"Pinnacle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... There was a something beyond, faint, vague, impalpable as yet, which the rolling mists begirt as sometimes they cincture an Alpine needle. Even as the thought came, a sudden lifting—of the gray mass showed the point of a high uplifted pinnacle. The point thereof pricked the sky. Then the wind, like a strong hand, swept the clouds into a mantle, and we saw ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... trail and started across the loose rock with the pack yelping at his heels. We followed as rapidly as possible over such hard going but before we reached the other side the dogs had rounded a sharp pinnacle and disappeared far below us. Expecting that the goral would swing about the base of the peak the hunters sent me back across the talus to watch for a shot, but the animal ran down the valley and into a heavily wooded ravine where the dogs lost his ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... that might have heartened him. But after being hurled from what he accounted the pinnacle of success, he mistrusted now the crafty Lieutenant, saw that he had been played with as a mouse by this Imperial cat with the soft, ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... is the great moment, the pinnacle of all happiness as I have dreamed of it! Now, tell me yourself: Am I not to be envied? Whatever I wish is fulfilled. And, do you know, last year in Heligoland I had a curious experience. We capsised by the ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... very women was his unworldliness, his separateness, his devotion to an ideal which in their reason seemed a delusion. And no women would have been more sensitive than they to his fall from his spiritual pinnacle. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... bewildered eye. There was neither chapel nor convent, nor humble hermitage, to be seen; nothing but a moss-grown stone pinnacle, rising out of the centre of the area, surmounted by a cross. The greensward around appeared to have been sacred from the tread of man or beast, and the surrounding trees bent toward the cross, as ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... Pordenone half envied the imbecile peace of his bosom; "For in 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 my sorrows and do my ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... him 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 ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... St. Malo, 'twas a smiling morn in May, When the Commodore Jacques Cartier to the westward sailed away; In the crowded old Cathedral, all the town were on their knees, For the safe return of kinsmen from the undiscovered seas; And every autumn blast that swept o'er pinnacle and pier, Filled manly hearts with sorrow, and gentle hearts ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... Dudley abandoned her place in the British empyrean, gave up her wealth, and endeavored to eclipse by her sacrifices her whose virtue had been the cause of this great disaster. She took delight, like the devil on the pinnacle of the temple, in showing me all the riches of ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... not absolutely ignorant of nautical phraseology, promptly ported his helm and at the same moment stopped the engines, by which manoeuvre the Flying Fish glided close past the object so slowly that it was easily distinguishable as a huge pinnacle ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... nothing above man but God. His fellow man is by his side, his equal, and all other material creations are beneath his feet, and he is not to permit his fellow man to lift up the inferior thing and place it above him. If he does he must step down from the pinnacle on which he was placed by his God and which his own consciousness ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... of these last words. You cannot look at the canopy work or the pinnacle work of this cathedral without seeing that they do not merely suggest buds and leaves, but that the buds and leaves are there carven before your eyes. I myself cannot look at the tabernacle work of our stalls without being reminded of the young pine forests which ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... endeavour? Why had she, his Jewel, accepted the loneliness, the impoverishment of those younger days with light-heartedness? He never had thought of it before. Now, deposed, dethroned, defeated at the very pinnacle of his life, the answer came, with a force that brought a lump to his throat and a tear to his eyes. Why? Because they had loved this great, human, glistening thing of shining steel and thundering noise, loved it because the Blue Ribbon division had included the Blue Ribbon section, their ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... and how, throughout the whole of Tuscany, the rumour ran that over Arezzo horsemen had been seen fighting in the air. And who is there who has not heard that before the death of the elder Lorenzo de' Medici, the highest pinnacle of the cathedral was rent by a thunderbolt, to the great injury of the building? Or who, again, but knows that shortly before Piero Soderini, whom the people of Florence had made gonfalonier for life, was deprived of his office and banished, the ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... minister of the tabernacle. It becomes the people of God to be careful of the reputation of their brethren, and aim to wipe off the aspersions with which the world is apt to depreciate their characters, rather than to unite in the clamours of defamation. Men in official situations are placed upon a pinnacle which renders them conspicuous, and envy is always ready to shoot at them its envenomed darts. They have their faults indeed, but let charity cover them: they may have also their counterbalancing ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... Dravidian temples. The sculptures in the long and dimly lighted corridors at the base of the temple, and in the first tiers of the tower, are wonderfully realistic representations of a sensual and ferocious deity. But, as you stand in the court, and look up the sides of the tower to the gilded pinnacle on its dome, you discover that all the upper rows of gods and demons are of stucco. Money evidently gave out, as the structure rose, and plaster took the place ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... coral-tinted glow of the sunset, as a sailor steers by a star. There was further assurance that he was not losing himself or wandering in a circle, when from some chance outlook he ventured to glance backward and saw the pinnacle of Windy Mountain or the dome of the Pilot straight behind him. There lay the natural retreats of the lynx, the bear, and the outlaw like himself; and, as he fled farther from them, it was with the same frenzied instinct to return ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... preserved through the most violent political crises and outbreaks of personal hatred to himself, but also for his lofty disposition. He himself accounted it his greatest virtue that he never gave way to feelings of envy or hatred, but from his own exalted pinnacle of greatness never regarded any man as so much his enemy that he could never be his friend. This alone, in my opinion, justifies that outrageous nickname of his, and gives it a certain propriety; for so serene and impartial a man, utterly ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... dome for a mile into mid-air. On the right, the snow descended in a steep, unbroken sheet into the tremendous {p.124} basin which lies between the southern and the northern peaks, and which is enclosed by them as by two mighty arms.