"Abyss" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 351. Should the foregoing testimony be deemed insufficient, the following, by those foreigners who had good opportunities for judging, may be added: (Gouverneur Morris, letter of December 3, 1794.) "The French are plunged into an abyss of poverty and slavery, a slavery all the more degrading because the men who have plunged them into it merit the utmost contempt."—Meissner, "Voyage a Paris," (at the end of 1795,) p. 160. "The (revolutionary) army and the revolutionary committees ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... really you? Can it indeed be that you are alive? Is it possible that you succeeded in climbing out of that awful abyss?" ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the ground, and looking like portions of a razed temple. It is the colonnade of old Burlington House, conveyed hither from Piccadilly who knows why, and likely to rest here, the sporting ground for adventurous infants, until its origin is lost in the abyss of time. ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... near the edge of a monstrous quarry that it seemed as if it might topple into the abyss at any moment. Our friends were on historic ground, indeed, for these quarries—or latomia, as they are called—supplied all the stone of which the five cities of ancient Syracuse were built—cities ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... more and more. But always through the tree-stems on his right he saw glancing, a ghost on a white horse, which kept pace with him, do what he would. Now he was among the precipices on the ranges. On his left, a lofty inaccessible cliff; on the right, a frightful blue abyss; while the slaty soil kept sliding from beneath his horse's feet. Behind him, unseen, came a phantom, always gaining on him, and driving him along the giddiest wallaby tracks. If he could only turn ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... It is not only this; but you make sport of our sacredest and deepest sentiments, you reopen our wounds, and you purely and simply abuse us. You ought to have thought of all this before you set out for Sofia. Today there is an abyss dividing Serbs and Bulgars. It is an open precipice which will serve for you as a grave. You wish to fill it? To succeed you must employ other ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... convent cellars you could reach the Catacombs, [Footnote: Catacombs: subterranean passages.] the quarries, the baths of Julian, [Footnote: Baths of Julian: a Roman emperor of the fourth century.] and what not. These vaults were the key to a world of darkness, terrors, mysteries: an immense abyss dug beneath our feet, closed by iron gates, whose exploration was as perilous as the descent into hell of AEneas or Dante. For this reason it was absolutely imperative to get there, in spite of the insurmountable difficulties of the enterprise, and the terrible punishments the discovery ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... from prisons, stripped naked, and compelled to leap into the abyss of Jenemdere, the "Devil's Gap," until one victim carried a Turk with him, when the remainder were shot. At Tamvot 250 Armenians were massacred and the women carried into captivity. The Turks did not permit the burial ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... with—you know what the eyes are to me, and the lips and the hair. And I, for my part, know now, while fresh from seeing you, certainly know, whatever I may have said a short time since, that you will go on to the end, that the arm round me will not let me go,—over such a blind abyss—I refuse to think, to fancy, towards what it would be to loose you now! So I give my life, my soul into your hand—the giving is a mere form too, it is yours, ever yours from the first—but ever as I see you, sit with you, and come away to think over it all, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... river that made the bounds of his province, there he made a halt, pausing a little, and considering, we may suppose, with himself the greatness of the enterprise which he had undertaken; then, at last, like men that are throwing themselves headlong from some precipice into a vast abyss, having shut, as it were, his mind's eyes and put away from his sight the idea of danger, he merely uttered to those near him in Greek the words, "Anerriphtho kubos," (let the die be cast,) and led his army through it. No sooner was ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... hospital door was ever open for them, and whatever the history, the physical or moral condition of the patient, he was received, and with gentle, loving ministration tended back to health, and sent out again to camp or mine, often only to return for another plunge into the abyss of lust and consequent misery; sometimes, however, to set his feet upon the upward trail that led to pure and noble manhood. For The Don, while he never preached, took pains to make clear to all who came under his charge the results of their folly ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... printed. In lieu of forms of expression, clear, orderly, accurate, and full; such as a young parser might profitably imitate; such as an experienced one would be sure to approve; what have we? A chaos of half-formed sentences, for the ignorant pupil to flounder in; an infinite abyss of blunders, which a world of criticism could not fully expose! See, for example, the seven pages of parsing, in the neat little book entitled, "A Practical Grammar of the English Language, by the Rev. David Blair: Seventh Edition: ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the infant ages, Before the eras stamped their autographs Upon the stony records of the earth; Before the burning incense of the sun Rolled up the interlucent space, Brightening the blank abyss; Ere the Recording Angel's tears Were shed for man's transgressions: A Seraph, with a face of light, And hair like heaven's golden atmosphere, Blue eyes serene in their beatitude, Godlike in their tranquillity, Features as perfect ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... house, And swiftly will the Destiny close on us. It drove me hither from my calm asylum, It mocks my soul with charming witchery, It lures me forward in a seraph's shape, 120 I see it near, I see it nearer floating, It draws, it pulls me with a god-like power— And lo! the abyss—and thither am I moving— I have no power within me not ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... heart throb with a nervousness which he could not control. What if the bird should tire, he thought, and he should be dropped into the fathomless abyss below? Life's journey would then come to a tragic end. Where, too, was he being carried and how should he be ever able to return to his far-off home on the earth? He was becoming more and more agitated, when the fairy took hold ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... specific ethical judgments, is above all things vitally necessary in ethics. Such appreciation saves the ethicist from the pernicious fallacy of erecting personal preferences into universal laws; and it also saves him from falling into the ethical abyss where all things are of equal value because all ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... portion of the sacred edifice. Listening profoundly, he even thought he caught such accents as befit those graves of living men, the faint echoing of groans and sighs, sounding as it were from the deep abyss beneath. But in this respect his fancy probably filled up the sketch which his conjectures ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... perilous steep, they sat down and took a brief rest with their backs against a sheltering rock and their heels dangling over a bottomless abyss; then they climbed to the base of another ridge—a more difficult and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... If he had been rather older, he would have read happy memories blended with thoughts of repentance, the whole story of a woman's life in that sublime face—the careless childhood, the loveless marriage, a terrible passion, flowers springing up in storm and struck down by the thunderbolt into an abyss from which ...
— La Grenadiere • Honore de Balzac
... that was all one with the plot now woven round our feet. We could but follow the path, though we knew with what an evil purpose it was made: that it was as phantom as the rest. At one place it invited us to cross, upon two shaking pine trunks, the abyss of a cataract; in another it invited us to climb, in spite of our final weariness, a great barrier of rock that lay between an upper and a lower jasse. We continued upon it determinedly, with heads bent, barely hoping that perhaps at ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... silence overcame him; an infinite peace entered into him; and, without the least revolt, he received the impression that his exhausted body, with nothing now to hold it back, was rolling to the very edge of the rock, toward the abyss. ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... by Thy hand, Wander unwearied through the blue abyss— They own Thy power, accomplish Thy command, All gay with life, all eloquent with bliss. What shall we call them? Piles of crystal light— A glorious company of golden streams— Lamps of celestial ether burning bright— Suns lighting systems with ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... edge of another of those terrible canyons, the eighth he had crossed, whose precipitous sides would have taxed to the uttermost the strength of an untired man well fortified by food and water, and for the first time, as he looked down into the abyss and then at the opposite side that he must scale, misgivings ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the change of wind, we were exposed to the whole of its fury. The rain fell in torrents. We lay at three anchors, and the boat was tossed about terribly, the sea frequently breaking quite over her, insomuch that we expected every moment to be swallowed up in the abyss. With much difficulty we succeeded in lowering our after-mast. Jonathan and the rest of our company on shore, were obliged to be passive spectators of the dreadful scene, waiting the event in silent anguish. They quitted their ...
— Journal of a Voyage from Okkak, on the Coast of Labrador, to Ungava Bay, Westward of Cape Chudleigh • Benjamin Kohlmeister and George Kmoch
... time now, resting frequently. There was not the slightest chance of Malmsworth's getting away, for at the other end of the rift lay the cave and the abyss containing, at least, one ghost of ...
— The Marooner • Charles A. Stearns
... like those worn by the monks of Cologne; but he finds that they are crushing weights of gilded lead—splendid semblance and agonizing, destroying reality. Again, when the two poets, Dante and Virgil, came to the Abyss of Evil-pits (Malebolge), down which the crimson stream of Phlegethon leaps in "a Niagara of blood," he is on the edge of the Circle of Fraud in all its varieties, down which they are to be carried on the back of Geryon, the triple-bodied ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... the winds, the dashing of the waves against the ship and each other, formed a sound altogether as horrible for our ears; while our ship, sometimes lifted up, as it were, to the skies, and sometimes swept away at once as into the lowest abyss, seemed to be the sport of the winds and seas. The captain himself almost gave up all for lost, and exprest his apprehension of being inevitably cast on the rocks of Scilly, and beat to pieces. And now, while some on board were addressing ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... and wild descent, sloping away unto the very bowels of a pit of gloom. The trail was vague and bush-grown, and crowding trees dangerously narrowed it. To the right the hill fell sharply away at the edge of the track, an abyss that might well have been bottomless for aught that could be seen from above. To the left the crown of the hill rose sheer and barren, and only at its foot grew the vegetation that so perilously narrowed the track. Then, ahead, where the trail vanished, a misty hollow, dark and ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... What—this was his thought—what if this was the mouth of a well? Or a mediaeval trap for fools? He had seen such things in French castles. In the pitch darkness he could not guess whether he hung above an abyss or had the ground within an inch ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... atmosphere often reflects the lights, becoming tinged with this uniform glow, which shines without a flicker, he fancied that he was looking at the reflection of a vast fire. He accepted, without reflection, the idea that Paris was sinking into the abyss of a prodigious conflagration; he found it natural that the private catastrophe in which he had become involved should be merged into a public disaster and that this same night should be for a whole population, as for him! a night of ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... abyss of heaven Hath swallowed up thy form; yet on my heart Deeply has sunk the lesson thou hast given, ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [August, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... doubling the dangers of France, Spain would add nothing to its resources. With what contemptuous bitterness did Spain, in fact, watch the long train of disasters which from the pinnacle of power brought Louis XIV. to the brink of an abyss by one of those vicissitudes the effect of which is never more rapid upon the popular mind than when fortune deserts men who have been ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... receded and came on again with a deafening roar. Then the crust of the earth between the mountain range and the spot where the city had been, seemed to crack like a bit of dried orange peel, and the flood rushed over the abyss, and there arose a blinding steam that hid the whole scene below, and ascending circled ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... the Four Infernal Rivers. XV. The Violent against Nature. Brunetto Latini. XVI. Guidoguerra, Aldobrandi, and Rusticucci. Cataract of the River of Blood. XVII. Geryon. The Violent against Art. Usurers. Descent into the Abyss of Malebolge. XVIII. The Eighth Circle, Malebolge: The Fraudulent and the Malicious. The First Bolgia: Seducers and Panders. Venedico Caccianimico. Jason. The Second Bolgia: Flatterers. Allessio Interminelli. Thais. XIX. The Third Bolgia: Simoniacs. Pope Nicholas III. ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... right. You'd have done better to keep out of bondage. But there, you took your uncle's advice; you saw the abyss, and drew back from it. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... brink of the chasm; next moment, with a tremendous bound, he cleared it, and alighted on the snow beyond. His weight snapped off the mass, his arms were thrown wildly aloft, and, with a shout, rather than a cry, he fell headlong into the dark abyss! ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... this great sphere (now turning slow Up to the light from that abyss of stars, Now wheeling into gloom through sunset bars) With all its elements of form and flow, And life in life, where crown'd yet blind must go The sensible king—is but a Unity Compressed of motes ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... boss who, in order to extort fat contracts for his firm, holds up for a year the building of a filtration plant designed to deliver his city from the typhoid scourge, and thereby dooms twelve hundred of his townspeople to sink to the tomb through the flaming abyss of fever, comes ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... political monsters are possible in the Free States, at such a time as this, sufficiently demonstrates towards what an abyss of degradation we were drifting when this war began. They are the legitimate and necessary fruits of the numerous compromises by which well-meaning men have sought to avert a crisis which could only be postponed. The North has been diligently educated ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... don't know what they ought to do: and in a certain sense it may even be said that they don't know what they are doing. In the worst examples surveyed in the last chapter, such as A Peep at Our Ancestors, this ignorance plumbs the abyss—blocks of dull serious narrative, almost or quite without action, and occasional insertions of flat, insipid, and (to any one with a little knowledge) impossible conversation, forming their staple. Of the better class of books, from the Female Quixote to Discipline, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... your power to remove it. Great affronts among private men have often been the occasion of great charity. When the devil's envy had destroyed man, God's mercy restored him. That wicked spirit, jealous of our city's happiness, has plunged her into this abyss of evils, out of which you alone can rescue her. It is your affection, I dare say it, which has brought them upon us, by exciting the jealousy of the wicked spirits against us. But, like God himself, you may draw infinite good ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... I know your kindly heart; but I cannot be rallied out of this depression. I have only the interest of a cousin, a friend, a protector, in the girl; but her going away, after my other misfortunes, has plunged me into an abyss. I can't be cheerful." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... father. 'Until that time you cannot count yourself one of us. We are standing on two different paths: the one we go on is narrow and leads high; the other, which you have chosen, is broad and will lead you from the heights to a deep abyss. Our prayers will surround you always like a fiery wall. I know that you will have to suffer much evil and much sorrow, but our prayers will prevent you from sinning as grievously as you will see others do ...
— The Three Comrades • Kristina Roy
... have every day to wrestle with the devil and with my own heart, no man in all the world more. Oh no! thou must not for one moment think of me as if I had by my own power or holiness climbed up into heaven or descended into the abyss. Oh no! hear me. I am as thou art. I have no more light than thou hast. Let no man think of me what I am not. But what I am all men may be who will truly believe, and will truly wrestle for truth and goodness under JESUS CHRIST. I marvel every day that GOD should ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... end of Frederic Neville, Earl of Scroope, and the end, too, of all that poor girl's hopes in this world. When you stretch yourself on the edge of those cliffs and look down over the abyss on the sea below it seems as though the rocks were so absolutely perpendicular, that a stone dropped with an extended hand would fall amidst the waves. But in such measurement the eye deceives itself, for the rocks in truth slant ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... Miriam lay awake, pondering the new aspect which things had assumed, and gazing down the fearful abyss into which, in a spirit of self-devotion, she was seeking to find the ...
— Woman's Trials - or, Tales and Sketches from the Life around Us. • T. S. Arthur
... Yellowstone, five or six hundred feet deep. It was a beautiful and impressive situation,—shelter, snugness, even cosiness,—looking over the brink of the awful and the terrifying. With a run and a jump I think one might have landed in the river at the bottom of the great abyss, and in doing so might have scaled one of those natural obelisks or needles of rock that stand up out of the depths two or three hundred feet high. Nature shows you what an enormous furrow her plough can open ...
— Camping with President Roosevelt • John Burroughs
... lord of the earth," just as Neptune is [Greek]; he is "the king of rivers;" and he comes from the sea to teach the Babylonians; but he is never called "the lord of the sea." That title belongs to Nin or Ninip. Hoa is "the lord of the abyss," or of "the great deep," which does not seem to be the sea, but something distinct from it. His most important titles are those which invest him with the character, so prominently brought out in Oe and Oannes, of the god of science and knowledge. He is "the intelligent guide," ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... and Helen's gentle kiss Fell on my cheek. As from a deep abyss, I drew my weary self from that strange sleep That rests not, nor refreshes. Scarce awake Or conscious, yet there seemed a heavy weight Bound on my breast, as by a cruel Fate. I knew not why, and ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... plunder? When one has turned the same person away twice and thrice an emotion arises somewhat akin to homicide. And when one has once become conscious of this sanguinary feeling his whole destiny seems to grip hold of him and drag him into the abyss. More than once I found myself unconsciously pulling the rifle into position to get a sight on the miserable trespassers. In my sleep I slew them in manifold ways and threw their carcasses into the reservoir. Each day the temptation to shoot them ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... was come to pass After their grief. The flood subsided straight, And at the saint's behest the storm was stilled, The waters ceased. Then was the mountain cloven— A frightful chasm—into itself it drew The flood, and swallowed up the fallow waves, The struggling sea—the abyss devoured it all. 1590 Yet not the waves alone it swallowed up; But fourteen men, worst caitiffs of the throng, Went headlong to destruction with the flood Under the yawning earth. Then sore afraid ...
— Andreas: The Legend of St. Andrew • Unknown
... sight (Heaven knows how!), delight and severity struggling in the expression of his face the meanwhile. The Countess had plunged in a kind of stupor; to me, watching her, it seemed that she was fathoming the depths of the abyss into which she had fallen. There was remorse still left in that woman's soul. Perhaps a hand held out in human charity might save her. I ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... if changed to stone, while the clattering of the little horse's hoofs went on, and great fragments went rattling off beneath it to increase their pace and go plunging down into the abyss as if to show the way for the ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... hour Will soon be here. Oh, when will Liberty Once more be here? Scaling yonder peak, I saw an eagle wheeling near its brow, O'er the abyss his broad-expanded wings Lay calm and motionless upon the air As if he floated there without their aid, By the sole act of his unlorded will, ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... heads, while the red-tiled roofs of Ilsenburg were dancing, and green trees flew through the air, until all was green and blue before my eyes, and I, overcome by giddiness, would assuredly have fallen into the abyss, had I not, in the dire need of my soul, clung fast to the iron cross. No one who reflects on the critically ticklish situation in which I was then placed can possibly find fault with me for ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... wearily. Was he not himself an accessory after the fact in the matter of two crimes at least? These new friends, it seemed, were about to topple him into the abyss which he had studiously avoided for so long a time. But why should he permit it? What ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... fate, which had hurled Denver from the heights into the depths of dark despair, suddenly snatched him up out of the abyss again and whisked him back to Globe. When he walked out of Moroni his mind was a blank, so overcome was his body with heat and toil and the astounding turns of his fortune; but at the next station below, as he was trying to steal a ride, a man had dropped off the train and dragged ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... sign of present life on the Norway coast, only hills, hills, dead and dark, and floating craft, all dead and dark; and my eyes now, I found, had acquired a crazy fixity of stare into the very bottom of the vacant abyss of nothingness, while I remained unconscious of being, save of one point, rainbow-blue, far down in the infinite, which passed slowly from left to right before my consciousness a little way, then vanished, came back, and passed slowly again, from left to right ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... sufficient, is like flinging a stone into an unfathomable gulf we may find in the depths of a grotto, and imagining that the sounds it creates as it falls shall answer our every question, or reveal to us aught beside the immensity of the abyss. ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Your Majesty's communication encourages me to relate a dream I had in the troublous days of the spring of 1863. I dreamt, and I told my dream at once to my wife and to others the next morning, that I was riding along a narrow Alpine path, to the right an abyss, and to the left rocks; the path became narrower and narrower, until at last my horse refused to take another step, and there was no room either to turn or to dismount. I then struck the smooth rocky wall with my riding whip in my left hand, and invoked God; the whip became interminably long, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... the giant effort of the strong man above them, they are together drawn up within a few feet of the bending and tottering bridge. But with all his desperate exertions, he can raise them no higher, and there they hang suspended over the dark abyss of whirling waters that had opened in the disrupturing mass beneath, at the instant, as if to receive them; while a mountain billow of ice, that must overwhelm them with certain destruction, is rolling ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... rays, I wondered how many centuries it took to chisel that mighty water way fifty-two miles through this tortuous mountain. Perpendicular walls of fully 2000 feet are standing sentinels above this silvery water which goes roaring and foaming through the narrow abyss. ...
— The Sheep Eaters • William Alonzo Allen
... principles, our sense of justice trodden underfoot. We see the wild straining of the felon arms that would drag our land into the abyss of the giant Conspiracy ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman
... with despair of his inability to fathom the abyss of his self-contempt. There seemed to be positively no excuse for him. Stryker had befriended him indeed, had he permitted him to drown. Yet he had acted for the best, as he saw it. The fault lay in himself: an admirable fault, ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... unattempted yet in prose or rhyme. And chiefly thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer Before all temples th' upright heart and pure, Instruct me, for thou know'st; thou from the first Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread, Dove-like sat'st brooding on the vast Abyss, And mad'st it pregnant: what in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That, to the height of this great argument, I may assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men. Say ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... contemplate. One hesitates to advance; a feeling comes over you that you are become infinitesimally small and as easy to crush as an insect. The silence grows preternaturally solemn. The stars through all the gaps in the fearful ceilings seem to send their scintillations to you in an abyss. It is cold and clear ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... whatsoever in the whole earth, by right of baring her commission direct from God. To put it in one word, she was JOAN OF ARC—and when that is said, all is said. To us she was divine. Between her and us lay the bridgeless abyss which that word implies. We could not be familiar with her. No, you can see yourselves that that ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... unhesitating courage that had leaped bounds where his own volition and judgment would have hung waveringly; that one courage in all the world—a woman's courage—which finds in the effort of its achievement no obstacle too high and no abyss too wide though death waits with outreaching arms on the other side. And, surely, where there had been all this, there must also have been some deeper and finer impulse than one of destruction, of physical gain, or of mere duty in the weaving ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... awoke him and, at the same time awoke within him a certain dull feeling of despair, destruction, and perdition,—a feeling that all hope was already gone, extinguished and ended. He felt that about him was only night, night and darkness, a horrible abyss ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... was, first, the sense it produced in the spectator of hanging dizzily above the lake, with infinite air below him, and, then, the magical effects of dawn and evening, when wreaths of mist would blot out the valley and the lake, and leave the eye of the watcher face to face across the fathomless abyss with the majestic mountain mass, and its attendant retinue of clouds, as though they and he ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... crumbling edge of some ghastly precipice, who—let me ask—acts with the greater charity, he who is afraid to interfere, and will calmly allow the somnambulist to walk on, till he fall over into the abyss; or he who will shout, and, if need be, roughly shake him from his fatal sleep, and so, perhaps, save him from destruction? Surely, to allow a fellow-creature to follow a path of extreme danger, for fear of wounding his susceptibilities and incurring his anger, by candidly pointing out his ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... in ecstasy, consoled, And my gaze trembles toward the azure arc, When in the wide world-records I behold Flame like a meteor God's finger thro' the dark But if, at times, bowed over the abyss Wherein man crawls toward immortality,— Beholding here how sore his suffering is, I make my prayer with ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... guilty: sometimes I could have wished that there were no living creatures on earth but you and me; sometimes, feeling that there was a divinity mocking my wicked transports, I could have wished that divinity annihilated, if only, locked in your arms, I might have sunk from abyss to abyss with the ruins of God and of the world. Even now—shall I say it?—even now, when eternity waits to engulf me, when I am about to appear before the inexorable Judge—at the very moment when my mother ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... one of a fear of long or final separation— a shadow like an abyss which neither my love nor my hope can cross. I find that I cannot follow out any dream or plan which includes Richard; my soul stumbles in all such efforts as if it was blind. Now is there any promise for an uncertain ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... the deep;' The awful depth of a world's despair; Hearts that are breaking and eyes that weep; Sorrow and ruin and death are there. And the sea is wide; And its pitiless tide Bears on its bosom away. Beauty and youth, In relentless ruth, To its dark abyss for aye. But the Master's voice comes over the sea, 'Let down your nets for a draught for Me.' And He stands in our midst, On our wreck-strewn strand. And sweet and loving is His command. His loving word is to each, to all. And wherever that loving ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... us, and knew us and were known; While fast together, alive from the abyss, Clung the soul-wrung implacable close kiss; And pity of self through all made broken moan Which said, 'For once, for once, for once alone!' And still Love sang, and what ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... vices of humanity, and described the punishments reserved for them in a future state. Every Hearer looked back upon his past offences, and trembled: The Thunder seemed to roll, whose bolt was destined to crush him, and the abyss of eternal destruction to open before his feet. But when Ambrosio, changing his theme, spoke of the excellence of an unsullied conscience, of the glorious prospect which Eternity presented to the Soul untainted ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... spot? Just think of his coming to this island and, on this high cliff above the azure sea, building this palace! And then to think of him on a night when the moon was full, and the nightingales were singing, coming out and hurling a shuddering slave into the abyss! ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... on mimic spheres, Assumed the forms of lions, bulls, and bears; 370 —So erst, as Egypt's rude designs explain, Rose young DIONE from the shoreless main; Type of organic Nature! source of bliss! Emerging Beauty from the vast abyss! Sublime on Chaos borne, the Goddess stood, And smiled enchantment on the troubled flood; The warring elements to peace restored, And young Reflection wondered ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... well? is liquid fire Rushing and bubbling through the burning veins, Until they shrivel, well? And is it well To find the angel, who hath borne your soul Half o'er the flaming abyss of the damn'd, Shake it away, and feel it whirling sink To everlasting torments?—In bitter truth, These are but nought compared to the fell pangs Thy words have caused, which rack ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... the same story; and what with the Black Death sweeping over the land, and these terrible English ravaging at will, France sank into an abyss of misery worse even than that which had engulfed the empire. The unhappy peasantry, driven by starvation into frenzied revolt, avenged their agony upon the nobility by hideous plunderings and burnings of the rich chateaux.[21] A partial peace with England was patched up ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... always count upon a following, it doesn't matter who they are, nor what they claim, nor whether they come with documents or without. It was always so. Down out of the long-vanished past, across the abyss of the ages, if you listen you can still hear the believing multitudes shouting for Perkin Warbeck and ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... below the road that from the bridge, where the chasm is only a few yards wide, it is almost invisible. Risdon says: 'It maketh such a hideous noise, that being only heard, and not seen, it causeth a kind of fear to the passengers, seeming to them that look down to it, a deep abyss.' A story (that may quite easily be true) is told of a man arriving late one night in Lydford from Tavistock, to the amazement of Lydford people, who knew that their bridge had been broken down. In the darkness the traveller ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... comet of 1680 obeyed Kepler's laws in its flight about the sun; and an even harder one when the same visitant came back in 1758, obedient to Halley's prediction, after its three-quarters of a century of voyaging but in the abyss of space. Proved thus to bow to natural law, the celestial messenger could no longer fully, sustain its role. But long-standing notoriety cannot be lived down in a day, and the comet, though proved a "natural" object, was still regarded as a very menacing one for another ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... hundreds in Chicago. If you go to them and point out their danger, they will jest and joke at you. By and by he says: "I think I hear the rapids—yes, I hear them roar;" and he seizes his oars and pulls with all his strength, but the current is too great, and nearer and nearer he is drawn on to that abyss, until he gives one unearthly scream, and over he goes. Ah, my friends, this is the case with hundreds in this city. They are in the current of riches of pleasure, of drink, that will ...
— Moody's Anecdotes And Illustrations - Related in his Revival Work by the Great Evangilist • Dwight L. Moody
... found at Nineveh, and preserved in the British Museum. This text begins with the word Tiawthu "the sea," and goes on to enumerate, in turn, Tilmun (identified with the island of Bahrein in the Persian Gulf); Engurra (the Abyss, the abode of Enki or Ea), with numerous temples and shrines, including "the holy house," "the temple of the seer of heaven and earth," "the abode of Zer-panitum," consort of Merodach, "the throne of the holy place," "the temple of the region of Hades," "the supreme temple of life," ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Theophilus G. Pinches
... own troubles in talking with this woman. His family had been poor on the farm, but they had never known such poverty as this. And here were whole streets full of people living the same sort of life; hanging over the abyss of destruction, and with no prospect save to struggle forever. Mrs. Stedman talked casually about her friends and neighbors, and new glimpses came to make the boy catch his breath. Next door was Mrs. Prosser, whose husband was dying of ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... vivacity, sensibility, and passion, rendered his education difficult. But God, who is the master of all hearts, and whose divine spirit breathes where he wishes, worked a miracle on this prince between his eighteenth and twentieth years. From this abyss he came out affable, gentle, humane, moderate, patient, modest, penitent, and humble; and austere, even more than harmonised with his position. Devoted to his duties, feeling them to be immense, he thought only how to unite the duties ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... in their wonderful transparency and clearness. All the prominent points and corners, the varied outlines of the cavities, and the different recesses, can be distinguished far within the depths, until the eye is lost in the darkness of the abyss; and the luminous effects upon the rocks lend an additional beauty to the scene, which has all the magic of the poet's fairy-land. It is illumined by a radiance of a soft pale blue and green, which reaches only a few inches from the rocky barrier, ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... ten minutes, his staring eyes fixed on the ceiling. He was thinking of the abyss he had reached ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... not been good-looking. The judge set me free, on condition that he succeeded the surgeon. I was soon supplanted by a rival, turned out of doors quite destitute, and obliged to continue this abominable trade, which appears so pleasant to you men, while to us women it is the utmost abyss of misery. I have come to exercise the profession at Venice. Ah! sir, if you could only imagine what it is to be obliged to caress indifferently an old merchant, a lawyer, a monk, a gondolier, an abbe, to ...
— Candide • Voltaire
... hear anything about it. I should have to be crazy to believe such a thing. Could the earth turn over, and we not fall heels over head to the devil and clear down into the abyss? Ha, ha, ha! But, my Monsieur Berg, how is it that the moon is sometimes so small and ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... yawning throats: and Tartarus' self gapes sheer and strikes into the gloom through twice the space that one looks upward to Olympus and the skyey heaven. Here Earth's ancient children, the Titans' brood, hurled down by the thunderbolt, lie wallowing in the abyss. Here likewise I saw the twin Aloids, enormous of frame, who essayed with violent hands to pluck down high heaven and thrust Jove from his upper realm. Likewise I saw Salmoneus in the cruel payment he gives for mocking Jove's flame and Olympus' ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... or 200 years earlier.[47] It makes the same claim to the Old Testament, and builds its faith and hope upon its teaching. It is also, as before, strictly anti-national; above all, anti-judaic, and sentences the Jewish religious community to the abyss of hell. It might appear, then, as though the basis for the further development of Christianity as a church was completely given from the moment in which the first breach of believers with the synagogue ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... should be the leaven, the yeast, to work upon our great metropolis; not merely the flower, but the self-raising flour"—a pause for appreciation of the pun—"the self-raising flour [loud laughter, easily yielded and unnecessarily prolonged] that is to lift yourselves, and the city with you, from the abyss of no-art, and from the still deeper abyss of false art. That's where we're groping; that's where we're floundering. I declare, when I was elbowing my way through that struggling, gaping crowd [cries of "Oh, Doctor!" and laughter], I could only ask myself ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... and vice there is a bridge, not an abyss. The saintliest and the meanest men have still common ground for brotherhood. Your sins are my sins, my sins are your sins. That is the starting-point for a practical and lucid Christianity. I cannot be clean as long as you are not clean. I cannot be happy as long ...
— The Religious Spirit of the Slavs (1916) - Sermons On Subjects Suggested By The War, Third Series • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... these three centuries, bequeathed their art treasures to all time; and if here we cannot suppress a comparison of the art world of the present Italy with that of the periods named, still less can we fail to be astonished as we discover the abyss into which Italy must be judged to have sunk in point of merit, when measured by the high standard which in former days she set herself. But perhaps the greatest marvel of all is the rapidity of the decadence when it once set in, as it did immediately after the ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... Northwest; why could I not work my way in Boston? Was there, perhaps, some lack in me and in my courage? Again and again these questions rose in my mind and poisoned my self-confidence. The one comfort I had in those black days was the knowledge that no one suspected the depth of the abyss in which I dwelt. We were all struggling; to the indifferent glance—and all glances were indifferent—my struggle was no worse than that of my classmates whose rooms and frugal meals ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... shook did not obscure Her woman's intuition of the bliss - Their tempter's moment o'er the black abyss, Across the narrow plank ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... all right in two seconds," answered Larry, from some bottomless abyss. "Tare an' ages; what'll I do at all," I heard him continuing, as he made his way into the hall. Oh what a clatter he made upon the pavement,—for it was all stone! And how the drops of perspiration stood upon my brow as ...
— The O'Conors of Castle Conor from Tales from all Countries • Anthony Trollope
... into the pressure chamber. There was hardly need to close the door after us. I stood gripping him as he opened the small outer slides. The abyss was at our feet; the outgoing wind tore at us like a gale, so that we stood ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... can you conceive any one copying out and posting one of these letters, or even taking it as the basis for composition? You cannot. That shows how little you know of your fellow-creatures. Not you nor I can plumb the abyss at the bottom of which such humility is possible. Nevertheless, as we know by that great and constant 'demand,' there the abyss is, and there multitudes are at the bottom of it. Let's peer down... No, all is darkness. ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... dreams that he is standing on the edge of a precipice. He sees a child running toward it. The dream makes him experience all the tortures of the thought—if only the child will not be heedless and fall over into the abyss! He sees it fall, and hears the dull thud of the body below. He awakes, and perceives that an object which had been hanging on the wall of the room has become unfastened, and made a dull sound by its fall. This simple event is expressed in dream-life by one ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... Arthur Pym and Dirk Peters, living on nuts and bitterns' flesh, escaped discovery by the natives, who did not suspect their presence. They found themselves at the bottom of a sort of dark abyss including several planes, but without issue, hollowed out from the hillside, and of great extent. The two men could not live in the midst of these successive abysses, and after several attempts they let themselves slide on one of the slopes ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... hell, as automata through whom Satan plays his game upon earth—not on objects which call forth their reverence, their love, their hope of good even in the most strayed and perverted, but on a minute identification of human things with such symbols as the scarlet whore, the beast out of the abyss, scorpions whose sting is in their tails, men who have the mark of the beast, and unclean spirits like frogs. You might as well attempt to educate the child's sense of beauty by hanging its nursery with the horrible and grotesque pictures in which the early painters ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... way rebellion began among the angels; and he who had been Lucifer, the light-bearer, prince among the glorious sons of God, took up arms of rebellion against the Almighty. Naturally, he failed in this inevitably losing battle, and was cast out into the abyss, with a third part of all the angels, who had followed him. Then the tradition goes on: God decided to create the world, that the sons of men born and trained here might ultimately take the places that had been held by the angels who had been cast out on account ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... what you'd call rejoicing; instead, his rather hilarious announcement was greeted with a sort of constrained silence. It's such a tremendous thing for any country to declare war, and for a country in China's position it is such a blind leap into the abyss. However, the matter is not yet quite decided: the first vote is taken, but the final has yet to be cast. Parliament has been sitting all day. This, of course, merely means the severance of diplomatic relations, but the next step must follow ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... funereal apotheoses, these encomiastic requiems, having all the attraction of the abyss for weak minds and ambitious vanities, many of these yielding to this attraction have thought that fatality was the half of genius; many have dreamt of the hospital bed on which Gilbert died, hoping that they would become poets, ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... sighed the Pharisee, as at the expiration of this period he looked over into the abyss-"we shall be too late! we shall be turned out of office by ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... could not try to win her affections by showing that he had paid for them beforehand. She seemed to be utterly unconscious of the fact that it was he who had been with her in the abyss of waters. If the thought came to her of itself, and she ever asked him, it would be time enough to tell her the story. If not, the moment might arrive when he could reveal to her the truth that he was her deliverer, without accusing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... to the sin of loving thee, And in that hour forgot my holy mission. For I am also sent to save thy soul And to deliver thee from curse of lust. The love that burns in thee is only lust. Between that and the pure love of true hearts There yawns abyss like that 'twixt Heaven and Hell; Nor can the foul fount e'er be closed in thee, Until the pure fount shall be opened wide; Nor can thy sinful heart be ever saved By heavy sorrow and much agony; Nor e'en by service rendered unto others; Only one ...
— Parsifal - A Drama by Wagner • Retold by Oliver Huckel
... present, and their repeal on the restoration of tranquillity; and, lastly, to stipulate for their immediate repeal, if he could not otherwise subdue the obstinacy, or remove the jealousy of the insurgents. The treaty at Uxbridge had disclosed to the eyes of the monarch the abyss which yawned before him; he saw "that the aim of his adversaries was a total subversion of religion and regal power;" and he commanded Ormond to conclude the peace whatever it might cost, provided it should secure the persons and properties of the Irish Protestants, and the full exercise of the ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... this is caricature; but the abyss of confusion produced by modern science in nomenclature, and the utter void of the abyss when you plunge into it after any one useful fact, surpass all caricature. I have in my hand thirteen plates of thirteen ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... They still perversely lulled themselves into a false security. The blow came, when it did, like a flash. It was as if the heavens had fallen in liquid fury upon the earth. It was as if ocean itself had been precipitated into an abyss. The slow but inexorable march of the mightiest glacier of the Alps, though comparable, was not equal to this in force. The whole of a Pyramid, shot from a colossal catapult, would not have been the petty charge of a pea shooter to it. Imagine Niagara, or a greater even than Niagara, falling ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... the past she had now, with gloomy power, wrenched herself away. Crime such as hers admits not long the sentiment that softens remorse of gentler error. If there wakes one moment from the past the warning and melancholy ghost, soon from that abyss rises the Fury with the lifted scourge, and hunts on the frantic footsteps towards the future. In the future, the haggard intellect of crime must live, must involve itself mechanically in webs and meshes, and lose past and present in the ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... himself were the storm. But the uproar did not last long. Almost suddenly it was gone, as if, like a bird that had been flapping the ground in agony, it had at last recovered itself, and taken to its great wings and flown. The sun shone out clear, and in all the blue abyss not a cloud was to be seen, except far away to leeward, where one was spread like a banner in the lonely air, fleeting away, the ensign of the charging storm—bearing for its device a segment ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... thousandth part of the worth that indeed is in him. You have seen how his disciple only hath satisfied me, and hath told me more than I asked of him. Besides, he hath opened unto me, and resolved other inestimable doubts, wherein I can assure you he hath to me discovered the very true well, fountain, and abyss of the encyclopaedia of learning; yea, in such a sort that I did not think I should ever have found a man that could have made his skill appear in so much as the first elements of that concerning which we disputed by signs, without speaking ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... to find a safe place; for from the foot of the crag the heathery turf slopes down all but upright, on one side to a cliff which overhangs a shoreless cove of deep dark sea, and on the other to an abyss even more hideous, where the solid rock has sunk away, and opened inland in the hillside a smooth-walled pit, some sixty feet square and some hundred and fifty in depth, aptly known then as now, as the Devil's-limekiln; the mouth of which, as old wives say, was ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... to which we have been brought by those very maxims and counsels which would now deter us from adopting the proposed constitution; and which, not content with having conducted us to the brink of a precipice, seem resolved to plunge us into the abyss that awaits us below. Here, my countrymen, impelled by every motive that ought to influence an enlightened people, let us make a firm stand for our safety, our tranquillity, our dignity, our reputation. Let us at last break the fatal charm which has too ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... followed by something still more singular to Kirtley, or at least out of his reckoning. It was to stir the depths of his contemplations and comparisons and give him the sharpest look into German character he had yet received. It was to show him that a gaping abyss might be separating the Teuton from other western humanity. Having latterly doubted that the race was easy of sympathetic grasp, any true kinship, he now profoundly realized that instead of being able to approach it nearer in feeling the more he knew it, he was encountering very ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... they passed in behind that range of horseshoe rocks that sheltered Hurricane Hall—thus, as it were doubling their own road. Beneath that range of rocks, and between it and another range, there was an awful abyss or chasm of cleft, torn and jagged rocks opening, as it were, from the bowels of the earth, in the shape of a mammoth bowl, in the bottom of which, almost invisible from its great depth, seethed and boiled a mass of dark water ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... no communion where there is no distinction. But we shall be in an abyss of metaphysics presently, if we don't look out; and besides, we must not be too grand, to-day, for the younger children. We'll be grand, some day, by ourselves, if we must. (The younger children are ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... eighteen—the toils and sports that delighted his brother seemed to him like toys amusing infants on the verge of an abyss, and he spent his leisure either in searching in the Vulgate for something to give him absolute direction, or in going in search of preachers, for, with the stirring of men's minds, sermons ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... greater, eternally The Same Good. The Good which would be just as good, and just, and right, and lovely, and glorious, if there were no world, no men, no angels, no heaven, no hell, and God were alone in his own abyss. That very good which is the exact pattern of His Son Jesus Christ, in whose likeness man was made at the beginning, God hath showed thee, O man; and hath told thee that it is neither more nor less than thy Duty, thy Duty as a man; that thy ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... clear that, although it was of great depth, the eye could discern each pebble at the bottom. Eddying round this reservoir, the brook found its way as if over a broken part of the ledge, and formed a second fall, which seemed to seek the very abyss; then, wheeling out beneath from among the smooth dark rocks which it had polished for ages, it wandered murmuring down the glen, forming the stream up which Waverley had just ascended. [Footnote: See Note 24.] The borders of this romantic reservoir ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... been thrown into one melting pot. The mere fact that the expression "a scrap of paper" has become a household word, bandied about by orators and scribblers, shows the distance we have descended into the abyss. The whole structure of our international relations seems to have fallen to the ground and the labored work of centuries to have been undone in a few months. Now, the Jews have been from the earliest times a people ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... would thrill as they whispered verses of Alfred de Musset and Sully Prudhomme, into which they read abyss on abyss of perversity: they used to copy them out, and ask each other about the hidden meanings of passages, which generally contained none. These little women of thirteen, who knew nothing of love, used, in their innocent effrontery, to discuss, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... open a week, however, when, as two or three hurrying peasants were venturing it with their carts, it fell with a crash, and all were washed headlong in an instant over the precipice and into the boiling abyss below, from which not one vestige of their remains was ever returned for a sign to their awe-stricken friends. Supposing this bridge to be rebuilt,—which is not likely,—I do not believe that a habitant of all that region could be got to cross it, even under the malediction, with bell, book, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... which her patient had lately been promoted. The fever had gone, and Mrs. Crawley was slowly regaining her strength—very slowly, and with frequent caution from the Silverbridge doctor that any attempt at being well too fast might again precipitate her into an abyss of illness ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... incurable, or not supremely serious. Apart from this, there was much in Protestantism that he admired, much in its effects for which he was grateful. With the Lutheran view of imputation, Protestant and Catholic were separated by an abyss. Without it, there was no lasting reason why they should be separate at all. Against the communities that hold it he stood in order of battle, and believed that he could scarcely hit too hard. But he distinguished ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton |
