"Abysmal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... company's worth all it costs, Narcisse. Excuse me; I always forget your last name—and your first is so appropriate." It was worth all it cost, though Richling could ill afford the purchase. The young Latin's sweet, abysmal ignorance, his infantile amiability, his artless ambition, and heathenish innocence started the natural gladness of Richling's blood to effervescing anew every time they met, and, through the sheer impossibility of confiding any of his troubles to the Creole, made him think them ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... Clavering wondered if this were a secret declaration of war. She, too, was of the siren class, and it was possible that she and Mary Zattiany derived from some common ancestress who had combed her hair on a rock or floated northward over the steppes of Russia. But there were abysmal differences between the two women, as Clavering well knew. Marian Lawrence, with great natural intelligence, never read anything more serious than a novel and preferred those that were not translated into English. She took no interest whatever in anything outside her inherited ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... misfortune's stroke are bent, when all your hopes seem riding round in hearses—a scowling brow won't help you worth a cent. Look pleasant, please, when days are dark and dismal and all the world seems in a hopeless fix; the clouds won't go because your grief's abysmal, the sun won't shine the sooner for your kicks. Look pleasant, please, when Grip—King of diseases, has filled your system with his microbes vile; I know it's hard, but still, between your sneezes, you may be able to produce a smile. Look pleasant, please, whatever trouble galls you; a gloomy ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... has enriched our language with many new expressions, but none more beautiful than that of "Somewhere in France." To all noble minds, while it sounds the abysmal depths of tragic suffering, it rises to the ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... the forces you are up against? Have you looked into the unfathomable heart of this trouble? Understood the tug of the towns, the call of money to money; grasped the destructive restlessness of modern life; the abysmal selfishness of people when you threaten their interests; the age-long apathy of those you want to help? Have ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... not about Sir Claude but about peacocks—too strange for the child to have the presence of mind to thank her. But the felicity in which she had arrived was so proof against everything that Maisie felt more and more the depth of the purpose that must underlie it. She had a vague sense of its being abysmal, the spirit with which Mrs. Beale carried off the awkwardness, in the white and gold salon, of such a want of breath and of welcome. Mrs. Wix was more breathless than ever; the embarrassment of Mrs. Beale's isolation was as nothing ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... feeling, and of the blind selfishness of a decadence born of long freedom from any form of national discipline; of liberties too easily won and but half-understood; of superficial education as to rights, and abysmal ignorance as ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... important, they had so faint a disapproval for sins which we condemn, and so weak an indignation against vices which we abhor, that in their early years we can hardly suppose them to have often fathomed those "abysmal deeps of personality," the recognition of which is a necessary element ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... she should fail and perish utterly, God, before whom ever lie bare The abysmal deeps of Personality, [39] Plagued her with ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... Mildred, like a white apparition in the full light from the open furnace doors. He glares into her eyes, turned to stone. As for her, during his speech she has listened, paralyzed with horror, terror, her whole personality crushed, beaten in, collapsed, by the terrific impact of this unknown, abysmal brutality, naked and shameless. As she looks at his gorilla face, as his eyes bore into hers, she utters a low, choking cry and shrinks away from him, putting both hands up before her eyes to shut out the sight of his face, to protect ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... the first precipitous descent of a mighty hill the whole earth seemed to drop out from under the car. Down-down-down with incredible swiftness and smoothness the great machine went diving towards abysmal space! Up-up-up with incredible bumps and bouncings, trees, bushes, stonewalls went rushing to ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... not to say ofttimes, emerged from much worse spots; from little lazy villages, noisy only on Sunday, with grimier court-houses, deeper dust and mud, their trade more entirely in the hands of rat-faced Isaacs and Jacobs, with more frequent huge and solitary swine slowly scavenging about in abysmal self-occupation, fewer vine-clad cottages, raggeder negroes, and more decay. Vermilionville is not the worst, at all. I have seen ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... in trailing this man to destruction was of deep vengeance: the assuagement of an abysmal hatred that smoldered in her heart against every individual of the terrible man kind, whose cruel traps of iron, blades of steel, and leaden bullets had made her a monstrous, sexless thing, feared and unsought by mating males, hated of her ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... women do for a man—the sort of thing they invent when they're exceptionally good and clever. When they're not they don't do so well; but it's not for want of trying. There's only one thing in the world better than their incomparable charm: it's their abysmal conscience. Deep calleth unto deep—the one's indeed a part of the other. And when they club together, when they earnestly consider, as in the case we're supposing," Nash continued, "then the whole thing takes a lift; for it's no longer ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... farther back. Their origin must be carried far into the mists of that "prehistoric" period, that mythical age which inspires the modern historian with such a feeling of squeamishness that anything creeping out of its abysmal depths is sure to be instantly dismissed as a deceptive phantom, the mythos of an idle tale, or a later fable unworthy of serious notice. The Atlantean "old Greeks" could not be designated even as the Autochthones—a convenient term used to dispose ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... such occasions as this, appeared no one could say whence, hungry and smelling of caves and old tombs—bareheaded wretches with naked arms and legs, hair and beard in uncombed mats, and each with one garment the color of clay; beasts with abysmal mouths, in outcry effective as lions calling each other across desert spaces. Some of them had swords; a greater number flourished spears and javelins; though the weapons of the many were staves and knotted clubs, and slings, for which latter selected stones were stored ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... sudden blow, This stumbling, how I know not, by this stone, This horrid mouth in which my grave is shown, This cave of many shapes, Through which the melancholy mountain gapes, This mountain's self, a vast Abysmal shadow cast Suddenly on my heart, as if 't were meant To be my rustic pyre, my strange new monument, All fill my heart with wonder and with fear, What buried mysteries are hidden here That terrify me so, And make me tremble 'neath impending woe. [A solemn ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... in which the missionary lived and the one next north-east was a wide prairie, succeeded by a stretch of primitive forests, through which, down its abysmal, rocky bed, ran a foaming river. The limestone bluffs that formed its banks abounded in holes and caves—fitting homes for wild beasts. Here the cry of the panther might be heard, and bears and wolves sought ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... know," he sighed, and his sigh was abysmal. "But what I wanted to tell you is this: when you went away, you didn't let me know and didn't care how or when I heard it, but I'm not like that with you. This time, I'm going away. That's what I wanted to tell you. I'm going away ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... approaching the cell in which they had been placed. At last there was a perfectly appreciable sound. It was a fumbling, as of some one in the darkness, making hasty efforts to get a key in a lock. Carter, now bent on discovery, made a rush into the abysmal ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... of the baulked waves, each thud against the base of the great crag seeming to shake her whole being, while, whichever way she looked, menacing headlands towered stark and pitiless above the sea. She felt like a fly on the wall of some abysmal depth—only without ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... over its balustrade to-night—a night rare in its kindness and beauty—and watch the fiery ashes of my cigar drop into the abysmal darkness below, I am inclined to take back the whole of that preceding paragraph, although it cost me some labor to elaborate its polite malevolence. I can even recognize some melody in the music which comes irregularly and fitfully from the balcony of the Museum on ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... fireballs exploded. The screams and shrieks of maimed and dying Earthlings—of Earthlings unwounded but possessed of abysmal fear.... ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... for one peep at Flora's fairy palace, and saw its portals open at last. There was a deep gully before us, where a gang of convicts was working at a wooden bridge for the tramway, amid the usual abysmal mud of the tropic wet season. And on the other side of it there was no rastrajo right and left of the trace. I hurried down it like any schoolboy, dashing through mud and water, hopping from log to log, regardless of warnings and offers of help from good-natured Negroes, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... at Pirna; but they will be difficult to cart. Or we might have a boat-bridge; boats planked together two and two. At Pirna are plenty of boats; and by oar and track-rope, the River itself might be a road for them? Boats or pontoons to Konigstein, by water or land, they must be got. Eight miles of abysmal roads, our horses all extenuated? Impossible to cart these pontoons!" said Rutowski to himself.—Pity he had not tried it. He had a week to do those eight bad miles in; and 2,000 lean horses, picking grass or brown leaves, while their riders threshed. "We will drag our pontoons ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... heart as few men know, and your eyes are fey and deep, With a "something lost" come welling back from the raw, red dawn of life: With woe and pain have you greatly lain, till out of abysmal sleep The soul of the Stone Age leaps in you, alert ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... irrevocableness of time would seem to mean that an actual state of all nature can never return. I admit it seems unlikely that there should ever be such a recurrence down to the smallest particular. But extreme unlikeliness is not the point. Our ignorance is so abysmal that our judgments of likeliness and unlikeliness of future events hardly count. The real point is that the exact recurrence of a state of nature seems merely unlikely, while the recurrence of an instant of time violates our whole concept of ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... migrating passion. Menhaden, in vast schools, sweep along our Atlantic Coast in their season. From unknown regions of the ocean herring and salmon return to {62} the streams of their nativity when the spirit of migration sweeps over the shoals into the abysmal depths. There are butterflies that in companies rise from mud puddles beside the road and go dancing away to the South in autumn. The caribou, in long streams, come southward over the barrens of Labrador when the word ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... are streets of once decent two-storied villas, now lodging- houses. The very atmosphere is different. One is conscious first of dejection, then of some hideous and abysmal degradation. It is not only the people who make this impression on one's mind, but the houses themselves. Dear God, the very houses seem accursed! The bricks are crusted, and in a dull fashion shiny with grime; the doors, window-frames, and railings are dark with dirt only disturbed ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... My task is done! Now I have filled thy soul with song and sun. Forth! Now thou soarest on triumphant wings,— Forth! Now thy Svanhild is the swan that sings! [Takes off the ring and presses a kiss upon it. To the abysmal ooze of ocean bed Descend, my dream!—I fling ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... are held in solution and are deposited at various stages of evaporation. Let us suppose the lake to have the bottom sloping toward the abysmal center; the different minerals will be assorted as if with a sieve. At the Sunlight Basin the edge is as flaming red as one ever sees in the sunlit sky. And every color ever seen in a sunset flames almost as brilliantly ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... abysmal pitfall for the world and it won't take heed. I tell you, Kirtley—and I want you to mark my words—Deutschland is going to spring at Europe like a tiger. The army and navy are ready for the onslaught. ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... excitement of his return was over, a cool distaste descended upon her. Before the first weeks of the new life were over, she found herself watching her husband with almost hostile eyes. It must be wrong for a wife to feel so abysmal—so overwhelming an indifference toward the man whose name she bore. Wallace, weary with the moving, his collar off, his thick neck bare, his big pale face streaked with drying perspiration, was her husband ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... more, he just kept moving. His feet clumped up and down. He lifted himself out of snowpits; he staggered a few steps, fell, crawled on all fours in the darkness, then in a lull of the furious wind rose once more to his feet. The night was abysmal; closer and closer it hugged him. The wind was charging him from all points, baffling him like a merry monster, beating him down. The snow whirled around him in a narrow eddy, and he tried to grope out of it and failed. Oh, he ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... after the car had carried her off, and marched to his hotel in a sort of baffled fury. He didn't know exactly what had gone wrong about the evening. He couldn't, in phrases, tell himself just what it was he'd wanted. But he did know, with a perfectly abysmal conviction, ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... It can be so only when we view Nothing on the positive side as identical with All, make annihilating deprivation equivalent to universal bestowment, regard negation as affirmation, and, in the last synthesis of contradictions, see the abysmal Vacuum as a Plenum of fruition. As Oken says, "The ideal zero is absolute unity; not a singularity, as the number one, but an indivisibility, a numberlessness, a homogeneity, a translucency, a pure identity. It is neither great nor small, quiescent nor moved; but ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... in his own dear native land. Still on the Painter's fresco, from the hand Of God takes Eve the life-spark whereunto She trembles up from nothingness. Outdo Both of them, Music! Dredging deeper yet, Drag into day,—by sound, thy master-net,— The abysmal bottom-growth, ambiguous thing Unbroken of a branch, palpitating With limbs' play and life's semblance! There it lies, Marvel and mystery, of mysteries And marvels, most to love and laud thee for! Save it from chance and change we most abhor! Give momentary feeling permanence, ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... things remain visible. Oh, the unimaginable length of ages when on the earth there was no living thing! then life's ugly, slimy beginnings; then the conscious soul's fitful dream stretching forth to endless time and space; then the final sleep in abysmal night with its one star of hope twinkling before the all-hidden throne of God, in the shadow of whose too great light faith ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... them, where might wheel On sloping plane the system of the Signs. And as toward Scythia and Rhipaean heights The world mounts upward, likewise sinks it down Toward Libya and the south, this pole of ours Still towering high, that other, 'neath their feet, By dark Styx frowned on, and the abysmal shades. Here glides the huge Snake forth with sinuous coils 'Twixt the two Bears and round them river-wise- The Bears that fear 'neath Ocean's brim to dip. There either, say they, reigns the eternal hush Of night that knows no seasons, her black pall Thick-mantling fold on ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... in its outlines not unlike that of Hesiod, but develops the ruder ideas at greater length. In the shortest (but probably not the earliest) form of the cosmogony, the beginning of all things is found in the watery abyss. Two abysmal powers (Tiamat and Apsu), represented as female and male, mingle their waters, and from them proceed the gods. The list of deities (as in the Greek cosmogony) seems to represent several dynasties, a conception ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... in—and for an instant there seemed hope. But only that little breath of respite and there came a cry like myriads of lost souls. They were falling, falling, down through fire, with fire above, below, around, everywhere. Down, down,—an abysmal eternity of fire, till his seared soul writhed from his tortured body, and stood aside ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... thyself hast ruled. For all which hath been fixt, was fixt by thee. In the beginning, ere the Gods were born, Before the Heavens were builded, thou didst slay The giant Ymir, whom the abyss brought forth, Thou and thy brethren fierce, the sons of Bor, And cast his trunk to choke the abysmal void. But of his flesh and members thou didst build The earth and Ocean, and above them Heaven. And from the flaming world, where Muspel reigns, Thou sent'st and fetched'st fire, and madest lights, Sun, moon, and ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... dream, so familiar to childhood, of meeting a lion, and, from languishing prostration in hope and vital energy, that constant sequel of lying down before him, publishes the secret frailty of human nature—reveals its deep-seated Pariah falsehood to itself—records its abysmal treachery. Perhaps not one of us escapes that dream; perhaps, as by some sorrowful doom of man, that dream repeats for every one of us, through every generation, the original temptation in Eden. Every one of us, in this dream, has a bait offered to the ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... Peace has turned the clean white page There shall be sorrow on the earth for years; Abysmal grief, that has no eyes for tears, And youth that hobbles through the earth like age. But better to play this part upon life's stage Than to aid structures that a tyrant rears, To live a stalwart hireling torn with fears, And shamed by feeding on a conqueror s wage. Death, yea, a thousand ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... had grown into her days, as subtly as the growth of little cell and little cell. And now the weight upon her, instead of lifting, soaring in the possibility of the return of her old freedom, lay the more heavily, and her sense of oppression became abysmal.... "Something is going to happen," she had kept ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... Supersensual Life the Master says to the disciple who has asked, 'How shall I be able to live aright amid all the anxiety and tribulation of this world?': 'If thou dost once every hour throw thyself by faith beyond all creatures into the abysmal mercy of GOD, into the sufferings of CHRIST, and into the fellowship of His intercession, then thou shalt receive power from above to rule over the world, and death, and the devil, and hell itself.' And again, 'O thou ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... on earth turned sneak-thief; collecting pennies on stolen property, and pocketing them with a greasy and libidinous leer; going into partnership with foreign thieves to rob its own children; and when the child escapes the foreigner, descending to the abysmal baseness of hanging on and robbing the infant all alone by itself! Dear sir, this is not any more respectable than for a father to collect toll on the forced prostitution of his own daughter; in fact it is the same thing. Upon these terms, what is a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... they stood now at last, about to part, there stretched an abysmal gulf which might never ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... tragedians, embodying at intervals this word sin, are more extravagant than would be the word category introduced into the harangue of an Indian sachem amongst the Cherokees; and finally that the very nearest approach to the abysmal idea which we Christians attach to the word sin—(an approach, but to that which never can be touched—a writing as of palmistry upon each man's hand, but a writing which "no man can read")—lies in the Pagan idea of piacularity; which is an idea thus far like hereditary sin, that it expresses ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... instant, however, consider these noon hours as recreational. There is no idle talk or play. The sermon is discussed and the children forbidden to romp or laugh. One sometimes wonders how the little things had any impulse to laugh in such an abysmal atmosphere, but apparently the Puritan boys and girls were entirely normal and even wholesomely mischievous—as proved by the constantly required services of ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... reached the ears of other travellers who were on duty in the observation car, painfully conscious of the scenery and the obligations it imposed. To experience some ecstasy, more or less, was imperative, and it was weary work for most of them. They stuck to it manfully and woman-fully, with abysmal furtive yawns; but the skirmish between the conductor and their fellow-passenger came as a sort of godsend, and when the transfer of a dollar bill, incredibly dirty and greasy and tattered, had brought warfare to a close, they still had the voluntary exile ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... ascending In the darkly clouded sky And on earth its glory spending Until clouds and darkness fly, So my Jesus from the grave, From death's dark, abysmal cave, Rose triumphant Easter morning, Brighter than the ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... had tacitly admitted that she returned his love. Born for each other, heirs of all the ages, they were destined to be separated under conditions that could not have been brought about by the worst tyrant that ever oppressed his fellow creatures. Small blame should be his portion if in that abysmal moment there came to Philip a dire temptation. There was every reason to believe that he and Iris, if they found some hiding-place on the island that night, might escape. He could send Marcel crashing into the undergrowth with a blow, carry the unconscious girl somewhere, ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... Not distant from the shore on which we stood, A fixed, abysmal, gloomy, breathing place— Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams Innumerable, roaring with one voice! Heard over earth and sea, and, in that hour, For so it seemed, felt by ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... was below, below was above, to the man stripped of gravitating body: depth was swallowed up in height insurmountable, height was swallowed up in depth unfathomable. Suddenly as thus they rode from infinite to infinite, suddenly as thus they tilted over abysmal worlds, a mighty cry arose—that systems more mysterious, that worlds more billowy,—other heights, and other depths,—were coming, were nearing, were at hand. Then the man sighed, and stopped, shuddered and wept. His over-laden heart uttered itself in tears; and he said,—"Angel, I will go no farther. ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... is supposed to know French and English, return with the "interpreter." That young man is a fraud. He does not know English—not even coast English—and all he has got under his precious wool is an abysmal ignorance darkened by terror; and so, after one or two futile attempts and some frantic scratching at both those regions which an African seems to regard as the seats of intellectual inspiration, he bolts out of the door. Situation terrible! My host and I smile wildly at each other, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... to the body of the dead bull. For the first time there flashed to his understanding the explanation of the reason for the girl's attempted abduction. Korak's eyes went wide and then they closed to narrow slits of rage as he stood glaring down upon the abysmal brute at his feet. When next his glance rose to Meriem's face a slow flush suffused his own. Now, indeed, was he looking upon her through new eyes—the eyes of a man looking upon ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... particularly interesting whenever anyone evinced a desire to learn anything of his native land. The officers were wont to question the voyageurs, and Dan played upon their ignorance of the western half of their Empire, which was deep enough to begin with, and made it abysmal. ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... quickly righted himself, and as quickly clambered upward to be revenged upon Tarzan, but the ape-man was otherwise engaged and did not wish to be interrupted. He was explaining again to Taug the depths of the latter's abysmal ignorance, and pointing out how much greater and mightier was Tarzan of the Apes than Taug or ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... infinite, and that infinitely infinite. But to return to ourselves. The legend there says: "Novae Liparaeae aeoliae," because it seems as if we are to believe that all the winds which are in the abysmal caverns of AEolus were converted into sighs, if we include those which proceed from the affection, which aspires continually to the highest good and to the ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... brief summary of an educational system. She inquired, "How old is Arnold now?" learned that he was seventeen, remembered that, oh yes, he was a year older than Sylvia, and allowed the subject to drop into one of the abysmal silences for which she alone had the courage. Her husband's sister was as little proof against it as her husband. As it continued, Mrs. Marshall-Smith went through the manoeuvers which in a less perfectly bred person would ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... right. From a tower of strength, supporting alone, yet with ease, National Woolens, and the vast structure based upon it, Dumont had crumbled into an obstruction and a weakness. There is an abysmal difference between everybody knowing a thing privately and everybody knowing precisely the same thing publicly. In that newspaper exposure there was no fact of importance that was not known to the entire Street, to his chief supporters in his great syndicate of ranches, railroads, factories, ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... the skies!" mused De Galgenstein, "ye shine as ye did in the olden days! WE change, but YE speak ever the same language. Gazing in your abysmal ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... tender responses of the Most High. To what shall we refer this sublime, transfiguring dream? Is it the delusion of the sleeper, or the whisper of God? Is the ladder set up from the earth, or is it let down from above? Did man shape it out of his abysmal desire, or did God make and establish it out of His love. What can we say of that which is the highest wisdom, the widest sympathy, the divinest love, and the mightiest power in human history? What can we do with that which is ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... member of it—perhaps a little on the outer fringe, but still an ordinarily intelligent member—and I was not aware of the underground factors and forces which had caused this thunderbolt out of the blue, as it were. Needless to say, the country was in a state of more abysmal ignorance still, and it is questionable whether outside of Munster, owing to a scandalous Press boycott of Mr O'Brien's speeches for many years afterwards, the masses of the people ever had an understanding of the motives which impelled him "to stand ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... off into a fit of silent laughter, for the abysmal ignorance of Wesley Thompson concerning practical things, his awkward length of body, his student's pallor that the Athabasca sun had played such havoc with, his blue eyes that looked so often with trepidation or amazement on the commonplaces of their world, his general ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... psychologist will take the man in hand and, from the minute record of his life, emotions, thoughts, fancies, speculations and nightmares, which he has embodied in autobiographical novels and that most remarkable perhaps of all his creations, abysmal in its pessimism, "The Inferno," will be drawn a true conception of ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... only manifest itself first by some one indisputable proof of a still undisintegrated body, some crisp, reassuring method of outlining one's corporeal edges, some sensory roll-call, as it were of—head, hands, feet, sides! But out of oblivion, out of space abysmal, out of sensory annihilation, to come vaporing back, back, back,—headless, armless, legless, trunkless, conscious only of consciousness, uncertain yet whether the full awakening prove itself—this world or the next! As sacred of Heaven—as—of ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... fall asleep. For hours he remained stretched on his bed, now a prey to feverish and agitated wakefulness, now in the grip of oppressive dreams in which he tumbled down flights of stairs and felt himself sinking, powerless, into abysmal depths. ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... borrowed the light from below, and the solemn, leafless woods on one side were outlined distinctly against the reflection in the sky. The flare showed, too, the abrupt precipice on the other side, the abysmal gloom of the valley, the austere summit-line of the mountain beyond, and gave the dark mysteries of the night a sombre revelation, as in visible blackness it filled the ...
— 'way Down In Lonesome Cove - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... seems to be listening to Schoenbergian harmonies) hasn't much colour, a critic tells us, only a sickly rose in her dress. He also paints grey-green landscapes and visions, the latter dug up from the abysmal depths of his subconsciousness. Schoenberg is, at least, the object of considerable curiosity. What he will do next no man may say; but at least it won't be like the work of any one else. The only distinct reminiscence of an ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... inevitable—not first on Jerry's part, but on Borckman's part. Borckman felt the abysmal urgings of the beast, as a beast, to prove himself master of this four-legged beast. Jerry felt his jowl and jaw clutched still more harshly and hardly, and, with increase of harshness and hardness, he was flung farther down the deck, which, on account of its ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... Now they are so enormous that even the truck of the tall Yankee clipper staggering along to {123} leeward cannot be seen except when both ships are topping the crest. Wherever you look there seems to be an endless earthquake of mountainous waves, with spuming volcanoes of their own, and vast, abysmal craters yawning from the depths. The Victoria begins to labour. The wind and water seem to be gaining on her every minute. She groans in every part of her sorely racked hull; while up aloft the hurricane roars, rings, and screeches ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... matchless outlook on the grandest manifestations of nature. If the Denver citizen brags more of his State Capitol, his Metropole Hotel (no accent, please!), and his smelting works than of his snow-piled mountains and abysmal canons, he only follows a natural human instinct in estimating most highly that which has cost him ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... the lilies-of-the-valley. "She doesn't even guess what it's all about." And he contemplated her absorbed young face with a thrill of possessorship in which pride in his own masculine initiation was mingled with a tender reverence for her abysmal purity. "We'll read Faust together ... by the Italian lakes ..." he thought, somewhat hazily confusing the scene of his projected honey-moon with the masterpieces of literature which it would be ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... who has flung in the face of peaceful geologists this octavo camouflet of his scientific lucubrations professes to have scoured the surface and ravaged the bottom (in a suit of patent sub-marine Scriptural armor) of a no less abysmal subject than the cryptology of Genesis,—to have undermined with his sapping intellect and blown up with his explosive wisdom the walled secrets of time and eternity, carrying away with him in the shape of plunder a whole cargo of the plans and purposes of the Omnipotent in the Creation. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... toward which this mass of flesh was striving so frantically? Above the apex of the pyramid, amid the sheen of the lightning, was revealed a vast figure, naked and indeterminate, dim and yet seeming of a denser texture than the most abysmal beasts, a figure at the same time human and serpentine, that twisted in attitudes of human anguish, yet appeared, like a maddened serpent, to ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... genuine Pleiades. The great majority were relegated, by Pickering's[1565] and Stratonoff's[1566] counts of the stellar populace in and near the cluster, to the position of outsiders from it. They are undistinguished denizens of the abysmal background upon ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... immensity, and dread encompass and overshadow us. Nay, in handling the smallest matter, he works it with the tools of a giant. A common truth is wrenched from its old combinations, and presented to us in new, impassable, abysmal contrast with its opposite error. A trifle, some slender character, some jest, quip, or spiritual toy, is shaped into the most quaint, yet often truly living form; but shaped somehow as with the hammer of Vulcan, with three strokes that might have helped to forge ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the path is forever down—down into the shadowed vale, down into the abysmal canon, balustraded with sombre, cold gray rocks holding in the far recesses secret streams that make their way beneath the mountain to the cloven rock on the sunlit slope. Thither then they rode, solemn but steadfast. Once and again they turned upon ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... terra firma now for anything." He handed his aunt in, and then Bertie. He exacted from Bertie a perfectly superfluous shake of the hand, bowed over that hand with a sudden access of gravity, and lost himself in an abysmal reverie before he ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... with a string round its leg. He resented the aptness of that degrading simile. It was a new sensation; and he did not relish it. The few women he intimately loved had counted for so much in his life that he scarcely realised his abysmal ignorance of the power that is in woman—the mere opposite of man; the implicit challenge, the potent lure. Partly from temperament, partly from principle, he had kept more or less clear of 'all that'. Now, weaponless, he had ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... aid already given, Prom brazen skies call down abundant showers, Are heard when sickness threats or danger lowers, Win for a war-worn land the smiles of peace, And crown the year with plentiful increase. Song checks the hand of Jove in act to smite; Song soothes the dwellers in abysmal night. ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... with a sounding slap on Tom's astounded cheek. Immediately thereafter she raised her voice in the shrill, hoarse, monotonous madness of hysteria, sat down on the floor, and rocked back and forth in the throes of an abysmal grief. ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... a circular quagmire of festering black mud about a hundred yards across. Near at hand they could see the mud heaving, very slowly, as though abysmal forms of life were tunneling along just under the surface. They glanced toward the center of the bog, which was occupied by one of the smooth black pools, and cried aloud at what ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... Quillan had led her to the window-seat beneath the corridor, and sat holding one plump trifle of a hand, the, while her speech fluttered bird-like from this topic to that; and be regarded Nelchen Thorn with an abysmal content. The fates, he considered, had been ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... to friend or foe, smile or snarl. As for what we call the laws of Nature, they are pure assumptions to-day, and may be nothing better than scrap-iron tomorrow. Good Heavens, Lawford, consider man's abysmal impudence.' He smoked on in silence for a moment. 'You say you fell ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... returned De Beauxchamps, "that many have thought that the abysmal creatures were generally of small size, but they knew nothing about it. What could one have expected to learn of the secrets of life in the ocean depths from the small creatures which alone the trawls brought to the surface? The great monsters ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... loved us.' Properly and strictly speaking, that 'first' only declares the priority of the divine love towards us over ours towards Him. But we may fairly give it a wider meaning, and say—first of all, ere Creation and Time, away back in the abysmal depths of an everlasting and changeless heart, changeless in the sense that its love was eternal, but not changeless in the sense that love could have no place within it—first of all things was God's love; last to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... willowy figure, contrasted with much richer costumes, not one of which had its character of bold simplicity. De Gery, from his corner, gazed at that smooth, narrow forehead beneath the fringe of hair brushed low, those long, wide-open eyes of a deep blue, an abysmal blue, that mouth which ceased to smile only to relax its classic outline in a weary, spiritless expression. All in all, the somewhat haughty aspect of ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... full of bright-eyed children, with mothers and sisters of all ages as their confederates, the secret was soon out, and before Agricola had left his little cottage in the grove the topic of all tongues was the abysmal treachery and ingratitude of negro slaves. The whole tribe of Grandissime believed, this morning, in the doctrine ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... out the door and turned to Kielland with burden of ten months' frustration in his voice. "They're stupid," he said slowly. "They are so incredibly stupid I could go screaming into the swamp every time I see one of them coming. Their stupidity is positively abysmal." ...
— The Native Soil • Alan Edward Nourse
... her the darkling mysteries of the Egyptian Magi. I could chant for her the wild chorus that rang in the disheveled Eleusinian revel: I could tell her and I would, the watchword never known but to one woman, the Saban Queen, which Hiram breathed in the abysmal ear of Solomon—You don't attend. Psha! you have drunk too much wine!" Perhaps I may as well own that I was NOT attending, for he had been carrying on for about fifty-seven minutes; and I don't like a man to have ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... wanted to cover his mouth with her hand. She preferred his tawny eyes with their black brows and lashes. His eyes watched her as a cat watches a bird, but without the white gleam of ferocity. In his eyes was a deep, deep sun-warmth, something fathomless, deepening black and abysmal, but ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... creeping paralysis of the established faiths. Just at the time when we most had need of religion, it seemed to weaken and vanish from our sight, though we knew that human life, when not enriched and ennobled by spiritual forces, sinks into abysmal depths, and that even any diminution in the strength of these forces is fatally injurious to our most sacred and ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... standing with his head up, his eyes looking out over the abysmal scene below. Behind his back he had gripped tight together his long and sinewy hands. He was a lean and broad man, so she thought. He stood in the uniform of his country, made for manly men, and beseeming only ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... study in human nature, and hopeless though the general outlook appeared, the future was not entirely without its promise. The souls of Blanch and Chiquita shone like radiant twin stars from out the gloomy, abysmal depths of the Egyptian darkness that had ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... name blazing from the walls of every town and village, his portrait (how that wrung her!) hawked up and down the country like the image of a hunted criminal; now the little compact, populous island, so policed, surveyed, and administered, revealed itself as a Sphinx-like guardian of abysmal mysteries, staring back into his wife's anguished eyes as if with the malicious joy of knowing ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... the depths of solitary valleys; others hang, as it were, in mid-air above the hills, clinging to the mountain slopes or projecting from the verge of precipices. On all sides man has sought out the poesy of the infinite, the solemnity of silence: he has sought God; and on the mountain-tops, in the abysmal depths, among the caverned cliffs he has found Him. Yet nowhere as on this European islet, half African though it be, can he find such differing harmonies all blending to lift the soul and quell its springs of anguish; to cool its fevers, and give to the sorrows ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... succeeded in devising. Having devised them, she leaves their operation to the blindness of chance. Steps in man and controls and directs them. For the first time in the history of life conscious intelligence forms and transforms life. These yearnings and desires, promptings of the "abysmal fecundity," have in man evolved into what is called "love." They arise in instinct and sensation and culminate in sentiment and emotion. They master man, and the intellect of man, as they master the beast and all the acts of the beast. And they operate in the ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... of Egypt is a common enough expression on the lips of those who know nothing of what they are talking about, and Jill, who had often used the words, stood transfixed at the abysmal ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... merely admiring," then exclaimed Darrow, "the delicious femininity of the proposal. It displays at once such really remarkable insight into the psychological needs of another human being, and such abysmal ignorance of the demands of what we are ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... conceal a fundamental inclination to sympathize with every rank that suffers in this onward sweep of power. Royalty and Rags, throughout these pages, find many mourners over the sacrifices each has made to reconcile the eternal conflict between poverty and pomp. In the abysmal void between the disappearing star and the aspiring glowworm men tramp upon, there seems to be sufficient latitude for the play of gratitude or grief. A Napoleon exiled by the French or a Ney shot down by Frenchmen is unthinkable ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... and Sierra Nevada mountains in their southward trend, and forms the southern rim of the Great Basin. This depression was once a vast inland sea, of which nothing remains but the Salt Lake of Utah, and is drained by the Colorado river. The entire plateau region is remarkable for its grand scenery—abysmal chasms, sculptured buttes and towering cliffs, which are "brightly colored as if painted by artist Gods, not stained and daubed by inharmonious hues but beautiful as flowers and gorgeous as the clouds." ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... the rest of the Board—stupidity uber alles!—think all us Ops and Primes are psycho and that the ship will never even lift. So they made a Grand Circus of it. But they succeeded in one thing—with such abysmal stupidity so rampant I'm getting more and more reconciled to the idea of our not getting back—at least, for ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... presence and companionship of her son and Jack; and if the lads happened to be both absent when these paroxysms of revived memory occurred, the poor lady quickly became plunged into a condition of such abysmal despair and such maniacal violence that she was for the time being a menace to herself and everybody else. Nobody but Carlos or Jack seemed to have the power of soothing her, and sometimes the combined efforts of both were needed: thus it came about that ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... the idea that the universe is a universe, a oneness; that its laws are continuous. We follow the chemistry of it to the farthest stars and there is no serious break or exception; it is all of one stuff. We follow the mechanics of it into the same abysmal depths, and there are no breaks or exceptions. The biology of it we cannot follow beyond our own little corner of the universe; indeed, we have no proof that there is any biology anywhere else. But if there is, it must be similar to our own. There is only one kind of electricity (though two ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... dark?" Thorpe questioned. "Or...." He visioned dimly some denizen of the vast depths, living beyond the limits of the sun's penetration, far in the abysmal darkness where its only light must be self-made. But his mind failed in the attempt to picture what manner of horror this thing ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... that Redemption" (i.e., what Christ has done and suffered for mankind) "is universal, in so far as it left no obstacle between man and God, but man's own will: that indeed is in the power of God's election, with whom alone rest the abysmal secrets of personality; but as far as Christ is concerned, his death was for all, since his intentions and affections were equally directed to all, and 'none who come to him will he in any ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... of the world the snows and storms, the winds and the wraiths of the long dead moaned and screamed as with an icy voice of abysmal warning. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... brick upon which the letter was engraved into a neighboring fish-pond, and resolved to get rid of His Majesty by strategy. For three nights I pondered over my plan of operations, and then the great method came to me like the dawning of the sun after a night of abysmal darkness. I went to the royal tent and discovered His Majesty hard at work chiseling out an article on "How I Brought Down My First Proterosaurus" on a slab of granite he had brought with him. As I approached he smiled broadly, and with a wave ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... to the narrow world of an invalid's room and its few interests. With the wealth he had fortunately inherited he brought to his side leading specialists who might possibly help him, and went through alternate ecstatic hopes and abysmal fears as the great men came and departed. Very quietly, too, he helped others less fortunate, financially, than himself. The nurses and physicians in the hospital where he lay learned to like and admire him, and other patients, convalescents ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... were to be bugle-calls throughout the city, and the message they gave would mean "lights out!" in every part of Paris. For several nights there were rehearsals of darkness, without the bugle-calls, and the city was plunged into abysmal gloom, through which people who had been dining in restaurants lost themselves in familiar streets and groped their way with little shouts of laughter as ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... water surged in and out with a thunderous, muffled sough and moan, like a Titan under the earth, pinned down eternally in pain. It was awfully impressive,—so impressive that I reflected neither upon it nor on myself. With this immitigable, adamantine wildness about me, and that abysmal, booming stifle of plaint, to which all the air trembled, sounding from below, I became another being, and the very universe was no longer itself; past and future were not, and I was a dumb atomy creeping over the bare peaks of existence, while out of the blind ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... several ineffectual efforts to draw Dane into conversation; but at each remark the young man started violently, as if suddenly recalled to his surroundings. Finally Sir James desisted, and the meal concluded in abysmal silence. ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... the Caucasus mountains a wild storm was gathering. Drear shadows drooped and thickened above the Pass of Dariel,—that terrific gorge which like a mere thread seems to hang between the toppling frost-bound heights above and the black abysmal depths below,—clouds, fringed ominously with lurid green and white, drifted heavily yet swiftly across the jagged peaks where, looming largely out of the mist, the snow-capped crest of Mount Kazbek rose coldly white against the darkness of the threatening sky. Night was ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... quietly and ironically; not because it is condemned by human morality, but because "we have our work to do"! We must live in "the good" and "the true," not because it is our "duty" so to do, but because only along this particular line does the "energy without agitation" of the "abysmal mothers" ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... of how she had behaved, and it was a statement that she for the most part found herself able to make. What had happened at present was that nothing, as she felt, was left of her to report to; she was all too sunk in the inevitable and the abysmal. To give an account of herself she must give it to somebody else, and her first instalment of it to her hostess was that she must please let her cry. She couldn't cry, with Milly in observation, ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... red brilliance of departing daylight. In a few moments all the stars came out above the intense blackness of the earth and the great lagoon gleaming suddenly with reflected lights resembled an oval patch of night sky flung down into the hopeless and abysmal night of the wilderness. The white man had some supper out of the basket, then collecting a few sticks that lay about the platform, made up a small fire, not for warmth, but for the sake of the smoke, which would keep off the mosquitos. He wrapped himself in the blankets ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... happens his way. All things are then loaded with ominous powers the strength of which is directly proportionate to the hope or fear that enthralls him. If the universe were lawless, the irony of man's fate would forever be what it was when he lived in abysmal ignorance: when in bitterest need of sane guidance, he would be most prone to trust to the feeblest and most irrational of aids. On the other hand, if things are determined by necessity, nothing happening either miraculously or by chance, science and a commensurate power of scientific ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... boast of scorning it—if people asked his opinion, he "gave it to 'em straight". So now he caused this white angel to understand that he regarded the effete aristocracies of the old world with abysmal contempt; he meant to put them out of business right off the bat. In vain the white angel pleaded that some of them might be useful people, or at any rate well-meaning: Jimmie pronounced them a bunch of parasites and grafters; the thing to do was to ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... outlines of surrounding peaks; then long, bright streams, piercing the gloomy depths of the valleys, chasing gigantic shadows, like spirits of light contending with the legions of darkness; and, at length, the whole immense sea of mountains brought into majestic view, with their unnumbered abysmal valleys covered with forests of every intermingled variety and shade ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... of the adoption of the modern scientific method has been the tendency of those endeavoring to bring light into the dark nooks and crannies of human existence, to immerse themselves in an abysmal materialism from which rescue ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... In his abysmal discouragement his ideals were all topsy-turvy. He burlesqued his own religion as the most earnest constantly do, for we all revolve around ourselves as well ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... of his Captives (MACMILLAN). Of course I have nothing like space to detail for you its plot. Summarised, it tells the life of a young woman, Maggie Cardinal, whom one may briefly call the bemused victim of religions—and relations. You never knew any well-intentioned heroine who had such abysmal luck with both. Her clergyman father, a bad hat, who spared us his acquaintance by expiring on the first page; her semi-moribund aunts in their detestable London home; the circle of the Inner Saints, with their intrigues ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various
... filled him with benevolence. He was to lose that confidence strangely in a little while. It came to him sitting there that he felt much as he had felt in the old care-free past before Brian had deserted, plunging him into abysmal despair. ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... gleam of hellish satisfaction in its eyes as it pressed the bolster down; and watched the murdered creature's contortions grow fainter, and fainter, until they finally ceased. The eyes then left the room; and from afar off, away below, in the abysmal cellars of the house, came the sound of digging—faint, very faint, but unquestionably digging. This terminated the grim, phantasmal drama for that night at least, and Letty, chilled to the bone, but thoroughly ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... for matches by this time, and seemed disappointed that none was to be found in his pockets. I don't know why he should seem to recede from me, for he didn't move an inch from where he stood with that defensively mocking smile on his face. But abysmal gulfs of space seemed to blow in like sea-mists between him and me, desolating and lonely stretches of emptiness which could never again be spanned by the tiny bridges of hope. I felt alone, terribly alone, in a world over which ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... were unusually abysmal. He stood with his back to the door of his theater as though shielding it from Philistine assaults upon the drama's ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... affairs is the only aim of Protestants. We but contend for the privilege of placing the Bible in the hands of the masses—of flashing the glorious flambeau of truth into the dark recesses of ignorance and superstition—into the abysmal depths of papal iniquity. Unscrupulously employing every method conducive to the grand end of disseminating Romish dogmas, the fagot, the wheel, and all the secret horrors of the Inquisition, were speedily brought to bear upon all who dared ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... it was real! God knew the abysmal depths of its reality. Months piled on months there had been of it! Those voices out there that rose in a jangle of ribald mirth were the same voices that, hushed in deadlier menace, had whispered that grim slogan, ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... mounting with infirm unsearching tread, His hopes to chaos led, He may have stumbled up there from the past, And with an aching strangeness viewed the last Abysmal conflagration of his dreams,— A flame where nothing seems To burn but flame itself, by nothing fed; And while it all went out, Not even the faint anodyne of doubt May then have eased a painful going down From pictured heights of power ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... could hardly grasp the vast and abysmal catastrophe that without warning had swept from space. How could the dark star have traversed three thousand light-years of space in a week's time? It was unthinkable! So stupendous a control of power, so gigantic a manipulation of cosmic forces, ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei |
