"Immensity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the power of Haroun al Raschid were bounded by the immensity of fate, yet he did all he could to fulfil the hope he had raised in Naima's heart. He gave a commission to all his servants in his kingdom, high and low, and to his ambassadors in the neighbouring kingdoms, and even sent into distant lands, with the princes of which he was friendly, ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... bold plan in silence, too much surprised to ask why Pina was so ready to propose it, and a little frightened too, for she was a mere girl, and all the world beyond Venice was a mysterious immensity of Cimmerian gloom in the midst of which little pools of brilliant light marked the great and wonderful places she had heard described, such as Rome, Florence, and Milan, and royal ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... reason, imagination, and will,—there was a great plenty of will, John,—and all the other ingredients that go to make a human being. But after He had gotten them all together there was still a great space left to be filled, and He just threw in an immensity of love with which to complete me. Therefore, John, am I not in true proportion. There is too much love in me, and it wells up at times and overflows my heart. How thankful I should be that I may pour it upon you and that it will not be wasted. How ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... all day, in a purely meditative posture. Rutowski numbers 35,000, now on this ground, with immensity of cannon; 32,000 we, with only the usual field-artillery, and such a Tschonengrund, with its half-frozen quagmires ahead. A ticklish case for the old man, as he grimly reconnoitres it, in the ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... in talking with each other-for these two great persons did nothing on a small scale, and a whole day to deliver a single sentence, such was the immensity of their discourse, ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... three years of the War, we are only now beginning to see it, as it is, in its epic immensity. On the eastern front it has been too far from us; on the western front it has been too near us, and we have been too much a part of it, to get any sight at all of that series of monotonous and monstrous battles, a series punctuated ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... after what he had discussed with Edith upstairs. She would rather that he had asked his question, forced her to the issue. That at least would have shown some comprehension of her state. But he had taken the issue for granted, refused to face the immensity of it all. She had had her first taste of sacrificial flames, and her spirit was prepared to go through fire to reach him. And he presented himself as already folded and protected; satisfied with some inferior and independent secret ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... enlightened by a superior firmament of luminaries, which are planted at so great a distance, that they may appear to the inhabitants of the former as the stars do to us; in short, while I pursued this thought, I could not but reflect on that little insignificant figure which I myself bore amidst the immensity of God's works. ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... midst of dreadful dangers. Yet her head was full of a blank astonishment at being mistaken for a simpleton! The sole explanation could be that Gerald, in some matters, must himself be a confiding simpleton. He had not reflected. He had not sufficiently realized the immensity of her sacrifice in flying with him even to London. She felt sorry for him. She had the woman's first glimpse of the necessity for some adjustment of outlook as an essential ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... gainsaying the immensity of the problem. It is appalling enough to make us despair. But those who do not put their trust in man alone, but in One who is Almighty, have no right to despair. To despair is to lose faith; to despair is to forget God Without God we can do nothing in this frightful chaos ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... itself, with its immensity, its mystery, its moods, the danger in it, and the man's work in mastering it, was almost irresistibly attractive ...
— Out of the Fog • C. K. Ober
... in the midst of the new and majestic music, the winning qualities of the popular strain. To such a boy, with an imaginative mind, an impassioned nature, and a memory which retained and developed powerfully year by year all associations involving the feelings of grandeur, magnificence, or immensity,—to such a boy, life and experience were but the storing up of material which the creative mind might weave into literature that had the form of prose ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... such as Heaven might accept; this would release her from the burthen of life that weighed upon her, and would reunite her to her mother; in this way she could show her lover and the bishop and all the world the immensity of her self-sacrifice, which was in nothing behind that of "the other"—the much-vaunted daughter of Thomas! She would do the great deed before Paula's eyes, in sight of all the people. But Orion must know whose image she bore in her heart and for whose sake she made that leap from blooming ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to Reuben a man solemnly preoccupied with the immensity of his charge; and it seemed to him (though it was doubtless a wicked thought of the boy) that the ponderous minister would have counted it a matter of far smaller merit to instruct, and guide, and save a wanderer ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... defends this fanciful science, if science it may be called. "It demonstrates nothing while it defends every thing. It confutes, according to Knight's own ideas: it alleges a few scattered facts in favour of astrological productions, which may be picked up in that immensity of fabling which disgraces history. He strenuously denies, or ridicules, what the greatest writers have said of this fanciful art, while he lays great stress on some passages from obscure authors, or what is worse, from authors of no authority."—The most ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... already so productive, Amiel is then a fresh and remarkable instance. Having caught from the Germans not only their love of exact knowledge but also their love of vast horizons, their insatiable curiosity as to the whence and whither of all things, their sense of mystery and immensity in the universe, he then brings those elements in him which belong to his French inheritance—and something individual besides, which is not French but Genevese—to bear on his new acquisitions, and the result is of the highest ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in the living, moving germ, what dozens can scarcely see today with the germ glued to the spot and with all the aid of stains and dark-field apparatus. After all, it is brain-power focused to a point that moves events, and to the immensity of that power the history of our growing knowledge of syphilis bears the ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... the interposition of Providence life was preserved, expressions which imply that the mischief had one origin, and the remedy another; but such language certainly derogates, from the honour of the great Universal Cause, who, acting through all duration, and subsisting in all space, fills immensity with his presence, and eternity with ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... out of bed and wandered about. I sat at the window and stared at the immensity of space. Between the stars was the void, the unfathomable darkness! I tried to recall the fragmentary knowledge of astronomy I had gained in my irregular reading, but it was all too vague to furnish any idea of the things we might expect. At last I got back to bed and snatched some ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... Australia is, as is well-known very old, one third of the continent being desert sandstone with no marine fossils, but although, scantily supplied with water on the surface, there is little doubt of the immensity of the subterranean supply. ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... Probably every new and eagerly expected garment ever put on since clothes came in, fell a trifle short of the wearer's expectation. But after I had had my new suit on some half an hour, and had gone through an immensity of posturing with Mr. Pumblechook's very limited dressing-glass, in the futile endeavor to see my legs, it seemed to fit me better. It being market morning at a neighboring town some ten miles off, Mr. Pumblechook was not at home. I had not told him exactly when ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... they had often stood before, on some high ridge of the desert cliff which overlooked its desolation and immensity. Margaret's face was star-lit; her beauty softened. As Michael gazed ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... side, and saw nothing but an immensity of quiet waters. But to starboard, on the bottom appeared a large protuberance, which at once attracted my attention. One would have thought it a ruin buried under a coating of white shells, much resembling a covering of snow. Upon examining the mass attentively, I could recognise the ever-thickening ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... will even go and sleep till three," replied the young man. "At that hour, Mr. Brown, I will come and seek you. I have an immensity to say to you, all about nothing in the world, and therefore it is absolutely necessary that I should disgorge ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... I have seen it, most terrifying, that neuter state and limbo of nothingness, when unreal sea and spectral sky, all boundaries lost, mingled in a vast shadowy void of ghastly phantasmagoria, pale to utter huelessness, at whose centre I, as if annihilated, seemed to swoon in immensity of space. Into this disembodied world would come anon waftures of that peachy scent which I knew: and their frequency rapidly grew. But still the Boreal moved, traversing, as it were, bottomless Eternity: and I reached latitude 72 deg., not far now ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... tier they rise to dizzy height— The cells of men who know the world no more. Silence intense from ceiling to the floor; While through the window gleams a lone blue light Which stabs the dark immensity of night. Felt shod and ghostly like a shade of yore, The guard comes shuffling down the corridor; His key-ring jingles . . . and ...
— Bars and Shadows • Ralph Chaplin
... around, and touching me as the foam runs to my feet. I am in it now, not to-morrow, this moment; I cannot escape from it. Though I may deceive myself with labour, yet still I am in it; in sleep too. There is no escape from this immensity. ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... bought and paid for in money, and the sweat of long, toil-filled miles. It looked bigger in that niche than it had looked out on the desert with nothing but the immensity of earth and sky to measure it by. It looked bigger, more powerful—a mechanical miracle which still seemed more dream than reality. And it was his, absolutely the sole property of Johnny Jewel, who had retrieved it ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... real treasure was contained in them. Although strong, they were quickly broken open by well-directed blows of the pickaxes; and upon the lids being raised there burst upon Jim's eyes such a vision of wealth that he was positively dazed by the immensity of it. The particular chest which he opened was full, from bottom to top, of solid gold ingots, black with age on the surface, but showing the dull red metallic lustre of gold when scraped with a knife. There must ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... the voice of the restless and mystic ocean, obeying the fiat of Him who hath fixed its bounds—at too great a distance now to excite other feelings than those of their own impotence, and the immensity by which they were surrounded. I know of no sound to be compared to it. There is nought in the wide range of our intelligence that can produce the dread, the almost terrific expansion which it seems to create ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... thickened—and it seemed to me as if I no longer knew her age, nor her name, nor the work she happened to be doing down here, nor anything about her—nothing at all. She gazed at the pale immensity, which touched her. Her eyes gleamed. You would say she was crying, but no, her eyes only shed light. She would be an angel if reality flourished upon ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... sit down. The sight of that gargantuan sweep of cliff coming on top of the weariness of the journey had crushed her. To go forward seemed impossible, to fight against that immensity impossible. She could have wept but she had neither tears nor energy. The gods seemed to have built those bastions to shut out all hope and the voice of the returning sea seemed like a tide turning over her broken ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... revenue cutter which had a wharf at the Fisheries Bureau station at Woods Hole, Mass. This officer, who had a brother in the Bureau, was only too glad to talk to the boy about the service, and Colin monopolized his spare time on the journey. And when, one day, his friend depicted the immensity of the great salmon drives of the Alaskan rivers, the lad grew so excited that the lieutenant laughingly told him he expected some fine morning to find that he had jumped overboard and had started swimming for the Ugashik River or some other of the famous salmon streams ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... our heads, of sympathy for our hearts; so, respecting the destiny of the soul. In spite of all our philosophy, we cannot be satisfied with the conception of a mere immaterial essence floating hither and thither in immensity. The intellect looks eagerly forward to a boundless and excursive state; but the affections, the sentiments, yearn for some locality—some spot of residence and repose. We cannot help cherishing the conception of a place where our friends ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... — In the evening we saw in the distance New Zealand. We may now consider that we have nearly crossed the Pacific. It is necessary to sail over this great ocean to comprehend its immensity. Moving quickly onwards for weeks together, we meet with nothing but the same blue, profoundly deep, ocean. Even within the archipelagoes, the islands are mere specks, and far distant one from the other. Accustomed to look at maps drawn on a small scale, where dots, shading, and names are ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... may have been with her livery altar-cloth. Indeed, it seems to me that we got more delight out of our very imperfect work, designed by ourselves and sent to Clarence to be executed by men in back streets in London, costing an immensity of trouble, than can be had now by simply choosing out of a book of figures of cut ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sea at seven, but when an old sailor pointed out on the stern of the jolly-boat, the letters that formed the name of his first ship—it had all come back to the child; and then he found his first Bible. Slowly conceiving its immensity, its fullness for him—he was almost lifted from his body with the upward winging of happiness. It was his first great exaltation, and there was a sacredness about it which kept him from telling anybody.... And now all the structures ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... was no darkness of sin or punishment in the original state of man and the angels, but there was a certain natural obscurity in the human and angelic intellect, in so far as every creature is darkness in comparison with the immensity of the Divine light: and this ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... bred in him a contempt for lesser signs. The religion of his birth, the faith of Taou Yuen, the fetishism of the Zanzibar Coast, he had regarded as equally important, or futile—the mere wash of the immensity of beauty, the inexorable destiny, that had seemed to breathe on him alone at the stern of ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... among associate planets; whose meek handmaiden is the moon, whose mediate sovereign is the sun; whose life is eternity, whose thought is that of a God; whose enjoyment is knowledge; whose destinies are lost in immensity, whose cognizance of ourselves is akin with our own cognizance of the animalculae which infest the brain—a being which we, in consequence, regard as purely inanimate and material much in the same manner as these animalculae must ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... never till this hour had he known Nature, that she was One, that she was his Mother and divine. And as the ruddy glow was fading into clearness in the sky, and the Sun had now departed, a murmur of Eternity and Immensity, of Death and of Life, stole through his soul; and he felt as if Death and Life were one, as if the Earth were not dead, as if the Spirit of the Earth had its throne in that splendor, and his own ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... theology into the living figure of a new faith. "From the surface of the earth I raised my ideas to all the existences in nature, to the universal system of things, to the incomprehensible Being who embraces all. Then with mind lost in that immensity, I did not think, I did not reason, I did not philosophise; with a sort of pleasure I felt overwhelmed by the weight of the universe, I surrendered myself to the ravishing confusion of these vast ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... this time Sejanus was so imposing both in his haughtiness of mind and in his immensity of power that, to make a long matter short, he seemed to be the emperor and Tiberius a kind of island potentate because the latter spent all his days in the island called Capreae. Then there was rivalry and jostling about the great man's doors from the fear not merely that a person might ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... alienate one who had been his second father, rouse England, America and Germany to anger, because of the Princess whose name rumor had already coupled with his, and raise in every direction a storm of disapproval. When this girl whom he loved realized the immensity of the concession he was making because of his reverent love for her, she would give her life to ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... in a supreme authority elevated on alliance with the priesthood, at the expense of the independence and the equipoise of nations. The exploits of Magellan and Cortez, upsetting all habits of perspective, called up vain dreams of the coming immensity of Spain, and roused the phantom of universal empire. The motive of domination became a reigning force in Europe; for it was an idea which monarchy would not willingly let fall after it had received a religious and an international consecration. For centuries it was constantly asserted as ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... with crimson-madder; the last clouds scattered, drenched in orange and rose, and flames burned in the glass of every window-pane. Up came the tip of the sun's rim, grew to a fiery quarter, to a half; till, bounding free from the horizon, it began to mount and to lose its girth in the immensity of ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... Marquis of Denonville's saying, often repeated:—that the King of France, our monarch was not high lord enough to open up such a vast country, as we are only beginning to enter on the confines of the immensity of ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... feet in length and its height 481 feet, or 60 feet higher than the cross of St. Paul's, and that gangs of men, 100,000 in each, were engaged for twenty years in its construction, some idea of its immensity may be formed. At one time the pyramids were covered with polished stone, but this has all been removed and has been used in building the mosques of Cairo, and to-day its exterior is a series of steps, each 4 to 6 feet in height, formed by the enormous ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... Protestant communions it was felt that the work called for was a simple, peaceful, and positive one—to plant the soil of the West, at the first occupation of it by settlers, with Christian institutions and influences. The immensity of the task stimulated rather than dismayed the zeal of the various churches. The work undertaken and accomplished in the twenty years from 1840 to 1860 in providing the newly settled regions with churches, pastors, colleges, and theological seminaries, with Sunday-schools, ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... as if inclosing a large object; wave the hands forward and somewhat upward. (Apache III.) "Suggesting immensity." ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... much pains? It is, in the end, Peter or William that carries it, takes it into his possession, and whom it only concerns. O what a valiant faculty is hope, that in a mortal subject, and in a moment, makes nothing of usurping infinity, immensity, eternity, and of supplying its master's indigence, at its pleasure, with all things he can imagine or desire! Nature has given us this passion for a pretty toy to play withal. And this Peter or William, what is it but a sound, when all is done? or three or four dashes with a pen, so easy ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... exalt life. It is very hard—perhaps it is impossible—to present in a page or two the substance and quality of nearly a month's conversation, conversation that is casual and discursive in form, that ranges carelessly from triviality to immensity, and yet is constantly resuming a constructive process, as workmen on a wall loiter and jest and go and come back, ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... me, and claimed no sacrifice; for a long time He and little Therese had known and understood one another. That day our meeting was more than simple recognition, it was perfect union. We were no longer two. Therese had disappeared like a drop of water lost in the immensity of the ocean; Jesus alone remained—He was the Master, the King! Had not Therese asked Him to take away her liberty which frightened her? She felt herself so weak and frail, that she wished to be for ever united to ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... outstanding claims that the track became almost derelict. For these were anxious days for railway promoters. The rosy promise of rich revenues from remote Welsh lines failed to mature, and Mr. Savin, heavily weighted with the immensity of his undertakings, and crushed by the costly construction of his great hotels, sank under the burden. He faced his financial embarrassments with characteristic pluck, but it was a dark hour in the annals of British finance far beyond the boundaries ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... face and body were lost in sheer immensity above them. They knew they were riding in a car; but they couldn't see the car. All they could see was the black cliff that was the seat-cushion behind them. The world had disappeared—hidden in its bigness; the world, indeed, was just at present ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... effort to prey on every part of the Empire finally tires Italy; quarrels over the division of spoils embitter friends; the immensity of the conquests, made in a few years of reckless enthusiasm, is alarming. Finally a new civil war breaks out, terrible and interminable, in which classes and families fall upon each other anew, to tear away in turn the spoils taken together abroad. Out of the tremendous discord rises at last ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... effect. Although not such a philosopher as Hume, his work is quite as philosophical as Hume's history, and he has been more faithful in the use of his materials. Guizot, while pointing out his errors, says he was struck, after "a second and attentive perusal," with "the immensity of his researches, the variety of his knowledge, and, above all, with that truly philosophical discrimination which judges the past as it would judge ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... incumbrance of episodes, and monstrosity of images, as a general rule it is endowed with simplicity of style, pure coloring, sublime ideas, rare figures, and chaste epithets. Its exuberance must be attributed to the strange mythology of the Hindus, to the immensity of the fables which constitute the groundwork of their poems, and to the gigantic strength of their poetical imaginations. A striking peculiarity of Sanskrit poetry is its extensive use in treating of those subjects apparently the most difficult to ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Africa, which she had never seen. Her destination was Beni-Mora. She had chosen it because she liked its name, because she saw on the map that it was an oasis in the Sahara Desert, because she knew it was small, quiet, yet face to face with an immensity of which she had often dreamed. Idly she fancied that perhaps in the sunny solitude of Beni-Mora, far from all the friends and reminiscences of her old life, she might learn to understand herself. How? She did not know. She did not seek to know. Here was a vague pilgrimage, as many ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... the years following 1913, it is necessary to have a sense of the immensity of the problems involved, as well as a restrained judgment and some knowledge of the chief actors. Beginning in 1914, the great nations of Europe were constantly menaced by appalling dangers; their leaders were daily confronted with decisions of the utmost importance. Because of ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... steady himself not to be awestruck at the immensity of the good his own friend must on all this evidence have wanted to do him. Of one thing indeed meanwhile he was sure: Milly Theale wouldn't herself precipitate his necessity of intervention. She would absolutely never say to him: "Is ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... quail-of-the-water), of pickerel and bass, astounded him. His travels had broadened his views. The chatter of his Iroquois and Algonquin friends was now easier of interpretation. The riddles of the wilderness were more easily read. He now realized how possible it was, in this continent of unsurveyed immensity, to journey for weeks, after leaving the white man's domain hundreds of miles behind, and then reach only the rim of another kingdom of even far greater fertility. He also realized that beyond these laughing lands lay a rugged world of desolation, bounded in turn by the rasping ice-floes ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... He could not believe his eyes. She must have followed his scent, slept on the threshold like a lost dog. Her Pa? Gone away. Her Ma? Dead. Her name? Maud. Her age? Didn't know. Born somewhere in the immensity of Whitechapel, towheaded, round-faced. Nothing to eat for two days. She'd do! He would go to the police-court, get the license later; meantime, he netted ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... garniture of its trackless wastes is that of great daubs of vivid color, laid thick upon the canvas with the knife—never modulated, never worked into delicate shading with the brush, but attracting by its riot, its audacity, its immensity, its disdain of convention, its utter disregard of the canons cherished by the puny mind that contemplates it. The forest's appeal is a reflex of its own infinite complexity. The sensations which it arouses within the one who steps from civilization into ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... hell than the one she then carried in her bosom; though it had ever been pictured to her in its deepest colors, and threatened her as a reward for all her misdemeanors. Her vileness and God's holiness and all-pervading presence, which filled immensity, and threatened her with constant annihilation, composed the burden of her vision of terror. Her faith in prayer is equal to her faith in the love of Jesus. Her language is, 'Let others say what they will of the efficacy of prayer, I believe in ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... partly by Captain George Vancouver, one of Cook's men, in 1791, and partly in 1792 by the French commander, Bruni Dentrecasteaux, who was despatched in search of the gallant La Perouse—"vanished trackless into blue immensity."* (* Carlyle, French Revolution book 2 cap 5.) Flinders carefully revised what they had done, commencing his elaborate, independent survey immediately after the Investigator made the Leeuwin, on December 6, 1801. He had therefore ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... medical men uncertain how to act. She had tasted no food since the child died; she was hopeful to the last: it was impossible, she said, that her child could die; her faculties could not comprehend the immensity of the anguish in store for her. So there she sat like stone—cold, and silent, and wan, as the effigy she watched. Who ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... the power of opposition; I closed my eyes, stretched out my arms toward the god of my vocation and felt myself drawn with the suddenness of thought through the trackless immensity of space. There was an instant of extreme cold and ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... an unaccustomed height, had taken on an added and tremendous swiftness. The red turbid stream was eddying and bulging and hurrying with terrific swiftness between its shallow banks, striking with an immensity of power against the projection of land on which stood Marie Louise's cabin, and rebounding in great circling waves that spread and lost themselves in the seething turmoil. The cable used in crossing the unwieldly flat had long been submerged and the posts which held it wrenched ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... flight became less abrupt, but the speed increased, the wind-pressure became almost insupportable. I twisted, dropped upon my right arm, thrust my head against my shoulder, stared backward. When first I had looked upon the place I had sensed its immensity; now I began to realize how vast it must really be—for already the gateway through which we had come glimmered far away on high, shrunk to a hoop of incandescent brass ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... of gasping wonderment. We seemed to stand upon a great stage of an immensity which words can not describe. It was a stage proportioned for giants. The rock prosscenium arched above us seventy feet and the stage was nearly two hundred feet wide. As an audience chamber one could look out over twenty-five thousand square ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... confession, which is, that only since I had left the Emperor, had I fully comprehended the immensity of his greatness. Attached to his service almost from the beginning of the Consulate, at a time when I was still very young, he had grown, so to speak, without my having perceived it, and I had above all seen in him, from the nature of my duties, the excellent master rather than the great man; ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... divine germs, homogeneous Unity must limit its immensity and create within itself the diversity of matter, of form. This can be obtained by the creation of "multiplicity" and by the "limitation" of what might be called a portion of Divinity. Now, limitation implies ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... some mariners—a part of the crew of the vessel from the Spanish Main—who had come ashore to see the humours of Election Day. They were rough-looking desperadoes, with sun-blackened faces, and an immensity of beard; their wide short trousers were confined about the waist by belts, often clasped with a rough plate of gold, and sustaining always a long knife, and in some instances, a sword. From beneath their broad-brimmed hats of palm-leaf, gleamed eyes which, even in good-nature and merriment, had ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... flowing current, and then molten metal in the dazzling glare of the lightning. The time, the place, and his troubles stirred Major Braithwaite deeply. To-night the wilderness oppressed him with its immensity and its unknown, but none the less deadly, dangers. Things that he had read, scraps of old learning at college, floated through ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... now: it made mere placidity of his personally foregoing the young man's society in favour of Delia and Francie. He had not hitherto been perfectly satisfied that the streets and shops, the general immensity of Paris, were just the safest place for young ladies alone. But the company of a helpful gentleman ensured safety—a gentleman who would be helpful by the fact of his knowing so much and having it all right ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... and walking about London, has noted the effect of this prodigious town upon him; and how singularly he is lost in its immensity, overwhelmed by its grandeur, and bewildered amid its endless multiplicity of attractions. So it was with our little party. Excited by the thousand novel and dazzling objects, the hours fleeted away like minutes; and it was late before ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... flowing stream, and pass out upon the plain. Weird and picturesque is the procession as the long line of horsemen face the loneliness of the far-flung line of desert waste—the flat and sombre serenity of sand and sage and cactus. Clouds of dust are lifted from the immensity of the arid stretches, like smoke signals to the matchless immensity of the sky. The burning haze, the molten heavens, the weird and spearlike cactus, the valiant horsemen, hold the eye. We follow their trail until they are almost lost to view in the drapery that enshrouds sand and sage ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... find a breeze careening our sail and the Jeanne d'Arc rushing through a pale blue world—pale blue water, pale blue sky, and, it seemed, pale blue air. No single solid thing but the boat was to be seen in the indefinite immensity. Sprawling on its bottom in every attitude of limp relaxation, the oarsmen lay asleep; only Pere Victorien was awake, his hands on the tiller and his eyes gazing ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... part of the night gazing into the immensity of the heavens, or into the depths of the lake; but in spite of the nature of the thoughts agitating her, she none the less found very great physical alleviation in contact with this pure air and in contemplation of this peaceful and silent night: thus she awoke next day calmer ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... heavens! what a revulsion! what an unheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had vanished was now a trifle in my eyes; this negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me, in the abyss of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... nailed to his imprisoning corner, alone of his kind, a rebel against all the immensity ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... in France good men, pure books, true wit. But there is an immensity that is bad, and more hurtful to our farmers, clerks and country milliners, than to those to whose tastes it was originally addressed,—as the small-pox is most fatal among the wild men of the woods,—and ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the North have ever inquisitively considered the Mississippi River, and as a consequence its numerous peculiarities are not generally known. Indeed, its only characteristic features are supposed to be immensity of proportions rather than any specific variation from the universal nature of rivers. Many there are that have never seen the river, and have conceptions of its appearance merely in imagination; others have been more ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... I have already admitted several Quotations which have occurred to my Memory upon writing this Paper, I will conclude it with a little Persian Fable. A Drop of Water fell out of a Cloud into the Sea, and finding it self lost in such an Immensity of fluid Matter, broke out into the following Reflection: Alas! What an [insignificant [4]] Creature am I in this prodigious Ocean of Waters; my Existence is of no [Concern [5]] to the Universe, I am reduced to a Kind of Nothing, and am less then the least of the Works of God. It so happened, ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... and should mark in the rapid course of ages, in the continual progress of successive changes, those fixed points with which other catastrophes may one day be compared. All epochs are proximate to each other in the immensity of time comprehended in the history of nature. Years which have passed away seem but a few instants; and the physical descriptions of a country, even when they offer subjects of no very powerful and general interest, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... Tournier was much depressed, because he had asked himself a question which every man must one day ask, if he means to be truly happy, though some, by God's grace, learn the answer before they know the immensity of it. ...
— The French Prisoners of Norman Cross - A Tale • Arthur Brown
... I have seen the future, the destinies of the human race; I have spoken to the mighty, the lofty, and the pure; I have learnt the wise Order which guides the apparent great disorder; I trembled at the unfathomable secret of the Universe of which I had a glimmering perception, and I felt the immensity of my ignorance. Plato, you shall write what I have seen. You shall teach the children of men to estimate things at their proper value, to look up to the Invisible with awe, to revere Beauty, to cultivate virtue, and to hope for final deliverance, ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... their union with God, become godlike, by a most lofty and supereminent similitude with God, so that the mind can conceive no greater. Thus, like very gods, they shine to all eternity in the divine brightness. By these same acts they expand themselves into immensity, so as to be co-equal and co-extensive, as far as may be, to so great a good, that they may take it in, and comprehend it all. They linger not outside, as it were upon the surface of it; but they ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... the immensity of the sorrow surrounding you, I think you have a right to rejoice, and the more so as your consort, her Majesty the Queen, shares this rare privilege ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... week. It was with tears in his eyes that he parted from her, whom he never expected to see again in this life; and on reaching his American home, he addressed her in words of touching tenderness:—"I stretch out my arms towards you, notwithstanding the immensity of the seas which separate us, while I wait the heavenly kiss which I firmly trust ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... the highest sense. It exhibits no common display of gorgeous colors, such as poor artists and the ignorant crowd rejoice in. As far as the eye can see, there is a serene stretch of yellow sand, without even a blade of grass to break its awful immensity." (The artist, being on his favorite theme, took his pipe out of his mouth for the first time, and spoke with warmth.) "Look at that bit of desert, now. Does it not convey a perfect ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... pugilist rather than the low cunning of the traditional usurer; and the nose in particular, while of far healthier appearance than when I had seen it first and last, was both dominant and menacing in its immensity. It was a comfort to turn from this formidable countenance to that of Raffles, who had entered with his own serene unconscious confidence, and now introduced us with that inimitable air of light-hearted authority which stamped him in all shades ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... line she could take or not take, that might for every one, even for the Countess, give a better turn to the crisis. She was ready, in this interest, for an immense surrender, a surrender of everything but Sir Claude, of everything but Mrs. Beale. The immensity didn't include THEM; but if he had an idea at the back of his head she had also one in a recess as deep, and for a time, while they sat together, there was an extraordinary mute passage between her ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... from Men or Nature, is always what we call silent; cannot speak or come to light, till it be seen, till it be spoken to. Every noble work is at first 'impossible.' In very truth, for every noble work the possibilities will lie diffused through Immensity; inarticulate, undiscoverable except to faith. Like Gideon thou shalt spread out thy fleece at the door of thy tent; see whether under the wide arch of Heaven there be any bounteous moisture, or none. Thy heart and life-purpose ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... to say, "you, too, shall taste of that peace and that unrest in a searching intimacy with your own self—obscure as we were and as supreme in the face of all the winds and all the seas, in an immensity that receives no impress, preserves no memories, and keeps no reckoning ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... flowing tide kept curling over them, and sweeping the refuse away, to be snapped up by the shoals of hungry fish that came up the bay, the thousands that had been captured that morning being as nothing in the immensity of the ocean population. ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... the hulking steamer was pulled out into the stream and headed for the sea. It was a hot June morning and through the haze the great buildings towered loftily. The long city raised a jagged sky-line of human immensity, and the harbor swarmed with craft,—car ferries, and sailing vessels dropping down stream carefully to take the sea breeze, steamers lined with black figures, screeching tugs, and occasionally a gleaming yacht. The three stood together on the deck ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... critical of method only, he corresponded to the movement which, all around him, was ushering in the Bourbons: the hardening of Goujon's and de l'Orme's luxuriance into the conventions of the great colonnades and the sombre immensity of the new palaces; the return of one national faith to a people weary of so many random quarrels; the mistrust of an ill-ordered squirearchy; the firm founding of a ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... here, here at thy very life-breath, and will extinguish it. Thou, whose whole existence hitherto was a chimera and scenic show, at length becomest a reality: sumptuous Versailles bursts asunder, like a dream, into void Immensity; Time is done, and all the scaffolding of Time falls wrecked with hideous clangour round thy soul: the pale Kingdoms yawn open; there must thou enter, naked, all unking'd, and await what is appointed thee! Unhappy man, there as thou turnest, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 of animal life, is not this ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... sometimes gazing on the cataract; looking sometimes up the steep sylvan acclivities, into the narrow space of the cloudless ether; sometimes down into the abyss of the pool, and the deep bright-blue reflections that opened another immensity below her. The distressing recollections of the morning, the world and all its littlenesses, faded from her thoughts like a dream; but her wounded and wearied spirit drank in too deeply the tranquillising power of the ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... curtains of clouds pavilioned the immensity, brighter than celestial roses; masses of mist were lifted on high, like strips of living fire, more radiant than the sun himself, when his glorious noontide culminates from the equator. A kind of aerial ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... would adore thee, God sublime! Whose power and wisdom, love and grace, Are greater than the round of time, And wider than the bounds of space, O how shall thought expression find, All lost in thine immensity! How shall we seek thee, glorious Mind, ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... an abstraction and taking the form of the Eleatic philosophy. Like Parmenides, he is overpowered and intoxicated with the idea of Being or God. The greatness of both philosophies consists in the immensity of a thought which excludes all other thoughts; their weakness is the necessary separation of this thought from actual existence and from practical life. In neither of them is there any clear opposition between the inward and outward world. The substance of Spinoza has ...
— Meno • Plato
... soul was like the sea. Before the moon was made, Moaning in vague immensity, Of its own strength afraid, Unresful and unstaid. Through every rift it foamed in vain, About its earthly prison, Seeking some unknown thing in pain, And sinking restless back again, For yet no moon ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... we knew. We who believed In our own majesty, we who walked with gods As younger sons on this proud central stage, Round which the whole bright firmament revolved For our especial glory, must we creep Like ants upon our midget ball of dust Lost in immensity? I could not take That darkness lightly. I withheld my book For many a year, until I clearly saw, And Rome approved me—have they not brought it yet?— That this tremendous music could not drown The still supernal ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... that opened to the world like a stage to the audience, Mrs. Rodney kept her evening vigil. The last faint amethystine haze on the mountains was deepening. They towered about the valley where the house lay, with a challenging immensity, mocking the pitiful grasp of these pygmies on the thousand hills. The snow on the taller of the peaks still held the high lights. But all the valleys and the spaces between the mountains were wrapped in ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... general song of praise. Two further quotations from St. Augustine, in similar strain, follow. For who will be, asks the saint, unmoved by those frequent passages in the Psalms in which are proclaimed the immensity, the omnipotence, the infallible justice, the goodness, the clemency of God? Or who is not moved by the prayers and thanksgivings for benefits received by the humble and trustful petitions, by the cries ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... that as sufficient, is like flinging a stone into an unfathomable gulf we may find in the depths of a grotto, and imagining that the sounds it creates as it falls shall answer our every question, or reveal to us aught beside the immensity of ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck |
