"Pinnacle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Markets) and fully sustained the anticipations which were formed of him by his relations. For a year or two afterwards no quarrel was fought without him; and his prowess rose until he had gained the very pinnacle of that ambition which he had determined to reach. About this time I was separated from him, having found it necessity, in order to accomplish my objects in life, to reside with a relation in another part of ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... human plummet has sounded the depths of a woman's devotion; no surveyor's chain will ever mark the limits of a woman's faithful, patient endurance; and only the wings of an archangel can transcend that pinnacle to which the sublime principle of self-sacrifice ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... his voice for the sake of the profane and idle who may chance to stumble across his entertainment. His living auditors, unsolicited for the tribute of worship or an alms, find themselves conceived of in the likeness of what he would have them to be, raised to a companion pinnacle of friendship, and constituted peers and judges, if they will, of his ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... a fortunate combination of events placing in my hands, precisely at the moment of their greatest value, clear opportunities that none but a hopeless blunderer could have disregarded. What men call Chance operated in my favour as though with superb calculation, lifting me to this miniature pinnacle I could never have reached by ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... themselves very much upon the antiquity of the line from which they have descended. Now the family of Queen Catharine had risen to rank and distinction within a moderate period; and though she was, as Queen of France, on the very pinnacle of human greatness, she would naturally be vexed at any remark which would remind her of the recentness of her elevation. Now Mary at one time said, in conversation in the presence of Queen Catharine, that she herself was the ...
— Mary Queen of Scots, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... the lone, the admired, the lost The gracious old, the lovely young, to May The fair, December the beloved, These from my blue horizon and green isles, These from this pinnacle of distances ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... half-way down when I reached a cleared place an hour or so later, and turned to look back. The sharp angle of the Devil's Ledge was the highest point visible, the very pinnacle of the mountain, and there, clear against the burnished steel of the morning sky, on the very edge, clear in the rare atmosphere was a small figure. It stood for a second, a black point distinctly outlined, and ...
— Elsket - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page
... heaps of sand. The air gets so clear around you, and the great black wings flap close against your face; and you sit astride where the bells are, with some quaint stone face beside you that was carved on the pinnacle here a thousand years and more ago, and has hardly been seen of man ever since; and the white clouds are so near you that you seem to bathe in them; and the winds toss the trees far below, and sweep by you as they go down to torment the trees and the sea, the men that work, and the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... who has preserved to the end of his career the statesman's tact of discriminating between the possible and the impossible, and has not broken down in the task which for greatly gifted natures is the most difficult of all— the task of recognizing, when on the pinnacle of success, its natural limits. What was possible he performed, and never left the possible good undone for the sake of the impossible better, never disdained at least to mitigate by palliatives evils that were incurable. But where he recognized that fate had spoken, he always obeyed. Alexander ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... are mortal and fallible, be wary how we condemn one whose head was rendered giddy by his very pinnacle of ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... curled up on his divan in the elm, was thinking over the extraordinary good fortune that had befallen him. Yet such was his sagacity that even when thus about to attain almost the topmost pinnacle of his ambition, he did not forget the instability of affairs, but sought to confirm his position, or even to advance it. He reflected that Kapchack was not only cunning beyond everything ever known, but he was just now a prey to anxieties, and consumed with ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... them a line of stunted firs edged limits of perpetual snow, and rocks and glistening fields of crag-broken white carried the eye on upward to the dazzling pinnacle of the Col de la Reine, splitting the ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... again its sobering sensation struck me, and I found myself staring up at its top, a full 800 feet high, the bottom being an ornate and elaborate temple. The middle, which supplied most of its height, was a long, round tower, and at top there was a spherical pinnacle which had what looked to ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... on the morning they cleared the ground for the first post Charnock felt daunted as he beat his numbed hands. The sky was clear; a hard, dazzling blue, against which the white peaks were silhouetted with every ridge and pinnacle in sharp outline. They twinkled like steel in places, but there were patches of delicate gray, and here and there a dark rock broke through its covering. The bottom of the gorge was soft blue, and the river a streak of raw ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... the many topsy-turvy things in topsy-turvy China that this prosaic people is so addicted to picturesque and significant terms. I found the names of some of the monasteries quite as interesting as anything else about them. From the "Pinnacle of Contemplation" you ascend to the "Monastery of the White Clouds," stopping to rest in the "Hall of the Tranquil Heart," and passing the "Gate to Heaven" you enter ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... rough stone, older, I suppose, than Charlemagne and without any ornament. In its lower courses I thought I even saw the Roman brick. It had once two towers, northern and southern; the southern is ruined and has a wooden roof, the northern remains and is just a pinnacle or ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... own groans. Nor is this said by way of paradox; daily experience shows the truth of these observations. It is almost impossible to elevate the spirits of a man groaning under ideal calamities; but nothing is easier than to render him wretched, though on the pinnacle of felicity: as it would be an herculean task to hoist a man to the top of a steeple, though the merest child ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... receiving visits and speaking of business, he avoided thinking of the unexpected resistance. How was this! She—the woman for whom the highest favor, the pinnacle of happiness had been the possibility of remaining at the head of his house, in the brilliancy of wealth and general respect, dared—had the shamelessness to oppose his will! He felt such contempt that, in thought, he threw that woman on the ground to trample her; in spite of this, that, ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... "I heard it from the Chamois, who have a habit of bounding about everywhere, as you know. Your dear husband reached the middle of the Glacier in safety, when—being hampered by a satchel and a green cotton umbrella—he fell in attempting to jump an ice-pinnacle, and sprained his foot so severely that he was unable to move. Though he bleated loudly for help, no one came except some huntsmen who were in search of Chamois. They picked him up, and dragged him to the Inn on the other side of the valley, where he was locked up ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... crush your well-earned and well-deserved fame. But it was the Lilliputians upon Gulliver. Our countrymen have recovered from the alarm into which art and industry had thrown them; science and honesty are replaced on their high ground; and you, my dear Sir, as their great apostle, are on its pinnacle. It is with heartfelt satisfaction that, in the first moments of my public action, I can hail you with welcome to our land, tender to you the homage of its respect and esteem, cover you under the protection of ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... prophet. From that hour, As leisure offer'd, close to Mr. Spring's Box-office door, I've stood and eyed the builders. They had a plan to render less their labours; Workmen in olden times would mount a ladder With hodded heads, but these stretch'd forth a pole From the wall's pinnacle, they plac'd a pulley Athwart the pole, a rope athwart the pulley; To this a basket dangled; mortar and bricks Thus freighted, swung securely to the top, And in the empty basket workmen twain ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... the correctness of my restoration. The entrance-chamber and the wings I suppose to have been also covered by similar pyramidal roofs. There would thus have been four distinct pyramids, of which that over the inner chamber must have been the loftiest, the height of its pinnacle above the ground being ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... court-poets, of course, were not allowed to neglect the praise of the queens, and they were called upon to celebrate the royal weddings;[316] nay, in the extravagance of their gallant homage they rose to a level of bad taste the pinnacle of which was reached by Callimachus in his elegy—so well-known through the imitation of Catullus—on the hair of queen Berenice placed among the constellations by the courtesy ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... far too excited to sit down. From the depths of poverty she suddenly felt herself raised almost to a pinnacle of wealth, as ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... they knew they were only of small extent. There was a pinnacle of rock and a single sea might possibly carry them over it; but the peril of being washed off was none the less. Now they could see the huge rise of the combing sea with its frowning black top rushing at the shoal, and smashing ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... vanity. Envy often avails itself of it as a fit instrument subservient to its own purposes. Soon, in fact, the works of Osmyn only were spoken of, and after languishing a long time unnoticed, he saw himself at once raised to the pinnacle, without having passed the steps which lead from misery to fortune, from obscurity ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 495, June 25, 1831 • Various
... as in religion and in politics, which divides one into conflicting many. The law of Cyclic change follows us relentlessly even in the realm of thought. When we have raised ourselves to the highest pinnacle, through some oversight we fall over the precipice. Men have offered their lives for the establishment of truth. A climax is reached after which the custodians of knowledge themselves bar further advance. Men who have fought for ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... air,—who descendest on thy nest in the cleft of the inaccessible rock, who makest the mountain pinnacle thy perch and halting-place, and, scanning with steady eye the orb of glory right above thee, imprintest thy lordly talons in the stainless snows, that shoot back and scatter round his glittering shafts,—I pay thee homage. Thou art my king. I give honor due to ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... If Association is this glorious truth to renovate the nations, then glorious should be its announcement; loud, wide, startling, should be its call; sudden, as from the skies, its appearing. Here on the pinnacle of the temple of peace (or of Salem), shalt thou stand, and cast thyself down among the multitudes like an angel. Some splendid boldness should introduce thy reign. Take no heed of care and caution; count not the cost; risk all in a providential career. ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... in the city of Hereford, which, in 1901, contained 4,565 inhabited houses. Here, no fewer than 218 chimneys had to be repaired or rebuilt. The Cathedral was slightly injured. The finial of a pinnacle of the Lady Chapel was thrown down, a fragment of a stone fell from one of the arches in the south transept, and the three pinnacles of the western front were fractured. Several churches suffered ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... Church of England during the previous century, in the course of which its creed and liturgy were formed. The evidence of these transactions lies wide; much of it is still in the British Museum; and it may be possible to produce something sufficient to sustain Falkland on the pinnacle on which Mr. Arnold and the Dean of Westminster have placed him. But we cannot help surmising that he has in some measure undergone the process which, in an age prolific in historic fancies as well as ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... on by his son. The tower was not finished till four hundred and twenty-five years after the commencement of the building, and then Hueltz, from Cologne, came to effect the undertaking. The tracery of this lofty pinnacle is inimitably beautiful. We ascended the spire, and I can assure you that the prospect amply repays the trouble. We saw the winding, silvery Rhine, the Black Forest, and the long line of the Vosges Mountains. I never felt more keenly my inability to describe a place than when I walked ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... large nor is the chapel, but, nevertheless, my soul expanded as in a basilica, soared up as under some vast dome, and touched the pinnacle of high Heaven where blazes the Sign of Signs in the azure of Paradise, in the ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... fantastic shapes. There seemed to be little hills and valleys; and from among these peeped—and did they only seem to move?—a number of tiny figures in green and gold. One sat astride of a snowy pinnacle, another lay stretched at full length in a hollow, his pretty face only peering out; some were chasing each other among the elfin hills, others were standing at ease, their hands on their hearts, their forms bent gracefully as if in salutation. In the middle rose a white throne, and ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... reproduction. The result was the more or less original elevation that we now see. It consists of a three-light lancet window at the east end of the choir, with a small circular window, with seven cusps, in the gable above, surmounted by a cross, and a stair-turret, terminating in an octagonal pinnacle at each end ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... not concern such criminal cases as the above, as a rule, but marriage contracts do specify death by strangling, drowning, precipitation from a tower or pinnacle of the temple or by the iron sword for a wife's repudiation of her husband. We are quite without evidence as to the executive in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... Othmann came in and examined me about my form of prayer. Oh! it was just then that I had reached the passive state of prayer: I did nothing, Another did everything in my prayer. From that time, having put me down in the gutter, the novice-master raised me up to the pinnacle, whereas I should have been in neither place." On another occasion he told how the change of prayer had happened: "I was on my knees one day after Communion, making a regular thanksgiving, when suddenly God stopped me, and I was told not to pray that way ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... the reader to judge how I relished this piece of information, which precipitated me from the most exalted pinnacle of hope to the lowest abyss of despondence, and well nigh determined me to take Banter's advice and finish my chagrin with a halter. I had no room to suspect the veracity of my friend, because, upon recollection, I found every ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... my own," he mused, "is such a combat of devils, That I believe torpid age or stupid youth would be better Than this manhood of mine that has climbed aloft to discover Heights which I never can reach, and bright on the pinnacle standing In the unfading light, my rival crowned victor above me. If I could hint what I feel, what forever escapes from my pencil, All after-time should know my will was not less than my failure, Nor should any one dare remember me merely in pity. All should read ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... the passionate lover who had committed a crime for Aquilina's sake. His inmost nature had suddenly asserted itself. His brain had expanded, his senses had developed. His thoughts comprehended the whole world; he saw all the things of earth as if he had been raised to some high pinnacle above the world. ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... sky very bright as on some clear winter night of frost, and of all that gigantic amphitheater of mountains which circled behind them from right to left there was hardly a hint. Perhaps here some extra cube of darkness showed where a pinnacle soared, or there a vague whiteness glimmered where a high glacier hung against the cliff, but for the rest the darkness hid the mountains. A cold wind blew out of the East ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... Satan carry our Savior to the pinnacle of the Temple, and show him all the kingdoms ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... leads up to St. James's Church, designed by Vulliamy, and consecrated in 1845; it has a square tower of considerable height, with a pinnacle at each corner. The chancel was added later. St. Gabriel's, in Clifton Road, is an offshoot of this church, but, curiously enough, it does not come within the parochial boundaries. It was built in 1883. ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... resigned to the King's agents, and a great cloud hung over the little town. In a short time the gorgeous shrines and altars were plundered and desecrated; the buildings were sold; and before the eyes of the astonished inhabitants tower and pinnacle, church and chapter-house, gatehouse and cloister, fell a prey to ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... I look back on that night from the pinnacle of more than half a century, that not one man in ten thousand has ever spent one like it. Allied with a horde whose language we could not speak, we had boarded our own ship and now—mutineers, pirates, or loyal mariners, according to your ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... before sunset, when we were near a cluster of crumbling pinnacles that formed the summit, I had ceased to feel anxiety about the mountaineering strength and skill of my companion, and pushed rapidly on. In passing around the shoulder of the highest pinnacle, where the rock was rapidly disintegrating and the danger of slipping was great, I shouted in a warning voice, "Be very careful here, ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... below the aisle windows and round the buttresses of the nave, but are not continued across the nave beneath the lancet windows. The buttresses do not quite rise to the full height of the side walls of the nave, and not a pinnacle is to be met with anywhere. The sill of the west window is about fifteen feet from the ground, and from it three tall lancets about four feet wide rise to a height of nearly thirty feet. They are placed under a comprising ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: A Short Account of Romsey Abbey • Thomas Perkins
... about the garden party, the freshness and unique manner in which it was arranged, and the pretty serving. She heard it again at the Dyckmans', and is now far up the pinnacle of self-complacency. ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Luzon and Samar, and passed for a day through a region of isles. The sea was glassy save when a school of porpoises tore it apart in their pursuit of the flying fish. On its deep sapphire the islands seemed to float, sometimes a mere pinnacle of rock, sometimes a cone-shaped peak timbered down to the beach where the surf fell over. Toward evening, when the breeze freshened slightly, we seemed almost to brush the sides of some of these islets, and they invited us with sparkling pools and coves, with beaches over which the sea wimpled, ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... man with a gun. And the Princess was miles off and forever beyond their reach. When they had settled with him they would no doubt burn the House down, but that would serve them little. From his airy pinnacle he could see the whole sea-front of Huntingtower, a blur in the dusk but for the ghostly eyes ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... Lunas, New Mexico, where he first attracted public attention as a healer. From here he went to Albuquerque, where he treated as many as six hundred persons in a day, many very effectively. After forty days' fast, which was broken by a hearty meal of solid food, he went to Denver and here reached the pinnacle of his fame and success. At the home of a sympathizer, daily from 9 A. M. to 4 P. M., he treated those who came to him, always without any remuneration. From two thousand to five thousand people would congregate in line, reaching nearly around a city block, five or six ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... himself the instruments by which they were won, or rather, I should say, he was the last and perhaps by the nature of the circumstances the most efficient of a list of distinguished men whose task it has been to rescue the Egyptian army from inefficiency and contempt in order to put it on the pinnacle of ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... thus let his own words be the necromantic spell that raises the dead, and brings us into communion with that man who knew what was in men more than any other mere man ever did. Well was it for Shakspere that he was humble; else on what a desolate pinnacle of companionless solitude must he have stood! Where was he to find his peers? To most thoughtful minds it is a terrible fancy to suppose that there were no greater human being than themselves. From the terror of ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... sympathy, and kindness. It's no use, Mrs Willoughby. I've put you on the topmost pinnacle in my mind, and nothing that you can say can pull you down. I think you are the ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... under his arm, his hat upon his head. Just before him Tom lay motionless upon the sward; but the murderer minded him not a whit, cleansing his blood-stained knife the while upon a whisp of grass. Everything else was unchanged, the sun still shining mercilessly upon the steaming marsh and the tall pinnacle of the mountain, and I could scarce persuade myself that murder had actually been done and a human life cruelly cut short a moment ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with its grey familiar towers, a pinnacle or two shining in the sun, the buttresses and terrace walls casting great blue shades on the grass. And Harry remembered all his life after how he saw his mistress at the window looking out on him in a white robe, the little Beatrix's chestnut curls resting at her mother's ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... to young Mrs. Percival. He might be a gentleman, but she feared that he would never be more. There was nothing imposing about him. He had lifted her out of sordid want, but he would not raise her to the pinnacle of greatness. The bland flat face of Mr. Early and his commanding slowness of movement impressed her imagination much as a great stone image might its votary. Here was indeed the truly illustrious. She devoured ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... concentration of power in the Tudor crown, the Dissolution itself, and the Reformation which followed, all left this as they found it, or left it stronger still. To this constitution alone the noble church was indebted for its preservation. The King could grasp all else from pinnacle to basement, but the nave was the parishioners', and that he could not touch. The result is a church surviving entire and substantially as its vanished patrons and banished brethren left it. Therefore if this church is a monument of baronial and abbatial power long departed, it ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury - with some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst Gloucestershire • H. J. L. J. Masse
... people who sat or wandered about in the coolness of the night, they passed through the gates of the kraal unheeded, and walking quickly across the wide stretch of tableland reached the eastern edge of the cliff. Now upon the very verge of this cliff rose a sharp pinnacle of rock fifty feet or more into the air, and upon the top of this pinnacle was that stone shaped like a great chair, in which Suzanne sat day by day, poised like an eagle over the dizzy gulf of space, for the slopes of the mountain swelled five hundred feet beneath, watching for ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... the white men I know, only a hundred or so have the privilege of sitting around in my parlor. As to the mulatto South, if you Southerners have one boast that is stronger than another, it is your women; you put them on a pinnacle of purity and virtue and bow down in a chivalric worship before them; yet you talk and act as though, should you treat the Negro fairly and take the anti-inter-marriage laws off your statute books, these same women would rush into the arms of black lovers and husbands. It's a ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... held by the unassisted excellence of a noble character, by the force of which he had previously won and adorned all the subordinate gradations of office."[201] He adorned this unenvied and unsullied pinnacle of fame by virtues of which the record is ennobling to the mind. "He is," observes another writer, "in every situation, so full of honour, of gentleness, of kindness, and intrepidity, that we doubt ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... as a hermitess on Helmet Rock came into the bar-room at the Cliff House, and there, amidst the crushing thunders and lightnings spilling all over the horizon, she related that she had seen a young seal in a comfortable overcoat, sitting pensively upon the pinnacle of Seal Rock, and had distinctly heard the familiar words of a Methodist hymn. Upon inquiry the tale was discovered to be founded upon fact. The identity of this seal could no longer be denied without downright blasphemy, and in all the old chronicles of that period not a doubt ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... was the intention of Aeschylus to exhibit to us a sudden fall from the highest pinnacle of prosperity and renown into the abyss of ruin. The prince, the hero, the general of the combined forces of the Greeks, in the very moment of success and the glorious achievement of the destruction of Troy, the fame ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... not always on a pinnacle. There have been plenty of times when the mere human want of you has sent me to the dust. Is it wrong to tell you that? But of course not. You know it. But you and I know this; Clay, dear. Love that ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... maman has put my name on the register of the monument; so the great archangel St. Michel will deliver me from all evil. What canst thou do? Canst thou turn children into cats? or canst thou walk across the sea without being drowned? or canst thou stand on the highest pinnacle of the church, where the golden image of St. Michel used to be, and cast thyself down without killing thyself? I will go back with thee to thy house and ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... unsought power as to be indifferent to its honors. Ambition is not for him, for ambition aspires; and what object has he to aspire to? From his contented mediocrity as alderman of a village, the people have insisted on elevating him from one pinnacle of greatness to another, until they have at last made him President of the United States. He might have been Dictator had he pleased; but what, to a man wearied with authority and dignity, would dictatorship be worth? If he is proud of anything, it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... not, as many another mediaeval architect has done, decked his roofs as Nature has decked hers, with the spruce and fir-tree spires, which cling to the hill-side of the crag, old above young, pinnacle above pinnacle, whorl above whorl; and clothed with them the sides and summit of the stone mountain which he had raised, till, like a group of firs upon an isolated rock, every point of the building should seem in act to grow ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... came the far cry of Innocent Smith, apparently from some remote pinnacle. "Come up here; and bring some of my things to eat and drink. It's just the ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... the best of the dull, respectable old house they had inherited, in the dull, respectable old street of the dull, respectable old town. Daisy and Pansy Mytton were, however, bright girls, and to them Arthurine Arthuret was a sort of realised dream of romance, raised suddenly to the pinnacle of all to which they had ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and worthy counsel: veritable autograph letters of the highest value. The Prince had steamed up the salt river, upon which the Sutton harvests were mirrored, and landed on a spot marked in honour of the event by a broad grey stone; and from that day Jonathan Eccles stood on a pinnacle of pride, enabling him to see horizons of despondency hitherto unknown to him. For he had a son, and the son was a riotous devil, a most wild young fellow, who had no taste for a farmer's life, and openly declared his determination not to perpetuate the Sutton farm in the hands ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Nature—the goddess, as she has been called, of a hundred voices—until here and there he can pick out a few simple notes to which his own powers can resound. If, then, at a moment when he finds himself placed on a pinnacle from which he is called upon to take a perspective survey of the range of science, and to tell us what he can see from his vantage ground; if at such a moment after straining his gaze to the very verge of the horizon, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... notice, went forth the palace to the horse and mounting it, turned the pin of ascent, whereupon bird-like it flew with him high in air and soared towards the upper regions of the sky. In early morning his father missed him and, going up to the pinnacle of the palace, in great concern, saw his son rising into the firmament; whereat he was sore afflicted and repented in all penitence that he had not taken the horse and hidden it; and he said to himself, "By Allah, if but my son return to me, I will destroy the horse, that my heart may be at rest ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... also the introduction of incantations and apparitions, of which romantic style of writing she was a professed admirer. The "Indian Emperor" had the most ample success; and from the time of its representation, till the day of his death, our author, though often rudely assailed, maintained the very pinnacle of poetical superiority, ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... sons of the noble patriot, soon "put out his wings," and soared, ultimately, to a pinnacle of honor and renown attained by few among men. In the winter of 1793 and 1794, the public mind had become highly excited from the inflammatory appeals in behalf of France, by Citizen Genet, the French Minister to the United States. A large portion of the anti-Federal ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... pinnacle, as it were, of professional success. The inventor is something else—a wilding in the profession—and as such cannot be considered in a paper of this kind, save only as to say that he is the presiding genius among engineers, the Shakespeare or Milton among his kind, a man whose path to the ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... bulging ridge like a bastion upon the right side of the terrible khor up which the camels were winding. At one point it rose into a small pinnacle. On this pinnacle stood a solitary, motionless figure clad entirely in black, save for a brilliant dash of scarlet upon his head. There could not surely be two such short, sturdy figures or such large, colourless faces in the Libyan desert. His shoulders were ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... infirmities of budding genius; but the poems he contributed to Fox's journal during the following two years (1834-36) show a significant predilection for imagining the extravagances and fanaticisms of lonely self-centred minds. Joannes Agricola, sublime on the dizzy pinnacle of his theological arrogance, looking up through the gorgeous roof of heaven and assured that nothing can stay his course to his destined abode, God's breast; Porphyria's lover, the more uncanny fanatic who murders with a smile; ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... profuse, or that neglect of his private interests which almost inevitably accompanies the absorbing duties of public life, his affairs were always somewhat confused, and Lady Montfort, who wished to place him on a pinnacle, had resolved that he should marry an heiress. After long observation and careful inquiry and prolonged reflection, the lady she had fixed upon was Miss Neuchatel; and she it was who had made Lord Roehampton cross the room and address ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... the highest pinnacle of the rock, and placing me on the top of it, 'Cast thy eyes eastward,' said he, 'and tell me what thou seest.' 'I see,' said I, 'a huge valley, and a prodigious tide of water rolling through it.' 'The valley that thou seest,' said he, 'is the Vale of ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... H. Weise, in "Die Komodien des Plautus, kritisch nach Inhalt und Form beleuchtet, zur Bestimmung des Echten und Unechten in den einzelnen Dichtungen" (Quedlinburg, 1866), follows hard on Becker's heels and places Plautus on a pinnacle of poetic achievement in which we scarcely recognize our apotheosized laugh-maker. Every passage in the plays that is not artistically immaculate, that does not conform to the uttermost canons of dramatic art, is unequivocally damned as "unecht." ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... a wagon go rattling along the road, and the shouting, whistling and singing of boys. It was past noon before he recalled the object with which he had left home that morning. He sat upon the very pinnacle of achievement—that is to say, he sat upon the very highest point in the orchard, his head up, his spirits up, with such a decidedly upward tendency that it was hard for him to make up his mind to ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various
... declaiming in this manner in order to terrify me," said Clara: "but, friend John, I know you and your ways, and I have made up my mind upon all contingencies that can take place. I will tell you more—I have stood on this tottering pinnacle of rank and fashion, if our situation can be termed such, till my head is dizzy with the instability of my eminence; and I feel that strange desire of tossing myself down, which the devil is said to put into folk's heads when they stand on the top of steeples—at ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... be better for us, provided it be practicable, to wrest those Places from the Hands of the Enemy than trust to the Uncertainty of Treaty? I confess we have a Choice of Difficulties. I pray God we may surmount them all! None however reach the Pinnacle of Eminence & Glory but the virtuous & brave. Adieu my dear Sir. I hope to see & live with you shortly; but I shall expect another Letter from you before I ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... oak. Barriers of lofty mountains encompassed it; the woods were fresh and cool in the early morning; the peaks of the mountains were wreathed with mist, and sluggish vapors were entangled among the forests upon their sides. At length the black pinnacle of the tallest mountain was tipped with gold by the rising sun. About that time the Hail-Storm, who rode in front gave a low exclamation. Some large animal leaped up from among the bushes, and an elk, as I thought, his ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... of fawn-color and black, or of the sensitive, priceless aigrettes which spring from my ears? My ear-rings She calls them.... What cat could resist me! Ah! the January nights, the serenades under a frosty moon, the dignified wait on the pinnacle of a roof, the encounter with a rival cat on the narrow top of a wall!... But I feel quite sure of my superior strength. I'll swish my tail, put back my ears, sniff tragically as one does before vomiting, and then lift up my voice—its modulations are infinite. I'll make it strong enough to ...
— Barks and Purrs • Colette Willy, aka Colette
... agnosticism of the later half of last century, had felt her faith, not indeed extinguished, but obscured and darkened. From the perusal of certain writers she had shrunk, perhaps with cowardice. They were put on such a pinnacle that she feared she would find no arguments fit to oppose to theirs. Weakly, she locked the skeleton cupboard. Then she was attacked by a malady which, while leaving her mind free and strong, she knew might be very speedily fatal. ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... but when he asked if she missed him, she gave such a chilly, formal reply that despair fell upon him. On learning his good fortune she almost clapped her hands. Was the joy all for the boys? Then on hearing his destination, she said, "So far away!" in a tone of despair that lifted him on to a pinnacle of hope, but the next minute she tumbled him down again by observing, like one entirely absorbed in ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... of a serpent; whispering in David's ear that a census would be a good thing, while Jehovah whispers a similar suggestion on the other side; asking Jesus to turn pebbles into penny loaves, lugging him through the air, perching him on a pinnacle, setting him on the top of a mountain whence both squinted round the globe, and playing for forty days and nights that preposterous pantomime of the temptation in the desert; getting miraculously ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... new order of experience—of an ecstasy. Something drew me forth with a sense of inexpressible yearning towards the being of this strange old man in the window seat, and for a moment I knew what it was to taste a mighty and wonderful sensation, and to touch the highest pinnacle of joy I have ever known. It lasted for less than a second, and was gone; but in that brief instant of time the same terrible lucidity came to me that had already shown me how the past and future exist in the present, and I realised and understood that pleasure and pain are one and the same ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... era of intellectual indifference to the world set in. She read Milton in a garret and ate very little. When addressed, she gave the impression of being suddenly dragged down from some sublime pinnacle of thought. This was the period of absent-mindedness, of untidiness, of unpunctuality, for she was convinced that these three ingredients compose the spiritual life. But it was not a success. True, ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... intolerable than ever. At last, half mad with irritation, I set off straight up the side of the nearest mountain, in hopes of attaining a zone too high for them to inhabit; and, poising myself upon its topmost pinnacle, I drew my handkerchief over my head—I was already without coat and waistcoat—and remained the rest of the morning "mopping and mowing" at the ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... Abbey and hanged in chains at Tyburn.[1] They were then buried at the foot of the gallows along with he moldering remains of highway robbers and criminals of the lowest sort, but Cromwell's head was cut off and set up on a pinnacle ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... statesmanlike, but it could not be very popular. It was quite impossible to say that it was the duty of the English people to obey the House of Hanover upon any principles which do not concede the right of the people to choose their rulers, and which do not degrade monarchy from its solitary pinnacle of majestic reverence, and make it one only among many expedient institutions. If a king is a useful public functionary who may be changed, and in whose place you may make another, you cannot regard him with mystic awe and wonder; and if you ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... choked. That was supposed to be the very pinnacle of the top secret stuff. But she was right of course. Four of the earlier models had cracked up. No pilots in them at the time—radio controlled. But jobs designed to ...
— The Very Black • Dean Evans
... over by the mare. With a hideous crash the flying roof was hurled against a nearby pinnacle of rock. The wooden wings split upon the immovable obstruction, and on they went ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... the highest pinnacle of the cape and in the gathering daylight gazed out over the ice-covered ocean to get an idea of its condition. At my back lay the land of sadness, just below me the little village of snow-houses, the northern-most ...
— A Negro Explorer at the North Pole • Matthew A. Henson
... immense elevation from the surface of the earth, drawn as it were to a single apex, without any neighbouring mountain for the senses and imagination to rest upon, and recover from their astonishment in their way down to the world—and this point, or pinnacle raised on the brink of a bottomless gulf, often discharging rivers of fire, and throwing out burning rocks, with a noise that shakes the whole island. Add to this, the unbounded extent of the prospect, comprehending the greatest diversity, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 265, July 21, 1827 • Various
... about in search of some place of safety, rapidly, and all eye; till at length I espied a small tuft of grass on the pinnacle of the highest of the small rocks that were scattered about my prison; for such now ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... Courtenay was shouting for some explanation, a great black wall rose out of the deep on the port bow. It was a pinnacle rock, high as the ship's masts, but only a few feet wide at sea level, and the Kansas sped past this ugly monitor as though it were a buoy ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... ran as far north sometimes as the Aleutians; and he had immediately gained official recognition by sticking to his instruments for sixty-eight hours—recorded at fifteen-minute intervals in his log—when the whaler Goblin encountered a submerged pinnacle rock in the Island Passage and flashed ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... High Admiral he took Pepys with him in his advancement. Thus in 1684, Pepys became Secretary of the Navy. When later the Prince of Wales became King James II, Pepys, although his office remained the same, came to quite a pinnacle of administrative power. He was shrewd and capable in the conduct of his position and brought method to the Navy Office. He was a prime factor in the first development of the British Navy. Later ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... genesis of the highest spiritual qualities in Man as the goal of Nature's creative work. This view has survived the Copernican revolution in science, and it has survived the Darwinian revolution. Nay, if the foregoing exposition be sound, it is Darwinism which has placed Humanity upon a higher pinnacle than ever. The future is lighted for us with the radiant colours of hope. Strife and sorrow shall disappear. Peace and love shall reign supreme. The dream of poets, the lesson of priest and prophet, the inspiration ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... what part the United States has to act in these scenes; for it must seem reasonable and probable that a nation which has arisen so suddenly as ours, made such unparalleled progress, and attained to such a pinnacle of greatness and power, must be a subject of divine prophecy, or ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... soon far beneath us, pursuing its headlong course till it reached level ground, where it flowed in the midst of a beautiful but confined prairie. There was something sylvan and savage in the mountains on the farther side, clad from foot to pinnacle with trees, so closely growing that the eye was unable to obtain a glimpse of the hill sides, which were uneven with ravines and gulleys, the haunts of the wolf, the wild boar, and the corso, or mountain-stag; the latter of which, as I was ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... find some glimmer of the thoughts, emotions, and meanings behind. And in the long run such a habit of inquiry must bear fruit in understanding and sympathy. Joseph Conrad (who seems, by the way, to be more read by newspaper men than any other writer) put very nobly the pinnacle of all scribblers' dreams when he said that human affairs deserve the tribute of "a sigh which is not a sob, a smile which is ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... of his work. An American original, unconsciously bringing the revolutionary mind to the climax of all utterances possible to it, has said that 'men are degraded when considered as the members of a political organisation.'[2] Shelley's position was on a yet more remote pinnacle than this. Of mankind he was barely conscious, in his loftiest and divinest flights. His muse seeks the vague translucent spaces where the care of man melts away in vision of the eternal forces, of which man may be but the fortuitous ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... by modern geometers have deposed Euclid from his pinnacle of correctness. It was thought, until recent times, that, as Sir Henry Savile remarked in 1621, there were only two blemishes in Euclid, the theory of parallels and the theory of proportion. It is now known that these ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... no doubt that at the time this is written he has reached the pinnacle of fame in France. He is the man in all France who is most talked about, most admired and most trusted. Were he to die now, as Kitchener died, his place in History would be secure. What will happen before the war is over is another matter. But, having heard the French talk about ...
— A Journey Through France in War Time • Joseph G. Butler, Jr.
... end to all things; and at length Otto was walking by the side of Madame von Rosen, along that mountain wall, her servant following with both the horses, and all about them sunlight, and breeze, and flying bird, and the vast regions of the air, and the capacious prospect: wildwood and climbing pinnacle, and the sound and voice of mountain torrents, at their hand; and far below them, green melting into sapphire ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he, "it is my right. It is Jean's right. You would love to put him on top of the pinnacle of fame, would ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... sceptical could designate as superstition, trace out and attempt to sanction for us a system of morality, in which the sublimest feelings of the Stoic and the Christian are represented but as stages in our progress to the pinnacle of true human grandeur; and man, isolated on this fragment of the universe, encompassed with the boundless desolate Unknown, at war with Fate, without help or the hope of help, is confidently called upon to rise into a calm cloudless height of internal activity and peace, and ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... the tracery which fills them, and the mouldings which surround them, belong to the pointed style; the arches may therefore have been the production of an earlier architect. The windows of the nave are crowned by pediments, each terminating, not with a pinnacle, but with a small statue. The pediments over the windows of the choir are larger and bolder, and perforated as they rise above the parapet; the members of the mouldings are full, ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... building was properly protected. There are many cases where the pinnacles of the same turret of a church have been struck where one has had a rod attached to it; but it is clear that the other pinnacles were outside the cone; and therefore, for protection, each pinnacle should have had its own rod. It is evident also that every prominent point of a building should have its rod, and that the higher the rod the greater is the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various |
