"Abyss" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... courage that had leaped bounds where his own volition and judgment would have hung waveringly; that one courage in all the world—a woman's courage—which finds in the effort of its achievement no obstacle too high and no abyss too wide though death waits with outreaching arms on the other side. And, surely, where there had been all this, there must also have been some deeper and finer impulse than one of destruction, of physical gain, or of mere duty in the weaving of ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... the very edge of the lofty tower on which he was standing—a man naked and blackened. He was lying on his face, one arm and one foot hanging over space as though he had fallen unconscious at the very edge of the abyss. ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... storm the breach in the mouth of batteries loaded with death and destruction, while, every step thou movest, thou art exposed to the horrible explosion of subterranean mines, which, being sprung, will whirl thee aloft in air, a mangled corse, to feed the fowls of heaven. Thou must leap into the abyss of dreadful caves and caverns, replete with poisonous toads and hissing serpents; thou must plunge into seas of burning sulphur; thou must launch upon the ocean in a crazy bark, when the foaming billows roll mountains high—when the lightning flashes, the thunder roars, and the howling tempest ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... I am insensible of the immeasurable gulf that separates me from what I might have been? And it is my own countrymen who have opened that gulf—who have robbed me of the opportunity of reaching that proud eminence that was at one time all but within my reach, and have hurled me into the abyss of crime and infamy in which you find me. And you are surprised, forsooth, that I should avenge ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... this physical metamorphosis is no false image of what has been the result of our subjecting it to a jet of fervent, though nowise brilliant, thought to-night. It has become luminous, and its clear rays, penetrating the abyss of the remote past, have brought within our ken some stages of the evolution of the earth. And in the shifting "without haste, but without rest" of the land and sea, as in the endless variation of the forms assumed by living beings, ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... the mysterious "over yonder" had swallowed them. It was as though the world had sunk into the sea; as if, behind the rugged ice-field which reached to the horizon, there now lay nothing but the abyss. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... equality with the men of the Revolution of 1793." The Moniteur, Napoleon's Parisian organ, said in August, 1809, after the conclusion of the war, "The mighty hand of Napoleon has snatched Germany from the revolutionary abyss ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... round in the vortex with such awful rapidity that renders all management of the vessel impossible, and the boat and its hapless crew are swallowed up in the abyss. One of the party had got out of the boat, preparing to walk, when looking back he saw one of the other boats containing two of the ladies, in a dangerous situation, having struck, in the midst of the rapids, upon the rocks, which had ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... can make out his spiritual genealogy, without a broken link, from the first Bishop of Rome, downwards!—though, poor fellow, it would puzzle him to say who was his great-grandfather. E——, you are aware, has long since joined the Church of Rome, and has disclosed such a bottomless abyss of "faith," that whole cart-loads of mediaeval fables, abandoned even by Romanists (who, by the way, stand fairly aghast at his insatiable appetite), have not been able to fill it. All the saints in the Roman Hagiography cannot work miracles as fast as he can credit them. ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... diplomatic handling nor precaution, and it may be good that they should see and touch the putrescent sores which canker them. Why fear to mention that which everyone knows? Why dread to sound the abyss which can be measured by everyone? Why fear to bring into the light of day unmasked wickedness, even though it confronts the public gaze unblushingly? Extreme turpitude and extreme excellence are both in the schemes of Providence; ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... dark. Out in the street men seem to be running to and fro and muttering hoarsely in each other's ears. The church clocks strike one after another, thrice, four times—one cannot tell how often. The time is horribly long and the night is an abyss of blackness. ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... planisphere and Whitaker's Almanac, and for a time day and moonlight were mere blank interruptions to the one satisfactory reality in his life—star-gazing. It was the deeps that had seized him, the immensities, and the mysterious possibilities that might float unlit in that unplumbed abyss. With infinite labor and the help of a very precise article in The Heavens, a little monthly magazine that catered for those who were under this obsession, he had at last got his opera-glass upon the new visitor to our system from outer ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... his hands, and gazing senselessly at the floor; across a kind of tempest of darkness pale shapes hovered about him; his heart was numb with anguish; he seemed to be falling, falling—and a bottomless abyss was opening at his feet. A familiar light rustle of a silk dress roused him from his numbness; Varvara Pavlovna in her hat and shawl was returning in haste from her walk. Lavretsky trembled all over and rushed away; ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... away their guns, and pressed forward with raised tomahawk. Brady saw his only chance of escape, which was to leap the creek, afterwards ascertained to be twenty-two feet wide and twenty deep. Determined never to fall alive into the hands of the Indians, he made a mighty effort, sprang across the abyss of waters and stood rifle in hand upon the opposite bank. As quick as lightning, he proceeded to load his rifle. A large Indian, who had been foremost in pursuit, came to the opposite bank, and after magnanimously doing justice to the captain by exclaiming ...
— Heroes and Hunters of the West • Anonymous
... atone for, the fact that hatred to the Catholic Church, and a desire to cripple her hands where her own children were concerned, should have been a more powerful agent in dragging them and theirs into the abyss of secularism than was their love of Christianity ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... occasions since then. The success of one project generally produces others of a similar kind. Popular imitativeness will always, in a trading nation, seize hold of such successes, and drag a community too anxious for profits into an abyss from which extrication is difficult. Bubble companies, of a kind similar to those engendered by the South-Sea project, lived their little day in the famous year of the panic, 1825. On that occasion, as in 1720, knavery gathered a rich harvest from cupidity, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... garret room, nothing in it but one chair and one spinning wheel. He closed it, and opened the next—to start back in terror, for he saw nothing but a great gulf, a moonless night, full of stars, and, for all the stars, dark, dark!—a fathomless abyss. He opened the third door, and a rush like the tide of a living sea invaded his ears. Multitudinous wings flapped and flashed in the sun, and, like the ascending column from a volcano, white birds innumerable shot into the air, darkening ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... sounder I shall sleep!" she declared to Garnett; and all the mitigations of art could not conceal the fact that she was desperately in need of that restorative. There were moments, indeed, when he was sorrier for her than for her husband or her daughter; so black and unfathomable appeared the abyss into which she must slip back if she lost her hold on ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... late, for I saw nothing but the looming figure of a second ruffian and his upraised arm; then painless darkness seemed to enfold me, and I was conscious of plunging down into a fathomless abyss. ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... miserable man—that a curse was on me, which must remain a secret, although the only one between us—yet that I was not without a hope of its being removed—that this poisoned every hour of my life—that I should plunge her with me into the abyss—she, the light and joy, the very soul of my existence. Then she wept because I was unhappy. Oh! Minna was all love and tenderness. To save me one tear she would gladly have sacrificed ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... traitors. Against these we must now proceed with untiring zeal and unfaltering purpose, even in the cities of the Buergerrecht. Our allies must be brought to support us in this, and not drag us down with them into the abyss through their culpable negligence." A deputation was now sent thither, composed of members of the Council, who visited Bern, Basel, Schaffhausen and St. Gall, and communicated an enlarged list of grievances, the warnings that had arrived from abroad, and a review ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... fathers. Those prayers had been answered by sudden darkness, a sea of thunder, and the coming of that mighty wind still called Kami-kaze,—"the Wind of the Gods," by which the fleets of Kublai Khan were given to the abyss. Why should not prayers now also be made? They were, in countless homes and at thousands of shrines. But the Superior Ones gave this time no answer; the Kami-kaze did not come. And the samurai boy, praying vainly before the little shrine of Hachiman in his father's garden, ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... steaming through the Kyles of Bute, for there the ship seems to be going full speed for the shore of an entirely enclosed sea, and here, saving for the tell-tale railway, there seems no way out of the abyss without scaling the perpendicular walls. The rocks are at their finest at Killingnoble Scar, where they take the form of a semicircle on the west side of the railway. The scar was for a very long period famous ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... called Gaud, rather curious to see the Icelanders of whom so much was said, who were never at home, and of whom, each year, some were missing; on all sides she heard the name of Iceland, which appeared to her as a distant insatiable abyss. And there, now, was the man ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... of kings!—my fathers' God!—who only Art strong to save, by whom is all controlled, Who givest the sea its waves, the dark and lonely Abyss of heaven its light, the North its cold, The air its currents, the warm sun its beams, Life to the flowers, and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... has, from unimaginable years, Sustained itself with terror and with toil Over a gulph, and with the agony With which it clings seems slowly coming down; Even as a wretched soul hour after hour, Clings to the mass of life; yet clinging, leans; And leaning, makes more dark the dread abyss In which it fears to fall: beneath this crag Huge as despair, as if in weariness, The melancholy mountain yawns—below, You hear but see not an impetuous torrent Raging among the caverns, and a bridge Crosses the chasm; and high above there grow, With intersecting trunks, from crag ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... attempting to thrust a Soliman from his throne, before she is finally whirled away with her heart aflame. The calm politeness with which the dastardly Barkiaroukh consents to a blood-curdling murder, the sardonic dialogue between Vathek on the edge of the precipice and the Giaour concealed in the abyss, the buoyantly high-spirited description of the plump Indian kicked and pursued like "an invulnerable football," the oppressive horror of the subterranean recesses, the mischievous pleasantry of the Gulchenrouz idyll reveal different facets of Beckford's ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... the middle of the bay. It is supposed that at one time a conical mountain, from 1,958 to 2,600 feet high, rose where soundings now give a depth of water of over 1,300 feet. A sudden break up of the mountain probably produced this abyss, and formidable eruptions have led to the pouring forth of immense quantities of pumice-stone. The three islets mentioned above would be the remains of the old central cone, and a bed of pumice-stone from 98 to 131 feet thick is spread over the whole of their surface, telling of ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... and exhibiting their prey, were terrible to behold. There was a menace in the attitude of the rocks. They seemed to be biding their time. Nothing could be more suggestive of haughtiness and arrogance: the conquered vessel, the triumphant abyss. The two rocks, still streaming with the tempest of the day before, were like two wrestlers sweating from a recent struggle. Up to a certain height they were completely bearded with seaweed; above this their steep haunches glittered at points like polished ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... impossible to thought, without assuring it any objective reality, and merely lest the supposed impossibility of what it must at least allow to be thinkable should endanger its very being and plunge it into an abyss of scepticism. ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... chain of the distant mountains sprang up in the blue flash and gleamed with blue light. When the lightning died away, the mountains vanished, as though flung back into an abyss of darkness. The air was filled with rumblings and vibrations, with sounds and echoes. The lowering, angry sky seemed purifying itself by fire, from the dust and the foulness which had risen toward it from the earth, and the earth, it seemed, was quaking in terror ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... Willow's lips moved. After all, it is the mother soul that gives us faith to meet eternity—and it was to the spirit of her mother that the Willow called in the hour of death. With the call on her lips she plunged into the abyss, her wind-whipped hair clinging to ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... drawing up of the deposition of Bouvet, who implicated General Moreau in the gravest manner. "Here is a man who comes back from the gates of the tomb, still surrounded by the shadows of death, who demands vengeance upon those who by their perfidy have thrown him and his party into the abyss where they now find themselves. Sent to sustain the cause of the Bourbons, he finds himself compelled either to fight for Moreau, or to renounce an enterprise which was the sole object of his mission. Monsieur was to pass into France, to put himself at the head of the ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... restrained, and even stopped voluntarily, as if unaccustomed to action or dominion. The army, the scattered corps of which had successively re-united round Paris, had given itself up to patriotic fervour, and, together with France, had plunged into an abyss to prove its devotion and avenge its injuries: but amongst its oldest and most illustrious chiefs, some—such as Gouvion St. Cyr, Macdonald, and Oudinot—had refused to join Napoleon, and openly espoused the Royal cause; others—like Ney, Davoust, Soult, and Massena—protested with ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Americans attracted to these erections, and had invented the fabulous account of which I have spoken, the Indians of the present day did not pretend to know any thing about their origin. They were beyond the reach of all their traditions, and were lost in the abyss of ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... and beauty to the depths of vulgar humanity. They themselves are swallowed up in it; but, thanks to their essential vigor and indestructible life, the true and the beautiful make a victorious fight, and issue triumphant from the abyss. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... wished he had found him sitting in it. He walked over to it and sat down himself—simply because it was Baird's chair and suggested his presence. Latimer knew how he would have turned to look at him as he came in, and that he would at once have known by instinct that the old abyss had ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... how it is apropos, I have not leisure to explain,) do you not know that I am almost in love with an acquaintance of yours?—Almost! said I—I am in love, souse! over head and ears, deep as the most unfathomable abyss of the boundless ocean; but the word Love, owing to the intermingledoms of the good and the bad, the pure and the impure, in this world, being rather an equivocal term for expressing one's sentiments and sensations, I must do justice to the sacred purity of my attachment. Know, then, that the ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... a wanderer. He gazes into the depths of the dark sea he is crossing; but there is no answering abyss in his heart, where he can lose the memory of his deed. He cannot count the wretched nights of watching, and of thought. Time brings no relief, change no solace. When the soul in its flight to eternity turns away from God, how droop her wings! She ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... my choleric correspondent who rebuked me for being too frivolous about the problem of Spiritualism. My correspondent, who is evidently an intelligent man, is very angry with me indeed. He uses the strongest language. He says I remind him of a brother of his: which seems to open an abyss or vista of infamy. The main substance of his attack resolves itself into two propositions. First, he asks me what right I have to talk about Spiritualism at all, as I admit I have never been to a seance. This is all very well, but there are a good ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... the abyss, the officer lowered his field glasses and turned his face. Then he rose and moved over to where she was sitting. She stood up ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... enlarged on before him—he so happy in having found him, and who trembled to lose again his beloved Fabian, whose hand he hoped would one day close his eyes. The blind tenderness of Bois-Rose did not divine the abyss under the calm surface of the lake, but ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... as Samson burst the green withes: he paralysed all remonstrance; he vanished into the abyss which the great staircase presented. He must have borne a charmed life to reach thus far—when a mightier roar, a perfect column of fire, a thundering avalanche of glowing timber and huge stones descended with a shock of an earthquake, and rebounded into ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... almost upon her—another instant and he would seize her. Pan-at-lee turned sharply to her left. Just a few steps she took in the new direction before she disappeared over the rim of Kor-ul-lul. The baffled lion, planting all four feet, barely stopped upon the verge of the abyss. Glaring down into the black shadows beneath he mounted ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... with tears and woeful looks, that she would not come to Magnolia; and Preston would be soon on his way back to college. I knew of only one comfort in the world; that wonderful, "Lo, I am with you." Does anybody know what that means, who has not made it the single plank bridge over an abyss? ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... fay. She had three sons at a birth, Primond, Diamond, and Triamond. Being anxious to know the future lot of her sons, she went to the abyss of Demogorgon, to consult the "Three Fatal Sisters." Clotho showed her the threads, which "were thin as those spun by a spider." She begged the fates to lengthen the life-threads, but they said this could not be; they consented, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... triumph arose from the ravines. The enemy had entered them and was smashing the boats of Kaupepee to fragments. That cry of defiance was mis-timed. In a few moments a thunderous roar was heard that echoed through the abyss and paralyzed the hands of those who were attacking the gates. The men who had run to the walls, on hearing the shouts below, had let loose, into the depths, a deadly avalanche of earth, rocks, and timber. When the dust of it had drifted out, ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... in 1881 marks the beginning of a new terrible reaction which has superimposed the system of wholesale street pogroms upon the policy of disfranchisement, and has again thrown millions of Jews into the dismal abyss of medievalism. ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... insensibly to decline, by reason of the immeasurable avarice and extortions of the court of Rome, which disgusted the clergy as well as laity, in every kingdom of Europe. England itself, though sunk in the deepest abyss of ignorance and superstition, had seriously entertained thoughts of shaking off the papal yoke [n]; and the Roman pontiff was obliged to think of new expedients for riveting it faster upon the Christian world. For this purpose, Gregory IX. published his decretals [o], ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... temple. It is the colonnade of old Burlington House, conveyed hither from Piccadilly who knows why, and likely to rest here, the sporting ground for adventurous infants, until its origin is lost in the abyss of time. ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... years—three disastrous years—so greatly during them has the gulf between Roger and me widened and deepened. Looking back on what it was before that, it seems to me now to have been but a shallow and trifling ditch, compared to the abyss that it is now. We left Mr. Parker standing at the hall-door, his red hair flaming bravely in the morning sun, loudly expressing his regret at our departure, and trying to extract an unlikely promise from us that we will come back ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... gulf; and my ruin was the more irreparable, because, falling at once to the same depth from whence I had been before rescued, each of the new disorders into which I now lapsed carried me deeper and deeper still down the profound abyss of vice. I had passed nearly a year at Paris without hearing of Manon. It cost me no slight effort to abstain from enquiry; but the unintermitting advice of Tiberge, and my own reflections, secured this victory over my wishes. The last months glided away so tranquilly, ...
— Manon Lescaut • Abbe Prevost
... this formidable race was in harmony with all their thoughts and habits, and the exact opposite of Christianity. In the beginning of time, according to their tradition, there was neither heaven nor earth, but only universal chaos and a bottomless abyss, where dwelt Surtur in an element of unquenchable fire. The generation of their gods proceeded amid the darkness and void, from the union of heat and moisture, until Odin and the other children of Asa-Thor, or the Earth, slew Ymer, or the Evil One, and created the material universe out of his ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... broken. Marcel promptly became the man of action. He pointed at the gnarled and broken head of a stunted tree growing at the very edge of the canyon, with its battered crest reaching out at a perilous angle over the abyss. ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... very beautiful sight. When swollen by the addition of all the waters of the valley, the river, a little above the Falls, is 175 feet wide, but on entering the defile which appears to have been made by an earthquake, it is not more than forty feet in breadth. The abyss into which it flings itself, is no less than 600 feet deep. Above this vast precipice constantly rises a dense cloud of foam, which, falling again almost immediately, is said to contribute greatly to the fertility of ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... energy of an eternal, unconscious Law, say the Buddhists. Space, then, or "Fan, Bar-nang" (Maha Sunyata) or, as it is called by Lao-tze, the "Emptiness," is the nature of the Buddhist Absolute. (See Confucius' "Praise of the Abyss.") The word jiva, then, could never be applied by the Arahats to the Seventh Principle, since it is only through its correlation or contact with matter that Fo-hat (the Buddhist active energy) can develop active conscious ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... toilet was, she had time to consider Lord Fareham's countenance and manner, the cold distance of his address, and to scorn herself for having thought of him in her reveries that day as loving her always and till death. It was far better so. The abyss that parted them could not yawn too wide. She put a stern restraint upon herself, so that there should be nothing hysterical in her manner, lest her fears about her sister's health should be mistaken for agitation at his presence. She stood ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... these fearless men. The huge mass hung in the air, dangling over the smooth surface of the sea; and the signal being given, was plunged down. In a moment it had disappeared, and a heavy mass of waters rushed on, swelling and boiling in the abyss, that seemed to have entombed the daring adventurers. The rolling off of the chain in a long succession of coils, and the disappearance of link after link, filled the mind with a shuddering impression ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... hand, And wears no mail, and hides behind no shield! That plucks its joy in the shadow of death's wing— That drains with one deep draught the wine of life, And that with fearless foot and heaven-turned eye, May stand upon a dizzy precipice, High o'er the abyss ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... then, turning to the left by a short bend, they passed in behind that range of horseshoe rocks that sheltered Hurricane Hall—thus, as it were doubling their own road. Beneath that range of rocks, and between it and another range, there was an awful abyss or chasm of cleft, torn and jagged rocks opening, as it were, from the bowels of the earth, in the shape of a mammoth bowl, in the bottom of which, almost invisible from its great depth, seethed and boiled a mass of dark water of what seemed to be a lost river or a subterranean spring. ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... halt for ever on the crater's brink And feed the wind with phrases, while we know There gapes at hand the infernal precipice O'er which a gossamer bridge of words we throw, Yet cannot choose but hear from the abyss The sulphurous gloom's unfathomable hiss ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... table, and held it with outstretched hand towards the ground, and with upturned gaze and frightful calm she seemed to plead an answer from the goddess. Then fell I into a deep swoon, and in vision seemed to fall from dark abyss to dark abyss, until my soul was torn asunder, and its portions rent again and dissolved into nothingness, and ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... triumphs. Next came the liberals, a portion of whom were sincerely devoted to political progress, for which the country was not yet prepared—and, finally, the Jacobins, old relics of 1793, who sought to precipitate France into that abyss of horror, the very trace of which the wonderful genius of Napoleon had effaced. All these opinions, advocated by intelligent and capable men, of gifted minds, but also of turbulent and dangerous spirits, to whom agitation is the natural element—all these were secretly busy, watching ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... enchanting voice, had reached a gallery in the midst of which, the floor having fallen in, there was a fearful abyss of flames, though the pillars on each side were still standing. Opposite to him the youth perceived the longed-for maiden, clinging with one hand to a pillar, while with the other she was threatening back some Spanish soldiers, who seemed ready ...
— The Two Captains • Friedrich de La Motte-Fouque
... emotion; thus to see space annihilated, and the furthest corners of the earth drawn together, fills one with admiration for this amazing human nature, more potent than the whole material creation by which it is surrounded, even than the three thousand miles of that Atlantic abyss. These manifestations of the power of man's intellect seem to me to cry aloud to him to "stand in awe [of his own nature] and sin not." And yet these victories over matter are nothing compared to the achievements ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... call forth their reverence, their love, their hope of good even in the most strayed and perverted, but on a minute identification of human things with such symbols as the scarlet whore, the beast out of the abyss, scorpions whose sting is in their tails, men who have the mark of the beast, and unclean spirits like frogs. You might as well attempt to educate the child's sense of beauty by hanging its nursery with the horrible and grotesque pictures in which the early painters represented the Last Judgment, ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... exasperations of pride, with an intensity of intellectual precision that burns and blazes. The deeper these strange beings sink into their anguish, the more remorseless their arguments become. They prove their horror in dreadful syllogisms; every inference plunges them farther into the abyss; and their intelligence flames upward to its highest point, when they are ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... surely and safely, along a dark and difficult road: but just as we are beginning to pride ourselves on having found our way so cleverly, we come to an edge of darkness; and see before our feet a bottomless abyss, down which our feeble lanthorn will not throw its ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... he was standing upon the dizzy abyss that leads to loss of caste. There was no doubt of Amiria's beauty, there was no doubt of her passionate affection, but there was a feeling at the back of his mind that his regard for her was merely a physical attraction. He admired every curve of her supple shape, ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... to one's neighbor the two beliefs are kin, but as regards one's self, as far apart as the West is from the East. For here, at this idea of self, we are suddenly aware of standing on the brink of a fathomless abyss, gazing giddily down into that great gulf which divides Buddhism from Christianity. We cannot see the bottom. It is a separation more profound than death; it seems to necessitate annihilation. To cross it we must bury in its depths all ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... to say that the most cowardly of all temptations was discouragement. When the enemy of our salvation makes us lose hope of ever advancing in virtue he has gained a great advantage over us, and may very soon succeed in thrusting us down into the abyss of vice. Those who fly into a passion at the sight of their own imperfections are like people who want to strike and bruise their own faces, because they are not handsome enough to please their self-love. They ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... glance it seemed so narrow that a rifle-shot could have crossed its tranquil depths; but a second look at the comparative size of the trees on the opposite mountain convinced him of his error. A nearer survey of the abyss also showed him that instead of its walls being perpendicular they were made of successive ledges or terraces to the valley below. Yet the air was so still, and the outlines so clearly cut, that they might have been only the reflections of ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... sleep-walkers awake out of their dreams when they are called by name? I am a somnambulist, who, with smiling courage, moves along a dizzy height; call me by name, and I shall awake, and, shuddering, plunge into the abyss beneath. Ah, Henry, I hate my name, for it is pronounced by other lips than yours. For you I will not be named as other men call me. Baptize me, my Henry; give me another name—a name which is our secret, and which no one knows ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... Legislative Body, as in the Cabinet. I see no reason to change the opinion I formed some time since, and perhaps already mentioned to you; I am sad, rather than uneasy, for the future of my country. She will not fall into the abyss; but, for want of political foresight and firmness, will allow herself to be dragged along the edge of it. Men's minds and characters ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... and more to passion for this pure one, but he sinks into deep and deeper reverie until a second long, burning kiss suddenly and completely awakens him. Then, having gained "world-knowledge," he sees into the deep abyss of this being full of guilt and penitence, and impetuously repulses the temptress. She herself, however, is now overpowered by the passion which she has sought by all the means of temptation to instil into the innocent youth, and fancies she sees in him again the Savior whom she had once ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had vanished was now a trifle in my eyes; this negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me, in the abyss of divine enjoyment ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... mentioned her father with ill-concealed contempt; his language was that of a hard egotist; and yet his offer seemed a blessing in her helpless condition, and with the second-sight of a loving heart she divined a meaning in it that she did not fully understand, but which shone into her abyss of sorrow like a distant ray of hope. However he might phrase it, this offer proceeded from no ordinary motives; and her convulsive sobs giving way to quiet tears, she tried to rise from the sofa, but sank to ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... fragrant smoke, nor sooner spired Down sank the brazen fabric at his feet. He started back, gazed, nor could aught but gaze, And cold dread stiffened up his hair flower-twined; Then with a long and tacit step, one arm Behind, and every finger wide outspread, He looked and tottered on a black abyss. He thought he sometimes heard a distant voice Breathe through the cavern's mouth, and further on Faint murmurs now, now hollow groans reply. Therefore suspended he his crook above, Dropped it, and heard it rolling step by step: He entered, and a mingled sound arose Like one (when ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... I exclaimed in agony, "what you forewarned me of has proved but too true. Fatal curiosity," added I, "insatiable desire of riches, into what an abyss of miseries have they cast me! I am now sensible what a misfortune I have brought upon myself; but you, dear brother," cried I, addressing myself to the dervish, "who are so charitable and good, among the many wonderful secrets you are acquainted ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... declaring that at present she could say nothing further. As she did so she felt sure that she would not be able to accept him in two months' time whatever she might bring herself to do when the vast abyss of six ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... god! The rocks dripped around them—the torrent dashed at their very feet. Down—down, in thunder, for ever and for ever, dashed the might of the maddening element; above, all wrath; below, all blackness;—there, the cataract; here, the abyss. Not a moment's pause to the fury, not a moment's silence to the roar;—forward to the last glimpse of the sun—the curse of labour, and the soul of unutterable strength, shall be upon those waters! The demon, tormented to an eternity, filling his dread dwelling-place with the ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... cloud with as serene a face as that with which Mr. Yocomb had watched its approach, but now a scud of vapor swept like a sudden pallor across her disk, giving one the odd impression that she had just realized her peril, and then an abyss of darkness swallowed her up. For a few moments longer the fire burned on, and then the cloud with its torrents settled down upon it, and the luridly luminous point ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... elapsed since my meeting with the stranger at Wilmington. Then my forlorn state had led me to the brink of suicide. A brief and feverish respite had been afforded me, but now was I transported to the verge of the same abyss. ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... design is unquestionably that which distinguishes the work of Gibbon from all other great historical compositions. He has first bridged the abyss between ancient and modern times, and connected together the two great worlds of history. The great advantage which the classical historians possess over those of modern times is in unity of plan, of course greatly facilitated by the narrower ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... which irritated providence will inflict on those whose wanton cruelty has prompted them to destroy this fair arrangement of nature—this flowery prospect of human felicity. Engulphed in the dark abyss of never ending misery, they shall in bitterness atone for the stab thus given to human nature; and in anguish unutterable expiate crimes, for which nothing less than eternal sufferings can make adequate ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... unfathomable ignorance can never take the place of an intellect, while such a combination cannot fail to destroy the blessed vis inertiae of the primitive fool, who only sees what is visible, instead of evolving the phantoms of an airy unreality from the bottomless abyss of his own so-called consciousness. Fortunately for humanity, the low-class unimaginative mind predominates in the world, as far as numbers are concerned; and there are enough true intellects among ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... dissensions, and introduced new elements into the strife of parties. By every opinion she held on religion, on the relations of prince and subject, on the fundamental principles of life, Mary was separated as by an abyss from the party represented by Knox. If we may judge from the language which each used of the other, Knox and she failed to find one point on which genial intercourse was possible. As the minister of St. Giles (then the only Reformed church in Edinburgh), Knox believed that Mary ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... of the wounded animals. A general stampede ensued at times, which often led the herd into morasses, or the quick-sand of the rivers, where they perished miserably. The destruction was still greater when the leader of the herd came upon some yawning abyss. Those behind drove him down into the deep, and the entire herd followed blindly, only to be ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... recoiled in panic and fell into the open grave behind him. The edge which he caught as he tumbled gave way, and down he went, expecting almost at the same instant to reach the bottom. But never was such a fall! Bottomless seemed the abyss! Down, down, down, with immeasurable and still increasing speed, through utter darkness, with hair streaming straight upward, breathless, he shot with a rush of air against him, the force of which whirled up his very arms, second ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... discovered a trap, which, when raised by the ring attached, exposed to view a steep and narrow descending staircase, leading apparently to some sally-port beyond the castle ditch. After carefully trimming his lamp, he was about to lead the way into this dark abyss, when a sound, sharp and sudden, as of something falling in the adjacent prison, caught his ear. Retracing his steps, he re-entered the apartment, where, after a brief search, he found beneath one of the embrasures a paper folded round a large pebble. Hastily opening ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... was overwhelmed with despair, and my mind was weakened by the horrors which I had experienced; and I had a vague fear that I had been drawn into the very channel through which the ocean waters flowed in their course to that terrific, that unparalleled abyss. Still, there was as yet no sign whatever of anything like a descent, for the boat was on even keel, and perfectly level as before, and it was impossible for me to tell whether I was moving swiftly or ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... containing in it everything relating to the fowls of the air, the fishes of the sea, and the four-footed beasts of the mountains. The man who knew a single page of the work could charm the heaven, the earth, the great abyss, the mountains and the seas. This marvellous composition he inclosed in a box of gold, which he placed within a box of silver; the box of silver within a box of ivory and ebony, and that again within a box of bronze; the box of bronze within a box of brass; and the ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... was that if she lost hold on her strange belief in the honesty of this one decent thing she had seen and felt so close to her that it cleared the air she breathed, it would be as if she had fallen into a bottomless abyss. Without knowing why she did it, she got up from her chair as if she were a witness ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... repeated the same story; and what with the Black Death sweeping over the land, and these terrible English ravaging at will, France sank into an abyss of misery worse even than that which had engulfed the empire. The unhappy peasantry, driven by starvation into frenzied revolt, avenged their agony upon the nobility by hideous plunderings and burnings of the rich ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... calls "a woman,"—such as a frivolous education makes a woman,—generous in great things, petty in small; vain, irritable, full of the littleness of herself and her complaints, ready to plunge into an abyss with her lover, but equally ready to fret away all love with reproaches when the plunge had been made. Of all men, Welford could bear this the least. A woman of a larger heart, a more settled experience, and an intellect capable of appreciating his character and sounding all his qualities, ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... transported into those fabulous regions of which poets had sung. The sea sparkled with phosphoric light, and the extraordinary transparency of its waters discovered to the view of the navigator all that had hitherto been hidden in the deep abyss.[7] Here and there appeared little islands perfumed with odoriferous plants, and resembling baskets of flowers, floating on the tranquil surface of the ocean. Every object which met the sight, in this enchanting ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... short-lived beauty." Others say that Orpheus is "the mythological expression of the delight which music gives to the primitive races," while yet others accept without hesitation the idea that Orpheus is the sun that, when day is done, plunges into the black abyss of night, in the vain hope of overtaking his lost bride, Eurydice, the rosy dawn. And, whether they be right or wrong, it would seem that the sadness that comes to us sometimes as the day dies and the last of the sun's rays ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... legends about abominable gods and goddesses are falling like mildew, these are still to some extent kept alive by the sweet influences of earth and sky and by the charities of family life. When the heart of woman is about to be swept into the abyss her infant's smile restores her to her better self. Thus family life does not go to ruin; and so long as that anchor holds society will not drift on the rocks that stand so perilously near. Still, the state ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... was that secretly he was crying out for the powerful hand to save him from the abyss. And he believed in Isaacson as a doctor, however much he now resented Isaacson's mistrust, no longer to be doubted, of the woman his chivalry ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... has escaped being a muddle the note it has succeeded in striking at the furthest will be recognised as one of those that are called high but by the courtesy, by the intellectual provinciality, of theatrical criticism, which, as we can see for ourselves any morning, is—well, an abyss even deeper than the theatre itself. Don't attempt to crush us with Dumas and Ibsen, for such values are from any informed and enlightened point of view, that is measured by other high values, literary, critical, philosophic, ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... you, sir, a letter from Mr. Gammon, of the firm of Quirk, Gammon, and Snap, solicitors, Saffron Hill," said the stranger, unconscious that his words shot a flash of light into a little abyss of grief and despair before him. "He begged me to give this letter into your own hands, and said he hoped you'd send him an answer by the ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... an incentive to all that is great and good, is an intercourse with men of first-rate merit!. I was then happy; I would not have exchanged my lot with a prince; and now, to be hurled, as I had been, from the summit of all my hopes and projects, into an abyss of wretchedness, and to be hurried thus from dungeon to dungeon, to perish doubtless either by a violent death or ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... suspected credit. In such a case a prosperous merchant takes back his note, and does not offer it elsewhere. Birotteau felt his head swim, as though he had looked down the sides of a precipice into a measureless abyss. ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... formidable and almost unknown cape, owing to contrary winds and stormy weather, the waves rose mountain high. At one time his ships were heaved up to the clouds, and seemed the next moment precipitated into the bottomless abyss of the ocean. The wind was piercingly cold, and so boisterous that the commands of the pilot could seldom be heard amid the din of the warring elements; while the dismal and almost constant darkness increased the danger of their situation. Sometimes ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... change. The rain yet fell, but the army was recovering from the battlefield. It took not long, nowadays, to recover. The army was learning to let the past drop into the abyss and not to listen for the echoes. It seemed a long time that the country had been at war, and each day's events drove across and hid the event of the day before. Speculation as to the morrow remained, but ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... comfortably off, continued the maternal tradition and kept on bringing himself up like a toy Pom. He did not know what else to do. Then, when he was five-and-twenty, he found himself at the edge of the world gazing in timorous starkness down into the abyss of the Great War. Something kicked him over the brink and sent him sprawling into ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... a large valley. Just above the fall the channel is not more than ten feet wide, and here a few planks are thrown across, whence, half hid by luxuriant vegetation, the mad waters may be seen rushing beneath, and a few feet farther plunge into the abyss. Both sight and sound are grand and impressive. It was here that, four years before my visit, the Governor-General of the Netherland Indies committed suicide, by leaping into the torrent. This at least is ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... . Between these points the Indus raves from side to side of the gloomy chasm, foaming and chafing with ungovernable fury. Yet even in these inaccessible places has daring and ingenious man triumphed over opposing nature. The yawning abyss is spanned by frail rope bridges, and the narrow ledges of rocks are connected by ladders to form a giddy pathway ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... as a transparency, that terrible collection of devils which you may have witnessed in a popular engraving entitled, 'Delirium Tremens.' The Inebriate, taking one parting drink, staggered—fell—rolled over and over down the hill into the abyss, from which flames burst forth, red, green, and blue, and the audience were wild with delight. Three times was Eglantine Mowbray compelled, by the rapturous encores, to roll down that hill into the fiery pit. No wonder that, at the last trial, there rose ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Curtis that this man is talking about?'' "It isn't Curtis, it 's Curtius, "was the reply. "Well, now, " said Dickinson, "what did Curtius do?'' "Oh,'' said his informant, "he threw himself into an abyss to save the Roman Republic.'' Upon this Dickinson returned to his seat, and as soon as the Democratic speaker had finished, arose and said: "Mr. President, I deny the justice of the gentleman's reference ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... angel of pity, hovering over an abyss of ruin, whose darkest horrors you only imagine faintly. What can you do? Nothing, but pray to God to paralyze my tongue, and grant me death, before I lose my last clutch on faith, and curse my Creator, and drift down to eternal perdition! It was hard enough ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... it, by the combined aid of a prism and a mirror, a powerful stream of light, I approached my eye to the minute hole drilled through the axis of the lens. For an instant I saw nothing save what seemed to be an illuminated chaos, a vast, luminous abyss. A pure white light, cloudless and serene, and seemingly limitless as space itself, was my first impression. Gently, and with the greatest care, I depressed the lens a few hairbreadths. The wondrous illumination still continued, ...
— The Diamond Lens • Fitz-James O'brien
... the opposite side of the bridge, she leaned on the parapet and gazed at the rapid waters of the stream. Little by little, she began to experience that strange fascination caused by the attraction of the abyss; and as her eyes followed the swift current, she felt overtaken by a sort of vertigo and drawn more and ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... scenes opened to the imagination by that system of theology, which dooms to perdition the great mass of human beings, who are permitted by their Creator to sport or suffer upon earth through a few rapid revolutions of time, and are then swept away for ever into an abyss of ruin; while, with confounding and dreadful mystery, the Author of their being is represented as the great agent in this work of appalling desolation. To redeem his character for mercy, He rescues an elect few, but leaves the devoted multitude ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... was a vengeance of the people against the monarchy, the throne only existing as the substitute of a unique power which was every where instituted, but which no one yet dared to name. The people, parties, trembled lest on removing the throne they should behold an abyss in which the nation would be engulphed: it was thus tacitly agreed to respect its forms, though they daily despoiled and insulted the unfortunate monarch whom ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... blinded them, the madness of everything around insatiate for destruction, the rapid substitution of furious violence for unnatural calm, and hosts of appalling sounds for silence: these were things, on the edge of a deep abyss, to chill the blood, though the fierce wind, made actually solid by ice and snow, had failed to ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... in the street, and tiles upon the houses, did bend themselves against me; methought that they all combined together, to banish me out of the world; I was abhorred of them, and unfit to dwell among them, or be a partaker of their benefits, because I had sinned against the Saviour.' In this deep abyss of misery, THAT love which has heights and depths passing knowledge, laid under him the everlasting arms, and raised him from the horrible pit in miry clay, when no human powers could have reached his case. Dr. Cheever eloquently remarks, that 'it was through ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... room for maneuver. spare room, elbow room, house room; stowage, roomage[obs3], margin; opening, sphere, arena. open space, free space; void &c. (absence) 187; waste; wildness, wilderness; moor, moorland; campagna[obs3]. abyss &c. (interval) 198; unlimited space; infinity &c. 105; world; ubiquity &c. (presence) 186; length and breadth of the land. proportions, acreage; acres, acres and perches, roods and perches, hectares, square miles; square inches, square yards, square centimeters, square meters, yards (clothing) &c.; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... conduct was entirely incomprehensible; but we may easily suppose that at this moment the unfortunate man first realized the fearful nature of the circumstances which surrounded him, and perceived the abyss which had yawned so suddenly at his feet. And no wonder that he shrank back from the prospect, overwhelmed for the moment with consternation and despair,—not the prospect of death, but of a degradation far worse to the proud spirit of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... no more. I walked by his side in silence, feeling the miserable conviction that there was an abyss in the shape of a family secret between my husband and me. In the spirit, if not in the body, we were separated, after a married life of ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... With an oath, he jumped to it and looked out. Far below, the water tumbled as of yore over the rocks. He strained horrified eyes for a glimpse of a human body. The girl and boy must have dropped together into the deep abyss, preferring death to uncertainty. They were gone—gone over the ragged rocks, where their bodies would be lost in some of the fathomless juts a mile beyond. He would never be bothered with Jinnie again. Then he turned ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... loved this man, who had educated him, and whose fortune he had made. The regent appreciated in Dubois the talents he had, and was not too severe on the vices from which he was not exempt. There was, however, between the regent and Dubois an abyss. The regent's vices and virtues were those of a gentleman, Dubois' those of a lackey. In vain the regent said to him, at each new favor that he granted, "Dubois, take care, it is only a livery-coat that I ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... upreared by captive hands, The great Tower of Triumph stands, All its pillars in a blaze With the many-coloured rays, Which lanthorns of ten thousand dyes Shed on ten thousand panoplies. But closest is the throng, And loudest is the song, In that sweet garden by the river side, The abyss of myrtle bowers, The wilderness of flowers, Where Cain hath built the palace of his pride. Such palace ne'er shall be again Among the dwindling race of men. From all its threescore gates the light Of gold and steel afar was thrown; Two hundred ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... deeming that they are not invariable, or not incurable, or not supremely serious. Apart from this, there was much in Protestantism that he admired, much in its effects for which he was grateful. With the Lutheran view of imputation, Protestant and Catholic were separated by an abyss. Without it, there was no lasting reason why they should be separate at all. Against the communities that hold it he stood in order of battle, and believed that he could scarcely hit too hard. But he distinguished ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... To understand Plato's most mystical and far-seeing speculations. The Eternal Nous, the Intellectual Teacher has vanished further and further off; further off still some dim vision of a supreme Goodness. Infinite spaces above that looms through the mist of the abyss a Primaeval One. But even that has a predicate, for it is one; it is not pure essence. Must there not be something beyond that again, which is not even one, but is nameless, inconceivable, absolute? What an abyss! How shall the human mind find anything whereon to rest, ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... was seen, which raised itself up from the abyss of darkness below, and, emerging into the pale moonlight, began cautiously and slowly to ascend the rocky path. The outline was so distinctly marked, that Captain Dalgetty could discover not only the person of a Highlander, but the long gun which he carried ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... reliefs, no new contingents, no warm winter clothing, which was indispensable. Desertions grew in number. The old army committees, elected in the first period of the Revolution, remained at their places and supported Kerensky's policy. Re-elections were forbidden. An abyss sprang up between the committees and the soldier masses. Finally the soldiers began to regard the committees with hatred. With increasing frequency delegates from the trenches were arriving in Petrograd and at the sessions of the Petrograd Soviet put the question point blank: "What ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky
... wind. About eight we left the Banks. Just then we observed, that the sailor who sounded, having sung out five, then six, then in a few minutes seven, suddenly found no bottom, as if we had fallen off all at once from the brink of the Bank into an abyss. ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... mingled with the breath of the terrified mule, and he held his head downward, and evidently with the intention of rushing forward upon the latter. Neither could have gone back, and of course the fierce bull would drive the mule into the abyss. The other bull stood close behind, ready to continue the work if the first one failed, and, perhaps, ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... not, Antoine," said Lawrence, gazing with feelings of awe into a terrible split in the ice, whose beautiful light-blue sides deepened into intense blackness as they were lost to vision in an abyss, out of which arose the deep-toned gurgling of sub-glacial streams; "but you must not forget that this is quite new to me, and my feet are not yet aware of the precise grip with which they must hold on ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... in danger of being taken for an idiot or a madman if he did not frame some answer to the questions which the doctors asked him. This new acuteness was perhaps the precursor to a return of his memory; but as yet the Past was like a dead wall, an abyss of darkness surrounding him. Now and then flashes of light seemed to dart across that darkness: he seemed on the point of recalling something—he knew not what; for the flashes faded as quickly as they came, and made the darkness all the ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... in 1819, at Troppau in 1820, and at Verona in 1822. The crowned heads of Europe appeared unable to comprehend that the French revolution, with its orgies of blood (p. 206) and tears, had produced an impassable abyss between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They wished to return to the conditions prevailing before the revolution, which caused the success of that upheaval; but the people, the masses, had quaffed of the cup of liberty, and the taste lingered. The Holy Alliance with its ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... from the deep beyond, showing that the visual ray was not yet strong enough to fathom the mighty distance; but let the full aperture be applied and mark the result. Mist and haze have disappeared; the telescope has pierced right through the stupendous distance, and only the vast abyss of space, boundless and ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... was exposed to the action of the sea was a vast moving mass, the shingle being alternately thrown up and sucked back again in tons, as the water hurled itself high upon the beach and then rushed back into the foaming abyss. ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... into a precipice: he had tumbled to the very bottom, if, in falling, his clothes had not taken hold on one of the crags of the rock, where he remained hanging over the depths without ability, either to disengage himself, or get up again. Those who followed, made towards him, but the horror of that abyss stopt short the most daring: Xavier only made not the least demur; he descended the precipice, and lending his hand to the secretary, by little and little dragged ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... spheres; that continuance of life after death was a truth; feeling all this, their concomitant influence was to make us positive that the human mind in an intelligent, satisfactory, self-illuminating way some day would reach mind everywhere in all its specific forms; and that the abyss of space would eventually thrill with the vibrations of conscious ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... thine eye, intently as thou canst, On th' everlasting counsel, and explore, Instructed by my words, the dread abyss. ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... as sufficient, is like flinging a stone into an unfathomable gulf we may find in the depths of a grotto, and imagining that the sounds it creates as it falls shall answer our every question, or reveal to us aught beside the immensity of the abyss. ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Dividing these last things again, let him exhaust his powers of conception, and let the last object at which he can arrive be now that of our discourse. Perhaps he will think that here is the smallest point in nature. I will let him see therein a new abyss. I will paint for him not only the visible universe, but all that he can conceive of nature's immensity in the womb of this abridged atom. Let him see therein an infinity of universes, each of ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... which is Himself. I mean, moreover, that He created all things out of nothing, and preserves them every moment, and could destroy them as easily as He made them; and that, in consequence, He is separated from them by an abyss, and is incommunicable in all His attributes. And further, He has stamped upon all things, in the hour of their creation, their respective natures, and has given them their work and mission and their length of days, greater or less, in their appointed place. I mean, too, that He is ever ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... weary. She heard Marya stop at the window, and shout: "Are you asleep, Pelagueya? You unfortunate, suffering woman, sleep! They abuse everybody, the heretics!" At last she dropped into bed without undressing, and quickly fell into a heavy sleep, as if she had plunged into a deep abyss. ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... first root and beginning of the whole question. Put it in the simplest shape, to which all Christians will agree. The Father sent the Son to die for the world. Most true: but who can explain those words? We are stopped at the very first step by an abyss. Who can tell us what is meant by the Father sending the Son? What is the relation, the connexion, between the Father and the Son? If we do not know that, we can know nothing about the matter, about the very root and ground thereof. And we do know little or nothing. The Bible only ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... halo, which his genius shall, in turn, render a glory gilded with the rays of all the crowns in Christendom. Such is the man you have beside you, monseigneur. It is to tell you that he has drawn you from the abyss for a great purpose, to raise you above the powers of the ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... drop all of these characters into the nearest abyss," she repeated each time with greater intensity. "I shall never play them again after your drama is ready. My contract with Westervelt has really expired so far as his exclusive control over me is concerned, and I will not be coerced into a return ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... wept over the poor, pitiful creatures who, after a struggle with surroundings that daily tempted them, too often wearied of the struggle and, like Loreen, threw up their arms and went whirling over the cataract into the boiling abyss of ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... Quincey had loved, then so strangely lost, and for whose face he looked into women's faces as long as he lived. Often have I stood at the corner of Titchfield Street, and thought how De Quincey had stood there night after night waiting for her to come, but all in vain, and how from the abyss of oblivion into which some cruel chance had swept her, not one cry from her ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... they were in the Rue de la Paix, after walking two blocks in contemplative silence, "my peace of mind is poised at the brink of an abyss. I have a feeling that I am about ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... girl? I called, but no answer came. I gazed about on every side, but no trace of her was visible. Unless she had plunged into the narrow abyss at my feet, there was no place where she could have concealed herself—none at least that I could discover. She had vanished, nevertheless; and since her disappearance must have been premeditated, I finally came to the conclusion ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... thing that debases her. One may fall, perhaps, because there are ditches along the wayside and it is not always easy to follow the right path. But if one falls, that is no reason to throw oneself in the abyss. ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... invisible, Will find at last The source of all attraction Which they have ever ardently desired— Round which they will ever circle Day on day, night on night, Century on century, millennium on millennium, Lost in the infinite and eternal abyss Of ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... rumor, and many wonderful stories were told in the hunter's cabin and the prospector's camp—stories of parties entering the gorge in boats and being carried down with fearful velocity into whirlpools where all were overwhelmed in the abyss of waters, and stories of underground passages for the great river into which boats had passed never to be seen again. It was currently believed that the river was lost under the rocks for several hundred miles. There were other accounts of great falls whose roaring music could be heard ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... only 700 tons) appeared such an atom in comparison with the enormous mountains of water. At one moment we would be perched on the summit of a wave, seemingly hundreds of feet high, and immediately below a terrible abyss into which we were on the point of sinking; the next we would be placed between two mountains of water which seemed ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... draw back. A few rays came through the decayed planks of the door which Alec had pushed to behind them, and fell upon the rubbish of centuries sloping in the brown light and damp air down into the abyss. One larger ray from the keyhole fell upon Kate's face, and showed it blanched with fear, and her eyes distended with the effort to see through ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... love, O Christ arisen, Yearns to reach these souls in prison! Through all depths of sin and loss Drops the plummet of Thy cross! Never yet abyss was found Deeper than that ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... confusion of it all left no room in his conscience for any other impression. But Mr. Harper, though surprised as he had never been before in all his professional career, lost himself in no such abyss. With the freedom which long-delayed insight into the truth gives to a man of his positive nature and training, he left speculation and all endeavor to reconcile events with her declaration, and plunged at once to the obvious question of ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... they stood was so narrow that there was no room for two to walk beside each other. Lifting the gentle form in one arm, he swung her over the abyss at his feet and placed her on the ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis |
