"Immensity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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, as they work, through faithful performance of ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... ceremonial could keep him out; but he is 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, in dull agony, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... shadowy, grey thing; immensely broad, immensely shadowy, winding away between immense, half-invisible mountains into the silence of an unknown country. A little band of men, microscopic figures in that immensity, in those mists, crept slowly up it. A man among them was speaking; I seemed to hear his voice, low, monotonous, overpowered by the wan light and the ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... babe, Lal," he cried in his relief. "To ride without thought to stanch so simple a wound, and so lose all this blood—bad Tressilian blood though it be." He laughed in the immensity of his reaction from that momentary terror. "Stay thou there whilst I call Nick to help us dress ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... to the kirkyard at Pittendurie. He was going to bid Sophy a last farewell. Henceforward he must try and prevent her memory troubling his life and influencing his moods and motives. It was a cold, chilling morning, and the great immensity of the ocean spread away to the occult shores of the poles. The sky was grey and sombre, the sea cloudy and unquiet; and far off on the eastern horizon, a mysterious ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... prediction is lawful, because, while we know the causes on which its rising depends, we know, also, that there has existed hitherto no perceptible cause to counteract them; and that it is opposed to experience that a cause imperceptible for so long should start into immensity in a day. If the uniformity is empirical only, that is, if we do not know the causes, and if we infer that they remain uncounteracted from their effects alone, we still can extend the law to adjacent cases, but only to cases still more closely adjacent in time; since ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... noted the immensity, the make-up, and the causes of this movement, we are now justified in seeking to know something concerning its effects upon the South. If this movement had any effects upon the South, these undoubtedly must have been felt first and most in its economic interests; for, as we ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... 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
... reached the University station Mr. World and his friend alighted, and at once entered one of the carriages in waiting. They were hurried away toward a group of immense structures known as the "College of the World's Literature;" and yet with all the immensity of its buildings, it was but a small part of the whole University which lay far extended over the distant ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... obelisks, massed and reared and piled in the grey of the air. It is nothing if not fantastic. Even by day that same mad grouping and jostling of monumental devices, gathered together from the ends of the world, gives to the place a cheerful half-pagan character; now, in its confusion and immensity, it might be some city of dreams, tossed up in cloud and foam and frozen into marble; some aerial half-way limbo where life slips a little from the living and ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... as far as Cyrene; so that there was now growing in his thoughts a religion of his own, with no distinct formula, and on that very account full of infatuation and fervour. He no longer believed that the earth was formed like a fir-cone; he believed it to be round, and eternally falling through immensity with such prodigious speed that its ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... sorrow of the haughty Plantagenet for the murder of Becket. His repentance was so profound, so sincere, so remarkable, that it is embalmed forever in the heart of a sinful world. Its wondrous depth and intensity almost make us forget the crime itself, which nevertheless pursued him into the immensity of eternal night, and was visited upon the third and fourth generation in treason, rebellion, and wars. "Be sure your sin will find you out," is a natural law as well as a divine decree. It was not only because ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... looking fixedly at the aviator as if fascinated. The novelty, the immensity of the proposition, ...
— Dave Dashaway and his Hydroplane • Roy Rockwood
... 1740 onward, attracted by the rich lure of cheap and even free lands in Virginia and North Carolina, a tide of immigration swept ceaselessly into the valleys of the Shenandoah, the Yadkin, and the Catawba. The immensity of this mobile, drifting mass, which sometimes brought "more than 400 families with horse waggons and cattle" into North Carolina in a single year (1752-3), is attested by the fact that from 1732 to 1754, mainly as the result of the Scotch-Irish inundation, the population ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... hearts find rest in Thee awhile; Silence of friendship, telling more than words; Silence of hearts, close-knitting heart to heart Silence of joys too wonderful for words; Silence of sorrows, when Thou drawest near; Silence of soul, wherein we come to Thee, And find ourselves in Thine Immensity; For that great silence where Thou dwell'st alone— —Father, Spirit, Son, in One, Keeping watch above Thine Own,— Deep unto deep, within us sound sweet chords Of praise beyond the reach of human words; In our souls' silence, feeling only Thee,— We thank ...
— 'All's Well!' • John Oxenham
... agriculturist than that of a direct impost; for the payment is conditioned by the size of the crops and is independent of the changing value of money. The chief objection to the tax, considered in itself and apart from its accompanying circumstances, was the immensity of the revenue which it yielded; the sums exacted by an Oriental despot were unnecessary for the economical administration of Rome; and the Roman administration of half a century earlier might have reduced the tithe to a twentieth as it had actually cut down the taxes of Macedonia to one-half ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... is hurt already? How shall we lay our hand so tenderly on that sore spot that we may not inflict a fresh wound? How can we say to a mother who bends over a fresh grave, that we regret the loss she has sustained in the death of her child? Can language measure the depth, the height, the immensity, the bitterness of that grief? What shall we say that is not trite and commonplace—even unfeeling? Shall we be pagan, and say that "whom the gods love die young," or Christian, and remark that "God does not willingly afflict the ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... hated, or for stronger reasons. Never did a tribune rising to power lift his people to such sudden hope and success. Never did a champion leave his followers at his death and decline to more terrible despair. Friend and foe admit his immensity. He was the greatest Irishman that ever lived or seemingly could live. In his own person he contained the whole genius of the Celt. Ireland could not hold his emotions, which overflowed into the world for expression. ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... of the intellect than those of the conscience; and if any thing can be called a contradiction of the former, it is to be told that a Being of infinite power, wisdom, and beneficence could not construct a world without an immensity of evil in it; no reason being assignable or even imaginable for such a proposition, except the fact that such a world has not been created! I am therefore compelled to doubt, whether such a universe be really ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... themselves with the most extraordinary rapidity. Their bodies were of the thin air, and they could pass through the hardest substances with the greatest ease. They had no fixed residence or abiding place, but were tossed to and fro in the immensity of space. When thrown together in great multitudes, they excited whirlwinds in the air and tempests in the waters, and took delight in destroying the beauty of nature and the monuments of the industry of man. Although they increased among themselves like ordinary creatures, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... reason, but from what we know? Of man, what see we but his station here, From which to reason, or to which refer? Through worlds unnumbered though the God be known, 'Tis ours to trace Him only in our own. He, who through vast immensity can pierce, See worlds on worlds compose one universe, Observe how system into system runs, What other planets circle other suns, What varied being peoples every star, May tell why Heaven has made us as we are. But of this frame, the bearings, and the ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... morning, upon the brink of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, a mighty abyss, too vast for the eye to take in its grand immensity; a mighty mountain rent asunder and forming a chasm which is a valley of grandeur and beauty, through which flows the Colorado Grande. Ranges of mountains tower to cloudland on all sides with cliffs of scarlet, blue, violet, yes, all hues of the rainbow; crystal streams flowing merrily along; verdant ...
— Buffalo Bill's Spy Trailer - The Stranger in Camp • Colonel Prentiss Ingraham
... you what answer you have made to this question hitherto? Whose friendship have you chosen? If, knowing what you know, you have not yet begun to act according to the immensity of the knowledge that is in you, then he who builds his house and lays up his treasure on the edge of a crater of molten lava is a sane, sensible person in comparison with yourselves. I say this as no figure of ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... a training in science can realise the huge isolation of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust of planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a vacant immensity that almost defeats the imagination. Beyond the orbit of Neptune there is space, vacant so far as human observation has penetrated, without warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness, for twenty million times a million miles. That is the smallest estimate of the distance to be traversed ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... and provision of the troops; and this an unnatural increase of trade, which, as its cause failed, must in some degree return to its ancient and natural bounds.—3rd, When the merchants met from all parts, and compared their accounts, they were alarmed at the immensity of the debt due to them from America. They found that the Americans had over-traded their abilities. And, as they found too that several of them were capable of making the state of political events an excuse for their ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the sun nor from volcanic flames, but it is the revelation of Truth and of spiritual ideas. This 504:12 also shows that there is no place where God's light is not seen, since Truth, Life, and Love fill immensity and are ever-present. Was not this a revelation instead of a ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... remarks, and the discussion of matters personal—the fugitive journal of that period, of which no one now remembers anything, not even by the waves, the witnesses of what went on that day—themselves now sublimed into immensity, as the ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... rushed out the fleet with guns blazing and dragged him to justice. Very nice, and I wished it could be done that way. Except where was he? A battleship may be gigantic on some terms of reference, but in the immensity of the galaxy it is microscopically infinitesimal. As long as it stayed out of the regular lanes of commerce, and clear of detector stations and planets, ...
— The Misplaced Battleship • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... at the immensity of this great underground grotto. Already I had traversed several hundred yards of it, from many points of which other corridors diverged. The whole cliff must be honeycombed with apartments and passages of which this community occupied but a comparatively small part, so that the possibility ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... conception was a grand one; and though it has proved an absolute failure, swallowing an immensity of toil and money, with annual returns hardly sufficient to keep the pavement free from the ooze of subterranean springs, yet it needs, I presume, only an expenditure three or four (or, for aught I know, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... The immensity of these aerial summits excited, when they suddenly burst upon the sight, a sentiment of ecstatic wonder, not unallied to madness. And, remember, this was all one scene, it all prest home to our regard and our imagination. Tho' it ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... fierceness seemed all to drop away from him, whelmed in the immensity of his astonishment. "You?" Then he laughed loud in scornful disbelief. "You think to save him," ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... his discourse might pass unchallenged in the sermon of an Orthodox divine. He kept this one ready in his memory of brass, to confound all who accused him of irreligion:—"Do we want to contemplate His power? We see it in the immensity of the creation. Do we want to contemplate His wisdom? We see it in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible whole is governed. Do we want to contemplate His mercy? We see it in His not withholding His abundance even from the unthankful. In fine, do we want to know ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... 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 Euroclydon ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... 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 obscurity suffices ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... 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 ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... 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 imperfection, both general and individual, ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... 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 literary interest and value. ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... roar, which is but seldom heard, out of the question, the lion's ordinary voice seems to be emitted by some being of incalculable immensity. It resembles a series of deep, half-smothered detonations linked together by querulous gruntle. It is difficult to realize that the sound originates from anything less ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... up the Quemado Road, walking disconsolately. The withered immensity of the world broke her spirit. The vast stricken spaces were but a material manifestation of those cruelties of nature which had broken her long ago, and which could not be expected to withdraw their spell now that the time had come ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... town, full of our relations, of our friends, of whose fate we hardly dared to think. The soldiers ran by the side of our horses. Everything was forgotten in the immensity of the catastrophe overtaking ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... with such a profusion of wealth that he could ornament the gates of a city with pearls? The gates of the New Jerusalem, however, were not merely ornamented or studded with pearls—that were a very small thing for her—but each gate was of one solid pearl. To conceive the immensity of this representation we must consider the size of the gates required to accommodate the multitudes constantly entering and departing from a city. To be in proportion to the wall they would have to be of immense size, and also of prodigious ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... 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 pleasant part, however, is ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... sublime dogma of the Christian Incarnation. This is one of the grossest errors that ignorance of the ideas and beliefs of a people has produced. Between the avatars of India and the Christian Incarnation there is such an immensity of difference that it is impossible to find any reasonable analogy that can approximate them. The idea of the avatars is intimately united with that of the Trimurti; the bond of connection between these two ideas ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... 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 and the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... raised high with stones, by the marge of restless oceans, that the dead men's spirits, when they wearied of their quiet graves, might rise up through the mounds, and gaze on the tossing billows, and be refreshed by storms, immensity, liberty, action. ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... attracted my attention. It wuz a small chapel where the little ones wuz took to learn their prayers and say 'em. It wuzn't a big, barren barn of a room, such as I have often seen in similar places, and which I have always thought must impress the children with a awful sense of the immensity and lonesomeness of space, and the intangebility, and distance of the Great Spirit who inhabiteth Eternity. No, it wuz small, and cozy, and cheerful, like a home. And the stained glass window held a beautiful picture ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... here and there some outline or shadow of a real passage is traceable. What fractional elements, capable of gaining some vestige of meaning when laid together in their cosmic order, I could pick from the circumambient immensity not cosmic, are here for the reader's behoof. Let him skip, if, like myself, he is weary; for the substance of the story is elsewhere given. Or perhaps he has the curiosity to know the speech of birds? With abridgment, by occasional ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... written testimony by the authority of your seal. As for me, I shrink not from taking upon me a task for the salvation of my soul; and with the help of the Lord I am ready to go and seek out all of them, solicit them, show unto them the immensity of your troubles, and pray them all to hasten on the day of your relief.'" The patriarch eagerly accepted the pilgrim's offer; and Peter set out, going first of all to Rome, where he handed to Pope Urban II. the patriarch's letters, and commenced in ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... 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 ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... the general ineffectiveness of the place, however, it was not without significance. For it gave that human touch which at once breaks up the overpowering sensation which never fails to depress in the silent heart of Nature's immensity. It spoke of courage, too. The reckless courage of early youth, plunging for the first time into independence. Furthermore, it suggested something of the first great sacrifice which the hot tide of love, surging through youthful veins, is prepared ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... clothed in flame and sending up a vast column of black smoke into the sky, made a grand picture in the solitudes of the sea, and hour after hour the outcasts sat and watched it. Meantime the captain ciphered on the immensity of the distance that stretched between him and the nearest available land, and then scaled the rations down to meet the emergency; half a biscuit for dinner; one biscuit and some canned meat for dinner; half a biscuit for tea; a few swallows of water for each meal. And so hunger began to gnaw while ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... its endless gray sagebrush and the creek bed almost dry—unless one should reckon the three parched cottonwood trees beside the stream, a little way down from the canon, and the flat-roofed adobe house near by, and the empty corral behind built of aspen poles. In that immensity of mountain and mesa the house looked like a brick of sun-baked mud, the corral like a child's device of straws, the three cottonwoods like three twigs stuck in the earth. Or, at any rate, that is how they appeared ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... watched these people his news had brought to the hill with tolerant, kindly eye. He saw them scattered like a small swarm of bees in the immensity of the ruin wrought by the storm. They had for the time forgotten him, they had forgotten everything in the wild moment of long-pent passions unloosed—the danger which overhung them, their past trials, their half-starved bodies, ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... curly hair like a halo about their heads, baskets of luscious fruit, a woman descending the rough pavements with a pitcher on her head or a distaff in her hand. Then, at a corner of the street, the blue twinkling of the waves, immensity once more. ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... caution you enough against sleeping in the new house. For Heaven's sake (or rather for my sake), don't think of it till I come and judge. I left you an immensity of trouble, which I fear has not promoted your health. Kiss our dear little ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... whose exterior semblance doth belie Thy soul's immensity; Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep Thy heritage, thou eye among the blind, That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep, Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,— Mighty prophet! Seer blest! On whom those truths do rest Which we are toiling all our lives to find; In darkness ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... quotes from the Mosaic account of the creation what he calls the sublimest passage ever uttered: "God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light." From the centre of black immensity effulgence burst forth. Above, beneath, on every side, its radiance streamed out, silent, yet making each spot in the vast concave brighter than the line which the lightning pencils upon the midnight cloud. Darkness ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... the ocean, we are astonished at its immensity, bounded only by the horizon, with not a speck of land, a solitary rock, or landmark of any description, to guide the adventurers cast adrift on its broad surface, with "water, water, every where;" and when we see its face agitated by storms, and listen to the ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... to Jesus. He died for you—died in your place—died under the frowns of Heaven, that we might die under its smiles. Regard neither unbelief nor doubt. Fear neither sin nor hell. Choose neither life nor death. All these are swallowed up in the immensity of Christ, and are triumphed over in His Cross. Fight the good fight of faith. Hold fast your confidence in the atoning, sanctifying blood of the Lamb of God. Confer no more with flesh and blood. Go, meet the Bridegroom. Behold He cometh! Trim your lamp. Quit yourself like a soldier of Jesus. ...
— Fletcher of Madeley • Brigadier Margaret Allen
... replied Mr Seagrave, "we have only to examine into any portion, however small, of creation, and we are immediately filled with wonder. There is nothing which points out to us the immensity and the omniscience of the Almighty more than the careful provision which has been made by Him for the smallest and most insignificant of created beings. This little animal is perhaps one of many millions, who have their term of existence, and their enjoyment, as well as we have. What is ...
— Masterman Ready - The Wreck of the "Pacific" • Captain Frederick Marryat
... narrows of the steep, sandy, weather-beaten banks that the road slanted upward through for a while, they came out again upon the immensity of the table-land. Here, abruptly like an ambush, was the whole unsuspected river close below to their right, as if it had emerged from the earth. With a circling sweep from somewhere out in the gloom it cut in ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... edge of the gulf which received the torrent, and thence looked at the horse-shoe fall in profile; it seems like awful daring to stand close beside it, and raise one's eyes to its immensity. I think the point the most utterly inconceivable to those who have not seen it, is the centre of the horse-shoe. The force of the torrent converges there, and as the heavy mass pours in, twisted, wreathed, and curled together, ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... continues, it will be a matter of immense difficulty developing a national sense of personal responsibility. I also know that your Middle West is inhabited by people, many of whom have never even seen the sea, who are rendered incapable, by their very environment, of realizing the immensity of the external dangers which threaten their country. These must see things differently from the more exposed section of the community, and I see how dangerous it would be to enforce upon them a measure which they regard as ridiculous. But on this great subject of Preparedness, ...
— Getting Together • Ian Hay
... did not begin that game of dominoes. We felt meditative, and fit for nothing but placid staring. The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marsh was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds. Only the gloom to the west, brooding over the upper reaches, became more sombre every minute, ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... detachment to that service I had had to read myself, once or twice, over childlike men who had died at sea. The words of hope and defiance, the winged words so inspiring in the free immensity of water and sky, seemed to fall wearily into the little grave. What was the use of asking Death where her sting was, before that small, dark hole in the ground? And then my thoughts escaped me altogether—away into matters ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... earth in its place in the solar system, and the solar system in its place in our astral system, but it also may be presumed to have the mightier duty of preserving a local arrangement between that astral system and an immensity of others, through which the imagination is left to wander on and on without limit or stay, save that which is given by its inability to grasp ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... dignity—or else going down to Apia on some more or less unsatisfactory errand. Altogether it is a life that suits me, but it absorbs me like an ocean. That is what I have always envied and admired in Scott; with all that immensity of work and study, his mind kept flexible, glancing to all points of natural interest. But the lean hot spirits, such as mine, become hypnotised with their bit occupations—if I may use Scotch to you—it is so far more scornful than any English idiom. Well, I can't help being ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... stinging sense of the irreparable wrong of which the revelation to this guileless, confiding girlish nature had suddenly wrenched every memory that once had been happiness, out of her young life—yet, in the very immensity of her anguish, had searched to the inmost truth of her woman's fibre and, in the fierce unfolding, ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... intrepid explorer, in his own phrase, "marched, tore, ploughed, and cut his way for one hundred and sixty days through this inner womb of the true tropical forest." The mind of man with difficulty endeavours to realise this immensity of wooded wilderness, covering a territory half as large again as the whole of France, where the rays of the sun never penetrate, where in the dark, dank air, filled with the steam of the heated morass, human beings dwarfed into pygmies and brutalised into cannibals lurk and live and die. ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... inhabited by Jeanbernat. It stood within the park, which it overlooked. But the old keeper had apparently blocked up that side of his dwelling, and had cleared a little garden by the road. And there he lived, facing southwards, with his back turned upon the Paradou, as if unaware of the immensity of verdure that stretched ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... shores of night and looks off on that mighty sea of darkness in which a world lies engulfed, there is no thought but worship and no speech but silence. Face to face with immensity and infinity, one travels in thought among the shining islands that rise up out of the fathomless shadows, and feels everywhere the stir of a life which knows no weariness and makes no sound, which pervades the darkness no less than the light, and ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... that as this night was the first time for him to awake to consciousness of a vague, wonderful other self, so it was one wherein he began to be aware of an encroaching presence of physical things—the immensity of the star-studded sky, the soaring moon, the bleak, mysterious mountains, and limitless slope, and plain, and ridge, and valley. These things in all their magnificence had not been unnoticed by him before; only now they spoke a different meaning. A voice that ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... just as when she was a child. Their silver-gleaming brightness blinded her ... "Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh ... warte nur ... balde ... ruhest ... du ..." she began to murmur, and stopped, awed by the immensity of the hush about her. She closed her eyes, pillowed her head on her upthrown arms, and sank into a wide, bright reverie, which grew dimmer and vaguer as the ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... Thus his immensity of thought Is deeply formed, and gently wrought, His temper always softening life's disease; That Fortune, when she does intend To rudely frown, she turns his friend, Admires his ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... great deal regarding the decline of our shipping interests, and so far as our shipping in the foreign trade is concerned it is unfortunately true," says The Boston Commercial Bulletin. "But few people realize the immensity of our coastwise commerce. The Custom House figures on the shipping of the port of New York for 1897 show that there were 4,614 arrivals of vessels from foreign ports, 7,095 from Eastern domestic ports, and 3,798 from Southern ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... conceit until he shook all over, and Hugh, now alive to the immensity of the great surprise that awaited the gentle couple, found himself obliged to join ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... as if Providence, in compassion to our weakness, and from the fear of its annihilating itself at the prospect of eternity, had so ordered it, that every man, a mere point in space, should act and feel as if he himself was the centre of immensity. ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... glare for a few minutes. He was also distracted by the five chairs standing around the room like sentries on post and the little table by the window with its crucifix and holy-water font. He wanted to keep thinking of "herself," as he called her, lost in the immensity of the oaken bed. He had been looking at the pinched face with its faint suspicion of blue since early that morning. He was very much awed by the nun's hood that concealed the back of the head, and the stiffly posed arms and the small hands in their white-cotton gloves moved him to ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... She dreamed of wonderful tellings, dreamed of the engrossing joys of the written word. But in what form—poetry, essay, history, novel?—The extreme limitation of her own knowledge, or rather the immensity of her own ignorance, confronted her. And that partly through her own fault, for she had been exclusive, fastidious, disposed to ignore both truths and people who offended her taste or failed to strike her fancy. Hitherto she had been ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... of the Allied armies was the greatest amphibious operation in the history of the world. It overshadowed all other operations in this or any other war in its immensity. Its success is a tribute to the fighting courage of the soldiers who stormed the beaches—to the sailors and merchant seamen who put the soldiers ashore and kept them supplied—and to the military and naval leaders who achieved a real miracle of planning and execution. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt • Franklin D. Roosevelt
... over this vast, level expanse. I remember them at intervals, as one recalls things seen passing in a train through a solitary landscape. I seem to see myself, a child with a child's imagination, standing on those wet sands, looking out over their purple immensity to the glittering line of the tide on the horizon, and to see again the sun in such a wide heaven that it seemed to have the world to itself, and to watch the changes in the sky as it sank, drawing with it the ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... liqueurs bubbles 3 seconds toumbtoumb officer whiteness telemetre cross fire megaphone sight-at-thousand-metres all-men-to-left enough every-man-to-his post incline-7-degrees splendour jet pierce immensity azure deflowering onslaught alleys cries labyrinth mattress sobs ploughing desert bed precision telemetre monoplane cackling theatre applause monoplane equals balcony rose wheel drum trepan gad-fly rout arabs oxen ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... supersubtle effluence, and contrive To follow beam and beam upon their way Hand-breadth by hand-breadth, till sense faint—confessed Frustrate, eluded by unknown unguessed Infinitude of action? Idle quest! Rather ask aid from optics. Sense, descry The spectrum—mind, infer immensity! Little? In little, light, warmth, life are blessed— Which, in the large, who sees to bless? Not I More than yourself: so, good my friend, keep still Trustful ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... turn to the left, bestriding the road with one of its arches. I looked up, after passing under it; the water must have been flowing near a hundred feet above my head, and I was filled with wonder at the immensity of the structure which conveyed it. There was, however, one feature which was no slight drawback to its pretensions to grandeur and magnificence; the water was supported not by gigantic single arches, like those of the aqueduct ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... where it will end—who knows! Will it be like the Tower of Babel, great in conception, great in execution, but overreaching in its greatness? Will our destiny be like the snowball, accumulating as it rolls till it becomes immovable in its immensity? Then—stagnation! And yet the start of that snowball was ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... that many of the high officials who had ready and constant access there had become inoculated with the nihilistic bacilli and although I had no doubt that many of them were at heart loyal to the emperor, I already knew better than they did the immensity of the obligation they had undertaken in swearing allegiance to an association of persons dominated by fanatics and by actual criminals whose trade was murder and whose chiefest pleasures and relaxation was the study of how best to bring ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... of the Bible is that of imagination and of faith: it is abstract and disembodied: it is not the poetry of form, but of power; not of multitude, but of immensity. It does not divide into many, but aggrandizes into one. Its ideas of nature are like its ideas of God. It is not the poetry of social life, but of solitude: each man seems alone in the world, with the original ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... simple. Her only enjoyment during her long hours of work was to gaze before her at the vast horizon, the huge pile of Paris, stretching its roofs, like billows, as far as the eye could reach. Her solitary corner overlooked all that immensity. ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... from which a panorama of London was painted. The artist was three years at work. The painting is now exhibited at the Colosseum; but the brain of the artist was turned, and he died insane! Indeed, one can scarcely conceive how it could be otherwise. You in America have no idea of the immensity of this building. Pile together half-a-dozen of the largest churches in New York or Boston, and you will have but a faint representation of St. ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... was her captain. It was he who had cut her cables, quelled, for a time at least, her mutineers; and sought to hearten those of her little crew who wavered, who shrank back appalled as they realized something of the immensity of the conflict in which her destiny was ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... intelligences Moving to and fro over the flaming causeways Of the kingdoms beyond the gates— The infinite arches And the stately pillars, Upbuilt with sapphire suns And illuminated with emerald and ruby stars, Making cathedrals of immensity For ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... mutually found ourselves. And so, you see, it really was the repentance I felt for misconceiving the heart of my friend which gave me the idea of devoting to the poor, through my own hands, the fortune he returned to me, and which I accepted without objecting to the immensity of the sum returned in proportion to the sum lent. Its destination justified my ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... were his playthings, and sharks were minnows beside him. He had to swim in water that reached only to his waist, because there was no deeper, and even then his head was circled by clouds. He had a wife of an immensity comparable to his own. Once, while busily beating out a piece of bark-cloth, the sun sank low before she had finished her task. Like the excellent housewife that she was, she did not wish the day to end on work unfinished, so, at her request, Maui reached out ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... electricity, And leave the struggling solar rays behind, The slightest throb pervades immensity, And instant reaches ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... description of Ararat. 'I beheld Ararat in all its amplitude of grandeur. From the spot on which I stood, it appeared as if the hugest mountains of the world had been piled upon each other, to form this one sublime immensity of earth, and rock, and snow. The icy peaks of its double heads rose majestically into the clear and cloudless heavens; the sun blazed bright upon them, and the reflection sent forth a dazzling radiance equal to other suns. This point of the view united the utmost grandeur of plain and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 551, June 9, 1832 • Various
... a prospect of boundless woodland, of plain, mound, hill, lake, and river, extending with a grand sweep that suggests ideas which can only be defined by the word Immensity. I see altogether a scene the like of which I never looked upon before—a scene of beauty, peacefulness, and grandeur which gladdens the eye to behold and fills the heart with gratitude to ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... struck by the logic of this reasoning, fell silent. After an interval the sun set in a film of yellow light; then the afterglow followed; and finally the stars pricked out the true immensity of the prairies. ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... be no whist this evening," he announced. "You will excuse me, Durant; I have an immensity of work on hand. Chaplin, put some whiskey and water in the study, and light the little lamp on my ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... crags of Monte Generoso, and Iseo far withdrawn among the rocky Alps! He who loves immense space, cloud shadows slowly sailing over purple slopes, island gardens, distant glimpses of snow-capped mountains, breadth, air, immensity, and flooding sunlight, will choose Maggiore. But scarcely has he cast his vote for this, the Juno of the divine rivals, when he remembers the triple lovelinesses of the Larian Aphrodite, disclosed in ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... shoulder Foma saw the pale, frightened and joyous face of Luba—she looked at her father with beseeching eyes and it seemed she was on the point of crying out. For a few moments all were silent and motionless, crushed as they were by the immensity of their emotions. The silence was broken by the low, but dull and quivering voice ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... represented here to me In such conception as my soul allows,— Under Thy measureless, my atom width!— Man's mind, what is it but a convex glass Wherein are gathered all the scattered points Picked out of the immensity of sky, To reunite there, be our heaven for earth, Our known unknown, our God ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... Barbara, Hector, Eustace, Janet, Hudson, William, and myself—and all save one were promising, in appearance at least. But our father knew his offspring, and when we stood, an alien and miserable band in front of Castle Garden, at the foot of the great city whose immensity struck terror to our hearts, he drew all our hands together and made us swear by the soul of our mother, whose body we had left in the sea, that we would keep the bond of brotherhood intact, and share with mutual confidence ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... tremendous swarm of things beneath them, amid the unexpected din of the wings and the engine, in the immensity of the sky, in the infinity of the horizon, his eyes sought nothing but that, and his ears admitted no other sound than the hum of the invisible car. His were the mighty and brutal sensations of the hunter chasing his game. He was the bird of prey whom the distraught quarry has no ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... of this kind that was ever seen was at the Royal Aquarium, London, in the summer of 1895. A part of the regular nightly performance at this Hall, which is familiar on account of its immensity, was the jump of an individual from the rafters of the large arched roof into a tank of water about 15 by 20 feet, and from eight to ten feet deep, sunken in the floor of the hall. Another performer, dressed in his ordinary street clothes, was tied up in a bag and jumped about ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... heard; it might be imagined that he was a hundred miles from the capital. D'Artagnan leaned against the hedge, after having cast a glance behind it. Beyond that hedge, that garden, and that cottage, a dark mist enveloped with its folds that immensity where Paris slept—a vast void from which glittered a few luminous points, the funeral ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and if they were not mathematicians, will be amazed to hear, that it travelled with a much greater degree of swiftness than a cannon ball, and drew after it a tail of fire that was fourscore millions of miles in length. What an amazing thought is it to consider this stupendous body traversing the immensity of the creation with such a rapidity; and at the same time wheeling about in that line which the Almighty had prescribed for it! That it should move in such inconceivable fury and combustion, and at the same time with such an exact regularity! How spacious must the universe be, that gives ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various
... infallibly, rapid and enormous influence, "other virtues of a surprising character were awarded the omnipotent mandragora. It conciliated affection and maintained friendship, preserved conjugal fealty and developed benevolence. The immensity of worth inherent in this mystical medicament, its vital essence, was by no means confined to sustaining health and providing certain remedies for infirmities; its power manipulated tribunals and secured judicial favor at court; ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... afternoon a certain black dot might have been observed, so lost in the immensity of landscape that it appeared to be stationary. It was well out upon the trail that wound northward from Indian Head into the country of the Fishing Lakes—the trail that forked also eastward to ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... know that you are a very clever person, and that one obtains an immensity of information from your writings," ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... that struck me was the physical immensity and magnificent proportions of the man, and, next, the picturesque majesty of his presence as ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... so much, desire, that evil of terrestrial love, had not as yet attacked them. Like two zephyrs swaying on the same willow-branch, they needed nothing more than the joy of looking at each other in the mirror of the limpid waters; immensity sufficed them; they admired their Ocean, without one thought of gliding on it in the white-winged bark with ropes of ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... from a garden in a populous community to the deep black mould of the west, and it grows to be a forest monarch. It is Hazlitt who says "the heart reposes in greater security on the immensity of nature's works, expatiates freely there and finds elbow room and ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... flatter ourselves with the hope of converting the Indians? We should rather begin with converting our back- settlers; and now if I dare mention the name of religion, its sweet accents would be lost in the immensity of these woods. Men thus placed are not fit either to receive or remember its mild instructions; they want temples and ministers, but as soon as men cease to remain at home, and begin to lead ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... than either by magistrates... or by an irresponsible and multitudinous Committee of Parliament? Finally, a Board elected for this one duty is immeasurably better than the Town Councils, who are distracted by an immensity ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... flame, that are each of them attended with a different set of planets; if we still discover new firmaments, and new lights, that are sunk further in those unfathomable depths of ether; we are lost in a labyrinth of suns and worlds, and confounded with the magnificence and immensity of nature;" the ease, with which this passage rises to unaffected grandeur, is the secret charm that captivates the reader. Johnson is always lofty; he seems, to use Dryden's phrase, to be "o'erinform'd with meaning," and his words do not appear to himself ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... shrinking in her attitude, and when she looked once for a few moments straight towards him, there seemed to be something both sad and frightened in her face. Not another soul was on the platform, and seen in that patch of light against an immensity of dark empty country and black sky, she gave him such an impression of friendlessness that he could scarcely stay in his seat. And all the while the roar of the on-coming train was growing louder and ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... are your natural element, and I should a priori expect that much of your history would be stranger than fiction. But you must remember that the bulk of readers have no personal acquaintance with you, or the characters you describe. The consequence is that they fancy there is an immensity of romance mixed up with the facts, and they are irritated by the inability to distinguish between them. I am confident, from all I have heard, that this was the source of the comparatively cold reception of Lavengro. I should have partaken the feeling myself ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... are the southern slopes of Erebus; but how different from those which you have lately seen. Northwards they fell in broad calm lines to a beautiful stately cliff which edged the sea. But here—all the epithets and all the adjectives which denote chaotic immensity could not adequately tell of them. Visualize a torrent ten miles long and twenty miles broad; imagine it falling over mountainous rocks and tumbling over itself in giant waves; imagine it arrested in the twinkling of an ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... with horror, for the trophies carried by were the heads of murdered men. For the nation had become sovereign, and the soldiers who fired upon it were reckoned rebels and traitors. The foreign envoys were all impressed with the idea that the vengeance wrought was out of all proportion with the immensity of the thing achieved. At nightfall the marshal gave orders to evacuate Paris. Besenval was already in full retreat, and the capital was no longer in the possession of ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... with some pretension to good looks; but there was a sort of languor in her manner that disappointed one ere she had uttered half a dozen sentences. In order to sustain the character her name suggested, she was continually soaring into immensity of space and deducing celestial problems for the uninitiated habitant of this lower sphere. It was when Urania had taken one of her upper flights into empyrean air that the fond mother would exclaim: "If Galileo were alive to-day I believe he could get ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... obtained through the treachery of the Marechal's most trusted agent; a man whom Biron had constantly employed in all his intrigues, and from whom he had no secrets. This individual, who from certain circumstances saw reason to believe that the plans of the Duke must ultimately fail from their very immensity, and who feared for his own safety in the event of his patron's disgrace, resolved to save himself by communicating the whole conspiracy to the King; for which purpose he solicited an audience, declaring that he had ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... to carry away something of the solemn grandeur of the sea, its vast immensity, immeasurable energy and ageless haunting mystery we would ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... realize the immensity of the chess-board and of the forces engaged in more than the bare statement of numbers and distances. If a first attack on a position failed, the wires from the Galland house repeated their orders to concentrate more ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... But as the measureless and endless had been the prime cause of the motion into separate existences and individual forms, so also, according to the just award of destiny, these forms would at an appointed season suffer the vengeance due to their earlier act of separation, and return into the vague immensity whence they had issued. Thus the world, and all definite existences contained in it, would lose their independence and disappear in the "indeterminate.'' The blazing orbs, which have drawn off from the cold earth and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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
... cut By the prow of our ship, Send off stars of phosphorous To vie with the stars overhead. Nothing but sky and the starlight, And a stretch of limitless sea, Nothing but peace and dominion,— Silence, immensity. ...
— A Little Window • Jean M. Snyder
... now I see the gray mist creeping down Upon the sea. The bright blue waves are hidden from my sight; Ah me, ah me, Thou too, O Sea of God's Immensity From me art screened; But till the mists be lifted up I wait, Wait patiently and long, then will I plunge Beneath Thy waves ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... hurried cloud, it is a Rape of the Sabines overhead from all quarters, either one of the winds brawnily larcenous; and London, smoking royally to the open skies, builds images of a dusty epic fray for possession of the portly dames. There is immensity, swinging motion, collision, dusky richness of colouring, to the sight; and to the mind idea. London presents it. If we can allow ourselves a moment for not inquireing scrupulously (you will do it by inhaling the aroma of the ripe kitchen hour), here is a noble harmony ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... her uncle's practice and disapproved that of the priest;—because she loved the one and did not love the other. She had thought it probable that she might be sent for during the evening, and had, therefore, made for herself an immensity of household work, the performance of all which on that very evening the interests of the Lion d'Or would imperatively demand. The work was all done, but no message from Aunt Josey summoned ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope
... as a point in the midst of the limitless darkness,—have you never experienced a sort of mysterious fright and giddiness? At such a time turn your eyes upon nearer objects. He who has made the heavens with their immensity, is He who makes the corn to spring forth for your sustenance, who clothes the fields with the flowers which rejoice your sight, who gives you the fresh breath of morning, and the calm of a lovely evening: it is He, without whose ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... entirely pagan, performing their religious ceremonies not in temples made with hands, but in groves, in the shadow of whose melancholy boughs dwelt many divinities. They believed also in one Great Spirit whose presence filled immensity, and who was likened to no living thing, nor fashion of a man. To him were subject all inferior powers who presided over the seasons of the year, over various localities, over the lives of the lower animals, and over all the doings ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... side to the sea and in front to the Pyrenees, whose towering masses heaped one upon another in a stupendous manner, and covered with snow, offer a variety of lights and shades from indented forms and the immensity of their projections. This prospect, which contains a semicircle of a hundred miles in diameter, has an oceanic vastness in which the eye loses itself; an almost boundless scene of cultivation; an animated but confused mass of infinitely varied parts, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... down to the free foaming sea. The mountain with its snowclad peaks towering up into the immensity of the starry heavens. The rustling of the woodland above the blossom-spangled and smiling meadows, the steep uptowering, the widely growing, and the joyously smiling. At once the soft melody that stirs the heart and the strong wind that sweeps ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... in the channel, with the green islands lifting from the lacquered sea, bluer than any sky the lads had ever seen. From the bow of the Manhattan spread two thin emerald lines curling transparently and tipped with foam. Upon the immensity of the sea there would be for hours no other movement, and upon the immensity of the sky there would not be a fleck of cloud. At night the boys slept in their bunks with the waves whispering to the ...
— Boy Scouts in the Philippines - Or, The Key to the Treaty Box • G. Harvey Ralphson
... 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 vision ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... to the ravines, and the head swam at the sight of those, vast pits of blackness. This immensity in the wrong place, stolen from above and cast into the depths, ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... 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 ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... 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 had risen: Its only voice a vast dumb moan, Of utterless anguish speaking, It lay unhopefully ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Flinders' time, 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 been just four months in this region, when he left his ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... growing immensity in the speculations of science to which no human thing or thought at this day is comparable. Apart from the results which science brings us home and securely harvests, there is an expansive force and latitude in its tentative efforts, which lifts ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... Henry a certain awe and yet by its very vagueness and immensity it attracted. Just as he had wished to explore the secrets of the forest he would like now to tread the Great Plains and ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... these people accompanied every candidate, and quietly whispered into his ear the name of each voter as he came in sight. Few, indeed, were they who could dispense with the services of such an assessor; for the office imposed a twofold memory, that of names and of persons; and to estimate the immensity of the effort, we must recollect that the number of voters often far exceeded one quarter of a million. The very same trial of memory he undertook with respect to his own army, in this instance recalling the well known feat of Mithridates. ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... heavens, as Herschel reads them, declare the glory of God. Yet how seldom do we think of the splendors and harmonies which a modern book of astronomy unveils as part of God's appeal to our wonder; how seldom does the solemn light from the uppermost regions of immensity, the light of nebulae which science has broken up into heaps of suns, converge upon a human soul with power enough to stimulate devout awe and make the heart bend before the ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... a sense of utter dependence. His mind is irresistibly preoccupied by the idea of a Power, lost in the immensity of time and space, which, from the depths of some dark mystery, governs the world. This power, at first, seems to him to manifest itself in the phenomena of nature, whose grandeur surpasses the power or even ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... scrambling, yelping rush that followed. He must have gone East, else the dogs had not been so bold. She looked down the valley where the mountains parted seaward, the only break in the continuous barrier of land that cut off her retreat and closed in about the atom of her own identity. The thought of that immensity of ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... and the truth of the Mississippi had been partly revealed to him. What the Tug was to the Big Sandy, what the Big Sandy was to the Ohio, the Ohio was to the Mississippi. What he had looked to as the end was but the beginning, and Rasba was lost in the immensity of the river that was a mile wide, thousands of miles long, and unlike anything the mountain preacher had ever dreamed of. If this was the Mississippi, what must the ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... obsessed by the immensity, the atmosphere and the mystery of London. Its nomenclature embedded itself in my fancy; Hounsditch and Shoreditch, Billingsgate and Blackfriars; Bishopgate, within, and Bishopgate, without; Threadneedle Street and Wapping-Old-Stairs; ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... object, wordless music, stealing Through all my soul, until my pulse beat fast With aimless hope, and unexpressed desire— Thou sea, who wast to me a prophet deep Through all thy restless waves, and wasting shores, Of silent labour, and eternal change; First teacher of the dense immensity Of ever-stirring life, in thy strange forms Of fish, and shell, and worm, and oozy weed: To me alike thy frenzy and thy sleep Have been a deep and ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... that if only the Christians awoke to their duty they could influence the whole population profoundly. That is precisely the effect produced upon the Christians by a missionary survey undertaken with them, and understood by them; they begin to see the immensity of the work to be done, they begin to see that it can ...
— Missionary Survey As An Aid To Intelligent Co-Operation In Foreign Missions • Roland Allen
... notes of landscape effects; the description is of the war, technical; otherwise the writer's thought is not of earth at all. Once only, towards the end, we find a sorrowful recollection of himself, a profound lamentation at the remembrance of bygone hopes, of bygone work, of the immensity of the sacrifice. 'This war is long, too long for those who had something else to do in the world! Why am I so sacrificed, when so many others, not my equals, are spared? Yet I had something worth doing to do in the world!' Most touching is that sigh, even more touching than the signs ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... work, sir. I don't have a dull moment. And—" here his voice sank with the immensity of the tidings with which it was charged—"you'll be very glad to hear, sir, ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... sunlight. The Sound stretched away to Elsinore, dotted with a few white sails, like sea-gulls' wings; and in the misty east and away to the north-east lay outstretched the faintly-shadowed shores of Sweden. All this immensity of space whirled and wavered, ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... leave him much time for his studies; but these expectations wholly failed. He was immediately appointed vicar-general to the bishops of Arras, St. Omer's, Ipres, and Boulogne. This involved him in an immensity of business; and, his reputation continually increasing, he was consulted from every part of France on affairs of the highest moment. The consequence was, that, contrary to the wishes and expectations of his friends, he never was so little master of his time as he was during his residence ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... much or how little liberty the people enjoy. And these things I learned to a great extent from my social intercourse with those cultured reformers of America. Among these people I had not the depressing feeling of immensity and hugeness which marred my enjoyment when I arrived at New York. My literary lectures on the Brownings and George Eliot were much appreciated, especially in the East, where I found paying audiences in the fall or autumn of the year. These lectures have been delivered many times in Australia; ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... 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 ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... and analysing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life, until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me—a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple, that while I became dizzy with the immensity of the prospect which it illustrated, I was surprised that among so many men of genius who had directed their inquiries towards the same science, that I alone should be reserved to ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... came in pride and exultation into the avenue from the central court. He had not been there before. The first thing he did was to stand fully five minutes gazing at the immensity of the enclosure trying to comprehend it, instinctively but vainly seeking adjectives with which to characterize it, and finally giving it all up, as a man gives up trying to measure the ocean or count the stars, ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... sides. Figures convey little, I am afraid, but when I tell you that each of its sides was originally 755 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 blocks of limestone of ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... horse lopes; the saddle creaks and sways. A thousand glittering spears of sun slant from on high. The immensity, the spaces, Are like the spaces Between star ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... belligerent powers were by this time heartily tired of a war which had consumed an immensity of treasure, had been productive of so much mischief, and in the events of which, all, in their turns, had found themselves disappointed. Immediately after the battle of Laffeldt, the king of France had, in a personal conversation with sir John Ligonier, expressed his desire of a pacification; ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... that there are in existence millions of stars, and suns, flooding immensity and space ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... "Gracious!" said she, "what a place! But I make it a point to see everything as I go." Nothing had changed. There, as of old, lay the flat litter of the town—sheds, stores, and dwellings, a shapeless congregation in the desert, gaping wide everywhere to the glassy, quivering immensity; and there, above the roofs, turned the slatted wind-wheels. But close to the tracks, opposite the hotel, was an edifice, a sort of tent of bunting, from which brass music issued, while about a hundred pink and blue sun-bonnets moved ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... of the sky, there is something inane in its serenity and something stupid in its wrath, which is endless, boundless, persistent, and futile—a grey, hoary thing raging like an old ogre uncertain of its prey. Its very immensity is wearisome. At any time within the navigating centuries mankind might have addressed it with the words: "What are you, after all? Oh, yes, we know. The greatest scene of potential terror, a devouring enigma ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... indescribable. There is a great silence; then, as the margin has it, he heard a still small voice— not a loud and jarring voice—but a voice low, soft, still; and yet! the utterance of that voice! what immensity of self-conscious power what authority and dignity—the dignity of infinite integrity: "Shall mortal man be more just than God? Shall man be ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... I had bade them farewell, I slept at Nimes, where I spent three days in the company of a naturalist: M. de Seguier, the friend of the Marquis Maffei of Verona. In his cabinet of natural history I saw and admired the immensity and ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... things, in doubt, despair, poverty, sick, feeble, or baffled, we have yet to learn reliance. "I will not leave thee or forsake thee" are the words of the most ancient spirit to the spark wandering in the immensity of its own being. This high courage brings with it a vision. It sees the true intent in all circumstance out of which its own emerges to meet it. Before it the blackness melts into forms of beauty, and back of all illusions is seen the old enchanter tenderly smiling, the ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... penetration, he was deliciously sweated, and wearied out indeed: so that it was deep in the morning before he achieved his second let-go, about half way of entrance, I all the while crying and complaining of his prodigious vigour, and the immensity of what I appeared to suffer splitting up with. Tired, however, at length, with such athletic drudgery, my champion began now to give out, and to gladly embrace the refreshment of some rest. Kissing me then with much affection, and recommending me to my ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland |
