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More "Immensity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... up to the mind of later reasoners, in the immensity of the sacrifice of God to man, were not such as would occur to an early heathen. He had been accustomed to believe that the gods had lived upon earth, and taken upon themselves the forms of men; had shared in human passions, in human labours, and in human misfortunes. What was ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... episode on the other side of the water and the problem it involved took their tiny places in the universe instead of the large ones in her life and, strangely enough, it was Charles Batty who loomed up big, as though he had some odd fellowship with immensity and beauty. ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... others, already Jacobin, the faction takes it upon itself to render them still more so.—Lost in the immensity of Paris, all these provincials require moral as well as physical guides; it agrees to exercise toward them "hospitality in all its plenitude, the sweetest of Republican virtues."[1128] Hence, ninety-six sans-culottes, selected ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... on that arch above: The glittering vault admire. Who taught those orbs to move? Who lit their ceaseless fire? Who guides the moon to run In silence through the skies? Who bids that dawning sun In strength and beauty rise? There view immensity! behold! my God is there: The sun, the moon, the stars, ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... appreciate the valour of Columbus in the XV century, his secret doubts, his temerity, how much fainter is our conception of the heroism of the early Mediterranean navigators. Steam has destroyed for us the awful majesty of distance, and we can never realise the immensity of this "great Sea" to the ancients. To Virgil the adventures of the "pious AEneas" were truly heroic. The western shores of the Mediterranean were then the "end of the earth," and even during the first ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... is the source of the common error of youth that everything can be put right by some simple remedy. If only some tiny change could be made in men's attitude towards one another and towards the universe, what a flood of evil could be dammed; the slightness of the cause is as striking as the immensity of the effect. Those who ridicule the young do not, perhaps, always see that this is perfectly true, though of course they are right in denouncing the inference so often drawn—and here lay Shelley's fundamental fallacy—that ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... the 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 of souls sorrowing for sin, found in the Psalms? Whom will the Psalmist not ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... unlikeliness that he has overcome them. Misprints taking wrong numbers by the hand, black and thorny creatures, dance their wild dance round him. He is awe-stricken, and shudders; he wonders at the boldness of his undertaking; "Qu'allait-il faire dans cette galere?" The immensity of the task, the insufficience of the means stand in striking contrast. He had started singing on his journey; now he looks for excuses to justify his having ever begun it. Usually, it must be confessed, he finds some, prints them or not, and recovers his spirits. I ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... had spread over the country. There were thousands of serious cases; men, women, and children were dying everywhere, unattended and under the most distressing circumstances. Hardly had the first of the foreign aid arrived when the immensity of the task required was recognized, and telegrams and cables were sent all over the world calling for further assistance. To this second appeal no country responded more nobly than ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... 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 toward ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... to St. Clement's church, and saw several shops open upon this most solemn fast-day of the Christian world, I remarked, that one disadvantage arising from the immensity of London, was, that nobody was heeded by his neighbour; there was no fear of censure for not observing Good Friday, as it ought to be kept, and as it is kept in country-towns. He said, it was, upon the whole, very well observed ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... 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
... into the very bosom of night, descending ever lower and lower, exploring depth after depth, until at last they had worked their way through the narrow and winding passages, and stood in the sublime silence of the immensity of space. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... help, and pious response 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 ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... made the most formal partitions of cultivation, hedge-rows of pollard willows, conduct the eye into the depths and distances of his picture; and thus, more than by any other means, has given it that appearance of immensity which is so striking. As I have slipped into the subject of painting, I feel anxious to inquire whether your pencil has been busy last winter in the solitude and uninterrupted quiet of Dunmow. Most likely you know that we have changed our residence in Grasmere, which I hope will be attended with ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... two they hesitated before opening the heavy double door in the side of the hull, savoring to the full the immensity of the moment. ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... before we see it floating over the worship of the city. It may be most worthily seen from precisely the point where our two friends were now standing. At any nearer view the grandeur of St. Peter's hides itself behind the immensity of its separate parts,—so that we see only the front, only the sides, only the pillared length and loftiness of the portico, and not the mighty whole. But at this distance the entire outline of the world's cathedral, as well as that of the palace of the world's chief priest, is taken ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... again as though dragged down by a grievous weight!"[403] And S. Gregory, expounding those words of Job, When a spirit passed before me, says: "The mind does not long remain steadfastly occupied with the sweetness of intimate contemplation, for it is recalled to itself, stricken back by the immensity of that Light." The contemplative life, then, ...
— On Prayer and The Contemplative Life • St. Thomas Aquinas
... with an expression on her face which spoke of long vigils, and of fear passing on to certainty. She peered past me for an expected Something on the street. Her leisure and its new habits had assimilated her in dress and make-up to the women of the wealthier sort in the city; but there was an immensity of trouble in the agonized eye and the pitiful droop of her mouth, which I should have rejoiced to see exchanged again for the ill-groomed exterior and the old fret of the farm. Her first question ignored all reference to the things leading to my being there, "in the dead vast and middle of the ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... were turned towards the East just then, for the rising sun, tearing with one gigantic sweep the banks of cloud asunder, now displayed his magnificence in a gorgeous immensity of flaming crimson. The sea, in response, turned to liquid fire beneath the glow, whilst the whole sky was irradiated with the first blush ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... assumptions; it is senseless to pass judgement on the point of law when one does not know the matter of fact. To say with St. Paul, O altitudo divitiarum et sapientiae, is not renouncing reason, it is rather employing the reasons that we know, for they teach us that immensity of God whereof the Apostle speaks. But therein we confess our ignorance of the facts, and we acknowledge, moreover, before we see it, that God does all the best [207] possible, in accordance with the infinite wisdom which guides his actions. It is true that we have already before our ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... Occasionally we passed small towns with a few planted trees. The latter part of the way seemed almost like a desert; there being little to observe, one had time to reflect, and, in some inscrutable manner, the immensity of China, its extreme age, its teeming population, and its unreality, judged by Western standards, began to dawn on me. I had previously failed to realize that I was actually in China. Having seen the Chinese at several points before reaching Hong-Kong, ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... this lack of brotherhood. But a sister.... He grunted his disapprobation of the thought. A sister would have meant enchainment to civilization. Cities, probably. Even the States. And slavery to a life he detested. He appreciated the immensity of his freedom. A Mary Standish, even though she were his sister, would be a catastrophe. He could not conceive of her, or any other woman like her, living with Keok and Nawadlook and the rest of his people in the heart of the tundras. And the tundras would always ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... ready for opening, so long a delay took place in settling 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 of the Principality, amidst ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... 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 ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... distinction—were the sunsets 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 light. These great sands were dangerous at times, shifting in whirling ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... that she had put from her came again upon her, no longer in its merciful immensity, faceless and formless (for she had shrunk from picturing Lady Cayley), but boldly, abominably defined. She grasped it now, the atrocious tragedy, made visible and terrible for her in the body of Lady Cayley, the phantom of her own ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... moved towards the west so as to cross the lower reaches of the barren grounds as soon as possible and proceed northward by way of the basin of the Great Slave Lake, where they would find a wooded country reaching far to the north. A glance at the map will show the immensity of the task before them. The distance from Fort Churchill {52} to the Slave Lake, even as the crow flies, is some seven hundred miles, and from thence to the Arctic sea four hundred and fifty, and the actual journey is longer ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock
... and to reason. Such is the power of the highest animals. Overlying this is the spirit which man shares with higher natures, by which thought transcends the range of the senses, and man thinks of immensity, eternity, infinity, immortality, the beautiful, the holy, and God—it is certain that man's mind possesses both these classes or sets of thought." Now in regard to the higher of these elements, there are very many well authenticated cases where ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... Presley from his feet. As from a point high above the world, he seemed to dominate a universe, a whole order of things. He was dizzied, stunned, stupefied, his morbid supersensitive mind reeling, drunk with the intoxication of mere immensity. Stupendous ideas for which there were no names drove headlong through his brain. Terrible, formless shapes, vague figures, gigantic, monstrous, distorted, whirled at a ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... to what I said at the beginning—that there were several reasons for including this little girl in my series of impressions. The most important one has been left until now. I want to meet her again, but how shall I find her in this immensity of London— these six millions of human souls! Let me beg of any reader who knows Rose Mary Angela Catherine Maude Caversham—a name like that—who has identified her from my description—that he will inform me ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... mademoiselle," he resumed, "how a sudden calamity may effect a good man's reason. It is only at the time a thing escapes us that we feel the greatness of the loss. God preserve me from doubting all that you have said; but picture to yourself the immensity of the blow which struck M. de Commarin. Can you say that on leaving you he did not give way to despair? Think of the extremities to which it may have led him. He may have been for a time bewildered, and have acted ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... some mariners,—a part of the crew of the vessel from the Spanish Main,—who had come ashore to see the humors 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 ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... could meet every commercial demand; supply a sewing-machine needle or set up a saw-mill; receipt for gas bills and water rates or fit out a general store. Under one roof it held the resources of a city. Henry was startled by its immensity, and as he followed Witherspoon through labyrinths of bright gauzes and avenues of somber goods, he perceived that a change in the tone of the hum announced the approach of the master. And it appeared that, no matter what a girl might be doing, ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... have completely disappeared. Their bold rocks and shady nooks will have become river-bottom. All that one hears or reads of the extent of the Amazons and its tributaries does not give one an idea of its immensity as a whole. One must float for months upon its surface, in order to understand how fully water has the mastery over land along its borders. Its watery labyrinth is not so much a network of rivers, as an ocean of fresh water cut up and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... his fascinated glance; she too was looking down, and standing thus before each other in the glaring light, between the four bare walls, they seemed brought out from the confused immensity of the Eastern borders to be exposed cruelly to the observation of my Western eyes. And I observed them. There was nothing else to do. My existence seemed so utterly forgotten by these two that I dared not now ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... difficult indeed to be taken by storm. I went up to my bedroom to change my wet clothes; and the vast extent of that old wainscoted apartment (which was over the archway leading to the Inn, I remember), and the sedate immensity of the four-post bedstead, and the indomitable gravity of the chests of drawers, all seemed to unite in sternly frowning on the fortunes of Traddles, or on any such daring youth. I came down again to my dinner; and even the slow comfort of the meal, and the orderly silence of ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... to 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 guns and attack again. In the end the ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... 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, Amid ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... confidently made by Atheists and Pantheists, that the universe has no boundaries; not merely none which we can see, but that it actually fills all immensity; suns succeeding suns, and firmament clustering beyond ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... had seemed for him to bridge all gaps, to explain all mysteries. Now indeed chaos stretched all about him, full of huge mists, dark chasms, hidden echoes; but he perceived something of its vastness and immensity; he had broken down the poor frail fences of his soul, and was in contact with reality. He did not doubt that he seemed to the younger generation an elderly and sombre personage, stumbling down the dark descent of life, with ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... been explored prior to 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 ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... life of India. He selects a healthy and normal, but not a clever, boy, and allows all India to happen to him. The book is without beginning and without end; but its very lack of neatness and compactness of plan contributes to the general impression it gives of India's immensity. ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... a great concern, how careworn he was looking—a great concern, because, directly she set eyes on him, she realised the immensity of her love for him. At that moment she loved him more than she had ever done before; he was not only her lover, to whom she had surrendered herself body and soul, but also the father of her unborn little one. Faintness ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... given. It was the tentative answer given by Copernicus. It is the correct answer. Not only from every position of the earth, but from every planet of the solar system, the same constellations are visible, and the stars have the same aspect. The whole immensity of the solar system shrinks to practically a point when confronted with the distance ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... carry away something of the solemn grandeur of the sea, its vast immensity, immeasurable energy and ageless haunting mystery we would say, "go ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... Brother left brother, and the frantic mother For fruitless safety hurried east and west, And dropp'd the babe to perish from her breast; All howling prayers that would be noticed never, And craving mercy that was fled for ever; While earth, in motion like a troubled sea, Open'd in gulfs of dread immensity Amid the wild confusions of despair, And buried deep the howling and the prayer Of countless multitudes, and closed—and then Open'd and swallow'd ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... felt anything so great or so instantaneous. I know not what shape, what analogy, what secret of relation it was that made me see in this flower a limitless beauty. . . . I shall never enclose in a conception this power, this immensity that nothing will express; this form that nothing will contain; this ideal of a better world which one feels, but which it would seem that nature has ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... taken these instances haphazard; they are large instances, as it were, of big and visible things. They only give the rudest idea of the immensity and complexity of insect life in our own country. My friend the sparrow is, I believe, a friend likewise to man generally. He does a little damage, I admit; but if he were to resort to living on damage solely in his enormous numbers, we should not have a single flower or a single ear of wheat. He ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... 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 ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... of a fool, and credulity the defect of a man of intelligence. The latter sees far into the immensity of the Possible; the former scarcely sees anything possible beyond the Actual. Perhaps this is what produces the timidity of the one, and the ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... nature of civilisation to exalt the savage. Chilled by the immensity of the distance, he cannot be an equal: his relation to the white can only be that of an alien, or a slave. By the time astonishment subsides, the power of civilised men is understood, and their encroachment is felt. Fine houses ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... 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 ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... one sense retiring, and in another expansive. In her dark brown, or, as some called them, black eyes, there would suddenly come up and shine an enthusiasm, a capacity of poetic and romantic fire, to the quelling of which there must have gone an immensity of religious force. As to Gabriel, during a large portion of his splendid youth he exhibited a genial breadth of front that affined him to Shakespeare and Walter Scott. The English strain in the family found expression in him, and ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... the lonely track. She heard no sound of hoofs. She tried to whistle a tune to keep herself cheery, but very soon it failed. The silent immensity of the veldt enveloped her. She had a forlorn feeling of being the only living being in all that vastness, except for a small uneasy spirit out of the great solitudes that wandered to and fro ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained, what is man, that Thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that Thou visitest him?"—If fearful that the eye of God may overlook us in the immensity of His kingdom, we have only to call to mind that other passage, "Yet Thou hast made him but a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over all the works of Thy hand; Thou hast put all things under ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... is executed; how 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 ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... last I understood the immensity of his illusion how, one by one, the noiseless years had ebbed away and left him brooding in charmed inaction, for ever preparing for a work for ever deferred. It seemed to me almost a kindness now to tell him the plain truth. "I should be sorry to ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... birch. For the first time since he had come from Miriam Kirkstone's he had the opportunity to think, and in thinking he found his brain crowded with cold and unemotional fact. He saw his lie in all its naked immensity. Yet he was not sorry that he had lied. He had saved Conniston. He had saved himself. And he had saved Conniston's sister, to love, to fight for, to protect. It had not been a Judas lie but a lie with his heart and his soul and all the manhood in him behind it. To have ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... eloquent. Some passages of 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. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... leads it tenderly to see The harmony of laws Which unifies immensity, And tells of ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... countries where nature seems to be a step-mother, where adoration, far from being the instinctive act of a happy soul soaring upward to bless the heavenly Father, is, on the contrary, the despairing cry of an atom lost in immensity, they desired above all things a religious reformation, rational and profound. They dreamed of bringing the Church back to the purity of the ancient days, and saw in the vow of poverty, understood in its largest sense, the best means of struggling against the vices of the clergy; ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... am satisfied that the English-speaking world is little aware at present of the immensity and importance of the work Wagner has done for art. Plato declared that the true musician must have poetry and music harmonized in himself; and the world has waited twenty-five hundred years for that combination to appear. Having carefully read the poems all written by ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... 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 ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... consider the immensity of the British Empire in territory, population, and trade, it requires a stern exercise of faith to believe in the figures which represent Australasia's contribution to the Empire's commercial grandeur. As compared with the landed estate of the British Empire, the landed estate ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... though I read these with more admiration and astonishment, I still read Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon with more amusement and more satisfaction. The original poets were not, however, without excuse. They found the limits of nature too straight for the immensity of their genius, which they had not room to exert without extending fact by fiction: and that especially at a time when the manners of men were too simple to afford that variety which they have since offered in vain to the ...
— Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon • Henry Fielding
... 1785 sent with two frigates on a voyage of discovery by Louis XVI.; "the brave navigator" went forth, sailing along the Pacific shores of America and Asia as far as Botany Bay, but never returned; "the seekers search far seas for him in vain; he has vanished trackless into blue immensity, and only some mournful mysterious shadow of him hovers long in all ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Gilbert—an investigation which I cannot avoid characterising as one of the most laborious and apparently trustworthy on record. The mere statement of the results of this inquiry occupies 187 pages of one of the huge volumes of the Transactions of the Royal Society—a fact which best indicates the immensity of the labour which these gentlemen imposed upon themselves, and which, independently of their other and numerous contributions to scientific agriculture, entitles their names to most honourable mention in the ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... guiding all, Thou art! Direct my understanding then to Thee: Control my spirit, guide my wandering heart: Though but an atom midst immensity, Still I am something fashioned by Thy hand! I hold a middle rank 'twixt heaven and earth, On the last verge of mortal being stand, Close to the realms where angels have their birth, Just on ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... 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 fled as the swift beams spread onward and outward, in an ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... epithet, and the Straights of Magellan, which divide Terra del Fuego from the continent are comparatively no more than a mountain stream in a hilly country, so that that island may without any impropriety be deemed a part of it. The Andes are not one continuous chain of mountains; but an immensity of piles raised one on another, at different elevations of which are extensive plains, termed "Pampas," some of which appear as boundless as the horizon, and totally divested of herbage. On one of these plains, called the Pampa of Diesmo, in the province of Junin, I was detained some days at ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... but one objection against immortality, if objection it may be called, and this arises from the very greatness of the truth. My mind sometimes sinks under its weight, is lost in its immensity; I scarcely dare believe that such a good is placed within my reach. When I think of myself, as existing through all future ages, as surviving this earth and that sky, as exempted from every imperfection and error of ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... ferryman was getting the boat ready. I was not disappointed—but I could make out nothing. In an instant I was blinded by the spray, and wet to the skin. I saw the water tearing madly down from some immense height, but could get no idea of shape, or situation, or anything but vague immensity. But when we were seated in the boat, and crossing at the very foot of the cataract—then I began to feel what it was. Directly I had changed my clothes at the inn I went out again, taking Kate with me, and hurried ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... 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
... who created so many millions of worlds, and keeps them flying around him with immense velocity, could occupy himself with us human beings, who are no more than insects moving on this world, which is but a speck in the immensity of the universe. But I know how it is—our souls are immortal, and hence we must soar higher than the countless worlds, were they ten times as great. Our blessed Lord, by coming amongst us and dying to save those souls, ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... the earth is wonderful, and man, who, by force of intellect, has sought to comprehend the immensity of one and unravel the formation of the other, is hardly less wonderful than either. Still the great mystery remains unriddled; our researches have brought us no nearer the beginning, and the first cause of all continues unapproachable and undefinable as ever. ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... last century the latter were considered repelling. They oppressed the soul by their immensity. No painter then undertook to depict giant mountains with eternal snow upon summits which towered above the clouds. A Salvator Rosa or Poussin, or even the great Ruysdael, would have preferred to set up his easel at the Pichelsbergen or in the country about Potsdam, rather than at the foot of Mont ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to desire to possess it, the most dangerous of follies. Open your window, Octave; do you not see the infinite? You try to form some idea of a thing that has no limits, you who were born yesterday and who will die to-morrow! This spectacle of immensity in every country in the world produces the wildest illusions. Religions are born of it; it was to possess the infinite that Cato cut his throat, that the Christians delivered themselves to lions, the ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... formation of 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 History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... A Discourse of Poets ('The Heroic Enthusiasts') Canticle of the Shining Ones: A Tribute to English Women ('The Nolan') Song of the Nine Singers Of Immensity Life Well Lost Parnassus Within Compensation Life ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... which changed the dead bones of old 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 ideas. I loved to lose myself in imagination in immeasurable ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... short time before he had been in misery and despair because he felt that he was lost. Here were these Indians perfectly at their ease, and ready to set to work and prepare for a stay if needs be, for nothing troubled them—the immensity and solitude had no ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... Probably neither is quite right. For some people the home is narrowing, for others it is the place that affords the widest scope; for some the world is narrow, for others the world is extremely broad—in fact, so broad that they never are able to get free from its immensity. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... and lakes; I see the burial-cairns of Scandinavian warriors; I see them 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
... 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 ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... great blaze of the ocean. Such were the days, still, hot, heavy, disappearing one by one into the past, as if falling into an abyss for ever open in the wake of the ship; and the ship, lonely under a wisp of smoke, held on her steadfast way black and smouldering in a luminous immensity, as if scorched by a flame flicked at her ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... in the case of infantry and artillery results directly from the character of the modern battle; in the case of cavalry it is due to the nature of their strategical duties and the need of sometimes fighting on foot like infantry; in the case of leaders of every grade, from the immensity of the armies, the vast extent of the spheres of operation and fields of battle, and the difficulty, inseparable from all these conditions, of giving direct orders. Wherever we turn our eyes to the wide sphere of modern warfare, we encounter the ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... summit, than had before been seen there. If his theme were a lovely lake, a celestial smile had now been thrown over it, to gleam forever on its surface. If it were the vast old sea, even the deep immensity of its dread bosom seemed to swell the higher, as if moved by the emotions of the song. Thus the world assumed another and a better aspect from the hour that the poet blessed it with his happy eyes. The Creator had bestowed ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... And it seemed to me that the dingy cabin was transfigured and now it seemed a fit and proper scene for such an extremity of passion. I thought I should never forget that schooner in the harbour of Honolulu, crowded with shipping, and yet, under the immensity of the starry sky, remote from all the world. I liked to think of those lovers sailing off together in the night over the empty spaces of the Pacific from one green, hilly island to another. A faint breeze of romance softly fanned ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... The immensity of the river itself was an appalling thing; its bends swept miles long in giant arcs. But bend after bend they spanned, bar after bar they skirted, bank after bank they conquered—and went on. In the water as much as out of ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... before I discovered 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 ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... exertion great enough for the absorption of its tireless energies, and none of them is more hopeful than the great world of books, if the demon is docile enough to be coaxed into it. Then will its erratic restlessness be sobered by the immensity of the sphere of exertion, and the consciousness that, however vehemently and however long it may struggle, the resources set before it will not be exhausted when the life to which it is attached shall have faded away; and ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... lawns and gardens fine. The winds my tax-collectors are, They bring me tithes divine,— Wild scents and subtle essences, A tribute rare and free; And, more magnificent than all, My window keeps for me A glimpse of blue immensity,— A ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... laboring in the path of civilization. Moreover, as was shown on page 238, the ruling classes and their Governments are seeing to it that the military armaments and wars break their own backs by their own immensity. Thus the last weapons will wander into the museums of antiquity, as so many of their predecessors have done before, and serve as witnesses to future generations of the manner in which the generations ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... awaits them, and misery besets them on all sides. In the hope of escaping from such a host of enemies, they separate, and each individual endeavors to procure the means of supporting his existence in solitude and secrecy, living in the immensity of the desert like an outcast in civilized society. The social tie, which distress had long since weakened, is then dissolved; they have lost their country, and their people soon deserts them; their very families are obliterated; the names they bore in ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... triumph of human intelligence; to desire to possess it, the most dangerous of follies. Open your window, Octave; do you not see the infinite? You try to form some idea of a thing that has no limits, you who were born yesterday and who will die to-morrow? This spectacle of immensity in every country in the world, produces the wildest illusions. Religions are born of it; it was to possess the infinite that Cato cut his throat, that the Christians delivered themselves to lions, the Huguenots to the Catholics; all the people of ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... seemed to hover over the restless waters upon the one hand, and those vast silent plains on the other; sea and sky, sky and sand, met the wearied eye wherever it wandered. The scene was unspeakably solemn in its immensity and loneliness; while irresistibly the thought would wander over those fateful leagues of prairie and forest that stretched unbrokenly between this far frontier and the few scattered and remote settlements that ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... distance 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
... not tell what was sky and what was land. The immensity of the scene stunned her faculties of conception. She sat down in one of the old rocking-chairs and looked and looked, and knew that she was not grasping the reality of what stretched wondrously ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... in what I fain would know, Again I turn my eyes below And eastward, past the hither mead Where all day long the cattle feed, A crescent gleam my sight allures And clings about the hazy moors,— The great, encircling, radiant sea, Alone in its immensity. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... to my eye The swimming lights of yonder fishing-boat Than worlds that burn in night's immensity— So huge, but ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... rate, there were now no couches on the floor. The room seemed even bigger than before, and when the walls settled down to a steady golden glow, Forrester felt lost in the immensity of the place. In the center of the room was a raised golden dais. It was about five feet across and nearly ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... human eye can see Or human thought contain, Made of infinity a space, Made of Immensity a place, To win ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... regions of the south-western desert country of Arizona and New Mexico lies an eternal spell of silence and mystery. Across the sand-ridges come many foreign things, both animate and inanimate, which are engulfed in its immensity, which frequently disappear for all time from the sight of men, blotted out like a bird which flies free from a lighted room into the outside darkness. As though in compensation for that which it has taken, the desert ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... 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 ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... 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 ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... affected. He has fits of silent stiffness, alternating with spasms of extravagant gayety. He avoids me at times for hours together, and then he comes and looks at me with an inscrutable smile, as if he were on the verge of a burst of confidence—which again is swallowed up in the immensity of his dumbness. Is he hatching some astounding benefit to his species? Is he working to bring about my removal to a higher sphere of ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... dimensions of the head-race he seemed to discern the obliterated canal over which St. Marys came to grief. Was he himself to be brought down by its titanic successor? He stared up the lake, comparing himself with the voyageur who had once floated out of this wide immensity to trade at St. Marys. He, too, had been trading at St. Marys. "Big magic!" old Shingwauk had said, when his dark eyes beheld the works. Was it, after all, barely possible ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... and shining torches innumerable; the smoke from them half choked us, while above there seemed an immensity of darkness, for the roof of the natural chamber was so high that it could ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... road across the desert, as straight as a surveyor's line, and as they cleared the rough gulches and glided down into its immensity Virginia glanced ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... 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 is an essential notion common to both, the notion of Vishnu. ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... heeded the crowds of people that thronged the street and rudely jostled her. If she saw them at all, it was only to regard them as so many purchasers of molasses candy. With her brain almost reeling with the immensity and magnificence of her scheme, she reached Temple Street. After a little search, she found the number of Mrs. Gordon's residence on a splendid house, whose grandness quite abashed her. But her courage revived as she thought of the purpose that had ...
— Poor and Proud - or The Fortunes of Katy Redburn • Oliver Optic
... 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various
... darkling, lamp-studded canyon of a cross-town street, stark against a sky pulsing with the faintest foreboding of daybreak, the gaunt, steel-girdered framework of the new Grand Central Station stood—in its harshly angular immensity as majestic as the blackened skeleton of a burnt-out world glimpsed against the phosphorescent pallor of the last ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... blank space of North London was flying by; the very pace gave us a sense of its immensity and its meanness. It was, as it were, a base infinitude, a squalid eternity, and we felt the real horror of the poor parts of London, the horror that is so totally missed and misrepresented by the sensational novelists who depict it as being a matter ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... Salmon, 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 whatever good ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... quoted correctly, but you know the sort of thing I mean, that sounds so breezy and stimulating. And they've helped me understand the immensity of the landscapes and the ideas out here, the big, throbbing, rough young life, and under it all, as Whitman says, "a meaning—Democracy, American Democracy." Really it's been interesting, the jolliest time of my life, and it's got me all unsettled. ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... his knee before the real princess, kissed the hem of her robe and arose with face pallid. The chasm was now endless in its immensity. The princess gingerly seated herself on the throne, placed her elbow on the broad arm, her white chin in her hand, and tranquilly surveyed the voiceless ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... paced the drawing-room overhead in such agitation and exaltation of mind as he had never conceived possible, and Cassandra remained alone with her uncle. Ralph, at length, rose and walked gloomily to the window. He pressed close to the pane. Outside were truth and freedom and the immensity only to be apprehended by the mind in loneliness, and never communicated to another. What worse sacrilege was there than to attempt to violate what he perceived by seeking to impart it? Some movement behind him ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... 'Ah! (a deep-drawn sigh) it is indeed, sir.' 'Great power, sir.' 'Immense—immense!' 'Great deal done by steam, sir.' 'Ah! (another sigh at the immensity of the subject, and a knowing shake of the head) you may say that, sir.' 'Still in its infancy, they say, sir.' Novel remarks of this kind, are generally the commencement of a conversation which is prolonged until the conclusion of the trip, and, perhaps, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... of the animals, and the streaming out of curtains, scarfs, shawls, and loose draperies of every shape and color, lent touches of drollery and bright contrasts to the scene. One instant the spectator on the hill was disposed to laugh, then to admire, then to shiver at the immensity of a danger; over and over again amidst his quick variation of feeling, he repeated the exclamation: "These are not men, but devils fleeing ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... were wiped out of being, there would be left no noticeable void among the countless systems of worlds and suns and stars; in the immensity of space the sun with all his revolving planets is not even as a drop to the ocean or a grain of sand to the composition of the earth. There are millions of other suns of larger dimensions with larger attendants wheeling ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... States' public domain, but as an independent republic, owning all its lands, amounting to 237,504 square miles, or 152,002,560 acres, a vast empire in itself. I remember hearing a distinguished senator, in the course of the debate on its admission into the Union, describe its immensity by saying, "A pigeon could not fly across ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... tributaries; let it pass to Oregon and explore all its bays, inlets, and streams; and then let it raise the curtain of the future and contemplate the extent of this Republic and the objects of improvement it will embrace as it advances to its high destiny, and the mind will be startled at the immensity and danger of the power which the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... Life, beauty, light, intelligence, and love! Eternal, uncreated, infinite! Unsearchable Jehovah! God of truth! Maker, upholder, governor of all: Thyself unmade, ungoverned, unupheld. Omnipotent, unchangeable, Great God! Exhaustless fullness! giving unimpaired! Bounding immensity, unspread, unbound! Highest and best! beginning, middle, end. All-seeing Eye! all-seeing, and unseen! Hearing, unheard! all knowing, and unknown! Above all praise! above all height of thought! Proprietor of immortality! Glory ineffable! Bliss underived! Of old Thou build'st Thy throne on righteousness, ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... the immensity of the labour confronting him. He had no thought for anything but the purpose of his life. He knew that successful completion of the work before him would set the seal to his ambitions. He would then be able to lay at the feet of the girl who was the mother of his child the promotion to ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... great, but God more great, more great in power, more great in wisdom, more great every way for the help of his people; wherein they dealt proudly, he was above them. These words therefore take in for this people, the great God who in his immensity and infinite greatness is beyond all ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... 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 close to the lofty mesa beneath tall clean-graded ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... "all the despatches have been garbled, defeats turned into victories." It is not of Dr. Leyds he is speaking, but of the English. He declares (February 1st) that "the best English regiments are already disintegrated," that "the immensity of the cost will frighten the English shopkeepers," that "the ministerial majority will likely soon be dissipated." In giving these proofs of perspicacity, Dr. Kuyper charitably adds, concerning England, "her reverses may be her salvation." And in order to ensure her this salvation, he looks forward ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... well as justice and humanity. Europe contains one hundred and twenty millions of inhabitants. Query—How many millions doth Africa contain? Supposing the Africans, collectively and individually, to expend 5l. a head in raiment and furniture yearly when civilized, &c. an immensity ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... visitor not formally enrolled St. Peter's speaks less of aspiration than of full and convenient assurance. The soul infinitely expands there, if one will, but all on its quite human level. It marvels at the reach of our dreams and the immensity of our resources. To be so impressed and put in our place, we say, is to be sufficiently "saved"; we can't be more than the heaven itself; and what specifically celestial beauty such a show or such a substitute may lack it makes ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... which was rather a sob, indicative of the inner throes that were racking the statesman's whole being, burst from his heart. His head fell upon his breast, and his whole body trembled. Joseph comprehended the immensity of his grief, and made no ineffectual attempt ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... spent a whole afternoon there once and had been simply wild about it. Vernabelle said it was times like this, with a few real people, that she got her biggest ideas; that life in the rough was too terribly a labyrinth, didn't we think, stunning one with its immensity, while in these dear little half-lighted moments the real came out unafraid, if we understood what she meant. Many of us ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... in imperishable gold: A drop of water fell out of a cloud into the sea, and finding herself lost in such immensity of fluid matter, broke out into the following reflection: "Alas! What an inconsiderable creature am I in this prodigious ocean of waters; my existence is of no concern to the universe; I am reduced to a kind of nothing, ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... United States' public domain, but as an independent republic, owning all its lands, amounting to 237,504 square miles, or 152,002,560 acres, a vast empire in itself. I remember hearing a distinguished senator, in the course of the debate on its admission into the Union, describe its immensity by saying, "A pigeon could not fly across it ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... sky, or the pathetic charm of its wild bell music, shattering down through the silent watches of the night, over the sleeping town, as I have heard it, standing by some silent, dark, palace-bordered canal, watching the tall tower melting into the immensity of the dusk, or by day in varying light and shade, in storm and sunshine, with wind-driven clouds chasing each other ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... the eyes of all mankind beheld a mightier grandeur reposing on its breast, or soaring to its summit, than had before been seen there. If his theme were a lovely lake, a celestial smile had now been thrown over it, to gleam forever on its surface. If it were the vast old sea, even the deep immensity of its dread bosom seemed to swell the higher, as if moved by the emotions of the song. Thus the world assumed another and a better aspect from the hour that the poet blessed it with his happy eyes. The Creator had bestowed him, as the last best ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... began the ascent. Crewe, whose spirits were at high pressure, talked all the way up the winding stairs; on issuing into daylight, he became silent, and they stood side by side, mute before the vision of London's immensity. Nancy began to move round the platform. The strong west wind lashed her cheeks to a glowing colour; excitement added brilliancy to her eyes. As soon as she had recovered from the first impression, this spectacle of a world's wonder served only to exhilarate her; she was not awed by what ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... and perpetually labors for 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 ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... newly arrived 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; ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... 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 ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... of God above, or man below, What can we 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, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... 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 ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... 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 ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... tawny velvet stretched over dipping hillocks. The long rows of wheat-shocks marched like soldiers in worn yellow tabards. The newly plowed fields were black banners fallen on the distant slope. It was a martial immensity, vigorous, a little harsh, ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... are trying to explain the nature of Space. One ant is blind, and one can see, and always has seen, its limited, tiny, Spatial world. Neither ant has ever been more than a few feet across a little patch of sand and leaves. I think we could explain the immensity of North and South America, Europe, Asia and the rest more easily to the ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... lovers placed their chairs close to the railing and leaning over it looked down into the deserted street or off toward the distant hills swimming like islands on a sea of light, or up to the infinite sky in the immensity of which their individual being seemed to be swallowed up, or down into each other's eyes, in the depths of which they discovered realities which they had never before perceived, and lost sight of those in which they had always believed. For a long time they sat in silence. Afterwards, there came ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... uncreated, infinite! Unsearchable Jehovah! God of truth! Maker, upholder, governor of all: Thyself unmade, ungoverned, unupheld. Omnipotent, unchangeable, Great God! Exhaustless fullness! giving unimpaired! Bounding immensity, unspread, unbound! Highest and best! beginning, middle, end. All-seeing Eye! all-seeing, and unseen! Hearing, unheard! all knowing, and unknown! Above all praise! above all height of thought! Proprietor of immortality! Glory ineffable! Bliss underived! Of old Thou build'st Thy ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... have been astonished at the tales that were carried back by the early explorers and voyagers, in relation to the New World. The story of the immensity of the quantity of gold and silver, of great stores of hidden treasures, of the quantities of precious gems and priceless crystals was fully discounted when, from the Florida coast and the explorers of the Lower Mississippi, men returned with the tale that in the everglades and in ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... maiden, hitherto entombed in the massive depths of the earth, had now obtained an idea of the universe—of the works both of God and of man. She had looked upon town and country, and beyond these, into the immensity of the sea, the ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... the fine art was a personage and nothing more; but, as I have said, there was an infinite diversity of temperament amongst the masters of the fine art I have known. Some were great impressionists. They impressed upon you the fear of God and Immensity—or, in other words, the fear of being drowned with every circumstance of terrific grandeur. One may think that the locality of your passing away by means of suffocation in water does not really matter very much. I am not so sure of that. I am, perhaps, unduly sensitive, but I confess ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... the affection is neither the offspring of dry and legal duty, nor of selfish enjoyment, but lies far down in the unconscious abysses of the heart and being itself:—as Christ—to compare (for He Himself permits, nay commands, us to do so in His parables) our littleness with His immensity- -as Christ, I say, showed, when He chose first to manifest His glory—the glory of His grace and truth—by increasing for a short hour the pleasures of a ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... the south-western desert country of Arizona and New Mexico lies an eternal spell of silence and mystery. Across the sand-ridges come many foreign things, both animate and inanimate, which are engulfed in its immensity, which frequently disappear for all time from the sight of men, blotted out like a bird which flies free from a lighted room into the outside darkness. As though in compensation for that which it has taken, the desert from time ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... about Ann forever haunting her, as they would a mother who had a child away from home. New vision of the immensity of life could save her from giving destroying place to that sense of the woe of the world, but a conception of the wonders of the centuries could not keep out the gnawing fear that Ann might not be getting ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... they both were, by heredity and training, the immensity of the appalling lack of anything tangible oppressed them. Ravindau was stern and serious, Fenimol moody. Finally ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... 