[6] Sheltered behind a pinnacle of ice, we fastened our flags upon the Alpine staffs, and then, standing erect in the furious blast, waved them in triumph ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... located the pass referred to,—the Port de Venasque: the notch in the chain from which the Maladetta is so strikingly revealed. It is itself another noted excursion from Luchon. A great sweep of rocky ridges rises to it, not perpendicular but sharply inclined. There is a savage black pinnacle shooting up on the left, remarkable for its uncompromising cone of rock, its rejection of all the refinements of turf and arbor and even of snow. This is the Pic de la Pique. On the right starts up another summit, sharp also, though less precipitous; and the short ridge between the two has in ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... phenomenon does history present to us than the rise of Spanish power to the pinnacle of greatness and glory in the sixteenth century? The Mohammedans, after centuries of fierce and stubborn war, driven back; the whole peninsula brought under a single rule with a single creed; enormous acquisitions from the Netherlands of Naples, Sicily, the Canaries; France humbled, ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... decided, Den?" I asked, for I felt that I should like to climb to the topmost pinnacle of the highest peak in all the world and shout the good news to the four corners ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... seen the career of a young literary man commenced with the first grand requisite of all excellence worth achieving—ENTHUSIASM; high notions of moral honor, and a warm devotedness to that "calling" which lifts units to a pinnacle formed by the dry bones of hundreds slain. We have seen that enthusiasm frozen by disappointment—that honor corrupted by the contamination of dissipated men—that devotedness to THE CAUSE fade away before the great want of nature—want ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... said Goupil, falling from the pinnacle of his hopes; "here's a stamped cheque; write me an order for twenty thousand francs; I want the money ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... wisdom. Doing right is God's"; or, "All great thoughts come from the heart"? Good are the words "The coward amongst us is he who sneers at the failings of humanity," and a healthy optimism rings in the phrase "There is for the mind but one grasp of happiness; from that uppermost pinnacle of wisdom whence we see that this world is well designed." In more playful mood is "Woman is the last thing which will be civilized by man." Let us hurry away abruptly, for he who starts quotation ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the highest pinnacle of happiness that he could himself have wished for, he departed this earth. His fatherland awaited him, his friends stretched their arms toward him; all the expressions of love which he so deeply needed, all testimonials of public honor, which he valued ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... of the day. If the day had been lost, Miltiades, even though he had escaped death upon the field, would have been totally and irretrievably ruined; but as it was won, the result of the transaction was that he was raised to the highest pinnacle of glory and renown. ...
— Darius the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... take care to reform, by your conduct and doctrine, all the churches, that all generations may call your land blessed through your beatitude. This, too, we thirst for with a sincere heart, that the spirit of tempests, which is wont to rage furiously about the pinnacle of honor, may never wrest you from the concern of your sanctification; lest, by reason of any deficiency in you, the deepest abyss of disgrace should succeed to the highest summit of dignity. And this we ardently long for, that, as the regulation of the ...
— Pope Adrian IV - An Historical Sketch • Richard Raby
... the commonplace; the "Coursing Hound," with its faded sign and weatherbeaten gables, has been lost to view long and long ago (if it ever really existed), and to-night he stands above the clouds, his foot upon the topmost pinnacle; and surely man can attain no higher, for to-night he feasts ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... rehearsed the events in the tannery house—for they were the events of his life now. The triumphs over his opponents and enemies fell away, and the pride of power. Such had not been his achievements. She had loved him, and no man had reached a higher pinnacle than that. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... sink from beneath him. His feet no longer touched the ground; a sense of supernatural buoyancy pervaded every fibre of his body: he felt himself floating in obscurity; then sinking softly, slowly, like a feather dropped from the pinnacle of a temple. Was this death? Nay, for all suddenly, as transported by the Sixth Supernatural Power, he stood again in light,—a perfumed, sleepy light, vapory, beautiful,—that bathed the marvellous streets of some Indian city. ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... the thickest of the wood. The green road in which they were riding dipped down to a low marshy place, where a stream soaked through the path. The rock, which seemed like a little pinnacle, rose sharply on their left clear of the bushes: all else was forest, except that a little path or clearing led up to the left, among the trees. There was an utter stillness in the air, which was all full of a golden light. The swords came merrily out of the scabbards with a sudden clang. ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... felt himself falling from the deck of the airship to the earth, was that he would strike on a pinnacle of ice and be killed. Much the same were the feelings of the others, as they admitted later. Jack was half senseless from fright when, seemingly half an hour after he tumbled, though in reality it was but a few ...
— Through the Air to the North Pole - or The Wonderful Cruise of the Electric Monarch • Roy Rockwood
... what a pretty fellow! a perfect doll!' The poor boy's head was completely turned; when he got home he ordered his coach out, and, putting on a ribbon of St. Anne, proceeded to drive all over the town, as though he had reached the pinnacle of fortune. 'Drive over every one,' he shouted to his coachman, 'who does not move out of the way!' All this was promptly reported to the empress: the decree went forth that he should be declared insane, and put under the guardianship of two of his ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... pinnacle of power was fast and smooth. Within half an hour new shackles were on Jason's wrists and he was chained to the wall in a dark room filled with other slaves. His leg-irons had been left on as an additional reminder of ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... cliffs, between the base and enormous sections of wall that had broken off and fallen far out. There was no weathering slope; the wind had carried away the smaller stones and particles, and had cut the huge pieces of pinnacle and tower into hollowed forms. This zone of rim merged into another of strange contrast, the sloping red stream of sand which flowed from the wall of ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... by calculated adultery had bought the power to ruin France. The Marquise de Pompadour, who began life as Jeanne Poisson,—Jane Fish,—daughter of the head clerk of a banking house, who then became wife of a rich financier, and then, as mistress of the King, rose to a pinnacle of gilded ignominy, chose this time to turn out of office the two ministers who had shown most ability and force,—Argenson, head of the department of war, and Machault, head of the marine and colonies; the one because he was not subservient to ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... general resigned his commission in the Czech Army, and by joining the Russian Army was instantly re-established in his position as Commander of the Russian armies on the right. Thus fell the glorious Czech legions from their high pinnacle of fame, killed as all armies must be the moment they join ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... difference, I think, between the brilliant Julius and the staid Octavian. The former might have settled the affairs of the world,—as its controller and master and the dazzling obvious mover of all the pieces on the board. I do not believe Octavian looked ahead at all to see any shining pinnacle or covet a place on it; but time and the Law hurled one situation after another at him, and he mastered and filled them as they came because it was the best thing he could do.... If we say that the two men were as the poles apart, there are but tiny indications of ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... kings form an impressive chapter in the history of Europe; and one of the most striking episodes in the narrative is the checkered life of the last king of France—one week among the mightiest monarchs on the loftiest pinnacle of ambition, he was, the next, an exile in a foreign ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... the studio when he had painted her portrait had been hours to remember, sound, sane hours in which they had discussed many things not comprehended in her philosophy, when he had led her by easy stages up the steep path he had climbed until she had gained, from the pinnacle of his successes, a vista of what had lain beneath. Unconsciously he had drawn upon her mentality until, surprised at its own existence, it had awakened to life and responded to his. To make her mental subjection the more complete, he had in his simplicity ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... I climbed by a ladder to the top of one of the towers. While there, we looked down into the street beneath, and saw a photographist preparing to take a view of the castle, and calling out to some little girl in some niche or on some pinnacle of the walls to stand still that he might catch her figure and face. I think it added to the impressiveness of the old castle, to see the streets and the kitchen-gardens and the homely dwellings that had grown up within the precincts of this ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the hindmost person, who was none other than the parson of Slaidburn. "That lantern, I think, is unquenchable. Does thy master never quit yon burning pinnacle?" ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... by ideal figures, and notably by the memorial to Robert Gould Shaw, a work distinctively American and without a counterpart in the annals of art. It is the spiritual quality of Saint Gaudens's work which sets it apart upon a lofty pinnacle—the largeness of the man behind it, the artist mind and ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... for my grandfather. He never petted, and he often frowned, and such people are generally reverenced. Besides, he was a just man, everybody said; a just man who might have been a great man if he had chosen, and risen to almost any pinnacle of worldly glory. That he had not so chosen was held to be a convincing proof of his greatness; for he was plainly too great to be great in the vulgar sense, and shrouded himself in the dignity of privacy and potentialities. This, at least, as time passed and he still did nothing, was the belief ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... signal for the two bears to discover him and rush on with a terrific roar. Blunderbore instantly fetched them each a sounding whack on their skulls, leaped over both their backs, and bounded up the side of the iceberg, where he took refuge, and turned at bay on a little ice pinnacle constructed ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... Rutherford seated himself behind it, robed in the black gown he had used in the dissecting-room, and crowned by a conical head-piece about two feet high, manufactured by Edward and himself, and which they had completed by placing on the pinnacle thereof a human skull. The effect of this picturesque costume was heightened by two large red circles around the doctor's eyes—whether obtained from the juice of the pokeberry or the inkstand on Edward's desk need ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... to be on the highest pinnacle of prosperity, beyond the reach of Fate. There was at Rome a Sire de Maucroix, sent thither by Fouquet on his private business. To him his friend La Fontaine wrote a full description of the day, and of the effect Vaux had produced upon the fashionable world. "You ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... neat arcaded town, deserves mention for the beauty of its situation, and the fine Alpine panorama which it commands. The glittering pinnacle of Monte Viso, is the most striking feature through this ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... glow from a furnace, giving the idea that the cloud-building was on fire, and that the flames from below, shooting up inside the dark walls, were the cause of the brilliant illumination that shone round every pinnacle and coign of vantage. It was a grand and a curious sight. You could fancy the sun looking across to the old Castle of Edinburgh standing on its rock, and saying, "Can you do anything like this with all the gas and paddelle you can lay your hands on?" ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... these cadets of his house, all of them now important personages in the kingdom. It was perhaps the swelling pride and exaltation of a man who had all Scotland at his command, and felt himself to have reached the very pinnacle of greatness, which suggested the singular expedition to France and Rome upon which Douglas set forth, in the mere wantonness of ostentation and pride, according to the opinion of all the chroniclers, to spread his own fame ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... there, and up and down, as though they had been bred among the valleys of the pass. There would come a ringing laugh from some rock above their head, and Lady Rowley looking up would see their dresses fluttering on a pinnacle which appeared to her to be fit only for a bird; and there would be the courier behind them, with two parasols, and a shawl, and a cloak, and an eye-glass, and a fine pair of grizzled whiskers. They made an Alpine club of their own, refusing to admit their father because he would not ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... is a power for good or evil; it may be likened to a magazine, holding within its throbbing sides an explosive deposit of untold energy and puissance, capable of all things within the range of the human. While it may lift man to the very pinnacle of goodness, it may also sink him to the lowest level of infamy. Only, in one case, it is spiritualized love, in the other, it is carnal; in one case it obeys the spirit, in the other, the flesh; in one case its true name is charity, in the other, it is animal, sexual instinct, and it is only improperly ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... shyly, and felt that it was indeed a proud moment for him. To be called Mr. Trotter by the great Bunsby, and to have his hand shaken into the bargain, put him on a pinnacle of greatness which he had never hoped ...
— Mark Mason's Victory • Horatio Alger
... found here from December 1 to February and are more abundant than the cod. Hake are plentiful on this ground and in 60 fathoms on the mud off the edge SE. of this ground during the summer season. Marks: The high pinnacle on the eastern end of Wooden Ball, showing just out by Matinicus Rock, SW. by S. ...
— Fishing Grounds of the Gulf of Maine • Walter H. Rich
... bright and motionless, low in the western sky, gleaming with deep bloody radiance. Directly beneath it, bathed in the white light of the moon, was a bare, rocky peak that seemed the highest point of the island. And upon that highest pinnacle, that chanced to be just below the ruddy star, was an ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... the wonder of the thing!" he cried. "The man pervades London, and no one has heard of him. That's what puts him on a pinnacle in the records of crime. I tell you, Watson, in all seriousness, that if I could beat that man, if I could free society of him, I should feel that my own career had reached its summit, and I should be prepared to turn to some ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... of Fifty-Six seemed to enter into and fill my whole life. I lived but from Saturday to Saturday. The appearance of false shirt-fronts would cast me to the lowest depths of despair; their absence raised me to a pinnacle of hope. It was not till winter softened into spring that Fifty-Six nerved himself to learn his fate. One Saturday he sent me a new white waistcoat, a garment which had hitherto been shunned by his modest nature, ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... the sweets of 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, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... could never quite consider human,—at his white and blue petticoats, and his effeminate face, so sleepy and so mindless, as if he expected him to turn into a plate or sugar-bowl, or begin flying in the air across some porcelain river, and alighting on the pinnacle of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... to whom it is administered to regard the person administering it as insane. Perhaps Adelaide might have talked more or less frankly to Janet had Janet not been so obviously in the highest of her own kind of heavens. She was raised to this pinnacle by the devoted attentions of the Viscount Brunais, eldest son of Saint Berthe and the most agreeable and adaptable of men, if the smallest and homeliest. Adelaide spoke of his intelligence to Janet, ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... master-stroke of policy at that moment would evidently have been this: I should have gone to the Regent and made out a story similar to the real one, but with this difference, all the ridicule of the situation should have fallen upon me, and the little Dubois should have been elevated on a pinnacle of respectable appearances! This, as the Regent told the Abbe everything, would have saved me. I saw the plan; but was too proud to adopt it; I followed another course in my game: I threw away the knave, and played with the king, i.e., with the Regent. After a little preliminary conversation, ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... passing up the stairs behind. The doctor was somewhat repressed in his mode of address by the communication which had so lately been made to him. Miss Dunstable was now standing on the very top of the pinnacle of wealth, and seemed to him to be not only so much above his reach, but also so far removed from his track in life, that he could not in any way put himself on a level with her. He could neither aspire so high nor descend so low; ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... into the beautiful butterfly, basking in the bright sunshine, the envy of the child and the admiration of the man. Is there no appeal in this wonderful and enchanting fact to man's highest reason? Does it contain no suggestion that man, representing the highest pinnacle of created life upon the globe, must undergo a final metamorphosis, as supremely more marvelous and more spiritual, as man is greater in physical conformation, and far removed in mental construction from ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... atoms as to cause a waste Greater than nutriment whereby they wax. For 'tmust be granted, truly, that from things Many a body ebbeth and runs off; But yet still more must come, until the things Have touched development's top pinnacle; Then old age breaks their powers and ripe strength And falls away into a worser part. For ever the ampler and more wide a thing, As soon as ever its augmentation ends, It scatters abroad forthwith to all sides round More bodies, sending them from out itself. Nor easily now is food ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... earthy thud that accompanied each "There" pointed the slightest significance to the word. The first thud was a slim, queer, stone flagon of vodka. Wanly, like some far pinnacle on some far Russian fortress, its grim shape loomed in the sallow lantern light. The second thud was a dust-colored basket of dates from some green-spotted Arabian desert. Vaguely its soft curving outline merged into shadow and turf. ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... and honour, so much the greater the favour of God. You entered this service with an upright mind and pure intent; and here, therefore, can you most safely remain, instead of casting yourself down from the pinnacle of the temple, which, you know, the Son of God refused to do. Remember His words, 'Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.' Be not tempted yourself, by pride of heart, to compare your lot with that of ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... grew stronger while Nelson marvelled at the great height of the structure he was mounting. Immediately in front of him swayed the naked shoulders of the three captive Atlanteans; he could see rose petals from their crowns fluttering in the strong warm breeze sweeping that man-made pinnacle for the worship of a ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... where is it to come from, that's the question? Cossey's do not like land now, any more than other banks do. However, I'll see my principal about it. But, George, I can't possibly get up to the Castle at eleven. I have got a churchwardens' meeting at a quarter to, about that west pinnacle, you know. It is in a most dangerous condition, and by-the-way, before you go I should like to have your opinion, as a practical man, as to the best way to deal with it. To rebuild it would cost a hundred and twenty ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... scents with which the night air was redolent; the warm, sensuous abandonment, felt rather than made obvious—it was not barbarism, but decadence. And I realized then how close are the two extremes. A reversion to type, merely. And I knew, then, that from the pinnacle of civilization which we of Earth had reached, naught lay ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... Christ, after his resurrection; but even by many a saint before their death. The Spirit used to catch Elijah away, no man could tell whither. It carried Ezekiel hither and thither: It carried Christ from the top of the pinnacle of the temple into Galilee; through it he walked on the sea; the Spirit caught away Philip from the eunuch, and carried him as far as Azotus (1 Kings 18:11,12; 2 Kings 2:11; Eze 3:14; Luke 4:14; Matt ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... have imagined. Trained first by one of the greatest, and next by one of the subtlest statesmen the world has ever seen, the provincial woollen-draper's son has all the qualities needed to raise France to the pinnacle of fortune, if his master will but ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... purposes of progress and of good the press of England has in reality become something more than a single estate of the realm, since it combines in itself, and exceeds the authority of all. But while raised to this lofty pinnacle of greatness, it does not, it dares not, it cannot from its very constitution permanently abuse its power; and though isolated attempts have been, from time to time, made in this direction, yet they have in the end, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... 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 ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... said gravely; "you have had far more experience among these people in the city than I have, and you know the need of caution. Take care; a slip may mean destruction now we have climbed so near the pinnacle of our hopes. I will say no more than this—Go, and Heaven ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... went to the mountains, and he scaled the loftiest pinnacle, hoping that there at last he might hear no more of that king whom none had ever seen. And as he stood upon the pinnacle, what a mighty panorama was spread before him, and what a mighty anthem swelled upon his ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... Rolled o'er the glen their level way; Each purple peak, each flinty spire, Was bathed in floods of living fire. But not a setting beam could glow Within the dark ravines below, Where twined the path, in shadow hid, Bound many a rocky pyramid, Shooting abruptly from the dell Its thunder-splintered pinnacle; Bound many an insulated mass, The native bulwarks of the pass, Huge as the tower which builders vain Presumptuous piled on Shinar's plain. The rocky summits, split and rent, Formed turret, dome, or battlement. Or seemed fantastically set With cupola or minaret, Wild crests as pagod ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... been applicable to Caius Caesar. There was nothing fair or gay even about the beginning of his reign. From first to last it was a reign of fury and madness, and lust and blood. There was an hereditary taint of insanity in this family, which was developed by their being placed on the dizzy pinnacle of imperial despotism, and which usually took the form of monstrous and abnormal crime. If we would seek a parallel for Caius Caesar, we must look for it in the history of Christian VII. of Denmark, and Paul of Russia. In all three we find the same ghastly pallor, the same sleeplessness which ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... extraordinary action, and a man who would have gambled his soul for the scientist's ecstasy of at last learning all about a hidden study—both had seen suddenly open up to them a broad avenue leading to the very pinnacle of their dreams. ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... only forty miles distant by an air line, close to the waters of Puget Sound. Yet here, almost in sight of them, I was enjoying a quietude known only to the haunts of nature. More than seven thousand feet above me towered the majestic dome of the second highest pinnacle in the United States, reserving observation to the north until its summit should be reached, while far toward the east and the south extended range upon range of mountain peaks, like an army of giants gathered around their chief. Here and ...
— The Beauties of the State of Washington - A Book for Tourists • Harry F. Giles
... being thus affected by the vulgar circumstances of life; only a few supreme natures stand unshaken under such a trial, and though his love of Amy was still passionate, he knew that her place was among a certain class of women, and not on the isolated pinnacle where he had at first visioned her. It was entirely natural that she shrank at the test of squalid suffering. A little money, and he could have rested secure in her love, for then he would have been able to keep ever before her the best ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... the noise caused by the opening of this great lead had awakened him from sleep. The open water was now about a quarter of a mile in width, and extended east and west as far as we could see when we climbed to the highest pinnacle of ice in the ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... blaze of light; in the hollow near Fleet Market, the house and warehouses of Mr. Langdale, a Catholic—a Christian like ourselves, though not one of our own blessed and reformed church—is blazing; a pinnacle of flame, like a volcano, is sent up into the air. St. Andrew's Church is almost scorched with the heat; whilst the figures of the clock—that annalist which numbers, as it stands, the hours of guilt—are plain as at noonday. The gutters beneath, catching here and there ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... inspiration from nature. The forest trees of Central Europe became pillars; grouped together, apparently haphazard, they reflected a mystical nature pulsing with mysterious life. Spreading and ramifying, growing together in an impenetrable network of foliage, they bore buds, leaves and fruits. Every pinnacle became a sprig, even the pendant icicles reappeared in the gable-boards. But the assimilation of natural objects did not cease there; tiny animals, light as a feather, run over the tendrils, lizards, birds, even the gnomes of German mythology, find their way into the Gothic cathedral. Not the traditional ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... outwardly seemed trivial enough, but already his keen and calculating mind had seen various side issues which might tend to place him—Robespierre—on a yet higher and more unassailable pinnacle. ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... like a fly to the face of the cliff my fate was certain. I was almost exhausted, and my heart sank as I searched in vain for a way up. The distance was not great now, a bare fifty feet separating me from the topmost pinnacle, but though I walked along the bottom of this barrier for some distance it still presented ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... satisfaction which Bonaparte must have felt at the pinnacle of grandeur where fortune had placed him was not, however, entirely unmixed with uneasiness and vexation. Except at Berlin, in all the other great Courts the Emperor of the French was still Monsieur Bonaparte; ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... of modern times; so lauded by the great geniuses who surrounded his throne, all of whom looked up to him as a central sun of power and glory,—is not to be flippantly judged, or ruthlessly hurled from that proud pinnacle on which he was seated, amid the acclamations of two generations. His successes dazzled the world; his misfortunes excited its pity, except among those who were sufferers by his needless wars or his ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... where, at Tripp's, orders, the carcass had been dragged away. From there, looking off to the left, up the cliffs, she would see the spot which Lee believed had harbored one of the riflemen. High above the canon rose the rocky pinnacle he had marked yesterday, with brush standing tall in a ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... to be the gist of Khalid's gospel. This, through the labyrinths of doubt and contradiction, is the pinnacle of faith he would reach. And often in this labyrinthic gloom, where a gleam of light from some recess of thought or fancy reveals here a Hermit in his cloister, there an Artist in his studio, below a Nawab in his orgies, above a Broker on the Stock Exchange, we have paused to ask a question ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... sister Sorais would levy war upon me. So be it. She shall not prevail against me. I, too, have my friends and my retainers. There are many, I say, who will shout "Nyleptha!" when my pennon runs up on peak and pinnacle, and the light of my beacon fires leaps tonight from crag to crag, bearing the message of my war. I will break her strength and scatter her armies. Eternal night shall be the portion of Sorais of the Night. Give me that parchment and the ink. So. Now summon the officer ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... attempt to lay the palace low. Again she was frustrated. The building had soared, by this time, to an ambitious height, and its splendour had reached the limits of the materials at command. The final pinnacle which was required to cope the structure had been mislaid. Hadria was searching for it, when Martha, seizing her chance, struck the palace a blow in its very heart, and in an instant, the whole was ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... 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 spot for ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... 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, and after describing the most distant ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... builder thrust Heavenward in Southampton town His spire and beamed his bells, Largely conceiving from the dust That pinnacle for ringing down Orisons ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... 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 those laws which were made for the ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... As from a pinnacle, Presley, from where he now stood, dominated the entire country. The sun had begun to set, everything in the range of his vision was overlaid with a ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... latch," I append, for I have been examining the mechanism of the gate since I came in, and have made a discovery which dislodges my savant from his pinnacle; namely, that the only fastening on the gate is a huge wooden latch, which not one of us had sense enough to lift; but then who thinks of taking a fort by assault and battery on the latch? Halicarnassus hit upon it by mere accident, and I therefore remorselessly ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... led me to 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 ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... descends to the popular strata; that, from one end of France to the other, a sullen hostility prevails against the new institutions; for now the political and social constitution is joined to the ecclesiastical constitution like an edifice to its spire, and, through this sharp pinnacle, seeks the storm even within the darkening clouds of heaven. The evil all springs out of this unskillful, gratuitous, compulsory fusion, and, consequently, from those who ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Now, all my poverty and humiliation will end!" Janina whispered rapturously to herself. She thought that a repertory of roles would immediately be assigned to her. She gave free reign to her imagination and already saw herself upon some pinnacle. She was already in that promised land of powerful emotions about which she dreamed every day in that realm that swarmed before her eyes with a stately throng of heroic figures, superhuman passions, and dazzling beauty, a realm in which there reigned ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... (which have hitherto kept this principle within bounds) will have been done away; the voice of reason will be unheard; the passions only will bear sway; famine, distress, havoc, and dismay will spread around; hatred, violence, war, and bloodshed will be the infallible consequence, and from the pinnacle of happiness, peace, refinement, and social advantage, we shall be hurled once more into a profounder abyss of misery, want, and barbarism than ever, by the sole operation of the principle of population!"—Such is a brief abstract of the argument ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... a niche, nigh to its pinnacle, Twelve Saints had once stood sanctified in stone; But these had fallen, not when the friars fell, But in the war which struck Charles from his throne, When each house was a fortalice—as tell The annals of full many a line undone,— ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... lantern to light my lord down. I lay and watched the King's favorite as he descended. The torches held slantingly above cast a fiery light over his stately figure and the face which had raised him from the low estate of a doubtful birth and a most lean purse to a pinnacle too near the sun for men to gaze at with undazzled eyes. In his rich dress and the splendor of his beauty, with the red glow enveloping him, he lit the darkness like a ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... lords, and therefore it would be superfluous to prove, that the liberties of Europe are now in the utmost danger; that the house of Bourbon has arrived almost at that exalted pinnacle of authority, from whence it will look down with contempt upon all other powers, to which it will henceforward prescribe laws at pleasure, whose dominions will be limited by its direction, and whose armies will march at ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... at a distance, appears the pinnacle of a lofty pagoda, a structure like most of those bearing the name, with eight corners and nine stories. Originally designed for the mere purposes of look-outs, these airy edifices have degenerated into appliances of ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... no opinion. I explained nothing. I let him continue to believe what he believes; because it is the only way to keep you on the pinnacle where he has placed you. Let any other reason for your conduct than an almost infantine ignorance of men and things be suggested and accepted, and down you will come, my poor Jane, and great will be the fall. Mine shall not be the hand thus ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... day! From the deck of the little ferry-boat that steamed its way across from Garrison's on that eventful afternoon I viewed the hills about West Point, her stone structures perched thereon, thus rising still higher, as if providing access to the very pinnacle of fame, and shuddered. With my mind full of the horrors of the treatment of all former cadets of color, and the dread of inevitable ostracism, I ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... which account all religions equal. He conceded that secular writings and mundane arts were not without their value and charm; in the arts may be permitted divers manifestations, such as landscape, animal, and flower painting. The Church is tolerant of all that is good, but on the highest pinnacle stands the Christian painter. Over these matters he had pondered long, and was accustomed to say to himself, "Let not my Christ be ever robbed of my love; the true home of art is within the soul before the altar of the Church; ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... the sides of the lighthouse there jutted out, clinging to the walls among the arabesques, engines of every description, useful and useless, windlasses, tackles, pulleys, counterpoises, ladders, cranes, grapnels. On the pinnacle around the light delicately-wrought ironwork held great iron chandeliers, in which were placed pieces of rope steeped in resin; wicks which burned doggedly, and which no wind extinguished; and from top to bottom the tower was covered by a complication of sea-standards, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... the embers of the expiring fire: and, getting the two marked trees in line, I walked away from them, keeping them in one, until I saw, just clear of the trees and bushes on the southern extremity of the island, a small pinnacle of uncovered rock peering blackly out from among the snowy glittering surf. I then drove the stick I held in my hand deep into the sandy beach, exclaiming, "Here lies the buried treasure-ship, if there be any ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... while 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; ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... Luther had frequently predicted that after his death his doctrine would wane and decline because of false brethren, fanatics, and sectarians, and that the truth, which in 1530 had been placed on a pinnacle at Augsburg, would descend into the valley, since the Word of God had seldom flourished more than forty years in one place. (Richard, Conf. Hist., 311.) Stephanus Tucher, a faithful Lutheran preacher of Magdeburg, wrote in 1549: "Doctor Martin Luther, ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... He knew that if he was caught in the open by the stampeded herd his chance for life would be small, and at once ran for the river. By desperate efforts he reached the breaks in the sheer banks just as the buffaloes reached them, and got into a position of safety on the pinnacle of a little bluff. From this point of vantage he could see the entire plain. To the very verge of the horizon the brown masses of the buffalo bands showed through the dust clouds, coming on with a thunderous roar like that of surf. Camp was a mile away, and the ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... step down from the pinnacle you stood on. So it's not cowardice that has set you down here. It's wrong conception. And I've thought of two things. The first, and best, is for you to go back. No one has taken your place, because no one could do the work. But if that's out of the question,—and only you know that, ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Mutsellim, who acted as their cicerone, as to the height of the rock on which the citadel was built above the valley, only made him suspected of being an engineer surveying the stronghold with a view to its capture. After climbing up a pinnacle of rock which overlooked the abyss, he was compelled to return re infecta; "and when we got a little way along the valley, I looked back; Sokol looked like a little castle of Edinburgh placed in the clouds; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... warriors who have figured in the great wars of Europe, from Charlemagne to the battle of Waterloo. His military career was so brilliant that it dazzled contemporaries. Without the advantages of birth or early patronage, he rose to the highest pinnacle of human glory. His victories were prodigious and unexampled; and it took all Europe to resist him. He aimed at nothing less than universal sovereignty; and had he not, when intoxicated with his conquests, attempted impossibilities, his power would have been practically unlimited ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... up to the highest pinnacle of the Mountain of the Thunders, and there fell to musing, the while scratching the side of his head with his mighty claw. At last he bethought himself of a spell or charm, which was taught him by his father, who lived before time was, and survived ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... which he at once reached the pinnacle of success, and became in his profession the most famous figure of his day, was the capture of the Rajah of Kishmoor's great ship, The Sun of the East. In this vessel was the Rajah's favorite Queen, who, together with her attendants, was set upon a pilgrimage ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... mountains, existing under appointed laws of birth and endurance, death and decrepitude? There can be no doubt as to the answer. The rock itself answers audibly by the murmur of some falling stone or rending pinnacle. It is not as it was once. Those waste leagues around its feet are loaded with the wrecks of what it was. On these perhaps, of all mountains, the characters of decay are written most clearly; around these are spread most gloomily the memorials ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... must return to our story. The triumph was complete. The timid and obscure girl found herself on the highest pinnacle of fame. Great men, on whom she had gazed at a distance with humble reverence, addressed her with admiration, tempered by the tenderness due to her sex and age. Burke, Windham, Gibbon, Reynolds, Sheridan, were among her most ardent eulogists. Cumberland acknowledged ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... west and northwest to latitude 47 north, there finding a broad inlet between 47 and 48, he entered, sailing therein more than twenty days . . . and found very much broader sea than was at the said entrance . . . a great island with a high pinnacle. . . . Being come into the North Sea . . . he returned to Acapulco." According to the story the old pilot tried to find his way to England in the hope of the Queen recouping him for goods taken by Cavendish, and furnishing him with a ship to essay the Northeast Passage ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... is not merely a suggestive analogy, but really true as a tendency, not only with regard to man's gains by the conquest of electricity, but also with respect to every other signal victory which has brought him to his present pinnacle of discernment and rule. If this permutative principle in former advances lay undetected, it stands forth clearly in that latest accession to skill and interpretation which has been ushered in by Franklin ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... returned to Paris, after the declaration of peace in the year 1807, he spent much of his time with the Empress and the Court at Fontainebleau. It was the time when he was at the pinnacle of his career. He had in three successive campaigns humbled Austria, crushed Prussia, and made the Russians very glad to get upon the right side of the Niemen. The old Bulldog over the Channel was still growling, but he could not get very far from his kennel. ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... accustomed to the deference of the country people, the young marquis came to Paris with the expectation of being a lion, supposing that his name and fortune were sufficient to place him upon any pinnacle he might desire. ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... surnamed the Just, who seems to have resided chiefly in Jerusalem, finished his career by martyrdom. Having proclaimed Jesus to be the true Messiah on a great public occasion, his fellow-citizens were so indignant that they threw him from a pinnacle of the temple. As he was still alive when he reached the ground, he was forthwith assailed with a shower of stones, and beaten to pieces with the ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... the glaciers. She, the murderess, the destroyer, is half a child of air and half the powerful ruler of the streams; therefore, she had received the power, to elevate herself with the speed of the chamois to the highest pinnacle of the snow-topped mountain; where the most daring mountaineer had to hew his way, in order to take firm foot-hold. She sails up the rushing river on a slender fir-branch—springs from one cliff to another, ...
— The Ice-Maiden: and Other Tales. • Hans Christian Andersen
... can find a thousand dramas in the books on geography if she knows how to interpret the pages of the books, and with these inspiring dramas she can lift her pupils to the very pinnacle of appreciation. Such tales are as fascinating as fairy stories and have the added charm of being true to the teachings of science. A raindrop seems a common thing, but cast in dramatic form it becomes of rare charm. It slides from the roof of the house and finds its way ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... conceit is dead and buried. But I want you to realize that during those few minutes I was not John Trenholme, an artist struggling for foothold on the steep crags of the painter's rock of endeavor, but a master of the craft gazing from some high pinnacle at a territory he had won. If you know anything of painting, Miss Manning, you will go with me so far as to admit that my indiscretion was impersonal. I, a poet who expressed his emotions in terms of color, was alone with Aphrodite ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... Rome stands at the gate of Pride, and the Pope has palaces in the streets of Pleasure and of Lucre; because the Church of England is the fairest part of the Catholic Church, surmounted by "Queen Anne on the pinnacle of the building, with a sword in each hand"; and because the Papist is turned away from the Catholic Church by a porter with "an exceedingly large Bible." "One fair morning," ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... would choose the manner of my death. On the pinnacle of rocks overlooking this valley, where each day that he hunted in the woods my dear Mus-kin-gum would stand and wave to me, tomorrow night 'neath the light of the moon, with my son's hand in mine—together ...
— How Ethel Hollister Became a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson
... leads Alexander eastward beyond the Tigris to spread far the name of Hellas. Akbar started as his grandfather had started, and Baber's faith was not less sincere.[10] But the contact with other races and other creeds diverted or heightened this first purpose of the Mongol, and at the pinnacle of earthly power, Akbar met and yielded to the temptation, which dazzled for a moment even the steady gaze of Napoleon. Apprehending the unity beneath the diversity of the religions of his various subjects, Hindoo, Persian, Mohammedan, Christian, Akbar dared the lofty enterprise and essayed to ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... at Court for me that will, Tottering Favor's pinnacle; All I seek is to lie still! Settled in some secret nest, In calm leisure let me rest; And, far off the public stage, Pass away my silent age. Thus, when, without noise, unknown, I have lived out all my span, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... masts, completely encircled by the flames, fell hissing into the water. The other, after standing awhile in solitary grandeur, formed a fiery pinnacle to the flaming ...
— The African Trader - The Adventures of Harry Bayford • W. H. G. Kingston
... time had come into Wanda Leland's life. In one swift moment she had risen to a pinnacle, she had looked down upon the level lowlands from the heights. The monotony of the commonplace receded and was lost; the aspect of life upon which she looked was wonderful and new. There had been a change within her. She was no longer the Wanda Leland she had ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... woman herself, and that these women at heart are very women, as entirely as their less gifted sisters are, and have the ordinary woman's longing for love and laughter, and for all the little things that make life happy. A pinnacle is a poor substitute for a hearthstone, from the feminine point of view; and laurel wreaths do not make half so satisfactory a journey's end as lovers' meetings. All of which it is difficult for ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... cornices, vast masses of wall, heavy pilasters, and, in general, the horizontal outlines and heavy expression of all these churches, have a character very remote from that of the airy, upspringing, fantastic German architecture, in which every shaft, arch, vault-girdle, pillar, window-frame, pinnacle, seems struggling and panting upward with an almost audible eloquence. This is not the expression of the duomo here. There is no perpetual Excelsior ringing from point, spire, and turret. On the contrary, the grave, almost rigid aspect of the ancient basilica—the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... apocalypse of giant glories, an empire of absolute being, independent and careless of human presence, affirming itself eternally to its own immeasurable solitudes. "I have reached the top and pinnacle of life," cried the poet; "this is the world wherein all things are made!" And now, indeed, save for the fairy bird, he trod his path alone. Now and then great clouds of mist swept down from the heights, or rose from the icy gorges, and wrapped him in ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... school"—the gradual development of every unnatural tendency in the youthful Jack Sheppard (another immor-t-al work by the author of the afore-lauded comedy)—the celebration, by a classic chaunt, of his reaching the pinnacle of depravity; this was the ne plus ultra of dramatic invention. Robbers and murderers began to be treated, after the Catholic fashion, with extreme unction; audiences were intoxicated with the new drop; sympathy became epidemic; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... must feel, while human tongues Tremble to speak, they did rage horribly, Breathing in self-contempt fierce blasphemies Against the Daemon of the World, and high Hurling their armed hands where the pure Spirit, 285 Serene and inaccessibly secure, Stood on an isolated pinnacle. The flood of ages combating below, The depth of the unbounded universe Above, and all around 290 Necessity's ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... one glass of champagne-frappe, momentarily stimulating, but quickly forgotten. When I was in America, I met the most charming women in New York—I did not spend two weeks, all told, in Washington—and New York is the concentrated essence, the pinnacle of American civilization and achievement. But although I frequently talked to one or another of those women for five hours at a time without a suggestion of fatigue, I always had the same sensation in regard to them that I had in regard to their waists while dancing—they were unsatisfactory, ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... 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
... Immediately Fulbert, believing that her husband, who aided in the flight, designed to be rid of her, coinceived a dire revenge. He and some others broke into Abelard's chamber by night, and perpetrated on him the most brutal mutilation. Thus cast down from his pinnacle of greatness into an abyss of shame and misery, there was left to the brilliant master only the life of a monk. The priesthood and ecclesiastical office were canonically closed to him. Heloise, not yet twenty, consummated her work of self-sacrifice ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... that—every one says that—beforehand," she answered; and not only her words, but also her way of saying them, seemed to set her down miles away from him, on a lonely pinnacle of experience. "Afterwards, you ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... to find the view of the snow-clad Olympians grow monotonous. It is true that every pinnacle was silhouetted, a spire of unsullied whiteness, against softest azure. The peaks towered, a sight to entrance the vision—ethereally majestic above a cerulean sea—but Geoffrey had seen rather too much snow unpleasantly close at hand ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... synonym for heartless destruction of happiness and life. The traffic itself was a great evil generality, and as such met condemnation. But in generalities, as in mountain ranges, there are specific points that tower out distinctively for consideration. Such a pinnacle of iniquity this liquor firm had seemed to Jean to be since her ...
— The Daughter of a Republican • Bernie Babcock
... for old work, and that the rubbish is worth a great deal of money. And then, if one of the ministers should purchase the group, he would go to pay his respects, and prove that he was the maker, and be almost carried in triumph! Oh! he believes he has reached the pinnacle; poor young man, and he is as proud as two ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... new object caught my glance. Mordecai—who, while he was thus speaking in paroxysms of alternate indignation and sorrow, had never for a moment ceased to turn over his books and boxes—had accidentally shaken a pile of tin cases from its pinnacle, and the whole rolled down at my feet. On one of them I saw, with no very strong surprise, the words—"Mortgage—Mortimer Castle." The eyes of both ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... 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 my ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... for a moment to doubt my father's probity.—Confide in him, dearest lady; he is wise though he is grave, and kind though he is plain and homely in his speech. Should he prove false he will fare the worse! for I will plunge myself from the pinnacle of the Warder's Tower to the bottom of the moat, and he shall lose his own daughter ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... Duniquoich Hill, on the top of which is a building like a watch-tower; it rises boldly and almost perpendicular from the plain, at a little distance from the river Arey, that runs through the grounds. To the right is the town, overtopped by a sort of spire or pinnacle of the church, a thing unusual in Scotland, except in the large towns, and which would often give an elegant appearance to the villages, which, from the uniformity of the huts, and the frequent want of ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... will not be an adult in the place who will not have learnt the secret of pure and lasting happiness. What do you say to that? ALINE Well, dear, of course a filter is a very useful thing in a house; but still I don't quite see that it is the sort of thing that places its possessor on the very pinnacle of earthly joy. ALEXIS Aline, you misunderstand me. I didn't say a filter—I said a philtre. ALINE (alarmed) You don't mean a love-potion? ALEXIS On the contrary—I do mean a love potion. ALINE Oh, Alexis! I don't think it would be right. I don't indeed. ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... 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 be a ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... thou darling of my soul! stop not till I rise superior to all superlative, till I mount triumphantly the pinnacle of glory, or at least open the way for one of my own family and name to enter ...
— The Fall of British Tyranny - American Liberty Triumphant • John Leacock
... were scarce and stunted. As I plodded slowly up the steep slope I heard loud reports, as though some one were setting off heavy blasts. They echoed and reechoed among the cliffs. A roaring stream dashed frothily down the slope, rocks rolled past. I climbed a pinnacle overlooking the glacier ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... there to hang for the space of three hours until he be dead; and thereafter to be cut down by the hangman, his head, hands, and legs to be cut off, and distributed as follows—viz., his head to be affixed on an iron pin, and set on the pinnacle of the west gavel of the new prison of Edinburgh; one hand to be set on the port of Perth, the other on the port of Stirling; one leg and foot on the port of Aberdeen, the other on the port of Glasgow. If at his death penitent, and ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... mind that if they escaped death at the hands of the law it was hardly likely that during the whole course of their after-lives they could hope to escape committing sin of some sort or another. At the moment they had reached a pinnacle of nobility which they could never pass and it was a thing to be desired for them that they should die now, when they would live to all posterity as heroes. The happiest fate for the Ronin was a righteous death, and as their admiring sympathiser the abbot expressed his unwillingness to do anything ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... 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 ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... my greatest need, the crest And pinnacle of my desires; And as I toil with feverish zest 'Twill be the dream of blazing fires That spurs me to my labour ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various |
