of his acquirements called for, in order to make the weight endurable to himself, and to bear him up during his long career of political excitement. Take the routine of a day for instance. In his early life he has been known to attend, ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... he said, "I would appoint you at once to the command of a galley; but to do so would do you no service, for it would excite against you the jealousy of all the young nobles in the fleet. Besides, you are so young, that although the council at home cannot but acknowledge the vastness of the service you have rendered, they might make your age an excuse for refusing to confirm the appointment; but if you like to come as my third officer, I can promise you that you shall have rapid promotion, and speedily be in command of a galley. We Venetians have no prejudice against foreigners. ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty
... on the forward end. Molly stepped ahead carefully, with the strange intelligence of the logger's horse. Through the tall, straight, decorative trunks of trees the little convoy moved with the massive pomp of a dead warrior's cortege. And little Fabian Laveque, singing, a midget in the vastness, typified the indomitable spirit of these conquerors ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... its effect upon the judgment of these gentlemen, is the accepted vocabulary of poetic symbolism, that helps them, by habit, in dealing with Nature: a mountain, to them, is synonymous with height—a lake, with depth—the ocean, with vastness—the sun, with glory. ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... voyage as well as the vastness of his spoil roused a general enthusiasm throughout England. But the welcome which he received from Elizabeth on his return was accepted by Philip as an outrage which could only be expiated by war. Sluggish as it was, the blood of the ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... you not hear That what was seen behind the midnight mist, Their oar-blades tossing twinkles to the moon, Was but a fleet of fishing-craft belated By reason of the vastness ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... day the High North is luring Unto her vastness, taintlessly sweet; You who are steel-braced, straight-lipped, enduring, Dreadless in danger and dire in defeat: Honor the High North ever and ever, Whether she crown you, or whether she slay; Suffer ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... voyaged on the ocean, know the solemn feeling and the idea of vastness which is conveyed during a calm at night, when monsters of the deep are heard far and near as they come to the surface to inhale the air, or "blow," as it is called. The same feeling is experienced by the traveller up ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... talking about himself. It would seem as though he is never sure of his personality, as though he is ever yearning to have that personality confirmed from some source other than, extraneous to, his own ego. The reason for this must be that we Russians live diffused over a land of such vastness that, the more we grasp the immensity of the same, the smaller do we come to appear in our own eyes; wherefore, traversing, as we do, roads of a length of a thousand versts, and constantly losing our way, we come to let slip no opportunity of restating ourselves, ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... utterly beyond our adequate comprehension he must be. As men in old tales used to take diffused superhumans, the genii, and by magic word bring them down into a stoppered bottle where they could be held in manageable form, so man has taken the vastness of God and run ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... days was not the Loch Awe of the present. There was no railway; there was not a steamer on the lake, either public or private; there was no hotel by the waterside, only one or two small inns, imperceptible in the vastness of the almost uninhabited landscape. The lake was therefore almost a solitude, and this, added to the wildness of the climate and the peculiarly simple and temporary character of my habitation, made nature much ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... was a common fate, and yet it seemed an awful thing to say of any man. She listened without a word, and her stillness now was like the protest of an invincible unbelief. What need she care for the world beyond the forests? I asked. From all the multitudes that peopled the vastness of that unknown there would come, I assured her, as long as he lived, neither a call nor a sign for him. Never. I was carried away. Never! Never! I remember with wonder the sort of dogged fierceness I displayed. I had ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... "The vastness of their numbers, and their exceeding minuteness, are circumstances, discovered in the examination of these animalcules, of uncommon interest. In a drop of water examined by a power of 28.224 (magnified superficies) there were fifty in number, ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... The first object you catch sight of as you approach is the spire tapering into the sky, or the huge towers holding possession of the centre of the landscape—majestically beautiful—imposing by mere size amidst the large forms of Nature herself. As you go nearer, the vastness of the building impresses you more and more. The puny dwelling-place of the citizens creep at its feet, the pinnacles are glittering in the tints of the sunset, when down below among the streets and lanes ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Stafford, and of Anne, daughter of Thomas, duke [v.04 p.0672] of Gloucester, youngest son of Edward III.; Henry's mother was Margaret, daughter of Edmund Beaufort, 2nd duke of Somerset, grandson of John of Gaunt. Thus he came on both sides of the blood royal, and this, coupled with the vastness of his inheritance, made the young duke's future of importance to Edward IV. He was recognized as duke in 1465, and next year was married to Catherine Woodville, the queen's sister. On reaching manhood he was made a knight ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... to the Monico in the March wind, and went in with a group of Italians, passing the woman who sells foreign papers, and seeing names that transported them to Paris, to Milan, to Rome, to Berlin. A vastness of marble contained a myriad of swarthy strangers, releasing souls astoundingly foreign in vivid gesture and talk. They had coffee with cream like a burgeoning cloud floating ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... as a type of character which Christian men should emulate—a vision of life whose influence has touched millions with its inspiration. The price which had to be paid to attain this nobleness of character and this vastness of holy influence was ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... Maintenon wrote to one of her friends: "Why cannot I give you my experience? Why cannot I make you comprehend the ennui which devours the great, and the troubles that fill their days? Do you not see that I am dying of sadness, in a fortune the vastness of which could not be easily imagined? I have been young and pretty; I have enjoyed pleasures; I have spent years in intellectual intercourse; I have attained favor; and I protest to you, my dear child, that all such conditions ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... in impressing his auditors with the vastness of his information, acquired by reading and study. He had, moreover, a kind of childlike vanity in making men feel that he was not only extraordinary, but greatly their superior, even when they got him ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... sky, or burrowing, a fugitive, in suffocating virgin forests. The soul and the sea—they are the beloved provinces of this sailor and psychologue. But he also recognises the relativity of things. The ineluctable vastness and sadness of life oppress him. In Karain we read: "Nothing could happen to him unless what happens to all—failure and death." His heroes are failures, as are heroes in all great poetry and fiction, and their failure is recorded with muffled irony. The fundamental pessimism ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... etiquette, might leave this world is well known to all, the "seppuku," the elegant name for the vulgar term "hara-kiri" or "belly-cutting." To one who is sensitive to tales of blood, unexpurgated Japanese history must be a dreadful thing. The vastness of the multitudes who died by their own hands would be incredible, were there not ample evidence of the most convincing nature. It may be said with truth that suicide became apotheosized, a condition that I suppose cannot be said to have prevailed ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... immensity, where shall I find my place? Oh, that I might sleep eternally! Yes, that would be best of all—to sink into sleep never ending, unbroken, and unbreakable, to be absorbed into the cool vastness of the night, and lie in her great arms for ever. Oh, Night! whom I have ever loved, you bring your sleep to wearied millions— bring me sleep eternal. But no, the stars are above the night, and above the stars ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... for Paris he was delighted at the idea. Jeanne and Cayrol were leaving Nice at the end of the week. Lost in the vastness of the capital, the lovers would be more secure. They could see each other at leisure. Serge would hire a small house in the neighborhood of the Bois de Boulogne, and there they could enjoy each ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... According to his arrangement, there were to be two archbishops, one at London and one at York. But we cannot regret that this scheme was not carried out, as an archiepiscopal see is much more picturesquely framed by the hills which encircle Canterbury than it could have been by the dingy vastness of ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... Sir William Herschel, more than to any other astronomer, for our knowledge of the stellar universe. It was he who ascertained the vastness of its dimensions, and attempted to delineate its structural configuration. He also explored the star depths, which occupy the infinitude of space by which we are surrounded, and made many wonderful discoveries, ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... time the cargo space was again pumped empty and the great door opened to the vastness of space, Hoddan had a very broad view of things. He'd said that same day to Fani that a practical man can always make what he wants to do look like a sacrifice of his personal inclinations to others' welfare. He began ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... uniformity. It has not succeeded in showing that the human will comes under the same rule. It has not succeeded in silencing the voice within us, which claims superiority for the moral over the physical. And when the utmost extent of human knowledge is compared with the vastness of nature, the claim to extend the induction from generality to universality is seen to be utterly untenable. So much as this, indeed, Science has rendered highly probable, that the uniformity of nature is never broken except for a moral purpose. It is only for such a purpose ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... a beauty of their own, those great fens," he said, "a beauty of the sea, of boundless expanse and freedom. Overhead the arch of heaven spreads more ample than elsewhere, and that vastness gives such cloud-lands, such sunrises, such sunsets, as can be seen nowhere else ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... the pause that followed there was an instant during which the universe seemed to Hugh Millner like a sounding-board bent above his single consciousness. If he spoke, what thunders would be sent back to him from that intently listening vastness? ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... on to the nodding wheat, the rivers, cliffs, and islands, to the cities and the people everywhere for thousands of miles. What is the effect of this vastness on the thought of a child? Can you not realize for yourself any clear night that you may gaze at the numberless stars in the arching skies? How small, how infinitely little are we in all the great universe! Have we the imagination to grasp the saving thought that comes ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... and cloudy, in rain and sleet and snow had she approached that group, as she approached it now! Here were the people, still, in the midst of whom her earliest associations had been formed, changed, indeed,-but yet the same. No, the change was in her, and the very vastness of that change came as a shock. These had stood still, anchored to their traditions, while she —had she grown? or merely wandered? She had searched, at least, and seen. She had once accepted them—if indeed ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... leading from one to the other, and herds and flocks browzing, and you have Switzerland before you. I admit, however, that these accessories add to the variety and interest of the landscape, and perhaps heighten the idea of its vastness. ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... wretched, so totally forlorn, who has been born under so hard a fate and to such travail as never to have felt the vastness of the Divine generosity? Look even at those who complain of and live malcontent with their lot, and you will find they are not altogether without a portion in the celestial generosity; and there is none on whom some drops have not ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... idea of him our minds are capable of: all which is done, I say, by enlarging those simple ideas we have taken from the operations of our own minds, by reflection; or by our senses, from exterior things, to that vastness to ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... be narrow at times, with nothing between it and a gulf, and it may be pitched at an angle that compels the use of "all-fours;" but with patience and discretion the ultimate peak is conquered without rope-ladder or ice-axe, and the vastness of the world below, gray and cold at some hours, and at others lighted with a splendor which words cannot transcribe, is revealed to the adventurer ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... had fallen, though the wind still held steady, and this surface calmness, under-run by a gentle swell, served only to emphasize the vastness of the view. The island seemed immensely remote and immense in size, the far snow-covered mountains the mountains of a land where giants had lived and from which they ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... unexpecting step the narrow margin of the lake. Sometimes a heavy swell gave it expression; at others, only its varied coloring, which I found more admirable every day, and which gave it an air of mirage instead of the vastness of ocean. Then there was a grandeur in the feeling that I might continue that walk, if I had any seven-leagued mode of conveyance to save fatigue, for hundreds of miles without an ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... the woods with cries, swelling the murmuring rivulets with tears, her noble parents with a generous rage reviling her, and her betray'd sister loading her bow'd head with curses and reproaches, and all about her looking forlorn and sad. Judge, oh judge, my adorable brother, of the vastness of my courage and passion, when even this deplorable prospect cannot defend me from the resolution of giving you admittance into my apartment this night, nor shall ever drive you from ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... through all the intoxication of it there is a certain note of terror and bewilderment. The soul of Beethoven was a tormented soul. The passion and the awe of the infinite seemed to toss it to and fro from heaven to hell, Hence its vastness. Which is the greater, Mozart or Beethoven? Idle question! The one is more perfect, the other more colossal. The first gives you the peace of perfect art, beauty, at first sight. The second gives you ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... part of this disaster has not been told. Indeed, the most graphic description that can be written will not tell half the tale. No pen can describe nor tongue tell the vastness ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... people were looking up at the roof of the Liberal Arts building. Countless small black specks could be seen moving along the roof. Then it was perceived that those specks were really men and women. It is only by such a comparison that they could realize the vastness of these buildings. ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... task is difficult—perhaps never to be more than approximately achieved. But, considering the vastness of the interests at stake, its difficulty is no reason for pusillanimously passing it by; but rather for devoting every energy to its mastery. And if we only proceed systematically, we may very soon get at results ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... triumph, Jesus, Gird thy sword upon thy thigh; Neither earth nor Hell's own vastness Can Thy mighty power defy. In Thy Name such glory dwelleth Every foe withdraws in fear, All the wide creation trembleth Whensoever Thou ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... Bellagio, so fortunate in its command of the three branches of the Lake of Como, yet the ridge of the Promontory itself, being for the most part covered with vines interspersed with olive-trees, accords but ill with the vastness of the green unappropriated mountains, and derogates not a little from the sublimity of those finely contrasted pictures to which it is a foreground. The vine, when cultivated upon a large scale, notwithstanding all that may be said of it in poetry,[64] makes but a dull formal appearance in ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... after week we travelled across that endless desert by a way known to Harut on which water could be found, the only living things in all its vastness, meeting with no accidents save that of the sandstorm in which the ivory was lost. I was much alone during that time, since Harut spoke little and Ragnall and his wife were wrapped up in ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... may be more flashy, and show more symptoms of polished bedizenment in their construction; but three-fourths of them sink into dwarflings and mediocrities when compared with the rare old buildings of the past. In strength and beauty, in vastness of design and skill of workmanship, in nobility of outline and richness of detail, the religious fabrics of these times fall into insignificance beside their grand old predecessors; and the manner in which they are cut up into patrician and plebeian quarters, into fashionable ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... unwritten, the nameless. The leaders, sons of fame, conspicuous in lustre, eminent in place; these are the few, whose great individuality burns with distinct, starry light through the dark of ages. Such stars, without the starry way, would not teach us the vastness of heaven; and the 'way,' without these, were not sufficient to gladden and glorify the night with pomp of ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... straw that bedded the orchard aisles. It seemed to him that if he could only be there again for a moment he would be willing to spend the rest of his life in prison. As it was, he was in prison; it did not matter how wide the bounds were that kept him from his home. He hated the vastness of the half world where he could come and go unmolested, this bondage that masked itself as such ample freedom. To be shut out was the same as to ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... him and admired him as he stood there quivering, pondering over all that he evoked from his dream. But she was frightened by the vastness of such hopes, and could not restrain a cry of ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... being the real continuation), but at this point we turned off into a field, deep in grass and studded with flowers, where some comfortable-looking boulders invited us to rest. Miss Blunt,—whose soul thrills with delight at the vastness and beauty of nature,—never allowed opportunities of committing the choicest bits to canvas or paper, to escape her; and, some picturesque display having caught her eye, directly she had located herself on an accommodating ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... sacrifice when, by the putting away of foolish desires, we find God! And to find God, through the following of Jesus Christ, is to gain so much (even in this world, and without waiting for the next) that those who gain it never cease to be amazed at the vastness of it. ...
— The Golden Fountain - or, The Soul's Love for God. Being some Thoughts and - Confessions of One of His Lovers • Lilian Staveley
... was transported to the bowels of the earth, and that he stood alone in a mighty cavern supported by enormous columns of rough and primaeval rock, lost, as they ascended, in the vastness of a shadow athwart whose eternal darkness no beam of day had ever glanced. And in the space between these columns were huge wheels, that whirled round and round unceasingly, and with a rushing and roaring noise. Only to the right and ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... fact about this eruption was, that the mountain did not make use of its old crater. The original vent must have become so jammed and consolidated, in the few years between 1785 and 1812, that it could not be reopened even by a steam-force the vastness of which may be guessed at from the vastness of the area which it had shaken for two years. So when the eruption was over it was found that the old crater-lake, incredible as it may seem, remained undisturbed, as far as has been ascertained. But close to it, and separated only ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... wonders, and compare my sensations with those I had already experienced in the air. He told me that my wish might easily be gratified; adding that, although he had never been beyond the top of a steeple, he could take it upon him to assure me, that the feeling of vastness and sublimity induced by an aerial ascent, was almost in direct contrast to the sensations of the diver—the one being comparable to the effects produced by the enlarged views of generalization, indulged in ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark Drowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape, that shone Sheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out; nor mark Is any of him at all so stark But vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resur- rection, A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, | joyless days, dejection. Across my foundering deck shone A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... the loom of the monstrous airship had been visible. The eye could hardly at first glance take in the vastness of this stupendous thing, that overshadowed all the central portion of the huge enclosure. It gave a sense of power, of swift potentialities, of speed unlimited. It stood there, tense, ready, waiting, with a hum of engines audible in its vast heart, ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... with mountains, plains, rocks, waters, forests, animals, and a thousand objects, glorious and beautiful in the sunlight. Theology became visibly a shrivelled thing. Men grew to be conscious of the vastness of the universe. At the same time and by the same process the Encyclopaedia gave them a key to the plan, a guiding thread in the immense labyrinth. The genealogical tree, or classification of arts and sciences, which with a few modifications was borrowed from Bacon and appeared ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... pupils with that sincere emotion to which the occasion had given rise, that they should speak always respectfully of their elders, but especially in the most tender and solemn tones of the dead; after pointing out to them the perniciousness of a low and vulgar curiosity, and expatiating on the vastness and superiority of the spiritual life, compared with the earthly and carnal, I paused, only to give, further on, a fuller illustration ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... a large one, in an oak opening and all around the trees rose like a mighty circular wall. The red shadows of a sun that had just set lingered on the western edge of the forest, but in the east all was black. Out of this vastness came the rustling sound of the wind as it moved among the autumn leaves. In the opening was a core of ruddy light and the living forms of men, but it was only a tiny spot in ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... emphasised its vastness. It was not, I suppose, a great Forest, but to-day it seemed as though we were winding further and further, through labyrinth after labyrinth of clouding obscurity, winding towards some destination from which we could never again ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... these great deposits, they must have picked up the material composing them either from the shores of the sea or the beds of streams. And when we consider the vastness of the drift-deposits, extending, as they do, over continents, with a depth of hundreds of feet, it would puzzle us to say where were the sea-beaches or rivers on the globe that could produce such inconceivable quantities of gravel, sand, and clay. The ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... been killing rats. Blood did not disturb him; but what amazed him, and would have surprised anyone who stood in that ruinous room, was that there were clean new sheets on the bed. Had you seen the state of the furniture and the floor, O my reader, and the vastness of the old cobwebs and the black dust that they held, the dead spiders and huge dead flies, and the living generation of spiders descending and ascending through the gloom, I say that you also would have been surprised at the sight of those nice clean sheets. Rodriguez noted the fact ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... The vastness of the Rocky Mountains is beyond comprehension, they sprawl the length of the continent. No one can hope to see all their beauty, all their grandeur and awesomeness in a single lifetime. From the crest of the Divide, north, west, and ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... something of a fancy that it was never made, that it has stood there since the morning of the world. It has the lightness and the strength, the absence of ornament and the essential beauty, the vastness and the perfection, of a ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... leaned back to gaze at the stars and contemplate the vastness of the universe, compared to which even Big Joe ...
— A Matter of Magnitude • Al Sevcik
... so. If finished, it would be the highest monument of its kind standing on the face of the globe; and yet, after all, what would it be even then as compared with one of the great pyramids? Modern attempts cannot bear comparison with those of the old world in simple vastness. But in lieu of simple vastness, the modern world aims to achieve either beauty or utility. By the Washington monument, if completed, neither would be achieved. An obelisk with the proportions of a needle may be very graceful; but an obelisk which requires an expanse ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... mountains. For what seemed to Gloria a thousand miles there was the broken wilderness of mountains gashed with gorges, crowned with peaks, painted with sunlight and distance, glinting white here, veiled in purple there. She gasped at the bigness of it; it spoke of the vastness of the world and of the world's primitive savagery. And yet it did not repel; it fascinated and its message had the seeming of an old, oft-told, and half-forgotten tale. It threatened with its spires as cruel as bared fangs, and yet it beckoned and invited with its blue distances. ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... reform in the relations between Great Britain and Ireland would be the main work of the present Parliament.... The country had no sufficient warning—I think I may say the country had no warning at all—that any proposals of the magnitude and vastness of those which were unfolded to us last night were to be considered in the present Parliament, much less were to form the first subject of consideration upon the meeting of this Parliament. I am perfectly aware that there exists in our Constitution no principle ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... The walls are painted in rich, sombre colours, and the light comes very gently through the good old stained-glass windows. It is a southern church, dark, cool, and somewhat mysterious; quite foreign to the glare and heat of reality. People are lost in its solemn vastness, and even with many worshippers it is a solitude where most holy vigils could be kept, a mystic place where the southern imagination might well lose itself in such sacred ardours as Saint Theresa felt. The traveller liked to linger here; in the day-time when he peered vainly at the re-redos ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... the vastness of this plan seemed to keep the public mind in a state of suspense. For nearly a month, indeed, after its introduction, no indications of serious or determined opposition were discernible, although Fox, when the subject was first started, pointed out many objections to its provisions. Endeavours, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... (an exercise much in vogue in Boston), I might perhaps find reasons for my rambling off. To say that Boston did not interest me would be the reverse of the truth. It interested me deeply; but it did not excite me with a sense of novelty or vastness. One can only repeat the obvious truth that it is like an exceptionally dignified and stately English town. One instinctively looks around for a cathedral, and finds the State House in its stead. To the founders of this city, the glory of God was not a thing ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... insect in such a labyrinth of a place. He forgot where he put things, and then, overcome by the vastness and number of rooms, forgot what he was looking for, losing himself in an abstracted and fruitless survey of the walls. He must buy things to hang on the walls, especially over certain stains on the wall of the parlour, or throne-room, to which in the heat of battle, doubtless, certain items of ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... sale of a paper cover all its expenses and that the advertising revenue is all clear profit. The average newspaper reader would be amazed if he knew at how great a cost the day's news is laid before him. A dignified journal displays no inclination to cry from the housetops the vastness of its expenditure, but from time to time an accident enables the public to obtain information in this connexion. The evidence taken by a recent Copyright Commission disclosed that the expenditure of the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... heart of a savage, in a way that no wisdom of his wisest, humblest child can see, or imagine that it sees. Many who have never beheld the face of God, may yet have caught a glimpse of the hem of his garment; many who have never seen his shape, may yet have seen the vastness of his shadow; thousands who have never felt the warmth of its folds, ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... on the prairie a lonely coyote howled, and a faint wind, that was now like snow-cooled wine, brought the sighing of limitless grasses out of the silence. There was no cloud in the crystalline ether, and something in the vastness and stillness that spoke of infinity, brought a curious sense of peace to him. Impostor though he was, he would leave Silverdale better than he found it, and afterwards it would be of no great moment what became of him. Countless generations of toiling men had borne their ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... might as well insist on a faithful representation of the household furniture of the burgomaster of Zoetenaeg, which is the smallest village in Belgium, in drawing the map of Europe to scale. At the critical moment this more than continental vastness gathers to a wedge-like determination that goes home. He means to ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... screen her lover and to aid his cause.... The scenes are laid among that curious mixture of Oriental magnificence and barbaric discomfort, of lavish expenditure and shabby makeshift, to be found in a Russian castle, with its splendid vastness, the immensity of its grounds, the immensity of the forests on all sides of it, and the general scale of immensity on which everything about it, and within it, is invariably conducted. Add to these Russian prisons, Paris salons, French convents, the lyric stage at Milan, Socialists, Nihilists, ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... extensive view. Only for a little. Plans were out for the erection of flats in Magnolia Road also. And again a few years, and all the flats in either road might be pulled down, and new buildings, of a vastness at present unimaginable, might ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... felt it, too, and more than once had sat down with her pencil to transcribe her thoughts. She thought that it was not exactly fear, but an overpowering realization of her own atomity; a sort of cringing of the soul away from the utter vastness of the world; a growing consciousness of the unlimited bigness of things; an insight of the infinite power of God—the yearning of the soul for understanding of the mysteries of life ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... man remained motionless, with the stolidity of the veteran hunter waiting to make sure. Torpor rapidly seized on Parker's mind. He shouted as best he could, but his voice was hoarse from hours of shouting into the vastness of the deserted woods. His faculties were growing befogged. He dared not exert himself enough to keep awake, for his rock was but a narrow bulwark. It seemed to be ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... our work—on the fifth day from this—God willing—we shall march. I engaged two more pagazis besides two guides, named Asmani and Mabruki. If vastness of the human form could terrify any one, certainly Asmani's appearance is well calculated to produce that effect. He stands considerably over six feet without shoes, and has shoulders broad enough ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... he sat with his head leaning forward over his silver plate. A heavy silence fell. Death hovered over that table—and also, as it were, the breath of past ages. The multitude of lights, the polished floor of costly wood, the bare whiteness of walls wainscotted with marble, the vastness of the room, the imposing forms of furniture, carved heavily in ebony, impressed me with a sense of secular and austere magnificence. For centuries there had always been a Riego living in this fortress-like palace, ruling this portion of the New World with the whole majesty of his ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... timorous under the stars. The vastness of the plains, the sweep of the wind under the unbroken arch, frighten them; they are made for the close comforts of the barn-yard; and the apprehension is contagious, as every ranchman knows. Waite realized the need of becoming good friends with his animals. Night after night, riding ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... Orleans, and PARIS! Why they should print Paris in capitals, rather than Boston and Philadelphia, I am at a loss to conceive; but such an announcement does indeed demand some note of admiration at the vastness of the enterprise of REPRINT & Co., who, to give Mr Blackwood more time to attend to the getting up of each successive number of his work, thus undertake to relieve him of any share in seeing to the supply of the Continent of Europe. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... irreparable havoc in his life. It was only another step to suggest that, once they were married, her father's strong liking for him would soon bring about their forgiveness. He pressed and pressed these points, pausing at times to declare the vastness of his affection for her, until at last, against her better judgment, and in spite of a lurking distrust of him, of which she could not rid herself, she yielded to his persistence and the overwhelming influence of his stronger personality, and ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... he sees her beautiful, and knows That he must love her; and the doom is sealed Of all his happiness and all the woes That shall be born of pregnant years hereafter. The swift poise of a head, a flutter of laughter— And love flows in on him, its vastness pent Within his narrow life: the pain it brings, Boundless; for love is infinite discontent With the poor lonely life ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... conscious of the power still at his command, and the mighty stake for which he was about to play, Alroy in a great degree recovered his usual spirit and self-possession. His energy returned with his excited pulse, and the vastness of the impending danger seemed only to stimulate the fertility of ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... which he has called Soho, about two miles from Birmingham, which the very ingenious proprietor shewed me himself to the best advantage. I wish Johnson had been with us: for it was a scene which I should have been glad to contemplate by his light[1348]. The vastness and the contrivance of some of the machinery would have 'matched his mighty mind.' I shall never forget Mr. Bolton's expression to me: 'I sell here, Sir, what all the world desires to have—POWER.' He had about seven hundred people at work. I contemplated him ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... possible that these dream-like masses, with their sparkling lights, like reversed heavens, are the rude, restless, discordant gehennas which they sometimes seem to us by day. And yet I realize the awfulness and vastness of these great living creatures far more than in the belittling and disillusionizing daylight. The anchored or passing vessels only add to the sense of seclusion,—the former with a solitary lantern at the stern, the latter perhaps ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... learned, exact, and measured, but definite and decided. The novelty was in the application of it, in the new life breathed into it, in the profound and intense feelings called forth by its ideas and objects, in the air of vastness and awe thrown about it, in the unexpected connection of its creeds and mysteries with practical life, in the new meaning given to the old and familiar, in the acceptance in thorough earnest, and with keen purpose to call it into action, of ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... Vastness of the theme; scenical opportunities; the poetry independent of the creed; Milton's choice of subject; King Arthur; Paradise Lost; attractions of the theme: primitive religion, natural beauty, ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... frontier hurled; In the camp at the bend of the river, with its dozen saloons aglare, Its gambling dens a-riot, its gramophones all a-blare; Crimped with the crimes of a city, sin-ridden and bridled with lies, In the hush of my mountained vastness, in the flush of my midnight skies. Plague-spots, yet tools of my purpose, so natheless I suffer them thrive, Crushing my Weak in their clutches, that only my ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... the open door—a doorway so wide that a hundred like them could have marched through it abreast. A thousand feet away across the vastness of the room they could see Targo's brother and ten of his men—sitting on mats upon the floor, talking earnestly. Before them stood a stone bench on which were a number of golden goblets ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... perplexity or uneasy reflections. The will, being perfectly dead to all its own appetites, was become void of every human inclination, both natural and spiritual, and only inclined to whatever God pleased, and to whatever manner He pleased. This vastness or enlargedness, which is not bounded by anything, however plain or simple it may be, increases every day. My soul in partaking of the qualities of her Spouse seems also to partake of His immensity. My prayer was in an openness ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... caverns which underlie various parts of this country are of a description suitable in extent and magnificence to the general scale of nature here, in lakes, rivers, cataracts, valleys in which empires are cradled, prairies of scarcely conceivable vastness, and mountains whose bases are amid perpetual flowers and where frozen seas have never intermission of their crashing thunders. In Virginia, New-York, and other states, the caves of Weyer, Schoharie, and many that are less famous but not inferior in beauty ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... where the crowd had been thickest, the tempers highest, and the yells most strident, there now stretched before this tired, excited throng, the peaceful vastness of ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... heavenly army. Chariots of fire and horsemen of fire thronged it in every part. High up into the viewless air mounted their wheeling bands: rank beyond rank, and army beyond army, they seemed to stretch on into the vastness of space, until the gazer's wearied eye was unable to gaze on them. And all of these were gathered round his master. They were God's host, keeping guard over God's servant. And they who would injure him must first turn aside those flashing swords, must break ...
— The Rocky Island - and Other Similitudes • Samuel Wilberforce
... at its ultimate miscarriage. Probably, as a single trial, it was the most severe that Mr. Lincoln ever suffered. Hope then went through the painful process of being pruned by failure, and it was never tortured by another equal mutilation. Moreover, the vastness of the task, the awful cost of success, were now, for the first time, appreciated. The responsibility of a ruler under so appalling a destiny now descended with a weight that could never become greater upon the shoulders of that lonely man in the White House. A solitary man, ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... FOLDED MOUNTAINS. The vastness of the forces which wrinkle the crust is best realized in the presence of some lofty mountain range. All mountains, indeed, are not the result of folding. Some, as we shall see, are due to upwarps or to ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... especially on the roadsides quite up to the Damascus Gate, the country filled rapidly with all kinds of temporary shelters for pilgrims to the Passover. Ben-Hur visited the strangers, and talked with them; and returning to his tents, he was each time more and more astonished at the vastness of their numbers. And when he further discovered that every part of the world was represented among them—cities upon both shores of the Mediterranean far off as the Pillars of the West, river-towns in distant India, ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... when it again comes glorious on its predicted return. Were the Eternal Being to slacken the course of a planet, or increase even the distance of the fixed stars, the decree would be soon known on earth. Our ignorance is great, because so is our knowledge; for it is from the mightiness and vastness of what we do know that we imagine the illimitable unknown creation. And to whom has God made these revelations? To a worm that next moment is to be in darkness? To a piece of earth momentarily ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... rosy coronal wings; his native Earth, a bright greenish point suspended in the dark gulf below it; Mars, nearer, smaller, a little ocher speck above the shrunken sun. Above him, below him, in all directions was vastness, blackness, emptiness. Ebon infinity, sprinkled with ...
— Salvage in Space • John Stewart Williamson
... Australian casual worker (at 30s. a week and rations) went his way cheerfully. He had to find some odd bullocks six miles out, in the flat, grey, illimitable plain; then find the herd of milkers somewhere else in that vague vastness, and break seven of them to harness; fix up a dray and make cattle yokes; and then go out into the depths to find a camp thirty miles out, without a fence or a track, and hardly a tree, to ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... Satronius, weak, ill and tottering on my feet, needing all my will power to stand steadily and not reel, with my head buzzing and my ears humming, feeling large and light and queer, I was abased and crushed by the vastness and hugeness of the room and by the uncountable crowd which ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... antagonism to Spain was bred in the bone. But his insistence upon immediate action was also stimulated by his opposition to Monroe and the secretary of state. Clay's great speech on recognition was made May 24 and 25, 1818. His imagination kindled at the vastness of South America: "The loftiest mountains; the most majestic rivers in the world; the richest mines of the precious metals; and the choicest productions of the earth." "We behold there," said he, "a spectacle still more interesting and sublime—the ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... but there is no room for debate concerning the meaning of the parental relation. It interprets itself. Tell a child that a man is his father, and he can be told no more. The name interprets the relation. In earlier times the vastness of the creation was but dimly appreciated, and then the idea of God was equally contracted. Jesus taught that the Deity, whether the conception of Him was small or large, was to be interpreted in terms of fatherhood. What an ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... brighter out here, and the constellations looked a little flattened. Textbook tables came back to him. He had traveled 47 light-years—he couldn't remember how many billions of miles that was. Even so, it was only the tiniest hop-skip-and-jump in the measureless vastness ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... poem, or other esthetic work, entirely western, fresh and limitless—altogether our own, without a trace or taste of Europe's soil, reminiscence, technical letter or spirit. My days and nights, as I travel here—what an exhilaration!—not the air alone, and the sense of vastness, but every local sight and feature. Everywhere something characteristic—the cactuses, pinks, buffalo grass, wild sage—the receding perspective, and the far circle-line of the horizon all times of day, especially forenoon—the clear, pure, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... vastness of our aerial effort on the British front in France can be gathered from the R.F.C. work performed on a typical ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... passes to sleep, Still full of the feats that he did, Long ago in Olympian wars, He closes it down with the sweep Of its slow-turning luminous lid, Its cover of darkness and stars, Wrought once by Hephaestus of old With violet and vastness and gold. ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... nineteen centuries before the eyes of the world as a type of character which Christian men should emulate—a vision of life whose influence has touched millions with its inspiration. The price which had to be paid to attain this nobleness of character and this vastness of holy ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... had experiences which we have not been able to explain: a sudden sense of loneliness, or a feeling of wonder or awe in the face of the universal vastness. Or we have had a fleeting visitation of light like an illumination from some other sun, giving us in a quick flash an assurance that we are from another world, that our origins are divine. What we saw there, or felt, or heard, may have been contrary to all that we had been taught in the schools ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... They had built their fire, not a large one, in an oak opening and all around the trees rose like a mighty circular wall. The red shadows of a sun that had just set lingered on the western edge of the forest, but in the east all was black. Out of this vastness came the rustling sound of the wind as it moved among the autumn leaves. In the opening was a core of ruddy light and the living forms of men, but it was only a tiny ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... and din indistinguishable. It seems hardly possible that these dream-like masses, with their sparkling lights, like reversed heavens, are the rude, restless, discordant gehennas which they sometimes seem to us by day. And yet I realize the awfulness and vastness of these great living creatures far more than in the belittling and disillusionizing daylight. The anchored or passing vessels only add to the sense of seclusion,—the former with a solitary lantern at the stern, the latter ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... the ribbon, "his" Project Hot Rod was in view before him—appearing to be a half moon which looked larger than the real moon in the background behind it; and seeming to stand in the vastness of space at a distance from the far end of the long anchor tube, a narrow band of bright green glowing near its ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... with a bang and a clang, and the little boy from far Virginia, with the wistful grey eyes and the sunny curls was alone in a throng of curious school-fellows, and in the dimness, the strangeness, the vastness of a hoary, mysterious mansion full of echoes, and of quaint crannies and closets where shadows lurked by day as well as by candle-light. Alone, yet not unhappy—for Edgar the Dreamer was holding full sway. With the departure of his foster-father, all check was removed from his fancy which ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... is not the earth, as Addison understood it, but the entire sidereal universe, depicted not as the infinity we now know it to be, but as a definite object, so insulated in the vastness of space as to be perceptible to the distant Fiend as a minute star, and no larger in comparison with the courts of Heaven—themselves not wholly seen—than such a twinkler matched with the full-orbed moon. Such a representation, if it diminishes the grandeur ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... shines in loveliness revealed. Now first he sees her beautiful, and knows That he must love her; and the doom is sealed Of all his happiness and all the woes That shall be born of pregnant years hereafter. The swift poise of a head, a flutter of laughter— And love flows in on him, its vastness pent Within his narrow life: the pain it brings, Boundless; for love is infinite discontent With the poor lonely life of ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... is held up to derision, and so is the idea of God's interest in individual character; man, the atom, must not think that the Creator is specially anxious for his fate, and is bidden to measure his insignificance against the vastness of the heavenly bodies; and in conclusion we are pertly told that if God really cares about the individual as such, "He has a queer way of showing it." In this view—the view of Monism—it is indeed true that "the individual withers, and the world ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... man has his star: without insisting upon this, we may reflect that there is no one universal opinion which has not its foundation in truth. Tradition may well have dropped the thought from Adam downwards, that the stars may some day be our thrones. We know their several vastness, and can guess their glory: verily a mighty meed for miserable services on earth, to find a just ambition gladdened with the rule of spheres, to which Terra is a point; while that same ambition is sanctified and legalized by ruling as vicegerent ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... illusion was by the use of masks. These were rendered necessary by the vastness of the ancient theatres, and the custom of ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... if fate had been different he would never have seen her, perhaps. Yes, he should be satisfied; he had seen his star. And when it faded, as fade it must, in the vastness of the dark—why, what then? Well, at least he had seen his star; even this much is denied many. So, he would live it out and be thankful he had been permitted to feel the great thrill—to know that at least he had the heart ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... thought and dreamed only a little time before they began to explain the marvelous earth on which they found themselves and the strange things that happened in it; the vastness and beauty of the fields, woods, sky and sea, the force of the wind, the coming and going of the day and night, the warmth of summer when everything grew, and the cold of winter when everything died, the rush of the storm and ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... track. She heard no sound of hoofs. She tried to whistle a tune to keep herself cheery, but very soon it failed. The silent immensity of the veldt enveloped her. She had a forlorn feeling of being the only living being in all that vastness, except for a small uneasy spirit out of the great solitudes that wandered to and fro and sometimes fanned her with an icy breath that made ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... I made my first journey to Alaska for the purpose of searching out for myself the best big-game shooting grounds which were to be found in that territory. Few people who have not traveled in that country have any idea of its vastness. Away from the beaten paths, much of its 700,000 square miles is practically unknown, except to the wandering prospector and the Indian hunter. Therefore, since I could obtain but little definite information as to just where to go for the best shooting, I determined ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... to move another way. My language shall be honest, full of truth, My flames as smooth and spotless as my youth: I will not entertain that wandring thought, Whose easie current may at length be brought To a loose vastness. ...
— The Faithful Shepherdess - The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10). • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... wonder of utilitarian architecture, with something of a fancy that it was never made, that it has stood there since the morning of the world. It has the lightness and the strength, the absence of ornament and the essential beauty, the vastness and the perfection, ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... it was not altogether the divine rage of the artist that had wrought this havoc. The confusion argued a power at war with itself rather than with its creations; the very vastness of it all suggested a deity tied as to time, but apparently unshackled as to space. That was it. There really wasn't as much time as there used to be. It was in his free evenings and on Sundays that ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... humble if we have much knowledge, for it only serves to better show the vastness of the unknown, and to compare the little we have discovered for ourselves with the amplitude of that which we owe to the ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... on the ocean, know the solemn feeling and the idea of vastness which is conveyed during a calm at night, when monsters of the deep are heard far and near as they come to the surface to inhale the air, or "blow," as it is called. The same feeling is experienced by the traveller ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... Vastness! and Age! and Memories of Eld! Silence! and Desolation! and dim Night! I feel ye now—I feel ye in your strength— O spells more sure than e'er Judaean king Taught in the gardens of Gethsemane! O charms more ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the sudden realization that he was in Nature's laboratory, and in the hieroglyphics traced on the granite walls he read the symbols of the mysterious alchemy silently and secretly wrought beneath their surface. The vastness of the scale of Nature's work, the multiplicity of her symbols, bewildered him, but in his own mind he knew that he still held the key to this mysterious code, and the knowledge thrilled him with delight. He gazed about him, fascinated, ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... of a national hunger for greatness. Some day a wise man, one who has not read too many books but who has gone about among men, will discover and set forth a very interesting thing about America. The land is vast and there is a national hunger for vastness in individuals. One wants an Illinois-sized man for Illinois, an Ohio-sized man for Ohio, and a Texas-sized man ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... what has been done? How do I come into the midst of it all?" The vastness of street and house he was prepared for, the multitudes of people. But conflicts in the city ways! And the systematised sensuality of a class ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... the cutting, and the unnerving vastness of the gulfs opened out on either side. Gard felt like a blindfolded man stumbling along ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... great sweep of colonnades. There, too, they borrowed from the circle of saints the idea of the repeated Star figure. The colonnade not only encloses the court but is produced along the sides of the Palaces of Agriculture and Transportation to form two corridors of almost Egyptian vastness. These two features, the arches and the colonnades, here at the center of the palace group, strike the Exposition's note of breadth. Their decoration is the key to the festal richness ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... several attitudes in turn. The empty hearth frightened him away from the mantelpiece, the fragile appearance of a gilt settee decided him against risking his sixteen stone weight on its silken cushions, and the vastness of the room overawed him when he took up his position in the centre of the Aubusson carpet. Finally he selected an ornate chair, rather more solid-looking than the rest, which he drew up to a small table on the far side of the room. There he sat down, his large red hands spread out ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... as much interest and excitement out of life in a cramped flat as in the splendours of the Van Osburgh establishment. Today, however, her chirping enthusiasms did not irritate Lily. They seemed only to throw her own exceptionalness into becoming relief, and give a soaring vastness to her ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... aspect is pleasant and serene, with a finely-arched forehead; and I thought I could read in it clear indications of that cheerful, social disposition by which he was as much characterized among his contemporaries as by the vastness of his genius. The inscription mentions his age at the time of his decease, fifty-three years—an untimely death for the world, for what fruit might not have been expected from the golden autumn of such a mind, sheltered as it was from the stormy vicissitudes of life, and flourishing in the sunshine ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... sensuous charm summed up its essence. There is a good deal of ambiguity about the stereotyped phrase "ahead of one's time." Rightly apprehended, great geniuses do live for the future rather than the present, but where the public have the vastness of appetite and scantness of taste peculiar to the ostrich, there it is impossible for a composer to be ahead of his time. It is only where the public are advanced to the stage of intelligent discrimination that a Ninth Symphony and a Nibelung ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... mood of mind changes with the scene. The beauty soothed and softened you; now you grow impulsive and stern. The awful forms around you blend with the soul, as it were, and impart something of their own vastness to it. You feel yourself carried into the very presence of that Power which sank the foundations of the mountains in the depths of the earth, and built up their giant masses above the clouds; which hung the ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... are gone; a luminous pink bathes the whole scene in its fairy light. The night train for Venice, leaving the town, appears as a long string of blinking lights. A chill breeze comes from the Alpine vastness to westward. The deep silence of an Alpine night settles down. The two Americans continue their talk until they are out of hearing. The breeze interrupts and obfuscates their words, but now and then half ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... the blue heavens. The column of Phocas is also erect; and you see some portions of the Rostra fitted together out of fragments discovered near by. But if the eye seeks a sensation of extraordinary vastness, it must travel beyond the three columns of the temple of Castor and Pollux, beyond the vestiges of the house of the Vestals, beyond the temple of Faustina, in which the Christian Church of San Lorenzo has so composedly installed ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... world!" and Ayrault wished that his soul was already free; while the dead leaves rustling in the gentle breeze, and the nightwinds, sighing among the trees, seemed to echo his thought. Far above their heads, and in the vastness of space, the well-known stars and constellations, notwithstanding the enormous distance they had now come, looked absolutely unchanged, and seemed to them emblematic of tranquillity and eternal repose. The days were changed by their shortness, ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... swamp," Charlie said in astonishment, alike at the vastness of the scheme, and the energy with which it was ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... principal member of this great system has been named The Grand Canyon, as a conscious and meaningful tribute to its vastness, its sublimity, its grandeur and its awesomeness. It is unique; it stands alone. Though only two hundred and seventeen miles long, it expresses within that distance more than any one human mind yet has been able to comprehend or interpret to the world. ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... utterly dissimilar,—is the phenomenon before us! Here is a singularly confused and shallow thinker oppressed with the vastness of his discovery, that the Bible—has nothing in it! Here is a Clergyman of the Church of England, and a Lecturer in Divinity, whose difficulty is how he shall convince the world that the Bible is—like any other book! ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... nothing but the glow of the dwindling fire and the sweep of sand, covered sparsely with ragged bushes. New stars flared out; the spirit of the night descended upon the desert. As the world seemed to draw further and further away from them, these two beings, strange to the vastness engulfing them, huddled closer together. They spoke little, always in lowered voices. Between words they were listening, awaiting that ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... writings of the younger Adams had now brought him prominently before the public. They attracted the especial attention of Mr. Jefferson, who saw in them a vastness of comprehension, a maturity of judgment and critical discrimination, which gave large promise of future usefulness and eminence. Before his retirement from the State Department, he commended the youthful statesman to the favorable regard of President Washington, as one pre-eminently fitted ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... which we call G-d, being all boundless and infinite, we frame the best idea of him our minds are capable of: all which is done, I say, by enlarging those simple ideas we have taken from the operations of our own minds, by reflection; or by our senses, from exterior things, to that vastness to which infinity ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... particularly that my readers should not be intimidated by the apparent vastness and complexity of this enterprise of forming the literary taste. It is not so vast nor so complex as it looks. There is no need whatever for the inexperienced enthusiast to confuse and frighten himself with thoughts of "literature in all its branches." ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... dazed, startled by the vastness of the domain to which he was heir apparent, Bonbright returned to the aloof quiet of ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... national lack of humor, whether there be such a thing as national humor or not. One such article, I remember, endeavored to prove that the exaggeration often found in American humor was due to the vastness of the American continent. Our geography, that is to say, is too much for the Yankee brain. Mr. Birrell, an expert judge of humor, surely, thinks that the characteristic of American humor lies in its habit of speaking ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... power of Russia Much as we may dread Russia for is from the vast extent of its the vastness of her territory and territory, and the great and of her rapidly increasing numbers, rapidly increasing number of there is greater cause for fear its (54) subjects, (5) it is in the military spirit and ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... looking into another world; at the Cave you find yourself already arrived there. The one presents to us a God who is very "wonderful in working;" the other exhibits the same power, but with it is blended loveliness in a thousand forms. In each is vastness. Greatness constitutes the whole of one; but the other is elegant, as well as great. Of each we must retain lively impressions; and to witness such displays of the Creator's power, must ever be considered ...
— The Book of Enterprise and Adventure - Being an Excitement to Reading. For Young People. A New and Condensed Edition. • Anonymous
... Mexico; but there was a time when the delta of that river was at St. Louis, more than seven hundred miles from its present position. In Egypt and in America—in fact, in all countries—the rivers have been inch by inch prolonging the land into the sea; the slowness of their work and the vastness of its extent satisfy us that we must concede for the ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... at the foot of the hill; over the forest-clad mountains in the glory of their brown and gold; over the vast sweep of the tree-crowned Ozark ridges that receded wave after wave into the blue haze until, in the vastness of the distant sky, they were lost. And something made me know that, in the moment's respite from her task, the woman was looking ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... left there came upon them, in that cozy little two-room apartment, a feeling of desolation and vastness, and a terrible loneliness such as they had never dreamed of in the great twelve-room house in Winnebago. They kept close to each other. They toiled up the winding stairs together and stood a moment on the balcony, feigning a light-heartedness ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... that civil war had risen a new nation, mighty in the vastness of its limitless resources, the realities within its reach surpassing the dreams of fiction, and eclipsing the fancy of fable—a new nation, yet rosy in the flesh, with the bloom of youth upon its cheeks and the gleam of morning ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... its converts among the Northern nations, and renewed the contest as a Western reaction of Teutonic pride against a Roman gospel. The struggle went on for full three hundred years in all, and on a scale of vastness never seen again in history. Even the Reformation was limited to the West, whereas Arianism ranged at one time or another through the whole of Christendom. Nor was the battle merely for the wording of antiquated ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... their breath for the work of their bodies. On every side was the silence, pressing upon them with a tangible presence. It affected their minds as the many atmospheres of deep water affect the body of the diver. It crushed them with the weight of unending vastness and unalterable decree. It crushed them into the remotest recesses of their own minds, pressing out of them, like juices from the grape, all the false ardours and exaltations and undue self-values of the human soul, until they perceived themselves finite and small, specks and motes, ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... sun, because we have every reason to suppose that each of those fixed stars, and myriads now not visible to the naked eye, are all suns, bright and glorious as our own, and of course throwing light and heat upon unseen planets revolving round them. Does not this give you some idea of the vastness, the power, and the immensity ...
— Masterman Ready • Captain Marryat
... Morrison's "Service of Man," which I hope will be a new inspiration to fresh labors by all for the elevation of humanity, and Carnegie's "Triumphant Democracy," showing the power our country is destined to wield and the vastness of our domain. This book must give every American citizen a feeling of deeper responsibility than ever before to act well his part. We read, too, Harriet Martineau's translation of the works of Auguste Comte, and ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... his tenderness for his dead father welled up a passionate loyalty toward the woman who slept in the room adjoining the library, whose soul had "never been welded." She had known life no more than a prattling brook in a meadow may know the sea. Bound in shallows, she knew nothing of the unutterable vastness in which deep answered unto deep; tide and tempest and blue surges were fraught ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... inspire enthusiasm and ardor in the imaginative spirit. They are beneficial for this purpose. For the training of a great poet they are necessary. They have the effect of lifting the mind to the contemplation of vastness, depth, height, profundity. This produces an intensity of mood—the natural result of any association between our own feelings and such objects as are lofty and noble in the external world. The feelings and passions as they are influenced by the petty play of society, which diffuses ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... itself. Whilst it was all clear horizon the immensity of the deep was in a measure limited to the vision by its cincture. But this ice-line gave the eye something to measure with, and when I looked at those leagues of frozen shore my spirits sank into deepest dejection at the thought of the vastness of the waters in whose heart I floated in ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... the ocean think of its vastness; of the many shores in many climes visited by its waves to ply "their priest-like task of clean ablution;" of cities and empires that rose beside its waters, flourished, decayed, and became a memory; of others that shall rise and also pass away, ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... green, as a cedar of Lebanon, which, waving its broad archangel wings over some fast-rooted eternal old solitude, and seeing from its sublime height the vastness of the universe, veils its kingly head with humility before God's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... with the most far-reaching problems that have thus far called forth the intellectual efforts of man. If rightly handled, these great themes may be made to teach the true method of inquiry into past natural events whose vastness puts them quite beyond the resources of the laboratory. This method finds its key in a search for the history of such vast and remote events by a scrutiny of the vestiges these events have left as their own automatic record. This method stands in sharp contradistinction to simple ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... of the Indians and the vastness of the swamp, it was a faint chance indeed that he or his companion would live to see any of the tribe, but, faint as it was, no other hope remained and Walter sent the canoe ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... in so vast a realm. His was not the order of speculative financial enthusiasm which, in the type known as the "promoter," sees endless possibilities for gain in every unexplored rivulet and prairie reach; but the very vastness of the country suggested possibilities which he hoped might remain undisturbed. A territory covering the length of a whole zone and between two seas, seemed to him to possess potentialities which it could not retain if the States of the ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... wished she had chosen another hotel. But where else could she have gone? She had stayed at few hotels in London: once at the Savoy; once at Claridge's; every other time at Sturrocks's. The Savoy? Its vastness had frightened her. And Claridge's? No; that was sanctified for ever. Oliver in his lordly way had snapped his fingers at Sturrocks's. Only the best was good enough for Peggy. Now only ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... with the sunburst at the far edge, hang over the gray sea, into which the sandpoints stretch like gray figures. The sea is tumbling in over the shallows and the sandy flats with a roar, muffled in the sea-mists drifting inland. The horizon is lost in a gray mist. All vastness, the clouds are piled up like giant rocks, and there is a 'brool' over the sea that sounds like some passage of doom. Dark figures are on the beach here and there, sometimes half shrouded in the mist, ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... time, when compared to the span of human life, expectant motherhood occupies, and realize the vastness of its influence upon the nature of the child, and through ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... eclipse of which had made life resemble an attempt to play whist with an imperfect pack of cards, the truth of things, their mutual relations, their meaning, and for the most part their horror, rose before her with a kind of architectural vastness. She remembered a thousand trifles; they started to life with the spontaneity of a shiver. She had thought them trifles at the time; now she saw that they had been weighted with lead. Yet even now they were trifles after all, for of what use was it to her ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... He left the two figures together, and presently saw them both from a distance against the vastness of the gold. Bushes and shrubs, and two or three giant pine trees, between the summit of Drouva and the plain, showed black, and the figures of woman and child were almost ebon. Dion watched them. He could not see any features. The two were ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... round them was full of that heavenly army. Chariots of fire and horsemen of fire thronged it in every part. High up into the viewless air mounted their wheeling bands: rank beyond rank, and army beyond army, they seemed to stretch on into the vastness of space, until the gazer's wearied eye was unable to gaze on them. And all of these were gathered round his master. They were God's host, keeping guard over God's servant. And they who would injure him must first turn aside those flashing swords, ...
— The Rocky Island - and Other Similitudes • Samuel Wilberforce
... mines. They were old mines—veritable cities tunnelled out beneath the mountains, the main passages running for miles. One day Hal stole off from his job, and took a trip with a "rope-rider," and got through his physical senses a realisation of the vastness and strangeness and loneliness of this labyrinth of night. In Number Two mine the vein ran up at a slope of perhaps five degrees; in part of it the empty cars were hauled in long trains by an endless rope, but coming back loaded, they came of their own gravity. This involved ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... above, convey but little idea of the vastness of the area concerned. Transferring them to countries with which we are more familiar, we may say that the disturbed area was only a little less than half the size of Europe; the region in which serious damage occurred to masonry was more than twice as large as the whole of Great Britain; ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... in respect to Punch itself. Consider for a moment. That work consisted in the summer of 1895 of 108 volumes. At the moderate estimate of four jokes per column, attempted and made, we reach a grand total of nearly 270,000 jokes—a total bewildering in its vastness, and representing, one would think, all the humour that ever was produced since this melancholy world began. The mind refuses to grasp such a mass of comicality; how, then, would you classify this prodigious joviality and sarcasm? ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... splendid, panelled room with deep-embrasured windows, from which the defences had now been removed and through which the inmates could have noble views of the lawns and gardens beyond the moat. The little company of three seemed, as it were, lost in the vastness of the chamber as they sat at meat together at the oak table by the hearth at one end of the room, Brilliana at the head, with Halfman at her right and Evander at her left as the guest and stranger. It proved a vastly pleasant ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... beyond a general, uniformity. It has not succeeded in showing that the human will comes under the same rule. It has not succeeded in silencing the voice within us, which claims superiority for the moral over the physical. And when the utmost extent of human knowledge is compared with the vastness of nature, the claim to extend the induction from generality to universality is seen to be utterly untenable. So much as this, indeed, Science has rendered highly probable, that the uniformity of nature is never broken except for ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... it broke in white foam at his feet; near the horizon a pitch-black wall of cloud seemed to rise sheer from the water and join the gray sky that arched over the great flat spaces. And in the absence of stars, the earth itself seemed to gain in vastness and mystery, its own awfulness, as it sped round, unlessened by those endless perspectives of vaster planets. And from the soundless night and sea and sky, and from those austere and solemn stretches of sand and forest, wherein ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... fallen, though the wind still held steady, and this surface calmness, under-run by a gentle swell, served only to emphasize the vastness of the view. The island seemed immensely remote and immense in size, the far snow-covered mountains the mountains of a land where giants had lived and from which they had ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... wish this cub away; Their wish they have: he (to direct his dam Unto the gap through which they thither came) Before her swims, and quits the hostile lake, A pris'ner there but for his mother's sake. She, by the rocks compell'd to stay behind, Is by the vastness of her bulk confined. They shout for joy! and now on her alone Their fury falls, and all their darts are thrown. 170 Their lances spent, one, bolder than the rest, With his broad sword provoked the sluggish beast; Her oily side devours both blade and ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... associations which remained through her after-years. Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter's, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... to sit back in the corner of the seat and feed his senses on the lovely creature before him. He had never seen her so beautiful, so utterly worth having as now. He was conscious of a great, overwhelming sense of pride, somewhat smothering in its vastness. She was a creature to be proud of! His ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... would ease me immensely to admit to myself that (for me, at least) all those things had no importance. I mean the things they rub into you in Europe; the tiresome international topics, the petty politics, the stupid social customs, the baby-house scenery. The vastness and freshness of this American world, the great scale and great pace of our development, the good sense and good nature of the people, console me for there being no cathedrals and no Titians. I hear nothing about ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... Causation is change; but it is nothing but substance assuming attributes, and attributes assuming modes. Phenomena are only the bubbles which arise on the bosom of the ocean and disappear, absorbed in its vastness. The universe is bound in one vast chain of fatalism, one grand and perfect whole. Man's perfection is to know by contemplation the universe in ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... one side of the apartment opened like a veranda, giving a view of the green country and the gray sky beyond. By way of a chair, they gave me a square cushion of black velvet; and behold me seated low, in the middle of this large, empty room, which by its very vastness is almost chilly. The two little women (who are the servants of the house and my very humble servants, too), awaited my orders, in attitudes ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... you at once to the command of a galley; but to do so would do you no service, for it would excite against you the jealousy of all the young nobles in the fleet. Besides, you are so young, that although the council at home cannot but acknowledge the vastness of the service you have rendered, they might make your age an excuse for refusing to confirm the appointment; but if you like to come as my third officer, I can promise you that you shall have rapid promotion, and speedily be in command ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty
... or below us, to the right or the left, we find a boundless expanse teeming with life and its enjoyments. This earth, large as it may appear to us, is less than a grain of sand in size, when compared with the vastness around it. ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... published, and the Government, apparently acting on these views, most culpably delayed the measures by which the visitation could be successfully combated. Now, their part was to admit to the fullest extent the vastness of the Famine, and make it the excuse for their want of energy and success in overcoming it. On the same principle, Mr. Labouchere, relying on figures supplied by Mr. Griffith, goes into what appears to be a fair statement of the actual money ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... science unfolds more and more new infinities of time and space, new infinities of worlds and forms of life. The curious notion has crept in, that man must sink lower into insignificance with every new discovery of the vastness and huge design of creation. God would seem to have over-reached Himself in disclosing His power and majesty, stunning and overwhelming the intellect and heart with the crushing weight of the evidences of His Infinity. We have modern ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... time drift round me, and within There is the knell of passing and decay: The sun-smit vastness of the world doth weigh Upon my riddling soul like hidden sin, And bids it speak. Thou desert art my kin! I crumble to thee, waning day by day; But I am cursed with questions that betray The end of life before death's hours begin, My eyes are staring, yet their ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... age of the monsters which flourished in slime came to an end? There must have been places and conditions which made for greater longevity, greater size, greater strength than was usual. Such over-lappings may have come down even to our earlier centuries. Nay, are there not now creatures of a vastness of bulk regarded by the generality of men as impossible? Even in our own day there are seen the traces of animals, if not the animals themselves, of stupendous size—veritable survivals from earlier ages, preserved by some special qualities in their habitats. I ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... contradictions, instead of condemning it, justify it, its diversity producing its adaptation and its adaptation producing benefits.—This is no barren formula. A sentiment of such grandeur, of such comprehensive and penetrating insight, an idea by which Man, compassing the vastness and depth of things, so greatly oversteps the ordinary limits of his mortal condition, resembles an illumination; it is easily transformed into a vision; it is never remote from ecstasy; it can express ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... bore the character of Gothic gloom, and helped my fancy to shape and furnish the black void that yawned all round me. I heard a sound like the slow tread of two persons walking up the flagged aisle. A faint echo told of the vastness of the place. An awful sense of expectation was upon me, and I was horribly frightened when the body that lay on the catafalque said (without stirring), in a whisper that froze me, "They come to place me in the grave ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... stammered, more and more frightened at the vastness of the serpent which involved her with its coils, and which was so careless about the loss of its ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... connection it is probably useful to bear in mind that in all discussions about religious ideas or feelings we should ourselves be in an exalted mood, and yet "with a compelling sense of our own limitations," and of the vastness and ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... rabbits darting now and then between the rocks. Suddenly from the top of a little hill they came out to a spot where they could see far over the desert. Forty miles away three square, flat hills, or mesas, looked like a gigantic train of cars, and the clear air gave everything a strange vastness. Farther on beyond the mesas dimly dawned the Black Mountains. One could even see the shadowed head of "Round Rock," almost a hundred miles away. Before them and around was a great plain of sage-brush, and here and there ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... midget, in the immensities of sky, or burrowing, a fugitive, in suffocating virgin forests. The soul and the sea—they are the beloved provinces of this sailor and psychologue. But he also recognises the relativity of things. The ineluctable vastness and sadness of life oppress him. In Karain we read: "Nothing could happen to him unless what happens to all—failure and death." His heroes are failures, as are heroes in all great poetry and fiction, and their failure is recorded ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... the desert sent her soul straining towards the immensity of the Beyond; and almost, in flashes elusive as the light on a bird's wing, she understood what eternity might mean. She felt that the last days of her childhood had been left behind, on the threshold of these mysterious spaces, this vastness into which she had plunged, as into an ocean. Yet she did not regret the loss, if it were a loss. Never, she thought, whatever might happen, would she wish not to have known this experience, not to have entered upon this great adventure, ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... day looking over the curio treasures of Mr. Trelawny. From what I had heard from Mr. Corbeck I began to have some idea of the vastness of his enterprise in the world of Egyptian research; and with this light everything around me began to have a new interest. As I went on, the interest grew; any lingering doubts which I might have had changed to wonder ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... make one or the other of these ascents when a clear day can be found, not so much because the view is fine, as because you will get a sensation of vastness and multitude not easily to be forgotten. There is, or was not long ago, a point on the ridge which connects Hampstead with Highgate from which, as you looked over London to the Surrey Hills beyond, the modern Babylon presented something like the aspect of a city. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... and fashion to his own pleasure, than as a succession of days and years which would inevitably mould and influence him in their course. It is not wholly conceit, perhaps, which so assures these clever lads of the vastness of their untried capabilities, that there are moments when they feel as if they could grasp heaven and earth in their wide consciousness; it is rather a want of experience and clearness of perception. Horace Graham was not ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... other things, which are included in "grace upon grace." And after we mentioned all these precious things, we would have to put the pen down and confess our insufficiency to tell out the riches, the fulness and vastness of "grace upon grace." ...
— The Lord of Glory - Meditations on the person, the work and glory of our Lord Jesus Christ • Arno Gaebelein
... dining-room and drawing-room grew very cold, cold as with the coldness of what is dead; and though he slept in the same part of the house by choice, not often did the young laird enter either. But he had concerning them, the latter in particular, a notion of vastness and grandeur; and along with that, a vague sense of sanctity, which it is not quite easy to define or account for. It seems however to have the same root with all veneration for place—for if there were not a natural inclination to venerate place, ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... which did not become the feeders of the railroads dwindled to insignificance. But the railroads could not affect the navigation of the lake quite so disastrously as that of the river; the lake in such a rivalry had some such advantage as that of the sea from its mere vastness, and from the expanses where the railroads could not follow the steamer in the mere nature of things. The iron horse had his way with the canals, though, and these monuments of a former period of enterprise grow more and ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... went on for some little way until Hazel almost despaired of catching him at all, and was becoming more and more aware of the vastness of the universe about her, and the smallness ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... The very vastness of its sameness lends A fascination which it else had not; And here my sense of solitude transcends What I have felt on any other spot: Of solitude, yet not of loneliness, For God seems present, and ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats
... opposite Danieli's on all fine afternoons except Sundays and holidays requires four hours; but if the day be fine they are four hours not to be forgotten. The way out is round the green island of S. Elena, skirting the Arsenal, the vastness of which is apparent from the water, and under the north wall of Murano, where its pleasant gardens spread, once so gay with the Venetian aristocracy but now the property of market gardeners and lizards. ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... He sensed, rather than saw them. The searchers. And his fear of them was greater than his fear of space alone. He moved. Somehow he moved, driving headlong through great vastness while the pinpoints of light grew ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones
... and that because space or extension appears united to our senses, while time or succession is always broken and divided. This difficulty, when joined with a small distance, interrupts and weakens the fancy: But has a contrary effect in a great removal. The mind, elevated by the vastness of its object, is still farther elevated by the difficulty of the conception; and being obliged every moment to renew its efforts in the transition from one part of time to another, feels a more vigorous ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... In the camp at the bend of the river, with its dozen saloons aglare, Its gambling dens a-riot, its gramophones all a-blare; Crimped with the crimes of a city, sin-ridden and bridled with lies, In the hush of my mountained vastness, in the flush of my midnight skies. Plague-spots, yet tools of my purpose, so natheless I suffer them thrive, Crushing my Weak in their clutches, that ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... A lingering afterglow touched the broken rows of skyward-pointing tassels, but the valley below her lay shrouded in gloom. Night was creeping up the mountain side; she could see it, feel it in the horrible silence. All alone in that stark vastness of crags, disregarding those who might be "layin' out" for her, she put her hands to her mouth and called; then leaned forward, holding her breath and listening. There was not even an echo. So she turned wearily back to the cabin and ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... iii. of "NOTES AND QUERIES" you have honoured me by an allusion to the Monumenta Anglicana I have in the press, as "a plan which would have your hearty concurrence and recommendation, if it were at all practicable; but which must fail from its very vastness." It may be so; but the motto of my family is Essayez. Every "gigantic scheme" must have a commencement, and this "scheme," I am perfectly aware, is one "that no individual, however varied in attainments and abilities, could without assistance hope to achieve." My father, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 78, April 26, 1851 • Various
... the way, who had selected the Notch for these Texas nesters. It had proved a happy choice, for the hotel sat upon the top of the world, and beneath it lay outspread the whole green and purple vastness of the earth. The Briskows were entranced, of course, and, once they had established themselves here, they never thought of moving, nor did it occur to them that there might—be other mountains than these, other hotels as good as this. To them Burlington Notch became merely a colloquial ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... From somewhere in the distance there also came a curious drumming which she did not know then was made by an axe, but it presently ceased, and the song of the river rose alone in long drowsy pulsations. In front of and behind her stretched the rows of serried trunks which had grown to vastness of girth and stateliness with the centuries, and the girl, who was of quick perceptions, felt instinctively the influence of their age and silence. There was, it seemed, something intangible but existent in this still land of shadow which reacted upon her pleasantly after the artificial gaieties ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... cool, impassible, reckless explorer that he was, felt himself at last seized with a nameless dread. He strove to retrace his steps, but in vain. He called aloud. Not even an echo replied, and his voice died out in the empty vastness of surrounding space, like a pebble cast into a bottomless gulf; then, down he sank, fainting, on the sand, alone, amid the eternal ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... vaguely in the direction of the north-east, where stretched a terra incognita into which vastness few men have strayed and fewer emerged. "I was in camp one day with Klooch. Klooch was as handsome a little kamooks as ever whined betwixt the traces or shoved nose into a camp kettle. Her father was a full-blood ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... went on, "you seem to be the soul of that which is around you, yet oppressed with the weight of its vastness, and unable to account for what is ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... not in these petty wrongs of one individual to his fellow, nor had any balm for these little agonies of a solitary soul; but shed its justice, and its mercy, in a broad, sunlike sweep, over half the universe at once. Its vastness made it nothing. But Hepzibah did not see that, just as there comes a warm sunbeam into every cottage window, so comes a lovebeam of God's care and pity ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... abundance, and of such other beasts as were either of uncommon strength, or of such a sort as were rarely seen. These were prepared either to fight with one another, or that men who were condemned to death were to fight with them. And truly foreigners were greatly surprised and delighted at the vastness of the expenses here exhibited, and at the great dangers that were here seen; but to natural Jews, this was no better than a dissolution of those customs for which they had so great a veneration. [13] It appeared also no ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... of vastness. Misprised by many specialists, who carp at his technical imperfections, he has nevertheless enlarged the imagination, and set free the speculative mind of countless doctors, engineers, and lawyers, of many physicists and chemists, and ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... an idle and envious spectator of the business and pleasure rife about him. He durst not approach that quarter of the town where Sidwell was living—if indeed she still remained here. Happily, the vastness of London enabled him to think of her as at a great distance; by keeping to the district in which he now wandered he was practically as remote from her as when he walked the streets ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... says the planter, into the ruin of your islands, without effecting any good for the Africans at large, and but little for those upon whom your bounties were bestowed. And, then, we cannot see the vastness of your philanthropy, in allowing such destructive cruelties to prevail so long, and in only emancipating your slaves when it was apparent they must soon become extinct under the lash, as applied by the hands of Britons. We know that you claimed that slavery was the same everywhere, ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... The murmur of little children in their cradles, the tender words of mothers, the footbeat of men on the pavements of ten thousand cities, the flags leaping in air from high buildings, ships putting out to sea with gunners at their sterns—in one aching synthesis the vastness and dearness and might of his land came to him. A mingled nation, indeed, of various and clashing breeds; but oh, with what a ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... greatest city in the whole world, so great indeed that I should scarcely venture to tell of it, but that I have met at Venice people in plenty who have been there.... And if anyone should desire to tell of all the vastness and great marvels of this city, a good quire of paper would not hold the matter, I trow. For 'tis the greatest and noblest city, and the finest for merchandise, that the ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... of these interesting statements that she was suddenly aware of the sound of her own voice, as though it had been a brazen gong beating stridently in the vastness of a deserted Cathedral. She saw the old lady take two pieces of buttered toast from the china dish, hold them tenderly in her hand and fling them a swift, bird-like glance before she devoured them; during that moment's vision Maggie discovered what so many people of vaster ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... the casement Wail the winds of winter; Shaken from the frozen eaves Many an icy splinter. On the hillside, in the hollow, Weaving wreaths of snow: Now in gusts of solemn music Lost in murmurs low; Howling now across the wold In its shroudlike vastness, Like the wolves about a fold In some Alpine fastness, ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in the awful vastness of the universe. In the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built for themselves mankind ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Dreaming 'neath the August sun, Thus my meditations run— What if that great Ember bright Were a monster Pipe alight, Or the glowing from afar Of some Fire-God's cigar? If the Smoker's Peace abide In that sun fire, multiplied By its vastness, I will ...
— The Smoker's Year Book • Oliver Herford
... a gesture full of drama, although quite unconscious, raised her head, looking off into the vastness of the mountains, her hands thrust straight down at her sides and clenched, her shoulders squared, her chest heaving with a mighty intake. The little mountain-girl, as she stood there, thrilling with her longing for revenge, with prayers ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... Secession wore slowly away, now illuminated by the joy of a victory, now overshadowed by the gloom of defeat, and meanwhile President Lincoln was criticised by friends and foes, alike by those who did not understand, and by those who would not appreciate the vastness of the ideal underlying the pain and tragedy of the war. But the President struggled on, wearing out his heart and his strength, but his courage and his faith never failed, and through all the suspense ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... the man who had got his deserts, and saying this he burst into a petty fury against the epistle of Dr. Shrapnel, which appeared to be growing more monstrous in proportion to his forgetfulness of the details, as mountains gather vastness to the eye at a certain remove. Though he could not guess the reason for Mr. Romfrey's visit to Bevisham, he was, he said, quite prepared to maintain that Mr. Romfrey had a perfect ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... watching the clock. The shadow of what once was in France is an abiding presence for us. We know nothing can happen again which will release us from it. And yet how much has been written of it? That is the measure of its vastness and its mystery—it possesses the minds of many men, but they are silent on what they know. They rarely speak of it, except to one of the fraternity. But where are their thoughts? Wandering, viewless and uneasy wraiths, over Flanders, in Artois and ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... a great white radiance streamed through the vastness of the aisles; the moon, that was at her height, had broken through the clouds, the snow had ceased to fall, the light reflected from the snow without was clear as the light of dawn. It fell through the arches ...
— A Dog of Flanders • Louisa de la Rame)
... doubt but the inspired man, who first was commissioned to proclaim the true religious idea, had fully realized in his mind the vastness and immense consequences of that new institution in its ultimate universal compass. In his eloquent addresses there are even some broad traits which allude to a fulfilment reserved to the latest posterity. Nevertheless, it is obvious, that, having to instruct a people who were not yet prepared ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... bow. Her eyes roved from the sun-glittering stream to the hills that rose above the tree-fringed valley floor, as if sight had been restored to her so that her eyes could dwell upon the green-leaved alder and maple, the drooping spruce bows, the vastness of those forests of somber fir where the deer lurked in the shadows and where the birds sang vespers and matins when dusk fell and dawn came again. There were meadow larks warbling now on stumps that ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Their arrival at Dover and their journey to London was a triumph; and on their arrival, their progress through the great capital was marked by a popular demonstration, which, from its enthusiasm and vastness, may be called sublime. The line of carriages passed through crowded streets—crowded from the kerbstones to the housetops—? until they reached Hyde Park Corner. It is said that the emperor pointed out to the empress the street, leading into St. James's Street, where ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... her that wonderful sad tale of Hans Christian Andersen's which treats of the china chimney-sweep and the shepherdess, who eloped from their bedizened tiny parlor-table, and were frightened by the vastness of the world outside, and crept ignominiously back to their fit home. "And so," the colonel ended, "the little china people remained together, and were thankful for the rivet in grandfather's neck, and continued to love each other until they were broken ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... vision I have conjured up in my mind of life spreading slowly from this little seed bed of the solar system throughout the inanimate vastness of sidereal space. But that is a remote dream. It may be, on the other hand, that the destruction of the Martians is only a reprieve. To them, and not to us, perhaps, ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... blind madness of the hero; but there is a towering grandeur about him, a whirlwind force of passion and of will, which catches our hearts, and puts the scruples of criticism to silence. The most delirious of enterprises is that of Moor, but the vastness of his mind renders even that interesting. We see him leagued with desperadoes directing their savage strength to actions more and more audacious; he is in arms against the conventions of men and the everlasting laws of Fate: yet we follow him with anxiety through the forests and desert ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... thoughts and acts which constitute real life, and not by hours of emptiness. They pass up the church-aisle, and raise their eyes to the ceiling. Had our Adam and Eve become mortal in some European city, and strayed into the vastness and sublimity of an old cathedral, they might have recognized the purpose for which the deep-souled founders reared it. Like the dim awfulness of an ancient forest, its very atmosphere would have incited them to prayer. ...
— The New Adam and Eve (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to the province. Its great alluvial plain traversed by large rivers drawing an unfailing supply of water from the Himalayan snows affords an ideal field for the labours of the canal engineer. The vastness of the arid areas which without irrigation yield no crops at all or only cheap millets and pulses makes his works of inestimable benefit to the people and a source of revenue to ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... seek not the shadowy region; Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear; And visions rising, legion after legion, Bring the unreal ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... chapel on the south side was called Our Lady of the Pew. The oldest part of the ancient palace remaining is Westminster Hall, built by William Rufus as a part of a projected new palace. He held his Court here in 1099, and, on hearing a remark on the vastness of his hall, he declared that it would be only a bedroom to the palace when finished. However, he himself had to occupy much narrower quarters before he could carry out his scheme. Richard II. raised the hall and ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... the house in which she dwelt. They were people of the world, and knew what the world might say, but they were also human beings in distress, and they felt as if they had passed into a region in which the meaning of the world's voices was lost, as the cry of an angry child is lost in the vastness of the desert. She agreed to his request, and they lived thus, innocently, till the winter was over and the spring came to bring to Italy its radiance ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... etherialized purity as if made for spirits to travel in, and tempting them to rise and free themselves from the soil; and the stillness, like nature's hand laid upon the soul, bidding it think. In view of all that vastness and grandeur, man's littleness does bespeak itself. And yet, for every one, the voice of the scene is not more humbling to pride than rousing to all that is really noble and strong in character. Not ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... and above all, that he had been spared the humiliation of acknowledging his inability to resist the strange fascination that dragged him from his allegiance, as Auroras swing the needle from the pole. He did not attempt to underrate the vastness of his loss, nor to condone the folly which he designated as "infernal idiocy"; yet conscience acquitted him of intentionally betraying the trust a noble woman had reposed; and his vanity was appeased by the conviction that though ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... mists that hung over the landscape. The birds were waking and their calls filled the air. The amorous notes of the inamboo were repeated and answered from far off by its mate, and the melancholy song of the wacurao piped musically out from the vastness of the forest. Small green paroquets flew about and filled the air with their not altogether pleasant voices. These are the same birds that are well-known to the residents of New York and other large cities, where a dozen of them can often ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... his eyes glistening, his soul stirred to awe. Long since had he ceased regretting the glittering tinsel of the cities of his recollection; they seemed artificial, unreal. When he had first gazed out over the basin he had been oppressed with a sensation of uneasiness. Its vastness had appalled him, its silence had aroused in him that vague disquiet which is akin to fear. But these emotions had passed. He still felt awed—he would always feel it, for it seemed that here he was looking upon a section of the world in its primitive ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... end of her life Esther will never forget that walk across the moor under the cold blue of the darkening sky—the long, mysterious-looking Stretches of darkness with here and there a big rock standing up grim and gaunt in the silence, the vastness in which they seemed but specks, the shrill, sweet voices of the birds calling to each other, and the busy, persistent voice of the river, added to the weirdness and loneliness of the experience. ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... speak of DREW—they brought good audiences. There is, it must be confessed, a curious fascination in hearing deep things talked about, even tho neither we nor the disputants understand them. We get the problematic thrill, we feel the presence of the vastness. Let a controversy begin in a smoking-room anywhere, about free-will or God's omniscience, or good and evil, and see how everyone in the place pricks up his ears. Philosophy's results concern us all most vitally, and philosophy's ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... doctors to the lecture-room, And saw the inner form of man laid bare; Went with the chymists, where the skilful hand, Revering laws higher than Nature's self, Makes Nature do again, before our eyes, And in a moment, what, in many years, And in the veil of vastness and lone deeps, She laboureth at alway, then best content When man inquires into her secret ways; Yea, turned his asking eye on every source Whence knowledge floweth for the hearts of men, Kneeling at some, and drinking freely there. And at the end, ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... revenue is all clear profit. The average newspaper reader would be amazed if he knew at how great a cost the day's news is laid before him. A dignified journal displays no inclination to cry from the housetops the vastness of its expenditure, but from time to time an accident enables the public to obtain information in this connexion. The evidence taken by a recent Copyright Commission disclosed that the expenditure of the leading English journal upon foreign news alone amounted ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... brinded mane; the ounce, The libbard, and the tiger, as the mole Rising, the crumbled earth above them threw In hillocks: The swift stag from under ground Bore up his branching head: Scarce from his mould Behemoth biggest born of earth upheaved His vastness: Fleeced the flocks and bleating rose, As plants: Ambiguous between sea and land The river-horse, and scaly crocodile. At once came forth whatever creeps the ground, Insect or worm: those waved their limber fans For wings, and smallest lineaments exact In all the liveries decked of summer's ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... fragment; the nave fell in, isolating the bell tower, during a tempest in 1674, and by that time all interest in churches as beautiful and sacred buildings having died out of Holland, never to return, no effort was made to restore it. But it must, before the storm, have been superb, and of a vastness superior to any ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... of answer there seemed to rise before the eye of Montalvo's mind a measureless black gulf, and, falling, falling, falling through its infinite depths one miserable figure, a mere tiny point that served to show the vastness it explored. The point turned over, and he saw its face as in a ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... words, the sun's heat reaching the outskirts of our atmosphere is capable of doing without cessation the work of an engine of four-horse power for each square yard of the earth's surface. Thus, modern inquiries tend to render more and more evident the vastness of the thermal stores contained in the great central reservoir of our system, while bringing into fair agreement the estimates of its probable temperature. This is in great measure due to the acquisition of a workable formula by which to ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... it would be the highest monument of its kind standing on the face of the globe; and yet, after all, what would it be even then as compared with one of the great pyramids? Modern attempts cannot bear comparison with those of the old world in simple vastness. But in lieu of simple vastness, the modern world aims to achieve either beauty or utility. By the Washington monument, if completed, neither would be achieved. An obelisk with the proportions of a needle may be very graceful; ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... else was the great black enclosing firmament. The stars blazed with a new white glory never seen through the haze of an atmosphere. Like a little world in the vastness of this awesome void, we ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
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