"Sublimity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shot from one end of it to the other, and caused it to kindle up, throughout its vast extent, like a mass of ignited and glowing charcoal. This, it must be remembered, was in the broad light of day. No fancy may picture the sublimity which might have been exhibited by a similar phenomenon taking place amid the darkness of the night. Hell itself might have been found a fitting image. Even as it was, my hair stood on end, while I gazed afar down within the yawning abysses, letting imagination descend, as it were, and stalk ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... sea, which ornamented the shrine of Domitius in the Flaminian Circus. In this, tender grace, heroic grandeur, daring power, and luxurious fullness of life were combined with wonderful harmony. [Footnote: Muller, 125.] Like the other great artists of this school, there was the grandeur and sublimity for which Phidias was celebrated, but a greater refinement and luxury, and skill in ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... Perhaps Laura, perhaps Tanqueray, had divined him and were endeavouring in kindness to take from him the poison of a preposterous hope. He preferred, however, not to explain them or the situation or himself thus. He was, with all possible sublimity, ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... rehearsal and preparation. Therefore let your Illustrious Sublimity provide the inhabitants of Salona with arms, and let them practise themselves in the use of them; for the surest safeguard of the Republic is ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... rival queens of Alexander the Great—Roxana and Statira—figure in the first, which is still presented upon the stage. It has been called, with just critical point, "A great and glorious flight of a bold but frenzied imagination, having as much absurdity as sublimity, and as much extravagance as passion; the poet, the genius, the scholar are ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... air of sublimity, too, looking over and beyond the cedars to the bay, and down the length of the winding stream that fretted at its feet or ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... belong the Dutch and Flemish schools; the sensible, which aims at refined and select nature, and accords with the Venetian school; and the intellectual, which aspires to the ideal in beauty, grandeur, and sublimity, and corresponds with the Greek, Roman, and Florentine schools. Modern art as founded upon the intellectual school of the ancient Greeks, became grand, scientific, and severe in the practice of Michael Angelo, and Leonardo da Vinci; graceful, beautiful and expressive in Raphael, ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... limited to any place, and is at once nowhere and everywhere. It is true, Luther does not proceed to explain how this body is still a human body, or indeed a body at all. Zwingli, in keeping the two natures distinct, wished to preserve the sublimity of his God and the genuine humanity of the Redeemer; but in so doing, he ended by making the two natures run parallel, so to speak, in a mere stiff, dogmatic formulary, and by an artificial interpretation and analysis of the words of Scripture ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... remarked, that tragedy, in no small degree, owed its downfall to Euripides. Poetry was gradually superseded by rhetoric, sublimity by earnestness, pathos by reasoning. Thus, Iphigenia and Macaria give so many good reasons for dying, that the sacrifice appears very small, and a modern wag in the upper regions of the theatre would, at the end of the speech of the latter heroine, ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... sad and solemn, yet not of unmingled pain. The very excess of our misery carried a relief with it, giving sublimity and elevation to sorrow. I felt that I carried with me those I best loved; I was pleased, after a long separation to rejoin Adrian; never again to part. I felt that I quitted what I loved, not what loved me. The castle walls, and long familiar trees, did not hear the parting ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... contemptible to lose sight of the sublimity of life even to enjoy perfect ease and happiness." That is a very grand saying; but, oh dear! we are poor creatures; and though Dulcie is an infinitely nobler being now than then, the tears are fit to start into our eyes when we remember the little brown head which "bridled ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... in his 'Lay of the Last Minstrel.' It was a timely and judicious truth, and I should have told it myself in the circumstances. But I should have stopped there. It was a stately truth, a lofty truth —a Tower; and I think it was a mistake to go on and distract attention from its sublimity by building another Tower alongside of it fourteen times as high. I refer to his remark that he 'could not lie.' I should have fed that to the marines; or left it to Carlyle; it is just in his style. It would have taken a medal at any ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... "to define all his images in such a manner as to bring them within the circle of our vision, and to subject them to the power of the pencil, renders him little better than grotesque, where Milton has since taught us to expect sublimity." It is true that Dante has never shrunk from embodying his conceptions in determinate words, that he has even given measures and numbers, where Milton would have left his images to float undefined ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... observed to your sublimity, that the sect of dervishes of which I had become a member, were then designated by the name of howling dervishes; all our religion consisted in howling like jackals or hyenas, with all our might, until we fell down in real or pretended convulsions. ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... purpose of the quotation." The improver, however, did not condescend to explain what he really meant by a mere stone with distances, though he strenuously maintained that he did not mean a milestone. His idea, therefore, stands on record, invested with all the sublimity that ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... or float about the canals of Venice, or woo the Venus and the Apollo; and learn from the silent lips of those teachers a lore sweeter than the French novelists impart;—let who will, climb the tremendous Alps, and feel the sublimity of Switzerland as he rises from the summer of Italian lakes and vineyards to the winter of the glaciers, or makes the tour of all climates in a day by descending those mountains towards the south;—let those who care for it, explore in Germany ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... Nature excites and recalls it, as by a perpetual revelation. Our feelings almost necessitate it; and the law of conscience peremptorily commands it. The arguments, that at all apply to it, are in its favour; and there is nothing against it, but its own sublimity. It could not be intellectually more evident without becoming morally less effective; without counteracting its own end by sacrificing the life of faith to the cold mechanism of a worth less because compulsory assent. The belief of a God and a future state, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... said Eve, who clung to her father's arm, as she gazed around her equally in admiration and in awe; "a dreadful exhibition of the sublimity of nature!" ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... the ground at the sight of the fearful slaughter at Roncesvalles, we are rather moved to smile at the violence of their emotion than to weep over the dead, so little power has the poet to touch the springs of feeling. However, there are passages in which the poem rises to sublimity, and which have been pronounced ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... by the mutual contradictoriness of concepts, 91. Criticism of his attempt to transcend ordinary logic, 92. Examples of the 'dialectic' constitution of things, 95. The rationalistic ideal: propositions self-securing by means of double negation, 101. Sublimity of the conception, 104. Criticism of Hegel's account: it involves vicious intellectualism, 105. Hegel is a seer rather than a reasoner, 107. 'The Absolute' and 'God' are two different notions, 110. Utility of the Absolute in conferring mental peace, 114. ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... began to lie about the classics. I said to people who knew no Greek that there was a sublimity, a majesty about Homer which they could never hope to grasp. I said it was like the sound of the sea beating against the granite cliffs of the Ionian Esophagus: or words to that effect. As for the truth of it, I might ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock
... Venetian school than triviality. Color was taken up with the greatest seriousness, and handled in such masses and with such dignified power that while it pleased it also awed the spectator. Without having quite the severity of line, some of the Venetian chromatic schemes rise in sublimity almost to the Sistine modellings of Michael Angelo. We do not feel this so much in Giovanni Bellini, fine in color as he was. He came too early for the full splendor, but he left many pupils who completed ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... picture of the country-bred child, palpitating with awed delight in the belief that she had wrested Something from Nothing. Youth alone is absolutely fearless. The presumption of ignorance is akin to sublimity. ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... was in their intelligent and moral nature, were, as to that nature, in a condition analogous to what their physical existence would have been under a total and permanent eclipse of the sun. It was perpetual night in their souls, with all the phenomena incident to night, except the sublimity. While the material economy, constituting the order of things which belonged to their temporal existence, was in conspicuous manifestation around them, pressing with its realities on their senses; while nature presented to them its open and distinctly-featured aspect; while there ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... been written in the first or second century of the Christian era,(1)—but in which the questions raised by man in the remotest ages, to which we can trace back his desire "to comprehend the ways of the Most High," are invested with a grandeur of thought and sublimity of word to which I know of no parallel in writers we ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... subjects afford a noble field for the play of imagination, and it is a certain truth that the purity of composition is generally defective, in proportion to that degree of sublimity at which the Poet is capable of arriving[59]. Great objects are apt to confound and dazzle the imagination. In proportion as this faculty expands to take them in, its power of conceiving them distinctly becomes less adequate to the subject; and when the mind is overwrought ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... succeeded finally in farming prairie land, but that most of them gradually drifted to the towns, where they became waiters, barbers, porters, and domestic servants. My impression is that he over-estimated their capacity. But this does not diminish the moral sublimity ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... General vowed it was the exact dress of the Highlanders in the late war. The Chevalier's Guard, he declared, had all white satin slashed breeches, and red boots—"only they left them at home, my dear," adds this wag. Not one pennyworth of sublimity would he or George allow henceforth to Mr. Home's performance. As for Harry, he sate in very deep meditation over the scene; and when Mrs. Lambert offered him a penny for his thoughts, he said, "That he thought, Young ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... approached. The victim did not pray that the cup might pass from his lips. He ceased to struggle against the inevitable, and submitted to his fate, becoming as gentle and peaceful as a child. As the earth left him, he turned to heaven. "I understood and felt," said Count Prokesch-Osten, "all the sublimity there is in religion, which alone could throw a light on this man's path, through the uncertainty and darkness that surrounded him.... Religion is our staff. We can find no surer support in our journey ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... P——, turning his eyes in the direction of the mountains. "There is nothing in the world to be compared to the sublimity of this scenery, defined as the outlines are by the clearness of the atmosphere and its deep blue tint." After a short pause he continued, "When we can see at one glance such an immensity of space, and know that this vast tract of mountain and of valley must be full ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... "for me there is but one life which is with you; but for you there is one will which is your own. Yes, I confess, I love you with the whole fire of love, but I feel I am not worthily yours. You stand far above me in nobility, sublimity and purity, and I can scarcely understand the thought of ever calling you my wife. And, yet, there is no other road on which we could travel through life together. Marie, you are wholly free; I ask for no sacrifice. ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... of invocation, and in pomp of numbers, surpasses all that Greece, (176) melodious but simple in the service of the altar, ever poured forth from her vocal groves in solemn adoration. By the force of native genius, the ancients elevated their heroes to a pitch of sublimity that excites admiration, but to soar beyond which they could derive no aid from mythology; and it was reserved for a bard, inspired with nobler sentiments than the Muses could supply, to sing the praises of that Being whose ineffable perfections ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... cry— Lest in some after moment aught more mean 5 Might stamp me mortal! A triumphant shout Black Horror scream'd, and all her goblin rout Diminish'd shrunk from the more withering scene! Ah! Bard tremendous in sublimity! Could I behold thee in thy loftier mood 10 Wandering at eve with finely-frenzied eye Beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood! Awhile with mute awe gazing I would brood: Then weep ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... has never been presented with such sublimity of expression, such noble simplicity and force of thought, as in the majestic and touching legend of Job. But its completeness, as a presentation of the human tragedy, is impaired by the excessive ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... from thousands of gazers, he will realize perhaps for the first time how intense is the passion of sympathy which they have sealed up, how powerful the emotion to which they are forbidden to appeal. The most pathetic figure in the Passion Play is not Christ, but his mother. There is in him also sublimity. She is purely pathetic. And after Mary the mother comes Mary Magdalene. Protestantism will have much leeway to make up before it can find any influence so potent for softening the hearts and inspiring the imagination of men. ...
— King of the Jews - A story of Christ's last days on Earth • William T. Stead
... forth the universe either as a part of the substance of God, or as an unsubstantial something proceeding from him: the former a conception more tangible and readily grasped by the mind; the latter of unapproachable sublimity, when we recall the countless beautiful and majestic forms which Nature on all sides presents. This visible world is only the ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... fateful wanderings, his unparalleled pilgrimage, through the lands and the centuries, along an endless, thorny path, drenched with blood, watered with tears, across nations and thrones, lonely, terrible, sublime with the stern sublimity of tragic scenes. They are not the sights and experiences to inspire joyous songs—melody is muffled by terror. Only lamentation finds voice, an endless, oppressive, anxious wail, sounding adown, through two thousand years, like a long-drawn sigh, reverberating in far-reaching echoes: "How long, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... thoughts were diverted from the sublimity of the sight which had claimed his attention. At that moment he saw the form of some one peering just above the ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and Simon's Mine • Ross Kay
... had any fixed abiding place, in a visible majesty, in an imperial grace, in a godlike stamp of softened power, which shone upon that radiant countenance like a living halo. Never before had I guessed what beauty made sublime could be—and yet, the sublimity was a dark one—the glory was not all of heaven—though none the less was it glorious. Though the face before me was that of a young woman of certainly not more than thirty years, in perfect health, and the first flush of ripened beauty, yet it had stamped upon it a look of unutterable ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... is there an image more striking than his "shapeless sculpture?" Of sculpture in general, it may be observed, that it is more poetical than nature itself, inasmuch as it represents and bodies forth that ideal beauty and sublimity which is never to be found in actual nature. This at least is the general opinion. But, always excepting the Venus di Medicis, I differ from that opinion, at least as far as regards female beauty; for the head of Lady Charlemont (when I first saw her ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... form, and the floating essence it is to contain. On the one hand, was the teeming, still fluid world, of old beliefs, as we see it reflected in the somewhat formless theogony of Hesiod; a world, the Titanic vastness of which is congruous with a certain sublimity of speech, when he has to speak, for instance, of motion or space; as the Greek language itself has a primitive copiousness and energy of words, for wind, fire, water, cold, sound—attesting a deep susceptibility to the impressions of those things—yet with edges, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... differ with the majority was to be suspected, and where to be suspected was almost certain death—Thomas Paine had the courage, the goodness, and the justice to vote against death. To vote against the execution of the king was a vote against his own life. This was the sublimity of devotion to principle. For this he was arrested, imprisoned, and doomed to death. There is not a theologian who has ever maligned Thomas Paine that has the courage to do this thing. When Louis Capet was on trial for his life before the French convention, Thomas Paine ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... grandeur, which, contrasted with the present solitude of the scene, impresses the traveller with awe and curiosity. During my travels abroad I visited this spot. As I walked over the loose fragments of stone, which lay scattered through the immense area of the fabrick, and surveyed the sublimity and grandeur of the ruins, I recurred, by a natural association of ideas, to the times when these walls stood proudly in their original splendour, when the halls were the scenes of hospitality and festive magnificence, and when they resounded with the voices of those whom death had long since ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... ends our figure of speech; for only the pitifulness of the defeat is the Great Mogul's; the sublimity of suicide is proper ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... and our time but a moment; and yet, as that inconceivably grand system is now understood by us, there is nothing in it which seems to conflict with the dictates of reason, or with the infinite perfections of God. On the contrary, the revelations of modern science have given an emphasis and a sublimity to the language of inspiration, that "the heavens declare the glory of the Lord," which had, for ages, been concealed from the loftiest conception of ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... been reading the writings of the Hebrew Prophets, and of those other gifted bards who communed so intently with nature and with nature's God, it has seemed to me impossible that any one could enter fully into all the tenderness, beauty, and sublimity of their language, or receive into his heart all its peculiarity of meaning, unless his own eye had been used to trace the skill of that hand which framed and fashioned every thing that is, and to descry ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... strongly recommended by Gluck for her good natural voice. At Her Majesty's request, Gluck himself taught Madame Saint Huberti the part of Armida. Sacchini, also, at the command of Marie Antoinette, instructed her in the style and sublimity of the Italian school, and Mdlle. Benin, the Queen's dressmaker and milliner, was ordered to furnish the complete dress ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 4 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... being exhibited only by slight and subtle use of contrast. Similarly as to form; some compositions associate massive and rugged forms, others slight and graceful ones, each with few interruptions by lines of contrary character. And, in general, such compositions possess higher sublimity than those which are more mingled in their elements. They tell a special tale, and summon a definite state of feeling, while the grand compositions ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... That is what ought to have been—perhaps was. Now, see how I tell a pathetic negative. Nobody knows what became of her—that is finely indicated by the series coming to a close. There is no sixth picture." Here Hans pretended to speak with a gasping sense of sublimity, and drew back his head with a frown, as if looking for a like impression on Deronda. "I break off in the Homeric style. The story is chipped off, so to speak, and passes with a ragged edge into nothing—le neant; can anything be more sublime, especially in French? ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... herself that the horrible forebodings she had in reference to the island, were but the precursor of what might be expected. The grandeur and sublimity of its scenery, its isolated position, being surrounded by the waters of the Atlantic—the unnatural music and noises, all conspired to fill the mind of this young girl with the idea that something was about to transpire of no ordinary ...
— Blackbeard - Or, The Pirate of Roanoke. • B. Barker
... "Why in her sublimity. And that belief had remained with her, I make out, till the accident of the other day opened your eyes. For that it did," said Maria, ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... the falling avalanche or the shrill voice of the restless crow, was so evident and so powerful, and combined so impressively with the marvellous beauty of the surroundings, that the heart could not fail to recognise the sublimity of Nature and ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... Mlle. Giraud rode among the Andean peaks, enveloped in their greatness and sublimity. The mightiest cousins, furthest removed, in nature's great family become conscious of the tie. Among those huge piles of primordial upheaval, amid those gigantic silences and elongated fields of distance the littlenesses ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... within their reach than the pathetic; for they never attempted that comprehension and expanse of thought which at once fills the whole mind, and of which the first effect is sudden astonishment, and the second rational admiration. Sublimity is produced by aggregation, and littleness by dispersion. Great thoughts are always general, and consist in positions not limited by exceptions, and in descriptions not descending to minuteness. It is with great propriety that subtlety, which in ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... Miltonic blank verse of Paradise Lost is not a copy of any master; it is a development and a consummation of two influences, the slow maturity of Milton's mind, deepened and broadened by the Commonwealth controversies "not without dust and heat," and the exalted sublimity of the yet unattempted theme of justifying God's management of human and divine affairs. His maturity brought him his great familiarity both in matter and in style with nearly all that was best in European literature, and his peculiar subject, with only gods and angels ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... hills, with the Potomac at its feet, it resembles the capitol in Rome, surrounded by the Alban hills, with the Tiber at its feet. But the situation is grander than that of the Roman capitol. The edifice itself is worthy of the situation. It has beauty of form and sublimity in proportions, even if it lacks originality in conception. In itself it is a work of art. It ought not to receive in the way of ornamentation any thing which is not a work of art. Unhappily this rule has not always ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... not reached our time: many others were published. These accounts of the virtues and sufferings of the martyrs were received by the faithful with the highest respect. They considered them to afford a glorious proof of the truth of the Christian faith, and of the holiness and sublimity of its doctrines. They felt themselves stimulated by them to imitate the heroic acts of virtue and constancy which they placed before their eyes, and to rely on the assistance of heaven when their own hour of trial should arrive. Thus the vocal blood of the martyrs ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... admiration for transcendent intelligence evoked. From among a host this luminary stands forth. Faultless he was not, as we shall presently see; but his failings, whatever they may have been, in no way obscured the luster of a genius that gave sublimity to the most prosaic of pursuits, and, in the teeth of prejudice, vindicated law against the toils of the narrow-minded and the opprobrium of ages. What Bacon proved to philosophy Mansfield in his day became, in a measure, to his own cherished ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... beyond the shelter of the cliffs of Rakata, and come partly into view of the other parts of the island, the real extent of the volcanic violence burst upon Nigel and Moses as a new revelation. The awful sublimity of the scene at first almost paralysed them, and they failed to note that not only did a constant rain of pumice dust fall upon them, but that there was also a pretty regular dropping of small stones into the water around them. Their ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... completed the emancipation of South America, and made the achievements of Bolivar easy in the Northern Andes. Said the hero of Maipu—and what words of man under the circumstances ever equalled the declaration in moral sublimity!— ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... could have wished, however, that you had prepared not only the tragedies of Racine, Corneille, and Voltaire, but also some of the comedies of Moliere. You know how highly I esteem them. But the Germans would not understand them. We must show them the beauty and sublimity of our tragic theatre; they will appreciate it better than the profound wit of Moliere. Make it indispensable for the actors, and very particularly the actresses, to speak as distinctly and loudly as possible, that the Emperor Alexander, who is somewhat hard of hearing, ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... towns, the houses clustered at their feet like subjects round some majestic queen, were images indeed of the civil supremacy which the Church of the Middle Ages had asserted for itself; but they were images also of an inner spiritual sublimity, which had won the homage of ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... opinions of his companion were not altogether without some influence on his mind. Here and there, among those fine bursts of passion and description that abound in the third Canto of Childe Harold, may be discovered traces of that mysticism of meaning,—that sublimity, losing itself in its own vagueness,—which so much characterised the writings of his extraordinary friend; and in one of the notes we find Shelley's favourite Pantheism of Love thus glanced at:—"But this is not all: the feeling ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... speaking of the advantage of a low horizon, he says:—"What gives sublimity to Rembrandt's Ecce Homo more than this principle? a composition which, though complete, hides in its grandeur the limits of its scenery. Its form is a pyramid, whose top is lost in the sky, as its base in tumultuous murky waves. From the fluctuating crowds who inundate ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet
... and Roman systems. Varuna, the god of heaven. The sublimity of the Vedic description of him.] We have first referred to Agni and Soma, as being the only divinities of highest rank which still retain their physical character. The worship paid to them was of great antiquity; for it is also prescribed in the Persian Avesta, and ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... his vehemence and his posture - till, at last, in the midst of an almost furious vow, in which he dedicated himself to me for ever, he relieved me, by suddenly calling upon Jupiter, Juno, Mars, and Hercules, and every god, and every goddess, to witness his oath. And then, content with his sublimity, he ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... was exceedingly hot, and we wended our way slowly along the plains of Old Castile. With all that pertains to Spain, vastness and sublimity are associated: grand are its mountains, and no less grand are its plains, which seem of boundless extent, but which are not tame unbroken flats, like the steppes of Russia. Rough and uneven ground ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... taught that the practice of, what they rather vaguely designated, virtue, involves its own reward, discarded the idea of a future retribution. Plato had still a goodly number of disciples; and though his doctrines, containing not a few elements of sublimity and beauty, exercised a better influence, it must be admitted, after all, that they constituted a most unsatisfactory system of cold and barren mysticism. The ancient philosophers delivered many excellent moral precepts; but, as they wanted the light of revelation, ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... to the treaty of Luneville: and the latter (that is, our Thomas Campbell) celebrated that battle in an Ode—of which I never know how to speak in sufficient terms of admiration: an ode, which seems to unite all the fire of Pindar with all the elegance of Horace; of which, parts equal Gray in sublimity, and ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... over the points involved. What Professor Pupin has apparently done is to free the wire from those miscellaneous disturbances known as "induction." This Pupin invention involved another improvement unsuspected by the inventor, which shows us the telephone in all its mystery and beauty and even its sublimity. Soon after the Pupin coil was introduced, it was discovered that, by crossing the wires of two circuits at regular intervals, another unexplainable circuit was induced. Because this third circuit travels apparently ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... of gloom, horror and sublimity is the result of geological conditions and the action of water, which together have produced many similar phenomena in the region of the causses, but in no other case, I believe, with such power in composing the picturesque. Imagine ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... concealed—and that the Lord alone is exalted, and that those who now shut their eyes will then be compelled to acknowledge these truths. That Isaiah has this general judgment in view, is too clearly proved by the sublimity of the whole description, by the express mention of the whole earth, e.g., ii. 19, and by not limiting, in the individualized description in ver. 12 sqq., the high and lofty which is to be brought low to Judah ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... interpreted her stupefaction as contrition, her silence as delicacy, her changeing of colour as flying hues of shame: the partial coldness at their meeting he attributed to the burden on her mind, and muttering in a magnanimous sublimity that he forgave her, he claimed her mouth ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... this mountain the better, I find that kings are called mountains in Scripture; and good kings are so called, for these three, 1. For their sublimity; as mountains are high above the valleys, so are kings lifted up in majesty above their subjects: some apply that place to kings, "Hear ye, O mountains, the Lord's controversy, and ye strong foundations ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... the beauty, simplicity, and sublimity of that comparison. I remained absolutely mute and confounded. Though it was demolishing all the traditions and doctrines of my Church, and pulverizing all my holy doctors and theologians, that noble answer found such ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... Dame, moreover, gives it a sublimity which would swallow up anything that might look gewgawy in its ornamentation, were we to consider it window by window, or pillar by pillar. It is an advantage of these vast edifices, rising over us and spreading ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... superiority in sublimity and beauty which I, and those who pursue the same path with me, oppose," replied Hermon. "Nature is sufficient for us. To take anything from her, mutilates; to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... a gaudily attired attendant had left upon his mind as he grew up into boyhood. But as he listened to the Sea-flower, as she told him of her home in the sea, of the music of the glorious billows, companions of her childhood, filling the very soul with nature's beauty and sublimity, he looked upon her, as if fearful she might prove an "Undine," and he would not have been taken by surprise had her spiritual face faded calmly from beneath his gaze, to join her sister ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... Yellowstone, the Columbia, and the Colorado, the total depth of the Chelan canyon reaches in places nearly 8,000 feet, while its waters occasionally cover a bottom 1,700 feet below the surface. Throughout the 55 mile ride from Chelan to Stehekin, views are observed that for immensity, sublimity and color blending are unexcelled. Right into the heart of the Cascades the traveler is drawn, while the solemnity and general impressiveness of the whole increases, as he is gradually brought in closer intimacy with divine nature. Among ...
— The Beauties of the State of Washington - A Book for Tourists • Harry F. Giles
... the scene, as a protagonist should be. He is particularly suited, by our received ideas of his energy and restlessness, for the principal character. The devil of the German patriarch's Faust is, after all, but a profligate casuist; and the high poetical tone of sublimity of Milton's Satan is no less to be avoided in a delineation that has truth and nature for its inspiration. In short, the devil, the true romantic devil, must speak, as the devil would naturally speak, under the various circumstances ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... and coldness. At the Church of St. John and St. Paul is the famous martyrdom, or rather assassination, of St. Peter Martyr, by Titian, one of the most magical pictures in the world. Its tragic horror is redeemed by its sublimity. Here too is a most admirable series of bas-reliefs in white marble, representing the history of our Saviour, the work of a modern sculptor. Here too the Doges are buried; and close to the Church is the equestrian statue of one of the Falieri ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... and as oft as they named the Redeemer, Lowly louted the boys, and lowly the maidens all courtesied. Friendly the Teacher stood, like an angel of light there among them, And to the children explained he the holy, the highest, in few words, Thorough, yet simple and clear, for sublimity always is simple, Both in sermon and song a child can seize on its meaning. Even as the green-growing bud is unfolded when Spring-tide approaches Leaf by leaf is developed, and, warmed by the radiant sunshine, Blushes with purple and gold, till at last the perfected ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... large, heavy drops; but the sun was bravely struggling through the dense masses of black clouds, which had obscured his rays during the long stormy day, and now cast a watery and uncertain gleam upon the wild scenery, over which Bamborough Castle frowns in savage sublimity. ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... collation, including a salad of the Avon crawfish, and a little iced punch. It would be still better for good pedestrians to walk the distance by the fields and push on to the inn for refreshment, without which all tame scenery is so very flat. In the sublimity of the Alps, the Pyrenees, or even the great Highland hills, a man may forget his dinner; but, when within the verge of the horizon church-towers and smoking chimneys of farm-houses continually occur, visions of fat, brown, sucking pigs, rashers of ham and boiled fowls, with ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... into the rare show of Nature is lifting my soul into sublimity, I am brought down to the base earth again by an exception. This is the plague of all high science. You design a stately theory, collect from many quarters a wealth of facts to establish it with, ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... critical moments in history,' he says, 'men have come out from the narrow and confined track of their daily life and seized in one wide vision the infinite universe; the august face of eternal nature is suddenly unveiled before them; in the sublimity of their emotion they seem to perceive the very principle of its being; and at least they did discern some of its features. By an admirable stroke of circumstance, these features were precisely the only ones ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley
... apologised for it, but, while it raises difficult problems in its details, the total effect of it is to present a sublime conception of Jesus and of His absolute, universal authority. The conception is heightened in sublimity when the two adjacent miracles are contemplated ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... feeling was the very sublimity of maiden innocence if it were real; if not, well, the coquetry was ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... God, the Holy Church, Mary is the rose, the pride of the garden, the queen of the flowers. The rose is therefore the most beautiful symbol of Mary, of all saints the queen, exalted above all saints in sublimity, beauty, gentleness and sweetness. Therefore, because Mary is among the saints what the rose is among flowers, she is called "the mystical rose." And the name rosary is to ...
— The Excellence of the Rosary - Conferences for Devotions in Honor of the Blessed Virgin • M. J. Frings
... and dark casements, and wasteful finery of shops, and feeble coxcombry of club-houses, it is well; promote the building of more like them. But if they never taught you any thing, and never made you happier as you passed beneath them, do not think they have any mysterious goodness of occult sublimity. Have done with the wretched affectation, the futile barbarism, of pretending to enjoy; for, as surely as you know that the meadow grass, meshed with fairy rings, is better than the wood pavement cut into hexagons; and as surely as ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... His legs were the pillars of Hercules, his body a brewer's butt, his face the sun rising in a red mist. We have been told that magnitude is a powerful cause of the sublime; and if this be true, the dimensions of his lordship certainly had a copious and indisputable claim to sublimity. He seemed born to bear the whole hierarchy. His mighty belly heaved and his cheeks swelled with the spiritual inflations of church power. He fixed his open eyes upon me and surveyed me from top to toe. I too made my remarks. 'He is a true son of the church,' said I.—The ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... write rapidly were traits Scott admired most in Byron, and in the vigor and beauty of the poems he found the fine flower of all these qualities. "We cannot but repeat our conviction," he says, "that poetry, being, in its higher classes, an art which has for its elements sublimity and unaffected beauty, is more liable than any other to suffer from the labour of polishing.... It must be remembered that we speak of the higher tones of composition; there are others of a subordinate character where ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... have been distinct in manner and expression, and even in idea. Few actors or readers can be found to agree respecting Shakespeare's conception of the character. This, however, may be safely asserted, that no criticism on Hamlet will ever be permanent which does not recognize the sublimity of his nature. Horatio understood Hamlet better than anyone, and his judgment of him doubtless ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... from images which disdain the pencil. Had I wished to make a picture of this scene I had thrown much less light into it. But I consulted nature and my feelings. The ideas excited by the stormy sunset I am here describing owed their sublimity to that deluge of light, or rather of fire, in which nature had wrapped the immense forms around me; any intrusion of shade, by destroying the unity of the impression, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... one fail to appreciate the beauty and sublimity of some of the Vedic hymns of the Hindus or the profound depth of the philosophic reach of the Upanishads, those sublime "guesses at truth," or the great excellence of the Bhagavad-Gita which is the gem ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... necessary,' argued Sir Matthew, 'to have justice kept up at all times,' whatever flaws may exist in the title of the men in whom the supreme authority may chance to be vested. Never yet was there a simpler proposition; but there is sublimity in its breadth. It involves the true doctrine of subjection to the magistrate, as enforced by St. Paul. The New Testament furnishes us with no disquisitions on political justice: it does not say whether the title of Domitian ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... of reason, to which the mind cannot sink gently of itself—but to which it must descend by treading the steps of thought. And for the sublime,—if we consider what are the cares that occupy the passing day, and how remote is the practice and the course of life from the sources of sublimity, in the soul of Man, can it be wondered that there is little existing preparation for a poet charged with a new mission to extend its kingdom, and to augment and spread ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... the first foe that menaces him whom the senses yet grasp and inthrall. Dost thou wonder that I close upon thee the gates forever? Dost thou not comprehend, at last, that it needs a soul tempered and purified and raised, not by external spells, but by its own sublimity and valour, to pass the threshold and disdain the foe? Wretch! all my silence avails nothing for the rash, for the sensual,—for him who desires our secrets but to pollute them to gross enjoyments and selfish vice. How have the imposters and sorcerers of the earlier times perished ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Tode, he literally poured over his three leaves. Very little of the language did he understand—the great and terrible figures were utterly beyond his knowledge; yet as he read them once, and again and again, something of the grandeur and sublimity stole into his heart, helped him without his knowledge, and now and then a word came home, and he caught a vague glimpse of its meaning. "Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil." That was plain; that must mean the great All-seeing Eyes, for Tode knew enough of human ...
— Three People • Pansy
... descent upon sublimity, according to Byfleld—took me in the face. I put up my hands. I broke into elfish laughter, and ended with a sob. Sobs and laughter together shook my fasting body like a leaf; and I zigzagged across the fields, buffeted this side and that by a mirth as uncontrollable as it ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her honor. Campanari, though himself confident of the genuineness of the picture, could not procure it to be recognized in England. Accordingly he sent it to Rome, where the Academy of San Luca, with Minardi at its head, unanimously decided in its favor. In fact, it contains a grandeur and sublimity which could be ascribed to nobody but the author of the prophets and sibyls of the Sistine Chapel. An antique repose is displayed in the whole work, perfectly agreeing with the character of the lady as described by Michel Angelo, and which ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... a dense growth of tall trees, especially of Pines, which have but little underbrush, the wood represents overhead a vast canopy of verdure supported by innumerable lofty pillars. No one could enter these dark solitudes without feeling a deep impression of sublimity, especially if it be an hour of general stillness of the winds. The voices of animals and of birds, particularly the hammering of the woodpecker, serve to magnify our perceptions of grandeur. A very slight sound, during a calm in one ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... read in stories of boys who were fond of nature, and loved her sublimity and beauty, but I do not believe boys are ever naturally fond of nature. They want to make use of the woods and fields and rivers; and when they become men they find these aspects of nature endeared to them by association, and so they think that they were dear for their own sakes; but the taste ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... his researches in the mere region of the events and mutual relation of nations, than upon his universal acquaintance with general literature and the sister arts of politics and philosophy. It was for the treacherous and elegant Bolingbroke to reduce the noble art of Thucydides from the height of sublimity and grandeur to the parlor level of the conversations of the Hotel de Rambouillet, to introduce into the most serious political disquisitions, concerning perhaps the welfare of society, an imperceptible yet carefully ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... of view of the millennium. It is American in its vast applications of arithmetic; in the facility with which it brings the breadth of a continent within the limits of a summer's ride; in the eloquence which rises to sublimity over mining stock, and dwindles to the verge of commonplace before unmarketable natural beauties. Of course, it is the best book on the theme it handles, for it is the latest; it is lively, readable, instructive; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... were all charged with rain and the elements of a tempest. From one of these depended a phenomenon which I had never witnessed before—I mean a water spout, wavering in its black and terrible beauty over this savage scenery, thus adding its gloomy grandeur to the sublimity of the thunder-storm, which now deepened, peal after peal, among the mountains. To such as are unacquainted with mountain scenery, and have never witnessed an inland water spout, it is only necessary to say, that it resembles a long ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... that brings men, events and prospects before the eye with the vividness of reality. In this power of verbal delineation Mr. Borrow has never been outdone. . . . His descriptions of scenery have a peculiar sublimity and grace." A little later, W. Bodham Donne, a Norfolk man and acute critic, said, "We all read Mr. Borrow's books," but lamented his "plunge into the worse than Irish bogs of Polemical Protestantism." Mr. Saintsbury, one of our foremost literary essayists, while asserting, ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... over, I suffered no disquiet from them, we came in sight of the two inlets which form the Turk's Island passage. A winter voyage, however unpleasant, has this advantage, that then only can you be sure of meeting with such a succession of storms as shall leave settled in the memory the sullen sublimity of that 'changing, restless mound' of disturbed ocean in which is embodied the mass of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... parts of Ossian are natural. He allowed himself therefore to see distinctly and to characterise severely the bad things in the book—where it sunk into the bathos or soared into the falsetto,—but ignored its beauties, and was obstinately blind to those passages where it rose into real sublimity or melted into ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... and last place. The real and proper use of the word romantic is simply to characterize an improbable or unaccustomed degree of beauty, sublimity, or virtue. For instance, in matters of history, is not the Retreat of the Ten Thousand romantic? Is not the death of Leonidas? of the Horatii? On the other hand, you find nothing romantic, though much that is monstrous, ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... approaches Paris, is the Triumphal Arch, erected with the view of commemorating the victories of Napoleon, but as those victories were ultimately crowned by defeat, it is more consistent to consider the Triumphal Arch as a triumph of art than of arms; as certainly the magnificence and sublimity of the design is only to be equalled by the exquisite beauty of the execution. Having passed this noble monument and splendid specimen of architectural talent, the Champs Elysees extend in all their beauty to the view of the beholder, presenting a fine broad road ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... transforming their methods, Rubens is nevertheless the spiritual descendant of the Italianizants. It is from them and from his direct contact with the works of Michael Angelo and Titian that he inherits his association of spiritual sublimity with physical strength. Adopting without reserve Michael Angelo's pagan vision of Christianity, he transformed his saints and apostles into powerful heroes and endeavoured to convey the awe and majesty inspired by the Christian drama through an imposing combination ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... visions of beauty, and sublimity, were those that swept constantly past us as we thus advanced into the wild depths of the woods. No two views were ever alike, and every curve in the river bank brought a fresh vista. I never tired of ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... ("pegai") to which Longinus alludes. In the 8th chapter of his fragment "On the Sublime," he observes, that if we assume an ability for speaking well, as a common basis, there are five copious fountains from whence sublimity in eloquence may ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... Allegory, winged trumpeters, and classic figures in full-bottomed wigs; but it was strange to observe how the old Abbey melted all such absurdities into the breadth of its own grandeur, even magnifying itself by what would elsewhere have been ridiculous. Methinks it is the test of Gothic sublimity to overpower the ridiculous without deigning to hide it; and these grotesque monuments of the last century answer a similar purpose with the grinning faces which the old architects scattered among ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... Chinese annals it is said, "Music hath the power of making heaven descend upon earth." It likewise stirs up in us the sense of triumph and the glorious ardour for war. These powerful and mingled feelings may well give rise to the sense of sublimity. We can concentrate, as Dr. Seemann observes, greater intensity of feeling in a single musical note than in pages of writing. It is probable that nearly the same emotions, but much weaker and far less complex, are felt by birds when the male pours forth his full volume of song, in rivalry ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... might interfere with the greatness of his design. "These pictures are the fruit of the deepest thought which then stirred the mind of Duerer, and are executed with overpowering force. Finished as they are they form the first complete work of art produced by Protestantism.[229-[]] What dignity and sublimity pervade those heads of such varied character![230-*] What simplicity and majesty in the lines of the drapery! what sublime and statue-like repose in their attitudes! Here we no longer find any disturbing element: there are no small angular breaks in the folds, no arbitrary or fantastic features ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... But it was all pure art. The actor was superior to the scene. It was the passion with which she threw herself into the representation, with a distinct conception of the whole, and a thorough knowledge of the means necessary to produce its effect, that secured the success. There was a sublimity of self-control in the spectacle, for, if she had allowed herself to be overwhelmed by the excitement, the play must have paused; real feeling would have invaded that which was represented, and we should, by a rude ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... lips murmured a word or two indistinctly; she trembled, became giddy, her strength failed her; overcome by the purity of the air and the sublimity of the scene, she sank fainting into Harry's arms, who, watching her closely, was ready ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... in place of the calm, unearthly spirituality of the earlier masters. Compare the cartoon of S. Paul preaching at Athens, in which he has all the majesty of a Casar in the Forum, with the lowly spirit of the Apostle's life! In truth, Raphael failed to approach nearer to sublimity than Fra Angelico, with all his faulty drawing ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... one another, hear nothing but the clock that tells us our woes; the vine shall grow, but we shall never see it," etc. Is not the last circumstance exquisite? I mean not to lay myself open by saying they exceed Milton, and perhaps Collins in sublimity. But don't you conceive all poets after Shakspeare yield to 'em in variety of genius? Massinger treads close on their heels; but you are most probably as well acquainted with his writings as your ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... sublime investigation it was but a step to sublimity itself. His soul seemed separate from his body; he was dispassionate, superhuman, all-seeing and all-comprehending. Now he could see men as winged ants, crossing each other, nearing, drifting apart, interweaving, floating in a cloud, blown ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... month of June, whose secret harmonies infuse such sweetness into the sunset. The air was clear, the stillness perfect, so that far away in the park they could hear the voices of some children, which added a kind of melody to the sublimity of the scene. ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac
... it regards a general or commander-in-chief, may be divided into two parts, one comprehending mere discipline and settled systems for putting a certain number of rules into practice; and the other originating a sublimity of conception that method may assist, ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... our neighbours will yield us, as their greatest critic has done, the preference for sublimity and nobleness of style, we will willingly quit all pretensions to ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe
... were aroused. The great heart of the nation was beating in response to the appeals for justice and right which were made in their ears. The world can scarce furnish a parallel to this spectacle of moral sublimity. It was the voice of a people, calling, in tones that must be heard, for justice and freedom,—and that not for themselves, but for a distant, a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... limit of the moon's visible hemisphere. 'Here the valley narrows to a mile in width, and displays scenery on both sides picturesque and romantic beyond the powers of a prose description. Imagination, borne on the wings of poetry, could alone gather similes to portray the wild sublimity of this landscape, where dark behemoth crags stood over the brows of lofty precipices, as if a rampart in the sky; and forests seemed suspended in mid-air. On the eastern side there was one soaring crag, crested with trees, which hung over in a curve like three-fourths ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... walked more leisurely, lest undue haste should excite suspicion; and all the solemn sublimity of the scene confronted her. The green crescent of the Horseshoe blanched to foam, as it leaped to the stony gulf below, the wreaths of mist floating up, gilded by the sunshine; the maddened rush of the tossing, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... there is beauty and sublimity in nature, in ideas, in feelings, and in actions. After all this it might be supposed that a unity could be found amidst these different kinds of beauty. The sight of a statue, as the Apollo of ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... rising above the others, which he called the Throne of Moses. If that prophet had received his revelations in this desert, no voice need have declared it holy ground, for every part of it is stamped with such a sublimity of character as would alone be ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... privileged men, to bask in the sunshine of happiness a long, beautiful summer day, and then at the golden sunset to sink upon my knees and cry, 'I thank Thee, O God, that in Thy goodness I have recognized Thy sublimity, and that Thou hast revealed thy glory to me.' All this appears of little importance to your majesty, for the heart of a king is not like that of other men, and the personal happiness of individuals appears a matter of little account ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity. The qualifications which frequently invest the facade of a prison with far more dignity than is found in the facade of a palace double its size lent to this heath a sublimity in which spots renowned for beauty of the accepted kind are utterly wanting. Fair prospects wed happily with fair times; but alas, if times be not fair! Men have oftener suffered from the mockery of a place too smiling for their reason ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... six to eight hundred feet in height, rising perpendicularly from their bases, below which were recesses, into which the sun never shone, and whose gloomy grandeur imparted a melancholy cast to the thoughts and feelings, in unison with the sublimity of the scene around. ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... the epic no better course could be pursued than to study the whole of the Divine Song. It is, however, too long a production to be introduced here in its entirety; but the following extracts give the chief features of the work, than which nothing in Hindu literature is more characteristic, in its sublimity as in its puerilities, in its logic as in its want of it. It has shared the fate of most Hindu works in being interpolated injudiciously, so that many of the puzzling anomalies, which astound no less the reader than the hero to whom it was revealed, are probably later ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... again an eager anxiety not to be misunderstood as undervaluing the Philippians' gift. How beautifully the sublimity of the previous words lies side by side with the lowliness and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... perfection than its inventor himself had been able to achieve. The gifted but unequal Pordenone, who showed himself so incapable of sustained rivalry with our master in Venice, had moments of a higher sublimity than Titian reached until he came to the extreme limits of old age. That this assertion is not a mere paradox, the great Madonna del Carmelo at the Venice Academy and the magnificent Trinity in the sacristy of the Cathedral of San Daniele ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... rankled most poignantly in this spectacle of his final self-exposure was the fact that the cloven hoof should have been found on noble mountain tops—that he should have attempted to better his disguise by dwelling near regions of sublimity. Of all hypocrisy the kind most detestable to her was that which dares live within spiritual fortresses; and now his whole story of the Christmas Tree, the solemn marshalling of words about the growth of ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen |
