"Sublime" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unknown to man, when the negress before mentioned entered with a small round brass tray, on which were two covered dishes. The middy lowered his hands in prompt confusion, for he had not attained to the Moors' sublime indifference to the opinion or ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... frequently they thrust themselves upon him. Sunrise now—what an extraordinary thing! He never ceased to be amazed at that. The economy of the moon, too, so exquisitely adapted to the needs of mankind! Nations, tongues (hardly to be explained by the sublime folly of a Babel), the reverence paid to elders, to women; the sense of law and justice in our kind: in the leafy shades of Upcote in Oxfordshire, he had pondered these things during his lonely years of youth and adolescence—had pondered, and in some cases ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... gentleman's mind and in his talk. She herself was a character—she couldn't help being aware of that; and hitherto her visions of a completed consciousness had concerned themselves largely with moral images—things as to which the question would be whether they pleased her sublime soul. Lord Warburton loomed up before her, largely and brightly, as a collection of attributes and powers which were not to be measured by this simple rule, but which demanded a different sort of appreciation—an appreciation that the girl, with ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... eagle's nest doesn't take the cake!" exclaimed Dick, always modern. "If there were any more to take, it could have that, too. Hurrah for you, rock and river. You're sublime." ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... truthfulness, fickleness in some things, fickleness in all things, an exalted mind, poetry, domestic peace, hatred, jealousy, morbid sensibility, pardon, receiving again into favour, flowers, decay of health, sickness, returning health, love in a gentle degree, love in a sublime degree, doubting, also trusting love, loneliness, ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... subject to their command, and to effect those wonders, of which they deemed themselves to have a dim conception, but which more rational views of nature have taught us to regard as beyond our power to effect. These sublime wanderings of the mind are well entitled to our labour to trace and investigate. The errors of man are worthy to be recorded, not only as beacons to warn us from the shelves where our ancestors have made shipwreck, but even as something honourable to our nature, ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... been dignified by wisdom, bravery or virtue. The [That] man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.' Had our Tour produced nothing else but this sublime passage, the world must have acknowledged that it was not made in vain. Sir Joseph Banks, the present respectable President of the Royal Society, told me, he was so much struck on reading it, that he clasped his hands together, and remained for some time in an attitude of silent admiration. BOSWELL. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... great men all remind us, We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... of yours won a classic event of the turf. How much finer it would be if you had some boys in training for the sublime contests of life, an' it wouldn't cost half so much. You know, there are plenty of homeless boys who need your help. Wouldn't it pay better to develop a Henry M. Stanley—once a homeless orphan—than a Salvator or an ...
— Keeping up with Lizzie • Irving Bacheller
... printing, engraving on copper plates, oil-painting, looking-glasses; the art of restoring, in some measure, old men to their sight by spectacles; gunpowder, &c., had been discovered. A new world had been fought for, found, and conquered. Would not one suppose that these sublime discoveries had been made by the greatest philosophers, and in ages much more enlightened than the present? But it was far otherwise; all these great changes happened in the most stupid and barbarous times. Chance only gave birth ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... daughter living whose future might be prejudiced by its recital, and while there were other persons on whom the disclosure of the real truth would have been crushing as an avalanche, Lady Byron's only course was the perfect silence in which she took refuge, and those sublime works of charity and mercy to which she ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... Lord Stratford, however, saw the danger underlying the ambiguity of the language, and, under his advice, the Porte proposed as an amendment the substitution of the words "to the stipulations of the Treaty of Kainardji, confirmed by that of Adrianople, relative to the protection by the Sublime Porte of the Christian religion." The Russian Government refused to accept this amendment, and from that moment war was inevitable. The British Fleet under Admiral Dundas had been sent from Malta to the East ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... the term implies, the playful, jocose movement of a symphony, but in the case of sublime geniuses like Beethoven and Schumann, who blend profound melancholy with wild humor, the playfulness is sometimes of a kind which invites us to thoughtfulness instead of merriment. This is true also of some Russian composers, whose scherzos ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... sublime as she delivered that little exordium; and to the girl, anxious as she was for her old strength and happiness, the words were like music. They made her blood flow again, and there was a ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... the Finale (Orgy of Brigands) which, when it was once played "con amore" by a fine orchestra, called forth from Berlioz the following eulogy,—"Sublime! I thank you, gentlemen, and I wonder at you; you are perfect brigands." The finale is also notable in that the opening portion is a reminiscence, a passing in review, of the chief themes of the preceding movements. Berlioz, ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... and soon reached the farmhouse, which was almost sublime in its dreariness. There was not a tree within sight; there was not, at this season, a green pasture—nothing but fallow and turnips everywhere, in large fields divided by hedges plashed ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... remarks on cathedrals generally. I said that I thought it singular that we so seldom knew who were the architects that designed these great buildings; that they appeared to me the most sublime efforts ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... condemnation to put him to death. After performing so glorious an action as this, you ought to do nothing that's mean and little; you ought not to think of, much less do, anything but what is great and sublime. Which to attain to, this is your only way: as you have subdued your enemies in the field, so to make it appear that you of all mankind are best able to subdue Ambition, Avarice, the love of Riches, and can best avoid ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... Lieutenant Kingsley concerning his religious experience, he said he was not satisfied with his attainments in the divine life, and very earnestly requested to be remembered at a throne of grace. The moon rose full and clear on the sparkling face of the deep, reminding us of David's sublime thoughts when he exclaims in the eighth Psalm: "When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him? and ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... some of them may seem to be incorporated in this narrative, under the guise of mere romance, the reader need not on this account think himself misled, or treat them with sublime contempt. If it should ever be his fate or fortune to make a tour through the East Indian Archipelago, he will cease to ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... Defiance was ordered to take us in tow; we shortly afterwards made the signal, that we were able to renew the action. The enemy's fleet were making for Cadiz. Nineteen sail of their line of battleships had surrendered, and one, the Achille, had blown up. The explosion she made was sublime and awful; a number of her crew were saved by the Pickle schooner. The wind still continued light, and the signal was flying to renew the attack. In about twenty minutes we were again in the rear of the enemy, who appeared to have had enough of ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... the grand and sublime things in Nature had always appealed to him. He was gazing toward the east, where the rising sun was flooding the plains with a golden hue. Beyond the cottonwoods he caught a glimpse of the winding river. Then, when he turned, ...
— Dave Porter at Star Ranch - Or, The Cowboy's Secret • Edward Stratemeyer
... and meditation to the impressions of the story, the pity of it, the naturalness of it, the glory and the mystic splendours of the indifferent heavens, will feel that here indeed is the true strength which out of the trivial raises expression for the pathetic and the sublime. ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... true victor of Oran, in whose behalf Heaven had condescended to repeat the stupendous miracle of Joshua, by stopping the sun in his career. [14] But the cardinal, humbly disclaiming all merits of his own, was heard to repeat aloud the sublime language of the Psalmist, "Non nobis, Domine, non nobis," while he gave his benedictions to the soldiery. He was then conducted to the alcazar, and the keys of the fortress were put into his hand. The spoil of the captured city, amounting, ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... next hundred years—like a breath, swept past. America, with all its forty-story buildings, its little Play Niagaras, its great dumb Rockies, is the unseen country. It can only as yet be seen in people's eyes. Some days, flowing sublime and silent through our noisy streets, and through the vast panorama of our towers, I have heard the footfalls of the unborn, like sunshine ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... relationship with the author. I was unluckily engaged on an excursion for some days afterwards; and, as the Duchess was on the eve of departing for Scotland, I have postponed my introduction till the winter, when I shall favour the lady, whose taste I shall not dispute, with my most sublime and edifying conversation. She is now in the Highlands, and Alexander took his departure, a few days ago, for the same blessed ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... beautiful," it seems to say: "even the hidden parts of me were spotless, precious, and fair"—and so, musing over this wonderful scene, perhaps I get some feeble glimpse or idea of that ancient Greek spirit which peopled it with sublime races of heroes and gods; {1} and which I never could get out of a Greek book,—no, not though Muzzle flung it at ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fragilia, et puerilibus consentanea crepundiis sunt ista quae vires et opes humanae vocantur, affluunt subito, repente delabuntur, nullo in loco, nulla in persona, stabilibus nixa radicibus consistunt, sed incertissimo flatu fortunae quos in sublime extulerunt improviso recursu destitutos in profundo miseriarum valle miserabiliter immergunt. Valerius, lib. 6. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... the future, the agonies of years by the ecstasy of half an hour. If this conservative sentiment of the creature, the fear of death, does not stop her, what could be expected of laws? Oh, sublime infamy!"— ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... Oh, sublime faith of our fathers, where utter self-sacrifice alone was true love, the fragrance of whose unrequired subjection was pleasant as that of golden censers ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... immaterial. im[e]ti[e]ri[e]l immertierierl. miniature. mini[ts][e] minnitsher. extraordinary. ikstr[o]:dnri ikstrordnry. salute. s[e]lu:t [-lju:-] serloot and serlute. solution. s[e]lu:[s][e]n [-lju:-] serloosh'n and serl[u]sh'n. subordinate (adj.). s[e]b[o]:d[n.]it serbord'nit. sublime. ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... Dietrich, 'had the tenderness of a living body, and was easily moved hither and thither at the will of those who handled it . . . . And many, sublime in the valour of their faith, tore off the hair of her head and the nails of her fingers ("even the tips of her ears, et mamillarum papillas," says untranslatably Montanus of Spire), and kept them as relics.' The reference relating to the pictures of her disciplines ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... them least capable of reaping those Advantages."—Locke, on Ed., p. 372. "It is a mere figment of the human imagination, a rhapsody of the transcendent unintelligible."—Jamieson's Rhet., p. 120. "It contains a greater assemblage of sublime ideas, of bold and daring figures, than is perhaps any where to be met with."—Blair's Rhet., p. 162. "The order in which the two last words are placed, should have been reversed."—Ib., p. 204. "The orders in which the two last ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Paraphrase on Isaiah nothing very favourable can be said. Sublime and solemn prose gains little by a change to blank verse; and the paraphrast has deserted his original, by admitting images not Asiatick, at ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... a temple of art; it contained the rarest and choicest treasures; and when Gotzkowsky passed through the rooms on the arm of his daughter, and contemplated the pictures, or dwelt with her on one of the sublime statues of the gods, his eye beamed with blissful satisfaction, and his whole being breathed cheerfulness and calm. But at this moment his countenance was care-worn and anxious, and however pleasantly and cheerfully the pictures looked ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... grand severity of nature, upon these immense, half desert plains, in the silence of these gloomy forests, on the banks of this majestic river that is ever speeding onward to the eternal ocean, we may feel emotions that are truly sublime. If, in this quiet solitude, should we open the soul to a dream of love, it takes the serious tone; it needs must be a pure being that dares to breathe to the heavens and to the waves these sacred words, 'I love thee,' and that can add the promise and the pledge of ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... than the five acts of her tragedy. I saw that my exclamation had been repeated to her, and that a universal anathema was thundered at the rustic boor, at the barbarian impudent enough to dare to be witty by Monsieur Mery's side, and to affect to be insensible to the sublime beauties of "Cleopatre." However, all was not yet lost; I had unconsciously another way of conquering Madame de Girardin's favor. Her countenance became wreathed in smiles, she advanced towards me, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... his broad shoulders. He had a flat foraging cap on his head, which was as large as a buffalo's, and his person was clothed in blue pantaloons, tight at the ankle, rapidly increasing in width as they ascended, until they diverged at the hips to an expanse which was something between the sublime and the ridiculous. The upper part of his body was cased in a blue jacket, with leaden buttons, stamped with the rampant lion, with a little tail behind, which was shoved up in the air by the protuberance of the parts. Having gained the deck, he walked to Vanslyperken, and ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... as he caught sight of her pale but sublime face, he shuddered and sat down, entirely subjugated, in his turn, by the melancholy ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... a sublime unconsciousness of any moral degradation involved in this allusion that even Hale accepted it without a shock. She rose presently, and, going to the little sideboard, brought out a number of glasses; ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... magnificent in its proof of the sublime conviction of the truth of his belief: "The existence of an orchid with a slender nectary eleven inches in length, and with nectar secreted at its tip, is a conclusive demonstration of the existence of a moth with a tongue eleven ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... yours about everything depending on the point of view. A very obvious statement, of course, but genius seizes on the obvious and draws from it the obscure. Thus the thoughts of even the simplest mind can suggest to the man of genius his sublime conceptions, as is evident from the fact that I ...
— The Point of View • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... therefore deems I shall endure it — I, the unconquered Air! Imagines this triumphant strength may bear His paltry sway! yea, ignorantly dreams, Because proud Rhea now his vassal seems, And Neptune him obeys in billowy lair, That he a more sublime assault may dare, Where blown by tempest wild ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... results, and now stoops to tyrannize over and oppress the weak and good, and cast them among the ruins of their temples of worship to weep and lament in despair! No, my king, this idea of a Pantheon, a universal house of worship, can never be realized. It was a great and sublime thought, but not a wise one; too great, too enlarged and liberal to be appreciated by this pitiable world. Your majesty will forgive me for having spoken the honest truth. I was forced to speak. Like my king, ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... feet, sending heavenward great clouds of mist! I took one look, then looked up the Valley to the great Half Dome, to Glacier Point, from there to Sentinel Peak and the Cathedral Spires, and I concluded that the Yosemite is too beautiful for description, too sublime for comprehension and too magnificent for immediate human understanding. In the presence of those awful cliffs, towering, with an average height of over three thousand feet, above the floor of the valley; those immense waterfalls, as they thundered over the canyon walls; ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves
... the wild, unmeasured trail had to be broken. The Northland giants thronged about them, glistening in their impenetrable armour and crested by the silvery burnish of their glacial headpieces. They frowned vastly, yet with a sublime contempt, at the puny intrusion of their solitude. But the fiery spirit impelling the brothers was a power which defied the overwhelming grandeur of the mountain world, and rendered insignificant the trials they encountered. The cry was "On!" and the dogs laboured as only these burden-bearers ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... how a balloon may be made to take a fresh lease of life is supplied by a voyage of M. Testu about this date, which must find brief mention in these pages. In one aspect it is laughable, in another it is sublime. From every point of view it ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... through the air serene, And flame forth 'twixt the dew-fall and the rime, But I behold her radiant eyes wherein My weary spirit findeth rest from pain; As dimmed by her rich veil, I saw her the first time; The very heaven beamed with the light sublime Of their celestial beauty; dewy-wet Still do they shine, and I am burning yet. Now if the rising sun I see, I feel the light that hath enamored me. Or if he sets, I follow him, when he Bears elsewhere his eternal light, Leaving behind the shadowy ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... mourners, weep anew! Not all to that bright station dared to climb: And happier they their happiness who knew, Whose tapers yet burn through that night of time In which suns perished. Others more sublime, 5 Struck by the envious wrath of man or God, Have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prime; And some yet live, treading the thorny road Which leads, through toil and hate, to Fame's ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... entered his life. And her beautiful love, which enfolded him like a garment, and her sublime faith, which moved before him like the Bethlehem star to where the Christ-principle lay, were, little by little, dissolving the mist and revealing the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... with it. But an investigation of the history of other Chosen Peoples will, I fear, dissipate any notion that the Sinaitic Covenant was other than a symbolic summary of the national genius for religion, a sublime legend retrospectively created. And the mission to other nations must have been evolved still later. "The conception or feeling of a mission grew up and was developed by slow degrees," says Mr. Montefiore, and this sounds much nearer the truth. For, as I said, history is the sole clue ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... axe still fell. The sublime spectacle of men singing as they died, and, above all, the impression produced upon the crowd by the progressive diminution of the chanting voices, superseded the fear inspired ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... With vision clear, Sees forms appear and disappear, In the perpetual round of strange, Mysterious change From birth to death, from death to birth, From earth to heaven, from heaven to earth; Till glimpses more sublime Of things, unseen before, Unto his wondering eyes reveal The Universe, as an immeasurable wheel Turning forevermore In the rapid and rushing river ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... to talk about the singular scenery of coal dust, potsherds, flame and steam, through which the train wound its way. It was squalid ugliness, but it was squalid ugliness on a scale so vast and overpowering that it became sublime. Great furnaces gleamed red in the twilight, and their fires were reflected in horrible black canals; processions of heavy vapour drifted in all directions across the sky, over what acres of mean and miserable brown architecture! The air was alive with the ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... and divine: all these are set to an orchestral accompaniment of continuous harmony, now hushed as the wind among the woods at evening, now strong and sonorous as the storm-wind battling with the mountain-pine. Saul is a vision of life, of time and of eternity, told in song as sublime as the vision is steadfast. The choral symphony of earth and all her voices with which the poem concludes is at once the easiest passage to separate from its context, and (if we may dare, in such a matter, to choose) one, at least, of the ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... agmina stabant Quaeque fuis, Equitum turmae, Peditumque Cohortes, Obvia torquentes Danais vestigia Troes Ibant, sublato Campum clamore replentes: Non secus ac cuneata Gruum sublime volantum Agmina, dum fugiunt Imbres, ac frigora Brumae, Per Coelum matutino clangore feruntur, Oceanumque petunt, mortem exitiumque cruentum Irrita Pigmaeis ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... is not easy to see why the curtain-string should be tied in a hard knot that must be cut at night, or why the servants can't be thorough, deft-handed, and immaculate. One has indigestion, scowls fiercely, tries to swallow large lumps of inamiability, and fears she is not sublime. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... heart after other gods; and his heart was not perfect with the Lord his God, as was the heart of David his father. For Solomon went after Ashtaroth, the goddess of the Sidonians, and after Milcom, the abomination of the Ammonites[6]." Yet this was he who had offered up that most sublime and affecting prayer at the Dedication of the Temple, and who, on a former occasion, when the Almighty gave him the choice of any blessing he should ask, had preferred an understanding heart to long life, and ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... topic meet for classic rhyme? Hast thou no elegiac verse For Brunswick's venerable hearse? What! not a line, a tear, a sigh, When valour bleeds for liberty? Oh, hero of that glorious time, When, with unrivalled light sublime - Though martial Austria, and though all The might of Russia, and the Gaul, Though banded Europe stood her foes - The star of Brandenburg arose! Thou couldst not live to see her beam For ever quenched in Jena's stream. Lamented chief!—it was not given To thee to change the doom of ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... was a great mystery to the Delaware. He could not grasp the simple but sublime truths which lie at the foundation of Christianity. But he longed to do so. At midnight he lay trying to sleep in the silent woods, looking up at the stars and meditating on the wonderful Being who had done all this. In the simplicity of his nature, he talked ...
— The Daughter of the Chieftain - The Story of an Indian Girl • Edward S. Ellis
... their faded features. Mademoiselle de Sombreuil was neither wife nor maid; she was and ever will be a living poem. Mademoiselle Salomon de Villenoix belonged to the race of these heroic beings. Her devotion was religiously sublime, inasmuch as it won her no glory after being, for years, a daily agony. Beautiful and young, she loved and was beloved; her lover lost his reason. For five years she gave herself, with love's devotion, to the mere mechanical ...
— The Vicar of Tours • Honore de Balzac
... with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his World. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, 'I am Divine. Through me God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.' But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... to forget, dear, that I am a plain man," I answered, though to tell the truth I was asking myself whether I was not a trifle weary of posing in that sublime capacity. Now that I thought of it, what was the especial virtue of being a ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... a lovely valley, with bright and warm green shades, and rich, dark-black forests in the rear. No one can gaze upon such a combination and contrast without being impressed, and without recognizing the sublime beauty and grandeur of ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... who was visiting the United States, in 1917, on an important governmental mission, had an almost sublime illustration of the extent to which the telephone had developed on the North American Continent. Sitting at a desk in a large office building in New York, Lord Northcliffe took up two telephone receivers and placed ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... the sandals of celestial mould, Fledged with ambrosial plumes, and rich with gold, Surround her feet: with these sublime she sails The aerial space, and mounts the winged gales; O'er earth and ocean wide prepared to soar, Her dreaded arm a beamy javelin bore, Ponderous and vast: which, when her fury burns, Proud tyrants humbles, ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... "that sublime composer's works with what by common consent is called Italian music. What feebleness of ideas, what limpness of style! That monotony of form, those commonplace cadenzas, those endless bravura passages introduced at haphazard irrespective of the dramatic situation, that recurrent crescendo that ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... any stars, they were those which go with a garter. Though of celebrated and historical ancestry, great rank, and some personal reputation, he had all the ambition of a parvenu. He had a strong regard for office, not so much from the sublime affection for that sublime thing,—power over the destinies of a glorious nation,—as because it added to that vulgar thing—importance in his own set. He looked on his cabinet uniform as a beadle looks on his gold lace. ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... national freedom there is this great dream still to be striven for, let us not decry it as something too sublime for earth. It must be our guiding star to lead us rightly as far as we may go. We can travel rightly that part of the road we now tread on only by shaping it true to the great end that ought to inspire us all. We shall have ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... raged near us, we witnessed a sublime sight. A spiral abyss seemed to be suddenly formed in the air. The clouds followed each other into it with great velocity, till they attracted all objects around them, whilst such clouds as were too large and too far distant ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... often summons to church only the parson and an occasionally conforming clerk; while, two hundred yards off, a thousand Catholics are huddled together in a miserable hovel, and pelted by all the storms of heaven. Can anything be more distressing than to see a venerable man pouring forth sublime truths in tattered breeches, and depending for his food upon the little offal he gets from his parishioners? I venerate a human being who starves for his principles, let them be what they may; but starving for anything is not at all to the taste of ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... fleet with a shout of answering acclamation, made sublime by the spirit which it breathed and the feeling which it expressed. "Now," said Lord Nelson, "I can do no more. We must trust to the Great Disposer of all events, and the justice of our cause. I thank God for this great opportunity of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... their splendor; to that the long ages through which they lived and flourished; to sacrifice, as the very basis of the national and religious polity, they owed the vigor, the young vigor, of humanity. Their literature was grandiose; their architecture magnificent; their art sublime. The traces of divinity ran through the whole of it. But, beautiful as it was, it would not have been well that it should have lasted, for had it been so, mankind would have grown to depend too much upon the manifested Divine life walking incarnate side by side ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... me, there was a spirit stronger than they all. At that moment not the combined powers of earth and hell could have tempted me to do otherwise than to stand firm. Moral and physical cowardice were subdued, thanks to that Washington delegate for the sublime strength roused by his question: "Would Christ ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... present day—Trade, Politics, Letters, Science, or Religion—seem to feel, and to labor to express, the identity of their law. They are rays of one sun; they translate each into a new language the sense of the other. They are sublime when seen as emanations of a Necessity contradistinguished from the vulgar Fate by being instant and alive, and dissolving man, as well as his works, in its flowing beneficence. This influence is conspicuously visible in the ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... fossilized"; whether he spoke of the unprecedented popular ovations given to him at his final departure from Berlin as a "first-class funeral"—there are always the same childlike directness, the same naive impulsiveness, the same bantering earnestness, the same sublime contempt for ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... substituted for the true Almond oil. The best qualities of Olive oil are much esteemed, though they are not as agreeable to English taste as the oil previously mentioned. The best qualities are termed Virgin, Extra Sublime and Sublime. Any that has been exposed for more than a short time to the light and heat of a shop window should be rejected, as the flavour is affected. It should be kept in a cool place. Not only does it vary much in freedom from acid and rancidity, but is frequently ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... former, then Miss Smith of New York is certainly more modest than Miss Smith of London, who still does not scruple to say that tables, pianos, and animals have legs. Oh, my faithful, good old Samuel Richardson! Hath the news yet reached thee in Hades that thy sublime novels are huddled away in corners, and that our daughters may no more read Clarissa than Tom Jones? Go up, Samuel, and be reconciled with thy brother-scribe, whom in life thou didst hate so. I wonder whether a century hence the novels of to-day will be hidden behind locks and wires, ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... objective for him, that is, in his own belief of their kind and origin,—still the thoughts, the reasonings, the grounds, the deductions, the facts illustrative, or in proof, and the conclusions, remain the same; and the reader might derive the same benefit from them as from the sublime and impressive truths conveyed in the Vision of Mirza or the Tablet of Cebes. So much even from a very partial acquaintance with the works of Swedenborg, I can venture to assert; that as a moralist Swedenborg is above all praise; and that as a naturalist, psychologist, and theologian, ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... returned, and the twins, their eyes bright with the unholy light of mischief, never looked at her. They sometimes looked heavenward with a sublime contentment that drove Connie nearly frantic. Occasionally they uttered cryptic words about the morrow,—and the older members of the family smiled pleasantly, but Connie shuddered. She remembered ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... altogether ignorant of the time of his coming, even if he would ever again come at all,—was called to meet the man whom she had so wronged and misunderstood. But how to perform the rites of reconciliation, is one of the sublime mysteries which Nature teaches when she gives us the other holy lessons of love; and who doubts that the cousin-lovers clasped each other more fondly, and with a better knowledge of what each was worth to ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... seven years of age. Is not that enough to explain his whole being? Silent, self-contained, pious, exemplary in conduct, he went his way over that vast tract of country named on the map of the heart Love-without-Hope, the sublime and arid steppes of Desire. Modeste had christened this grotesque little being her "Black Dwarf." The nickname sent him to the pages of Walter Scott's novel, and he one day said to Modeste: "Will you accept a rose against ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... a moment I pause, Here for you! and here for America! Still the present I raise aloft, still the future of the States I harbinge glad and sublime, And for the past I pronounce what the air holds of ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... with himself, and steadfastly true to himself in his heart in spite of the spectacle of exultant vice, was a fallen angel doing penance, who remembered his origin, foresaw his guerdon, accomplished his task, and obeyed his glorious mission. The sublime resignation of Christians was then seen in all its glory. He depicted martyrs at the burning stake, and almost stripped them of their merit by stripping them of their sufferings. He showed their inner angel as dwelling in the heavens, while the outer ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac
... sublime studies, I can name some rustic Romans from the Sabine district, neighbours and friends of my own, without whose presence farm work of importance is scarcely ever performed—whether sowing, or harvesting or storing crops. And yet in other things this is less surprising; ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... let us here erect a stone, To mark the place, to mark the time; A witness to God's mercies shown, A pledge to hold this day sublime. ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... beloved Lady Eleanor. Most interesting is your description of that visit, mutually paid to that desolate and silent Dinbren. How worthy of yourselves that hour of consecration, with all its tributary sighs! Too happy were the days and weeks which I passed beneath its roof, and in its beautiful and sublime environs, to permit such ...
— The "Ladies of Llangollen" • John Hicklin
... said. "Any discoveries to be made in Grant Place will wait. On second thought the death of the Russian is the best solution. But there's no hurry. Besides," continued Inspector Val, his tones betraying that sublime appreciation of art at its utmost which an amateur of bronzes might have felt in the presence of Cellini's Perseus, "besides, I want you to take a look over this job of London Bill! You'll never again see its equal—never such perfection of plan ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... the Philosopher says (De Anima i, text. 1), "one knowledge is preferable to another, either because it is about a higher object, or because it is more certain." Hence if the objects be equally good and sublime, that virtue will be greater which possesses more certain knowledge. But a virtue which is less certain about a higher and better object, is preferable to that which is more certain about an object of inferior degree. Wherefore the Philosopher says (De Coelo ii, text. 60) that "it is ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... other to speak of within five hundred miles on either side; dominator of the greatest of oceans, waters more spacious than those of Rio, airs of purple haze sweeter than those of Italy, hills islands and shore lines more sublime than any of Greece—all this time these benefactions of nature have awaited the appreciation and action of those who for their own benefit and the benefit of the nation would utilize them. Are they here now, these new ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... literature and every phase of human activity. It explains life, points the way to better things, gives us hope, strengthens the weary and heavy-laden, bids us look upward and onward, and constitutes the most sublime ideal ever conceived by ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... at those times, of all the thunderous events which then loosened excited tongues, caused by high-minded men of action expertly conjuring crisis after crisis while their docile followers scrambled out of one sublime trouble into another, heated and exhausted, but still gaping with obedience and respect, we can see that nothing remains but the burial parties, whose work is yet uncompleted in France. What good does persist out of those days is the light in which Gilbert's tortoise sunned itself. ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... There is something sublime in bringing order out of chaos; light out of darkness; giving each planet its place in the solar system; oceans and lands their limits; wholly inconsistent with a petty surgical operation, to find material for the mother of the race. It is on this ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... and the Roman historians, however, that we have not only the most authentic and instructive, but even the most engaging representations of the tribes from whom we descend. Those sublime and intelligent writers understood human nature, and could collect its features, and exhibit its characters, in every situation. They were ill succeeded in this task by the early historians of modern Europe; who, generally bred to the profession of monks, and confined to the ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... it was beautiful to see Jimmy lead it back with a word and a look; when he sent some sleepy Senior to bed with the remark, "You're no more good. Sleep it off and be fresh to-morrow," Jimmy touched the sublime. ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... a colossal genius. No human writer has done quite what he did, anticipating the methods and spiritual secrets of posterity, and creating for himself, with sublime indifference to contemporary usage and taste, the sort of intellectual atmosphere that ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... as sublime, animating as well as solemn, on that bright Sunday morning, was this prelude to the stern game of war about to be played: the quiet summer sea stirred only by a breeze sufficient to cap with white the little waves that ruffled its surface; the dark hulls gently rippling the water aside in their ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... squares and parallelograms were compact and perfect as a Chinese puzzle; an enormous hieroglyphic which man must decipher or die. There fell upon both of them, but upon Turnbull more than the other, because he know more what the scene signified, that quite indescribable sense as of a sublime and passionate and heart-moving futility, which is never evoked by deserts or dead men or men neglected and barbarous, which can only be invoked by the sight of the enormous genius of man applied to anything other than the best. Turnbull, the old idealistic democrat, had ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... is a great deal more to one who has been nourishing a youth sublime with the curious facts of Science and the thousand-and-one items of general information necessary to any person who, like the fantastical duke of dark corners, above all other strifes contends especially to know himself; and that physically, as well as morally. To him it is a nasty ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... these: "Quid est tarn furiosum vel tragicum quam verborum sonitus inanis, nulla subjecta sententia neque scientia." What can be so proper for tragedy as a set of big sounding words, so contrived together as to convey no meaning? which I shall one day or other prove to be the sublime of Longinus. Ovid declareth ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... gote Ercule ancor, d' aver posti que' segni, Perche piu oltre passeranno i legni. E puossi andar giu nell' altro emisperio, Pero che al centro ogni cosa reprime: Sicche la terra per divin misterio Sospesa sta fra le stelle sublime, E laggiu son citta, castella, e imperio; Ma nol cognobbon quelle gente prime. Vedi che il sol di camminar s' affretta, Dove io dico che laggiu s' aspetta. Pulci, ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... to a certain extent," said Aunt Judy. "It only wants the right feeling; some of the good God-like feeling which originated the creation of a beautiful world, and caused the contemplation of it to produce the sublime complacency which is described, 'And God looked upon everything that He had made, and behold ...
— Aunt Judy's Tales • Mrs Alfred Gatty
... So sublime, indeed, was the German confidence that many in America who had been driven to cover because of their Teutonic activities before America entered the war began to dream that they, too, would reap a great reward for their martyrdom ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... habitual exercise and expansion of the most generous sentiments, men were prepared for the magnificent apostolic mission of making the rich and happy sympathize with the sufferings of their brethren, by unveiling the frightful miseries of humanity—a sublime and sacred morality, which none are able to withstand, when it is preached with eyes full of tears, and hearts ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... no outlying province, nor does any province lie beyond him. East, West, North, South, and height and depth are contained in his bosom, the poles of his being reaching more widely, his zenith and nadir being more sublime and more profound. We are cheated by nearness and intimacy. Let us look at man with a telescope, and we shall find no star or constellation of sweep so grand, no nebulae or star-dust so provoking and suggestive to fancy. In truth, there are no words to say ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... we well remember the enthusiasm and keen zest with which he passed many winter evenings at the house of a friend in reading, analyzing, and applying the canons of criticism to Burke's Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful. His article on Miracles, published in the October number, 1863, of the Christian Review, contains one of the most searching examinations of Hume's doctrines extant. It presents a vexed subject in a new and striking light, and offers ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... corruption he trampled on our self-respect, he demonstrated to us daily our want of moral courage; he tainted our lives. Had we been a miserable gang of wretched immortals, unhallowed alike by hope and fear, he could not have lorded it over us with a more pitiless assertion of his sublime privilege. ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... of character, threw her brown velvet eyes on her neighbour, Mr. Penruddock, and cross-examined him in mystical whispers. She soon recognised his love of nature; and this allowed her to dissert on the subject, at once sublime and inexhaustible, with copiousness worthy of the theme. When she found he was an entomologist, and that it was not so much mountains as insects which interested him, she shifted her ground, but treated it with equal felicity. Strange, ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... old man left the young people without any sign of uneasiness, and went to his room. When Francesca was tired of singing, she led Rodolphe on to the balcony, whence they perceived the sublime scenery of the lake, and signed to him to be seated by her on ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... definitions a large number of customs of public worship and, above all, a number of stories about the gods, were in violent contradiction; thus we find even so old and so pious a poet as Pindar occasionally rejecting mythical stories which he thinks at variance with the sublime nature of the gods. This form of criticism of popular beliefs is continued through the whole of antiquity; it is found not only in philosophers and philosophically educated laymen, but appears spontaneously in everybody of a reflective mind; its ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... of Machiavel and the earthquake genius of the Italian republics were characteristics of all the individuals of this race. The proportions of their souls exceed the height of their destiny: vices, passions, virtues are all in excess. The women are all angelic or perverse, the men sublime or depraved, and their language even is as emphatic and lofty as their aspirations. There is in their most familiar correspondence the colour and tone of the heroic ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... of Beethoven is inscribed upon the second, and the last bears that of Franz Schubert. Schubert died aged but thirty-one, in 1828, the year after Beethoven had passed beyond. He had the greatest reverence for the sublime master, and on the day before his own death spoke of him in a touching manner in his delirium. Schubert was one of the torch-bearers at the grave of Beethoven, and after the funeral went with some friends to a tavern, where he filled two glasses of wine. The first he ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... comparatively low altitude many birds, as is well known, hie to the far North to find the proper climatic conditions in which to rear their broods and spend their summer vacation, some of them going to the subarctic provinces and others beyond. How different among the sublime heights of the Rockies! Here they are required to make a journey of only a few miles, say from five to one hundred or slightly more, according to the locality selected, up the defiles and canyons or over the ridges, to find the conditions as to temperature, ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... slender possibility of a second election of Mr. Adams." And, to be sure, the "United States Gazette" followed up the thing with a good, single-minded party malice which cannot be surpassed in these present days, ending in such altitudes of sublime coolness as the following:—"The insurrection of the negroes in the Southern States, which appears to be organized on the true French plan, must be decisive with every reflecting man in those States of the election of Mr. Adams and General Pinckney. The military skill and approved bravery ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... no great country inhabited by civilized man more favored by nature than France. Possessing every variety of surface from the sublime mountain to the shifting sand-dune, from the loamy plain to the precipitous rock, the land is smiled upon by a climate in which the extremes of heat and cold are of rare occurrence. The grape will ripen over the greater part of the country, ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... God exactly what his Son meant by the "camel," the "needle"—to say nothing of the "rich man." Thoreau might have wondered how this man NAILED DOWN the last plank in HIS bridge to salvation, by rising to sublime heights of patriotism, in HIS war against materialism; but would even Thoreau be so unfeeling as to suggest to this exhorter that HIS salvation might be clinched "if he would sacrifice his income" (not himself) and come—in to a real Salvation Army, or that the final triumph, the supreme ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... united nation and a constitutional government. He was His instrument in overthrowing despotism among the petty kings of Germany, and thus showing the necessity of a national unity,—at length realized by the genius of Bismarck. Even in his crimes Napoleon stands out on the sublime pages of history as the instrument of Providence, since his crimes were overruled in the hatred of despotism among his own subjects, and a still greater hatred of despotism as exercised by those ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... that the goldsmiths, weavers, sculptors, painters, architects, and musicians of the Emperor could collect the masses around the churches and make them patiently listen to what they could still comprehend of Paul's sublime morality. When you regard St. Mark or Notre Dame or any other stupendous cathedral of the Middle Ages, like museums for the work of art they hold, you see the luminous symbol of this paradoxical alliance between victim ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... observer of the stupendous spectacle that spread out around and above me; the most sublime feature in this imposing scene appeared to be the silence which reigned supreme over all. The heavens were as mute as the sea. It looked as if the earth had been engulfed by a second deluge, and all living nature had perished utterly from the ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... boundless desert, desert the more delicious the more solitary it is. There, in this abyss of wisdom, the soul grows by what it drinks in from the well-springs of the comprehension of love, ... and recognizes, however sublime and learned may be the terms we employ, how utterly vile, insignificant, and improper they are, when we seek to discourse of divine things by ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James |
