"Awfulness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the article, I became convinced that at least certain bodies had been found there, and upon comparing the date when the house was hired I knew it to be the same as when the children had been in Toronto; and thus being forced to realise the awfulness of what had probably happened, I gave up trying to read the article, and saw instead the two little faces as they had looked when I hurriedly left them—felt the innocent child's kiss so timidly given, and heard again ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... silent for a long moment while the awfulness of those words burned themselves into her brain. Then with a shudder she said aloud, "That's a mighty big thankful, ain't it?—To think I don't have to limp along with crutches! But, oh dear, two months in bed is such a long time to wait! Whatever ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... in such a state of collapse that I did not seem to have any power over my muscles; but for all that, I heard Miss Minturn's voice at the foot of the companion-way, and knew that she was coming on deck. In spite of the dreadful awfulness of that moment, I felt it would never do for her to see me in the condition I was in, and so, shuffling and half-tumbling, I got forward, went below, and made my way to the steward's room, where I had already discovered some spirits, and I took a good dram; for although ...
— The Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... the living-room. When he was gone, my mother called me in; and with eyes which would have been tearful had she allowed herself such a weakness before us, told me very solemnly and slowly, as if to impress upon me the awfulness of the matter, that I was to be sent to a tailor's workrooms the ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... let me conjure you, alike by the voice of friendship and the duty you owe yourself and family; above all, by the reverence you feel for the cause of Christianity; by the fear of God and the awfulness of eternity, to renounce from this moment opium and spirits as your bane! Frustrate not the great end of your existence. Exert the ample abilities which God has given you, as a faithful steward. So will you secure your rightful pre-eminence among the sons of genius; ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... was very nice," said Rorie thoughtfully. "Yes; there were times, perhaps, when I was a trifle stunned by all that grand calm beauty, the silence, the solitude, the awfulness of it all; but I have hardly tune to feel the thrill when I came bump up against a party of tourists, English or American, all talking the same twaddle, and all patronising the scenery. That took the charm out of the landscape ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... grew rapidly. Lady Hester related this story with great spirit, and I recollect that she put up her yashmak for a moment in order to give me a better idea of the effect which she produced by suddenly revealing the awfulness of her countenance. ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... that the cruelty of the sea, its relentlessness and awfulness, rushed upon me. Life had become cheap and tawdry, a beastly and inarticulate thing, a soulless stirring of the ooze and slime. I held on to the weather rail, close by the shrouds, and gazed out across the ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... and awful thing. In old times, without knowing so much of their strangeness and awfulness as we do, people were yet more afraid of mountains. But then somehow they had not come to see how beautiful they are as well as awful, and they hated them—and what people hate they must fear. Now that we have learned to look at them ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... imagine he realizes all the awfulness of my position?" Dolly resumed. "Not the slightest! He's happy ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... criticism. It was least to be expected from a professorial chair in a venerable university—least of all from a professor not yet forty, who might have been expected to be weighed down and solemnized by the greatness of his function and the awfulness of his surroundings. Hence arose the simple and amusing wrath of pedestrian poets like Mr. Ichabod Wright, and ferocious pedants like Professor Francis Newman, and conventional worshippers of such idols as ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... a fortune, and turned it all into halfpence, and tossed them out of the window, he could soon get rid of his whole fortune. And if you fling away your moments or live without the consciousness of their solemn possibilities and mystic awfulness, you will find at the last that you have made 'ducks and drakes' of your years, and have flung them away in moments without knowing what you were doing, and without possibility of recovery. 'Take care of the pence, the pounds will take care of themselves.' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... were having "barrels" of amusement at the expense of the demented ones. Fred and Flossy were perhaps in the wrong in causing such an upheaval in a very model household. But they were young, and the mischief had taken root before they suspected that any such danger was in existence. When the awfulness of the situation dawned upon them they looked at each other one day in the interrogative and agreed that the poisonous weed should be uprooted. But since it had grown to such proportions it was difficult ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... It was so chose to me that, in the confusion of my sleepy brain, it seemed to be far more terrible than that even of the gorilla. I was mistaken in this, however, and no doubt my semi-somnolent condition tended to increase its awfulness. ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... The awfulness of the truth dumbed him and an impetuous desire to protect her swept through him. But he was powerless, helpless. A wild idea of sacrificing his loyalty to his paper by warning Gibson of the impending ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... little at the awfulness of it; felt smaller than ever, backed away from the rim of the canyon, and headed ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... a mighty animal—a terrible animal. He is but little larger than his cousin of the lesser, lower hills; but he makes up for it in the awfulness of his ferocity and in the length and thickness of his shaggy coat. It was his ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... in tears. Mrs. Posttlethwaite was struck dumb by the awfulness of the occasion, and clung fast ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... this hemisphere of happiness and hope, there came trooping clouds with fiery bolts, full of death and desolation. At a cannon shot upon this fort, all the nation, as if it had been a trained army lying on its arms, awaiting a signal, rose up and began a war which, for awfulness, rises into the front rank of bad eminence. The front of the battle, going with the sun, was twelve hundred miles long; and the depth, measured along a meridian, was a thousand miles. In this vast area more than two million men, first and last, for four years, have, in skirmish, ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... easier because he knew nothing of German literature; and, indeed, the word 'German' was a term of reproach signifying something very awful, although nobody knew exactly what it was." The obscurantist and opponent of free thought has shown signs of hope that the German's reputation for awfulness may turn us from his evil companionship into the restful paths of British piety. The Englishman (especially, I believe, the Saxon element) has too often been prone to make a stronghold of ignorance. This stronghold has certainly in industry proved to be ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... his mouth and began to chide him for his awfulness, whereupon he kissed the palm of her hand and put his ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... he sit down just outside his door, but he crouched his head to his knees and shielded it with the arch of his arms. And Jerry, who had never heard shell-fire, much less imagined what it was like, was impressed with the awfulness of it. It was to him a natural catastrophe such as had happened to the Arangi when she was flung down reeling on her side by the shouting wind. But, true to his nature, he did not crouch down under the shriek of that first shell. On the contrary, he bristled his hair and snarled ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... thought I should have died with fear; I stood motionless, and astonished at the awfulness and majesty of his voice; but recovering myself in a short time, I related to him everything from the beginning, how desirous I was of knowing sublime truths, how I went to the philosophers, and hearing them contradict one another, ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... Johnny, I was a stout-hearted man, who'd never known a fear. I could freeze. I could burn up there alone in the horrid place with fever. I could starve. It wasn't death nor awfulness I couldn't face,—not that, not that; but I loved her true, I say,—I loved her true, and I'd spoken my last words to her, my very last; I had left her those to remember, day in and day out, and year upon year, as long as she ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... was damp with a cold sweat, and I could hardly shake off the horror of the vision. It was ridiculous, I said to myself, and yet, even with my eyes open, I could see the white awfulness of that dead finger, as it beckoned me, shining palely in the light of ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... their own. The monarchy of France laboured in extremity, rocked and reeled like a ship fighting with the darkness of monsoons. The madness of the poor king (Charles VI), falling in at such a crisis, like the case of women labouring in child-birth during the storming of a city, trebled the awfulness of the time. Even the wild story of the incident which had immediately occasioned the explosion of this madness—the case of a man unknown, gloomy, and perhaps maniacal himself, coming out of a forest at noonday, laying his hand upon the bridle of the king's horse, checking him ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... words with which to answer. "Impossible!" I burst out, flinging doubt, fear, hesitancy, everything I had hitherto trembled at to the winds. "It was in my nature to take it, worked upon as I was by family affection, the awfulness of our father's approaching death, and a thousand uncanny influences all carefully measured and prepared for this end. But it is not in my nature to keep it after four months of natural living in the companionship of a man thirty years removed from his ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... went wrong with the hoisting machinery, the upward movement was arrested, and the bucket hung motionless not more than ten feet above the deadly mine. In the awfulness of their common danger, the men forgot their enmity and gazed at each other with horror-stricken eyes. Then, with a groan of despair, Mike Connell sank limply to the bottom ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... stopped and let the awfulness of these statements bear down upon us? Do we take in, that we are talking about ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... modesty, the timidity of young passion, repugnance to vice, an imaginative temperament, a consciousness of unfitness to wrestle with the rough realities of life, the way lay invitingly open.... It lay through perils, but was made attractive by perpetual wonders. It was awful, but in its awfulness lay its power over the young mind. It learned to trample down that last bond which united the child to common humanity, filial reverence; the fond and mysterious attachment of the child and the mother, the inborn reverence of the son to the father. It is the highest ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... near, was now lighted up by their flames. On, on they went, carrying havoc, terror, and confusion wherever they went; their loud explosions, added to the roar of the guns, which opened on them from the whole French squadron, increasing the awfulness of the scene. The enemy soon saw that their firing was in vain: even their boats failed to tow aside the fiery masses borne down on them by the gale. One after the other they cut their cables, and attempted to run up the harbour; but in the darkness and confusion, ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... was to put up my hand and cover the gold watch. Alberta had dropped the carving knife and was trying desperately to get the gold bracelet off under the table. In a flash we had realized our mistake and its awfulness. As for me, I felt positively frightened; Margaret Hannah's warnings of old ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... help, laid his ear to her heart, her lips. Then the awfulness of the shock, and of his self-reproach, the crumbling of all his hopes, became too much to bear. Consciousness left him, and when the woman of whom Louie had spoken did actually come in, a few minutes later, she found the brother lying against the sister's knee, his arms outstretched ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... he told me, I will own I did not realize all the awfulness of your position. I saw nothing but him, and that the family was broken up. I felt sorry for him, but after talking to you, I see it, as a woman, quite differently. I see your agony, and I can't tell you ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... know how it feels to be mortified? The—the awfulness—" Lila stopped and swallowed once or twice as if something stuck in her throat. "She might have told me in a different manner so as not to wound me so ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... saw Frascuelo's knife seek that favorite junction of neck and collar-bone which Christobal had said was so well understood by those of his ilk. At the foot of the stairs the Indian lay still, and Frascuelo tried to rise. She helped him gladly. The awfulness of this killing no longer appalled her. Each dead or disabled Indian was one less obstacle between her and Courtenay. A third time the revolver barked, but Christobal missed. It did not matter greatly, ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... to the House, Bykes was full of threats of which he sought to enhance the awfulness by the indefiniteness; but Will told Malcolm as much as he knew of the matter—namely, that the head gamekeeper, having lost some dozen of his sitting pheasants, had enjoined a strict watch; and that Bykes having caught sight of Malcolm in the very act of getting ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... this vale of tears to Mary whose obedience had restored what Eve's self-will had ruined, and the last threefold sob of endearment to the "kindly, loving, sweet, Virgin Mary." After the high agonisings and aspirations of the day's prayer, the awfulness of the holy Sacrifice, the tramping monotony of the Psalter, the sting of the discipline, the aches and sweats of the manual labour, the intent strain of the illuminating, this song to Mary was a running into Mother's arms and finding ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... the wind blew as hard as ever. Still the water rose until the white foam reached almost close up to the spot on which their tent stood. A few minutes more might decide their fate. Owen felt deeply the awfulness of their situation. Ere long he and his companions might be standing in the ...
— Owen Hartley; or, Ups and Downs - A Tale of Land and Sea • William H. G. Kingston
... Schofield's version of things was that Penrod was insane. "He's a stark, raving lunatic!" declared the father, descending to the library from a before-dinner interview with the outlaw, that evening. "I'd send him to military school, but I don't believe they'd take him. Do you know WHY he says all that awfulness happened?" ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... intimated, are but violins of a larger growth. The pizzicato is, indeed, oftenest heard from the double-basses, where it has a much greater eloquence than on the violins. In music of a sombre cast, the short, deep tones given out by the plucked strings of the contra-bass sometimes have the awfulness of gigantic heart-throbs. The difficulty of producing the other effects grows with the increase of difficulty in handling the instruments, this being due to the growing thickness of the strings and the wideness of the points at which ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... present instance came to no result; they that sowed the hemp-seed forgot the magic rhyme that they were to pronounce, so the true lover never appeared; and as to the dumb-cake, what between the awful stillness they had to keep, and the awfulness of the midnight hour, their hearts failed them when they had put the cake in the pan, so that, on the striking of the great house-clock in the servants' hall, they were seized with a sudden panic, and ran out of the room, to which they did not return until morning, ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... tawny green which belongs to it under such circumstances. I pulled around the curving rear of the eastern church, with its surface of marble lace, such as we had seen before, gazing upward and upward at the towering awfulness and magnificence of edifice, myself frozen in admiration. The Parson, under high excitement, rained ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... wondering admiration at this marvellous woman. Was it possible that a girl could have such nerve, such courage? Or had woman's hope, so persistent where her loved ones are concerned, made Beulah Sands blind to the awfulness of the situation? As I looked at her I could not doubt that she fully realised our position, that she was really suffering more than either of us, that she was only acting to ease Bob's anguish. Bob brought out his memoranda, and in half an hour we had the ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... been accustomed to sights and scenes of peril, and had witnessed the burning of short grass to some extent; but this was the first time I had been in such fearful danger—the first time I felt the awfulness of such a situation—the first time that I had really ...
— History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians • George Mogridge
... wrists, but he remained in the same state of stupefaction, making no remark upon his unusual situation, or taking the least notice of his strange companions. When the vehicle stopped at the entrance of the county jail, then, and not until then, did the awfulness of his situation appear to strike him. Starting from his frightful mental abstraction, he eagerly demanded of the officers why his hands were manacled, and for what crime they had brought ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... slightly, from side to side. "But there was more than that. There was more than that. What was it?" She leaned her ear as if to listen, her eyes very large and fixed. "Yes, there was the war, and the awfulness of our disappointment in it, too, after all. There was the counsel of despair about everything, the pressure on us all to think that all efforts to be more than base are delusions. We were so terribly ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... keep silent, and handed him a cheque for five thousand pounds, receiving in return the marriage certificate. I then made Moreland swear to leave the colony, which he readily agreed to do, saying Melbourne was dangerous. When he left I reflected upon the awfulness of my position, and I had almost determined to commit suicide, but, thank God, I was saved from that crime. I write this confession in order that after my death the true story of the murder of Whyte may be known, and that any one who may hereafter be ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... writes: "And His will is our peace," it is the thought of Jesus. And at the same time God's judgements are as real to Jesus' mind. "I will tell you," he says, "whom to fear, God—yes, fear him!" (Luke 12:5). He feels the tenderness and the awfulness of ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... natural rock; or high upward in the deep cuts of the road. It appeared to the sculptor that Donatello prayed the more earnestly and the more hopefully at these shrines, because the mild face of the Madonna promised him to intercede as a tender mother betwixt the poor culprit and the awfulness ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... vast possibilities of destruction gripped in his hand. His mood was a singular mixture of fear and exultation. Chiefly he was afraid of being caught before he could accomplish his purpose, but behind this was a vaguer but larger fear of the awfulness of his crime. But his exultation far exceeded his fear. No Anarchist before him had ever approached this conception of his. Ravachol, Vaillant, all those distinguished persons whose fame he had envied dwindled ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... of water cast up by it, said to have rushed toward the vessel with a noise that was "deafening." The bark was struck flat aback, and "a roaring, white sea passed ahead." "The master, an old, experienced mariner, declared that the awfulness of ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... perfect alike in body and in mind, walking to and fro, his beautiful wife upon his arm, his noble boy beside his knee, in his 'white satin doublet, embroidered with pearls, and a great chain of pearls about his neck,' lording it among the lords with an 'awfulness and ascendency above other mortals,' for which men say that 'his naeve is, that he is damnable proud'; and no wonder. The reduced squire's younger son has gone forth to conquer the world; and he fancies, poor fool, that he has conquered ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... the tremulous eagerness of his words, the alternations of severity and tenderness in his manner to her, all struck her only as indications of the very grave danger in which she was placed, and the awfulness of the sin and condemnation which oppressed the soul of one for whom she was conscious of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... voice of the sea began to moan through the back of the cave, the gorse crackled no longer, and the turf burned in a dull red glow. Night with its awfulness had come down, and the boys were ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... such a race and in its traditions he had been nurtured by that sad lady whom we were going to see. I at least knew that he had acted, and was now acting, up to the very standard of his high calling. The place has lost much of its awfulness for me; it had become even ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... adapted to accomplish their purpose. The Egyptian beholder and worshiper was not to be attracted and charmed, but overwhelmed. His own nothingness and the terribleness of the power and the will of God was what he was to feel. But, if the awfulness of Deity was thus inculcated, the divine power of the Pharaoh was not less strikingly set forth. He is seen seated amongst them, nourished from their breasts, folded in their arms, admitted to familiar intercourse with them. He is represented on the walls of the temple as of colossal stature, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... and it was one of the best effects I ever invented. When it was finished I stood up on the platform and extended my hands abroad, for two minutes, with my face uplifted—that always produces a dead hush—and then slowly pronounced this ghastly word with a kind of awfulness which caused hundreds to tremble, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a suit of Leather. This man, the first of the Quakers, and by trade a Shoemaker, was one of those, to whom, under ruder or purer form, the Divine Idea of the Universe is pleased to manifest itself; and, across all the hulls of Ignorance and earthly Degradation, shine through, in unspeakable Awfulness, unspeakable Beauty, on their souls: who therefore are rightly accounted Prophets, God-possessed; or even Gods, as in some periods it has chanced. Sitting in his stall; working on tanned hides, amid ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... been by the death-beds of many men, and I have noted that shortly before death, as the frame grows weaker and weaker, the fiercer passions yield to those feelings better harmonizing with the awfulness of the hour. Thoughts soft and tender, which seem little to belong to the character in the health and vigour of former years, obtain then an empire, brief, indeed, but utter for the time they last; and this is the more impressive because (as in the present instance I shall have ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... like a little highlight seen for a moment and gone the next. I tried to believe it was sunburn, only I could not. I knew better. No one noticed it but me. No one ever noticed it except Stephen Kaluna, and I did not know that till afterward. But I saw it coming, the whole damnable, unnamable awfulness of it; but I refused to think about the future. I was afraid. I could not. And of ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... it happened that immediately on my interview, I acquainted them with the nature of my errand, and solicited their attendance in London. Conceiving that I had no right to ask them such a favour, or terrified at the abruptness and apparent awfulness of my request, some of them gave me an immediate denial, which they would never afterwards retract. I began to perceive in time that it was only by the most delicate management that I could get forward on these occasions. I resolved therefore ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... human limits, with the lamps of neighboring tenements glimmering across the street. The house probably seemed to her adrift on the great ocean of the night. A little parallelogram of sky was all that she had hitherto known of nature, so that she felt the awfulness that really exists in its limitless extent. Once, while the blast was bellowing, she caught hold of Zenobia's robe, with precisely the air of one who hears her own name spoken at a distance, but is unutterably reluctant to ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Oh, the awfulness of that moment when they both disappeared and we were left alone! With father gone it seemed as if there were no one left to keep order or inspire us with any show of courage. I think we all went mad or something like it, and, before we knew what was happening, one of the servants had opened ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... glow and colour of first youth, and in her presence became a changed being. I blushed if she looked at me; trembled at the touch of her hand or the scent of her hair. To be in her presence was to be closeted with the awfulness and splendour of God. I read immortality in her eyes. A smile from her blinded me, a gentle word or caressing look and I went faint and dizzy, and I was content to lurk in some corner and gaze upon her secretly with all my soul. And I took long, ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... answered his companion; "it is the grievous deficiency in Englishmen altogether. Englishmen have many gifts, faith they have not. Other nations, inferior to them in many things, still have faith. Nothing will stand in place of it; not a sense of the beauty of Catholicism, or of its awfulness, or of its antiquity; not an appreciation of the sympathy which it shows towards sinners: not an admiration of the Martyrs and early Fathers, and a delight in their writings. Individuals may display a touching gentleness, or a conscientiousness which demands ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... His holiness by which He desires to be remembered as that is the attribute which most glorifies Him. Let us bear this fact in mind as we study this attribute of the divine nature. It is just this vision of God that we need today when the tendency to deny the reality or the awfulness of sin is so prevalent. Our view of the necessity of the atonement will depend very largely upon our view of the holiness of God. Light views of God and His holiness will produce light views of sin and ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... the left. But Fafa hesitates,—halts a moment to look back. He sees the sun's huge orange face sink down,—sees the weird procession of the peaks vesture themselves in blackness funereal,—sees the burning behind them crimson into awfulness; and a vague fear comes upon him as he looks again up the darkling path to the left. Whither is she ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... a religious faculty. It is the mother and mistress of faith, hope, and love. It is the source of great thoughts, of high aspirations, and of heavenly dreams. Without it the illimitable starlit expanse loses its sublimity, oceans and mountains their awfulness and majesty, flowers their beauty, home its sacred charm, youth its halo, and the grave ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... awfulness to the sublimity of a storm at sea. The world about the ship is in wild commotion. The sky seems to have dropped into the sea, and now joins the roaring waves as they rush along. The blackness of the night is impenetrable, save as the lights from the ship gleam for an instant into the ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... and the verse does not lend itself to the sustained sublimity of terror. The glow of Milton's hell is intenser, and Milton's majestic instrumentation alone could render the voices of its flames. The real awfulness of Browning's Judgment Day dwells wholly in the inner experiences of a solitary soul. The speaker finds of a sudden that the doom is upon him, and that in the probation of life his choice was earth, not heaven. The sentence pronounced upon him is in accordance with the election ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... The rest, between the awfulness of their late discovery and the odd conduct of this third visitor, looked as if they knew not what to think, and said nothing. Instinctively they withdrew further and further from the grim gentleman in ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... No more Thy aged form shall rise before The bushed and waiting worshiper, In meek obedience utterance giving To words of truth, so fresh and living, That, even to the inward sense, They bore unquestioned evidence Of an anointed Messenger! Or, bowing down thy silver hair In reverent awfulness of prayer, The world, its time and sense, shut out The brightness of Faith's holy trance Gathered upon thy countenance, As if each lingering cloud of doubt, The cold, dark shadows resting here In Time's unluminous atmosphere, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... with the last possibility—there was no forked road for her—that of a shrewd, cold flirt. She realized too late the injustice done her under the name of a father's loving protection. Moreover, she determined never to let herself realize to any great extent the awfulness of the injustice. It was, as Steve said, a common fate these days—there was solace in the fact of never being alone in her defeat. But at five minutes after twelve she had glimpsed the situation and regretted briefly all she was denied. ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... seen the ball rolling, and they can't keep out of the game. The very bigness of the thing lures them on; the bigger the issue, the bigger the fascination. The millions of men and the billions of dollars—that lures them. And the awfulness—the dead, the wounded, the horrors, that lures them like nothing else. There was ...
— Makers of Madness - A Play in One Act and Three Scenes • Hermann Hagedorn
... hands and let them fall into her lap. The awfulness of Cousin Jane's indignation transcended the poor lady's powers of description. Zora dismissed the Vicar and Cousin Jane as persons of no account. The silly pair were legally married, and she would see that there was ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... twentieth century needed was a refrigerator! A poker and a pair of bellows would be very much more needful for them. For, dear brethren, the truths that you and I profess to believe are of such a nature, so tremendous either in their joyfulness and beauty, or in their solemnity and awfulness, that one would think that if they once got into a man's head and heart, nothing but the most fervid and continuous glow of a radiant enthusiasm would correspond to their majesty and overwhelming importance. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... yet of a majestic appearance, thoroughly understood the art of making herself loved. She was not beautiful, but yet she was sure of pleasing by her geniality and her wit, and also by that exquisite tact which made one forget the awfulness of the sovereign in the gentleness of the woman. A few days after, Count Partin told me that the empress had twice asked after me, and that this was a sure sign I had pleased her. He advised me to ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... tried to explain to her the awfulness of it, the incongruity, but no, she couldn't see it! We jawed about it for a couple of hours with the result that our engagement ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... unclose their eyes, and give another gentle grunt. They also grunt among themselves, without any external cause; but merely to express their swinish sympathy. I suppose it is the knowledge that these four grunters are doomed to die within two or three weeks that gives them a sort of awfulness in my conception. It makes me contrast their present gross substance of fleshly life with the nothingness speedily to come. Meantime the four newly-bought pigs are running about the cow-yard, lean, active, shrewd, investigating everything, as their nature is. When I throw an apple among ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... well understand," she said, "how the people there fancied they heard the mermaids singing—amidst so much mystery, and with the awfulness ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... slightest conception of the magnitude or awfulness of this canon. It is clearly one of the wonders of the world, and its vastness is such that to explore it from end to end is a work of ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... is the willing and probably the fit exponent, may be dismissed without further consideration, since he is, after all, only the inevitable as he is the deplorable result of that for which he stands; seemingly without any sense of the shame and the awfulness ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... than this vast area of rock and woodland. We can choose between sites, savage or idyllic, pastoral or grandiose, here finding a sunny glade, the very spot for a picnic, there break-neck declivities and gloomy chasms. The magnificent ruggedness of Alpine scenery is before our eyes, without the awfulness of snow-clad peaks or the blinding dazzle of glacier. In more than one place we could almost fancy that some mountain has been upheaved and split asunder, the clefts formed by these gigantic fragments being now filled ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... wretchedness and cruelty of the present world were enough to generate frightful beliefs and cast appalling shadows over the future. If the earth was full of devils and phantoms, surely hell must swarm worse with them. The Inquisition sat shrouded and enthroned in supernatural obscurity of cunning and awfulness of power, and thrust its invisible daggers everywhere. The facts men knew here around them gave credibility to the imagery in which the hereafter was depicted. The flaming stakes of an Auto da Fe around which the victims of ecclesiastical hatred writhed were but faint emblems of what awaited ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... said, and shivered, for now I understood the awfulness of this poor man's case. He was the father of a number of half-breeds who tied him to this spot as anchors tie a ship. I went on rather hastily past some sheds to a long, low building which proved to be a store. Here the quarter-blood called Thomaso, and some assistants ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... trivial life, although the war itself occasioned a multitude of poems, songs, hymns, and political disquisitions. The hymns of this period, which are filled with a sense of dependence, of the greatness and awfulness of an invisible eternity, and breathe a desire for the peaceful traits of a remote religious life, are at once a confession of the weariness of the best minds at the turmoil and uncertainty of the contest and a permanent contribution of the finest kind to that form of sacred literature. But ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... over the river of the monks. The man passed over the bridge and I followed him; on the other side we stopped and turned round. The river was rushing and surging, the pot was boiling and roaring, and everything looked wild and savage; but the locality, for awfulness and mysterious gloom, could not compare with that on the east side of the Devil's Bridge, nor for sublimity and grandeur with that ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... wild desire to fly from the room and the house came over Miss Ludington. Not that she did not long inexpressibly to see the vision that was drawing near, whose beautiful feet might even now be on the threshold, but the sense of its awfulness overcame her. She felt that she was not fit, not ready, for it now. If she could only have more time to prepare herself, and then could come again. But it was ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... awfulness displayed; His kindliness and mercy more appear; For flow'rs, the precious emblems He has made Of graciousness, in plenitude are here. In rich profusion blooming unconfined, They seem to whisper softly: ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats
... you'd send me on the—on the Death Trail?" he cried, aghast. The enormity of the peril swept over him in a flood, set him a-tremble. Though he questioned so wildly, he knew the truth, and the awfulness of it put his manhood in revolt, made him coward for the moment. The Death Trail! ... He had not been prepared for that. To back against the wall, and fight to the end like a trapped animal were one thing—a thing for ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... J.D. Kestell, who accompanied the Boer forces, gives the following striking description of the attack—a description which conveys to the mind of the reader something of the awfulness of war, as well as of the courage and heroism displayed by ...
— In the Shadow of Death • P. H. Kritzinger and R. D. McDonald
... you ask for news. It has just missed being disastrous. Poor Dionea! I fear that early voyage tied to the spar did no good to her wits, poor little waif! There has been a fearful row; and it has required all my influence, and all the awfulness of your Excellency's name, and the Papacy, and the Holy Roman Empire, to prevent her expulsion by the Sisters of the Stigmata. It appears that this mad creature very nearly committed a sacrilege: she was discovered handling in a suspicious manner the Madonna's ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... that she divined their lineage from the lines and features of the face, and could discern any man's birth by sheer shrewdness of vision. When she stood and fixed the scrutiny of her gaze upon Olaf, she was stricken with the strange awfulness of his eyes, and fell almost lifeless. But when her strength came slowly back, and her breath went and came more freely, she again tried to look at the young man, but suddenly slipped and fell forward, as though distraught. A third time also she strove ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... Gee, you fellers'll think I'm a Williams J. Bryant runnin' f'r President. Notice I said runnin'! No, I ain't tryin' t' be funny. I just wish I could be. It'd sort o' take th' weight off th' awfulness of what I remember as what happened, an' what I can't tell right 'cause I ain't got eddication an' ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... of Peter when, after his denial of the Lord, "he went out and wept bitterly." Another most touching passage was that representing the love of the woman who anointed the feet of Jesus. When the shout of the multitude arose in the words "Crucify Him!" the awfulness was intense. There were times when the audience scarcely seemed to breathe freely, so strong was the spell, so vivid the reality of this saddest and most touching of narratives, as interpreted by this wonderful music. Never but once have I heard the perfection of ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... strange how soon even the gentlest natures gain a familiarity with suffering and death. The awfulness and solemnity of the unaccustomed sight loses rapidly by daily contact with it; even though the sentiments of sympathy and pity may not grow callous as well. But, as yet, Richmond was new to such scenes; and a shudder went through the whole social ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... messenger. At that moment something within her more than loved him, worshipped him, felt for him an idolatry that had something in it of pain. A number of thoughts ran through her mind swiftly. One was this: "Can it be possible that he will die some day, that he will be dead?" And the awfulness, the unspeakable horror of the death of the body gripped her and ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... indeed, the boasted Sphinx of Gizeh seemed but a toy. It was no less than a small mountain of rock shaped by the genius and patient labour of some departed race of men to the form of a lion-headed monster. Its majesty and awfulness set thus above the rolling mists in the red light of the morning, reflected on it from the towering precipices beyond, were literally indescribable; even in our miserable state, they oppressed and overcame us, so that for ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... of war the German system of destruction, and the doctrine of "awfulness," as I saw it applied to physical objects, was barbaric, relentless, and totally unjustified. At Louvain, Aerschot, and Termonde it was at its height. On the other hand, in the mind of an impartial student of the facts there cannot be the slightest doubt that at Louvain there was an organized ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... flood sends the rainbow also? There are not two gods, nor many gods, but one God, of whom are all things. Light and darkness, storm or sunshine, barrenness or wealth, come alike from him. Diseases, storm, flood, blight, all these show that there is in God an awfulness, a sternness, an anger if need be—a power of destroying his own work, of altering his own order; but sunshine, fruitfulness, peace, and comfort, all show that love and mercy, beauty and order, are just as much attributes of his essence as ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... eyes, at any rate from his own. He drew a picture of the little ship amid the storm, and of God's hand as it moved in its anger upon the waters, but of the cause of that divine wrath and its direction he said nothing. Then, of the suddenness of death and its awfulness he said much, not insisting, as he did so, on the necessity of repentance for salvation, as far as those two poor sinners were concerned. No, indeed; how could any preacher have done that? But he improved the occasion by telling those around him that they ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... wasting variously in manifold and multiform shapes,—the brightness of the Catholic and only true Church went forward increasing and enlarging, yet ever in the same things and in the same way, beaming on the whole race of Greeks and barbarians with the awfulness, and simplicity, and nobleness, and sobriety, and purity of its divine polity and philosophy. Thus the calumny against our whole creed died with its day, and there continued alone our discipline, sovereign among all, and acknowledged to be pre-eminent in awfulness and sobriety, in its ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... knowledge; the plant has no perceptions. Each human life seems no more than a parabolic curve of motion out of earth and back to earth; but in that brief interval of change it perceives the universe. The awfulness of the phenomenon is that nobody knows anything about it No mortal can explain this most common, yet moat incomprehensible of all facts,—life in itself; yet every mortal who can think has been obliged betimes, to think about it in ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... was the black place—the rope of the Canadian Indian. The awfulness—the loneliness of her despair made her whimper brokenly behind a tattered sleeve. The hag was muttering her incantations and did not heed ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... of the milking to be done twice a day, might live their own stupid, commonplace lives there. The chance visitor who spent a few hours in scaling difficult cliffs would perhaps catch a brief and fleeting sense of their awfulness, only too quickly dissipated by the unwonted toil and peril of his situation. But Roland Sefton felt himself exiled to their ice-bound solitudes, cut off from all companionship, and attended only by an ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... shines through everything, through the infernal awfulness of these days, through my father's anger, and my mother's illness, whatever it proves to be—I think about them really with all my might, and at the end I find I've been thinking about Sylvia. Everything is she—the woods, the ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... solemn awfulness of the place and scene oppressed her. She began to think that she, too, ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... fitting clothing for the men exposed to all the terrors of a Russian winter; and her daughters, enlisted to aid in this pious work, began that career of beneficence which two of them were to pursue afterwards to such good purpose, amid the ravages of wars whose colossal awfulness dwarfed the Crimean campaign in the memories ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... is without any dampness, and would afford an habitation not uncomfortable. There were from space to space seats in the rock. Though it wants water, it excels Dovedale by the extent of its prospects, the awfulness of its shades, the horrors of its precipices, the verdure of its hollows, and the loftiness of its rocks: the ideas which it forces upon the mind are, the sublime, the dreadful, and the vast. Above is inaccessible altitude, below is horrible profundity. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... with the cold perspiration of dread and horror. His soul was moaning; his whole being was aghast with the awfulness of the deed; he could have shrieked aloud in his madness. How he lived through the hour in that theatre he never could have told, nor could he believe that he was sitting there with all those frightful thoughts piling themselves upon him. ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... charging,—but the roaring of beasts, the crackling and hissing of fire, the rumbling of earthquake, the thunder of ruin, and, above all these, a clamor continual as of shrieks and smothered shoutings,—the Voices that are said to be the voices of the drowned., Awfulness supreme of tumult,—combining all imaginable echoings of ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... satisfaction or approval—came before long under her mighty sway. The pianoforte threw a spell over him, and, attracting him more and more, inspired him with such a fondness as to induce his parents to provide him, notwithstanding his tender age, with an instructor. To lessen the awfulness of the proceeding, it was arranged that one of the elder sisters should join him in his lessons. The first and only pianoforte teacher of him who in the course of time became one of the greatest and most original masters of this instrument, deserves some attention ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... sternest prude in England. She wrote me, soon after that unbelievable mating: "I have married Cecil Grimshaw. I know you won't approve; I do not altogether approve myself. He is not like the men I have known—not at all English. But he intrigues me; there is a sense of power behind his awfulness—you see I know that he is awful! I think I will be able to make him look at things—I mean visible, material things—my way. We have taken a house in town and he has promised to behave—no more Chelsea parties, ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... Because he was so oppressed with dread in regard to the young man who walked and boated with Katy, courted and caressed her, but about the seriousness of whose intentions the mother seemed to have some doubt—because of the very awfulness of his apprehensions, he dared not ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... the window easily enough, and found myself in a bedroom the like of which for disorder and dust and general awfulness I had never seen in all my life. But I did not pause to take in details. With William Adolphus under my arm I marched downstairs, fervently hoping I should meet ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery |
