"Vastness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... themselves to think freely and widely and deeply, with all such aids to thought as exact science can furnish; and the larger the knowledge of the thinker, the more pressing and tremendous the problem appears, and the more hopelessly unanswerable. To Herbert Spencer himself it must have assumed a vastness beyond the apprehension of the average mind; and it weighed upon him more and more inexorably the nearer he approached to death. He could not avoid the conviction—plainly suggested in his magnificent Psychology and in other volumes of his great work—that there exists no rational evidence ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... manner, by means of pretty sentimental tales, and cheap apologues, Mrs. Sand proclaims HER truth—that we need a new Messiah, and that the Christian religion is no more! O awful, awful name of God! Light unbearable! Mystery unfathomable! Vastness immeasurable!—Who are these who come forward to explain the mystery, and gaze unblinking into the depths of the light, and measure the immeasurable vastness to a hair? O name, that God's people of old did fear to utter! ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the nodding wheat, the rivers, cliffs, and islands, to the cities and the people everywhere for thousands of miles. What is the effect of this vastness on the thought of a child? Can you not realize for yourself any clear night that you may gaze at the numberless stars in the arching skies? How small, how infinitely little are we in all the great universe! Have we the imagination to grasp the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... measurement are underlain by materials of higher specific gravity than the continents). In due course of time, when the strain became sufficient, it was readjusted by earth movements of a slowness proportioned to their vastness. These movements while tending upon the whole to raise the continents to or sometimes beyond their former relief, did not reverse the action of erosion agencies in detail, but often produced new lines ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... me more and more as I live longer, that most poetry and most literature and particularly the literature of the past is discordant with the vastness and variety, the reserves and resources and recuperations of life as we live it to-day. It is the expression of life under cruder and more rigid conditions than ours, lived by people who loved and hated more naively, ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... Lord? where is he? Hast thou deprived me of the power once bestowed, to see and hear him through the vastness of intervening space? Oh, in this mighty moment, restore me that divine gift—for the more I feel these human infirmities, which I hail and bless as the end of my eternity of ills, the more my sight loses the power to ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... desolate above all things, like disembarking from the Styx into the desolated underworld, was this landing at night. There was the raw, half-lighted, covered-in vastness of the dark place, boarded and hollow underfoot, with only desolation everywhere. Ursula had caught sight of the big, pallid, mystic letters 'OSTEND,' standing in the darkness. Everybody was hurrying with a blind, insect-like ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... the whole building to produce an overpowering and harmonious effect. But at York, when the minster is entered by the south transept, the east end is not seen at all, and the lantern, with all its height and vastness, is seen at once. Even as viewed from the west end, the choir is shut off from the rest of the church by a heavy screen, and the view eastward is broken and ineffective. But those very qualities of the interior which lessen the beauties of the nave increase the grandeur of the ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... there was a King and Sovereign lord of the great territory of Manzi who was styled FACFUR, so great and puissant a prince, that for vastness of wealth and number of subjects and extent of dominion, there was hardly a greater in all the earth except the Great Kaan himself. [NOTE 1] But the people of his land were anything rather than warriors; all their delight was in women, and nought but women; and so it was above all with the King himself, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... air that took on more and more of a razor-edge as the sun and the last of its warmth went over the rim of the world. It seemed an empty world, a plain of ugly desolation, unfriendly and pitiless in its vastness. Even the soft green of the wheatlands took on a look like verdigris, as though it were something malignant and poisonous. And farther out there were muskegs, and beyond the three-wire fence, which would stand no bar to ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... shame your demands! Surely the vastness of this war, its grim battles, its heroism, its anguish, its sublime earnestness, should sink all schemes of revenge. Before the grandeur of its simple story our children will walk with uncovered heads. ...
— A Man of the People - A Drama of Abraham Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... taken the glass after Mul-tal-la was through, and he stood for a long time gazing at the waste of waters. None spoke, for there was that in the scene and the occasion which made all thoughtful. The grandeur, the majesty, the vastness filled them with awe and held them mute. Finally, the Shawanoe lowered the instrument, and turning toward the boys, said gravely, as he pointed first to the east and then ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... way, not less beautiful. The quiet tranquillity of the large lawn, the half-hidden houses that nestle among its trees, the sense of being completely shut off from the work-a-day world, impress one as much as the apparent vastness of the area thus devoted to the cathedral. Leland, in his "Itinerary," was equally struck with its beauty, although, as the frontispiece shows, the surroundings were very different before Wyatt's exploits, and probably in Leland's time preserved still more of their mediaeval aspect. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... landscape. The birds were waking and their calls filled the air. The amorous notes of the inamboo were repeated and answered from far off by its mate, and the melancholy song of the wacurao piped musically out from the vastness of the forest. Small green paroquets flew about and filled the air with their not altogether pleasant voices. These are the same birds that are well-known to the residents of New York and other large cities, where a dozen of them can often be seen in charge of an intrepid Italian, who has ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... to his "Pearl-diving." He had never dared the big things, the spirit of the beauty that was a fire in him. That article would be a different thing when he was done with it. He was appalled by the vastness of the beauty that rightfully belonged in it, and again his mind flashed and dared, and he demanded of himself why he could not chant that beauty in noble verse as the great poets did. And there was all the ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... thing, we are too much impressed and oppressed by the ideas of magnitude and multitude. Since we have realized the unspeakable insignificance of the earth in relation to the unimaginable vastness of star-sown space, we have come to feel such a disproportion between the mechanism of life and its upshot, as known in our own experience, that we have a vague sense of maleficence, or at any rate of brutal carelessness, in the responsible Power, whoever that may ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... sea had been suddenly let loose. In they poured, thousands upon thousands of them, scrambling, pushing and jumping, scurrying and hurrying, falling and tumbling, as they pressed onwards through the wide doors and then dispersed in the vastness of the gigantic arena, like ants that scamper away to ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... swung across seeming great distances, till a strong arm out of the night and the vastness of things seized her, and the tension of the struggle passed from her limbs, leaving a sense of appeasement as sweet as sleep. She heard a man's voice directing her, and obeyed without understanding. Now the sea supported her ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... monotonous and monstrous battles, a series punctuated only by names: Liege, Antwerp, Mons, Ypres, Verdun and Arras. And if nothing had happened besides the Titanic conflict of material armaments I believe that we should not yet be anywhere near realizing its vastness and its significance. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... love her; and the doom is sealed Of all his happiness and all the woes That shall be born of pregnant years hereafter. The swift poise of a head, a flutter of laughter— And love flows in on him, its vastness pent Within his narrow life: the pain it brings, Boundless; for love is infinite discontent With the poor lonely life of ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... of her, as because of the shrinking of my soul within me from the thought of heading in my loneliness into those prodigious leagues of ocean which lay stretched under the sky. Whilst the hull floated she was something to hold on to, so to say, something for the eye amid the vastness of water to rest upon, something to take out of the insufferable feeling of solitude the poisonous sting ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... worker (at 30s. a week and rations) went his way cheerfully. He had to find some odd bullocks six miles out, in the flat, grey, illimitable plain; then find the herd of milkers somewhere else in that vague vastness, and break seven of them to harness; fix up a dray and make cattle yokes; and then go out into the depths to find a camp thirty miles out, without a fence or a track, and hardly ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... direction; in order that there might, at length, arise, under the auspices of Queen Victoria, built a third time from the ground, an Exchange, worthy of this great Nation and City, and suited to the vastness of a Commerce extending to the circumference of the habitable Globe. His Royal Highness of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Consort of Her Sacred Majesty, laid the first stone on 17 Jan., 1842, in the Mayoralty of the Rt. Hon. John Pirie. Architect, William Tite, F.R.S. May God, our Preserver, ward ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... life lay before him rather as something definite, which he could take up and fashion to his own pleasure, than as a succession of days and years which would inevitably mould and influence him in their course. It is not wholly conceit, perhaps, which so assures these clever lads of the vastness of their untried capabilities, that there are moments when they feel as if they could grasp heaven and earth in their wide consciousness; it is rather a want of experience and clearness of perception. Horace Graham was not particularly conceited, and yet, in common with many other ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... him—its magnificent scenery, the grandeur of the Columbia, the vastness of the territory, and the fertility of the soil. Here were mountains grander than Olympus, and harbors and water-courses as wonderful as the AEgean. He was almost afraid to map the truth in his extensive correspondence with the East, lest it should seem so ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... of the cathedral begins to become real and its majesty is properly appreciated. The total span, from end to end, of 556 feet, compared with the 537 feet of Ely, the 525 of York, the 524 of Lincoln, and the 516 of Canterbury, would not alone produce the effect of almost infinite vastness, and is certainly not realised either in a distant prospect from the hills or in a nearer view from the cathedral precincts. But when once the nave is entered, owing partly to the open and comparatively low choir-screen, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant
... rose into her face and the joy glowing tremulously in her eyes as she looked at him. They would get ready quietly. They might go tomorrow, the next day, any time. It would be a glorious adventure, just they two, with all the vastness of that mountain ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... stirring in me: I was conscious now, as I had not been before, of the past and the present, and these two existed in my mind, yet separated by a great gulf of time—a blank and a nothingness which yet oppressed me with its horrible vastness. How aimless and solitary, how awful my position seemed! It was like that of one beneath whose feet the world suddenly crumbles into ashes and dust, and is scattered throughout the illimitable void, while he survives, blown to some ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... motionless, taking it in. His intellectual faculties were as though non-existent. All the sensitiveness of his nature, like the sensitiveness of a photographic plate, was exposed to that which took place before him. No little detail of the scene would he ever forget; and nothing of what its vastness and mystery and turmoil signified in the world of further meanings would be lost to him, though for many years he would ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... "The vastness of their numbers, and their exceeding minuteness, are circumstances, discovered in the examination of these animalcules, of uncommon interest. In a drop of water examined by a power of 28.224 (magnified superficies) there were ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... come to think of it, we are not so much surprised that we have but a partial and limited revelation on this subject. There may be more divine kindness in that than at first sight appears. When we contemplate the vastness of creation, we see that there are myriads of other worlds far larger and more glorious than our own. Every one of these is likely to have a moral history—it may ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... grasp, the touch conveying more in the way of sympathy than any words would have done, while the discomforts of the novel ride seemed to die away, and the soft dreaminess of the night grew soothing; the vast silvery grey expanse, melting away in its vastness, became lit-up with a faint halo of hope, and with his spirits rising, Frank seemed another man when ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways; nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them greater than the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... about the Reindeer, running under her weather quarter and shouting in chorus, before they brought anybody on deck. Sail was then made at once, and together the two cockle-shells plunged away into the vastness of the Pacific. This was necessary, as 'Frisco Kid informed Joe, in order to have an offing before the whole fury of the storm broke upon them. Otherwise they would be driven on the lee shore of the California coast. Grub and water, he said, could be obtained by running into the land ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... the Hunter's out: The waves begin to wrestle and moan; The Lion stands by his shore alone, And sends to the bounds of Earth and Sea First low notes of the thunder to be. Then East and West through the vastness grim, The whelps of ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... charmed sweetness of love of which she had dreamed in the night. She was only one of the many millions of women who were awaking at the same hour to the same miracle of Nature, yet she might have been the first woman seeking the first man through the vastness and the mystery of an uninhabited earth. Impossible to believe that an experience so wonderful was as common as the bursting of the spring buds or the humming of the thirsty ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... Lutz and Compostilla Streets. A stranger cannot miss it, as it is one of the most formidable buildings in Havana. Though its style has something of the barbaric about it, yet it is chiefly so on account of its ruggedness, vastness and stern grandeur. It is built of stone, cemented and brown in color. The main arched entrance is very lofty, and on the steps as I passed by I noticed a gaunt, diseased and ragged negro, with outstretched arms soliciting alms. I rang the bell. A porter admitted ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... motives arrive at this dangerous conclusion, which spares their pride and caresses their indolence, while it flatters the sense of internal vastness, and invites to headlong intoxication. It allows them to think they are of such a compound, and must necessarily act in that manner. They are not taught at the schools or by the books of the honoured places in the libraries, to examine and see the simplicity ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... enormous edifice over which what would normally be a large congregation has scattered in chilled and chilling solitude Sunday after Sunday! Bishop Brooks himself could not have inspired a congregation of one thousand souls seated in the vastness of St. Peter's at Rome. In that colossal sanctuary it is only on great occasions which bring out the multitudes that the service is before the high altar—at other times the smaller side-chapels ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... they left the river valley and crossed a succession of ridges or plateaus. At last they reached vast black basaltic masses and lava fields, proof of former subterranean fires which seemingly had forever dried out the life of the earth's surface. The very vastness of the views might have had charm but for the tempering feeling of ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... of two kinds; for while the individual structure has been constantly becoming more complex, there are now in existence the analogues of the lowest fossil types, which, with the highest, and with all the intermediate, present a maze and vastness of complication, which, in comparison with the homogeneity of the aggregate of early structure, is sufficiently obvious ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... mainly of cattle trucks, puffed away from the coast town next morning, and attached to it were the cars containing the new air squadron. Late that night it had reached one of the huge airdromes, the vastness of which unfolded itself to the astonished gaze of the boys at daybreak of the morning after. They had not dreamed that such acres and acres of hangars existed along the whole front. The war in the air assumed new proportions to them. They were housed ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... given Europe some idea of the vastness of the world to the west. If Columbus was to bring his own discoveries to a glorious finish, it was high time that, instead of quibbling over maintaining a contract, he should have given up the empty honors that were to have been his, and have asked only for permission ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... And the vastness of it as you look on every side on you impresses you so you feel sunthin' as you would if you wuz sot down on the Desert of Sara, and Sara wuz turned into vistas of bewilderin' beauty towards every ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... and having ran a considerable way, without coming to a termination, stopped to breathe. All was now still, and as she looked around, the gloomy obscurity of the place struck upon her fancy all its horrors. She imperfectly surveyed the vastness of the cavern in wild amazement, and feared that she had precipitated herself again into the power of banditti, for whom along this place appeared a fit receptacle. Having listened a long time without hearing a return ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... associated with man sounds ridiculous; and the biggest fortune or the biggest grief are alike infinitesimal. But when the desire of bigness passes from a man's mind, humility becomes pleasurable, and immensity is soothing. I forgot to think of the vastness of the stars; they were for me neighbourly and friendly presences, talking like a wise old nurse to me of things that happened before my birth, and the ancient kindness of Him whom a daring poet calls, 'My ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... strange that ambassadors and nuncios should become confused and lose all recollection of the addresses they had committed to memory, in the presence of a prince whose exterior so ill accords with the grandeur of his titles and the vastness of his power? His form is below the middle height and very slender, the limbs having even an attenuated look. The whole appearance is that of a man of delicate and even feeble organization. The blonde complexion, the pale blue eyes, and the light sandy hue—save where they ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... American is unemotionally practical, but at heart he is a dreamer, first, last and always. If the Americans have merited any criticism in France, it is owing to the vastness of their plans; the tremendous dream of their preparations postpones the beginning of the reality. Their mistake, if they have made a mistake, is an error of generosity. They are building with a view to flinging millions into ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... been here. . . . To-day I have been driving through some of the best streets in London, and my ideas of its extent and magnificence are rising fast. The houses are more picturesque than ours, and some of them most noble. The vastness of a great capital like this cannot burst upon one at once. Its effect increases daily. The extent of the Park, surrounded by mansions which look, some of them, like a whole history in themselves, has to-day quite ...
— Letters from England 1846-1849 • Elizabeth Davis Bancroft (Mrs. George Bancroft)
... sun as a conveniently long measuring-rod, whereby to express the results. The nearest stars are still hundreds of thousands of times as far off as the sun. Let us ponder for a little on the vastness of these distances. We shall first express them in miles. Taking the sun's distance to be ninety-three million miles, then the distance of the nearest fixed star is about twenty millions of millions of miles—that is to say, we express ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... divine Science weakens in pro- 330:1 portion as mortals give up error for Truth and the un- derstanding of being supersedes mere belief. Until the 330:3 author of this book learned the vastness of Christian Science, the fixedness of mortal illu- sions, and the human hatred of Truth, she cherished 330:6 sanguine hopes that Christian Science would meet with ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... cook. While thus engaged, the missionary and his wife were occupied in tracing the course of the Mississippi and its tributaries upon a pocket map, which was the chief guide in that wilderness of streams and "tributaries." Who could deny the vastness of the field, and the loud call for laborers, when such an immense extent then bore only the name of "Unexplored Region!" And yet, this same headwater territory was teeming with human beings, as rude and uncultivated as the South ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... of the Indians and the vastness of the swamp, it was a faint chance indeed that he or his companion would live to see any of the tribe, but, faint as it was, no other hope remained and Walter sent the canoe onward ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... whole place is, it loses much in interest from its vastness. You never seem to know where you are, or when you have come to an end. I hear that Madame Cousino talks of extending the park still further, right up into the mountains, which seems almost a pity, as it is ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... veins of a universe—are cautiously coined, and thence munificently circulated—she applied herself diligently to the task of gathering, from various sources the data required for her projected work: a vindication of the unity of mythologies. The vastness of the cosmic field she was now compelled to traverse, the innumerable ramifications of polytheistic and monotheistic creeds, necessitated unwearied research, as she rent asunder the superstitious veils which various nations and successive epochs ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... grew tense; she was beginning to realize the vastness of her husband's purchase. She began to wonder, too, how much it had cost ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... the lonely idleness of her own reflections but a few days when the monotony of her life was broken by one of those sudden events which, by the vastness of their consequences, seem not only to change the face of nature for us, and the aspect of all the world without, but also to change ourselves, in our spirits and minds, so that we can never be the same creatures ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... troops so weak and so much out of humour, a general should at his own hand and, strictly speaking, at variance with the constitution, undertake an expedition to a distant and unknown land, full of rapid streams and snow-clad mountains—a land which from the very vastness of its extent rendered any lightly-undertaken attack fraught with danger. The conduct of Lucullus was therefore much and not unreasonably censured in Rome; only, amidst the censure the fact should not have ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... an awful thing to say of any man. She listened without a word, and her stillness now was like the protest of an invincible unbelief. What need she care for the world beyond the forests? I asked. From all the multitudes that peopled the vastness of that unknown there would come, I assured her, as long as he lived, neither a call nor a sign for him. Never. I was carried away. Never! Never! I remember with wonder the sort of dogged fierceness I displayed. I had the illusion of having got the spectre by the throat at last. ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... widowhood, addressed her in the muffled tones of the sympathetic undertaker. Peggy nearly cried. She wished she had chosen another hotel. But where else could she have gone? She had stayed at few hotels in London: once at the Savoy; once at Claridge's; every other time at Sturrocks's. The Savoy? Its vastness had frightened her. And Claridge's? No; that was sanctified for ever. Oliver in his lordly way had snapped his fingers at Sturrocks's. Only the best was good enough for Peggy. Now only ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... forth souls merely that they may be taken back again? To justify their creation, the fulfilment of some educative aim, and then the lasting fruition of it, appear necessary. Why else should a soul be drawn from out the unformed vastness, and have its being struck into bounds, and be forced to pass through such appalling ordeals of good and evil, pleasure and agony? An individual of any kind is as important as its race; for it ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the screen of wonderful carved oak, on the top of which, rising to a height of sixty feet above the floor of the church, stood the great Rood, with the images of the Virgin and St. John on either side. Here, of a sudden, the vastness and the silence of the holy place which they had known, every one, from childhood, with its echoing aisles, the moonlit, pictured windows, its consecrated lamps twinkling here and there like fisher lights upon the darkling waters, seemed to take hold of them. As at the sound of the Voice ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... as in a fevered dream, Such quick reverses, like a judge supreme— Austere but just, they contemplate the end To which the current of events must tend. Self-confidence has taught them to forbear, And in the vastness of their strength, they spare. Armed with impunity, for one in vain Resists a ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... these hundreds could scatter so far through the labyrinth of the Sierras that in a whole summer's journeying they were extremely unlikely to see each other—or indeed any one else, save when they stumbled on one of the established cow camps. The vastness of the California mountains cannot be conveyed to one who has not travelled them. Men have all summer pastured illegally thousands of head of sheep undiscovered, in spite of the fact that rangers and soldiers were out looking for them. One may journey diligently ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... at all times a cheery thing to go bowling along behind a spicy team, but especially so when traversing a wild and half-cultivated country, where everything around you is strange to the eye, and where the vastness of space conveys a feeling of grandeur; nor is it the less enjoyable when the scenery is decked in the rich attire of autumn, and seen through the medium of a clear and cloudless sky. Then, again, there is something peculiarly pleasing while ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... the Works of Nature and Art, as they are qualified to entertain the Imagination, we shall find the last very defective, in Comparison of the former; for though they may sometimes appear as Beautiful or Strange, they can have nothing in them of that Vastness and Immensity, which afford so great an Entertainment to the Mind of the Beholder. The one may be as Polite and Delicate as the other, but can never shew her self so August and Magnificent in the Design. There is something more bold and masterly in the rough careless Strokes of Nature, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... has opened to us ideas of magnificent vastness and greatness, and the perfected microscope has opened to us a world of magnificent smallness and minuteness. The latter has shown us that a drop of water is a world of minute living forms who live, eat, fight, reproduce, and die. The mind is capable of imagining a universe occupying ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... apprehensive slide down. Being raised so high above all objects that divide attention or in some degree obstruct the view, permits a freedom of outlook that sensibly increases the appreciation of the vastness of the enclosed chamber and its enclosing walls. Efforts to establish the age of the deposit by observations on the yearly growth, would afford little satisfaction, for the obvious reason that conditions ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... a sacrifice when, by the putting away of foolish desires, we find God! And to find God, through the following of Jesus Christ, is to gain so much (even in this world, and without waiting for the next) that those who gain it never cease to be amazed at the vastness of it. ...
— The Golden Fountain - or, The Soul's Love for God. Being some Thoughts and - Confessions of One of His Lovers • Lilian Staveley
... had fallen, though the wind still held steady, and this surface calmness, under-run by a gentle swell, served only to emphasize the vastness of the view. The island seemed immensely remote and immense in size, the far snow-covered mountains the mountains of a land where giants had lived and from which they had ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... descending the mountain now, scanning the depths closely, and from time to time shouting, uttering a loud, prolonged familiar cry which soon died away in that silent vastness. Then, he put his ear to the ground, to listen. He thought he could distinguish a voice, and so he began to run and shout again. But he heard nothing more and sat down, worn out and in despair. Toward midday he breakfasted and gave Sam, who was as tired as himself, something ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... philosophy,—that theory of the sole Divine Substance, the All-One, which Goethe in early life found so pacifying to his troubled spirit, and which, vague and barren as it proves on nearer acquaintance, induces at first, above all other systems, a sense of repose in illimitable vastness and immutable necessity. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... religious or supernatural forces. Down to the year 300 of the Christian era they were little changed, and in spite of Plato and the sceptics were more apparently chaotic than ever. The experience of three thousand years had educated society to feel the vastness of Nature, and the infinity of her resources of power, but even this increase of attraction had not yet caused economies ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... a long time and for a great distance. Prepared as he was to find a great extent, he was still astonished at its vastness. The half had not been told him! and though he had traversed so much, he was told that this was but a fraction of the whole extent. The average height of the passage ways was about eight feet, but in many places ...
— The Martyr of the Catacombs - A Tale of Ancient Rome • Anonymous
... his head leaning forward over his silver plate. A heavy silence fell. Death hovered over that table—and also, as it were, the breath of past ages. The multitude of lights, the polished floor of costly wood, the bare whiteness of walls wainscotted with marble, the vastness of the room, the imposing forms of furniture, carved heavily in ebony, impressed me with a sense of secular and austere magnificence. For centuries there had always been a Riego living in this fortress-like palace, ruling this portion of the New World with the whole majesty of his ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... extraordinary as his extent of information, is its singular activity. His energies never seem to flag—even for an instant; he does not seem to know what it is to be fatigued, or jaded. Some such quality as this, indeed, the vastness and universality of his acquirements called for, in order to make the weight endurable to himself, and to bear him up during his long career of political excitement. Take the routine of a day for instance. In his early life he has been known to attend, in his place in court, on circuit, ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... turned and left him there on the hillside, and went back to the town, awestruck by the vastness of the man's sorrow. And afterwards, for many years, when any of them heard of a great grief, he shook his head and said that he and those who had sung with him over a lonely grave in the mountains, alone knew what a man could feel and ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... inconceivably vast areas in space. Of the correctness of this hypothesis it is unnecessary to speak. It is to the Darwinian speculation what the infinite is to the infinitessimal, and we only refer to it to bring out the vastness of the conception as compared to the latter theory, and to predicate thereon the more conclusive induction that an Infinite Intelligence ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... compound quadrifarious, Invincible as wight Briareus![2] Hail! doubly-doubled mighty merry one, Stronger than triple-bodied Geryon![3] O may your vastness deign t' excuse The praises of a puny Muse, Unable, in her utmost flight, To reach thy huge colossian height! T' attempt to write like thee were frantic, Whose lines are, like thyself, gigantic. Yet let me bless, in humbler strain, Thy vast, thy bold Cambysian[4] ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... Market Mr. Gladstone addressed more than twenty thousand people, one of the largest congregations ever assembled in-doors in Scotland, and met with a reception which for enthusiasm was in keeping with the vastness of the audience. December 5th, at Glasgow, he delivered his address as Lord Rector to the students of the University, and in the evening addressed an immense audience of nearly six thousand in St. Andrew's Hall. He was most enthusiastically received, ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... beyond our adequate comprehension he must be. As men in old tales used to take diffused superhumans, the genii, and by magic word bring them down into a stoppered bottle where they could be held in manageable form, so man has taken the vastness of God and run ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... smoke and din indistinguishable. It seems hardly possible that these dream-like masses, with their sparkling lights, like reversed heavens, are the rude, restless, discordant gehennas which they sometimes seem to us by day. And yet I realize the awfulness and vastness of these great living creatures far more than in the belittling and disillusionizing daylight. The anchored or passing vessels only add to the sense of seclusion,—the former with a solitary lantern ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... disaster has not been told. Indeed, the most graphic description that can be written will not tell half the tale. No pen can describe nor tongue tell the vastness of ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... watching the clock. The shadow of what once was in France is an abiding presence for us. We know nothing can happen again which will release us from it. And yet how much has been written of it? That is the measure of its vastness and its mystery—it possesses the minds of many men, but they are silent on what they know. They rarely speak of it, except to one of the fraternity. But where are their thoughts? Wandering, viewless and uneasy wraiths, over Flanders, in Artois and Picardy. Those thoughts ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... speech, saving their breath for the work of their bodies. On every side was the silence, pressing upon them with a tangible presence. It affected their minds as the many atmospheres of deep water affect the body of the diver. It crushed them with the weight of unending vastness and unalterable decree. It crushed them into the remotest recesses of their own minds, pressing out of them, like juices from the grape, all the false ardours and exaltations and undue self-values of the human soul, until they perceived themselves finite and ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... search very deeply into my soul (an exercise much in vogue in Boston), I might perhaps find reasons for my rambling off. To say that Boston did not interest me would be the reverse of the truth. It interested me deeply; but it did not excite me with a sense of novelty or vastness. One can only repeat the obvious truth that it is like an exceptionally dignified and stately English town. One instinctively looks around for a cathedral, and finds the State House in its stead. To the founders of this city, the glory of God was not a thing to be ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... in speaking of the affair he should certainly not commiserate the man who had got his deserts, and saying this he burst into a petty fury against the epistle of Dr. Shrapnel, which appeared to be growing more monstrous in proportion to his forgetfulness of the details, as mountains gather vastness to the eye at a certain remove. Though he could not guess the reason for Mr. Romfrey's visit to Bevisham, he was, he said, quite prepared to maintain that Mr. Romfrey had a perfect justification for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in the awful vastness of the universe. In the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built for themselves mankind ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... dollars." Jerome said that with a gasp of horror and admiration at the vastness of it. Sometimes to him that thousand dollars almost represented infinity, and seemed more than the stars of heaven. His childish brain, which had scarcely contemplated in verity more than a shilling at a time of the coin of the realm, reeled ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... implies that therefore God is bound to fit him for his office. That is the boldness permitted to faith,—to remind God of His own past acts, which pledge Him to give what He has put us into circumstances to need. With beautiful humility, Solomon dwells on his youth and inexperience, and on the vastness of the charge laid on him. All these considerations are the motives for his choice of a gift, and also pleas with God ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... and the Duke of Luxembourg maintained the glory of the French arms by a victory over William at Steinkirk. But the battle was a useless butchery in which the conquerors lost as many men as the conquered. From that moment France felt herself disheartened and exhausted by the vastness of her efforts. The public misery was extreme. "The country," Fenelon wrote frankly to Lewis, "is a vast hospital." The tide too of the war began to turn. In 1693 the campaign of Lewis in the Netherlands proved a fruitless one, and Luxembourg ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... alone with the sunset and with the stubble—alone in this vastness which is so like the sea—alone—two tiny, moving black specks with a background of radiance and a golden haze to envelop them. In this immensity it seemed so much more easy to speak of love—for love could fill the plain and find room for its own immensity in this vastness which ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the vastness of our aerial effort on the British front in France can be gathered from the R.F.C. work performed on ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... telegrams have kept you pretty well up to date as to all that has occurred in this most God-forsaken corner of the world. The longer one stays here the more does the spirit of the moor sink into one's soul, its vastness, and also its grim charm. When you are once out upon its bosom you have left all traces of modern England behind you, but, on the other hand, you are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of the prehistoric people. On all sides of you as you walk are the houses of these forgotten folk, ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... propositions in the year 1778, circumstanced as America was at that time, is a far greater instance of unshaken fortitude than the refusal of the Spanish mediation by the Court of London: and other historians, besides the Abbe, struck with the vastness of her conduct therein, have, like himself, attributed it to a circumstance which was then unknown, the alliance with France. Their error shows their idea of its greatness; because, in order to account for it, ...
— A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America, in Which the Mistakes in the Abbe's Account of the Revolution of America Are Corrected and Cleared Up • Thomas Paine
... to brood Of shadowy vastness, such as made my heart Throb fast; anon I paused, and in a state Of half expectance ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... stream is sluggish, and is thickly wooded to the water's edge, with here and there an exposure of red granite. It is a very beautiful stream, and it was a pleasure to get out of the great river and its oppressive vastness into the familiar-looking, homely water, its eastern rocks and exquisite curves and bends. Rounding a point, we came upon a camp of Chipewyans drying fish and making birch-bark canoes, all of them fat, dirty, like ourselves, and happy; and, passing on, at dusk we reached the ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... a great white radiance streamed through the vastness of the aisles. The moon, that was at her height, had broken through the clouds. The snow had ceased to fall. The light reflected from the snow without was clear as the light of dawn. It fell through the arches full upon the two pictures ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... Thi; but he glanced at them unheeding, did not recognize his ancestors. And he did not care to penetrate into the tombs of Mera and Meri-Ra-ankh, into the Serapeum and the Mestaba of Ptah-hotep. Perhaps he was right. The Serapeum is grand in its vastness, with its long and high galleries and its mighty vaults containing the huge granite sarcophagi of the sacred bulls of Apis; Mera, red and white, welcomes you from an elevated niche benignly; Ptah-hotep, priest ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... will seek not the shadowy region; Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear; And visions rising, legion after legion, Bring the unreal ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... interest of New York State in this great Exposition. Here, during the period when thousands shall visit these grounds, those who owe allegiance to the Empire State will find a place which will typify to them their home and impress them, let us hope, to a greater degree with the vastness of our State and of the position which it occupies in our commonwealth of nations. To those who have been intrusted with the work we owe thanks for the conception of their duty and for this magnificent edifice which, in its strength and beauty of architecture, is symbolical of the ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... miracle of light to kindle it into smiles; the whole is, like the principal figure in it, 'a forerunner of the dawn.' The same atmosphere tinges and imbues every object, the same dull light 'shadowy sets off' the face of nature: one feeling of vastness, of strangeness, and of primeval forms pervades the painter's canvas, and we are thrown back upon the first integrity of things. This great and learned man might be said to see nature through the glass of time; he alone has a right to be considered as the painter ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... notwithstanding the vastness of his learning and the gigantic powers of his mind, he can, when it so pleases him, disburden himself of these great matters, and descend from his lofty height to the comprehension of the little ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... life so many unpleasant scenes with women that this was no new experience. This woman had, by her own indiscretion, put a whip into his hand; and, if necessary to secure his own way, by God! he meant to use it! These last days had made her a more desirable possession in his eyes. The vastness of her estate had taken hold on him, and his father's remorseless intention with regard to his will would either keep him with very limited funds, or leave him eventually a pauper if he forestalled ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... together, was the signal that they had been found, and for the searchers to return. Immediately all those who were able to act as searchers, without themselves becoming lost, scattered to their work. On account of the vastness of the forest Mr Ross positively refused to allow Frank, Alec, or Sam to go any distance away on the search. This was a keen disappointment to the boys, but Mr Ross was wise in his decision. The searchers had very little to assist them in their work. There were any number of signs ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... soaring wonder of utilitarian architecture, with something of a fancy that it was never made, that it has stood there since the morning of the world. It has the lightness and the strength, the absence of ornament and the essential beauty, the vastness and the perfection, of a ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... deeply felt the desolation of the northland. In a wilderness there is nothing forbidding to me; its huge earth-bedded, living pillars supporting the enormous canopy of green, its vastness, its mystery, its calm silence, may awe yet nothing sadden. But a vague foreboding enters when man enters. Where his corn grows amid the cinders of primeval things, his wanton gashes on tree and land, his beastly pollution of the wild, crystal waters, all the ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... were brave, And faith is courage in the things divine, Courage with meekness blent. The heroic heart Beats to the spiritual cognate, paltering not Fraudulent with truth once known. Like winds from God God's message on them fell. Old bonds of sin, Snapt by the vastness of the growing soul, Burst of themselves; and in the heart late bound Virtue had room to breathe. As when that Voice Primeval o'er the formless chaos rolled, And, straight, confusions ceased, the greater orb Ruling the day, the lesser, night; even ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... been a cruel man, and I could not find it in my heart to do this. The silence of the mountain and the sky-which seemed a thing apart from the roar of the torrent and not to be broken by it—awed me. The vastness of the solitude in which we sat, the dark void above, through which the stars kept shooting, the black gulf below in which the unseen waters boiled and surged, the absence of other human company or other signs of human existence, put such a face upon the deed that I gave up the thought of it with ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... "This vastness or enlargedness which is not bounded by anything, however plain and simple it may be, increases every day; so that my soul in partaking of the qualities of her spouse, seems also to partake of his immensity."—Madame ...
— Memoranda Sacra • J. Rendel Harris
... unsociable. You couldn't get chummy with it. I turned to my great barn of a room. You couldn't get chummy with that, either. I began to unpack, with furious energy. In vain I turned every gas jet blazing high. They only cast dim shadows in the murky vastness of that awful chamber. A whole Fourth of July fireworks display, Roman candles, sky-rockets, pin-wheels, set pieces and all, could not have made that room take on a ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... ambassador to the Tzar, had told him in several conversations, one of which had lasted seven hours, that he would find more terrible disaster in Russia than in Spain, that his army would be destroyed in the vastness of the country by the iron climate, that the Tzar would retire to the farthest Asiatic provinces rather than accept a dishonorable peace, that the Russians would retreat but ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... child, care more for it than I do. My love of fiction began with my breath, and will end with it; and goes on increasing; and the heights and depths of the consumption which it has induced you may guess at perhaps, but it is a sublime idea from its vastness, and will gain on you but slowly. On my tombstone may be written 'Ci-git the greatest novel reader in the world,' and nobody will forbid the inscription; and I approve of Gray's notion of paradise ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... the Labour Members who effected the change. For first time in life of present Parliament they with united front took the lead at a grave national crisis, representing without bluster the vastness of the social and political force behind them. JOHN WARD in weighty speech brought down the real question from nights of personal animosity and party rancour. It was "whether the discipline of the Army is to be maintained; whether it is to continue ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 1, 1914 • Various
... passion of a love Unspeakable, the ardour of a hope Boundless, insatiate: "Oh! suffering world, Oh! known and unknown of my common flesh, Caught in this common net of death and woe, And life which binds to both! I see, I feel The vastness of the agony of earth, The vainness of its joys, the mockery Of all its best, the anguish of its worst; Since pleasures end in pain, and youth in age, And love in loss, and life in hateful death, And death in unknown lives, which ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... Presentiment of better things on earth Sweeps in with every force that stirs our souls To admiration, self-renouncing love, Or thoughts, like light, that bind the world in one: Sweeps like the sense of vastness, when at night We hear the roll and dash of waves that break Nearer and nearer with the rushing tide, Which rises to the level of the cliff Because the wide Atlantic roils behind, Throbbing respondent ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... Colonel Clark on certain matters, and had but just arrived. But so modest was he that he would not let it be known that he was in the station, for fear of interrupting the pleasure. He was much the same as I had known him, only grown older and his reputation now increased to vastness. He and Clark sat on a door log talking for a long time on Kentucky matters, the strength of the forts, the prospect of new settlers that autumn, of the British policy, and finally of a journey which Colonel Clark ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... poet, of putting great masses through the most complicated evolutions without clash or confusion, but he was not curious that every foot should be at the same angle. In reading "Paradise Lost" one has a feeling of vastness. You float under an illimitable sky, brimmed with sunshine or hung with constellations; the abysses of space are about you; you hear the cadenced surges of an unseen ocean; thunders mutter round the ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... being very uneasy, had sent at all hazards to her husband. The king took a glass of wine and water and ate an orange, and got up for a moment to see whether the boat he was expecting was nowhere visible on the vastness of the sea. There was not a boat in sight, only the brig tossing gracefully on the horizon, impatient to be off, like a horse awaiting ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MURAT—1815 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... heard, a whisper, Coming from the starry distance, Coming from the empty vastness, Low, and musical, and tender; And the voice said: 'O Osseo! O my son, my best beloved! Broken are the spells that bound you, All the charms of the magicians, All the magic powers of evil; Come ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... brief, fascinated glance was done, there dropped upon my soul a sensation as of brooding weight intolerable; a spiritual oppression as though some vastness was falling, pressing, stifling me, I turned—and Larry caught me as ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... vastness of dispersion he was wearing silently away. He had had blood which had been drunk, skin which had been eaten, flesh which had been stolen. Nothing had passed him by without taking somewhat from him. December had borrowed cold of him; ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... the Sea of Rains here revealed itself in all its vastness to the eyes of the travellers, though it must be acknowledged that the immense depression so called, did not afford them a very clear idea regarding its exact boundaries. Right ahead of them rose Lambert about ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... as it has or has not profited by the divine sacrifice, so will the reward or punishment be infinite; at the final judgment, an eternity of torment or bliss opens before it. All other interests vanish alongside of a vision of such vastness. Thenceforth, righteousness is the most serious of all aims, not in the eyes of man, but of God and again, day after day, the soul renews within itself that tragic questioning in which the Judge interrogates and the sinner ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... How many hundred millions!" said his companion, gloating cheerfully over the vastness of unknown possibilities. "I've crossed with Miss Vanderpoel often, two or three times when she was in short frocks. She's the kind of girl you read about. And she's got money enough to buy in half a ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... as thy June turf keep his memory. Let Nor wood, nor dell, nor storied stream forget, Nor winds that blow round lonely Cedarcroft; Let the home voices greet him in the far, Strange land that holds him; let the messages Of love pursue him o'er the chartless seas And unmapped vastness of his unknown star Love's language, heard beyond the loud discourse Of perishable fame, in every sphere Itself interprets; and its utterance here Somewhere in God's unfolding universe Shall reach our traveller, softening the surprise Of his rapt ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the power of Russia Much as we may dread Russia for is from the vast extent of its the vastness of her territory and territory, and the great and of her rapidly increasing numbers, rapidly increasing number of there is greater cause for fear its (54) subjects, (5) it is in the military spirit and the still more (5) so ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... I can conceive nothing more sublimating than the strange peril and novelty of an adventure such as this. May God grant that we succeed! I ask not success for mere safety to my insignificant person, but for the sake of human knowledge and—for the vastness of the triumph. And yet the feat is only so evidently feasible that the sole wonder is why men have scrupled to attempt it before. One single gale such as now befriends us—let such a tempest whirl forward a balloon for four or five ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... a company of persons filling to excess the space they occupy and pressing inconveniently upon one another; the total number in a crowd may be great or small. Throng is a word of vastness and dignity, always implying that the persons are numerous as well as pressed or pressing closely together; there may be a dense crowd in a small room, but there can not be a throng. Host and multitude both imply vast numbers, but a multitude may be diffused over a great space so as ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... awakened to the vastness and promise of the home mission fields which they have put in charge of the American Missionary Association. They have not yet recognized the peculiar fitness of our free-church system for the people who have so lately come ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 4, April 1896 • Various
... against it, or rebounding, so that they were noiseless. No fishes rose to the surface. There was nothing living near, except a blue butterfly, which settled on the mast, having ventured thus far from land. The vastness of the sky, over-arching the broad water, the sun, and the motionless filaments of cloud, gave no repose for his gaze, for they were seemingly still. To the weary gaze motion is repose; the waving boughs, the foam-tipped waves, afford positive rest to look at. Such intense stillness ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... white foam at his feet; near the horizon a pitch-black wall of cloud seemed to rise sheer from the water and join the gray sky that arched over the great flat spaces. And in the absence of stars, the earth itself seemed to gain in vastness and mystery, its own awfulness, as it sped round, unlessened by those endless perspectives of vaster planets. And from the soundless night and sea and sky, and from those austere and solemn stretches of sand and forest, wherein ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... vastness, and solitude, rolled upon our souls emerging from the darkness, overwhelmingly, like a wave of the sea. We might have been an only couple sent back from the underworld to begin another cycle of pain on a depopulated earth. It had not for us even the fitful caress of a breeze; and the only sound ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... eloquence and power. Probably his greatest achievement was his remarkable, unerring ability to create atmospheres of widely varied kinds in his music, and in this respect there is no composer quite his equal. The soft beauty, grandeur, vastness and might of Nature; the joys and sorrows of Humanity; the romance of History and imaginative Legend; the buoyancy of sunshine and wind; the mysteriousness of enchanted woods; all these he translated with inimitable vividness into music. He could ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... another bosky-looking spot, which you learn to be about the same amount of manorial umbrage belonging to Lord Some-One-Else. And to right and left of these, in shaded stretches, lie other estates of equal consequence. It was therefore not the smallness but the vastness of the country that struck me, and I was not at all in the mood of a certain American who once, in my hearing, burst out laughing at an English answer to my inquiry as to whether my interlocutor often saw Mr. B——. "Oh no," the answer had been, "we never see him: he lives away ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... the subject of the new tariff, let us observe, that the suddenness and vastness of its changes (some of which we consider to be of questionable propriety) for a time unavoidably deranged mercantile operations; and in doing so, as necessarily produced many cases of individual dissatisfaction ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... outposts,—striving with others ever to deepen the interest and increase the fidelity of the loyal men and women of a loyal New England town. I was prepared then, both from my hearty respect for the charity and from my general conception of the nature and vastness of its operations, to welcome every opportunity to improve my knowledge of its plans and practical workings. I therefore gladly accepted the invitation which came to me to visit the head-quarters of the Commission at Washington, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... has chosen the new inaugurating stamp. It is in the form of a miniature map of the world distinguishing British possessions and illustrating the relative vastness of the Empire, in which Canada, of course, ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole
... The town was going backward. People who had been rich were, many of them, in absolute distress for the necessaries of life. And these men, in a vague sort of way, were blamed for it. Now, however, we can begin to see the wisdom of their plans and the vastness of the scope of their combinations. Nothing but the element of time was wanting, abundantly to vindicate their judgment and sagacity. The industries they founded succeeded as soon as they were divorced from the real-estate speculation which unavoidably entered into their management at the ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... or action. They brought to the contemplation of the new heaven and the new earth an imagination saturated with the spiritual convictions of the old era, which were not lost, but only infinitely expanded. The planets whose vastness they now learnt to recognize were, therefore, only the more powerful for evil or for good; the tides were the breathing of Demogorgon; and the idolatrous American tribes were real worshippers of the real devil, ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... the night, he stopped in the Western part of the world, in the kingdom of Atlas; and {there} he sought a little rest, until Lucifer should usher forth the fires of Aurora, Aurora, the chariot of the day. Here was Atlas, the son of Iapetus, surpassing all men in the vastness of his body. Under this king was the extremity of the earth, and the sea which holds its waters under the panting horses of the Sun, and receives the wearied chariot. For him, a thousand flocks, and as many herds, wandered over the ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... nothing but the glow of the dwindling fire and the sweep of sand, covered sparsely with ragged bushes. New stars flared out; the spirit of the night descended upon the desert. As the world seemed to draw further and further away from them, these two beings, strange to the vastness engulfing them, huddled closer together. They spoke little, always in lowered voices. Between words they were listening, awaiting ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... advantage the Peristyle now burning almost alone. They made the circuit slowly, Sommers leading his frightened animal among the refuse of the grounds. Mrs. Preston walked tranquilly by his side, her face still illuminated by the fading glow. The prairie lay in gloomy vastness, lighted but a little way by the waning fire. Along the avenue forms of men and women—mere mites—were running to and fro. The figures were those of gnomes toiling under a gloomy, uncertain firmament, or of animals furtively peeping out of the gloom ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... room, and that carefully shaded; so that there was no glare anywhere. None of that direct light which can manifest itself as a power or an entity, and so make for companionship. The room was a large one, and lofty in proportion to its size. In its vastness was place for a multitude of things not often found in a bedchamber. In far corners of the room were shadows of uncanny shape. More than once as I thought, the multitudinous presence of the dead and the past took ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... its vastness, so are its wonders. Stupendous mountains reach to three and nearly four miles in height, loftier than any others in the United States or its possessions. The Yukon River is 2,300 miles in length and ...
— The Beauties of the State of Washington - A Book for Tourists • Harry F. Giles
... atoms of matter," says Dr. Samuel Brown, "could be conceived of in no other way than as the persistent existence of the will of God himself, in whom we live and move and have our being, and which, if but for an instant withdrawn, the whole material universe and its forces in all their vastness, glory, and beauty, would collapse and sink in a moment into ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... life of that sort which my birth in time and space permitted me to attain. And more than that. It carried a promise. It was the beginning. From the sandspit the way led out through the Golden Gate to the vastness of adventure of all the world, where battles would be fought, not for old shirts and over stolen salmon boats, but for high ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... its practical workings. The tree is known by its fruits. Rationalism may be of evil character, but we must see the results it has produced,—the great overthrow of faith it has effected, and its influence upon the pulpit and press of the countries invaded by it, before we can comprehend the vastness of our danger. An enumeration of the evil doings of a public enemy is the best plan to forestall his future misdeeds. We are not to judge Rationalism by its professions. The question is not, What does it wish? At what does it aim? or, What is its creed? But the true way to measure, understand, ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... the Naturalist and all such as delight in contemplating sublime objects of nature, to see this skeleton; and there can scarcely be an exhibition better calculated to impress the youthful mind with the vastness of creation. It stands nearly 13 feet high, and the clear space beneath the ribs ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 368, May 2, 1829 • Various
... him into vastness, King became aware of frame beds, placed at intervals in a row, each with a mat beside it. And there were several brass basins and ewers for water. Also there were some little bronze lamps; the guide lit three of them, and King took up one to examine it. As he did ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... "Everywhere and always he cared for me. Ever prompt and decisive where aid was required, with a cordial response to all my wishes, and devoted love for me, he was to me what I had never found before, and with that intensity whose fullness we only comprehend when it actually embraces us in all its vastness." ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... ambition and no dread but of poverty, and a long list of rights thrust suddenly into their hands, with liberty to exercise them,—the right to vote, to speak, to print, to be tried by jury,—all this margin for unfettered action, even the corresponding vastness of the country itself, whose ruggedest features and greatest distances were playthings of the popular energy,—to love and extol these things were held by us equivalent to having a native land and feeding a patriotic flame. But now all at once ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... daughter and his son, and about Violet Effingham. So sudden, indeed, and so confidential was the conversation, that Phineas was almost silenced for awhile. A word or two had been said about Loughlinter, of the beauty of the place and of the vastness of the property. "I am almost afraid," said Lord Brentford, "that Laura ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... through the ragged patches of smoke from chimneys innumerable, it had a gloomy impressiveness well in keeping with the mind of her who brooded over it. Directly in front, rising mist-detached from the lower masses of building, stood in black majesty the dome of St. Paul's; its vastness suffered no diminution from this high outlook, rather was exaggerated by the flying scraps of mirky vapour which softened its outline and at times gave it the appearance of floating on a vague troubled ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... on. It was enough that they spoke with a peculiar accent—everything they said must be barbarous; but she was pleased once more to eat off plate, and to find herself in rooms which, though grotesque and comfortless, yet wore an air of state, and whose vastness enabled her to keep aloof from those with whom she never willingly came in contact. It was therefore with regret she saw the day of her departure arrive, and found herself once more an unwilling inmate of her only asylum; particularly as her situation now required ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... banks of the river, it is a conspicuous object from every quarter, and is as beautiful in its proportions when seen from a distance as in its details when more closely and minutely inspected: an unfailing source of gratification to the beholder, it well merits repeated visits. In its vastness, in its costly material, in its beautiful proportion, and in its delicacy of detail, it stands a noble monument of the talent which devised, and of the skill which executed it. It is said to have incessantly occupied 20,000 men for ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... scarce. I nearly dropped. All the climbing appeared to come hardest on the middle of my right foot, and it could scarcely have burned hotter if it had been in fire. Despite the strenuous toil there were not many moments that I was not aware of the vastness of the gulf below, or the peaceful lakes, brown as amber, or the golden parks. And nearer at hand I found magenta-colored Indian paint brush, very ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... banqueting-hall, a splendid, panelled room with deep-embrasured windows, from which the defences had now been removed and through which the inmates could have noble views of the lawns and gardens beyond the moat. The little company of three seemed, as it were, lost in the vastness of the chamber as they sat at meat together at the oak table by the hearth at one end of the room, Brilliana at the head, with Halfman at her right and Evander at her left as the guest and stranger. It proved a vastly pleasant meal to Evander, for the talk was brisk and entertaining, and there ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... simplification of the extremely complicated Jewish ritual, the remodeling of pedagogic methods, and, above all, the cultivation of the extended fields of Jewish science, whose head and front is Jewish historical research in all its vastness and detail. Heine's friend, Zunz, laid the cornerstone of Jewish science in the second decade of the nineteenth century. His work was taken up by a goodly company of zealous and able builders occupied for half a century with the task of rearing the proud edifice of a scientific historical ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... come to one not familiar with the vastness of the organized movement for rural welfare may be that a large number of agencies have undertaken rural service for their own sakes rather than for the sake of the community. This is not the case. It is recognized that rural organization for definite objectives should take the place of previous ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt
... not altogether the divine rage of the artist that had wrought this havoc. The confusion argued a power at war with itself rather than with its creations; the very vastness of it all suggested a deity tied as to time, but apparently unshackled as to space. That was it. There really wasn't as much time as there used to be. It was in his free evenings and on Sundays that his best thoughts came to him, the beautiful shy thoughts that must ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... written in so young an age, that if we shall reflect on the vastness of the argument, and his manner of handling it, he may seem like one of the miracles that he there adorns; like a boy attempting Goliah. This perhaps, may be the reason, that in some places, there may be more youthfulness and redundance of fancy, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber |
