"Vastness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a whisper, Coming from the starry distance, Coming from the empty vastness, Low, and musical, and tender; And the voice said: 'O Osseo! O my son, my best beloved! Broken are the spells that bound you, All the charms of the magicians, All the magic powers of evil; Come ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round—for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost—do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... portrayed in the twenty-ninth and thirty-first chapters of the book that goes under his name, melted me to tears. I was delighted with the purity and tenderness, the beauty and sublimity of the Psalms. I was amazed at the depth and vastness of the wisdom of the Book of Proverbs. I was pleased with the stern fidelity with which the prophets rebuked the vices and the crimes, the selfishness and cruelty, of the sinners of their days, and the tenderness and devotion with which they pleaded the cause of the poor, ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... impropriety of a political trader, who is lord over a great empire, being concerned in a contraband trade upon his own account, did not seem in the least to affect them; but they were struck with the obvious danger of subjecting their goods to seizure by the vastness of the prohibited import. To secure the larger adventure, they require of the China factory that Colonel Watson's ship should enter the port of Canton as an armed ship, (they would not say a ship of war, though that must be meant,) ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... all the distinction between "Pippa Passes" and "Sordello" that there is between the Venus of Milos and a gigantic Theban Sphinx. The latter is, it is true, proportionate in its vastness; but the symmetry of mere bulk is not the symmetria prisca of ideal sculpture. I have already alluded to "Sordello" as a derelict upon the ocean of poetry. This, indeed, it still seems to me, notwithstanding the well-meaning ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... being preserved—without disturbing the musical flow of sounds. Thus of the thirty-two feet in the eight lines, seventeen are iambs and eleven anapests, two are weak iambs (-orous, -ylus), one a spondee (bright night-), and one monosyllabic with a rest ([] Fills). Tennyson's Vastness may also be studied for its combinations of trochees, dactyls, and ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... before letters were introduced into Greece, one thousand years before the Trojan War, twelve hundred years before Buddha, and fifteen hundred years before Rome was founded, great architectural works existed in Egypt, the remains of which still astonish travellers for their vastness and grandeur. In the time of Joseph, before the eighteenth dynasty, there was in Egypt an estimated population of seven millions, with twenty thousand cities. The civilization of that country four thousand years ago was as high as that of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... a midget, in the immensities of sky, or burrowing, a fugitive, in suffocating virgin forests. The soul and the sea—they are the beloved provinces of this sailor and psychologue. But he also recognises the relativity of things. The ineluctable vastness and sadness of life oppress him. In Karain we read: "Nothing could happen to him unless what happens to all—failure and death." His heroes are failures, as are heroes in all great poetry and fiction, and their failure is recorded with muffled irony. The fundamental pessimism ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... at this point we turned off into a field, deep in grass and studded with flowers, where some comfortable-looking boulders invited us to rest. Miss Blunt,—whose soul thrills with delight at the vastness and beauty of nature,—never allowed opportunities of committing the choicest bits to canvas or paper, to escape her; and, some picturesque display having caught her eye, directly she had located herself on an accommodating boulder, she was at work. Herrick's good advice, ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... you compare those times with even the existing works of man, and when you remember that, when England was yet young in civilization, the pyramids of Egypt were already grey with 1500 years, you have got another step which impresses you with a doubled amount of vastness. Double that period, and you come to the far distant moment when the present aspect of this world was called, by creation, out of the formless void ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... for Paris he was delighted at the idea. Jeanne and Cayrol were leaving Nice at the end of the week. Lost in the vastness of the capital, the lovers would be more secure. They could see each other at leisure. Serge would hire a small house in the neighborhood of the Bois de Boulogne, and there they could enjoy ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... Amaravati of the chief of the celestials himself, is known by the name of Bhogavati. It is ruled over by Vasuki, the king of the Nagas. That Shesha dwelleth here, who, in consequence of his ascetic austerities of the foremost order, is able to support this earth with all her vastness. His body is like that of a white mountain. He is decked in celestial ornaments. He hath a thousand heads. His tongues are blazing like flames of fire, and he is endued with great strength. There dwell in happiness ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Langdon stood near, but said nothing. Harry saw that they were enveloped by the mystery, the vastness and the terrible grandeur of the occasion. So he said nothing to them, but rode back toward his commander. Then he glanced again at the sun and saw that it was low, filling all the western heavens with bars of red and yellow and gold. He looked once again ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... several parts of the procession well together had no easy part to play, as the line had to be repeatedly broken to permit the ordinary carriage traffic of the streets to go on with as little delay as possible. The cortege at this point looked grand and solemn in the extreme because of its vastness, and also because of all present appearing to be impressed with the one idea. The gloomy, wet, and cheerless weather was quite in keeping with the funeral march of 35,000 people. The bands were placed at such proper distances that the playing ...
— The Wearing of the Green • A.M. Sullivan
... footpaths leading from one to the other, and herds and flocks browzing, and you have Switzerland before you. I admit, however, that these accessories add to the variety and interest of the landscape, and perhaps heighten the idea of its vastness. ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... vigorously denounced. Yet the homesteader remained the chief figure in the opening of the West. The entries, as we have seen, were eighteen hundred in 1896. They were forty-four thousand in 1911. Areas of land princely in their vastness were thus given away. Each year the Dominion granted free land exceeding in area and in richness coveted territories for whose possession European nations stood ready to set the world at war. In 1908, for {228} example, a Wales was given away; in 1909, five Prince ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... Fenian cycle of tales is more influenced by Christianity than the others are. The mythological cycle is not only fully pagan, it is primeval. It has the vastness, the savagery, the relentlessness of nature-myths, and what beauty there is in it is akin to terror. Gentleness is unknown. There is only one exception to this, so far as I know, and that is in the ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... listened without a word, and her stillness now was like the protest of an invincible unbelief. What need she care for the world beyond the forests? I asked. From all the multitudes that peopled the vastness of that unknown there would come, I assured her, as long as he lived, neither a call nor a sign for him. Never. I was carried away. Never! Never! I remember with wonder the sort of dogged fierceness I displayed. I had the illusion of having got the spectre by the throat at last. Indeed ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... unreasonable distribution of praise and blame, none have suffered oftener than projectors, whose rapidity of imagination and vastness of design raise such envy in their fellow mortals, that every eye watches for their fall, and every heart exults at their distresses: yet even a projector may gain favour by success; and the tongue that ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... moment," he went on, "you seem to be the soul of that which is around you, yet oppressed with the weight of its vastness, and unable to account for what is going ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... of the monstrous airship had been visible. The eye could hardly at first glance take in the vastness of this stupendous thing, that overshadowed all the central portion of the huge enclosure. It gave a sense of power, of swift potentialities, of speed unlimited. It stood there, tense, ready, waiting, with a hum of engines audible in its vast heart, a thing almost of life, man's creation ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... his hand vaguely in the direction of the north-east, where stretched a terra incognita into which vastness few men have strayed and fewer emerged. "I was in camp one day with Klooch. Klooch was as handsome a little kamooks as ever whined betwixt the traces or shoved nose into a camp kettle. Her father was a full-blood Malemute from Russian Pastilik on Bering Sea, and I bred ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... to the Damascus Gate, the country filled rapidly with all kinds of temporary shelters for pilgrims to the Passover. Ben-Hur visited the strangers, and talked with them; and returning to his tents, he was each time more and more astonished at the vastness of their numbers. And when he further discovered that every part of the world was represented among them—cities upon both shores of the Mediterranean far off as the Pillars of the West, river-towns in distant India, provinces in northernmost Europe; and that, ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... of basalts support a lofty roof, under which the sea rolls its waves, while the vastness of the entrance allows the light of day to penetrate the various recesses ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... death, for the insane pleasure of it, or else he had some plan for making his own fortune by selling his escort as slaves. Men began to desert whenever they came to an attractive stopping-place where there was food and water. They feigned illness, or fled in the night with their camels into the vastness of the desert, their faces turned once more to the west. For soon, if they stayed, they would pass beyond the zone of known oases, into the terrible land of mystery, charted by no man, a land where it was said the sun had dried up all ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... fact about this eruption was, that the mountain did not make use of its old crater. The original vent must have become so jammed and consolidated, in the few years between 1785 and 1812, that it could not be reopened, even by a steam force the vastness of which may be guessed at from the vastness of the area which it had shaken for two years. So, when the eruption was over, it was found that the old crater-lake, incredible as it may seem, remained undisturbed, ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... gone over China and glanced at most of her outlying dependencies. The further exploration of Tibet we may postpone until she has made good her claims to dominion in that mountain region. The vastness of the Chinese Empire and the immensity of its population awaken in the mind a multitude of questions to which nothing but history can give an adequate reply. We come therefore to the oracle whose responses may perhaps be less ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... vast forests of Virginia have much to do with its peculiar temperature. As we travel from place to place we are strongly impressed with the vastness of the wilderness, which covers thousands of acres of as fine arable soil as can be found on the continent. How different is this from the notions we had formed of the Old Dominion, while reading of its early settlements, ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... warning held out to the country, that a radical reform in the relations between Great Britain and Ireland would be the main work of the present Parliament.... The country had no sufficient warning—I think I may say the country had no warning at all—that any proposals of the magnitude and vastness of those which were unfolded to us last night were to be considered in the present Parliament, much less were to form the first subject of consideration upon the meeting of this Parliament. I am perfectly aware that there exists in our Constitution no principle of the mandate. I know that ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... and perhaps more have been disposed to think, with fear or joy according to their predilection, that modern discovery is gradually putting the Bible out of date. A feeling, if not a judgment, has in some quarters arisen, that in view of the vastness of creation, the Scriptures ascribe to this globe and its concerns a share of its Maker's ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... not in any degree a nervous man by temperament, as I think I remarked before, and yet there was something in the vastness of the wainscoted room, lighted only by a single candle, and in the silence of the empty house, and still more in the appearance of my speechless attendant, which gave me a feeling of distinct uneasiness. As Horrod moved to and fro I took occasion ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... how much time had passed. Had it been too long? No. There would still be Earth ships prowling the vicinity, waiting for any sign of a Kerothi ship that had hidden in the vastness of space by not using ...
— The Highest Treason • Randall Garrett
... mind or intelligence in the inorganic world in the sense in which I see it in the organic. In the heavens one sees power, vastness, sublimity, unspeakable, but one sees only the physical laws working on a grander scale than on the earth. Celestial mechanics do not differ from terrestrial mechanics, however tremendous and imposing the result of their activities. But in the humblest living thing—in a spear of grass by the ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... his mental vision the walls of the room seemed to fade, and he was only conscious of a vastness of space, and knew that for this brief moment he was looking into eternity and realising for the first time the ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... the fit abode of those ideal forms, in which the imagination of ancient times embodied their conception of divine perfection; but the Pantheon is adapted for a holier worship, and accords with the character of a purer belief; and the vastness and solitude of its untrodden chambers awaken those feelings of human weakness, and that sentiment of human immortality, which befit the temple ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... the time when sensuous charm summed up its essence. There is a good deal of ambiguity about the stereotyped phrase "ahead of one's time." Rightly apprehended, great geniuses do live for the future rather than the present, but where the public have the vastness of appetite and scantness of taste peculiar to the ostrich, there it is impossible for a composer to be ahead of his time. It is only where the public are advanced to the stage of intelligent discrimination that a Ninth Symphony and a Nibelung ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Sprat, was written in so young an age, that if we shall reflect on the vastness of the argument, and his manner of handling it, he may seem like one of the miracles that he there adorns; like a boy attempting Goliah. This perhaps, may be the reason, that in some places, there may be more youthfulness and redundance of fancy, than his riper judgement would ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... on the even, throbbing voice, "surely, the vastness of this war, its titanic battles, its heroism, its sublime earnestness, should sink into oblivion all low schemes of vengeance! Before the sheer grandeur of its history our children will walk with ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... thou wilt enter the world's mysterious centre," And then the fairy bent her, imploring to the youth— "Thou'lt be free of Death's cold ghastness, and, with a comet's fastness, Thou canst wander through the vastness to the Paradise of Truth, Each day a new joy bringing, which will never leave in sooth The slightest ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... only perhaps a moment—one of those moments for which time has no measurement—that the soul of this man had gone out of him, as it were, into the vastness of the sunset; and when he recalled it his situation took on for him a somewhat different aspect. He experienced something of that temporary relief from personal responsibility that moments of religious sentiment often give to minds that are unaccustomed to religion. He had been free for ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... Flushing. "And in my opinion," he continued, "the absence of population to which Hirst objects is precisely the significant touch. You must admit, Hirst, that a little Italian town even would vulgarise the whole scene, would detract from the vastness—the sense of elemental grandeur." He swept his hands towards the forest, and paused for a moment, looking at the great green mass, which was now falling silent. "I own it makes us seem pretty small—us, not them." He nodded his head at a sailor ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... two reasons for the choice of the Cross of Christ as our subject, is the failure on the part of those who believe in it, trust in it, and even build their lives upon it, to realise the true vastness of its meaning. We are too apt to regard the Cross as one of the doctrines of our religion, or as supplying a motive to penitence, or to Christian conduct. Our view, when we are most in earnest, is one-sided, limited, parochial. ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... shop-fronts grow radiant on deepening gloom, and show in silhouette the figures numberless that are hurrying past. By accentuating a pause between the life of daytime and that which will begin after dark, this grey hour excites to an unwonted perception of the city's vastness and of its multifarious labour; melancholy, yet not dismal, the brooding twilight seems to betoken Nature's compassion for myriad mortals exiled from her beauty and her solace. Noises far and near blend into a muffled murmur, sound's equivalent of ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... the most part it ran back into the distance lonely and empty. It was steeped in strong, cold coloring, but on its western rim there burned a vivid flush of rose and saffron. Edgar was impressed by its vastness ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... scenes. At that season the many coloured liveries of the foliage, the lonely woodland wilderness and rocky paths, and the mists which in the earlier part of the day linger on the tops of the cliffs and woods, when partially dispersed by the suns rays, give a character of vastness and sublimity to the scenery which it would be difficult to describe. I would particularly point out on these occasions the view from the hill near the new church at Clifton, towards Long Ashton, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 398, November 14, 1829 • Various
... effect are identical; the natura naturans, and natura naturata. Causation is change; but it is nothing but substance assuming attributes, and attributes assuming modes. Phenomena are only the bubbles which arise on the bosom of the ocean and disappear, absorbed in its vastness. The universe is bound in one vast chain of fatalism, one grand and perfect whole. Man's perfection is to know by contemplation the universe in ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... the conversion of the heathen; and I know that many of you are praying specially for the heathen of Melanesia. And so one's thoughts float out to India, and China, and Japan, and Africa, and the islands of the sea, and the very vastness of the work raises one's thoughts to God, as the only One by ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... character, but we must see the results it has produced,—the great overthrow of faith it has effected, and its influence upon the pulpit and press of the countries invaded by it, before we can comprehend the vastness of our danger. An enumeration of the evil doings of a public enemy is the best plan to forestall his future misdeeds. We are not to judge Rationalism by its professions. The question is not, What does it wish? At what does it aim? or, What is its creed? But the true way to measure, understand, ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... this work, at first together, but, as night followed night, and there was no sign of the blacks, Mick allowed them to take their watches alone. This experience did more than any other to impress them with Central Australia: its silence, its absolute loneliness, its vastness and the puny insignificance of man, who dared to ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... did not belong to the world in which I had existence. Everything around me seemed the shadows of somebody's dream, in which I had no part, and could take no interest. I had but two all-absorbing ideas; and these were—injustice and Josephine. So distraught was I with the vastness of the one and with the loveliness of the other, that, when the young and splendid reality stole into the apartment softly, and moved before my eyes in all the fascination of her gracefulness, yet was I scarcely conscious of the actual presence of her ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... one comes at last to the borders of the land, the pleasure craft will be there, coming and going, and the swift great passenger vessels, very big and steady, doing thirty knots an hour or more, will trace long wakes as they go dwindling out athwart the restless vastness of the sea. ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... themselves to think freely and widely and deeply, with all such aids to thought as exact science can furnish; and the larger the knowledge of the thinker, the more pressing and tremendous the problem appears, and the more hopelessly unanswerable. To Herbert Spencer himself it must have assumed a vastness beyond the apprehension of the average mind; and it weighed upon him more and more inexorably the nearer he approached to death. He could not avoid the conviction—plainly suggested in his magnificent Psychology and in other volumes of his great work—that there exists ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... a place so big that no tenant could afford to live in it; and Sir Francis and his friend walked through room after room, admiring their vastness and dreary and deserted grandeur. On the right of the hall-door were the saloons and drawing-rooms, and on the other side the oak room, the parlour, the grand dining-room, the library, where Pen had found books in old days. Round three sides of the hall ran ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of the snows from Darjiling, grand and almost overpowering though it is, has warmth in it too. The main impression is one of magnitude and amplitude, of vastness and immensity, and withal of serene composure. The first view of the mountain seen through a rent in the clouds was perhaps more uplifting, though this view excites a sense of elevation also, for the eye is continually being drawn to the highest point. But in this full view ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... we have much knowledge, for it only serves to better show the vastness of the unknown, and to compare the little we have discovered for ourselves with the amplitude of that which we owe to ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... was spent in visiting the winter colony at San Moritz, where the Kulm Hotel, tenanted by some twenty guests, presented in its vastness the appearance of a country-house. One of the prettiest spots in the world is the ice-rink, fashioned by the skill of Herr Caspar Badrutt on a high raised terrace, commanding the valley of the Inn and the ponderous bulwarks of Bernina. The silhouettes of skaters, defined ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... clear profit. The average newspaper reader would be amazed if he knew at how great a cost the day's news is laid before him. A dignified journal displays no inclination to cry from the housetops the vastness of its expenditure, but from time to time an accident enables the public to obtain information in this connexion. The evidence taken by a recent Copyright Commission disclosed that the expenditure of the leading English journal upon foreign news ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... And the principal member of this great system has been named The Grand Canyon, as a conscious and meaningful tribute to its vastness, its sublimity, its grandeur and its awesomeness. It is unique; it stands alone. Though only two hundred and seventeen miles long, it expresses within that distance more than any one human mind yet has been able to comprehend or interpret to the world. Famous word-masters ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... and the conversation languished. The car had climbed out of the San Gregorio and was mounting swiftly along the route to La Questa, affording to the Parkers a panorama of mountain, hill, valley and sea so startling in its vastness and its rugged beauty that Don Mike realized his guests had been silenced as much by awe as by their desire to avoid a painful and ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... to the remote horizons.... At night the vastness of things, the height of the stars, fascinate me to the edge of uneasiness. And sometimes I go and sit in my room for a while—to reassure myself.... You see I am used to an enclosure—the walls of a room—the walled-in ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... India means, I hope. Certainly I begin to measure the depth of my own ignorance. I see I have nearly everything of essential importance still to learn. And that is a pretty large order—almost staggeringly large now that, thanks to you, I begin to realize the vastness of the amount." ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... to me more and more as I live longer, that most poetry and most literature and particularly the literature of the past is discordant with the vastness and variety, the reserves and resources and recuperations of life as we live it to-day. It is the expression of life under cruder and more rigid conditions than ours, lived by people who loved and hated more naively, aged sooner and died ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... here, That King of hate, and therefore slave of fear? Dragg'd from the fatal Bosworth field where he, Lost life, and what he liv'd for,—Cruelty: Search, find his name, but there is none: O Kings, Remember whence your power and vastness springs; If not as Richard now, so may you be, Who hath no tomb, but scorn and memory. And tho' from his own store, Wolsey might have A Palace or a College for his grave, Yet here he lies interred, as if that all Of him to be remembered were his fall. Nothing but Earth on Earth, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... captive king and get rid of the unprofitable booty by restoring it to him. In order, however, that the impression made on him by England's short-sighted disregard of her neighbor's landmark abroad might be counteracted by a glimpse of the vastness of her armaments and wealth at home, it was thought advisable to take him first to London, and show him the wonders of the town. But when the king arrived, his freedom from English prepossessions made it difficult to amuse, or even to impress him. A stranger to the idea that a ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... Madame Marouin, being very uneasy, had sent at all hazards to her husband. The king took a glass of wine and water and ate an orange, and got up for a moment to see whether the boat he was expecting was nowhere visible on the vastness of the sea. There was not a boat in sight, only the brig tossing gracefully on the horizon, impatient to be off, like ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MURAT—1815 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... Alps, and along the almost miraculous coast of the Mediterranean; and I shall not pretend that the view I now beheld approached many, in magnificence, that are to be met with in those magic regions. Nevertheless, it was both grand and soft; and it had one element of vastness, in the green mantle of its interminable woods, that is not often to be met with in countries that have long submitted to the sway of man. Such as it was, I shall endeavour ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... voyaged on the ocean, know the solemn feeling and the idea of vastness which is conveyed during a calm at night, when monsters of the deep are heard far and near as they come to the surface to inhale the air, or "blow," as it is called. The same feeling is experienced by the traveller up the ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... the darkness a great white radiance streamed through the vastness of the aisles; the moon, that was at her height, had broken through the clouds, the snow had ceased to fall, the light reflected from the snow without was clear as the light of dawn. It fell through the arches full upon the two pictures above, from which the boy on his entrance had ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... wherever life and death are plying their perpetual game; and this, like Cleopatra's "worm, will do its kind" in the veins of man, wherever obstructions, natural or artificial, temporary or permanent, interfere with its prompt diffusion in the vastness of the general atmosphere. Our "house of life" stands generously open, for every "inmate bad" to come and go through the absorbent, unquestioned, except in the stomach, where the tangible poisons have to go by the act of swallowing and where they are often challenged and ejected. It ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... on the ocean think of its vastness; of the many shores in many climes visited by its waves to ply "their priest-like task of clean ablution;" of cities and empires that rose beside its waters, flourished, decayed, and became a memory; of others that shall rise and also pass away, while the moving element remains,—so ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... forward to intercept. The notion of her heading into the vastness and the gloom was appalling; the inertness of that increasing group, formed now of both men and women collected from all the camp, maddened. So I would have besought her, pleaded with her, faced Montoyo for her—but ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... sight at all of that series of monotonous and monstrous battles, a series punctuated only by names: Liege, Antwerp, Mons, Ypres, Verdun and Arras. And if nothing had happened besides the Titanic conflict of material armaments I believe that we should not yet be anywhere near realizing its vastness and ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... that anger proved the vastness of his good intentions. Besides there's something about our old giant—steadiness and breeding, I believe—that uniformly makes Tom knock under to him; and there's a peculiar affinity of good sense between him and Marilda, that ought to ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... flashed across his mind that instead of undertaking such a complicated scheme, it would be better to attempt to stretch a telegraph wire entirely across the ocean, from the shores of Newfoundland to the coast of Ireland. The vastness of this scheme pleased him, and its usefulness to the entire world, if it could be carried out, was clear to ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... of darkness and doubt, The stars are dim and the Hunter's out: The waves begin to wrestle and moan; The Lion stands by his shore alone, And sends to the bounds of Earth and Sea First low notes of the thunder to be. Then East and West through the vastness grim, The whelps ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... classed with the mystics. He had a profound, typically German love of meadow and forest, and expressed it more exquisitely than the best among the minnesingers. "Look above you and around you and behold the vastness of heaven and the speed of its revolutions. The Lord has emblazoned it with seven planets, each of which—not only the sun—is far larger than the earth; he has adorned it with myriads of radiant stars. See how ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... the great canyon, which had seemed like a hunter's fable rather than truth. Slone's sight dimmed, blurring the spectacle, and he found that his eyes had filled with tears. He wiped them away and looked again and again, until he was confounded by the vastness and grandeur and the vague sadness of the scene. Nothing he had ever looked at had affected him like this canyon, although the Stewarts had tried ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... apartment of such size that its dimensions filled me with a kind of awe such as I never had known: the awe of walled vastness. Its immense extent produced a sensation of sound. Its hugeness ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... endure this homely, sick-nursish illustration of the effect produced upon one’s mind by the mere vastness of the great Pyramid. When I was very young (between the ages, I believe, of three and five years old), being then of delicate health, I was often in time of night the victim of a strange kind of mental oppression. I lay in my bed perfectly conscious, and with open eyes, ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... An idea of the vastness of our aerial effort on the British front in France can be gathered from the R.F.C. work performed on ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... unseen forces that drew him to that wonderful land of the West—where the crisp clear air held an intoxicating quality unknown in the East; where the eye foamed on and on over limitless expanses of waving green, till the mind was staggered at the vastness of the prospect; where the very largeness of nature seemed to enter into a man and to {35} crush out things petty and selfish? In doing this he would be beating the air. They were incapable of understanding him. They would deem ...
— Pathfinders of the Great Plains - A Chronicle of La Verendrye and his Sons • Lawrence J. Burpee
... were kneaded out of plaster: they were set there for a year, not for all time. But there is at Paestum a crumbled Doric temple to Poseidon, built in ancient days to remind the reverent of that incalculable vastness that tosses men we know not whither. It stands forlorn in a malarious marsh, yet eternally within hearing of the unsubservient surge. Many of its massive stones have tottered to the earth; and irrelevant little birds sing in nests among the capitals and mock the solemn silence that the Greeks ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... At the termination of these introductory remarks, the reader will be presented with critical portraitures of Burke from the writings and speeches of men, who, while opposed to him in their principles of legislative policy, with all the chivalry and candour of genius paid a noble homage to the vastness and variety of his unrivalled powers. Meanwhile, it may not be presumptuous for a writer, on an occasion like the present, to contemplate this great man under certain aspects, which, perhaps, are not sufficiently regarded ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... amazed, we beheld the lone vastness of it all and were mute. Rising out of the flat wilderness over which we had travelled was a mammoth vertical barrier of rock rearing its head to the skies above. The whole face for five miles was one magnificent series of ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... tendency to disappear as science unfolds more and more new infinities of time and space, new infinities of worlds and forms of life. The curious notion has crept in, that man must sink lower into insignificance with every new discovery of the vastness and huge design of creation. God would seem to have over-reached Himself in disclosing His power and majesty, stunning and overwhelming the intellect and heart with the crushing weight of the evidences of His Infinity. We have modern thinkers regarding Christian notions of the Godhead as impossible ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... freedom and wild freshness of the open sea, though Bessie would look intently to a distant part, where nothing, as she knew, came between her and the Atlantic. "If we only went far enough, we should reach America; that gives one the idea of freedom and vastness," she thought. ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... State in this great Exposition. Here, during the period when thousands shall visit these grounds, those who owe allegiance to the Empire State will find a place which will typify to them their home and impress them, let us hope, to a greater degree with the vastness of our State and of the position which it occupies in our commonwealth of nations. To those who have been intrusted with the work we owe thanks for the conception of their duty and for this magnificent ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... metaphysically the greatest subject that the mind of man can conceive. What an admirable salmi this is; undoubtedly the final end of the pheasant. Yes, I feel sometimes positively overwhelmed with the thought of the vastness and complexity of London. Paris a man may get to understand thoroughly with a reasonable amount of study; but London is always a mystery. In Paris you may say, 'Here live the actresses, here the Bohemians, and the Rates;' but it is different ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... prairie across which ran the now half-dry, grass-choked stream. A few stunted cottonwood trees followed its windings, and one little clump of wild plum bushes bristled in a draw leading down to the shallow place of the dry watercourse. All else was distance and vastness void of life ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... Sky, land, and sea disappear together out of the world when the Placido—as the saying is—goes to sleep under its black poncho. The few stars left below the seaward frown of the vault shine feebly as into the mouth of a black cavern. In its vastness your ship floats unseen under your feet, her sails flutter invisible above your head. The eye of God Himself—they add with grim profanity—could not find out what work a man's hand is doing in there; and you would be free to call the devil to ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... Savannah, New Orleans, and PARIS! Why they should print Paris in capitals, rather than Boston and Philadelphia, I am at a loss to conceive; but such an announcement does indeed demand some note of admiration at the vastness of the enterprise of REPRINT & Co., who, to give Mr Blackwood more time to attend to the getting up of each successive number of his work, thus undertake to relieve him of any share in seeing to the supply of the Continent of Europe. In this benevolent effort to take ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... profundity, what vastness of knowledge, what a grand gossip concerning all things, and more beside, did we anticipate, only to find the promise broken, and a big impostor with no more muscle than the black drone who fills the pipes and sentries the seraglio of the Sophi or the Sultan! The big, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... commonly realize the vastness of the change. Much of our life and much of our thought still belongs to the old world. Our education is still largely framed on the old pattern. And our views of poverty and social betterment, or what is possible and what is not, are ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... rampant shakes his brinded mane; the ounce, The libbard, and the tiger, as the mole Rising, the crumbled earth above them threw In hillocks; the swift stag from underground Bore up his branching head; scarce from his mould Behemoth, biggest born of earth, upheaved His vastness; fleeced the flocks and bleating rose As plants; ambiguous between sea and land, The river-horse and scaly crocodile. At once came forth whatever creeps the ground, Insect ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... intervened between them and Fred, their tones broke distinctly, though gently, on his ear. Yet these sounds did not interrupt the unusual stillness. They served rather to impress him more forcibly with the vastness of that tremendous solitude in the midst of ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... his tumultuous syncopations and blazing brass and cymbals and volcanically inundating melody; appeared to be struggling to achieve the thing that was his art. American life seemed to be calling for this music in order that its vastness, its madly affluent wealth and multiform power and transcontinental span, its loud, grandiose promise might attain ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... poor and unsubstantial a thing this glory is! The whole of this earth's globe, as thou hast learnt from the demonstration of astronomy, compared with the expanse of heaven, is found no bigger than a point; that is to say, if measured by the vastness of heaven's sphere, it is held to occupy absolutely no space at all. Now, of this so insignificant portion of the universe, it is about a fourth part, as Ptolemy's proofs have taught us, which is inhabited ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... great works of Mr. Bolton, at a place which he has called Soho, about two miles from Birmingham, which the very ingenious proprietor shewed me himself to the best advantage. I wish Johnson had been with us: for it was a scene which I should have been glad to contemplate by his light[1348]. The vastness and the contrivance of some of the machinery would have 'matched his mighty mind.' I shall never forget Mr. Bolton's expression to me: 'I sell here, Sir, what all the world desires to have—POWER.' He had ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... his cheek, its breath sweet as a girl's, caressing him, urging him over the vastness of ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... calm is like a sulky giant; one dreads that it may be meditating evil. Moreover, an angry sea looks less vast in extent than a calm one. Its mounting waves bring the horizon nearer, and one does not discern how for many leagues the pitiless billows repeat themselves. To appreciate the hideous vastness of the ocean one must see it when ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... if a rich curtain were swaying there. I used sometimes on these occasions to think of the Misses Bordereau and of the pity of their being shut up in apartments which in the Venetian July even Venetian vastness did not prevent from being stuffy. Their life seemed miles away from the life of the Piazza, and no doubt it was really too late to make the austere Juliana change her habits. But poor Miss Tita would have enjoyed one of Florian's ices, I was sure; sometimes I even had thoughts ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... Kansas and Wyoming and Nebraska, hundreds of miles away, plains where once the buffalo had roamed in great, shaggy herds, where once the emigrant trains had made their slow, rocking progress into a Land of Heart's Desire; and he began to understand something of the vastness of life, the great scope of ambition; new things to a man whose world, until two weeks before, had been the four ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... continental platforms above the level of the ocean basins (which as shown by gravity measurement are underlain by materials of higher specific gravity than the continents). In due course of time, when the strain became sufficient, it was readjusted by earth movements of a slowness proportioned to their vastness. These movements while tending upon the whole to raise the continents to or sometimes beyond their former relief, did not reverse the action of erosion agencies in detail, but often produced new lines or areas ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... the temples of the Syrians and Sicilians; the Colosseum, the Parthenon, the courts of Baalbec, the pillars of Palmyra and Girgenti,—sink into insignificance when compared with the structures that line the banks of an African river. The mind makes a leap amid their vastness, their variety, and their number. New combinations rise upon our limited invention and contract the taste,—the pyramid, the propylon, the colossus, the catacomb, ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... an intense, glowing epic of the great desert, sunlit barbaric, with its marvelous atmosphere of vastness ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... is this civilization... simply appalling in its vastness. The countless millions of your people, the wealth you have piled up... it seems like a huge bubble that may burst any minute. And the one device by which it is all ...
— Prince Hagen • Upton Sinclair
... little whirligig, into an infinite number of sun-systems, occupying inconceivably vast areas in space. Of the correctness of this hypothesis it is unnecessary to speak. It is to the Darwinian speculation what the infinite is to the infinitessimal, and we only refer to it to bring out the vastness of the conception as compared to the latter theory, and to predicate thereon the more conclusive induction that an Infinite ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... the path of proselytism. Every Buddhist is provided for the defence of his faith with the very armor best fitted to protect him in his particular social and intellectual sphere. The enlightened Lamas of Thibet take refuge in the vastness and antiquity of their system, which we ought, perhaps, rather to term a philosophy than a religion. Their comprehensive creed can tolerate all others which appear but as subdivisions of itself—partial ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... one is in Chinese dress (pien-yi) with the Member's badge pinned conspicuously on the breast. The idea speedily becomes a conviction that this after all is not extraneous to the nation, but actually of the living flesh, a vital and imperative thing. The vastness and audacity of it all cannot fail to strike the imaginative mind, for the four or five hundred men who are gathered here typify, if they do not yet represent, the four or five hundred millions who make up the country. ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... to us unless we do show not merely a slight but a well-nigh immeasurable improvement! We have assumed heavy burdens, heavy responsibilities. I have no sympathy with the men who cry out against our assuming them. If this great nation, if this nation with its wealth, with its continental vastness of domain, with its glorious history, with its memory of Washington and Lincoln, of its statesmen and soldiers and sailors, the builders and the wielders of commonwealths, if this nation is to stand ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... away never to return. A new continent had arisen beyond the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in the awful vastness of the universe. In the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built for themselves mankind ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... mountains, the silence of the plain, the vastness, the emptiness, the seeming purposelessness of it all, irritated and oppressed her spirit. And she so yearned to be where the ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... story' than I do; never even did I myself, as a child, care more for it than I do. My love of fiction began with my breath, and will end with it; and goes on increasing; and the heights and depths of the consumption which it has induced you may guess at perhaps, but it is a sublime idea from its vastness, and will gain on you but slowly. On my tombstone may be written 'Ci-git the greatest novel reader in the world,' and nobody will forbid the inscription; and I approve of Gray's notion of paradise more than of his lyrics, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... to which I meant to have alluded at the time you were speaking. She said that those who supposed that the spirit-land contained only one soul for every individual that had ever lived had no conception of its vastness, and that the stream of souls constantly ascending is like a thick mist rising from all the earth. The phrase struck me as strangely strong, but I can conceive now how she might have come to ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... in loveliness revealed. Now first he sees her beautiful, and knows That he must love her; and the doom is sealed Of all his happiness and all the woes That shall be born of pregnant years hereafter. The swift poise of a head, a flutter of laughter— And love flows in on him, its vastness pent Within his narrow life: the pain it brings, Boundless; for love is infinite discontent With the poor lonely life of ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... brought back Muscovy to the knowledge of Western Europe. English mariners penetrated among the Esquimaux, or settled in Virginia. Drake circumnavigated the globe. The "Collection of Voyages" which was published by Hakluyt in 1582 disclosed the vastness of the world itself, the infinite number of the races of mankind, the variety of their laws, their customs, their religions, their very instincts. We see the influence of this new and wider knowledge of the world, not only in the life and richness which it gave to the imagination of the time, ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... sea-trafficking in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. The knowledge and experience thus acquired ultimately made it possible for the Egyptians and their pupils to push their adventures further afield. It is impossible adequately to estimate the vastness of the influence of such intercourse, not merely in spreading abroad throughout the world the germs of our common civilization, but also, by bringing into close contact peoples of varied histories and traditions, in stimulating progress. Even if the practice of mummification had exerted no other ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... "put as you put it, you almost make me tremble at the vastness of the responsibility that I am about to undertake. But you shall see. I will at once go down to the huts, choose my men, and bring them up here for your approval." And with that shot at me he walked out at the back door and disappeared into the darkness, ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... who, like Antony, are not at all averse from the study of English writers, stand aghast at the vastness of the what seems so gigantic ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... in being religious, and righteous, and courageous. Keep thou also his commands and his laws, which he hath given us by Moses, and do not permit others to break them. Be zealous also to dedicate to God a temple, which he hath chosen to be built under thy reign; nor be thou aftrighted by the vastness of the work, nor set about it timorously, for I will make all things ready before I die: and take notice, that there are already ten thousand talents of gold, and a hundred thousand talents of silver [25] collected together. I have also laid together brass and iron without number, ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... daylight beauty of the earth, for that makes God seem as if He were here, in this world, which then is all we see (except its great eye, the sun) of these multitudinous worlds He has created, and that are hanging in countless myriads round us. Night suggests the vastness of creation, as day can never do; and darkness, silence, the absence of human fellowship, and the suspension of human activity, interests, and occupations, leave us a less disturbed opportunity of meditating on our Creator's inconceivable power. The ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... Compostilla Streets. A stranger cannot miss it, as it is one of the most formidable buildings in Havana. Though its style has something of the barbaric about it, yet it is chiefly so on account of its ruggedness, vastness and stern grandeur. It is built of stone, cemented and brown in color. The main arched entrance is very lofty, and on the steps as I passed by I noticed a gaunt, diseased and ragged negro, with outstretched arms soliciting alms. I rang the bell. A porter admitted ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... features. The river broadened, the air became salty, the wind rose and soon the little boat was bobbing up and down in a manner to give discomfort to my stomach. The water, building terraces and battlements, reflected enough light to impress me with the diminutiveness of the boat, set in the vastness on which it floated. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... When it was at last rejected by the Empire, it fell back upon its converts among the Northern nations, and renewed the contest as a Western reaction of Teutonic pride against a Roman gospel. The struggle went on for full three hundred years in all, and on a scale of vastness never seen again in history. Even the Reformation was limited to the West, whereas Arianism ranged at one time or another through the whole of Christendom. Nor was the battle merely for the wording of antiquated creeds or for the outworks of the faith, but for the very life ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... was in its immensity, and its solemn vastness—but unlike any temple ever raised by human toil. In no ruin of earth's youth giants' work now crumbling under the weight of time had I ever sensed a shadow of the strangeness with which this was instinct. No—nor in the shattered fanes that once had ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... though it possesses not all the vastness of the ocean, is yet equal in sublimity. In gazing upon its surface, whether spread out like a vast mirror reflecting the varying tints of the sky, or ruffled by gently curling waves, or lashed into fury by the tempest, one is impressed with the idea of the Infinite. It is known ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... the banqueting-hall, a splendid, panelled room with deep-embrasured windows, from which the defences had now been removed and through which the inmates could have noble views of the lawns and gardens beyond the moat. The little company of three seemed, as it were, lost in the vastness of the chamber as they sat at meat together at the oak table by the hearth at one end of the room, Brilliana at the head, with Halfman at her right and Evander at her left as the guest and stranger. ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... not seem strange that ambassadors and nuncios should become confused and lose all recollection of the addresses they had committed to memory, in the presence of a prince whose exterior so ill accords with the grandeur of his titles and the vastness of his power? His form is below the middle height and very slender, the limbs having even an attenuated look. The whole appearance is that of a man of delicate and even feeble organization. The blonde ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... rich veins of a universe—are cautiously coined, and thence munificently circulated—she applied herself diligently to the task of gathering, from various sources the data required for her projected work: a vindication of the unity of mythologies. The vastness of the cosmic field she was now compelled to traverse, the innumerable ramifications of polytheistic and monotheistic creeds, necessitated unwearied research, as she rent asunder the superstitious veils which various nations and successive epochs had woven before the shining features ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... The vastness of Mrs Hardman's preparations were equal to the greatness of her joy. The scene of the former reception was to be enacted over again, but with ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... How fine the view from that point of rock! Then, that delightful chain of hills, and the exquisite valleys at their feet! Could I but wander and lose myself amongst them! I went, and returned without finding what I wished. Distance, my friend, is like futurity. A dim vastness is spread before our souls: the perceptions of our mind are as obscure as those of our vision; and we desire earnestly to surrender up our whole being, that it may be filled with the complete and perfect bliss of one glorious emotion. But alas! ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... top of a little hill they came out to a spot where they could see far over the desert. Forty miles away three square, flat hills, or mesas, looked like a gigantic train of cars, and the clear air gave everything a strange vastness. Farther on beyond the mesas dimly dawned the Black Mountains. One could even see the shadowed head of "Round Rock," almost a hundred miles away. Before them and around was a great plain of sage-brush, and here and there was a small bush that ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... personal pronoun "you", now I was privileged to use the first personal pronoun "we". Almost to the last I did not know what text to choose and trusted to the inspiration of the moment what to say. My mind was confused with the vastness of the outlook. At last the words came to me which are the very foundation stone of human endeavour and human progress, "He that loseth his life for My sake shall find it." I do not know exactly what I said, and I do not suppose it mattered ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... is the chief attraction of the country, save perhaps in Ghent and Bruges, where we have also noble pictures. Even those who do not care to study this architecture in detail will be gratified to stroll at leisure through the dim vastness of the great Flemish churches, where the eye is satisfied everywhere with the wealth of brass and iron work, and where the Belgian passion for wood-carving displays itself in lavish prodigality. Such wealth, indeed, of ecclesiastical furniture you will hardly find elsewhere in Western ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... greatness. Some day a wise man, one who has not read too many books but who has gone about among men, will discover and set forth a very interesting thing about America. The land is vast and there is a national hunger for vastness in individuals. One wants an Illinois-sized man for Illinois, an Ohio-sized man for Ohio, and a ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... the power and the wisdom and many other things, which are included in "grace upon grace." And after we mentioned all these precious things, we would have to put the pen down and confess our insufficiency to tell out the riches, the fulness and vastness of "grace upon grace." ...
— The Lord of Glory - Meditations on the person, the work and glory of our Lord Jesus Christ • Arno Gaebelein
... the bow. Her eyes roved from the sun-glittering stream to the hills that rose above the tree-fringed valley floor, as if sight had been restored to her so that her eyes could dwell upon the green-leaved alder and maple, the drooping spruce bows, the vastness of those forests of somber fir where the deer lurked in the shadows and where the birds sang vespers and matins when dusk fell and dawn came again. There were meadow larks warbling now on stumps that dotted the floor of the Big Bend, and above the voices of those yellow-breasted ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... human flotsam, far on the frontier hurled; In the camp at the bend of the river, with its dozen saloons aglare, Its gambling dens a-riot, its gramophones all a-blare; Crimped with the crimes of a city, sin-ridden and bridled with lies, In the hush of my mountained vastness, in the flush of my midnight skies. Plague-spots, yet tools of my purpose, so natheless I suffer them thrive, Crushing my Weak in their clutches, that only ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... nature indescribable? every leaf infinite and transcendental? How much more those mighty downs, with their enormous sheets of spotless turf, where the dizzy eye loses all standard of size and distance before the awful simplicity, the delicate vastness, of those grand curves and swells, soft as the outlines of a Greek Venus, as if the great goddess-mother Hertha had laid herself down among the hills to sleep, her Titan limbs wrapt in a thin ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... wet and unsociable. You couldn't get chummy with it. I turned to my great barn of a room. You couldn't get chummy with that, either. I began to unpack, with furious energy. In vain I turned every gas jet blazing high. They only cast dim shadows in the murky vastness of that awful chamber. A whole Fourth of July fireworks display, Roman candles, sky-rockets, pin-wheels, set pieces and all, could not have made that room take ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... Amy, jumping up and down in her excitement as the boat sunk in the hollow between two huge combers and was lost to view. "No, they're not! They're up again," as the boat, looking pathetically tiny in comparison to the vastness of the ocean, rose gallantly on the crest of a big wave and came rushing toward them, reeling from side to side. The next moment they were lost to ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Bluff Point - Or a Wreck and a Rescue • Laura Lee Hope
... more; she swallowed the pride which for the first few months of innovation had made her treat the new rector merely with distant rudeness, and descended upon him in the three rooms of Brodnyx Rectory which he inhabited with cheerful contempt for the rest of its howling vastness. ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... swung across seeming great distances, till a strong arm out of the night and the vastness of things seized her, and the tension of the struggle passed from her limbs, leaving a sense of appeasement as sweet as sleep. She heard a man's voice directing her, and obeyed without understanding. Now the sea supported her ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... correlated greatness. If the scroll Where thoughts lie fast in spell of hieroglyph Be mighty through its mighty habitants; If God be in His Name; grave potence if The sounds unbind of hieratic chants; All's vast that vastness means. Nay, I affirm Nature is whole in her least things exprest, Nor know we with what scope God builds the worm. Our towns are copied fragments from our breast; And all man's Babylons strive but to impart The grandeurs ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... Heart's Desire, Dreaming 'neath the August sun, Thus my meditations run— What if that great Ember bright Were a monster Pipe alight, Or the glowing from afar Of some Fire-God's cigar? If the Smoker's Peace abide In that sun fire, multiplied By its vastness, I will be Henceforth a ...
— The Smoker's Year Book • Oliver Herford
... corn patch and listened. A lingering afterglow touched the broken rows of skyward-pointing tassels, but the valley below her lay shrouded in gloom. Night was creeping up the mountain side; she could see it, feel it in the horrible silence. All alone in that stark vastness of crags, disregarding those who might be "layin' out" for her, she put her hands to her mouth and called; then leaned forward, holding her breath and listening. There was not even an echo. So she turned wearily back to the cabin and tenderly covered that ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... the end of Barney Bill, and Paul found himself thrillingly alone in London. At first its labyrinthine vastness overwhelmed him, causing him to feel an unimportant atom, which may have been good for his soul, but was not agreeable to his vanity. By degrees, however, he learned the lay of the great thoroughfares, especially those leading to the quarters where ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... darker than, with large windows, should be the case, and however hideous the yellow-and-blue checks with which they are filled may be, they have the advantage of keeping out all brilliant light; the huge transept too is not well lit and gives that feeling of vastness and mystery which, as the supports are few and slender, would otherwise be wanting, while looking westwards the same result is obtained by the dark cavernous space ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... Doctor was green,—immortally green, as a cedar of Lebanon, which, waving its broad archangel wings over some fast-rooted eternal old solitude, and seeing from its sublime height the vastness of the universe, veils its kingly head with humility before God's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various |