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 ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... prolific. No other event has so powerfully influenced human civilization. Books became a tribune from which the world was addressed. That world was soon doubled. The compass opened safe roads across the monotonous immensity of the seas. America was discovered; and the sight of new manners, the agitation of new interests which were no longer the trifling concerns of one town or castle with another, but the great transactions of mighty powers, changed entirely the ideas of ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... future course of Master William Cullen Bryant. He was not to be a doctor, but a poet. A poet, that is, if he lived to be anything; for the chances were against his living at all. The lad was exceedingly frail, and had a head the immensity of which troubled his anxious father. How to reduce it to the normal size was a puzzle which Dr. Bryant solved in a spring of clear, cold water, which burst out of the ground on or near his homestead, and into which the ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... a pessimist, nor misanthrope, nor grumbler; I bear it all, the burden of Public Affairs, the immensity of Space, the brevity of Life, and the thought of the all-swallowing Grave—all this I put up with without impatience. I accept the common lot. And if now and then for a moment it seems too much; if I get my feet wet, or have to wait too long for tea, and my soul in these wanes of the moon cries ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... command as a mechanical puppet responds to the touch of a spring. To each unit of the millions, love of his own country means only hatred of all others and the belief that no other should be allowed existence. The sacred creed of each is that the immensity of Germany is such that there can be no room on the earth for another than itself. Blood and iron will clear the world of the inferior peoples. To the masses that is their God's will. Their God is an ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... that the English-speaking world is little aware at present of the immensity and importance of the work Wagner has done for art. Plato declared that the true musician must have poetry and music harmonized in himself; and the world has waited twenty-five hundred years for that combination to appear. Having carefully read the poems all written ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... they the wildest feature of the scene. This distinction could more justly be claimed by 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 ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... brighten, probing with eager eyes into the distances. Swiftly the sky filled to the coming day; the shadows withdrew from the hollows, the earth stood forth, naked and clearly revealed. Save for himself, feeling dwarfed in this immensity, there was no living thing within the scope of his vision. He shook his head and turned back to camp and breakfast, frowning grimly. He would have to walk out of this mess, and like any twelve cattlemen out of a dozen he had little ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... taken from among some 73 rules, to enumerate which would be useless as they would be meaningless in Europe. But even these few are enough to show the immensity of the difficulties which beset the path of the would-be "Upasaka," who has been born and bred ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... its guests, even if all its multitude of rooms are occupied, at least one spot for each visitor to regard as his or her favorite nook. So large an extent of woodland successfully defies landscape gardening. It insists on being left alone, and its very immensity raises a financial barrier against trimly-kept gravel walks. There were plenty of landscape garden walks in the immediate vicinity of the hotel, and some of them ambitiously penetrated into the woods, relapsing from the civilization of beaten gravel into a primitive thicket trail, which, however, ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... conception, and let the last object at which he can arrive be now that of our discourse. Perhaps he will think that here is the smallest point in nature. I will let him see therein a new abyss. I will paint for him not only the visible universe, but all that he can conceive of nature's immensity in the womb of this abridged atom. Let him see therein an infinity of universes, each of which has its firmament, its planets, its earth, in the same proportion as in the visible world; in each earth animals, and in the last mites, ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... you, Le Gardeur!" replied she, impetuously. She felt the vital soul of this man breathing on her cheek. She knew he spoke true, but she was incapable of measuring the height and immensity of such a passion. She accepted his love, but she could no more contain the fulness of his overflowing affection than the pitcher that is held to the fountain can contain the stream that ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Here, half-way up the side of the steep promontory, the whole immensity of the surrounding height and depth came upon her in a terrifying flash of realisation. From below rose the reiterated boom of the baulked waves, each thud against the base of the great crag seeming to shake her whole being, while, whichever way she looked, menacing headlands ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... communicates with an immensity of the like kind, we find ourselves among the most hard and durable materials. Here we must perceive, that most enormous masses of those solid materials had, in the course of time, been wasted by the flow effects of air and water, of the sun and frost, in order to hollow out those barren valleys ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... 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 ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... said, to glean more than a general idea that his testimony had been against Vampa. As soon, however, as his emotion permitted him to do so Giovanni went to them and communicated the glad tidings. Zuleika was almost overcome by the immensity of her joy and with difficultly restrained herself from embracing her lover directly in the face of the august Court and the assembled spectators. Valentine was ready to weep with delight and her husband felt as much triumph as if he had won a decisive victory over the ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... Moore say, "It's beginning." ... And the solemn curve of the Shadow touched the great disk. No one spoke: they stood—a handful of little human creatures, staring up into immensity; specks of consciousness on a whirling ball that was rushing forever into the void, and, as it rushed, its shadow, sweeping soundless through the emptiness of Space, touched the watching Moon ... and the broad plaque, silver gilt, lessened—lessened. To half. ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... possession is a means and not an end; unfaithfulness may give pain, but the bond is not less close; the soul is neither more nor less ardent or troubled, but happy at every moment; in short, the divine breath of desire spreading from end to end of the immensity of Time steeps it all for us in the selfsame hue; life takes the tint of the unclouded heaven. But Passion is the foreshadowing of Love, and of that Infinite to which all suffering souls aspire. Passion ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... earth. These were lamps still burning in the sleeping city. Still farther, between the less crowded buildings, faintly seen shafts of palm trees waved their fans of leaves; and beyond, the contours and the shapes were merged in a vaporous immensity, for even the eagle's glance could not have reached the limits of Thebes; and on the other side old Hopi was flowing ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... another expansive. In her dark brown, or, as some called them, black eyes, there would suddenly come up and shine an enthusiasm, a capacity of poetic and romantic fire, to the quelling of which there must have gone an immensity of religious force. As to Gabriel, during a large portion of his splendid youth he exhibited a genial breadth of front that affined him to Shakespeare and Walter Scott. The English strain in the family found expression in him, and in him alone. ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... 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 forms of nature, the rocks, the earth, and the sky. It is not ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... instances haphazard; they are large instances, as it were, of big and visible things. They only give the rudest idea of the immensity and complexity of insect life in our own country. My friend the sparrow is, I believe, a friend likewise to man generally. He does a little damage, I admit; but if he were to resort to living on damage solely in his enormous numbers, we should not have a single flower or ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... most interesting exhibition 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 ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... it is able to think and to reason. Such is the power of the highest animals. Overlying this is the spirit which man shares with higher natures, by which thought transcends the range of the senses, and man thinks of immensity, eternity, infinity, immortality, the beautiful, the holy, and God—it is certain that man's mind possesses both these classes or sets of thought." Now in regard to the higher of these elements, there are very many well authenticated cases where the extreme susceptibility ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... of perfection to the festival. There were roses everywhere; on the table, on the mantelpiece; the room was sweet with the smell of them; there was a rose on each child's plate. The tremulous movements of her hands betrayed the immensity and the desperation of her passion to please. The very waiter was touched by her, and smiled secretly in sympathy as he saw her laying her pretty lures. When he had gone she arranged the table all over again and did it better. Then she stood ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... Bosomed in tilth and vintage to her walls, A tower-crowned Cybele in armoured sleep The city lies, fat plenty in her halls, With calm parochial spires that hold in fee The friendly gables clustered at their base, And, equipoised o'er tower and market-place, The Gothic minister's winged immensity; And in that narrow burgh, with equal mood, Two placid hearts, to all life's good resigned, Might, from the altar to the lych-gate, find Long years of peace and ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... leniency is practicable, and am convinced you will soon have cause to regret its trial, and will be brought to my way of thinking; therefore, I should strongly advise you to relinquish the idea at once, and relieve yourself of an immensity of trouble and anxiety ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... temples—there is one Built without hands, to mankind given; Its lamps are the meridian sun, And all the stars of heaven; Its walls are the cerulean sky, Its floor the earth so green and fair; The dome is vast immensity— All ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... all—Thou art! Direct my understanding then to Thee; Control my spirit, guide my wandering heart; Though but an atom midst immensity, Still I am something, fashioned by Thy hand! I hold a middle rank 'twixt heaven and earth— On the last verge of mortal being stand. Close to the realm where angels have their birth, Just on ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... ask 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 speech or bugbear with which to frighten you, but ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... progressed in short jumps and above the dulled rattle of a billow breaking on the pebbles, the faint click-thud of oars between thole-pins was plainly audible. I had an odd fancy that the six men were rowing through immensity, into eternity, to meet God; and that they would ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... the most perfect and most inclusive of all; whose path is 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 thus ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... rein one 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 ...
— Buffalo Bill's Spy Trailer - The Stranger in Camp • Colonel Prentiss Ingraham
... 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 ...
— Getting Together • Ian Hay
... the monsters who exacted it, and of them alone—that he should show no sign of sympathy or sorrow.[11] "She was sitting on an old worn-out chair made of straw which scarcely supported her weight. Dressed in a gown which had once been white, her attitude bespoke the immensity of her grief, which appeared to have created a kind of stupor, that fortunately rendered her less sensible to the injuries and reproaches which a number of inhuman wretches were ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... mind must consent to correspondingly vast epochs for the duration of material changes. The geological age plays the same part in our views of the duration of the universe as the Earth's orbital radius does in our views of the immensity of space. Lucretius knew nothing of our time-unit: his unit was the life of a man. So also he knew nothing of our space-unit, and he marvels that so small a body as the sun can shed so much, heat and light ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... Mr. Byles, "object to the question, and I will answer it by saying that it would take a great deal more than the hon. member for Shipley will ever be able to pay." There the words stand—in the immensity of their vulgarity, in their ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... deliberation, diligent in manoeuvring, constant in attention. But, somehow, he was unlucky; his schemes were never successful. In the present instance he was peculiarly unfortunate, for everything went wrong with him. He had got rid of an obnoxious lover, he had coaxed over his son, he had spent an immensity of money, he had undergone worlds of trouble and self-restraint;—and then, when he really began to think that his ward's fortune would compensate him for this, his own family came to him, one after another, to assure him that he was completely mistaken—that it was utterly impossible that ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... For, as the fire was roaring at its best, certain stars stepped delicately forth on the surface of the immensity above, and peered down doubtfully—with wonder at first, then with interest, then with recognition, with a start of glad surprise. THEY at least knew all about it, THEY understood. Among THEM the Name was a daily familiar word; his story was a part of the music to which they swung, himself ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... charged with an exploring expedition to the Polar regions. He afterwards followed him to St. Petersburg, and there, after some vicissitudes of fortune, Morok became one of the imperial couriers—these iron automata, that the least caprice of the despot hurls in a frail sledge through the immensity of the empire, from Persia to the Frozen Sea. For these men, who travel night and day, with the rapidity of lightning there are neither seasons nor obstacles, fatigues nor danger; living projectiles, they must either be broken to pieces, or reach the intended mark. One may conceive ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... been well observed by an able writer, that it is impossible to trace the path of a sunbeam through our atmosphere without feeling a desire to know its nature, by what power it traverses the immensity of space, and the various modifications it undergoes at the surfaces and interior ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey
... after the Revolution of 1830, when the mob invaded the Archbishop's residence, when Republican agitators spurred them on to destroy the gilt crosses which flashed like streaks of lightning in the immensity of the ocean of houses; when Incredulity flaunted itself in the streets, side by side with Rebellion, Bianchon once more detected Desplein going into Saint-Sulpice. The doctor followed him, and knelt down by him without the slightest notice or demonstration ...
— The Atheist's Mass • Honore de Balzac
... propensities of a Columbus or Robinson Crusoe united with a habit of trembling at stray dogs in the daytime, and covering one's head with the bedclothes at night. I had longed to be afloat for some time past; but now, that I was fairly out of sight of land, I shuddered at the immensity of the fathomless sea that stretched before me. Whither bound? To the 'Peppersville Academy,' in a town on the border of a lake familiar to me in my geography days at school, but which seemed, practically, to have no more connection ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... be Jesus, he could forgive her, he can forgive all. The woman departs in peace; Simon is satisfied; Jesus triumphs; we almost hear the applauses with which the ages and generations of earth greet the closing scene. From the serene celestial immensity that opens above the spot we can distinguish a voice, saying, "This is my ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... of God; it was so strange and so consoling to think that great Being who created so many millions of worlds, and keeps them flying around him with immense velocity, could occupy himself with us human beings, who are no more than insects moving on this world, which is but a speck in the immensity of the universe. But I know how it is—our souls are immortal, and hence we must soar higher than the countless worlds, were they ten times as great. Our blessed Lord, by coming amongst us and dying to save those souls, ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... 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 lost, ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... one word is close to the original, though 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 change of phrase, ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... They remained here, however, but one day. Having nothing else to trade, they parted with their butcher knives, receiving for four of them one fat ox. It would all appear a fabulous tale, were we to incorporate into this narrative a history, or even a slight description of the immensity of the herds of horses and cattle which once roamed over the plains and valleys of California and New Mexico. It is but a few years since, that some wealthy Mexicans owned herds in these parts of America which they numbered by tens of thousands. ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... sins against good manners than can quote from his "Rasselas" and "Rambler," while there will always be more who can descant upon the selfish, tyrannical ill-breeding of Thomas Carlyle than can estimate the value and immensity ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... see the burial-cairns of Scandinavian warriors; I see them 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
... that couldn't be, for the cashier owns to having handled them at the time. Perhaps Mr. Graylock—" and there he abruptly came to a stop as a dazzling thought flashed through his mind almost staggering him with its immensity, so that he fairly gasped ...
— Dick the Bank Boy - Or, A Missing Fortune • Frank V. Webster
... of such peculiar appeal as he, when he stood by the guard, opening and shutting his hand in ironical adieu, and looking smaller and smaller as our tender drifted away and the vast liner loomed immense before us. He may have contributed to its effect of immensity by the smallness of his presence, or it may have dwarfed him. No matter; he filled no slight space in our lives while he lasted. Now that he is no longer there, was he really a bad little boy, merely and simply? Heaven knows, which alone ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... figured to himself the golden streets and glittering domes of the materialistic Heaven of a personal God. Below him are all the various objects out of which the world's pantheons have been manufactured: around, above—Immensity. And so also, far down the ascending plane of thought that leads from the earth towards the Infinite, the philosophic Buddhist describes, at different plateaux, the heavens and hells, the gods and demons, of ...
— The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons • H.S. Olcott
... most striking in the Court was its immensity. "Though it comes from Bernini's entrance court to St. Peter's in Rome, it is much bigger. There are those who think it's too big. But it justifies itself by its splendor. The use of the double row of ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... 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 breathless joy: ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... without 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 ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... slowly, against her will, to rise up from her chair, to tell the story, to speak the truth. Her brain reeled. She could hear the fatal words ringing through the room in the familiar tones of her own voice, distinctly, one by one, omitting nothing in the immensity of her self-accusation. She could feel the icy horror creeping through bone and marrow, as the truth tortured her in the utterance of it. She could see Greifenstein's grey face transformed with rage and hatred, she trembled under the inhuman savageness of his fiery eyes, she saw his tall ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... cordage, the nettings, the port-holes, the shrouds, the boats, the deck, the sails, the ladders, the funnels, the ventilators, everything was white. The sea was black and the sky black. The ship alone was white, floating along in this immensity. There was a contest between the high funnel, spluttering forth with difficulty its smoke through the wind which was rushing wildly into its great mouth, and the prolonged shrieks of the siren. The contrast was so extraordinary between the virgin whiteness ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... though the sprouting was so long put off. Everything, I have mentioned, had come at this time to be acceptedly, though far from braggingly, put off; and the ministrations of M. Ansiot really wash themselves over with the weak mixture that had begun to spread for me, to immensity, during that summer day or two of our earlier residence when, betraying strange pains and apprehensions, I was with all decision put to bed. Present to me still is the fact of my sharper sense, after an hour or two, of my being there in distress ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... staggering consciousness could realize was an immensity, an immeasurable uprearing that brought with it the same throat-gripping vertigo as comes from gazing downward from some great height—then a blur of white faces—intolerable shinings of hundreds upon thousands of eyes. Huge, incredibly huge, a colossal amphitheatre of jet, ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... visitor enters London; he is bound to be duly impressed by the immensity of it. In olden times the ambassador to St. James' was met at Dover, where he first set foot upon English soil, by the Governor of the Castle and the local Mayor. From here he was passed on in state to the great cathedral city of Canterbury, sojourned for a space beneath the shadow of Rochester ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... clothes. Again, Grotesquing thinly many an old sweet song, So cracked his fiddle, his hand so frail and wrong, You hardly could distinguish one in ten. He stopped at last, and sat him on the sand, And, grasping wearily his bread-winner, Stared dim towards the blue immensity, Then leaned his head upon his poor old hand. He may have slept: he did not speak nor stir: His ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... highness was such as was to be expected from the immensity of your wisdom; but hath not the prophet warned us, that the wisest of men are too often thwarted by the folly and obstinacy of the other sex. May your slave venture to observe, that many very fine stories were obtained by the caliph Haroun, ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... narrow, scanty, and meagre is the record of observations, compared with the immensity that was to be observed within the bounds which I prescribed to myself! How shallow and thin a stream of thought, too,—of distinct and expressed thought,—compared with the broad tide of dim emotions, ideas, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... changelessness, no immovability. It is probable that the universe is seeking and finding itself every day, that it has not become entirely conscious and does not yet know what it wants. It is almost certain that its ideal is still veiled by the shadow of its immensity and almost evident that the experiments and chances are following one upon the other in unimaginable worlds, compared wherewith all those which we see on starry nights are no more than a pinch of gold-dust in the ocean depths. Lastly, it is very nearly sure that ...
— Death • Maurice Maeterlinck
... jets of liquid lead spread out in sheaves, like water springing from the thousand holes of a watering-pot. Above the flame, the enormous towers, two sides of each of which were visible in sharp outline, the one wholly black, the other wholly red, seemed still more vast with all the immensity of the shadow which they ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... for all that Sarah must have suffered. And as she heard the ceaseless, cruel play of the water amid the dark jungle of ironwork under the pier, and the soft creeping of the foam-curves behind, and the vague stirrings of the night-wind round about—these phenomena combined mysteriously with the immensity of the dome above and with the baffling strangeness of the town, and with the grandeur of the beaten woman by her side; and communicated to Hilda a thrill that was divine in ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... to them and merges them in the 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 of souls sorrowing for ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... me everywhere, finding still Him who had united me to Himself, in His own immensity and boundless vastitude! Oh, how truly did I experience what He said in the Gospel, by the four evangelists, and by one of them twice over, "Whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it; and whosoever will save ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... and the same refined taste in the arts of composition caught from the models of antiquity, at length raised up rivals, who competed with the great ancients themselves; and modern literature now occupies a space which appears as immensity, compared with the narrow and the imperfect limits of the ancient. A complete collection of classical works, all the bees of antiquity, may be hived in a glass-case; but those we should find only the milk and honey of our youth; ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... profane in the vastness of the place, which seems meant as much for physical as for spiritual exercise, the different figures and groups, the mingled worshippers and spectators, may follow their various intentions without conflict or scandal. In that splendid immensity individual indiscretion carries but a short distance. Isabel and her companions, however, were guilty of none; for though Henrietta was obliged in candour to declare that Michael Angelo's dome suffered by comparison with that of the Capitol at ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... hands 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
... limitations is constantly present. Does man groan because he cannot comprehend the mind outside himself which manifests itself in the sun? Well, did not Prometheus draw the celestial rays into the pin-point of a flame which man can order, and which does him service? Is the fire a little thing beside the immensity ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... rather a sob, indicative of the inner throes that were racking the statesman's whole being, burst from his heart. His head fell upon his breast, and his whole body trembled. Joseph comprehended the immensity of his grief, and made no ineffectual attempt to ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... regularly. This is my particular request. She is universally esteemed. George is sensible of his fault. This calculation is incorrect. What a terrible calamity. His eye through vast immensity can pierce. Observe these nice dependencies. He is a formidable adversary. He is generous to his friends. A tempest desolated the land. He preferred death to servitude. God is the author of all things ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... times when the earth was thought to be a Square the Cube had emblematical meanings it could hardly have for us. From earliest ages it was a venerated symbol, and the oblong cube signified immensity of space from the base of earth to the zenith of the heavens. It was a sacred emblem of the Lydian Kubele, known to the Romans in after ages as Ceres or Cybele—hence, as some aver, the derivation of the word "cube." At first rough stones were most sacred, and an altar of hewn stones was forbidden.[15] ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... was not of those who go to the bottom of things; he shrank from the proofs, and his vague jealousy was lost in the immensity ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... silver waters 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
... all the scene which the top of the mountain presented, and impossible to describe it adequately. One was not occupied with the thought of description but wholly possessed with the breadth and glory of it, with its sheer, amazing immensity and scope. Only once, perhaps, in any lifetime is such vision granted, certainly never before had been vouchsafed to any of us. Not often in the summer-time does Denali completely unveil himself and dismiss the clouds from all the earth beneath. Yet we could not linger, unique though the occasion, ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... 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
... world which is small and narrowing. Probably neither is quite right. For some people the home is narrowing, for others it is the place that affords the widest scope; for some the world is narrow, for others the world is extremely broad—in fact, so broad that they never are able to get free from its immensity. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... move; she scarcely breathed. The spell of Jim's magnanimity held her, made her realize, at last, the grandeur, the immensity of love. Her soul was awed. Thought followed thought through her brain; love in its sublimity was bared to her gaze; self fell away—burned as dross in the fire of suffering; to guide herself was ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... had changed. It reminded me in the oddest way of her brother Reggie's. I think that for the moment, while it lasted, she had forgotten Jimmy, she had forgotten her brother Reggie; she had touched the fringe of the immensity that had drawn them from her and swallowed them up. And in forgetting them she had forgotten ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... Cousin will derive more gratification from a sight of the places themselves, than from any description we can give, and the time to explain will be when we arrive on the spot; for it is scarcely possible for any one to conceive the immensity of buildings they contain, or the regularity with which the business is carried on.—" How do ye do?" (thrusting his head out of the window, and moving his hand with graceful familiarity,)—"I have not seen Sir Frederick since my matrimonial trip, and now he has passed by on horseback I ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... tribesmen, gathered Heaven knew how or whence, had suddenly burst upon him from the south, had cut off his advance by sheer immensity of numbers, and, hemming him in, had forced him gradually back into the mountain fastnesses through which he ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... Legg, and her sufferings increased as the day advanced until they quite mastered the situation and clouded the brightness of conquest. Other difficulties and doubts also obtruded as she began to estimate the immensity of the thing that Mr. Gurd's ardour had prompted her to do; but Job was the primal problem and she knew that she could not sleep until she had made ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... on other isles, higher hills, brown and blue, broke the horizon, but apart from these one saw nothing but a green and blue plain lying beneath an immensity of white and blue sky. With sea birds hovering and crying and larks mounting and singing over this, and the sun shining, and a northwest breeze that tasted like dry champagne, and myriads of wild flowers, ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... English phrase, were anxious to amuse me, and would not let me remain alone in my room. The town we had already walked round and round, and if we advanced farther on the coast, it was still to view the same unvaried immensity ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... flying reptiles, but if so it made no deep impression on her. Somebody had said, or was saying, that we were descended from monkeys, which was quite absurd, though it might be true enough. On the sea the thrashing hills of green water suggested a kind of immensity and terror, but not the immensity of the poet's heart. The ship was safe, the captain at table in brass buttons and blue uniform, eager to be nice to her—told her so. Her faith really, was in the captain. And there with her, always, was Cowperwood, looking ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... immensity of the night cold and glittering worlds were bowing down before the eternal, Yakb looked, and noticed something approaching from the mountains. Along the heights and slopes there was a long chain ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... cannot see, understand, or follow? By what standard are we to judge her, if we look away from the passing hour? For instance, considering only the imperceptible speck that we form in the worlds, and disregarding the immensity that surrounds us, we are wholly ignorant of all that concerns our possible life beyond the tomb; and we forget that, in the present state of our knowledge, nothing authorises us to affirm that there may not be a kind of more or less conscious, ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... jerked and toiled across the interminable flat in their accompanying cloud of dust. The great circle of the world had dwarfed them to a bitter insignificance: a team of crickets, they seemed, driven by a gnome. The hushed tone of Thatcher's voice made unconscious tribute to this immensity. ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... is but one objection against immortality, if objection it may be called, and this arises from the very greatness of the truth. My mind sometimes sinks under its weight, is lost in its immensity; I scarcely dare believe that such a good is placed within my reach. When I think of myself, as existing through all future ages, as surviving this earth and that sky, as exempted from every imperfection and error of my present being, as clothed with an angel's glory, as comprehending ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... newcomers looked at each other as if trying to grasp the immensity of the proposition; then they pulled off their hats, and giving a shout threw them into the air while both roared ...
— The Outdoor Chums - The First Tour of the Rod, Gun and Camera Club • Captain Quincy Allen
... as Croaking comforts Frogs,[46] And Mire and Ordure are the Heav'n of Hogs. As well might Nothing bind Immensity, Or passive Matter Immaterials see, As these shou'd write by reason, rhime, and rule, Or we turn Wit, whom nature doom'd a Fool. If Dryden err'd, 'twas human frailty once, But blund'ring is the Essence ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... As the great ball of flame descended into the leaden-coloured zones that surrounded the sea, it grew yellow, and its outer rim became more clear and solid. Now it could be looked straight at, as if it were but the moon. Yet it still gave out light and looked quite near in the immensity; it seemed that by going in a ship, only so far as the edge of the horizon, one might collide with the great mournful globe, floating in the air just a few ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... lowered at last his fascinated glance; she too was looking down, and standing thus before each other in the glaring light, between the four bare walls, they seemed brought out from the confused immensity of the Eastern borders to be exposed cruelly to the observation of my Western eyes. And I observed them. There was nothing else to do. My existence seemed so utterly forgotten by these two that I dared not now make a movement. And I thought to myself ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... of waters stirred confusedly in the ominous clear-obscure of immensity. The Matutina was making quick way. She seemed to grow smaller every minute. Nothing appears so rapid as the flight of a vessel melting into the distance ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... filled with drifts of purple clouds that melted now in soft blue billows into the sky, now in ragged streams of crimson into canyons black in the distance. The little sounds of the camp were as nothing. The pygmy figures in the alfalfa field were infinitesimal. A new sense of the immensity of the universe poured into Roger's soul with devastating force and for the first time in his life Roger realized his own lack ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... was a loneliness in the desert. That was part of the big feeling of it, the still, stealing sense of immensity reaching out its shadowy hands for you.... Loneliness and restlessness.... These tropic nights, when the stars burned low and bright, and the hot sands seemed breathing.... Loneliness and restlessness—but ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... is the book of Job: the vast Arabian landscape, the picturesque pastoral details of Arabian life, the last tragic immensity of Oriental sorrow, the whole over-arching sky of Oriental piety, are here. But here also the inevitable 'indecency.' ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... End Road, and he saw her again, one morning, in front of his house in the very heart of London! 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 her and that ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... North London was flying by; the very pace gave us a sense of its immensity and its meanness. It was, as it were, a base infinitude, a squalid eternity, and we felt the real horror of the poor parts of London, the horror that is so totally missed and misrepresented by the sensational novelists who depict it as being a matter of narrow streets, filthy houses, ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... rate chance had given him a breathing space. He could lurk unchallenged by the passers-by, and watch the course of things. His eye followed up the intricate dim immensity of the twilight buildings, and it came to him as a thing infinitely wonderful, that above there the sun was rising, and the world was lit and glowing with the old familiar light of day. In a little while he had recovered his breath. His clothing had already ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... 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 ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the rue Royale toward the Place de la Concorde, which spread away before them in deserted immensity and beauty. ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... idea this gives of the immensity of creation, and of the bounty of Divine Providence in furnishing such a profusion of life in a region so remote from ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... to the wall, he never had any ultimate doubt again of his own purpose. Still, it brought him no serenity; and I suppose there is no writer in the world whose letters and diaries are so full of cries of anguish and hopelessness. He was crushed under the sense of the world's immensity; his own observation was so microscopic, his desire to perceive and know so strong, his appetite for definiteness so profound, that I feel that Carlyle's terror was like that of a mite in an enormous cheese, longing to explore it all, lost in the high-flavoured dusk, and conscious of a scale ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... across the treeless upland a mile or so apart. With the northernmost, the largest, rides now the leader of all, while between them gallop couriers carrying rapid orders. Every face sets eagerly westward. Every heart beats high with the thrill of coming battle. Some there are who note the immensity of the dust-cloud, who reason silently that for miles and miles the valley before them is covered by the scurrying herds; ten thousand ponies at least must there be to stir up such a volume; then, how many warriors are there to meet these ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... neither of the combats of Atriedes nor the labors of Cadmus, but of the tea-table and the Odyssey of the Rialto. Flaubert said that a drop of water contained all the elements of the sea, save one—immensity. Mr. Norris is concerned only with serious things, he has only large ambitions. His brush is bold, his color is taken fresh from the kindly earth, his canvas is large enough to hold American life, the real life of the people. He has come into the court ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... again driven into the south for many a day, and saw no earthly shore, but everywhere unending waters. A great wonderment to them was this immensity of the sea of ocean, wherein the land seemed a little thing lost for ever. And ever as they drove onward, the pilot star of the north was steadfast no longer, but sank lower and still lower in the heavens, and many of the everlasting lights, which at home ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... flag-ship of the squadron that was ordered to destroy another squadron, and did it, incidentally gathering in hand the keys of an empire in the Indies for America, because the American victor was an extraordinary man, who saw the immensity of the opportunity and improved it to the utmost, some one said: "There is the Admiral now, on the quarter-deck under the awning—the man in white, sitting alone!" The American Consul at Manila was aboard the ferry-boat, ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... thing occurs. This tuning-fork produces a sound which, by exciting our retina, gives us a sense of movement. This visual sensation of vibration is a purely subjective one, the external cause of the phenomenon is the sound. The outer world is a concert of sounds which rises in the immensity of space. Matter is noise and nothingness ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... of taxation falls; how justice is executed; how 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 ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... seen. It filled one with a horror which was far indeed removed from the pious horror which that Symbol is intended to arouse in every true believer. It emphasized all the ghastly ugliness of death upon that most barbarous of gallows, without any suggestion of the beauty and immensity of the Divine Martyrdom of Him Who in the likeness of the sinful flesh was Alone ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... undisciplined wilderness, and when we realized that this was but a section, and a small section at that, of a Dominion stretching thousands of miles between us and the Pacific, and how many thousand miles on the line North to South we could not compute, we began to get a glimmer of the immensity and potentiality of the land ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... redoubted governor of St. Blas and its "dependencies," bore the rank of colonel in the Spanish army. He had seen some service, having been present at the memorable siege of Gibraltar, that excited first the astonishment and then the ridicule of all Europe—astonishment at the immensity of the armament prepared, and ridicule on account of its inefficiency, in wasting years before the place without doing any thing. An advanced party commanded by Don Gaspar, then a captain, had the good fortune to get soundly thrashed by a sallying detachment ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... distant, that has not received instances of my benevolence. Thus, all nations send to do me homage, and to congratulate me incessantly. New and successive Embassadors arrive, some drawn in chariots over land, and others traverse, in their ships, the immensity of the seas. In fact, I attend to nothing but the good administration of my empire. I feel a lively joy in observing the anxiety with which they flock together from every quarter to contemplate and admire the wise administration ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... of Table Mountain. He loved it for its vastness and its solitude. On the back stoep, which is the Dutch word for porch, he sat for hours gazing at this mountain which like the man himself was invested with a spirit of immensity. ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... the ordinary lenses of the microscope 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 Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... has said Commonsense and a woman has said Happiness are the greatest things in the world. These things are male and female, for Commonsense is Thought and Happiness is Emotion, and until they embrace in Love the will of Immensity cannot be fruitful. For, behold, there has been no marriage of humanity since time began. Men have but coupled with their own shadows. The desire that sprang from their heads they pursued, and no man has yet known the love of a woman. And women have ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... not the less delightful for being tinged with melancholy, meditated with intense compassion, and dwelt with wonder on the mind of man, which, whilst it adores the Creator of the universe, and measures the immensity of space with an expansion of intellect almost divine, can devote itself to the narrow limits of sublunary possessions, and exchange the boundless paradise above for the low enjoyments of human pride. He looked with pity over that wide tract ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... the freedom of inns, and the distance from everything that can make me recollect the dependence of my situation, conspire to free my soul, and give boldness to my thoughts, throwing me, in a manner, into the immensity of beings, where I combine, choose and appropriate them to my fancy, without constraint or fear. I dispose of all nature as I please; my heart wandering from object to object, approximates and unites with ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... show herself half an hour later, and she was sustained at table by the immensity of her desire that her father should not perceive that anything had happened. This was a great help to her afterwards, and it served her (though never as much as she supposed) from the first. On this occasion Dr. Sloper was rather talkative. He ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... all that belongs to bodies and things called incorporeal, we cast ourselves into the greatness of Christ, and thence advancing into immensity by holiness, we may reach somehow to the conception of the Almighty, knowing not what He is, but knowing what He is not. And form and motion, or standing, or a throne or place, or right hand or left, are not at all to be conceived as belonging to the Father ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... we appreciate the valour of Columbus in the XV century, his secret doubts, his temerity, how much fainter is our conception of the heroism of the early Mediterranean navigators. Steam has destroyed for us the awful majesty of distance, and we can never realise the immensity of this "great Sea" to the ancients. To Virgil the adventures of the "pious AEneas" were truly heroic. The western shores of the Mediterranean were then the "end of the earth," and even during the first centuries of our own era, he ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... while the ferryman was getting the boat ready. I was not disappointed—but I could make out nothing. In an instant I was blinded by the spray, and wet to the skin. I saw the water tearing madly down from some immense height, but could get no idea of shape, or situation, or anything but vague immensity. But when we were seated in the boat, and crossing at the very foot of the cataract—then I began to feel what it was. Directly I had changed my clothes at the inn I went out again, taking Kate with me, and hurried to the Horse-shoe Fall. ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
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