"Unfathomable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... conjure your excellency, to give me all the assistance you can, in tracing out the author of the infidelity, which put extracts from General Conway's letters to me into your hands. Those letters have been stealingly copied; but, which of them, when, or by whom, is to me, as yet, an unfathomable secret. ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... worse, ma'am," she said, in her decided way. And the good lady, longing to deluge somebody with sympathetic tears, was compelled to confine herself to the round of the infantry quarters, where, with the ladies of her own regiment, she could bemoan the unfathomable ingratitude and lack of appreciation of ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... fighting always in a glorious and distinguished manner. In the hour of battle, diligent enough "to amass property," as the Vikings termed it; and in the long days and nights of sailing, given over, it is likely, to his own thoughts and the unfathomable dialogue with the ever-moaning Sea; not the worst High School a man could have, and indeed infinitely preferable to the most that are going even now, for a ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... through lustreless leaves. The black man, the donkeys, the women and children, the saint's dome, are all part of the inimitable Eastern scene in which inertia and agitation are so curiously combined, and a surface of shrill noise flickers over depths of such unfathomable silence. ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... palpable Aaron changed his position as he sat, and drew in his arm: though even now he was not aware of any need to do so. The invisible Aaron breathed with relief in the bows, the boat swung steadily on, into the deep, unfathomable ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... mysteries in the human heart that must ever remain unfathomable, and it is not for us to judge one another when we are confronted by them, and can find no clue to ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... never known Mrs. Hazleton before—he had never comprehended her fully. But now he knew her—now, though perhaps the depths were still unfathomable to his eyes, he felt that there was a strong commanding will within that beautiful form which would bear no trifling. He had often treated her with easy lightness—with no want of apparent respect indeed—but with the persuasions and ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... a cascade, that shone like silver. Every turn of the screw dashed a thousand flashes on either side, and the heaving of the lead was like the flight of a meteor, as it plunged with a luminous trail far down into the dark unfathomable depths below. ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... darkness deepened in the old parlor. There was a sound of voices passing in the street. The church bell broke the stillness. Softly the old calm crept over his brow, and he raised his face and looked at her with those great dark eyes—eyes of unfathomable tenderness and impenetrable fire, and she felt that her very soul stood naked before him. She trembled and sank on the couch at her side. His look was infinitely tender as he ...
— Beth Woodburn • Maud Petitt
... piercing beginnings, that dwindled to final melancholy moans, expressed a red and grim tragedy of the unfathomable possibilities of the man's dreams. But to the youth these were not merely the shrieks of a vision-pierced man: they were an utterance of the meaning of the room and its occupants. It was to him the protest of the wretch who feels the touch of the imperturbable granite wheels, ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... with the oddest irrelevance out of the unfathomable peace. She could not account for him, nor understand why, when she was incapable of seeing him a year ago, she should see him now with such extreme distinctness and solidity. She saw him, all pink and blond and callow with excessive youth, advancing with his inevitable, suburban, ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... Itwas no longer to the soul than my thought occupied to me. Recognising my own inner consciousness, the psyche, so clearly, death did not seem to me to affect the personality.In dissolution there was no bridgeless chasm, no unfathomable gulf of separation; the spirit did not immediately become inaccesible, leaping at a bound to an immeasurable distance. Look at another person while living; the soul is not visible, only the body which it animates. Therefore, merely ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... her passivity, the oaf advanced by inches, visibly. He looked knowingly about him, collecting approval from his followers, he whispered in her ear, hummed gallant airs, regaled the company with snatches of salt song. Fixed as the Sphinx and unfathomable, she sat on broodingly until, piqued by her indifference, maybe, or swayed by some wave of desire, he caught her round the waist and buried his face in her neck; and then, all at once, she awoke, shivered and collected herself, without ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... have suddenly sunk. Cable ships repairing a broken cable, snapped by the earthquake of November 18th, 1929, report that for distances of a hundred miles on the Grand Banks the cables have disappeared into unfathomable depths. And before the subterranean cataclysm, they were within six hundred feet of the surface. And all the bottom of that section of the North Atlantic seems to have caved in. Ten thousand square miles dropped out of the bottom of the ocean! ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... sighed with admiration at the scene—there lay before me a deep, almost circular sheet or water, about thirty yards across. Directly beneath me I could see the rocky bottom; fifty feet further out towards the centre it was of unfathomable blueness. On the opposite side a tree of enormous girth had fallen, long years before, yet it was still growing, for some of its mighty roots were embedded in the rich red soil of ...
— "Martin Of Nitendi"; and The River Of Dreams - 1901 • Louis Becke
... For once all is possible; nothing lies beyond our reach. And as we talk, and she listens, we two seem to be floating off into an empyrean of our own like the summer clouds above our heads, as they sail dreamily on into the far-away depths of the unfathomable sky. ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... Unfathomable boundless mystery, Last work of the Creator, deathless, vast, Soul—essence moulded of a changeful past; Thou art the offspring of Eternity; Breath of his breath, by his vitality Engendered, in his image cast, Part of the Nature-song ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... that they are dreadful!" It is so, for example, with the history of Israel, which, commencing with Abraham, when earth was young, four thousand years ago, is still moving on as a distinct stream flowing amidst the waters of the great ocean, yet never mingling with them, though nearing the unfathomable gulf ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... nature. Would you ask more?—you can learn nothing: whether it be eternal—whether it compel us, its creatures, to new careers after that darkness which we call death—we cannot tell. There leave we this ancient, unseen, unfathomable power, and come to that which, to our eyes, is the great minister of its functions. This we can task more, from this we can learn more: its evidence is around us—its name is NATURE. The error of the sages has been to direct ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... allege, for impiety. The death of Semele [45] is a sort of ideal or type of this peculiar claim on human pity, as the descent of Persephone into Hades, of all human pity over the early death of women. Accordingly, his triumph being now consummated, he descends into Hades, through the unfathomable Alcyonian lake, according to the most central version of the legend, to bring her up from thence; and that Hermes, the shadowy conductor of souls, is constantly associated with Dionysus, in the story of his early life, is not without significance in this connexion. As in Delphi the winter ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... washy, everlasting floods?" Why will they haul everything out into the open day? Why will they make the Holy of Holies common and unclean? Why will they be so ineffably stupid as not to see that there is that which speech profanes? Why will they lower their drag-nets into the unfathomable waters, in the vain attempt to bring up your pearls and gems, whose luster would pale to ashes in the garish light, whose only sparkle is in the deep sea-soundings? Procul, O ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... half-crown trumpet: in like manner, by means of pretty sentimental tales, and cheap apologues, Mrs. Sand proclaims HER truth—that we need a new Messiah, and that the Christian religion is no more! O awful, awful name of God! Light unbearable! Mystery unfathomable! Vastness immeasurable!—Who are these who come forward to explain the mystery, and gaze unblinking into the depths of the light, and measure the immeasurable vastness to a hair? O name, that God's people of old did fear to utter! O light, that God's ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Porter as the latter went down the street. About his thin-lipped, square-framed mouth hovered an expression that might have been a smile, or an intense look of interest, or a touch of avaricious ferocity. The gray eyes peeped over the wall of their lower lids, and in them, too, was the unfathomable something. ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... left of the waning light shows the rough track over the heather to High Horcum. The huge shoulders of the moors are now majestically indistinct, and towards the west the browns, purples, and greens are all merged in one unfathomable blackness. The tremendous silence and the desolation become almost oppressive, but overhead the familiar arrangement of the constellations gives a sense of companionship not to be slighted. In something less than an hour a light glows in the distance, and, although the darkness ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... fashion of a berth on board ship, which was shaded, like the little windows, with fair white curtains, and looked comfortable enough, though by what kind of gymnastic exercise the lady of the caravan ever contrived to get into it, was an unfathomable mystery. The other half served for a kitchen, and was fitted up with a stove whose small chimney passed through the roof. It held also a closet or larder, several chests, a great pitcher of water, and a few cooking-utensils and articles of crockery. These latter necessaries hung upon the walls, ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... neighbourhood, "put on its cap and began to smoke its pipe," which, to speak more plainly, means that it is covered with clouds, and that the snow, driven upon it by a south-west wind, formed a long crest on its summit in the direction of the unfathomable precipices of the Brenva glaciers. This crest betrayed to imprudent tourists the route they would have taken, had they had the temerity to ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... of the celestial spaces presents itself in the presebt connexion. Light from stars at unfathomable distances reaches us in such quantity as to suggest that space itself is absolutely transparent, leaving open the question as to whether there is enough matter scattered through it to absorb a sensible part of the light in its journey ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... words to say. She paused as he spoke at the other side of that little garden door. She seemed to like those lingering sentences—and hung upon them—and even smiled but in her eyes there was a vague and melancholy pleading—a wandering and unfathomable look that pained him. ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... that hand presently, and, having sighed, lifted it to press it upon his brow, but did not complete the gesture. As his hand came within the scope of his gaze, levelled on the unfathomable distance, he observed that the fingers held a sheet of printed paper; and he remembered Florence. Instead of pressing his brow he unfolded the journal she had thrust upon him. As he began to read, his eye was lustreless, his ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... an even table of coral running out many feet into the sea; and is impossible to step on it with bare feet. At the end of this table the reef goes down perpendicularly, a sheer precipice, into the unfathomable sea. No vessel can anchor here, and to make a landing was an exciting matter. The island was approached in small boats on the side sheltered from the wind, and here, with the luck which characterized the trip, was found the only opening in this barrier of coral. A long cleft, perhaps ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... domes and spires of Genoa, and exclaims with rapture: "This majestic city—mine! To flame over it like the kingly Day; to brood over it with a monarch's power; all these sleepless longings, all these never satiated wishes to be drowned in that unfathomable ocean!" We admire Fiesco, we disapprove of him, and sympathise with him: he is crushed in the ponderous machinery which himself put in motion and thought to control: we lament his fate, but confess that it was not undeserved. ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... of tapestry itself carries us back to the unfathomable East which has a trick at dates, making the Christian Era a modern epoch, and making of us but a newly-sprung civilisation in the history of the old grey world. After showing us that the East pre-empted originality for all time, the history ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... inestimable folio of drawings, once in the possession of Vasari, were certain designs by Verrocchio, faces of such impressive beauty that Leonardo in his boyhood copied them many times. It is hard not to connect with these designs of the elder by-past master, as with its germinal principle, the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it, which plays over all Leonardo's work. Besides, the picture is a portrait. From childhood we see this image defining itself on the fabric of his dreams; ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... Sidonian, naturally haughty, arrogant—if I were to free her, she would spit at me. No, no, a place for everything. A serpent crawls the earth; let it crawl. Dost thou know, Chios, methinks that girl, with her deep unfathomable eyes of night-gloom, is not quite so innocent as one ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... his late success, and promised to assist him in prosecuting the war with vigour, the nation loudly exclaimed against the intolerable burdens and losses to which they were subjected by a foreign scheme of politics, which, like an unfathomable abyss, swallowed up the wealth and blood of the kingdom. All the king's endeavours to cover the disgusting side of his character had proved ineffectual; he was still dry, reserved, and forbidding; and the malcontents inveighed bitterly against his ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... the case—that ambiguity runs through him in everything. Burke has found an admirable word for it in the Persian tongue, for which we have no translation, but it means an intricacy involved so deep as to be nearly unfathomable—an ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... blots covered with spines; the hippocampi, those little "devil's horses," swam restlessly; and flashes of silver and purple, of tails and fins, passed swiftly among whirlpools and bubbles, dashing out of one cave to disappear into the mouth of another unfathomable mystery. ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the story of those great exploits! God is my witness, how I slew the wolf, The lion, and the dragon; how I punished That fell enchantress with her thousand wiles; And how I suffered, midst the storm of snow, Which almost froze the blood within my veins; And how that vast unfathomable deep We crossed securely. These are deeds which awaken Wonder and praise in others, not in thee! The treasure which I captured now is thine; And what is my reward?—the interest, sorrow. Thus am I cheated ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... and here am I in London for the first time as a free man, and, to my own mind, master of my destiny. It really seems at moments as if one might pat it into any form one chose; and it really seems at times as if one were an insect without wings at the bottom of some unfathomable cranny. The fog of my first week in London is, I believe, historic, and its five or six days of tearful blindness and catarrh began to look as if they would reach to the very crack of doom. Those fog-bound days, in which it was impossible for a Midland-bred stranger to ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... any personal feeling—any sort of human relation with one of the units in the mosaic he was building—was to be avoided like the plague. His professional and personal contempt for a colleague capable of a love-affair with a woman in a company he was directing, would be inexpressible—unfathomable. Of course when a man's job was finished—and this sort of job nearly always did finish on the opening night—why, after that, his affairs were his ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... xiii. 18 where the Angel of the Lord, after having announced the birth of Samson, says: "Why askest thou thus after my name?—it is wonderful," [Hebrew: plai], i.e., my whole nature is wonderful, of unfathomable depth, and cannot, therefore, be expressed by any human name. Farther—Revel. xix. 12 is to be compared, where Christ has a name written that no man knows but He himself, to intimate the immeasurable glory ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... the eye of the mountain, jade green, placid, unwinking, also unfathomable. Whatever goes on under the high and stony brows is guessed at. It is always a favorite local tradition that one or another of the blind lakes is bottomless. Often they lie in such deep cairns of broken ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... in dithyrambic verse. It moves wholly by inspiration; every event is providential, every act unpremeditated. Absolute freedom and absolute helplessness have met together: you depend wholly on divine favour, yet that unfathomable agency is not distinguishable from your own life. This is the condition to which some forms of piety invite men to return; and it lies in truth not far beneath the ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Board of Works, and the peasants were being transformed into mendicants by process of law. These calamities, related of a distant and savage tribe, would move a generous heart; but seeing them befall our own people, the children of the same mother, and foreseeing all the black, unfathomable misery they foreshadowed, it was hard to preserve ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... her temples, and struggled with the sickness of heart, the dreadful faintness of terror, which would have overpowered a younger or a less resolute woman. Her eyes, dim with watching, weary with grief, searched the lawyer's unfathomable face. "His unhappy daughters?" she repeated to herself, vacantly. "He talks as if there was some worse calamity than the calamity which has made them orphans." She paused once more; and rallied her sinking courage. ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... had tormented his debonair boyhood with her shy ardent worship of himself and his daring exploits, but instead a winsome vision of Christmas color and Christmas cheer, holly-red of cheek, with flashes of scarlet holly in her night black hair and eyes whose unfathomable dusk reflected no single hint of that old, wild worship slumbering still in the ...
— When the Yule Log Burns - A Christmas Story • Leona Dalrymple
... mistake; and it is all a mystery to him. He says, What am I, that I should be the object of this? and whence comes it? He sees neither the fountain from which it springs, nor the banks that confine it. To him it is an ocean, unfathomable, and ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... marvellous enough when in health and singing merrily forward like a cunningly constructed and jewelled time-piece, becomes, in disease, as baffling, as hopeless of solution as the laws of the unfathomable sky. Beyond the utmost sweep of the imagined lies the marvel of fact. The beliefs, the vagaries, the hallucinations of the insane have never been co-ordinated, perhaps they never will be. It is possible that this girl, so normal in appearance, has a rotten strand in her—some weakness inherited ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... humidity, a welcome escape from the heat and deadly malaria of the hot region with its "bilious fevers." Sometimes as he passes along the bases of the volcanic mountains, casting his eye "down some steep slope or almost unfathomable ravine on the margin of the road, he sees their depths glowing with the rich blooms and enameled vegetation of the tropics." This contrast arises from the height he has now gained above the hot ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... and disappeared round the hop-bush. Then she turned her unfathomable eyes reproachfully on my face, as I ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... only half love you? I want to sit close in your heart, warmed by its glow. It is the irresistible power of truth that has drawn me to you. My whole life will not be long enough for me to sound the unfathomable depths of ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... from me, and affected to ignore my presence. I caught my horse feeding by the roadside, a furlong forward, and mounted and fell into place behind the two, as in the morning. And just as we had plodded on then in silence we plodded on now; almost as if nothing had happened; while I wondered at the unfathomable ways of women, and marvelled that she could take part in such ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... no more. It was a mystery, he says, a wonderful and unfathomable matter, which had been hidden since the foundation of the world, of which he himself says that he saw only through a glass darkly; and we cannot expect to have clearer eyes than he. But this he seems to have seen, that the Lord, when He rose again, ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... should see the evidence of her success in art, if art it was, not artlessness, as then I was compelled to think it. And she said the oddest things in the most unconventional way, skirting sometimes unfathomable abysms of thought, where I had hardly the courage to set foot. In short, she was fascinating in a thousand and fifty different ways, and at every step I executed a new and profounder emotional folly, a hardier spiritual indiscretion, incurring fresh liability to arrest by the constabulary of ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... him were the tumbled blocks and crags, Huge ridges and sharp juts of flinty peaks, Black caves, and masses of the grim, bald rock. The ethereal, unfathomable sky, Hung over him, the valley lay beneath, Dotted with yellow hayricks, that exhaled Sweet, healthy odors to the mountain-top. He breathed intoxicate the infinite air, And plucked the heather blossoms where they blew, Reckless with light and dew, in crannies green, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... is shown by the sympathetic earthquakes which mark its crises. His birth is supernatural and had he willed it he could have lived until the end of the present Kalpa.[171] So, too, the nature of a Buddha when he is released from form, that is after death, is deep and unfathomable as the ocean.[172] The Kathavatthu condemns the ideas (thus showing that they existed) that Buddhas are born in all quarters of the universe, that the Buddha was superhuman in the ordinary affairs ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... recompence? How will the authors and promoters of that villainous project, for the ruin of this poor country, be able to account with us for the injuries they have already done, although they should no farther succeed? The deplorable case of such wretches, must entirely be left to the unfathomable mercies of God: For those who know the least in religion are not ignorant that, without our utmost endeavours to make restitution to the person injured, and to obtain his pardon, added to a sincere repentance, there is no hope of salvation ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... unfathomable, father," at last Esther said softly, "and to think that His death was for even little Rosa, and the poor child knew nothing about it! I felt ashamed and speechless when she asked me why she had never been told before, having no reasonable answer whatever to give. I wish I could ...
— Rosa's Quest - The Way to the Beautiful Land • Anna Potter Wright
... of this kind is inscrutable for any observer, even for a man who prides himself, as I do, on a certain expertness. It is everywhere unfathomable; the dark depths in it are darker than in any other mystery; the colors confused even in the ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... of his efforts to get himself released, and the unequal contest between his "scrupulousness," and Elizabeth's astute, unfathomable diplomacy was still to be waged for many months. Her request to be allowed to send a verbal message to the Council by one of her servants was indeed declined, but she received permission to commit her ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... spite of the pain she knew she inflicted, she could not resist flirting with him just a little even at such a moment. It filled her with such exquisite joy to feel anew the power she exercised over him and the unfathomable depth of his love which each fresh thrust at his heart ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... horrible heat of the simoon. So abruptly had she taken her leave, that she was beyond hearing before I could sufficiently recover to reply. Words I would have spoken burned upon my lips, and emotions welled up from the depths of an affection as deep, true and unfathomable as ever struggled in such a heart as that of ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... impregnated with the qualities of her sensitive nature. It acts rather through a channel of electricity than of reasoning. Its perceptions of truth come, as it were, by intuition. It is under the influence of the heart, that has deep and unfathomable wells of feeling; and truth is felt in every pulse, rather than reasoned out and demonstrated. You cannot offend a woman so quick, in any way, as to ask her why she wishes to do thus, or why she reaches such a conclusion. Her reply is, invariably, "'Cause!" And that is about ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... perilous strip of ice between unfathomable blue depths along which they must pass, as bridge-builders along their girders, yet without the bridge-builders' knowledge that at the end of the passage there was a further way. Now it was some crevasse into which they must descend, cutting ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... but for a long time he may increase their number. His doctrine is indeed alluring. Instead of telling us, as a stern and contrite philosophy would, that the truth is remote, difficult, and almost undiscoverable by human efforts, that the universe is vast and unfathomable, yet that the knowledge of its ways is precious to our better selves, if we would not live befooled, this philosophy rather tells us that nothing is truer or more precious than our rudimentary consciousness, with its vague ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... know it so little, that the greatest thinkers have called it "a state of consciousness," i.e., an impression produced by it within ourselves.[51] It is the result of the will of the supreme Spirit, which creates "differences" (forms) in unfathomable homogeneous Unity, which is incarnated in them and produces the modifications necessary for the development of its powers, in other words, for the accomplishment of their evolution. As this evolution takes place in the finite—for the Infinite can effect its "sacrifice," i.e. its incarnation,[52] ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... An inarticulate, unfathomable depression rolled back on him, like a mist out of the sea. He hastily undressed, put watch and door-key and Critchett's powder under his pillow, paused, vacantly ruminated, and then replaced the powder in his waistcoat pocket, said his prayers, and got shivering to bed. He did not feel hurt at ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... fantastically set With cupola or minaret, Wild crests as pagod ever decked, Or mosque of eastern architect. Nor were these earth-born castles bare, Nor lacked they many a banner fair; For, from their shivered brows displayed, Far o'er the unfathomable glade, All twinkling with the dew-drop's sheen, The briar-rose fell in streamers green, And creeping shrubs, of thousand dyes, Waved in the ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... do—it was as though a city man were to direct a newcomer to Central Park, or impart to him a test for the destinations of trolley lines—yet Thorpe's new friends were profoundly impressed with his knowledge of occult things. The forest was to them, as to most, more or less of a mystery, unfathomable except to the favored of genius. A man who could interpret it, even a little, into the speech of everyday comfort and expediency possessed a strong claim to their imaginations. When he had finished these practical ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... dignified system. One feels that the three- legged table must hamper them. One can imagine an impatient spirit getting tired of spelling out a lengthy story on a three-legged table. But, as I have said, I am willing to assume that, for some spiritual reason unfathomable to my mere human intelligence, that three-legged table is essential. I am willing also to accept the human medium. She is generally an unprepossessing lady running somewhat to bulk. If a gentleman, he so often has dirty finger-nails, and smells of ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... hill and dale. The commotion of the day and the driving lulled the old woman into deep sleep, and Uli, with tense muscles, held in the wildly racing Blackie to a moderately fast pace; Freneli was alone in the wide world. As far off in the distant sky the stars floated in the limitless space of the unfathomable blue ocean, each by itself in its solitary course, so she felt herself again to be the poor, solitary, forsaken girl in the great turmoil of the universe. When she had left aunt and uncle, when they were dead, she would have no one left on earth; no house for a refuge ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... and she stood for a moment with a hand pressed over her eyes, swaying. He had never seen her like this; he was like a pilot striving to steer his ship through an unfathomable fog. Following what had become an instinct with him, he raised his left hand and touched the cross beneath his throat. ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... we miscall our life is Memory: We walk upon a narrow path between Two gulfs—what is to be, and what has been, Led by a guide whose name is Destiny; Beyond is sightless gloom and mystery, From whose unfathomable depths we glean Chaotic hopes and terrors, dimly-seen Reflections of a ...
— The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. - A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers • Various
... left them whispering among themselves. Some minutes later I knocked at the door of the Cardinal's house. Presently a window opened and the moonbeams fell on a grey head, with a black cap that seemed ashy pale against the unfathomable gloom of the ...
— The Miraculous Revenge - Little Blue Book #215 • Bernard Shaw
... partitioned off at the farther end, which was shaded with fair, white curtains, and looked comfortable enough,—though by what kind of gymnastic exercise the lady of the caravan ever contrived to get into it,—was an unfathomable mystery. The other half served for a kitchen, and was fitted up with a stove, whose small chimney passed through the roof. It held, also, a closet or larder, and the necessary cooking utensils, which ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... not constantly accustomed to sustain the splendour. Bury all your books, when you feel the night of scepticism gathering around you—bury them all, powerful though you may have deemed their spells to illuminate the unfathomable—open your Bible, and all the spiritual world will be ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... only the ocean as referred to man. How much more magnificent is it in itself! Thrice the magnitude of the land, the world of waters! its depth unfathomable, its mountains loftier than the loftiest of the land, its valleys more profound, the pinnacles of its hills islands! What immense shapes of animal and vegetable life may fill those boundless pastures ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... development, and in so far as he has appropriated the full richness of experience which is offered to him, man will and should find himself, as it were, flung to and fro between action and contemplation. Between the call to transcendence, to a simple self-loss in the unfathomable and adorable life of God, and the call to a full, rich and various actualization of personal life, in the energetic strivings of a fellow worker with Him: between the soul's profound sense of transcendent love, and its felt possession of and duty towards ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... ghostly Drill-manual for Fritz, at least the Catechism he had plied Wilhelmina with, which no doubt was the same, is still extant. [Preuss, i. 15;—specimens of it in Rodenbeck.] A very abstruse Piece; orthodox Lutheran-Calvinist, all proved from Scripture; giving what account it can of this unfathomable Universe, to the young mind. To modern Prussians it by no means shines as the indubitablest Theory of the Universe. Indignant modern Prussians produce excerpts from it, of an abstruse nature; and endeavor to deduce therefrom some of Friedrich's aberrations in matters of religion, which became ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... experience, which enables men to be men—looking before and after and, in some dim sense, understanding the working of this wondrous universe—and which distinguishes man from the whole of the brute world? I say that this functional difference is vast, unfathomable, and truly infinite in its consequences; and I say at the same time, that it may depend upon structural differences which shall be absolutely inappreciable to us with our present means of investigation. What is this very speech that we are talking ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... impossible to overstate the public excitement of the moment and the unfathomable sense of horror with which the community regarded an attack upon the chief executive of the nation, as a crime against government itself which compels an instinctive recoil from all law-abiding citizens. Doubtless both the horror and recoil ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... found a fitting image. Even as it was, my hair stood on end, while I gazed afar down within the yawning abysses, letting imagination descend, as it were, and stalk about in the strange vaulted halls, and ruddy gulfs, and red ghastly chasms of the hideous and unfathomable fire. I had indeed made a narrow escape. Had the balloon remained a very short while longer within the cloud—that is to say—had not the inconvenience of getting wet, determined me to discharge the ballast, inevitable ruin would have been the consequence. Such perils, although little ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... man himself belonged to an age that is past and gone—an age that flourished long before men recorded history. His best efforts seem to spring out of a heart that forgot all precedent, and arose, Venus-like, perfect and complete, from the unfathomable Sea of Existence. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... Whatever they have touched, they have finished; at least, so far as art, and the manner of working, is concerned. The depths of all wisdom and philosophy they have not sounded indeed, though they have gone deeper than any, only because they are in their own essence unfathomable. Time, as it flows on, bears us to new regions to be explored, whose riches constantly add new stores to our wisdom, and open new views to science. But in all art they have reached a point beyond which none have since advanced, ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... Wolston, "it is not the great works of Nature, or those of which the organization is most perfect, that alone presents to the mind of man the unfathomable mysteries of creation; atoms become to him problems, that utterly defy the utmost efforts ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... seemed capable of supplying all our wants. It lies in the latitude of 21 deg. 57' S., and in the longitude of 201 deg. 53' E. Such parts of the coast as fell under our observation, are guarded by a reef of coral rock, on the outside of which the sea is of an unfathomable depth. It is full five leagues in circuit, and of a moderate and pretty equal height; though, in clear weather, it may be certainly seen at the distance of ten leagues; for we had not lost sight of it at night, when we had run above seven leagues, and the weather was cloudy. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... solution. For this beautiful girl of fifteen was somewhat bitter and misanthropic, a condition perhaps due to the uncongenial atmosphere in which she had been reared. She was of dark complexion and her big brown eyes held a sombre and unfathomable expression. Once she had secretly studied their reflection in a mirror, and the eyes awed and frightened her, and made her uneasy. She had analyzed them much as if they belonged to someone else, and wondered what lay behind their mask, and what ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... rock, or deposited in masses under the crust of the earth. In some cases the quarried ore yields from 50 to 70, and even as much as 90 per cent of iron. The Dannemora Mine is a vast quarry open to the sky. When you come near it the place looks like a vast deep pit, with an unfathomable bottom. Ghostlike, weird-looking pinnacles of rocks stand out from its profound depths; but beyond these you see nothing but wreaths of smoke curling up from below. The tortuous chasm in the earth, caused by the quarries ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... time of her departure; but I had not. It was impossible for me to accept a truth with that amount of evidence which satisfied her mind, and I doubted, at times, a future existence. But I do not doubt it now. I have had proof,—abundant proof; and, O, the joy that fills my soul is unfathomable. ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... of the mighty fugue. The golden tubes of the organ, which as yet had but muttered at intervals—gleaming amongst clouds and surges of incense—threw up, as from fountains unfathomable, columns of heart-shattering music. Choir and anti-choir were filling fast with unknown voices. Thou also, Dying Trumpeter, with thy love that was victorious, and thy anguish that was finishing, ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... cor. "O! if Jove's will has linked that amorous power to thy soft lay."—Id. "SUBJUNCTIVE MOOD: If thou love, If thou loved."—Dr. Priestley, Dr. Murray, John Burn, David Blair, Harrison, and others. "Till Religion, the pilot of the soul, hath lent thee her unfathomable coil."—Tupper cor. "Whether nature or art contributes most to form an orator, is a trifling inquiry."—Blair cor. "Year after year steals something from us, till the decaying fabric totters of itself, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... throws it round her, while she says in quick, hoarse, spasmodic whispers). Never to see him again. Never! Never! (Puts her shawl over her head.) Never to see my children again either—never again. Never! Never!—Ah! the icy, black water—the unfathomable depths—If only it were over! He has got it now—now he is reading it. Goodbye, Torvald and my children! (She is about to rush out through the hall, when HELMER opens his door hurriedly and stands with an open ...
— A Doll's House • Henrik Ibsen
... of the Nile no one can give any account, since the country through which it passes is desert and without inhabitants," he explains, his thirst for knowledge unsatisfied. Some priest volunteers this explanation. On the frontiers of Egypt are two high mountain-peaks called Crophi and Mophi; in an unfathomable abyss between the two rose the Nile. But Herodotus does not believe in Crophi and Mophi; he inclines to the idea that the Nile rises away in the west and ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... has traveled and stumbled, suffered and thrived, in pursuing the economic routine, the socialists, since Pythagoras, Orpheus, and the unfathomable Hermes, have labored to establish their dogma in opposition to political economy. A few attempts at association in accordance with their views have even been made here and there: but as yet these exceptional undertakings, lost in the ocean of property, have been without result; and, as if destiny ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... not noticed her till she came quite near to him. She was also going to ascend the mountain. The maiden's eyes shone with an unearthly power, which obliged you to look into them; they were strange eyes,—clear, deep, and unfathomable. ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... we think of His character, its infinite loveliness, its unfathomable depth of love, and wisdom, and holiness, it seems to me that the impossibility is in not loving him. How can we help loving him? Add to this that He is our Father, out of the depth of whose being we were born, and that he loves us with ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... I felt, by the indignant ebullition of my own blood, that she ought this outrageous affirmation of what struck me as the intensity of masculine egotism. It centred everything in itself, and deprived woman of her very soul, her inexpressible and unfathomable all, to make it a mere incident in the great sum of man. Hollingsworth had boldly uttered what he, and millions of despots like him, really felt. Without intending it, he had disclosed the wellspring of all these troubled waters. Now, if ever, it surely ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of course, difficult and painful for that coarse and unfathomable vanity which is characteristic of every man, and which might be called malism, not to stir such a charming fire, to act the Joseph and the fool, to turn away his eyes, and, as it were, to put wax into his ears, like the companions of Ulysses did when they were attracted by the divine, seductive ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... of in the hands of a clan or an order? Look out there into that sad Europe, and see it all! See, there, how the Catholic element everywhere marks itself with night, and drags the soul, and energies, and freedom of the people backwards and downwards into political and social inaction—into unfathomable quagmires of death! ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... and life, which I hold with him—No! I have a Victor—true; but no superior.[123] Homage he has from all—but none from me: 430 I battle it against him, as I battled In highest Heaven—through all Eternity, And the unfathomable gulfs of Hades, And the interminable realms of space, And the infinity of endless ages, All, all, will I dispute! And world by world, And star by star, and universe by universe, Shall tremble in the balance, till the great Conflict shall ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... has been fulfilled with frightful regularity in the family of Gottmar. Not one has married with impunity. Bridegroom and bride have fallen. Auriola, crying for vengeance, hovers above the turf-pit, which since that hour has become a wide unfathomable moor. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... down among the grass of spring, the soft white cloud of foam opening momentarily at the bows, and fading or flying high into the breeze where the sea-gulls toss and shriek,—the joy and beauty of it, all the while, so mingled with the sense of unfathomable danger, and the human effort and sorrow going on perpetually from age to age, waves rolling forever, and winds moaning forever, and faithful hearts trusting and sickening forever, and brave lives dashed away about the rattling beach like weeds forever; and still at the helm of every lonely ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... fleeting glance of unfathomable scorn. And when I thought of all the sufferings I had gone through that term owing to her repulsive son and, indirectly, for her sake, I felt that the time had come to ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... representative defines, rather than analyzes. He aims at no complete catalogue, or interpretation of the subjects of knowledge, but a following out, as far as man can, what in its fulness is mysterious and unfathomable. Taking into his charge all sciences, methods, collections of facts, principles, doctrines, truths, which are the reflexions of the universe upon the human intellect, he admits them all, he disregards none, and, as disregarding none, he allows none to exceed or encroach. His watchword ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... Deep, unfathomable eyes looked up to meet his burning glance. Languorously she lay against his breast, and her red lips parted in a smile that ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... wife sat with drooped head, unable to speak. Daddy John looked into the fire. To them both the Angel of Death seemed to have paused outside the door, and in the stillness they waited for his knock. Only Courant was indifferent, staring at the wall with eyes full of an unfathomable unconcern. ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... made no verbal reply, but took out his knife, and stepping to where the rope passed out from the stern, mooring them to a crag of rock that seemed to rise from unfathomable depths, he divided the strands, and the rope fell with a splash in the water. Then, going to the bows, where the other rope ran to one of the timbers of the Petrel, he cut that, ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... Lord with injustice," said the angel; "His way is truth, and His judgments equitable. Recollect how often thou hast read, 'The decrees of God are unfathomable.' Know that he who lost his foot, lost it for a former crime. With the same foot he maliciously spurned his mother, and cast her from a chariot—for which eternal condemnation overtook him. The knight, his master, was desirous of purchasing ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... was unsurpassed for its convulsions of the elements, yet this disaster was worse than those for the novelty and magnitude of its dangers —the surrounding shores being inhabited by enemies, and the sea so boundless and unfathomable that it was taken to be without a shore, and the last in the world": whence we way infer that the ships had got well out into the Atlantic, which must have presented to the eyes of the Romans pretty much the same appearance ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... went forward steadily, counting his paces to keep his mind from wandering, and to his great joy he came suddenly on an opening in the wall which led towards welcome light, away from the horrors of that unfathomable pit. The woman waited for him there, looking ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... Actor. He was sitting in a deep arm-chair, so buried in his own thoughts that he was oblivious of our approach. On his knee before him lay a cabinet photograph of himself. His eyes seemed to be peering into it, as if seeking to fathom its unfathomable mystery. We had time to note that a beautiful carbon photogravure of himself stood on a table at his elbow, while a magnificent half-tone pastel of himself was suspended on a string from the ceiling. It was only when we had seated ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock |
