"Sublime" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... but a moment; and the sublimity of mountain heights, the gaudy decorations of fertile valleys, and the frowning grandeur of rocks, as they cast their dark shadow upon some foaming torrent, flit by him as a dream of twilight, and leave upon his memory only pencil outlines of the beautiful and the sublime. Not so the voyager on the ocean. Here the beautiful imprints itself ineffaceably in all its sparkling and its gorgeous variety upon the enchanted mind, and the grand and the sublime raise such a tempest of wonder in the soul that the ocean ever after ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... turn our thoughts to the condition of their country, in the contrast of the first and last day of that half century, how resplendent and sublime is the transition from gloom to glory! Then, glancing through the same lapse of time, in the condition of the individuals we see the first day marked with the fullness and vigor of youth, in the pledge of their lives, their fortunes, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... town than Nismes, partly because of the Rhone delta which begins there, partly because of its ruinous antiquity, and partly also because of the strong local character of its population. The amphitheatre of Arles is vaster and more sublime in its desolation than the tidy theatre at Nismes; the crypts, and dens, and subterranean passages suggest all manner of speculation as to the uses to which they may have been appropriated; while the broken galleries ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... and the modern had met for the first time and as irreconcileable enemies in the cloisters of Pisa; and the modern had triumphed in the great mediaeval fresco of the Triumph of Death. By a strange coincidence, by a sublime jest of accident, the antique and the modern were destined to meet again, and this time indissolubly united, in a painting representing the Resurrection. Yes, Signorelli's fresco in Orvieto Cathedral is indeed a resurrection, the resurrection of human ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... persons who have represented the development of the Indian mind as superior to any other, nay, who would make us go back to the Veda or to the sacred writings of the Buddhists in order to find there a truer religion, a purer morality, and a more sublime philosophy than our own. I shall not even mention the names of these writers or the titles of their works. But I feel equally impatient when I see other scholars criticising the ancient literature of India as if it were ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... forbidden. Manslaughter, which is the meaning of the one, is the same as man's laughter, which is the end of the other. A pun is prima facie an insult to the person you are talking with. It implies utter indifference to or sublime contempt for his remarks, no matter how serious. I speak of total depravity, and one says all that is written on the subject is deep raving. I have committed my self-respect by talking with such a person. I should like to commit him, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... goal; dust thou art to dust returnest, was not spoken of the soul. Art is long and time is fleeting, And our hearts, though stout and brave, Still like muffled drums are beating, Funeral marches to the grave. Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us footsteps on the sands of Time. Let us then ..." said Miss Milliken respectfully, ... "be ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... advocates. Many settlements have learned with grief, this very same lesson. Another reason for the lack of success is the mental calibre of those engaged in the work. However, the devotion and self-sacrifice of the Army slum sisters is one of the most touching and sublime elements of the slums, and it is all the more touching when it is to some extent misdirected and misplaced. To see the tact, patience and perseverance of these "Slum Angels" as they are often called, is a divine object ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... All but two of his English historical dramas are devoted to the War of the Roses and the incidental struggle over the French crown. The motive of this prolonged strife—so attractive to Shakespeare—had much the same dignity which distinguishes the family intrigues of the Sublime Porte, and Shakespeare presents the history of his country as a mere pageant of warring royalties and their trains. When the people are permitted to appear, as they do in Cade's rebellion, to which Shakespeare ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... place seemly and lovely, surrounding the Babe with a tapestry of heavenly forms, holy lights, rapturous sounds; taking the terror and the meanness of the scene away, and thereby, by our clumsy handling, losing the divine seal of the great mystery, the fact that hope can spring, in unstained and sublime radiance, from the vilest, lowest, meanest, noisiest conditions ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... "Goodness! 'Howls the Sublime' indeed!" thought Doris, gurgling with laughter in the passage. As soon as she had steadied her face she opened the studio door, and perceived Lady Dunstable's prospective daughter-in-law standing in the middle of the studio, head thrown back and hands outstretched, ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... the sublime doctrines which the illustrious founder of Pennsylvania declared to the Indians, and which he made the basis of his government, and the rule of his intercourse with his own people and with savage tribes. These doctrines were already instilled into the minds of the settlers, and they also found ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... hieroglyphics or symbolic devices, still in vogue among them. To this view of the matter Mr. Bancroft assents. "If you have a proof-sheet of your article on the Daneschrift, send it me. All they say about the Dighton Rock is, I think, the sublime of humbuggery." ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... life—was at length accomplished; and for a moment the blood recoiled back to my heart, and a tremulous thrill ran through my whole frame. I was so bewildered—so taken by surprise—that every feeling was absorbed in the one consciousness, that the sublime vision was before me; that I had at last seen Niagara; that it was now mine forever, stereotyped upon my heart by the unerring hand of nature; producing an impression which nothing but madness or idiotcy ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... royal thing! A wonderful and never-to-be-rivalled thing! Grander than the great stove of Hohen-Salzburg! Sublime! magnificent! matchless!" ...
— The Nuernberg Stove • Louisa de la Rame (AKA Ouida)
... always a hero. This explains that grand distinction between Heathen and Christian art, of which I spoke in the commencement; that expression of power blended with agony,—of celestial beatitude refining itself upon the face of grief. Christianity has made martyrdom sublime, and sorrow triumphant. Christ is "the Captain of our salvation,"-the leader of "many sons unto glory;" for he was "a man of sorrows, and acquainted ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... heeded. But the mighty organ of Modern Science with its hundred stops, each answering to some voice of Nature, takes up the pausing strain, and as we listen we recognize through all its mingling harmonies the simple, sublime, eternal melody that came from the lips of Timaeus the Locrian! The same doctrine reappears in various forms: in the popular works of Derham and Paloy and the Bridgewater Treatises; in the learned and thoughtful ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the mighty stream sweeping majestically past where I lay, liquid silver in the sunshine. Its tremendous volume had never so impressed me as in that moment of silent observation, nor had I ever realized before its sublime desolation. Along that entire surface but three objects met my gaze—a small island, green with trees, seemingly anchored just beyond the mouth of the Illinois; a lumbering barge almost opposite me, clearly outlined against the distant shore, and barely ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... comes in Canadian annals. For half a century its story is a record of lawless raids, bloody foray, dare-devil courage combined with the most fiendish cruelty and sublime heroism. Only a few of these raids can be narrated here. {157} June 18, 1686, when the long twilight of the northern night merged with dawn, there came out from the thicket of underbrush round Moose Factory, Hudson Bay, one hundred bush-rovers, led by Chevalier de Troyes of Niagara, accompanied ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... a parody on the most ancient and sublime poem in the Inspired Volume, is not mine. The great pleasure enjoyed in its perusal from early years, had occasionally prompted metrical imitations of isolated passages. These fragmentary effusions, recently woven together, are here presented, with the hope that as wandering ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... division of the Cabala contains the knowledge of things more sublime, as of divine and angelical powers, the contemplation of sacred names and characters; being a certain kind of symbolical theology, in which the letters, figures, numbers, names, points, lines, accents, etc. are esteemed to contain the significations of most profound things and wonderful ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... 1793, the King of Naples was obliged, for his own safety, to join the league against France, Acton concluded a treaty with your country, and informed the Sublime Porte of the machinations of our Committee of Public Safety in sending De Semonville as an Ambassador to Constantinople, which, perhaps, prevented the Divan from attacking Austria, and occasioned the capture and imprisonment of ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... little too sublime for poor Norry's mind, who was a long time among the Yankees, sufficiently instructed in the customs of this "free country" to be ready to observe the law of "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, and life ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... "A noble, sublime slavery!" he said, clasping his hands. "It is just in it that the highest meaning of woman's life lies! Of all the fearful medley of thoughts and impressions accumulated in my brain from my association with women my memory, like a filter, has retained no ideas, no clever saying, no philosophy, ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... tell you this!" She crept closer to me, hiding her face on my breast. For nearly a minute she was still, while confusion and clamor, Indian yells, and musketry fire reigned round us. I could feel the agitated heaving of her bosom, the throbbing of her heart. Then she looked up at me bravely, with a sublime expression in her tear-dimmed eyes that brought to my mind the Christian martyrs ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... JACQUES ROUSSEAU began his famous Confessions by a vehement appeal to the Deity: "I have shown myself as I was; contemptible and vile when I was so; good, generous, sublime when I was so; I have unveiled my interior such as Thou thyself hast seen it, Eternal Father! Collect about me the innumerable swarm of my fellows; let them hear my confessions; let them groan at my unworthiness; let them blush at my meannesses! Let each of them discover his heart ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... operas, "Cosimo," "Les Pontons de Cadiz," and other works had been produced at the Opera Comique in Paris. He was now director of the French opera in New Orleans and had brought out the charming Mademoiselle Capriccioso and the sublime Signor Staccato. The lady by his side, a dark brunette with features that were still beautiful, was the nimble-footed Madame Feu-de-joie, whose shapely limbs and graceful motions had delighted two generations ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... knowledge, their claim to intellectual power, would be laughable, were the subject less solemn and important. Speculations so feeble that they sound like the cries of an infant in the dark, are insinuated to be the sublime views of a bold and original thinker, who "has by a Divine help been enabled to plant his foot somewhere beyond the waves of Time!"—Doubts so badly expressed that they read like the confused utterance of one in his sleep, claim to be regarded as the legacy of one ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... it has nothing to do with sin; a man can be loudly and violently virtuous—nay, he can be loudly and violently saintly, though that is not the type of saintliness that we recognise in Dr. Horton. And as for sitting on one's hat, if it is done for any sublime object (as, for instance, to amuse the children), it is obviously an act of very beautiful self-sacrifice, the destruction and surrender of the symbol of personal dignity upon the shrine of public festivity. Now it will not do to attack the modern editor merely for being unrefined, like ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... I, enthusiastically, "I appreciate your delicacy, and your lofty sentiment. This is true chivalry. You surpass yourself. You are sublime!" ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... her hand lightly on his bowed head as he knelt beside her, and, in a voice that knew no faltering, breathed out a fervent prayer, full of pathos and sublime faith—invoking blessings upon him—life-long guardianship, and final salvation through Christ. The petition ended, she rose, smiling through the mist that gathered over her eyes, and ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... tender-hearted gentleman looking on and pitying him. As for any attempts to bring out, by objective dramatic touches, either the grievousness of the bereavement or the grief of the mourner, such attempts as are made to do this are either commonplace or "one step in advance" of the sublime. Take this, for instance: "The mourner was sitting upon a stone bench at the door, with his ass's pannel and its bridle on one side, which he took up from time to time, then laid them down, looked at them, and shook his head. He then took the crust of bread out of his wallet ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... love is of the immortal, And patience is sublime, And trouble a thing of every day, And touching every time; And childhood sweet and sunny, And womanly truth and grace, Ever call light life's darkness And bless earth's lowliest place. —Mrs. ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... better effectuate, from their preference of the sublime, or serious stile; which, having so much less of quickness or rapidity of execution, than the comic dance, admits of more attention to the neat expressiveness of every motion, gesture, ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... the Ambassador of Great Britain, to the Sublime Porte, stated in a letter which he presented, that Sir Moses Montefiore, Mr David William Wire, and Dr Madden, English subjects and distinguished members of society, also Mr Adolphe Cremieux and Dr Louis Loewe, form a distinguished deputation to the East, for the purpose of making a thorough investigation ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... paper in prose. For, in short, I am truly angry at the wrong which is done us in regard to intelligence; and I will avenge the whole sex for the unworthy place which men assign us by confining our talents to trifles, and by shutting the door of sublime knowledge against us. ...
— The Learned Women • Moliere (Poquelin)
... that it inculcates patriotism, makes it a religious duty to serve the state. But it is founded on error and falsehood, and renders its adherents superstitious, intolerant, and cruel. The first, the religion of man, or Christianity, is a sublime and true religion by which men, children of one god, acknowledge each other as brethren, and the society that unites them does not dissolve even with death. But Christianity of itself is not calculated to strengthen ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... atoms question how they feel sensation? Or dust make suggestion of its own creation? Yet if man were better than his base conditions, Could things baser fetter his sublime ambitions? ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... now arose among certain of those ancient and experienced men who grow gray about a court in the profound study of forms and ceremonials, with whom a point of punctilio is as a vast political right, and who contract a sublime and awful idea of the external dignity of the throne. Certain of these court sages propounded the momentous question whether the Moorish monarch, coming to do homage as a vassal, ought not to kneel and kiss the hand of the king. This ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... so many manifestations of one central force, and that Continuity is the law of nature, is clearly laid down, and its truth demonstrated, by Behmen, as well as the distinction between spirit and matter, and that the moral and material world is pervaded by a sublime unity. And though all this was not admitted in Behmen's days, because science was not then sufficiently advanced to understand the deep sense of our author, many of his passages, then unintelligible, or apparently absurd, read by the light of the present age, are found ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... it is splendid, it is sublime; let us enjoy it, let us make the most of it today—and bet not a farthing on tomorrow. The tomorrows have nothing for us. Too many times they have breathed the word of promise to our ear and broken it to our hope. We take ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of them may seem to be incorporated in this narrative, under the guise of mere romance, the reader need not on this account think himself misled, or treat them with sublime contempt. If it should ever be his fate or fortune to make a tour through the East Indian Archipelago, he will ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... also of that character, this, in its way, unique letter would then acquire an intolerable unity and monotony, and would no longer produce the desired effect, namely, to fashion and complete a most lovely chaos of sublime harmonies and interesting pleasures. So I use my incontestable right to a confused style by inserting here, in the wrong place, one of the many incoherent sheets which I once filled with rubbish, and which you, good creature, carefully preserved without my knowing it. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... nature. He shows how the artist loses his own personality in the object of contemplation, so completely that he identifies himself mentally with it. Schopenhauer describes the artistic mind when it is affected by the beautiful and the sublime. By losing all sense of individuality and personality the artist is so possessed by his object of thought and vision that he is absorbed in it and feels the Idea, which it represents. This theory put into ordinary language, is that the artist has in him the sense of a great Idea, ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... unifying thought of the Creator-Father. Faith in the unity of law is the foundation of all science, but the average Asiatic has not this thought or faith. Appalled at his own insignificance amid the sublime mysteries and awful immensities of nature, the shadows of his own mind become to him real existences. As it is affirmed that the human skin, sensitive to the effects of light, takes the photograph of the tree riven by lightning, so, on the pagan mind lie in ineffaceable and exaggerated grotesqueness ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... himself with his thoughts. Hope dazzled him, and already he saw himself acquitted. He piled up argument after argument, and planned artistically-turned periods and effective antitheses, concluding his apology with a sublime appeal to the sense of justice of ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... the Infinite. She did not guess why, did not even imagine the reason, but the tears came to her eyes with a smarting sting, and with them that feeling of overwhelming joy that was half-pain, the feeling that rushed over her so often when her father read some sublime ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... imagination failed him. He was entering a land of wonder in the belief that he was prepared for everything monstrous in Nature. He believed that with the stupendous vision of Unaga he had witnessed Nature's most sublime effort. So, out of his confidence he was trapped as easily as a man of no ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... bulletins which were issued hourly from the royal palace. The King's illness gave the finishing touch to his popularity; devotion to affairs of State had brought on brain-fever, and the more desperate the symptoms of the illness could be made to appear, the more sublime became the moral character of its august victim, and the more deeply-rooted ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... under the most prepossessing forms. They were conspicuous, moreover, for intellectual activity, and were by no means without intellectual eminence. Massachusetts had produced at least two men whose fame had crossed the sea,—Edwards, who out of the grim theology of Calvin mounted to sublime heights of mystical speculation; and Franklin, famous already by his discoveries in electricity. On the other hand, there were few genuine New Englanders who, however personally modest, could divest themselves of the notion ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... Salle, a man whom the historian Bancroft says that he had no superior among his countrymen for force of will and vast conceptions; for various knowledge, and quick adaptation of his genius to untried circumstances; for sublime magnanimity that resigned itself to the will of Heaven and yet triumphed over affliction by energy of purpose and ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... the character and habits of the North American savage, taken in connection with the scenery over which he is accustomed to range,—its vast lakes, boundless forests, majestic rivers, and trackless plains,—that is to my mind wonderfully striking and sublime. He is formed for the wilderness, as the Arab is for the desert. His nature is stern, simple, and enduring; fitted to grapple with difficulties and to support privations. There seems but little soil in ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... without finishing. Bending over the child, she drew him into her arms. With the same sublime expression of suffering, she went back to the open door and knelt in the beating rain, and tendered the little child toward the ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... vestments, and many other things of that kind, from apostolical tradition and discipline, in order that the majesty of so great a sacrifice might be displayed, and the minds of the faithful might be excited by these visible signs of religion and piety to the contemplation of those sublime things which are concealed in this sacrifice". Session XXII, c. V.—These words lead us to treat briefly of the mass, the principal act of divine worship during holy-week as at all other seasons of the year. This we do now the more readily, that we may not afterwards be obliged ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... rush Headlong into a deed you deem, sublime. Do not deceive yourself: I know you well: Long have you thirsted for it. If your pride But have its fill, what matters it to you Though thousand hearts should break. Oh! now, at length, I comprehend your feelings—'tis the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... "What a farce! There is Faust, the mysterious and sublime Faust who sings the horrible disgust and nothingness of everything; and this crowd are asking themselves anxiously whether Montrose's voice has not changed!" Then he listened, like the others, and behind the trivial ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... of mind, he pursued the track of the mystical divines, and having acquired great reputation in Spain, and being desirous of propagating his sublime mode of devotion, he left his own country, and settled at Rome. Here he soon connected himself with some of the most distinguished among the literati, who so approved of his religious maxims, that they concurred in assisting him to propagate them; and, in a short time, he ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... if any, interest in public affairs, and, indeed, knew about as much of the events and occurrences of the day as the sublime, abstracted dancing-master immortalized in one of the letters to Manning, he appears to have been profoundly and painfully impressed by the fate of Fauntleroy, the forger. He thought and talked of Fauntleroy by day, and dreamed of Fauntleroy at night. And on the day after the execution ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... power of even genius to triumph over an impossibility. During the first part of Bonaparte's life it was possible to paint or chisel Bonaparte's protuberant skull, his brow furrowed by the sublime line of thought, his pale elongated face, his granite complexion, and the meditative character of his countenance. During the second part of his life it was possible to paint or to chisel his broadened forehead, his admirably defined ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... of its people. That was, in other words, that this great statesman was always yet to be told that it behoved the Pilot of the ship to do anything but prosper in the private loaf and fish trade ashore, the crew being able, by dint of hard pumping, to keep the ship above water without him. On this sublime discovery in the great art How not to do it, Lord Decimus had long sustained the highest glory of the Barnacle family; and let any ill-advised member of either House but try How to do it by bringing in a Bill to do it, that Bill was as good as dead and buried when Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle rose ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... each other. The poacher eventually escaped. This, curious as it may seem, is the man whose eloquence at the club has not been forgotten in fifty years. "Thus did he stand," I have been told recently, "exclaiming in language sublime that the soul shall bloom in immortal youth through the ruin ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... siempre lo peor es cierto, La Dama duende, Una casa con dos puertas mala es de guardar and Guardate del agua mansa are almost unsurpassed. But it is as a writer of autos sacramentales that Calderon defies rivalry: his intense devotion, his subtle intelligence, his sublime lyrism all combine to produce such marvels of allegorical poetry as La Cena del rey Baltasar, La Vina del Senor and La Serpiente de metal. The autos lingered on in Spain till 1765, but they may be said to have died with ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... itself I am not called upon to express any opinion. But there can be no two opinions among fair-minded people as to the heroism, the purity, and the sublime self-sacrifice of the motives which prompted Lady Burton to this deed. Absolutely devoted to her husband and his interests as she had been in his lifetime, she was equally jealous of his honour now that he was dead. Nothing must tarnish the brightness of his good name. It was this ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... himself certainly at last soaring as high as the singer's voice and forgetting, in a lost gaze at the splendid ceiling, everything of the occasion but what his intelligence poured into it. This, as happened, was a flight so sublime that by the time he had dropped his eyes again a cluster of persons near the main door had just parted to give way to a belated lady who slipped in, through the gap made for her, and stood for some minutes full in his view. It was a proof of the perfect hush that no one stirred to offer ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... so soon as the expedition should have passed through the straits of Nassau, forced its way through the frozen gulf of Tartary, doubled Cape Tabin, and turned southward on its direct course to China. The sublime credulity which accepted Linschoten's hasty solution of the polar enigma as conclusive was fairly matched by the sedateness with which the authorities made the preparations for the new voyage. So deliberately were ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... unity and harmony of narrative, which shall comprehend this period of social disorganization, must be ascribed entirely to the skill and luminous disposition of the historian. It is in this sublime Gothic architecture of his work, in which the boundless range, the infinite variety, the, at first sight, incongruous gorgeousness of the separate parts, nevertheless are all subordinate to one main and predominant idea, that Gibbon ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... moment recall to memory the sensations I then experienced—the tones that seemed to thrill through my heart, the longing which I felt to unite my feeble voice to the full anthem, and the awful though sublime impression which the church service never failed to make upon my feelings. While my brothers were playing on the green before the minster, the servant who attended us has often, by my earnest entreaties, suffered me to remain beneath the great eagle which stood in the centre of the aisle, to support ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... condition divided between thinking and no thinking, refreshed by the fanning breeze, viewing the undulations of the soil, and the rippling of the brook, admiring the azure heavens, and the vast, the bold, and the sublime figure of the clouds, yielding themselves occasionally to "thick-coming fancies," and day-dreams, and the endless romances ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... characterized by sublime enthusiasm, self-sacrifice, and devotion, not only by the patriots but by loyalists who conscientiously adhered to the crown. In our admiration of those who secured the independence of the Colonies, we have overlooked the sacrifices and sufferings ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... that perish. I reflected further. Supposing, on extended investigation, I found a new theory. How far would it profit me? How far could I trust it not to lead me through another series of fantastic emotions and futile endeavours to the sublime climax of murdering a one-eyed cat? Self-abomination and contempt smote me as I thought of poor Polyphemus stretched dead on the hearthrug, and myself standing over him, sane, stupid, and remorseful, with ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... sublime confidence in divine Providence which led him perhaps to expose himself overmuch. He led the attack in person. Before the battle was far advanced, a report reached him that his left wing was wavering. With prompt resolution he started across the field, but, mistaking ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... our century has clomb its crest, And backward gazes o'er the plains of Time, And counts its harvest, yours is still the best, The richest garner in the field of rhyme (The metaphoric mixture, 'tis comfest, Is all my own, and is not quite sublime). But fame's not yours alone; you must divide all The plums and pudding with the ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... with what aspiring gaze Didst thou thy tranced vision raise To yonder orbs on high, And think how wondrous, how sublime 'Twere upwards to their spheres to climb, And live, beyond the reach of Time, Child ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... languor into a mood of vivid irony. Her lips curled, her eyes opened wide with a dancing beryl-coloured flame behind them, and her eyebrows arched in a sublime disdain. ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... mere function, but as a part of his nature. This is not an unfair criticism. The alternation seems to me, as well as to Mr. Johnston, psychologically impossible. But all the more importance attaches to the sublime figure of Baha-'ullah, who realized his oneness with God, and whose forerunner is like ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... Recreation that challenges the sublime Epithets of Royal, Artificial, Manly, and Warlike, for its Stateliness, Cunning, and Indurance, claims above all other Sports the Precedency; and therefore I was induced to place it at the Head to usher in the rest; and of which take this concise Definition, ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... But, the serenity of the night, and the grandeur of the road, with its impenetrable shadows, and deep glooms, and its sudden turns into the shining of the moon and its incessant roar of falling water, rendered the journey more and more sublime ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... ornament, and perhaps the most healthful and rational form of smoking,—pipes of all shapes, began to fill the shops of London. Coleridge, when cured of opium, took to snuff. Byron wrote dashingly about 'sublime Tobacco,' but I do not think he carried the practice to excess. Shelley never smoked, nor Wordsworth, nor Keats. Campbell loved a pipe. John Gibson Lockhart was seldom without a cigar. Sir Walter Scott smoked in his carriage, and regularly after dinner, loving both pipes and cigars. ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... us such sublime triumphs of her raw material, these have no history, no spirit. They tell to us no story of the past; and poetry has not crowned them with a diadem of romance. Hence their effect is partly lost, and ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... the name of my royal master, His Sublime and Ineffable Majesty, Jaikark the Seventeenth, King of Konkrook and of all the lands of the Konk Isthmus," Gurgurk squeaked and clicked. "I have the honor to bring with me the Lord Ambassador of King Orgzild of Keegark to the court of ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... but many islands, into which one large one has probably, in the course of time, become divided by the raging torrent. It is just above the Horse-Shoe Fall, in the midst of the most boisterous part of the rapids; and it was quite sublime on looking up the river to see the horizon formed at a considerable level above our heads by the mass of foaming water. ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... all remind us We can make our lives sublime; And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... front; of the beautiful medieval seat of the municipal government, once so sacred for the sublime and pathetic scenes enacted there during the famous siege and in the magistracy of Peter van der Werff, was accordingly enclosed by a solid palisade of oaken planks, strengthened by rows of iron bars with barbed prongs: ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... must lay aside in poetry as on entering a church. He is, as we have said, the priest of nature, in whom reverence is uppermost; and he who reads aloud the "Forest Hymn," with its solemn organ tone, has an impression that it must be followed by the sublime invitation, "O come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... Christianity with the derisive and impartial eye of an Epicurean god, I should think one would never cease marvelling and laughing; does it not actually seem that some single will has ruled over Europe for eighteen centuries in order to make a SUBLIME ABORTION of man? He, however, who, with opposite requirements (no longer Epicurean) and with some divine hammer in his hand, could approach this almost voluntary degeneration and stunting of mankind, as exemplified in the European ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... he wrote his two oratorios already mentioned. That by which he is best known is the "Creation," which is a master work indeed, if only we do not look in it for too much of the distinctly religious or sublime. It belongs to the pleasing in art, and certain of its numbers are worthy of Italian opera, so sweetly melodious are they, yet ever refined and beautiful. Of this kind are the solo arias, "On Mighty Pens," the famous "With Verdure ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... expulsion of dipus, as one who had become a curse to Thebes. And thus the poor, heart-shattered king would have been turned out upon the public roads, aged, blind, and a helpless vagrant, but for the sublime piety of his two daughters, but especially of Antigone, the elder. They share with their unhappy father the hardships and perils of the road, and do not leave him until the moment of his mysterious summons to some ineffable death in the woods of Colonus. The expulsion ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... strength, me the meek suppliant did address. 'Kshatriya, 't is well that thou hast turned, thy deed of murder to rehearse, Else over all thy land had burned the fire of my wide-wasting curse. If with premeditated crime the unoffending blood thou 'dst spilt, The Thunderer on his throne sublime had shaken at such tremendous guilt. Against the anchorite's sacred head, hadst, knowing, aimed thy shaft accursed, In th' holy Vedas deeply read, thy skull in seven wide rents had burst. But since, unwitting, thou hast wrought that deed of death, ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... infinitely does it enhance our delight in contemplating the products of nature! To know, for example, that the endless variety of colour which we see in plants is developed only by the rays of the sun, is to know a truism sublime by its very comprehensiveness. The cause of the whiteness of celery is nothing more than the want of light in its vegetation, and in order that this effect may be produced, the plant is almost wholly covered with earth; the tops of the leaves alone being suffered to appear ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... Knight, in his "Inquiry into the Principles of Taste,"[111] when treating of the "sublime and pathetic," quotes the story of Ulysses and his dog, as follows:—"No Dutch painter ever exhibited an image less imposing, or less calculated to inspire awe and terror, or any other of Burke's symptoms or sources of the sublime (unless, indeed, it be a stink), than the ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... motives which actuated me at this time. They do not appear to have flowed in a clear and pellucid stream. I discover a thirst for the surprising and experimental, for situations, dilemmas, and emergencies, sustained by the most sublime recklessness as to consequences. Then I see a dread of sinking into humdrum—the impulse never to be at rest; deeper than all this, I find a secret dissatisfaction with myself, a vague longing to use the best that is in me to some true purpose; a desire to leave ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... as he has had no breakfast this morning, his appetite will be good. Go, therefore, and give him your diamonds for breakfast. Anna Leopoldowna wants them not; she is already satiated with them!'—To the second I said: 'Go and announce your glorious victory to our sublime generalissimo. He is at his toilet, and as he every morning touches his noble cheeks with rouge, your new paint, prepared from the purple blood of the enemy, will doubtless be very welcome to him!'—'And as to what concerns your secret mission and your discovered conspiracy,' ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... good sense, but not common sense, must at last determine its limits. It has been thought, and I believe with reason, that Michael Angelo sometimes transgressed those limits; and, I think, I have seen figures of him of which it was very difficult to determine whether they were in the highest degree sublime or extremely ridiculous. Such faults may be said to be the ebullitions of genius; but at least he had this merit, that he never was insipid; and whatever passion his works may excite, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... Miss Nancy is a poet without genius, one who has a talent for discovering the fineness of life, but who lacks the wit to keep his views from ridicule. It is not a step of the seven-league boots between the sublime and the ridiculous. Sometimes it is only an invisible ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... study to be prescribed, in order that studious boys might ripen their minds by diligent reading; balance their judgment by precepts of wisdom, correct their compositions with an unsparing pen, hear at length what they ought to imitate, and be convinced that nothing can be sublime when it is designed to catch the fancy of boys, then the grand style of oratory would immediately recover the weight and splendor of its majesty. Now the boys play in the schools, the young men are laughed at in the forum, ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... he, now familiarly seating himself in the vacated chair, "what do you think of Mark? Sublime fellow, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... the universality of grace is truly sublime and would have to be accepted if God's salvific will could be demonstrated by revelation or some historic law to suffer no exceptions. But Ripalda has not been able to prove this from Revelation.(216) Then, too, his theory ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... was sublime. He was so transcendently unconscious of the emotions going on in Mr. Bernard's mind at the moment, that he had only ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... were to be denied to the masses. Nietzsche speaks of Kant: "With the aid of his concept of 'Practical Reason,' he produced a special kind of reason, for use on occasions when reason cannot function: namely, when the sublime command, 'Thou shalt,' resounds." In his old age Kant became more bold, and perhaps voiced his true views, for we find that in "Religion Within the Limits of Pure Reason," he is actively antagonistic ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... natural piety, is it probable, nay is it possible, that they, and they alone, should have no order in their seeming disorder, no unity in their seeming multiplicity, should suffer no explanation by the discovery of some central and sublime law of mutual connexion? ...
— The Darwinian Hypothesis • Thomas H. Huxley
... dawning upon his mind of any godlike faculty or apprehension, and more especially if that first dawning happened to connect itself with circumstances of individual or incommunicable splendor. The passage which I am going to cite first of all revealed to me the immeasurableness of the morally sublime. What was it, and where was it? Strange the reader will think it, and strange [3] it is, that a case of colossal sublimity should first emerge from such a writer as Phaedrus, the Aesopian fabulist. A great mistake it was, on the part of Doctor S., that ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... nest doesn't take the cake!" exclaimed Dick, always modern. "If there were any more to take, it could have that, too. Hurrah for you, rock and river. You're sublime." ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... in that light," returned the earl, "nor shall I turn philosopher now. I revere your principle, Sir William Wallace; but it is too sublime to be mine. Nay, nor would it be politic for one who holds his possessions in England by the right of conquest to question the virtue of the deed. By the sword my ancestors gained their estates; and with the sword I have no ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... devotions of a single woman. She was a female of one of those strange nations, decently clad, about thirty years of age, pleasant to the eye were she not so dirty, and had she not that wild look, half way between the sallow sublime and the dangerously murderous, which seems common to oriental Christians, whether men or women. Heaven might know of what sins she came there to leave the burden: heaven did know, doubtless; but from the length of ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... the Hebrew form of the Egyptian Peraa—or Phrah. "The great house," "sublime house," or "high gate" is the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... revolutionary and Napoleonic theories on the division of property; and a small volume entitled "Histoire impartiale des Jesuites," which is an impassioned defence of religion and the monarchy. "The Bourbons are the preservers of the sublime religion of Christ, and they have never betrayed the trust which confided Christianity to them," he cries. No one reading these political essays would think it likely that they were the work of the romantic writer of "La Derniere Fee" or ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... I turn round, and there, there in front of me, I see row upon row of richly-laden fruit trees, their leaves a brilliant copper in the scintillating rays of the ruddy autumn sun. I gasp for breath—the beauty of tint and tone surpasses all that I have hitherto seen—it is sublime, the grand climax of transformation. As the curtain falls with the approach of winter, I hurry to my Edinburgh home and pray for the prompt return of ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell |
