"Sublimity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have at different periods conferred a kind of lustre upon Bangor by residing in it, Taliesin in the old, and Edmund Price in comparatively modern time. Both of them were poets. Taliesin flourished about the end of the fifth century, and for the sublimity of his verses was for many centuries called by his countrymen the Bardic King. Amongst his pieces is one generally termed "The Prophecy of Taliesin," which announced long before it happened the entire subjugation of Britain by the Saxons, and which is perhaps ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... style he discourses of the gods, and it can be easily seen that he meant thereby the one, divine, heavenly power. No Grecian author serves so well for the interpretation of Holy Scripture, especially of the Psalms and Job, which rival him in sublimity." ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... at the American side by moonlight. There was then an air of grandeur and sublimity in the scene which I shall long remember. Yet at this side they are not seen to the greatest advantage. Next morning I crossed the Niagara river, below the Falls, into Canada. I did not ascend the bank to take the usual route to the ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... it is too difficult, but because it is no landscape, but like a vast illuminated capital letter filling the whole page, or the sublime monotony of the mosque-inscriptions, declaring in thousandfold repetition that God is great. The soaring sublimity of the Moslem monotheism comes partly from its narrowness and abstractness. Is it because we are a little hard of hearing that it takes such reiteration ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... Milton, 'an acrimonious and surly Republican[151],'—'a man who in his domestick relations was so severe and arbitrary[152],' and whose head was filled with the hardest and most dismal tenets of Calvinism[153], should have been such a poet; should not only have written with sublimity, but with beauty, and even gaiety; should have exquisitely painted the sweetest sensations of which our nature is capable; imaged the delicate raptures of connubial love; nay, seemed to be animated with all the spirit of revelry. It is a proof ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... overlooked us and our movements. The second day was beautifully clear, and many a time, in the midst of its carnage and noise, I could not help stopping to look across that vast field of battle, to admire its sublimity. ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... absolutely necessary,' argued Sir Matthew, 'to have justice kept up at all times,' whatever flaws may exist in the title of the men in whom the supreme authority may chance to be vested. Never yet was there a simpler proposition; but there is sublimity in its breadth. It involves the true doctrine of subjection to the magistrate, as enforced by St. Paul. The New Testament furnishes us with no disquisitions on political justice: it does not say whether the ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... never dreamed that fate was likely to cramp me in a cockleshell. I dare say there is a touch of sublimity about it. The associations are in favor ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... "What majesty! what awful sublimity!" said I, aloud. I thought not of the pain, and terror, and death that reigned in the human habitation upon which the bolt of destruction had fallen, but of the sublime power displayed in the strife of ...
— Heart-Histories and Life-Pictures • T. S. Arthur
... a vain shadow; and then the surprises come; something, which in its familiar aspect stirs no tangible emotion, in an instant overhangs the path, shrouded in dim grandeur and solemn awe. Days of depression have this value, that they are apt to reveal the sublimity, the largeness of well-known thoughts, all veiled in a melancholy magnificence. Then, too, one gains an inkling of the sweetness of the warm corners, the lighted rooms of life, the little centre of brightness which one can make in one's own retired ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... she must either be ruined herself or else ruin Girard, she would far sooner accept the former result. A demon, Guiol of course, tempted her in this very way, with the wondrous sublimity of such a sacrifice. God, she wrote, asked of her a bloody offering. She could tell her of saints who, being accused, did not justify, but rather accused themselves, and died like lambs. This example Cadiere followed. When Girard was accused before her, she defended him, saying, ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... dream, when they closed upon him the door of Bedford jail, that God would overrule their poor spite and envy to His own glory and the worldwide renown of their victim. In the solitude of his prison, the ideal forms of beauty and sublimity, which had long flitted before him vaguely, like the vision of the Temanite, took shape and coloring; and he was endowed with power to reduce them to order, and arrange them in harmonious groupings. His powerful imagination, no longer self-tormenting, but under ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... more from the life: it is the sublimity of an angel, mingled with all that is attractive in woman. But who is the friend we may venture to trust? To whom may I give my bond? And from whom may I receive a treasure which for the rest of my life ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... to say what place Father Ryan will occupy in the Temple of Fame, though he believes that an enlightened public sentiment would accord to him a high position. The chief merits of his poems would seem to be the simple sublimity of his verses; the rare and chaste beauty of his conceptions; the richness and grandeur of his thoughts, and their easy, natural flow; the refined elegance and captivating force of the terms he employs as the medium through which he communicates those thoughts and the weird fancy which ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... blaze, and lifting his shafts like pines, and his walls like precipices, ministered to their miraculous stability by an infinite phalanx of sloped buttress and glittering pinnacle. The spire was the natural consummation. Internally, the sublimity of space in the cupola had been superseded by another kind of infinity in the prolongation of the nave; externally, the spherical surface had been proved, by the futility of Arabian efforts, incapable of decoration; its majesty depended ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... these mournful tidings, and musing with his head bent downwards, he loses his road, and wanders into a wood. Here Nature, whose figure is described with sublimity, appears, and discloses to him the secrets of her operations. After this he wanders into a desert; but at length proceeds on his way, under the protection of a banner, with which Nature had furnished him, till on the third day he finds ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... Reynolds' book. This taste, though not natural to me, lasted for several years, and many of the pictures in the National Gallery in London gave me much pleasure; that of Sebastian del Piombo exciting in me a sense of sublimity. ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... palate his not yet been attuned to the sublimity of the substances it flavors. Tell me, the first time you tasted oysters, tea, porter, truffles, and sundry other dainties which you now adore, did you like them? Could you comprehend how the Romans stuffed their pheasants with assafoetida, and ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... me there is but one life which is with you; but for you there is one will which is your own. Yes, I confess, I love you with the whole fire of love, but I feel I am not worthily yours. You stand far above me in nobility, sublimity and purity, and I can scarcely understand the thought of ever calling you my wife. And, yet, there is no other road on which we could travel through life together. Marie, you are wholly free; I ask for no sacrifice. The world is great, and if you wish it, we shall ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... holding an intermediate place between spirit and matter, has, of course, a corresponding faculty in the world of spirits. It is, no doubt, an inconceivably pleasurable source of enjoyment. This increases the sublimity which there is in the silence of the dead, and its impressiveness. For what fancy can conceive of the communications, from heart to heart, in that multitude where every new acquaintance is the occasion ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... mile in width, and displays scenery on both sides picturesque and romantic beyond the powers of a prose description. Imagination, borne on the wings of poetry, could alone gather similes to portray the wild sublimity of this landscape, where dark behemoth crags stood over the brows of lofty precipices, as if a rampart in the sky; and forests seemed suspended in mid-air. On the eastern side there was one soaring crag, ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... or the cynic respectively, reflecting an innate hope—a common interest in common things and common men—a tune the Concord bards are ever playing, while they pound away at the immensities with a Beethovenlike sublimity, and with, may we say, a vehemence and perseverance—for that part of greatness is not ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... Valour yesterday, the sublimity of self-sacrifice, had appealed to them with irresistible force, even though they did not understand the force that had set these great virtues in motion. The hero of yesterday should be the chosen of to-day, the god ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... set, but was still reflected on the heaps of billowy gray clouds just above the horizon. It made the snow in front of her a delicate pink. The girl had not got far enough from the house to see a sunset for months. The freshness and keenness of the air, the colours in the sky, the grandeur and sublimity of it all chased away her anger and left her in a mood to reason over her situation. She followed the cow-path down to the bed of the stream and then threaded her way along its winding route for a greater distance than she had ever gone before. A broken willow barred her way after ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... boast of one truly great man, Christopher Wren; and the fire which laid London in ruins had given him an opportunity, unprecedented in modern history, of displaying his powers. The austere beauty of the Athenian portico, the gloomy sublimity of the Gothic arcade, he was like almost all his contemporaries, incapable of emulating, and perhaps incapable of appreciating; but no man born on our side of the Alps, has imitated with so much success the magnificence of the palacelike churches of Italy. Even the superb Lewis ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of a rough-bearded man, are seven years more terse and juvenile for one single operation; and if they did not run a risk of being quite shaved away, might be carried up by continual shavings, to the highest pitch of sublimity—How Homer could write with so long a beard, I don't know—and as it makes against my hypothesis, I as little care—But let us ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... knots during the day. At night she was out of sight of land. All day Sunday she made but little progress, and lay in a calm for several hours. Towards night, however, a fresh westerly wind came to her aid, and on Monday morning the crew saw the mountains of Europe and Africa vying with each other in sublimity, though they were too sour to appreciate the grandeur of the scene. The vessel hugged the Spanish shore, and Perth was on the lookout for an opportunity to spring the trap; but the sea was so rough and choppy, and the current so swift, that he was not willing to embark in the ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... trifle by this reflection and by a certain note of sublimity in her experience, Missy leaned against the gatepost upon which a lantern was blinking its last shred of life, and gazed at ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... terraces, all in shadow. And you climb and climb and climb, till at last, beyond a gray torii, the goal appears: a small, void, colorless wooden shrine,—a Shinto miya. The shock of emptiness thus received, in the high silence and the shadows, after all the sublimity of the long approach, is very ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... the most elevated pinnacle on the house of God. All dwellings in the neighbourhood appear like so many dwarfs couching at the feet of the Minster; while its own vastness and beauty impress the observer with feelings of awe and sublimity. As we stood upon the top of this stupendous mountain of ecclesiastical architecture, and surveyed the picturesque hills and valleys around, imagination recalled the tumult of the sanguinary battles fought in sight of the edifice. ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... 'Essay on Man,' than in the 'Excursion.' If you search for passion, where is it to be found stronger than in the epistle from Eloisa to Abelard, or in Palamon and Arcite? Do you wish for invention, imagination, sublimity, character? seek them in the Rape of the Lock, the Fables of Dryden, the Ode on Saint Cecilia's Day, and Absalom and Achitophel: you will discover in these two poets only, all for which you must ransack innumerable metres, and God only knows how many writers ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... maternity sat not too heavily to cloud the primal radiance. It was there in their soft Buon giorno in the way they did not, as the gondola drew beside them, cover their fruitful breasts from her tender eyes, in the way most fall, they grasped in the high mood of the forestieri a sublimity untouched by the niceties of bargaining. A man in the state of mind to which the girl's visible shine confessed, could hardly be expected to stickle at the price of the few figs and roses which served as an easy passage ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... remains as on the first day. Homer has given us the song of the landlocked sea, but where has the ocean found a human voice that is not lost and forgotten when it speaks to us in its own penetrating tones? The mountains stand revealed in more than one interpretation, touched by their own sublimity, but the sea remains silent in human speech, because no voice will ever be strong enough to match its ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... plunge into the night. Now have I reached the utmost limits of the town, where the last lamp struggles feebly with the darkness like the farthest star that stands sentinel on the borders of uncreated space. It is strange what sensations of sublimity may spring from a very humble source. Such are suggested by this hollow roar of a subterranean cataract where the mighty stream of a kennel precipitates itself beneath an iron grate and is seen no more on ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... victories of Napoleon, but as those victories were ultimately crowned by defeat, it is more consistent to consider the Triumphal Arch as a triumph of art than of arms; as certainly the magnificence and sublimity of the design is only to be equalled by the exquisite beauty of the execution. Having passed this noble monument and splendid specimen of architectural talent, the Champs Elysees extend in all their beauty to the view of the ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... great romance, "The Toilers of the Sea" ("Les Travailleurs de la Mer"), published in 1866, was written during his exile in Guernsey. Of all Hugo's romances, both in prose and in verse, none surpasses this for sheer splendour of imagination and diction, for eloquence and sublimity of truth. It is, in short, an idyll of passion, adventure, and self-sacrifice. The description of the moods and mysteries of the sea is well-nigh incomparable; and not even in the whole of Hugo's works can there be found anything ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... services of the Roman Church abroad, and particularly at Rome, certainly exercised a kind of magic attraction on many of the friends of Wiseman and Newman, though one wonders that the sunny grandeur of St. Peter's at Rome should ever have seemed more impressive than the sombre sublimity and serene magnificence of Westminster Abbey. Unfortunately, the introduction of a more ornate service, even of harmless candlesticks and the often very useful incense, had always a secret meaning. ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... be seen inscribed on Luther's tomb at Wittenberg—is the opening sentence and key-note of the Reformer's grandest hymn. The forty-sixth Psalm inspired it, and it is in harmony with sublime historical periods from its very nature, boldness, and sublimity. It was written, according to Welles, in the memorable year when the evangelical princes delivered their protest at the Diet of Spires, from which the word and the meaning of the word "Protestant" is derived. "Luther used often to sing it in 1530, while ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... realization of a dream which had often passed through the monkish heart—the embodiment, of a wish which had often brought tears into the eyes of genuine enthusiasts. There was, surely, as much sublimity in the first conception as in the execution. What indeed were the crusades, but the means of bringing to light, feelings, desires, passions, a lofty disinterested heroism, which the very depth of the former darkness had tended ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... It seems as if it must be like a fine sunset, and would pass in a few minutes. Perhaps we feel that we can't endure sublimity long, ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... Passage in the whole Poem worked up to a greater Sublimity, than that wherein his Person is described in ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... more than his duty; but when he went, without absolute need, and shared in the repugnant cares which the most devoted servants of Christ in the hospitals undertake only after struggles and heroic victory over revolted nature he rose to sublimity. It was because he saw in the poor the suffering members of the Saviour; to love the poor man, it is not enough to wish him well, we must respect him, and we cannot respect him as much as any child ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... bears us in imagination to Calvary and the Cross; and we seem to perceive some analogy between the scenical suffering which we are here contemplating and the real agonies of that final completion to which we dare no more than hint a reference. Ford was of the first order of poets. He sought for sublimity, not by parcels, in metaphors or visible images, but directly where she has her full residence, in the heart of man; in the actions and sufferings of the greatest minds. There is a grandeur of the soul, above mountains, seas, and the elements. Even in the poor perverted ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... of dead, flat plain. It may well be, indeed, as some have suggested, that the character of architecture is unconsciously determined by the type of surrounding scenery; that men do not build spires in the midst of mountains to compete with natural sublimity that they cannot hope to emulate, but are emboldened to express in stone and mortar their own heavenward aspirations in countries where Nature seems to express herself in less spiritual, or at any rate ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... imposing effect of the building by the alteration of its details, there is still, taking it as a whole, a simple grandeur in the design, a magnificence in the material employed, and a quiet harmony in the illumination, that impart to the interior a character of sublimity which nothing can impair. The rectangular portico was added at some subsequent period, and consists of sixteen splendid Corinthian columns (Fig. 138), eight in front supporting the pediment, and the other eight dividing ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... greatest degree. Its sublimity was gradually lost as the meaning of the Gothic style became less understood, and a tasteless imitation of the Roman style, like that of St. Peter's at Rome, was brought into vogue by the Jesuits and by the court architects, by whom the chateau of Versailles was deemed the highest ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... belongs to distant objects of terror, and uncertain, imaginary distress. His strength, in like manner, is not strength of will or action, of bone and muscle, nor is it coarse and palpable—but it assumes a character of vastness and sublimity seen through the same visionary medium, and blended with the appalling associations of preternatural agency. We need only turn, in proof of this, to the Cave of Despair, or the Cave of Mammon, or to the account of the change of Malbecco into ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... explained by a meditation on the true nature of religion; that is,—reason 'plus' the understanding. I say profoundness rather than sublimity; for Dante does not so much elevate your thoughts as send them down deeper. In this canto all the images are distinct, and even vividly distinct; but there is a total impression of infinity; the wholeness is not in vision or conception, but in an inner feeling ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... illimitable tracts beyond—mighty waves on the surface of the world's great inland seas, on whose crests sat the green and purple foam of herbage, and in whose hollows lay the still life of home and pasture. Silent, changeless, secure, perpetual sublimity rested on their summits, and unbroken repose lay along their graceful sweeps. They were the joy-bearers to the poor child of sorrow, who with eager eye looked out on their morning revelations. To her the ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... by that in which there is sublimity or majesty so overwhelming as to awaken a feeling akin to fear; in awe, considered by itself, there is no element of esteem or affection, tho the sense of vastness, power, or grandeur in the object is always present. Dread is a shrinking apprehension or expectation ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... betrayed them into fanatical extravagance. Anyone who did not erect or contribute largely to the erection of a temple or a pagoda was not admitted to the ranks of humanity. Men readily sacrificed their estates to form temple domains or to purchase serfs (tera-yakko) to till them. The sublimity of these edifices; the solemn grandeur of the images enshrined there; the dazzling and exquisite art lavished on their decoration; the strange splendour of the whole display might well suggest to the Japanese the ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... cone of grayish-coloured slate standing alone, which the workmen say is good for nothing; but it is good for its picturesque appearance. A heavy shower of hail came on, which, falling between the rifts of the rocks, and blown by the high wind, added to the sublimity of the scene: we were comfortably sheltered in ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... deities who struck horror into the gods themselves." His imagination dwells in the loftiest regions of the old mythology of Greece; his tone is always pure and moral, though stern and harsh; he appeals to the most violent passions, and is full of the boldest metaphors. In sublimity Aeschylus has never been surpassed. He was in poetry what Phidias and Michael Angelo were in art. The critics say that his sublimity of diction is sometimes carried to an extreme, so that his language becomes inflated. His characters, like his sentiments, were sublime,—they ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... better fitted for her; he toasted her; he praised her; he exhausted his knowledge of mythology in her honour, calling her Melpomene, the tragic Muse, for had she not made men weep with her song that very night? Song, did he say? nay, hymn it was! She was Polyhymnia, singer of sublimity. He named her Philomele, and desired the lute of Orpheus that he might play an accompaniment to her wondrous singing. He asked her in which enchanted ocean she had lived. 'Mademoiselle Sirene, lurer of men's ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... Religion of Friedrich Lange. "The German people is the elect of God and its enemies are the enemies of the Lord." And this German God, like the popular idea of Jehovah, is a "Man of War" who demands "eye for eye, tooth for tooth," and cries with savage sublimity:— ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... simple. And its various manners of being one suggest, for their accurate ascertainment, so many distinct programs of scientific work. Thus the pragmatic question 'What is the oneness known-as? What practical difference will it make?' saves us from all feverish excitement over it as a principle of sublimity and carries us forward into the stream of experience with a cool head. The stream may indeed reveal far more connexion and union than we now suspect, but we are not entitled on pragmatic principles to claim absolute oneness in any ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... recognise his divine dignity. In the next verse he is styled God, not to identify him, but as a matter of course in the narrative.—No sooner did the Judge take his seat, than "the earth and the heaven fled away." The simplicity and sublimity of this language are inimitable by human genius; and rarely if at all equalled, even by those who spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. The first inspired writer uses language very similar. (Gen. i. 3.) We are frequently and sufficiently taught ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... journey at a thrilling angle, down, down until, as mere specks, they reached the transport and washing department of the mine in the Vega. Two empty buckets came up as two full ones went down, travelling with a certain sublimity along the ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... light of high latitudes. There was mist in places, and flurries of snow were to be seen to the southward, while the ocean to the northward of the group was glittering under the brightness of an unclouded sun. It was the mixed character of this scene that rendered it so peculiar, while its grandeur, sublimity, and even beauty, were found in its vastness, its noble though wild accessories, its frozen and floating mountains, glowing in prismatic light, and the play of summer on the features ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... theory of her. If the ascetic impulse is the most purely selfish impulse in human nature, Mrs. Brinkley might not have been mistaken in suspecting her of an ignoble motive, though it might have had for the girl the last sublimity of self- sacrifice. The woman who disliked her and pitied her knew that she had no arts, and rather than adopt so simple a theory of her behaviour as her husband had advanced she held all the more strenuously ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... his head, from which a ribbon of enormous length was pendant. A small three-cornered hat, of extraordinary elegance, rested on the toupet of curls which hung down on either side of his head and shaded the forehead, which displayed the dignity and sublimity ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... in the way we do the common work of our trade or of our household, or our work on the farm, or in the mill or store. The faithfulness Christ requires and commends takes in all these things. Ofttimes, too, it would be easier to be faithful in some great trial, requiring sublimity of courage, than in the little unpicturesque duties of an ordinary day. Says Phillips Brooks: "You picture to yourself the beauty of bravery and steadfastness. You let your imagination wander in delight over the memory of martyrs who have ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... [she says] for your friendly zeal in defence of my powers of pathos and sublimity; but I think it carries you much too far when it leads you to imagine that I refrain, from principle or virtue, from displaying powers that I really do not possess. I assure you that I am not in the least capable of writing a dithyrambic ode, or any ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... to the dog or to the wolf, there is no botany to the cows and the sheep. All these sciences are creations of the mind of man; they are the order and the logic which he reads into Nature. Nature interprets man to himself. Her beauty, her sublimity, her harmony, her terror, are names which he gives to the emotions he experiences in her presence. The midnight skies sound the depths of his capacity for the emotion of grandeur and immensity, the summer landscape reveals to him his susceptibility ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... the Highlanders in the late war. The Chevalier's Guard, he declared, had all white satin slashed breeches, and red boots—"only they left them at home, my dear," adds this wag. Not one pennyworth of sublimity would he or George allow henceforth to Mr. Home's performance. As for Harry, he sate in very deep meditation over the scene; and when Mrs. Lambert offered him a penny for his thoughts, he said, "That he thought, Young Norval, Douglas, What-d'ye-call-'em, the fellow in white satin—who looked ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... within their reach than the pathetick; for they never attempted that comprehension and expanse of thought which, at once, fills the whole mind, and of which, the first effect is sudden astonishment, and the second, rational admiration. Sublimity is produced by aggregation, and littleness by dispersion. Great thoughts are always general, and consist in positions not limited by exceptions, and in descriptions not descending to minuteness. It is with great propriety that subtilty, ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... chemistry at the new University of Wisconsin, and then for years turned explorer of forests, peaks, and glaciers, not writing, at first, except in his "Journal," but forever absorbing and worshiping sublimity and beauty with no thought of literary schemes. Yet his every-day talk about his favorite trees and glaciers had more of the glow of poetry in it than any talk I have ever heard from men of letters, and his books and "Journal" will long perpetuate this thrilling sense of ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... really stunned by the beauty, simplicity, and sublimity of that comparison. I remained absolutely mute and confounded. Though it was demolishing all the traditions and doctrines of my Church, and pulverizing all my holy doctors and theologians, that noble answer found such an echo in my soul that it seemed ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... better course could be pursued than to study the whole of the Divine Song. It is, however, too long a production to be introduced here in its entirety; but the following extracts give the chief features of the work, than which nothing in Hindu literature is more characteristic, in its sublimity as in its puerilities, in its logic as in its want of it. It has shared the fate of most Hindu works in being interpolated injudiciously, so that many of the puzzling anomalies, which astound no less the reader than the hero to whom it was revealed, are probably later additions. It is a medley ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... performances which were by no means ordinary, and our repertory included everything of this nature that had ever been written for the theatre. I was particularly pleased with the presentation of Spohr's Jessonda, which was truly not without sublimity, and raised us high in the esteem of all cultured lovers of music. I was untiring in my endeavours to discover some means of elevating our performances above the usual level of excellence compatible with the meagre resources of provincial theatres. I persistently fell foul ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Intellectual Endowments; Conspicuous (among other Excellencies) by the Inclination Your Lordship discovers to promote Natural Knowledge: As it justifies the Discernment of that Assembly, to pitch upon Your Lordship for their President, so does it no less discover the Candor, yea, I presume to say, the Sublimity of your Mind, in so generously honoring them with your Acceptance of the Choice ...
— Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets • John Evelyn
... each other formed a rude portal on the summit. Here I sat down. A little level platform, about two yards long, lay before me, and then the eye immediately fell upon the sea, far, very far below. I never felt the sublimity of solitude before.' Names have been given to the great rock-masses. The Castle Rock looks far over the sea, the Devil's Cheesewring is on the inner side of the valley, and there are many others. A narrow path cut in the deep descent of the cliffs leads from ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... (as in some other cases) the interpreter is hardest to be understood of the two. If, finally, TIME be assumed as the exponent of the dreadful magnitudes, time combining itself with motion, as in the flight of cannon-balls or the flight of swallows, the sublimity becomes greater; but horror seizes upon the reflecting intellect, and incredulity upon the irreflective. Even a railroad generation, that should have faith in the miracles of velocity, lifts up its ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... Heddegan. She had, in truth, discovered, underneath the crust of uncouthness and meagre articulation which was due to their Troglodytean existence, that her unwelcomed daughters had natures that were unselfish almost to sublimity. The harsh discipline accorded to their young lives before their mother's wrong had been righted, had operated less to crush them than to lift them above all personal ambition. They considered the ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... white-hot and blazing all over the country side. To Hilma's notion, Annixter's attitude was heroic beyond all expression. His courage in facing the Railroad, as he had faced Delaney in the barn, seemed to her the pitch of sublimity. She refused to see any auxiliaries aiding him in his fight. To her imagination, the great League, which all the ranchers were joining, was a mere form. Single-handed, Annixter fronted the monster. But ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... very superiority in sublimity and beauty which I, and those who pursue the same path with me, oppose," replied Hermon. "Nature is sufficient for us. To take anything from her, mutilates; to add anything, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... sisters who were imprisoned in the Soudan, and whose freedom has been procured by Abdel Giabbari, Mgr. Sogaro's envoy in the Soudan. The striking historical spectacle presented by General Gordon's long and lonely journey on his camel across the desert to Khartoum has been eclipsed in its sublimity by the feat which has just been performed by Sister Cipriani, who has just traversed the same weary, arid waste on foot, accompanied by a single Arab attendant. Gordon's name will live forever in story, side by side with the great knights, historical and legendary, ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... fraud—effeminacy, futility, physical cowardice. And then, when the last of his loathsome secrets has been told, when he has nothing left either to gain or to conceal, then he rises up into a perfect bankrupt sublimity and makes the great avowal which is the whole pivot and meaning of the poem. He says in effect: "Now that my interest in deceit is utterly gone, now that I have admitted, to my own final infamy, the frauds that I have practised, ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... like repudiating our parents because we did not like their manners and clothes. The religious impulse is the art impulse, and both are manifestations of love, and love is the basis of our sense of sublimity. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... circumstances, I might have stayed to regard such a scene, though not to admire it. On that interminable waste, there was nought to be admired, not even sublimity; but no spectacle, however sublime, however beautiful, could have won from me a ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... P——, turning his eyes in the direction of the mountains. "There is nothing in the world to be compared to the sublimity of this scenery, defined as the outlines are by the clearness of the atmosphere and its deep blue tint." After a short pause he continued, "When we can see at one glance such an immensity of space, and know that this vast tract of mountain and of valley must be full of animal life, ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... Burke appear to have been drawn from those five sources ("pegai") to which Longinus alludes. In the 8th chapter of his fragment "On the Sublime," he observes, that if we assume an ability for speaking well, as a common basis, there are five copious fountains from whence sublimity in eloquence may be said ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... gave him, but the truth was it held him. He despised sentiment, tenderness, and, by the strangeness of the human mind, he went, by way of paradox, to the tenderest, most sublime spot in a book supreme in tenderness and sublimity. ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... second son, had been appointed "King of Spain" in that futile business; and with much sublimity, though internally in an impoverished condition, he proceeded towards Spain, landing in England to get cash for the outfit;—arrived in Spain; and roved about there as Titular-King for some years, with the fighting Peterboroughs, Galways, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... part of England which possesses not much of the picturesque, and nothing of that which the vulgar call sublime, he has learnt to see that in all nature, in the hedgerow and the sandbank, as well as in the alp peak and the ocean waste, is a world of true sublimity,—a minute infinite,—an ever fertile garden of poetic images, the roots of which are in the unfathomable and the eternal, as truly as any phenomenon which astonishes and awes the eye. The descriptions of the desolate ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... recommended by Gluck for her good natural voice. At Her Majesty's request, Gluck himself taught Madame Saint Huberti the part of Armida. Sacchini, also, at the command of Marie Antoinette, instructed her in the style and sublimity of the Italian school, and Mdlle. Benin, the Queen's dressmaker and milliner, was ordered to furnish the ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 4 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... are our peers of song. The Mocking-Bird undoubtedly possesses the greatest range of mere talent, the most varied executive ability, and never fails to surprise and delight one anew at each hearing; but being mostly an imitator, he never approaches the serene beauty and sublimity of the Hermit-Thrush. The word that best expresses my feelings, on hearing the Mocking-Bird, is admiration, though the first emotion is one of surprise and incredulity. That so many and such various notes should proceed from one throat is a marvel, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... more possible to refute the Roman prejudices based on utter ignorance of Jewish history, than the prejudices based on their narrowness of mind. But even here the writer has often to accommodate himself to a pagan standpoint, which could not appreciate Hebrew sublimity. When he wrote the Antiquities, his mind was already molded in Greco-Roman form, and where he seeks to glorify, he not seldom contrives to degrade. His works are a striking example of inward slavery ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... with hands clasped, a rope around her neck. When her fatigue becomes unendurable, she prostrates herself flat on her face against the earth, with her arms outstretched in the form of a cross; this is her only relief. In this attitude she prays for all the guilty in the universe. This is great to sublimity. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... wrath and the just man's recompense? Who can gaze upon the majesty of this mount, towering above the 'high places' and the hills, and turn without repining to the plains beneath, where puny man has pitched his tent and wars upon his fellow, mocking the sublimity of Nature with his paltry tyranny? I felt as if I lived in other times, and my eye eagerly but vainly sought for some traces of that 'ark' which furnished a refuge and a shelter to the creatures of God's mercy when the 'waters ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 575 - 10 Nov 1832 • Various
... conviction. He takes it for granted all the world knows and admits it, and he is so thoroughly persuaded of it himself, that, to use his own favourite phrase, he don't care a fig if folks don't admit it. His vanity, therefore, has a sublimity in it. He thinks, as the Italians say, 'that when nature formed him, she broke the mould.' There never was, never can, and never will be, another like him. His boastin', therefore, is passive. He shows it and acts it; but he don't proclaim it. He condescends and is gracious, ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... tired of futile expectation, his actor's instinct suggesting to him that the sublime moment having been too long drawn out was beginning to lose its sublimity, gave a sign with his hand. A single report of a signaling gun followed, and the troops, who were already spread out on different sides of Moscow, moved into the city through Tver, Kaluga, and Dorogomilov gates. Faster and faster, vying with one another, ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... lifted her hand and pointed to the figure of the Christ, hanging upon the great rugged cross against the wall, facing the door. The sublimity of a supreme adoration was in her voice, as she ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... rants of the heroic play as Fielding was to do in his Tragedy of Tragedies (1731) or reflecting on opera and pastoral as Gay had done in The Beggar's Opera (1728); rather he was trying, however unsuccessfully, to maintain his own work at the highest reaches of sublimity. He was like one of Pope's "Flying Fishes," who "now and then rise upon their fins and fly out of the Profound; but their wings are soon dry, and they ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... quiet household I learned Latin so effectually. But the small private schools which I witnessed for brief periods, containing thirty to forty boys, were models of ignoble manners as respected some part of the juniors, and of favouritism amongst the masters. Nowhere is the sublimity of public justice so broadly exemplified as in an English school. There is not in the universe such an areopagus for fair play and abhorrence of all crooked ways, as an English mob, or one of the English time-honoured public ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... repelled by violence, of treason heaped on treachery, of insult repaid by fraud, would be easy enough. Indeed, a huge book might be compiled containing nothing but the episodes in this grim history of despotism, now tragic and pathetic, now terror-moving in sublimity of passion, now despicable by the baseness of the motives brought to light, at one time revolting through excess of physical horrors, at another fascinating by the spectacle of heroic courage, intelligence, and resolution. Enough however, has been said to describe ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... Bard tremendous in sublimity! Could I behold thee in thy loftier mood, Wand'ring at eve, with finely frenzied eye, Beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood! Awhile, with mute awe gazing, I would brood, Then weep aloud ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... many places deeply indented by arms of the sea. The northern and western coasts are fringed with groups of islands. The general surface of the country is mountainous, yet capable of supporting innumerable cattle, sheep and deer. The scenery is nowhere excelled for various forms of beauty and sublimity. The lochs and bens have wrought upon the imaginations ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... finest dramas, The Wonderful Magician and Life's a Dream, and a splendid paraphrase of the Agamemnon of AEschylus, which fills its reader with regret that he should not have Englished the whole of the great trilogy with the same severe sublimity. In America this gentleman is better known by his translation or adaptation (how much more of it is his own than the author's I should like to know if I were Irish) of Omar Khayyam, the astronomer-poet of Persia. Archbishop Trench, in his volume on the life and genius ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... If our minds may be wrought up to such invincible firmness and energy of resolution to do evil; surely, God assisting, they may not only be inspired with a lofty enthusiasm to resist the solicitations of selfishness, but also roused to a sublimity of generous emotions, to engage, like a Mills or a Howard, in disinterested and self-denying efforts for the good ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark
... experiment himself at the court of Syracuse, first with the elder and then, twenty years later, with the younger Dionysius (387 and 367 B. C.). It is a story of disappointment, of course; bitter, humiliating and ludicrous disappointment, but with a touch of that sublimity which seems so often to hang about the errors of the wise. One can study them in Seneca at the court of Nero, or in Turgot with Louis; not so well perhaps in Voltaire with Frederick. Plato failed in his enterprise, but he did keep faith ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... morning, as I came back from the Roman baths, and saw that the corridors, the vaults, the staircases, the external casing, are still virtually there. Many of these parts are wanting in the Colosseum, whose sublimity of size, however, can afford to dispense with detail. The seats at Nmes, like those at Verona, have been largely renewed; not that this mattered much, as I lounged on the cool surface of one of them, and admired the mighty concavity of the place and the elliptical ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... such a final repose as this would represent the highest pinnacle of sublimity, the ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... unfavourably; he regarded the modern Highlanders as being incapable of estimating poetry otherwise than in the returning harmony of similar sounds. They were seduced, he remarks, by the charms of rhyme; and admired the strains of Ossian, not for the sublimity of the poetry, but on account of the antiquity of the compositions, and the detail of facts which they contained. On this subject a different opinion has been expressed by Sir Walter Scott. "I cannot ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... of her engagement, which I had told him about: the idea of marriage, the philosophy, the poetry, the sublimity of it." It was impossible wholly to restrain one's mirth at this, and some rude ripple that I emitted again caused my companion to admonish me. "It sounds a little stale, ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... eyes, that stately carriage, that Jove-like front, led men to call him "the godlike Daniel." When he appeared upon the Strand in London a great crowd followed him, and a British statesman described Webster as one describes a majestic landscape or the sublimity of a mountain. But during the last years of his life his face took on a strangely pathetic sorrow. With the language of a Dante his biographer has pictured for us an Inferno, in which we see one, sublime of reason, ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... preparation. Therefore let your Illustrious Sublimity provide the inhabitants of Salona with arms, and let them practise themselves in the use of them; for the surest safeguard of the ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... unfaltering power, are the early stages in the redemptive work—the unseen approach of that Kingdom whose strange mark is that it "cometh without observation." And these Kingdoms rising tier above tier in ever increasing sublimity and beauty, their foundations visibly fixed in the past, their progress, and the direction of their progress, being facts in Nature still, are the signs which, since the Magi saw His star in the East, have never been wanting from the firmament of truth, and which in every age ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... it—the sudden descent upon sublimity, according to Byfleld—took me in the face. I put up my hands. I broke into elfish laughter, and ended with a sob. Sobs and laughter together shook my fasting body like a leaf; and I zigzagged across the fields, buffeted this side and that by a mirth as uncontrollable as it was idiotic. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... removed to the Romsdal, and a few years later Bjoernstjerne was sent to school at Molde. His childhood was thus passed in the midst of the noblest scenery of Norway, and in regions of the richest legendary association. The austere sublimity of the Joetunheim—the home of the frost-giants—first impressed his childish sensibilities, but was soon exchanged for the more varied and picturesque but hardly less magnificent scenery of the western fjords. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... was bravely struggling through the dense masses of black clouds, which had obscured his rays during the long stormy day, and now cast a watery and uncertain gleam upon the wild scenery, over which Bamborough Castle frowns in savage sublimity. ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... perhaps why they do so little may be worth inquiry."[A] The result of this inquiry would probably lay a broader foundation for this art of the mind than we have hitherto possessed, ADAM FERGUSON has expressed himself with sublimity:—"The lustre which man casts around him, like the flame of a meteor, shines only while his motion continues; the moments of rest and of obscurity are the same." What is this art of meditation, but the power of withdrawing ourselves from the world, to view that world moving within ourselves, while ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... to outside humanity, simply because outside humanity was the last thing he would have thought worth troubling himself about. And still his unremitting zeal in the pursuit of his aim, and his cool self-possession in the presence of danger, were not without a sublimity of their own; and the lustrous intensity of his vision as he grasped some new fact corroborative of some favorite theory, might well have stirred a sympathetic interest even in a mind of ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... to say whether there is more of sublimity or beauty in the scene around us. Nature appears at once smiling and frowning, in activity and repose. How tremendous is the volcano, how magnificent this great laboratory of Nature in its unceasing fire, ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... in his recent "Politik," imitates the direct inference of Buckle when he ascribes the absence of artistic and poetic development in Switzerland and the Alpine lands to the overwhelming aspect of nature there, its majestic sublimity which paralyzes the mind.[19] He reinforces his position by the fact that, by contrast, the lower mountains and hill country of Swabia, Franconia and Thuringia, where nature is gentler, stimulating, appealing, and not overpowering, have produced many ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... and under all aspects, whether robed in mist or radiant with sunshine, I delight in it. Born beneath its giant shadow, I look upon it with filial regard. Some folks say Pendle Hill wants grandeur and sublimity, but they themselves must be wanting in taste. Its broad, round, smooth mass is better than the roughest, craggiest, shaggiest, most sharply splintered mountain of them all. And then what a view it commands!—Lancaster with its grey old castle on ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... had religiously brought home every relic of the person or property of the great missionary explorer were accorded places of honor. And well they might be. No triumphal procession of earth's mightiest conqueror ever equaled for sublimity that lonely journey through Africa's forests. An example of tenderness, gratitude, devotion, heroism, equal to this, the world had never seen. The exquisite inventiveness of a love that lavished tears as water on the feet of ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... this mountain the better, I find that kings are called mountains in Scripture; and good kings are so called, for these three, 1. For their sublimity; as mountains are high above the valleys, so are kings lifted up in majesty above their subjects: some apply that place to kings, "Hear ye, O mountains, the Lord's controversy, and ye strong foundations of the ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... head-wreaths, in representation of the Jews who persecuted our Saviour, rushing about the streets in tawdry attire before and after the ceremony in such apparent ignorance of the real intention that it annulled the sublimity of the ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... of the Mysterious Mother sought for sublimity, where the artist strictly copied nature, which was invariably his archetype, but which the painter, who soars into fancy's fairy regions, must in a degree desert. Considered with this reference, though the picture has faults, Mr. Walpole's ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... and miles to hear him. I have seen them swoon during his sermons; they declared him an angel, and touched his garment and kissed his hands when he descended from the pulpit. It is certain that, unless it be his beauty, nothing could equal the sublimity of his discourses, ever full of inspiration. The pure honey of the gospel combined on his lips with the flashing flame of the prophecies; and one recognized in the sound of his voice a heart overflowing with holy pity for the evils to which mankind are subject, and filled with ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the form, the great body of critics have been but too indulgent to these servile imitators. These were held up as correct modern classics, while the great truly living and popular poets, whose reputation was a part of their nations' glory, and to whose sublimity it was impossible to be altogether blind, were at best but tolerated as rude and wild natural geniuses. But the unqualified separation of genius and taste on which such a judgment proceeds, is altogether ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... its sublimity, and for a few minutes the hungry forgot their craving, the footsore their pain, the hopeless ...
— Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons - A Personal Experience, 1864-5 • Homer B. Sprague
... without self-reproach; he cannot be nobly unselfish without the fear of being a fool. You would think that this predicament must deprave, and so without doubt it does; and yet it is not wholly depraving. It often has its effect in character of a rare and pathetic sublimity; and many Americans take all the cruel risks of doing good, reckless of the evil that may befall them, and defiant of the upbraidings of their own hearts. This is something that we Altrurians can scarcely understand: it is like the munificence ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... piece is not divided into acts and scenes, and the only repose given to the action is by the chorus, who sing odes and lyric stanzas. The story is well conducted, the characters are all dramatic, and the incidents arise spontaneously out of each other; but the style of the tragedy has neither the sublimity nor the originality which becomes this kind of composition, and which distinguished the genius of the ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... On the west are the Olympic Mountains, the highest peaks of which reach up to 8,000 feet. Both ranges, brilliantly snow-crowned, are within view at the same time from various points, and the scenery in its entirety, with its continual changefulness and features of sublimity, can not be excelled. Strangers and travelers who have visited every part of the world never leave the deck of the steamers while going through the waters of the Sound country. In noting a single feature, Mount Rainier, Senator George F. Edmunds wrote as follows: ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... allowed to abandon myself to the recollections of my own distant travels, I would instance, among the most striking scenes of nature, the calm sublimity of a tropical night, when the stars, not sparkling, as in our northern skies, shed their soft and planetary light over the gently-heaving ocean; or I would recall the deep valleys of the Cordilleras, where the tall and slender palms pierce ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... the mind, "for an object is said to be beautiful for no other reason but that it appears so to the spectator." It arises from regularity, proportion, order, simplicity—properties which belong to sublimity as well (chap, iv.), but to which they are by no means so essential, since it is satisfied with a less degree of them. While the beautiful excites emotions of sweetness and gayety, the sublime rouses feelings which are agreeable, it is true, but which are not sweet ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... quite without reserve, in showing the bad and the good,—continues radiantly eloquent in these first months: ... "Carrousel, twice over; the like never seen for splendor, for [rather copious on this sublimity]—After which we played ROME SAUVEE [my Anti-Crebillon masterpiece], in a pretty little Theatre, which I have got constructed in the Princess Amelia's Antechamber. I, who speak to you, I played CICERO." Yes; and was manager ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... man with a blow of his fist, and had performed that feat at Bautzen, where he found himself, unarmed, face to face with a Saxon at the rear of his company. At the present moment the usually firm yet gentle expression of the man's face had risen to a sort of tragic sublimity; his lips were pale as the rest of his face, indicating a tumult within him mastered by his Breton will; a slight sweat, which every one noticed and guessed to be cold, moistened his brow. The notary knew but too well that these signs might result ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... of Sin. The vision of God could not but unseal a rushing stream of feeling of some kind in Isaiah. But of what kind would it be? Surely of joyful adoration: the soul, inspired with the sublimity of these sights and thrilled with these sounds, will rise to the majesty of the occasion, and the human voice will strike in with all its force among the angelic voices, crying, "Holy, ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... of each—the absent and the present one—there was resemblance,—resemblance in their simplicity, their grace. Perhaps Alice, of the two, had in her nature more real depth, more ardour of feeling, more sublimity of sentiment, than Evelyn. But in her primitive ignorance half her noblest qualities were embedded and unknown. And Evelyn—his equal in rank; Evelyn, well cultivated; Evelyn, so long courted, so deeply studied—had such advantages over the poor peasant girl! ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VIII • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... talent, and indeed his distinguishing excellence lies in the sublimity of his thoughts. There are others of the modern, who rival him in every other part of poetry; but in the greatness of his sentiments he triumphs over all the poets, both modern and ancient, Homer alone excepted. It is impossible for the imagination of man to disturb itself with ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a serious and devout character, in virtue of their dignified pathos, tragic sublimity, and religious fervour, Calderon's best title to praise will be found. In such, above all in his Autos, he reached a height beyond any of his predecessors, whose productions, on religious themes especially, striking as many of them are, with situations ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... unable to go farther without assistance; but he offered none, and they stood for several moments in absolute silence—for a quick spasm of fright had shot across his soul! The sublimity of her partial surrender, contingent only upon his transportation to a foreign battlefield, suddenly brought the war from three thousand miles away to his very door. But his next feeling was one of self-contempt, and squaring his shoulders with ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... because it will tell unprecedented truths. It was the mission of ancient art to express states of being and individuals, and it may be said to be in a general way the mission of our modern art to express the beautiful in endless change, the movement of masses, coming to its sublimity and immortality at last by revealing the beauty of the things that move and that have to do with motion, the bringing of all things and of all souls ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... these three things may concur in the same subject: thus when a person is appointed to a higher action, he attains thereby both office and grade, and sometimes, besides this, a state of perfection, on account of the sublimity of the act, as in the case of a bishop. The ecclesiastical orders are particularly distinct according to divine offices. For Isidore says (Etym. vi): "There are various kinds of offices; but the foremost is that which relates to sacred and Divine ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... welcomes death and hurls defiance at the Christians. The last act is occupied with the tragic denouement, which affords splendid opportunities for action, and is accompanied by very dramatic music to the close, often rising to real sublimity. In the pageantry of the stage, in the expression of high and passionate sentiment, in elaborateness of treatment, and in broad and powerful dramatic effect, "The Jewess" is one of the strongest operas ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... of Klazomenae who had most to do with forming Perikles's style, teaching him an elevation and sublimity of expression beyond that of ordinary popular speakers, and altogether purifying and ennobling his mind. This Anaxagoras was called Nous, or Intelligence, by the men of that day, either because they admired his own intellect, or because he taught that an abstract ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... in transforming their methods, Rubens is nevertheless the spiritual descendant of the Italianizants. It is from them and from his direct contact with the works of Michael Angelo and Titian that he inherits his association of spiritual sublimity with physical strength. Adopting without reserve Michael Angelo's pagan vision of Christianity, he transformed his saints and apostles into powerful heroes and endeavoured to convey the awe and majesty inspired by the ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... the common trees and the common sky. I suppose most of the principles of natural philosophy, and of many of the sciences, must have been derived from an acquaintance with Nature in her ordinary aspects. Oh, do not think it necessary to behold Nature in her great stretches of sublimity in order to appreciate her. You will come to know her far more easily, and much more helpfully, in a little woodside walk, or right here underneath these branches, than you will in Niagara Falls, or in looking at her in the great ocean. She comes down more to the level of your understanding here ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... Wrexham to Llangollen is remarkable for the sublimity and awful grandeur of the prospects; the most prominent feature in the landscape is a high and stupendous chain of mountains, sometimes swelling into the clouds, or gently shelving into the vallies, around which they form a wide amphitheatre; and by their elevations afford shelter, and tend ...
— The "Ladies of Llangollen" • John Hicklin
... with that degree of astonishment which many seem to feel on a first sight of it. I am so familiar with God's sublime works among the mountains of Virginia and those of other states that the view does not impress me with that sense of sublimity and awful grandeur that one might expect from reading the descriptions given of it. The Natural Bridge appears to me to be nothing more than the remains of a cave, nearly all of the roof of which has long since fallen in and been washed away. There are many ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... which is the same as saying, between solar system and solar system. In our Milky Way the stars seem to be crushed together into a whitish jelly, but the awful truth looms up before us with all sublimity that, although these stars seem to lie one upon another, they are millions and trillions ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... strange that you do not find yourself recalling fair mornings spent among the far-famed Alps. True, you do not feel that awe-inspiring sublimity that their snow-clad peaks produce, but as you joyfully gaze out over the quiet beauty of these fair Ohio hills and vales clothed in magnificent stretches of golden harvest field and green forest, through which lead winding roads and sinuous streams, you ask yourself this perplexing ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... were slowly and with great difficulty spiritualized and made to approach his own in some degree. But it is unquestionably true that they never not even after his death arrived at a clear appreciation of the full sublimity, the pure spirituality, the ultimate significance, of his mission and his words. Still, they did cast off and rise above the grossly carnal expectations of their countrymen. Partially instructed in the spiritual nature of Christ's kingdom, and partially ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... fond first love, sweet mistress of my mind, Thy beautiful sublimity hath long Charm'd mine affections, and entranced my song, Thou spirit-queen, that sit'st enthroned, enshrined Within this suppliant heart; by day and night My brain is full of thee: ages of dreams, Thoughts of a thousand ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... how I tell a pathetic negative. Nobody knows what became of her—that is finely indicated by the series coming to a close. There is no sixth picture." Here Hans pretended to speak with a gasping sense of sublimity, and drew back his head with a frown, as if looking for a like impression on Deronda. "I break off in the Homeric style. The story is chipped off, so to speak, and passes with a ragged edge into nothing—le neant; can ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... feet perfect lawns sloped down to a gracious waterway, which shuddered occasionally in a gentle wind; on every side pleasing trees were massed into shady and grateful woods; overhead the noonday sun lit up a deep-blue sky. Perhaps the sublimity of the scene played upon her softer emotions. Perhaps all intense beauty is pathetic, and makes one think of poor illusions and unavailing dreams. Lady Gray wondered why she could not feel, on this serene morning, the same confidence ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... constitutions of Europe—it was moulded to the habits, the manners, and the condition of the people whom it was intended to enlighten, to harmonize, and to guide. He was no gloomy ascetic, such as a false philosophy produces, affecting the barren sublimity of an indolent seclusion; open of access to all, free and frank of demeanour, he found wisdom as much in the market-place as the cell. He aped no coxcombical contempt of pleasure, no fanatical disdain of wealth; hospitable, and even sumptuous, in his habits of ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Adriatic; I saw her ruin in the ruin of the face before me. I walked to and fro in that city, so beloved of her citizens; I went from the Rialto Bridge, along the Grand Canal, and from the Riva degli Schiavoni to the Lido, returning to St. Mark's, that cathedral so unlike all others in its sublimity. I looked up at the windows of the Casa Doro, each with its different sculptured ornaments; I saw old palaces rich in marbles, saw all the wonders which a student beholds with the more sympathetic eyes because visible ...
— Facino Cane • Honore de Balzac
... by the beauty and sublimity of the true life, by what is sacred and pathetic in this strife of humanity for truth, justice, and brotherly love, his heart holds the fascination of it. Gradually everything subordinates itself to this powerful and persistent charm. The necessary hierarchy of powers is organized within him: ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... Macarius and Simeon Stylites. If anything can justify the serious and deliberate display of merely physical emotion in literature or in art, it must be one of two things; intense depth of feeling expressed with inspired perfection of simplicity, with divine sublimity of fascination, as by Sappho; or transcendent supremacy of actual and irresistible beauty in such revelation of naked nature as was possible to Titian. But Mr. Whitman's Eve is a drunken apple-woman, indecently sprawling in ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler |
