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More "Sublimity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... descent upon sublimity, according to Byfleld—took me in the face. I put up my hands. I broke into elfish laughter, and ended with a sob. Sobs and laughter together shook my fasting body like a leaf; and I zigzagged across the fields, buffeted this side and that by a mirth as uncontrollable ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not all the vastness of the ocean, is yet equal in sublimity. In gazing upon its surface, whether spread out like a vast mirror reflecting the varying tints of the sky, or ruffled by gently curling waves, or lashed into fury by the tempest, one is impressed with the idea of the Infinite. It is known to be the largest ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... life of her infant amid the fountainless desert; like Judah, under her palm-tree, mourning for the devastation of her temple; like Rachel, weeping for her children and refusing comfort. But he chiefly rose into rough sublimity when addressing the men yet reeking from battle. He called on them to remember the great things which God had done for them, and to persevere in the career which their victory ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... not been content to view this land of mystery from her brother's cabin. The dignity of nature had cast its thrall upon her. She was impressed with the sublimity of the climate, the wonderful sunshine, the crystal light of the days and the quiet peace and beauty of the nights. The lure of the plains had taken her upon long rides, and the cottonwood, filling a goodly portion of the flat, was the ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Minister's Bridge, not far distant, a place very wild and savage, but not comparable in sublimity with the Devil's Bridge, I determined to ascend the celebrated mountain of Plynlimmon, where arise the rivers Rheidol, Severn and Wye. I caused my guide to lead me to the sources of each of the three rivers. That of the Rheidol is a small, beautiful lake, overhung on two ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... answer was closed, and as oft as they named the Redeemer, Lowly louted the boys, and lowly the maidens all courtesied. Friendly the Teacher stood, like an angel of light there among them, And to the children explained he the holy, the highest, in few words, Thorough, yet simple and clear, for sublimity always is simple, Both in sermon and song a child can seize on its meaning. Even as the green-growing bud is unfolded when Spring-tide approaches Leaf by leaf is developed, and, warmed by the radiant sunshine, Blushes with purple and gold, till at last the perfected ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... further, that never-ceasing pity in her soul for Giles as a man whom she had wronged—a man who had been unfortunate in his worldly transactions; while, not without a touch of sublimity, he had, like Horatio, borne ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... in the midst of an almost furious vow, in which he dedicated himself to me for ever, he relieved me, by suddenly calling upon Jupiter, Juno, Mars, and Hercules, and every god, and every goddess, to witness his oath. And then, content with his sublimity, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... to account the tendencies of the age in literature, it was hardly to be expected that Andrew would soon succeed as a poet, though his imagination was powerful, and there was pathos and even occasional sublimity in his poetry. For five long years he had been toiling and striving without any success whatever in his vocation, in the way of realizing either fame ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... urgent demands are, therefore, addressed to the poet himself, from whom he requires not merely genius and talent isolated, as it were, in their activity, but a mood which takes possession of the entire soul and is in harmony with the sublimity of his vocation; it must be not a mere momentary exaltation, but an integral part of character. "Before he undertakes to influence the best among his contemporaries he should make it his first and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the sacred volume. He has been heard to quote from it with the happiest effect—to say there was no book like it—no book, regarding it as a mere human composition, which could on any subject even "approach it in poetry, beauty, pathos, and sublimity." Long may these sentiments abide in him! And as no man, to use his own words, "ever had fiercer enemies or firmer friends"—as no man, to use those of others, was ever more bitter and sarcastic as a political enemy, more affectionate and devoted as ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 356, Saturday, February 14, 1829 • Various
... analysis to that state of being which recognizes neither psychology nor element."—"Usefulness, if it requires action, seems less like existence than the desire of being absorbed in God, retaining consciousness.... Scorn trifles, lift your aims; do what you are afraid to do. Sublimity of character must come from sublimity ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... heart and enraptured the soul. There were in it abandonment, neglect, oblivion, exile, and sublimity. Gone the whirl of 1825. The church had resumed its dignity and its calmness. Not a piece of finery, not a vestment, not anything. It was bare and beautiful. The lofty vault no longer supported a canopy. Ceremonies of the palace arc not suited ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... about it. If you knew that there was one spot on the earth where Nature kept her secret of secrets, the key to the action of her most gigantic and patient forces through the long eras, the marvel of constructive and destructive energy, in features of sublimity made possible to mental endurance by the most exquisite devices of painting and sculpture, the wonder which is without parallel or comparison, would you not hesitate to approach it? Would you not wander and delay with this and that wonder, and this and that beauty and nobility of scenery, ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... awful in its sublimity, raged from the morning's opening till two o'clock, without the least abatement along the whole line. From the extreme right to our left at Taylor's Hill was a sea of fire. But Mayree's Hill was the center, around which all the other battles revolved. ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... old man at the manly sports of youth. Not so in the case of this history. The people that we here see upon the stage were the most peaceful in this part of the world, and less capable than their neighbors of that heroic spirit which gives sublimity to even the most paltry action. The pressure of circumstances surprised this people into a knowledge of their own strength, forcing upon them a transitory greatness which did not belong to them and which they perhaps will never again exhibit. So then the strength they manifested has not ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. But it reached its full perfection in ancient Greece; for there can be no doubt that the great Homeric poems are generically ballads, though widely distinguished from all other ballads, and indeed from almost all other human composition, by transcendent sublimity and beauty. ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... himself to that task, but because to him there was no common-place. In the cosmic perception of the universe, everything is exalted to the plane of fitness. As to the pure all things are pure, so to the one who is steeped in the sublimity of Divine Illumination, there is no high or low, no good or bad, no white or black, or rich or poor; all—all is a part of the plan, and, in its place in cosmic evolution, ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... his ears (figuratively speaking) that he might not hear the rest of the world bray, and for ten years more devoted himself to the study of Mr. Ruskin. At the end of that time he knew something about proportion, about masses and intervals of light and shade; about the grandeur and sublimity of size, and the grace and beauty of ornament; about depth and harmony of colour, and all the other wonders that make one sick with longing to behold them; and when he had mastered all this he determined to begin at the very beginning, that is to say, with the walls that were to ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... robbery, outrage, and villany, the despised, insulted flag of the Union rises from its burial, and waves once more above them in stainless purity and glory! Take all under consideration, if you would feel the moral sublimity ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... sang their poems in the country solitudes, in the army, openly or secretly, by deeds buried beneath the whirlwind of that storm, just as the wounded left behind to die in the great wars of the empire cried out, "Long live the Emperor!" This sublimity of soul belongs especially to France. The Abbe Brossette respected the convictions of the old man, who became simply but deeply attached to the priest from hearing him say, "The true republic is in the Gospel." The stanch republican carried the cross, and wore the ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... have observed to your sublimity, that the sect of dervishes, of which I had become a member, were then designated by the name of howling dervishes; all our religion consisted in howling like jackals or hyenas, with all our might, until we ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... it is always full of life and movement, and in great passages produces sudden, strange, electrifying effects which are rarely found in earlier plays, and not so often even in Hamlet. The more pervading effect of beauty gives place to what may almost be called explosions of sublimity or pathos. ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... usually denominate dark. But they were the realization of a dream which had often passed through the monkish heart—the embodiment, of a wish which had often brought tears into the eyes of genuine enthusiasts. There was, surely, as much sublimity in the first conception as in the execution. What indeed were the crusades, but the means of bringing to light, feelings, desires, passions, a lofty disinterested heroism, which the very depth of the former darkness had tended to foster ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... undertake to say what place Father Ryan will occupy in the Temple of Fame, though he believes that an enlightened public sentiment would accord to him a high position. The chief merits of his poems would seem to be the simple sublimity of his verses; the rare and chaste beauty of his conceptions; the richness and grandeur of his thoughts, and their easy, natural flow; the refined elegance and captivating force of the terms he employs as the medium through which he communicates those thoughts ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... continental divide, the scenery moment by moment growing in sublimity and grandeur. Darrell soon sank into a sleep, light and broken at first, but which grew deeper and heavier. For more than an hour he slept, unconscious that the rugged scenes through which he was then passing were to become part of his future life; that each cliff and crag and mountain-peak ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... its influences. The wild waste, the small but fertile valley, the rugged hills, with their crowns of cairns, the moors rich in the golden furze and the purple heath, the sea-beaten cliffs and the silver sands, were the pages she had studied, under the guidance of a mother who conceived, in the sublimity of her ignorance, that everything in nature was the home of some spirit form. The soul of the girl was imbued with the deeply religious dye of her mother's mind, whose religion was only a sense of an unknown world immediately ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... SERENE THE PRINCE AND THE MOST EXCELLENT SIGNORIA—I am Alvise of Murano, a faithful servant of your Serenity and of this most illustrious State. I have long been anxious to exercise my skill before your Sublimity and prove that continued study and labour on my part have not been useless. Therefore offer, as a humble subject, in honour and praise of that celebrated city, to devote myself, without return of payment or reward, to the duty of producing ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... imagine, were to blame for his indifference to his achievements in prose, for not even the Westminster Convention, or the divorce topics of Tetrachordon, or yet the liberty of the press, albeit raised to a level of philosophic first principles, were quite up to those fixed stars of sublimity about which it was Milton's pleasure to revolve. Hand and Soul is in faultless harmony with Rossetti's work in verse, because distinguished by the same strength of imagination. That it was written in a single night seems extraordinary when viewed in relation to its sustained beauty; ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... Valour yesterday, the sublimity of self-sacrifice, had appealed to them with irresistible force, even though they did not understand the force that had set these great virtues in motion. The hero of yesterday should be the chosen of to-day, the god of to-morrow; let the brutish Caesar be swept ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... awful to Roland Sefton in this sublimity. A bad man, whose ear has never heard the voice of Nature, and whose eye is blind to her ineffable beauty, may dwell in such places and not be crushed by them. The dull herdsmen, thinking only of their cattle and of the milking ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... anti-social conspirators, the Illuminati: most of them are knaves of abilities, who have usurped the easy direction of ignorance, or forced themselves as guides on weakness or folly, which bow to their charlatanism as if it was sublimity, and hail their sophistry ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... produces in idea the same effect as in real perspective. Objects are softened, and rounded, and rendered doubly graceful; the harsher and more ordinary points of character are mellowed down, and those by which it is remembered are the more striking outlines that mark sublimity, grace, or beauty. There are mists too in the mental as well as the natural horizon, to conceal what is less pleasing in distant objects, and there are happy lights, to stream in full glory upon those points which ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... stones inclining on each other formed a rude portal on the summit. Here I sat down. A little level platform, about two yards long, lay before me, and then the eye immediately fell upon the sea, far, very far below. I never felt the sublimity of solitude before.' Names have been given to the great rock-masses. The Castle Rock looks far over the sea, the Devil's Cheesewring is on the inner side of the valley, and there are many others. A narrow path cut in the deep descent of ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... extent at this point beyond the shelter of the cliffs of Rakata, and come partly into view of the other parts of the island, the real extent of the volcanic violence burst upon Nigel and Moses as a new revelation. The awful sublimity of the scene at first almost paralysed them, and they failed to note that not only did a constant rain of pumice dust fall upon them, but that there was also a pretty regular dropping of small stones into the water around them. ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... among the New England mountains. At one point we saw Snowdon, with its bifold summit. We also visited the smaller waterfall (this is a translation of an unpronounceable Welsh name), which is the largest in Wales. It was a very beautiful rapid, and the guide-book considers it equal in sublimity to Niagara. Likewise there were one or two lakes which the guide-book greatly admired, but which to me, who remembered a hundred sheets of blue water in New England, seemed nothing more than sullen and dreary puddles, with bare banks, and wholly destitute of beauty. I think they were nowhere ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... unfavourable circumstances; wherever the sun shines and warms, or the glory of the moon and stars can be seen at night, the children of genius will find a revelation of God in their beams. But there is not a doubt that those born and brought up among scenes of great natural sublimity and beauty, imbibe this feeling in a larger degree, and their minds are more easily imbued with the glorious colouring of romance,—the inspired ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... nothing to the eye when they stand in a meaningless front. A mountain covered by pure snow 10,000 feet high has but little more effect on the imagination than a mountain of snow 1,000 feet high—it is but more of the same thing; but a facade of seven systems of rock has its sublimity multiplied sevenfold. ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... and after more than a year and a half close contact with smoke we find no very good excuse for not remaining in it; and papa is going on with his eternal hunt for houses—the wild huntsman in the ballad is nothing to him, all except the sublimity—intending very seriously to take the first he can. He is now about one in particular, but I won't tell where it is because we have considered so many houses in particular that our considerations have come to be a jest in general. I shall be heartily glad, at least I think ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... nor the Tibetan-trained yogi had satisfied my yearning for a guru. My heart needed no tutor for its recognitions, and cried its own "Bravos!" the more resoundingly because unoften summoned from silence. When I finally met my master, he taught me by sublimity of example alone the measure of a ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... of the scene, impresses the traveller with awe and curiosity. During my travels abroad I visited this spot. As I walked over the loose fragments of stone, which lay scattered through the immense area of the fabrick, and surveyed the sublimity and grandeur of the ruins, I recurred, by a natural association of ideas, to the times when these walls stood proudly in their original splendour, when the halls were the scenes of hospitality and festive magnificence, and when they resounded with the voices ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... Notre Dame, moreover, gives it a sublimity which would swallow up anything that might look gewgawy in its ornamentation, were we to consider it window by window, or pillar by pillar. It is an advantage of these vast edifices, rising over us and spreading about us in such a firmamental way, that we cannot spoil them by ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... sweeping upwards, told of illimitable tracts beyond—mighty waves on the surface of the world's great inland seas, on whose crests sat the green and purple foam of herbage, and in whose hollows lay the still life of home and pasture. Silent, changeless, secure, perpetual sublimity rested on their summits, and unbroken repose lay along their graceful sweeps. They were the joy-bearers to the poor child of sorrow, who with eager eye looked out on their morning revelations. To her the mountains ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... published. These accounts of the virtues and sufferings of the martyrs were received by the faithful with the highest respect. They considered them to afford a glorious proof of the truth of the Christian faith, and of the holiness and sublimity of its doctrines. They felt themselves stimulated by them to imitate the heroic acts of virtue and constancy which they placed before their eyes, and to rely on the assistance of heaven when their own hour of trial should arrive. Thus the vocal blood ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... back to the door, her hand on a cradle, and as she rocked she sang softly. She was a plain little woman, the cradle was cheap and common, and her singing was only a monotonous chant; but the scene had a sort of sublimity—it was so old, ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... rural walks to do our children any good, we must give them a love for rural sights, an object in every walk; we must teach them - and we can teach them - to find wonder in every insect, sublimity in every hedgerow, the records of past worlds in every pebble, and boundless fertility upon the barren shore; and so, by teaching them to make full use of that limited sphere in which they now are, make them ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... finer touches may be lost in the copy, the great outlines will remain. An Englishman who never saw the frescoes in the Vatican may yet, from engravings, form some notion of the exquisite grace of Raphael, and of the sublimity and energy of Michael Angelo. And so the genius of Homer is seen in the poorest version of the Iliad; the genius of Cervantes is seen in the poorest version of Don Quixote. Let it not be supposed that I wish to dissuade any person from ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to lose their heads. In such an hour many a foolish, gossiping, half-educated woman, by absolute faithfulness to the small details of her trust, by the complete laying aside of personal needs and personal feelings, rises to the sublimity of duty, and, ministering to the wants of another with an unselfish vigilance almost perfect, earns that meed of praise from men, which from time to time persists, in grateful hyperbole, to liken her sex ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... the year 1527, at the highest development of the Renascence, in the youth of Benvenuto Cellini, when Michelangelo had not yet painted the Last Judgment, when Titian was just fifty years old, and when Raphael and Lionardo da Vinci were but lately dead; and the contrast between the sublimity of art and the barbarity of human nature in that day is only paralleled in the annals of our own century, at once the bloodiest and the most civilized in the ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... struggling through the dense masses of black clouds, which had obscured his rays during the long stormy day, and now cast a watery and uncertain gleam upon the wild scenery, over which Bamborough Castle frowns in savage sublimity. ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... standing alone, which the workmen say is good for nothing; but it is good for its picturesque appearance. A heavy shower of hail came on, which, falling between the rifts of the rocks, and blown by the high wind, added to the sublimity of the scene: we were comfortably sheltered in one ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... the emancipation of South America, and made the achievements of Bolivar easy in the Northern Andes. Said the hero of Maipu—and what words of man under the circumstances ever equalled the declaration in moral sublimity!— ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... and fell swooning to the ground at the sight of the fearful slaughter at Roncesvalles, we are rather moved to smile at the violence of their emotion than to weep over the dead, so little power has the poet to touch the springs of feeling. However, there are passages in which the poem rises to sublimity, and which have been ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... their majesty from mere bulk, our country could boast of one truly great man, Christopher Wren; and the fire which laid London in ruins had given him an opportunity, unprecedented in modern history, of displaying his powers. The austere beauty of the Athenian portico, the gloomy sublimity of the Gothic arcade, he was like almost all his contemporaries, incapable of emulating, and perhaps incapable of appreciating; but no man born on our side of the Alps, has imitated with so much success the magnificence of the palacelike churches of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... things might have presently settled down into their old rut and the mystery have lost the bulk of its romantic sublimity in Laura's eyes, if the village gossips could have quieted down. But they could not quiet down and they did not. Day after day they called at the house, ostensibly upon visits of condolence, and they pumped away at the mother and the children without seeming to know that their questionings ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... Adriatic; I saw her ruin in the ruin of the face before me. I walked to and fro in that city, so beloved of her citizens; I went from the Rialto Bridge, along the Grand Canal, and from the Riva degli Schiavoni to the Lido, returning to St. Mark's, that cathedral so unlike all others in its sublimity. I looked up at the windows of the Casa Doro, each with its different sculptured ornaments; I saw old palaces rich in marbles, saw all the wonders which a student beholds with the more sympathetic eyes because visible things take their color of his ...
— Facino Cane • Honore de Balzac
... the cloud, a flash of vivid lightning shot from one end of it to the other, and caused it to kindle up, throughout its vast extent, like a mass of ignited and glowing charcoal. This, it must be remembered, was in the broad light of day. No fancy may picture the sublimity which might have been exhibited by a similar phenomenon taking place amid the darkness of the night. Hell itself might have been found a fitting image. Even as it was, my hair stood on end, while I gazed afar down within the yawning abysses, letting imagination descend, as it were, and stalk ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... than Ezekiel and Daniel. The minor prophets exhibit a great diversity of manner and style—the rugged and sententious, the full and flowing, the oratorical, and the simple and unadorned. In them are passages attaining to the sublimity of Isaiah, to the tenderness and pathos of Jeremiah, and to the vehemence of Ezekiel. Nowhere do we find sin rebuked with more awful severity, the true meaning of the law more clearly expounded, or ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... completely overlooked us and our movements. The second day was beautifully clear, and many a time, in the midst of its carnage and noise, I could not help stopping to look across that vast field of battle, to admire its sublimity. ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... on to those at home—when I sent them a letter once in two months by the little tug that brought my oil and provisions—that I was homesick. I said the ocean was glorious; that there was a Byronic sublimity in lighting up the lantern; that standing behind a counter and showing dry-goods to silly, giggling girls couldn't be compared with it; that I hadn't blushed in six months, and that I didn't think I should ever be willing to come back to a world full ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... eye of a foreigner 'flood' and 'wood' and 'home' and 'come' are perfect rhymes. We must deal gently with the poet while 'trying his 'prentice hand,' hoping better things when he shall 'become an artist true;' and when we remember that to the national taste sublimity is represented by bombast, artifice takes the place of nature, and sense is sacrificed to sound, the love of the ore rotundo demanding mouth-filling words at any price, we cannot fail to discover the genuine Spanish beauties of the piece. I only wonder that in his ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... presents few greater characters—few that excite at once more love and admiration, and in which we see tenderness, humor, and a certain picturesque grace and poetic sensibility more happily combined with a lofty and magnanimous, if sometimes rugged, sublimity. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... he could not help yielding himself to the charm which the wonderful words he read there must ever have to a thoughtful mind. But the charm which the words had for his patient listener was something quite different from this. It was not the grandeur or sublimity of the style, or even the loftiness of the thought, that made her listen with such interest. She liked the simplest passages best. The simple narratives of the evangelists never lost their power ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... Richard. Among his contributions to Puritan theology are "The Good Man the Living Temple of God," and "Vanity of Men as Mortal," He was a man of intellect and imagination. His sermons, tho often long and cumbersome, are marked by warmth of fancy and a sublimity of spirit superior to his style. Howe was a leading spirit in the effort made for the union of the Congregational and Presbyterian bodies. He ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... ideas of the sublime; I do not imagine milking cows and butter-making would correspond with the general ideas of sublimity." ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... romance—all that belongs to distant objects of terror, and uncertain, imaginary distress. His strength, in like manner, is not strength of will or action, of bone and muscle, nor is it coarse and palpable—but it assumes a character of vastness and sublimity seen through the same visionary medium, and blended with the appalling associations of preternatural agency. We need only turn, in proof of this, to the Cave of Despair, or the Cave of Mammon, or to the account of the change of Malbecco ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... 90. Hegel explains conflicts by the mutual contradictoriness of concepts, 91. Criticism of his attempt to transcend ordinary logic, 92. Examples of the 'dialectic' constitution of things, 95. The rationalistic ideal: propositions self-securing by means of double negation, 101. Sublimity of the conception, 104. Criticism of Hegel's account: it involves vicious intellectualism, 105. Hegel is a seer rather than a reasoner, 107. 'The Absolute' and 'God' are two different notions, 110. Utility of the Absolute in conferring mental peace, ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... from Downham, where it rises in full majesty before me—from all points and under all aspects, whether robed in mist or radiant with sunshine, I delight in it. Born beneath its giant shadow, I look upon it with filial regard. Some folks say Pendle Hill wants grandeur and sublimity, but they themselves must be wanting in taste. Its broad, round, smooth mass is better than the roughest, craggiest, shaggiest, most sharply splintered mountain of them all. And then what a view it commands!—Lancaster with its grey ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... beauty, firmly planting Arches white on rosy heel! Whence the life-spring, throbbing, panting, Pulses upward to reveal! Fairest things know least despising; Foot and earth meet tenderly: 'Tis the woman, resting, rising Upward to sublimity, Rise the limbs, sedately sloping, Strong and gentle, full and free; Soft and slow, like certain hoping, Drawing nigh the broad firm knee. Up to speech! As up to roses Pants the life from leaf to flower, So each blending change ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... desperation of the ancient Scythians, and they won, as they deserved to win: for this was another revolt of freedom against oppression, of conscience against tyranny, of an exasperated people against a foreign despot. Every eye shone with the sublimity of a great principle, and every arm was nerved with a strength grander and more enduring than that imparted by the fierceness of passion or the sternness of pride. As I flew from one part of the field to another, in execution of the orders of my ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... I can tell you all; and I have a great deal to tell. For my first essay I have found a most extraordinary misfortune; a cruel mingling of pauperism and the need for luxuries; also scenes of a sublimity which surpasses all the inventions ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... this laconic description of the homely dreamer a richness of beauty which no efforts of the artist can adequately portray; and in the concise dialogue of the speakers, a simple sublimity of eloquence which any commentary could only weaken. While our feelings are excited by this description, we cannot but remember that "eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... led by two slaves richly dressed. Next him the Kyzlar-aga (your ladyship knows this is the chief guardian of the seraglio ladies) in a deep yellow cloth (which suited very well to his black face) lined with sables, and last his Sublimity himself, in green lined with the fur of a black Muscovite fox, which is supposed worth a thousand pounds sterling, mounted on a fine horse, with furniture embroidered with jewels. Six more horses richly furnished were led after him; and two ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... pleasure its superlative phrases gave him, but the truth was it held him. He despised sentiment, tenderness, and, by the strangeness of the human mind, he went, by way of paradox, to the tenderest, most sublime spot in a book supreme in tenderness and sublimity. ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... especially if that landscape be one of those great rolling ones to be seen nowhere so well as in Minnesota. Charlton had crossed Illinois from Chicago to Dunleith in the night-time, and so had missed the flat prairies. His sense of sublimity was keen, and, besides his natural love for such scenes, he had a hobbyist ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... saw it, and from a remote pinnacle of her rocky fastness hurled in that direction a final malediction. It was her last vituperative attempt, and perhaps for that reason was invested with a certain degree of sublimity. It did her good, she privately informed the Duchess. "Just you go out there and cuss, and see." She then set herself to the task of amusing "the child," as she and the Duchess were pleased to call Piney. Piney was no chicken, ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... the sublimity of style of the third verse of Genesis i. I have, with competent aid, put it into Chippewa, ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... the inhabitants of the village, who had turned out in alarm, and remained for pleasure, their eyes lighted up with interest in what they saw; for trappings and regimentals, war horses and men, in towns an attraction, were here almost a sublimity. ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... the text comes home with solemn force, to all such persons. "Thou that makest thy boast of the law, through breaking of the law, dishonorest thou God?" If the beauty of virtue, and the grandeur of truth, and the sublimity of invisible things, have been able to make such an impression upon your intellects, and your tastes,—upon that part of your constitution which is fixed and stationary, which responds organically to such objects, ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... John Milton, weary and depressed for a moment in the battle he was fighting in the cause of an enlightened liberty and an instructed freedom, exclaims, with the sad prophet Jeremy, 'Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me, a man of strife and contention,' we feel the sublimity of the quotation, which would not be quite the case were the words uttered by an Irishman returning home with a broken head from Donnybrook Fair. The Dunciad was quite uncalled- for. Even supposing that we admit that Pope was ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... Psalm, the Hebrew Poet describing God, says, '....He maketh the Clouds his Chariots, and walketh on the Wings of the Wind.' Making the 'Clouds his Chariots,' is a strong and lively Thought; But That of 'walking on the Wings of the Wind,' is a Sublimity, that frightens, astonishes, and ravishes the Mind of a Reader, who conceives it, as he shou'd do. The Judgement of the Poet in this Place, is discernable in three different Particulars; The Thought is in itself highly noble, and elevated; To move ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... birth, and strongly recommended by Gluck for her good natural voice. At Her Majesty's request, Gluck himself taught Madame Saint Huberti the part of Armida. Sacchini, also, at the command of Marie Antoinette, instructed her in the style and sublimity of the Italian school, and Mdlle. Benin, the Queen's dressmaker and milliner, was ordered to furnish the complete ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 4 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... "yearning after the gods" which the earliest of poets discerned in the hearts of all men. Studied in this sense they are rich in teachings. Would we estimate the intellectual and aesthetic culture of a people, would we generalize the laws of progress, would we appreciate the sublimity of Christianity, and read the seals of its authenticity: the natural conceptions of divinity reveal them. No mythologies are so crude, therefore, none so barbarous, but deserve the attention of the philosophic mind, for they are never ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... extraordinary egoism, assume even more towering proportions in their self-abnegation than in their pride. Then the thrilling clarion-notes of their defiances give way to the deep grand music of stern sublimity and stoic resignation. The gigantic spirit recoils upon itself, crushes itself, and reaches its ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... confident of the genuineness of the picture, could not procure it to be recognized in England. Accordingly he sent it to Rome, where the Academy of San Luca, with Minardi at its head, unanimously decided in its favor. In fact, it contains a grandeur and sublimity which could be ascribed to nobody but the author of the prophets and sibyls of the Sistine Chapel. An antique repose is displayed in the whole work, perfectly agreeing with the character of the lady ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... made but a ferriage of seas. The photographic art has made even the light of the sun a substitute for the pencil of the artist. Everywhere, in all the departments of science, in every branch of the arts, improvement, progress, has been going on with a sublimity of achievement unknown in any age of the past. These things are mighty motors which push along civilization, throwing a wonderful energy into the forward impulse of the world. But remember, that though these ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... have been? Had the desert claimed these three noble spirits, as it has done so many others? Like the monk, who seeks in the silence of cloister forgetfulness of the world's vain show, had Fabian in the sublimity of solitude been able to forget the woman who loved him, and who secretly hoped for and ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... comparisons of characters, might, for instance, find some striking analogies between mountebank Murat, with his irresistible bravery and horsemanship, who was a kind of mixture of Dugueselin and Ducrow, and Mountebank David, a fierce, powerful painter and genius, whose idea of beauty and sublimity seemed to have been gained from the bloody melodramas on the Boulevard. Both, however, were great in their way, and were worshipped as gods, in those heathen times of ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... imitation, not only of the peculiar style, but of the taste, temper, and manner of description of that most original author. * * * It does not aim, of course, at any shadow of his pathos or moral sublimity, but seems to us to be a singularly faithful copy of his ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... her soreness, if not of the effort of her conscience, did something quite visible to my eyes, and also quite unprecedented, for the beauty of her face. She got a real lift from it—such a momentary discernible sublimity that I recollect coming out on the spot with a queer crude amused "Do you know I believe I could ...
— The Beldonald Holbein • Henry James
... finished, I felt my ears ringing in the silence. She had walked to the sacrificial altar with so steady a step, and laid upon it her precious all with so gallant a front of quiet resolution, that for an instant I failed to take in the sublimity of her self-immolation. Mrs. Purdon asking for charity! And asking the one woman who had most reason to refuse ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... vast realm that stretches out unknown before us, and perhaps for ever unknowable; inspiring men with an elevated awe, and environing the interests and duties of their little lives with a strange sublimity. 'We emerge from the Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge again into the Inane.... But whence? O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only that it is through ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... informed of the state of her heart and gradually led him to perfect renunciation of her. By what sacrifices and struggles this was attained can be easily guessed; what rendered her success possible, could only be the depth and sublimity of her affection, devoid of every selfish thought, which gave her the power to show it to her husband in such a light that he, when she finally threatened him with her death, had to abstain from her and had to prove his unshakable love for ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... leads him into the mountains or in sight of them, he is charmed by their majesty and awed by their sublimity. A mountain panorama presents all the characteristic phases of Nature and all the moving variation of the atmosphere. At one time they are cloud-capped and surrounded with fog, and then in an incredibly short time they are glittering in a halo ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... legs were the pillars of Hercules, his body a brewer's butt, his face the sun rising in a red mist. We have been told that magnitude is a powerful cause of the sublime; and if this be true, the dimensions of his lordship certainly had a copious and indisputable claim to sublimity. He seemed born to bear the whole hierarchy. His mighty belly heaved and his cheeks swelled with the spiritual inflations of church power. He fixed his open eyes upon me and surveyed me from top to toe. I too made my remarks. 'He is a true ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... via the fire escape, and that is one reason why they returned so soonly. Cyclone, having drawn on his personal account at a Vancouver branch of the Ashcroft bank for enough to pay his next meal and car fare, and Skookum having jotted down the usual morning poetic inspiration on the sublimity of the situation, the army, led by Father, marched full breast upon the curling rink building. There were no knights at the gate to defend the castle, nor did the band meet them at the portal—neither did the Vancouver curling club. ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... have a fullness of sound which gives them an added weight and dignity. One would hesitate long before changing one of Milton's big-sounding phrases, even if he were not compelled to sacrifice the metre. In Webster's orations there is a dignity, a sublimity, gained by the use of full-mouthed polysyllables. Supposing he had said at the beginning of his eulogy of Adams and Jefferson, "This is a new sight" instead of "This is an unaccustomed spectacle," the whole effect of dignified utterance commensurate with the occasion ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... spectacle to heavenly powers. It is only as this rationality is clearly developed, and is allotted its just place in Moral Science, that the universal structure to which we have already alluded, and which, as we saw, culminated in the will, assumes its peculiar sublimity. For the voluntariness which is consciously realized in reason gives man the mastery over constitutional processes, not merely to direct, but even to thwart them; nor this merely for himself, but it is in his power, through the nullification of his own constitution, to nullify also that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... leathern doublet, a dress which he long affected, as well for its singularity as its cheapness. That he might wean himself from sublunary objects, he broke off all connections with his friends and family, and never dwelt a moment in one place; lest habit should beget new connections, and depress the sublimity of his aerial meditations. He frequently wandered into the woods, and passed whole days in hollow trees without company, or any other amusement than his Bible. Having reached that pitch of perfection as to need no other book, he soon advanced to another state of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... Saxony, Ulric Zwingle was born in a herdsman's cottage among the Alps. Zwingle's surroundings in childhood, and his early training, were such as to prepare him for his future mission. Reared amid scenes of natural grandeur, beauty, and awful sublimity, his mind was early impressed with a sense of the greatness, the power, and the majesty of God. The history of the brave deeds achieved upon his native mountains, kindled his youthful aspirations. ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... to the right one is faced by the Jama Masjid, another monument of the taste of Shahjahan. The gateway and the lofty ascent into this House of God are very fine. The mosque in the regular beauty and grandeur of its lines, appealing to the sublimity rather than to the mystery of religion, is a fitting symbol of the faith for whose service it was raised. South of the Jama Masjid in a part of the city once included in Firozabad stands the Kalan or Kala Masjid with low cupolas and heavy square black pillars, ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... gentleman, "to define all his images in such a manner as to bring them within the circle of our vision, and to subject them to the power of the pencil, renders him little better than grotesque, where Milton has since taught us to expect sublimity." It is true that Dante has never shrunk from embodying his conceptions in determinate words, that he has even given measures and numbers, where Milton would have left his images to float undefined in a gorgeous haze of language. Both were right. Milton did not profess to have been in heaven or ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... its commencement, has abated since they have been more known; and numbers, who began with rapture, have ended with disgust. Persons of vivacious imaginations, like Olivia, may be caught at first view by whatever has the appearance of grandeur or sublimity; but if time be allowed for examination, they will infallibly detect the disproportions, and these will ever afterwards shock their taste: if you will not allow leisure for comparison—if you say, do not look at such strange objects, the obedient eyes may turn aside, but the rebel ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... be allowed me, a constitutional sovereign, reigning but not governing, swearing to obey the law and appointing ministers to execute it. But, under the influence of the mirage which fascinates him, the theist sees, in this ridiculous system, only a new proof of the sublimity of his idol; who, in his opinion, uses his creatures as instruments of his power, and causes the wisdom of human beings to redound to ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... youthful enthusiasm, or feel pleased at that hotch-potch—the overture; or, a thrill when the muffin-bell tinkles, causing the lovely drop-scene—that combined the grandeur of the pretty Parthenon with the sublimity of Virginia Water—to vanish into its own intensely blue sky; disclosing the "Harlequin House that Jack built," and Mr. John Bull's huge paste-board thick head, snoring like thunder, in a "property" summer-house—an elephantine ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... have occurred. Even in the dark and tempestuous night, with the storm surging through the tree tops, and the rain descending in floods, in their sheltered camp, illumined by the flames of their night fire, souls capable of appreciating the sublimity of such scenes must have experienced exquisite delight. It is pleasant to reflect, that the poor man in his humble cabin may often be the recipient of much more happiness than the lord finds in his castle, or the ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... is not a copy of any master; it is a development and a consummation of two influences, the slow maturity of Milton's mind, deepened and broadened by the Commonwealth controversies "not without dust and heat," and the exalted sublimity of the yet unattempted theme of justifying God's management of human and divine affairs. His maturity brought him his great familiarity both in matter and in style with nearly all that was best in European ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... indulgence equal to those grand ones of the olden times whose places now know them no more. The inconceivable austerity and solemnity with which Puritanism invested this mortal life, the awful grandeur of the themes which it made household words, the sublimity of the issues which it hung upon the commonest acts of our earthly existence, created characters of more than Roman strength and greatness; and the good men and women of Puritan training excelled the saints of the Middle Ages, as a soul fully developed intellectually, educated ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... grades are taken from different things, as stated above (A. 1, ad 3). Yet these three things may concur in the same subject: thus when a person is appointed to a higher action, he attains thereby both office and grade, and sometimes, besides this, a state of perfection, on account of the sublimity of the act, as in the case of a bishop. The ecclesiastical orders are particularly distinct according to divine offices. For Isidore says (Etym. vi): "There are various kinds of offices; but the foremost is that which relates to sacred and ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... grief at these mournful tidings, and musing with his head bent downwards, he loses his road, and wanders into a wood. Here Nature, whose figure is described with sublimity, appears, and discloses to him the secrets of her operations. After this he wanders into a desert; but at length proceeds on his way, under the protection of a banner, with which Nature had furnished him, till on the third day ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... silver by the afternoon sun, but soon the thick blackness overspread the whole sky, and the desert around us was wrapped in deep gloom. I scarcely heeded it at the time, but now I cannot but feel that there was an awful sublimity in the hoarse murmuring of the thunder, in the somber shadows that involved the mountains and the plain. The storm broke. It came upon us with a zigzag blinding flash, with a terrific crash of thunder, and with a hurricane that howled over the prairie, dashing floods of water against us. ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... the weird ingenuity of the electric magicians struck Aunt Sarah with a sublimity almost more than she could endure. As the flashes of light struck out about the pillar and the ball of fire fell as if dropped from some creating hand she screamed, "O my God, what blasphemy is this that men have achieved. Can they snatch the fire ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... he once, at midnight, when we had returned from the Coffee-house in rather earnest talk, "it is a true sublimity to dwell here. These fringes of lamplight, struggling up through smoke and thousand-fold exhalation, some fathoms into the ancient reign of Night, what thinks Bootes of them, as he leads his Hunting-Dogs over the Zenith in their leash of sidereal fire? That ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... prosaic ugliness. Lucretius, by his imaginative power, had apparently deceived him into thinking that any fragment of science might be treated poetically. In his master the "flaring atom streams" had attained the sublimity of a Platonic vision, and the very majestic sadness of his materialism carried the young poet off his feet. But the mechanism of Aetna remained merely a puzzle with little to inspire awe, and the theme contained inherently no deep meaning for humanity—which, after all, the scientific problem ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... riches, O Ione! they know not what life is capable of who are not wealthy. Gold is the great magician of earth—it realizes our dreams—it gives them the power of a god—there is a grandeur, a sublimity, in its possession; it is the mightiest, yet the most obedient ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... perfect lawns sloped down to a gracious waterway, which shuddered occasionally in a gentle wind; on every side pleasing trees were massed into shady and grateful woods; overhead the noonday sun lit up a deep-blue sky. Perhaps the sublimity of the scene played upon her softer emotions. Perhaps all intense beauty is pathetic, and makes one think of poor illusions and unavailing dreams. Lady Gray wondered why she could not feel, on this ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... "Messiah" which have never been surpassed for tender and poetic expression. Among these are the "Behold and See if There Be Any Sorrow Like His Sorrow," "Come unto Him," and "He was Despised." In the direction of sublimity nothing grander can be found than the "Hallelujah," "Worthy is the Lamb," "Lift up Your Heads," nor anything more dramatically impressive than the splendid burst at the words, "Wonderful," "Counsellor." The work, as a whole, while containing mannerisms in the roulades ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... eastern altar one unbroken blaze, and lifting his shafts like pines, and his walls like precipices, ministered to their miraculous stability by an infinite phalanx of sloped buttress and glittering pinnacle. The spire was the natural consummation. Internally, the sublimity of space in the cupola had been superseded by another kind of infinity in the prolongation of the nave; externally, the spherical surface had been proved, by the futility of Arabian efforts, incapable of decoration; its majesty depended on its simplicity, and ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... treason heaped on treachery, of insult repaid by fraud, would be easy enough. Indeed, a huge book might be compiled containing nothing but the episodes in this grim history of despotism, now tragic and pathetic, now terror-moving in sublimity of passion, now despicable by the baseness of the motives brought to light, at one time revolting through excess of physical horrors, at another fascinating by the spectacle of heroic courage, intelligence, and ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... actors or readers can be found to agree respecting Shakespeare's conception of the character. This, however, may be safely asserted, that no criticism on Hamlet will ever be permanent which does not recognize the sublimity of his nature. Horatio understood Hamlet better than anyone, and his judgment of him doubtless expressed ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... to have, if anything, some bias in its favour. But (as I pointed out) the rollicking Radicalism of Bishops has to be restrained. The man who writes the notes in the weekly paper called the Outlook feels that it is his business to restrain it. The passage has such simple sublimity ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... and I therefore concluded to employ the little remaining eyesight I was to enjoy in doing this, the greatest service to the common weal it was in my power to render.' And so he wrote the Second Defence, and yet lived long enough, and preserved sublimity of imagination enough, to write the Paradise Lost as well. Mr. Goldwin Smith goes nearer the mark than the Rector when he insists that 'the tension and elevation which Milton's nature had undergone in the mighty struggle, together with the heroic dedication of his faculties to the most ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... succeeded in transforming their methods, Rubens is nevertheless the spiritual descendant of the Italianizants. It is from them and from his direct contact with the works of Michael Angelo and Titian that he inherits his association of spiritual sublimity with physical strength. Adopting without reserve Michael Angelo's pagan vision of Christianity, he transformed his saints and apostles into powerful heroes and endeavoured to convey the awe and majesty inspired by the Christian drama through an imposing combination ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... this time the moral atmosphere of the room had by no means attained the level reached by Leigh and Emmet alone, not only because of the restless presence of Cobbens, which refused to harmonise with the idea of sublimity, but also because, in any such gathering, the tendency is downward toward the plane of the most frivolous and common-place person present. The jest about the class, intermittently revived, had reduced ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... ardour and enthusiasm of combat. The white smoke of musketry fringed the front of battle, while the artillery on the hills in rear shook the earth with its thunder and filled the air with the wild shrieking of the shells that plunged into the masses of the retreating foe. To add greater horror and sublimity to the scene, the Chancellorsville House and the woods surrounding it were wrapped in flames. It was then that General Lee rode to the front of his advancing battalions. His presence was the signal for one of those uncontrollable out-bursts ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... Cramp Greek Dual, neuter pleural *sic*, and verb singular Theta Talented Homer Valcknaer Principles and Facts Schmidt Puritans and Jacobins Wordsworth French Revolution Infant Schools Mr. Coleridge's Philosophy Sublimity Solomon Madness C. Lamb Faith and Belief Dobrizhoffer Scotch and English Criterion of Genius Dryden and Pope Milton's disregard of Painting Baptismal Service Jews' Division of the Scripture Sanskrit Hesiod Virgil Genius Metaphysical Don Quixote Steinmetz Keats Christ's Hospital Bowyer ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... under the impact of the high-power bullet at so close a range, and collapsed face down. Simba sat calmly in his place. He did not even trouble to place himself in a better defensive attitude against possible attack. His confidence in his magic bone was growing to sublimity as he noted how efficiently it carried him through every crisis. All over the camp the porters, startled, leaped to their feet. But at the headmen's fire no one moved. They would ordinarily have been ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... some interested attachment to the present government, and some interested opposition of it; though after-knowledge will discover, in the hatred of Austria, enough meanness, lukewarmness, and selfish ignorance to take off its sublimity, the hatred is still found marvelously unanimous and bitter. I speak advisedly, and with no disposition to discuss the question or exaggerate the fact. Exercising at Venice official functions by permission and trust of the Austrian government, I cannot regard the cessation ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... The sublimity of her self-sacrifice smote him like a lash. He could not stop to argue, but he forced her forward, and one of the men above, feeling himself in safety, caught her by the arm to drag her up. But at that instant the spar, cut nearly through, broke with a sharp crack like the sound of a gun. ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... actually exhibited by actions in the world of sense according to the formal rule of a law of nature. However, the caution against empiricism of practical reason is much more important; for mysticism is quite reconcilable with the purity and sublimity of the moral law, and, besides, it is not very natural or agreeable to common habits of thought to strain one's imagination to supersensible intuitions; and hence the danger on this side is not so general. Empiricism, on the contrary, cuts up at the roots the morality of intentions (in ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... walls of the crater. It was as if these aged walls resented the violating of their silent sanctity. Gale felt himself a man, a thing alive, something superior to all this savage, dead, upflung world of iron, a master even of all this grandeur and sublimity ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... including a salad of the Avon crawfish, and a little iced punch. It would be still better for good pedestrians to walk the distance by the fields and push on to the inn for refreshment, without which all tame scenery is so very flat. In the sublimity of the Alps, the Pyrenees, or even the great Highland hills, a man may forget his dinner; but, when within the verge of the horizon church-towers and smoking chimneys of farm-houses continually occur, visions of fat, brown, sucking pigs, rashers of ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... suspected, and where to be suspected was almost certain death—Thomas Paine had the courage, the goodness, and the justice to vote against death. To vote against the execution of the king was a vote against his own life. This was the sublimity of devotion to principle. For this he was arrested, imprisoned, and doomed to death. There is not a theologian who has ever maligned Thomas Paine that has the courage to do this thing. When Louis Capet was on trial for his life ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... relate, had been kindled at times, by the very cruelty and fury, which at other moments made her almost detest him. There was a species of sublimity in the very atrocity of Catiline's wickedness, which fascinated her morbid and polluted fancy; and she almost admired the ferocity which tortured her, and from which, alone of mortal ills, she shrank ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... directing means of defence, while their commands were often drowned in the clashing of armour, or the clamorous shouts of those whom they addressed. Tremendous as these sounds were, and yet more terrible from the awful event which they presaged, there was a sublimity mixed with them, which Rebecca's high-toned mind could feel even in that moment of terror. Her eye kindled, although the blood fled from her cheeks; and there was a strong mixture of fear, and of a thrilling sense of the sublime, ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... back aghast-aghast at the sublimity of the young loafer's "cheek." Then they burst into a laugh that made the windows rattle. Tracy was too angry to realize that he had done a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and pious Sobieski taught me, how to discriminate between animal courage and true valor—between the defender of his country and the ravager of other states. In short, I see in Thaddeus Sobieski all that my fancy hath ever pictured of the heroic character. Whilst I contemplate the sublimity of his sentiments and the tenderness of his soul, I cannot help thinking how few would believe that so many admirable qualities could belong to one mind, and that mind remain unacquainted with the throes of ambition or ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... the most purely human of all the great artists, in the whole of Celtic myth and legend, where the loveliness of the world is shown through a mist of tears, and the life of a man is no more than the life of a flower, is there anything that, for sheer simplicity of pathos wedded and made one with sublimity of tragic effect, can be said to equal or even approach the last act of Christ's passion. The little supper with his companions, one of whom has already sold him for a price; the anguish in the quiet moon-lit garden; the false friend coming close to him so as to betray him with a ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... who were represented were more like human beings in their character, it followed that the statues of them more nearly resembled men and women, and gradually the old grandeur and sublimity were changed to grace, beauty, and mirth. Many people would prefer these works because they come nearer to the every-day life of the world; but earnest, thoughtful minds look for something more noble in art—something ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... things which are to the natural man more difficult to confess even than fraud—effeminacy, futility, physical cowardice. And then, when the last of his loathsome secrets has been told, when he has nothing left either to gain or to conceal, then he rises up into a perfect bankrupt sublimity and makes the great avowal which is the whole pivot and meaning of the poem. He says in effect: "Now that my interest in deceit is utterly gone, now that I have admitted, to my own final infamy, the frauds that I have practised, now that I stand before you in a patent and open villainy ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... upheaval. With change both of material condition and of ways of thought, new forms of sentiment and aspiration have appeared,—a wider and tenderer humanity; a reverence for the order of nature and dependence upon the study of that order for human progress; a consciousness of the sublimity and beauty of nature as a divine revelation; a reliance upon the powers and intuitions of the human spirit as its only and sufficient guides; a rediscovery under natural and universal forms of the faith and hope which were once supposed ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... her high throne in the north, That City's sombre Patroness and Queen, In bronze sublimity she gazes forth Over her Capital of teen and threne, Over the river with its isles and bridges, 75 The marsh and moorland, to the stern rock-bridges, Confronting ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... consumption fell from two hundred and ten pounds to one hundred and six. This fact sums up the whole socialistic philosophy: to gradually train the workingman to justice, encourage him to labor, lift him to the sublimity of devotion, by increase of wages, profit-sharing, distinctions, and rewards. Certainly I do not mean to blame this method, which is as old as the world: whatever way you take to tame serpents and ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... up this mountain the better, I find that kings are called mountains in Scripture; and good kings are so called, for these three, 1. For their sublimity; as mountains are high above the valleys, so are kings lifted up in majesty above their subjects: some apply that place to kings, "Hear ye, O mountains, the Lord's controversy, and ye strong foundations of the earth." 2. They are called mountains for their strength to guard their people. David ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... intermediate place between spirit and matter, has, of course, a corresponding faculty in the world of spirits. It is, no doubt, an inconceivably pleasurable source of enjoyment. This increases the sublimity which there is in the silence of the dead, and its impressiveness. For what fancy can conceive of the communications, from heart to heart, in that multitude where every new acquaintance is the occasion of some new joy, or wakes some thrilling recollection, or leads to ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... coxcombry of club-houses, it is well; promote the building of more like them. But if they never taught you any thing, and never made you happier as you passed beneath them, do not think they have any mysterious goodness of occult sublimity. Have done with the wretched affectation, the futile barbarism, of pretending to enjoy; for, as surely as you know that the meadow grass, meshed with fairy rings, is better than the wood pavement cut into hexagons; and as surely as you ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... man, who could endure agony and insult, and even thus commemorate his sufferings, with no unpoetical conception, almost degrades his own sublimity when the poetaster sets our teeth on ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... humblest possible way; and how many of the dregs of colonial society—the occupiers of the lowest rung on the colonial ladder—reached their new home with all the pomp and circumstance of quarter-deck sublimity, and all the humbug and pretension of real or fancied aristocracy. Is the result we see—for these contrasts are to be found plentifully in all the colonies at the Antipodes—what it ought to be, or not? That is ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... Academy, with many of the principal Athenians, having deserted their native home, and fled to Rome, from the fury of Mithridates, I immediately became his scholar, and was exceedingly taken with his philosophy; and, besides the, pleasure I received from the great variety and sublimity of his matter, I was still more inclined to confine, my attention to that study; because there was reason to apprehend that our laws and judicial proceedings would be wholly overturned by the continuance of the public disorders. In the same year Sulpicius lost ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... many respects. He is entirely wanting in that lofty religious character which fills with pureness and beauty the works of the early masters; he has not the great and impressive historical qualities of the school of Raffaelle, nor the daring sublimity of Michael Angelo; he has not the rich luxury of color that renders the works of the great Venetians so gorgeous, nor even that sort of striking reality which makes the subjects rendered by the Flemish masters incomparably life-like. Yet he ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... and magnitude of the descending waters, and of your own helplessness and insignificance. They flow down upon your vision like moving mountains of light; and the shadowy outline of black mysterious-looking rocks, dimly seen through clouds of driving mist, adds a wild sublimity to the scene. While the boat struggles over the curling billows, at times lifted up by the ground-swells from below, the feeling of danger and insecurity is lost in the whirl of waters that surround you. The mind expands with the scene, and you rejoice in the terrific power that ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... spirit which they enshrined; and alike in village and city, the majestic houses of the Father of mankind and his especial servants towered up in sovereign beauty, symbols of the civil supremacy of the church, and of the moral sublimity of life and character which had won the homage and the admiration of the Christian nations. Ever at the sacred gates sate Mercy, pouring out relief from a never-failing store to the poor and the suffering; ever within the sacred aisles ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... printed trash, that your library is a "back number." To some poor souls every thing that is great and good in the world's literature is a "back number"; and the Bible itself, with its immortal poetry and sublimity, is the oldest back number of all. It is no part of your business as a librarian to cater to the tastes of those who act as if the reading of endless novels of sensation were the chief end of man. As one fed on highly spiced viands and stimulating drinks surely loses ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... me at first with an impression of poverty and coldness. At the Church of St. John and St. Paul is the famous martyrdom, or rather assassination, of St. Peter Martyr, by Titian, one of the most magical pictures in the world. Its tragic horror is redeemed by its sublimity. Here too is a most admirable series of bas-reliefs in white marble, representing the history of our Saviour, the work of a modern sculptor. Here too the Doges are buried; and close to the Church is the equestrian ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... of his sacrifice is only enhanced in the eyes of superior beings, by the detestation that pursues him here, and the sufferings to which he is condemned. The belief that even his sister has deserted him, and gone over to his enemies, adds to his sublimity of feelings, and his confidence in divine ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... in transforming their methods, Rubens is nevertheless the spiritual descendant of the Italianizants. It is from them and from his direct contact with the works of Michael Angelo and Titian that he inherits his association of spiritual sublimity with physical strength. Adopting without reserve Michael Angelo's pagan vision of Christianity, he transformed his saints and apostles into powerful heroes and endeavoured to convey the awe and majesty inspired by the Christian drama ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... mountain-tops completely overlooked us and our movements. The second day was beautifully clear, and many a time, in the midst of its carnage and noise, I could not help stopping to look across that vast field of battle, to admire its sublimity. ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... me the most stately and concentrated in the whole volume. It is the sublimity of a despair not to be ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... not me!" said Roderick, with sublimity. There was a great laugh; but after all, Roderick had ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... visions of greatness, these lofty aspirations, not for renown, but for the inward consciousness of intellectual elevation, of moral sublimity, of heroism, had no influence, as is ordinarily the case with day-dreams, to give Jane a distaste for life's energetic duties. They did not enervate her character, or convert her into a mere visionary; on ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... no danger of Oswald becoming a partisan of this creed. He is impressed with its defects, though appreciating the sublimity of general tenets. Oswald does not like the doctrine of "Merger." This assertive Briton has no desire to lose identity in "Brahm." Oswald Langdon as dissolved dewdrop in shoreless sea ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... enchantment, and yet not waken an echo in the hearts of those homeless wanderers. The musicians paused to rest for a moment, and then suddenly, as if by magic, the glorious Rans des Vache of Switzerland stole over the water, with its touching pathos swelling into grand sublimity, its home-music melting away in love, and then bursting forth in the free, glad strains of revelry, till every breath was hushed as by the presence of visible beauty. Having never before heard this beautiful ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... in all its aspects, the whole book is devoted, is, 'The Word was made flesh.' Only when you let in the light of the last utterance of our text, 'I that speak unto thee am He,' do we understand the pathos, the sublimity, the depth and blessedness of meaning which lie in the first one, 'Give Me to drink.' When we see that He bowed Himself, and willingly stretched out His hands for the fetters, we come to understand the significance of these ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... presented was indeed singularly beautiful; since, without any of the wild, irregular, sublimity of the lower falls, it combined all the regular elegancies which the fancy of a painter would select to form a beautiful cataract. Captain Lewis now ascended the hill which was behind him, and saw, from its top, ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... commemorating the victories of Napoleon, but as those victories were ultimately crowned by defeat, it is more consistent to consider the Triumphal Arch as a triumph of art than of arms; as certainly the magnificence and sublimity of the design is only to be equalled by the exquisite beauty of the execution. Having passed this noble monument and splendid specimen of architectural talent, the Champs Elysees extend in all their beauty to the view of the beholder, presenting a fine broad road with rows ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... suffered no disquiet from them, we came in sight of the two inlets which form the Turk's Island passage. A winter voyage, however unpleasant, has this advantage, that then only can you be sure of meeting with such a succession of storms as shall leave settled in the memory the sullen sublimity of that 'changing, restless mound' of disturbed ocean in which is embodied the mass of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... sentimental enough for the enthusiast or the cynic respectively, reflecting an innate hope—a common interest in common things and common men—a tune the Concord bards are ever playing, while they pound away at the immensities with a Beethovenlike sublimity, and with, may we say, a vehemence and perseverance—for that part of greatness is ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... longings for "a thundering noise" were more than realized. He stood firmly on the break of the quarter-deck, surrounded by most of the crew, who seemed to gather near him for protection, astonished and terrified at the sublimity of the scene. ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... him into the mountains or in sight of them, he is charmed by their majesty and awed by their sublimity. A mountain panorama presents all the characteristic phases of Nature and all the moving variation of the atmosphere. At one time they are cloud-capped and surrounded with fog, and then in an incredibly short time they are glittering in a halo of sunlight. As one beholds their majestic heads, ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... {11} base as Milton's, to those of a whole line of the scholars of the Renaissance who lived with the noblest literature of the world and wrote of each other in the language of Billingsgate fishwives. So the sublimity of his life is wholly that of an irresistible will, set from the first on achieving great deeds and victoriously achieving them in defiance of adverse men and fates. But this is quite compatible with qualities the reverse of agreeable. It is the business of sublimity to compel ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... from the life: it is the sublimity of an angel, mingled with all that is attractive in woman. But who is the friend we may venture to trust? To whom may I give my bond? And from whom may I receive a treasure which for the rest of my life will ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... Macarius and Simeon Stylites. If anything can justify the serious and deliberate display of merely physical emotion in literature or in art, it must be one of two things; intense depth of feeling expressed with inspired perfection of simplicity, with divine sublimity of fascination, as by Sappho; or transcendent supremacy of actual and irresistible beauty in such revelation of naked nature as was possible to Titian. But Mr. Whitman's Eve is a drunken apple-woman, indecently sprawling in the slush and ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... to repose "till the sea gives up her dead,"—this, with the wailing moan of the wind aloft, the sobbing of the water alongside, and the solemn glory of the dying day all uniting to imbue the scene and the occasion with a profundity of sadness and a sublimity that would have been impossible under other circumstances. And so deeply was Leslie moved by it that, for the first time since the words of his cruel and unjust sentence had fallen upon his ears, he once more felt, to conviction, ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... than taking from the Airs that tiresome Emulation of the first and second Violin, and of the Tenor? Is there any that ever durst usurp the Glory of it? We, we are those, who by our Ingenuity have raised her to this Degree of Sublimity, in taking also from her that noisy murmuring of the fundamental Basses, in such Manner,——(mark me well, and learn) that if in an Orchestre there were an hundred Violins, we are capable of composing in such ...
— Observations on the Florid Song - or Sentiments on the Ancient and Modern Singers • Pier Francesco Tosi
... perishing in want, misery, and neglect, yet still remembering his long-lost benefactor, and collecting the last effort of expiring nature to give a sign of joy and gratulation at his return, hides his face and wipes away the tear! This is true sublimity of character, which is always mixed with tenderness—mere sanguinary ferocity being terrible and odious, but never sublime. [Greek: Agathoi polydakrytoi andres]—Men prone to tears are brave, says ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... sublimity of this spot seems to have struck the Puritan fathers of Salem, and looking around on its capabilities, they appear to have come to the conclusion that of all places it was the one expressly designed by the loving Father of mankind ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... of being in his ship on the open sea, the scene idealized to supernatural beauty and sublimity, as all such scenes are in dreams; and then she thought the ship took fire, and she saw, and heard, and felt the great ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... intellectually broad. Certainly the greatest of modern pagans, Goethe, will not be accused of favoritism toward the Bible, yet he said: "I esteem the gospels to be thoroughly genuine, for there shines forth from them the reflected splendor of a sublimity, proceeding from the person of Jesus Christ, of so divine a kind as only the divine could ever have manifested upon earth." The Earl of Rochester saw that the only liberalism which objects to the Bible, in its true uses, is the liberalism of licentiousness; and he left this saying: ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... and patronage, urged by no influence but the claims of duty, governed by no motive but a simple desire to serve his country and promote the well-being of his fellow-man—Mr. Adams presented a spectacle of moral sublimity unequalled ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... arrogance and avarice have blotted out her national virtue, and now work like a battering-ram her downfall. Yet, as arrogance is but another name for weakness, is it not better to brush off than kill the wasp? The principle herein contained we have, in the sublimity of our power, adopted as an example to the nations of the earth. Jonathan! we like your amiability; we esteem you as a keen fellow, who, large of trade, and wise in the ways of a cheap government, may well boast a happy people: bridle, then, the audacity of that southern ambition, ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... weave our thoughts into heart-spun plans, And weave secure for a fitful day, But lose in the web of earthly things The pattern of sublimity. ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... that he uttered them with vehemence and intensity. In Victorian times the average citizen thought of poetry as a somewhat weak-minded, effeminate pursuit—as very often it was. The poet who might be persuaded of the sublimity of his calling had necessarily to steel himself against the abuse of the matter-of-fact persons who have no traffic in poetry; and in so doing he lost the advantage of that bracing though insufficient criticism by which the sane, practical ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... your ideas of the sublime; I do not imagine milking cows and butter-making would correspond with the general ideas of sublimity." ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... his own slaves succeeded finally in farming prairie land, but that most of them gradually drifted to the towns, where they became waiters, barbers, porters, and domestic servants. My impression is that he over-estimated their capacity. But this does not diminish the moral sublimity of ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... the vast Atlantic Rolls the tide of human thought; Farther speeds that mental ocean Than the world of waves o'er sought! Mind, sublime in its own essence Its sublimity can lend To the rocks, and mounts, and torrents, And, ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... in the blood of all of New England birth to love the sea. They may never have seen it, nor even heard its wild, stern music; yet the fascination of great waters is part of their heritage. The thought of that vast inland ocean, of the magnitude and sublimity of which I had only the vaguest conception, haunted me all that afternoon; and I scarcely removed my eyes from those oddly constructed mounds of drifted sand, striving vainly to gain, through some depression between them, a fleeting glimpse of the restless waters that had ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... disasters which break down the spirit of a man, and prostrate him in the dust, seem to call forth all the energies of the softer sex, and give such intrepidity and devotion to their character, that at times it approaches to sublimity." ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... place, and its natural sublimity, combined with the recollection of his late deadly peril, tinged the young man's thoughts with an unusual seriousness; and yet he could not restrain the cynicism that was habitual to him whenever his attention was compelled ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... one of time's tragedies—the dethronement of a dynasty. There are but few who will not, in some degree, appreciate the sublimity of the scene. All present were in tears, and loud sobs were heard. The king and his family then laid aside all the insignia of royalty, and assumed the dress more appropriate to exiles. The king also wrote to the King of England and to the ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... himself unfavourably; he regarded the modern Highlanders as being incapable of estimating poetry otherwise than in the returning harmony of similar sounds. They were seduced, he remarks, by the charms of rhyme; and admired the strains of Ossian, not for the sublimity of the poetry, but on account of the antiquity of the compositions, and the detail of facts which they contained. On this subject a different opinion has been expressed by Sir Walter Scott. "I cannot dismiss this story," he writes, in his last introduction to his tale of the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... can hypothesize, even if we cannot prove and establish. My hypothesis is this: that the spout is nothing but mist. And besides other reasons, to this conclusion I am impelled, by considerations touching the great inherent dignity and sublimity of the Sperm Whale; I account him no common, shallow being, inasmuch as it is an undisputed fact that he is never found on soundings, or near shores; all other whales sometimes are. He is both ponderous and profound. And I am convinced that from ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... beauty and sublimity of the true life, by what is sacred and pathetic in this strife of humanity for truth, justice, and brotherly love, his heart holds the fascination of it. Gradually everything subordinates itself to this powerful and persistent charm. The necessary ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... one finger at the sparkling ruby liquid, "a sight that beggars all description; and yet, listen! I will paint it for you, if I can. It is a lovely spot. Tall mountains, crowned with verdure, rise in awful sublimity around; a river runs through, and bright flowers grow to the water's edge. But there a group of Indians gather. They flit to and fro, with something like sorrow upon their dark brows. In their midst lies a manly form, but his cheek, how deathly! His eyes are wild ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... Milton with as little change as Milton made in transplanting it from Marlowe. The author's own favourite passage, the invocation to the sun (act iii., sc. 2), has some sublimity, marred by lapses. The lyrics scattered through the poem sometimes ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... procured by Abdel Giabbari, Mgr. Sogaro's envoy in the Soudan. The striking historical spectacle presented by General Gordon's long and lonely journey on his camel across the desert to Khartoum has been eclipsed in its sublimity by the feat which has just been performed by Sister Cipriani, who has just traversed the same weary, arid waste on foot, accompanied by a single Arab attendant. Gordon's name will live forever in story, side ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... in Tacitus, nor the author of the Annals, the strength and sublimity of expression found in that great master of rhetoric, Cicero. The eloquence of Tacitus is grave and majestic, his language copious and florid. The language of the author of the Annals is cramped; ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... that make so much of my pleasure here; though a ship's deck is the place to enjoy them. O what AWFUL scenery, from a ship's deck, in the tropics! People talk about the Alps, but the clouds of the trade wind are alone for sublimity. ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... humanity, simply because outside humanity was the last thing he would have thought worth troubling himself about. And still his unremitting zeal in the pursuit of his aim, and his cool self-possession in the presence of danger, were not without a sublimity of their own; and the lustrous intensity of his vision as he grasped some new fact corroborative of some favorite theory, might well have stirred a sympathetic interest even in a mind ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... apparently unbroken, soaring superbly to more than twenty thousand and seventeen thousand feet respectively: Denali, "the great one," and Denali's Wife. And the little peaks in between the natives call the "children." It was on that occasion, standing spellbound at the sublimity of the scene, that the author resolved that if it were in his power he would restore these ancient mountains to the ancient people among whom they rear their heads. Savages they are, if the reader please, since "savage" means simply a forest ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... peaks of which reach up to 8,000 feet. Both ranges, brilliantly snow-crowned, are within view at the same time from various points, and the scenery in its entirety, with its continual changefulness and features of sublimity, can not be excelled. Strangers and travelers who have visited every part of the world never leave the deck of the steamers while going through the waters of the Sound country. In noting a single feature, Mount Rainier, Senator George F. Edmunds wrote as follows: "I have been ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... winds. The real trouble with the theme is its hopelessly prosaic ugliness. Lucretius, by his imaginative power, had apparently deceived him into thinking that any fragment of science might be treated poetically. In his master the "flaring atom streams" had attained the sublimity of a Platonic vision, and the very majestic sadness of his materialism carried the young poet off his feet. But the mechanism of Aetna remained merely a puzzle with little to inspire awe, and the theme contained inherently no deep meaning for humanity—which, after all, the scientific problem ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... says father Brumoi in another place, after having opened to himself a path entirely new and unknown to the ancients, seems like an eagle towering in the clouds, from the sublimity, force, unbroken progress, and rapidity of his flight; and, as Racine, in copying the ancients in a manner entirely his own, imitates the swan, that sometimes floats upon the air, sometimes rises, ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... flash of vivid lightning shot from one end of it to the other, and caused it to kindle up, throughout its vast extent, like a mass of ignited and glowing charcoal. This, it must be remembered, was in the broad light of day. No fancy may picture the sublimity which might have been exhibited by a similar phenomenon taking place amid the darkness of the night. Hell itself might have been found a fitting image. Even as it was, my hair stood on end, while I gazed afar down within the yawning abysses, letting imagination descend, as it ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... instance, find some striking analogies between mountebank Murat, with his irresistible bravery and horsemanship, who was a kind of mixture of Dugueselin and Ducrow, and Mountebank David, a fierce, powerful painter and genius, whose idea of beauty and sublimity seemed to have been gained from the bloody melodramas on the Boulevard. Both, however, were great in their way, and were worshipped as gods, in those heathen times of ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... upon the character of a people. 'Let me write the songs of a people,' said a great thinker, 'and I care not who makes its laws:'—if he included the tunes, there was no exaggeration in his thought. Alas! a meretricious age scorns and neglects the true, because it is always simple in its sublimity, and, striving to banish God from His own creation, would also banish nature and joy from the heart! A pedantic age loves all that is pretentious, glaring, and assuming; and Rhythm stoops to rock the cradle of the newborn infant; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... by no means disposed to retract,—that no ancient author has approached, in the expression of ethical truth, so near to the maxims and sometimes the very expressions, of the Gospel. Nevertheless, we as strongly affirm, that he who contrasts (whatever the occasional sublimity of expression) the faltering and often sceptical tone of Plato on religious subjects, with the uniformity and decision of the Evangelical system,—his dark notions in relation to God (candidly confessed) ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... forms of those infernal deities who struck horror into the gods themselves." His imagination dwells in the loftiest regions of the old mythology of Greece; his tone is always pure and moral, though stern and harsh; he appeals to the most violent passions, and is full of the boldest metaphors. In sublimity Aeschylus has never been surpassed. He was in poetry what Phidias and Michael Angelo were in art. The critics say that his sublimity of diction is sometimes carried to an extreme, so that his language ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... four great English poets, tells us, Chaucer's characteristic is intensity, Spenser's remoteness, Milton's sublimity, and Shakspeare's everything. The sentence is epigrammatic and memorable enough; but so far as Chaucer is concerned, it requires a little explanation. He is not intense, for instance, as Byron is intense, or as Wordsworth is intense. He does not see man like the one, nor nature like the other. ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... possible that things might have presently settled down into their old rut and the mystery have lost the bulk of its romantic sublimity in Laura's eyes, if the village gossips could have quieted down. But they could not quiet down and they did not. Day after day they called at the house, ostensibly upon visits of condolence, and they pumped away at the mother and the children ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... connection with Palestinian Judaism, his account of the temple and its service, apart from the general standpoint of his writings, proves to us that he was a loyal son of his nation, and loved Judaism for its national institutions as well as its great moral sublimity. His aspiration was to bring home the truths of the religion to the cultured world, and therefore he devised a new expression for the wisdom of his people, and transformed it into a literary system. Judaism forms the kernel, ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... would I have gathered thy children together as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings." The imagery is homely, but oh! so impressively sublime. I can not do better than to use here the words of another. "Was ever imagery so homely invested with such grace and such sublimity as this at our Lord's touch? And yet how exquisite the figure itself of protection, rest, warmth, and all manner of conscious well-being in those poor, defenseless, dependent, little creatures, as they creep under and feel themselves overshadowed ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... reign ... such a day as this brings with it a deeper pleasure than he (a naturalist) can ever hope to experience again,"[8] And in another place: "Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none can exceed in sublimity the primeval forests undefaced by the hand of man; ... temples filled with the various productions of the God of Nature; ... no one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... the form, the great body of critics have been but too indulgent to these servile imitators. These were held up as correct modern classics, while the great truly living and popular poets, whose reputation was a part of their nations' glory, and to whose sublimity it was impossible to be altogether blind, were at best but tolerated as rude and wild natural geniuses. But the unqualified separation of genius and taste on which such a judgment proceeds, is altogether untenable. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... more freely of his private affairs than I had reason to expect, though our business introduced the subject naturally; and, at such times, I thought the expression changed to a sort of melancholy resolution, that was not wanting in sublimity. ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... to herself that the horrible forebodings she had in reference to the island, were but the precursor of what might be expected. The grandeur and sublimity of its scenery, its isolated position, being surrounded by the waters of the Atlantic—the unnatural music and noises, all conspired to fill the mind of this young girl with the idea that something was about to transpire of no ordinary ...
— Blackbeard - Or, The Pirate of Roanoke. • B. Barker
... other land can nature in her varied aspects of sublimity and grandeur as regards celestial phenomena, be better studied than in the wild north-land. Her cyclonic storms in summer and her blizzard blasts in winter are at times not only terrific in their destructive power, but they are also overwhelmingly grand ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... between it and the old familiar face upon the mountain-side. The brow, with its massive depth and loftiness, and all the other features, indeed, were boldly and strongly hewn, as if in emulation of a more than heroic, of a Titanic model. But the sublimity and stateliness, the grand expression of a divine sympathy, that illuminated the mountain visage and etherealized its ponderous granite substance into spirit, might here be sought in vain. Something ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Judge [Mr. Breese] on the birth of a grandson.... As to the child, I saw him asleep, so can say nothing of his eye or his genius peeing through it. He may have the sagacity of a Jewish rabbi, or the profundity of a Calvin, or the sublimity of a Homer for aught I know. But time will show ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... after the lapse of so many years, every object that awoke in my breast emotions of astonishment and delight. What wonderful combinations of beauty, and grandeur, and power, at every winding of that noble river! How the mind expands with the sublimity of the spectacle, and soars upward in gratitude and adoration to the Author of all being, to thank Him for having made this lower world so wondrously fair—a living temple, heaven-arched, and capable of receiving ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... superstition-ridden beginnings. Man himself was once hardly different from a monkey. Yet there is a spark of the divine in him and in all these arts and institutions which he with the aid of the cosmic forces has evolved. Surely a juster judgment may find a sublimity in this age-long march from the clod toward the millennium that could never belong to the spectacular but very provincial myths of the Semites. The emotions ever lag behind the intellect; and our hearts may still yearn for the neighborly and passionate battle-god of the Pentateuch. Moreover, ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... understanding with the most scrupulous care. He gave her a general view of the sciences, and an exact acquaintance with every part of elegant literature. He taught her Latin and English, chiefly that she might understand the sublimity of their best poets. She discovered in her early years a taste for works of genius; and it was St. Aubert's principle, as well as his inclination, to promote every innocent means of happiness. 'A well-informed mind,' he would say, 'is the best security against the contagion of folly ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... of a tempest. From one of these depended a phenomenon which I had never witnessed before—I mean a water spout, wavering in its black and terrible beauty over this savage scenery, thus adding its gloomy grandeur to the sublimity of the thunder-storm, which now deepened, peal after peal, among the mountains. To such as are unacquainted with mountain scenery, and have never witnessed an inland water spout, it is only necessary to say, that it resembles a long inverted cone, that hangs from a ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... their journey at Killarney; but if they would continue their route to Caragh Lake, Blackstone, Lady Headley's improvements, and go on through the Pass of Droum to Valentia and Cahersiveen, they would discover that Killarney is only the opening to a scene of grandeur and sublimity. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... look at her, to answer her. Against the window's still pallid sky I see her hair, silvered with a moonlike sheen, and her night-veiled face. Closely I look at the share of sublimity which she bears on it, and I reflect that I am infinitely attached to this woman, that it is not true to say she is of less moment to me because desire no longer throws me on her as it used to do. Is it habit? No, not only that. Everywhere habit exerts its gentle strength, ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... choice of his theme, and by the comprehensive manner in which he has treated it, Milton has been enabled by his poetic genius to give to the world in his 'Paradise Lost' a poem which, for sublimity of thought, loftiness of imagination, and beauty of expression in metrical verse, is unsurpassed ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... that flashed over the sea. Upton had just been telling Eric the splendid phrase [Greek: anerithmon gelasma pontion], which he had stumbled upon in an Aeschylus lesson that morning, and they were trying which would hit on the best rendering of it. Eric stuck up for the literal sublimity of "the innumerable laughter of the sea," while Upton was trying to win him over to "the many-twinkling smile of ocean." They were enjoying the discussion, and each stoutly maintaining his own ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... green hill-side, Away from pomp and power; Here are the truths so oft denied To the imperial hour. Dear child, how precious are the tears, Suffusing friendly eyes! Sublimity is in their gleam, A light ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... men to call him "the godlike Daniel." When he appeared upon the Strand in London a great crowd followed him, and a British statesman described Webster as one describes a majestic landscape or the sublimity of a mountain. But during the last years of his life his face took on a strangely pathetic sorrow. With the language of a Dante his biographer has pictured for us an Inferno, in which we see one, ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... speaks in an aspirated tone; if he feels harshly toward anyone or is angry, his voice possesses that guttural quality which indicates the severer and harsher emotion; when he is moved by grandeur and sublimity, his voice naturally takes ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... to abandon myself to the recollections of my own distant travels, I would instance, among the most striking scenes of nature, the calm sublimity of a tropical night, when the stars, not sparkling, as in our northern skies, shed their soft and planetary light over the gently-heaving ocean; or I would recall the deep valleys of the Cordilleras, where the tall and slender palms pierce the leafy vail around them, and waving ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... to dwell on the literary excellence of the Breviary during the recitation of the Office. It is a useful thing that priests should recognise the authorship of the psalms recited, their probable dates, the circumstances of their composition, the sublimity of their thought, the peculiarity of their Hebrew style, the rhythm and poetry of the Hebrews. But the dwelling on these thoughts leads to distractions. Again, some priests, like the clerics of the Renaissance and post-Renaissance times, despise and dislike the Breviary ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... localised and incarnate and their actions woven into a tale, 'The Revolt of Islam' is a failure. In his next great poem he was to pursue precisely the same aims, but with more success, because he had now hit upon a figure of more appropriate vagueness and sublimity. The scheme of 'Prometheus Unbound' (1819) is drawn from the immortal creations ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... have I endeavoured to copy the several beauties of the ancient and modern historians; the impartial temper of Herodotus, the gravity, austerity, and strict morals of Thucydides, the extensive knowledge of Xenophon, the sublimity and grandeur of Titus Livius; and to avoid the careless style of Polybius, I have borrowed considerable ornaments from Dionysius Halicarnasseus, and Diodorus Siculus. The specious gilding of Tacitus I have endeavoured to shun. Mariana, Davila, and Fra. Paulo, are those ...
— English Satires • Various
... seated in the tiny room with her back to the door, her hand on a cradle, and as she rocked she sang softly. She was a plain little woman, the cradle was cheap and common, and her singing was only a monotonous chant; but the scene had a sort of sublimity—it was so old, ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... true that no comparison can exist between the mountain scenery of Britain, and that of many parts of the continent of Europe. But it must be remembered, that magnitude is not essential to beauty; and that even sublimity is not always to be measured by yards and feet. A mountain may be loftier, or a lake longer and wider, without any gain to that picturesque effect, which mainly depends on form, combination, and colouring. Still we do not mean to claim in these ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII. F, No. 325, August 2, 1828. • Various
... wholly in the shadow; yet there are dashes of spray which the shining sun turns to gold. Between the Golden River and ourselves lie some broad fields of ice. In fact, the picture is not altogether one of beauty, for there is a suggestion of sublimity and awe mixed with the view which causes us to shudder in spite of the glowing radiance of the morning. In the next paragraph Hans is shown proceeding on his journey, and then the depressing elements ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... their deaths, amid the uninspiring surroundings of that wayside hospital, took on a grandeur and sublimity ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... needed after the preceding cataclysm. The Development proper is renewed in measure 298 and after a repetition of the interpolated theme in measures 320-335 the rhythm of the first theme asserts itself in all its majesty, carrying us upward to a veritable table-land of sublimity. From this we are brought down through a series of decrescendo, modulatory chords, like drifting mists, to an almost complete cessation of musical life—nothing but a pianissimo tremolo on the strings. From this hush there floats ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... most various ways to effect a settlement between the two tendencies in the conception of the world. This conflict is reflected in the writings of early Christian times: in those of heathens attracted by the sublimity of Christianity, as well as in the writings of those Christians who found it hard to give up the conceptions of the Mysteries. Slowly did Christianity grow out of these Mysteries. On the one hand Christian ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... by the common trees and the common sky. I suppose most of the principles of natural philosophy, and of many of the sciences, must have been derived from an acquaintance with Nature in her ordinary aspects. Oh, do not think it necessary to behold Nature in her great stretches of sublimity in order to appreciate her. You will come to know her far more easily, and much more helpfully, in a little woodside walk, or right here underneath these branches, than you will in Niagara Falls, or in looking at her in the great ocean. She comes down ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... hot, and we wended our way slowly along the plains of Old Castile. With all that pertains to Spain, vastness and sublimity are associated: grand are its mountains, and no less grand are its plains, which seem of boundless extent, but which are not tame unbroken flats, like the steppes of Russia. Rough and uneven ground is continually occurring: here a deep ravine and gully worn by the wintry torrent; yonder an eminence ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... who sleep upon a cannon and lavish my blood for my country, I must consider myself as fortunate in having obtained a pension of one thousand livres." "And do you account as nothing, sir, the liberty of addressing me thus?" replied Le Kain, with all the sublimity and conciseness of an ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... been said it is clear that we must not seek too high for Jeremiah's rank as a poet. The temptation to this—which has overcome some recent writers—is due partly to a recoil from older, unjust depreciations of his prophetic style and partly to the sublimity of the truths which that mixed style frequently conveys. But those truths apart, his verse was just that of the folksongs of the peasants among whom he was reared—sometimes of an exquisite exactness of tone and delicacy of feeling, but sometimes full both of what ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... female singer at the French opera, was a German by birth, and strongly recommended by Gluck for her good natural voice. At Her Majesty's request, Gluck himself taught Madame Saint Huberti the part of Armida. Sacchini, also, at the command of Marie Antoinette, instructed her in the style and sublimity of the Italian school, and Mdlle. Benin, the Queen's dressmaker and milliner, was ordered to furnish the complete dress ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 4 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... the instincts of an artist, had stood for hours on the deck, partially sheltered by a smoke-stack, to study wave motions and the ever-changing effects of the ocean. Never before had he known its sublimity. When the sea was wildest and the deck was wave-swept, he in his safe retreat made sketches of waves and their combinations which he hoped sometime to reproduce on canvas. At other times, conscious of storm dangers in mid-ocean, Leo's conscience troubled him. For a year he had been much in love ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... distinct in manner and expression, and even in idea. Few actors or readers can be found to agree respecting Shakespeare's conception of the character. This, however, may be safely asserted, that no criticism on Hamlet will ever be permanent which does not recognize the sublimity of his nature. Horatio understood Hamlet better than anyone, and his judgment of him ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... wrist; fragments of fossil wood hang from the loins; and to the knees are fastened tortoise-shells. Nothing is worn with a view to ornament. These seeming monstrosities, frightful in their ugliness, move about quite nimbly, and are boldly impudent to a degree approaching sublimity. Notwithstanding their uncouth figures and mountebank tricks their movements at times are undoubtedly graceful, and they appear to exercise a certain authority ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... position of Desdemona is precisely that defined with such quaint sublimity of fancy in the old English byword—"between the devil and the deep sea." Deep and pure and strong and adorable always and terrible and pitiless on occasion as the sea is the great soul of the glorious hero to whom she has given ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Dual, neuter pleural *sic*, and verb singular Theta Talented Homer Valcknaer Principles and Facts Schmidt Puritans and Jacobins Wordsworth French Revolution Infant Schools Mr. Coleridge's Philosophy Sublimity Solomon Madness C. Lamb Faith and Belief Dobrizhoffer Scotch and English Criterion of Genius Dryden and Pope Milton's disregard of Painting Baptismal Service Jews' Division of the Scripture Sanskrit Hesiod Virgil Genius Metaphysical Don Quixote Steinmetz ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... religious faculty. It is the mother and mistress of faith, hope, and love. It is the source of great thoughts, of high aspirations, and of heavenly dreams. Without it the illimitable starlit expanse loses its sublimity, oceans and mountains their awfulness and majesty, flowers their beauty, home its sacred charm, youth its halo, and ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... Holbach has always appealed to a certain type of radical mind and his translators and editors have generally been men who were often over-enthusiastic. For example, Mr. Wilkinson says of the Systeme de la Nature, [64:15] "No work, ancient or modern, has surpassed it in the eloquence and sublimity of its language or in the facility with which it treats the most abstruse and difficult subjects. It is without exception the boldest effort the human mind has yet produced in the investigation of Morals and Theology. The republic of letters has never produced another author ...
— Baron d'Holbach • Max Pearson Cushing
... the young braves listen to the wisdom, or ever now in their Councils witness the allegorical or figurative language so beautifully illustrating the discourses of Red Jacket, Corn Planter, Farmers Brother and other Chiefs, thus eulogized by PRES. DWIGHT: "In strength and sublimity of their eloquence they may be ...
— Birch Bark Legends of Niagara • Owahyah
... menaces him whom the senses yet grasp and inthrall. Dost thou wonder that I close upon thee the gates forever? Dost thou not comprehend, at last, that it needs a soul tempered and purified and raised, not by external spells, but by its own sublimity and valour, to pass the threshold and disdain the foe? Wretch! all my silence avails nothing for the rash, for the sensual,—for him who desires our secrets but to pollute them to gross enjoyments and selfish vice. How have the ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... on that subject in "Twelfth Night," I do not recollect more than one thing said adequately on the subject of music in all literature; it is a passage in the Religio Medici {14} of Sir T. Brown, and though chiefly remarkable for its sublimity, has also a philosophic value, inasmuch as it points to the true theory of musical effects. The mistake of most people is to suppose that it is by the ear they communicate with music, and therefore that they are purely passive to its effects. But this is not ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... are a first essential; the air is a first essential; but the body has many members, given for different purposes, secreting different things, and each has a method of nutrition as special to itself as its own activity. While prayer, then, is the characteristic sublimity of the Christian life, it is by no means the only one. And those who make it the sole alternative, and apply it to purposes for which it was never meant, are really doing the greatest harm to prayer itself. To couple the word "inadequate" with this might word is not to dethrone prayer, ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... Alice, while the chorus of sound about them swelled almost to sublimity, "that I've been getting engaged—to Eugene Herbert, ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... months of 1823—if it can be called living, to leave food untasted, and go in neglect of person and dress. He wrestled so desperately with the difficulties, that anybody but the Cointets would have seen the sublimity of the struggle, for the brave fellow was not thinking of his own interests. The moment had come when he cared for nothing but the victory. With marvelous sagacity he watched the unaccountable freaks of the semi-artificial substances called into existence by man for ends of ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... sentimental ideas of the warrior with which the civilian head is so generously crammed. I love military servitude, and the humble life of the men in the ranks, but I have a genuine horror of heroes and their sublimity. ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... reflection and by a certain note of sublimity in her experience, Missy leaned against the gatepost upon which a lantern was blinking its last shred of life, and gazed at the slow-rising, ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... were silent and empty; and the low but tower-like summit of the blockhouse rose above the bushes, by which it was half concealed, in picturesque beauty. The sun was just casting its brightness into the open places of the glade, and the vault over her head was impending in the soft sublimity of the blue void. Not a cloud was visible, and she secretly fancied the circumstance might be taken as a harbinger of peace ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... religion was met in the order in which it was advanced. Hume's sophistry on the subject of miracles was, if possible, more perfectly answered than it had already been done by Campbell. And in the whole lecture there was so much simplicity and energy, pathos and sublimity, that not another word was uttered. An attempt to describe it, said the traveler, would be an attempt to paint the sunbeams. It was now a matter of curiosity and inquiry who the old gentleman was. The traveler concluded it was the preacher from whom the pulpit eloquence was heard; but no—it ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... fanatical extravagance. Anyone who did not erect or contribute largely to the erection of a temple or a pagoda was not admitted to the ranks of humanity. Men readily sacrificed their estates to form temple domains or to purchase serfs (tera-yakko) to till them. The sublimity of these edifices; the solemn grandeur of the images enshrined there; the dazzling and exquisite art lavished on their decoration; the strange splendour of the whole display might well suggest to the Japanese the ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... disposition, seldom fails to call forth and unfold the liberal virtues of the soul. Brave above all estimation of danger, he was also generous, gentle, complacent and humane; the pattern of the officer, the darling of the soldier: there was a sublimity in his genius which soared above the pitch of ordinary minds; and had his faculties been exercised to their full extent by opportunity and action, had his judgment been fully matured by age and experience, he would without doubt have rivalled in reputation the most celebrated captains ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... of the wild absurdity of the situation. Glancing from one to another, portly Mr. Waldo stood uneasily by. He believed some escaped lunatic had invaded the Lambert. Even Wells, who had known Elmendorf for months, seemed unprepared for the sublimity of this flight. He turned away towards the window to let them settle it between them. At last Allison spoke, ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... of something hovering in the .. centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through. —It's the ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... acting. Yet to us who understand it, it does not seem that Patrick Henry in the old church at Richmond need yield the palm to Chatham in St. Stephen's Chapel, either for the grandeur of his theme or of his stage, or the sublimity of his eloquence. ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... course, in county Cork!' said my father, and we passed on through the debris of blasted rocks, stumps of uprooted trees, and heaps of stones, till we got far enough into the mountain to feel the sublimity of its stern, silent solitude, with the night gathering its shroud of clouds about it, and we were glad to pick our way back to our cheerful tea-table at Mr. Thompson's. We had a long evening before us, but we diversified it (my father hates ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... point which had been reached, called Caley's Repulse, was a spot that almost seemed to forbid man's footsteps to advance beyond it. Nothing was to be seen there in every direction but immense masses of weather-beaten sandstone-rock, towering over each other in all the sublimity of desolation; while a deep chasm, intersecting a lofty ridge covered with blasted trees, seemed to cut off every hope of farther progress. But all these difficulties have now long since been got over, and stage-coaches are able to run across what were a few years ago deemed impassable ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... a feeling allied to devotion, it is that which such a scene of sublimity as this we have just witnessed inspires, and yet that feeling is not devotion. I am aware that it is but the emotion of taste. It may exist without a particle of true religious feeling, or it may coexist and add strength to it. There are thousands, probably, who have here had their ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... which Lincoln possessed of fitting language to thought is marked. It made him the matchless story-teller, and gave sublimity to his graver addresses. His thoroughness and accuracy were a source of wonder and delight to scholars. He had a masterful grasp of great subjects. He was able to look at events from all sides, so as to appreciate how they would appear to different grades of intelligence, ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is, what are you going to do with all these things? ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... man himself was good, and not only good but very handsome. There was a nobility about him beyond that of his family. Those prone to ridicule might perhaps have called him Werter-faced, but to Mary there was a sublimity in this. But then was she in ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... pictures on which the artist would seize with avidity; but, the instant nature attempts any of her grander models, on this, a spot that seems never to rise much above the level of commercial excellencies, it is found that the accessaries are deficient in sublimity, ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... proclaim our return, and sing of the days to come when Fauns and Dryads shall haunt their accustomed groves in beauty. Guided was our choice by those who now sit before the Corycian grotto on thrones of ivory, and in whose songs thou shalt hear notes of sublimity by which years hence thou shall know the greater messenger when he cometh. Attend their voices as one by one they sing to thee here. Each note shalt thou hear again in the poetry which is to come; the poetry which shall bring peace and pleasure to ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... "the greatest orator that ever lived." He seems to have exercised a kind of magical influence over his hearers, which they could not explain, which charmed and overwhelmed them, and "has left behind a tradition of bewitching persuasiveness and almost prophetic sublimity."—See Life of Patrick Henry, by William Wirt, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... manner that they could not choose but believe in them. His strength was in his reverent perception of the majesty of Right as accordant with the Divine and Eternal Will; his power over men was in the sublimity of his appeal to an answering faith ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
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