"Sublime" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of friends, good in an uncommon way, accomplished, learned, and surrounded with pretty and tasteful objects, your life will certainly be in danger of not proving very sublime." ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... requires further explanation. The Royal Procession to the Convent in the distance, with the young King, Edward VI. beneath a canopy, has a picturesque, if not imposing effect. By the way, a Correspondent, who appears to delight in the quaint sublime, tells us that in digging the foundation of the Market just erected in Covent Garden, a quantity of human bones were dug from a rich black mould, at the depth of five feet from the surface, opposite James-street. "The Irish labourers threw them forth, and the sun again gleamed upon ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 473., Saturday, January 29, 1831 • Various
... dark chestnut in colour, almost black, with longish ears, and an eye so full, honest, and impudent, that it made you laugh in his face. Widderin, Sam said, was his name, price and history being suppressed; called after Mount Widderin, to the northward there, whose loftiest sublime summit bends over like a horse's neck, with two peaked crags for ears. And the Major comes somehow to connect this horse with the Highflyer colt mentioned by our Irish friend, and observes that Sam ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... of appreciating. Every man on that night seemed to be inspired by the subject. Speeches more replete with talent and energy, on both sides, never were heard in the Irish Senate; it was a vital subject. The sublime, the eloquent, the figurative orator, the plain, the connected, the metaphysical reasoner, the classical, the learned, and the solemn declaimer, in a succession of speeches so full of energy and enthusiasm, so interesting in ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... the sublime performances of Hillquit, that which lays the brightest crown on his veracity was the answer he gave at Albany on February 17, 1920, to the long hypothetical question concerning the attitude of the Socialists should their friends of the Third International, ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... gone, a century will not replace their loss; they cannot, they must not fall; their vernal bloom, their summer richness, and autumnal tints, please and refresh the eye of man; and even when the days of joy and warmth are fled, the wintry blast soothes the listening ear with a sublime and pleasing melancholy as it ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... the several parts of which he specifies in the course of the epistle, but not in any very exact order. It is in connection with these admonitions that the apostle, while insisting on the duty of humility and self-sacrificing love, brings in that sublime description of the Saviour's original glory and equality with God, which he laid aside for our redemption, taking upon himself the form of a servant and submitting to the death of the cross; for which act of self-abasement ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... of science is thus to change men's idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of experience. By the same token, it changes the idea and the operation of reason. Instead of being something beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found indigenous in experience:—the factor by which past experiences are purified and rendered into tools ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... sensible excess." The word began to excite discussion in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. See vol. i., p. 185, for Gilpin's "Observations on Picturesque Beauty." See also Uvedale Price, "Essays on the Picturesque as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful," three vols., 1794-96. Price finds the character of the picturesque to consist in roughness, irregularity, intricacy, and sudden variation. Gothic buildings are more picturesque than Grecian, and a ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... degenerates into prettiness. We appeal to the memories of all our observing readers, whether they have treasured up any scene, pretending to be more than pretty, which has not about it either a tinge of melancholy or a sense of danger; the one constitutes the beautiful, the other the sublime. ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... one blush for the sake of Christianity, to think that the perpetrators of the outrages upon the original possessors of the Americas were persons professing that sublime religion,—and that in the midst of their slaughter and plunder, they impiously held forth the cross of Christ. The confiding but dignified nature of the idolatrous Mexicans, did much more honour to the purity of the Christian religion ...
— Peter Parley's Tales About America and Australia • Samuel Griswold Goodrich
... little hills round and round a vineyard! Then some lamentations were poured into the heart of the Public Prosecutor, of the Sous-prefet, even of Monsieur Gravier, and they all increased in their devotion to this sublime victim; for, like all women, she never mentioned her speculative schemes, and—again like all women—finding such speculation ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... With a mother's wonderful, sublime instinct, she had found the most powerful reason that could be urged to induce Pascal to live. "Did you not feel, my son, that it showed a lack of courage on your part to brand yourself and your name ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... are far more magnificent and sublime thoughts about Him than that; but I do not know that there is any that ought to come nearer to our hearts, and to silence more of our grumblings and of our distrust, than the belief that the gladness of His children is an ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... that shade the wave-worn steep, Long may ye rear your aged brows sublime, Though, hurrying silent by, relentless Time Assail you, and the winds of winter sweep Round your dark battlements; for far from halls Of Pride, here Charity hath fixed her seat, Oft listening, tearful, when the tempests beat With hollow bodings round your ancient ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... the arts and sciences among men. Those reach but to some resemblance of the wisdom of God, expressed in his works, but this aspires to an imitation of himself in holiness, which is the glory of his name, and so to a fellowship with himself. Therefore there is nothing hath so high a pattern, or sublime an end. God himself, who is infinitely above all, is the pattern, and society with God is the end of it and so it cannot choose, but where religion makes a solid impression on a soul. It must exceedingly raise ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... paths, and little groves of shrubs and young trees around us; yet it is a gratification of the highest order, to witness the animals of almost every country on the earth assembled within a few acres; and it is indeed a sublime study to observe how beautifully the links in the great chain of nature are wrought, and how admirably are the habits and structure of some of these animals adapted to the wants of man, while all are subservient ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 535, Saturday, February 25, 1832. • Various
... benzoic acid from twelve ounces of gum benzoin by the first sublimation. As the gum is not exhausted by the first operation, it may be bruised when cold and again submitted to the action of heat, when a fresh portion of benzoic acid will sublime from it. This acid thus obtained, is not perfectly pure and white, and Mohr states that it is a question, in a medicinal and perfumery point of view, whether it is so valuable when perfectly pure, as when it contains a small portion of a fragrant volatile ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... Rule is the whole Bible; yea, Christ says it is-"the law and the prophets;" yea, it is the Old Testament and the New condensed; and with ever-increasing glory of Providence in one sublime aphorism, which can be understood and obeyed only by those who know what the Bible, or Providence, reveals as to man's varied ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... counted. They were all driven by some common impulse of terror. In their head-long plunge, those in front pressed on by the innumerable throng behind, it was manifest that no ordinary obstacle would in the slightest degree retard their rush. The spectacle was sublime and terrible. Had the travellers been upon the open plain, it seemed inevitable that they must have been trampled down and crushed out of every semblance of humanity by these thousands of ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... woman. She was a female of one of those strange nations, decently clad, about thirty years of age, pleasant to the eye were she not so dirty, and had she not that wild look, half way between the sallow sublime and the dangerously murderous, which seems common to oriental Christians, whether men or women. Heaven might know of what sins she came there to leave the burden: heaven did know, doubtless; but from the length of her manoeuvres in quitting herself of their weight, one would ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... Punch-and-Judy voices, dog-whistles, trumpets. Each time it is something more and more absurd, so that at last we are overcome with uncontrollable fits of laughter. Last of all, an aged Japanese optician, who assumes a most knowing air, a look of sublime wisdom, goes off to forage in his back shop, and brings to light a steam fog-horn, a relict ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... honor and pitiful tears To all who fail in their deeds sublime, Their ghosts are many in the van of years, They were born with Time in ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... in the fact that the hoary memorial of a stolid antagonism to the interchange of ideas, the monument of hard distinctions in blood and race, of deadly mistrust of one's neighbour in spite of the Church's teaching, and of a sublime unconsciousness of any other force than a brute one, should be the goal of a machine which beyond everything may be said to symbolize cosmopolitan views and the intellectual and moral kinship of all mankind. In that light ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... mend things before she sends them to us," she said, with sublime naivete, and then, at the burst of laughter which greeted her words, she stopped short, staring at the highly entertained circle with widely opened, innocent eyes. "What are you laughing at?" she ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the ones to do penance. Religious sentiment certainly had, in those days, an affinity with love; it was either the motive or the end of it. Love was still a religion, with its fine fanaticism, its naive superstitions, its sublime devotions, which sympathized with those ...
— Maitre Cornelius • Honore de Balzac
... underlying the ambiguity of the language, and, under his advice, the Porte proposed as an amendment the substitution of the words "to the stipulations of the Treaty of Kainardji, confirmed by that of Adrianople, relative to the protection by the Sublime Porte of the Christian religion." The Russian Government refused to accept this amendment, and from that moment war was inevitable. The British Fleet under Admiral Dundas had been sent from Malta to the East at the ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... away he saw her only in the beatified state, in company with saints and angels; and he was wrapped in ecstasies which knew no end,—the unbroken adoration of beauty, grace, and truth, even of those eternal ideas on which Plato based all that is certain, and all that is worth living for; that sublime realism without which life is a failure, and this world is "a mockery, a delusion, and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... the entire housekeeping of half a world, and give the kingdom of fashion a list to starboard; who could paint beautiful pictures; compose music; speak four languages; write sublime verse; address a public assemblage effectively; produce plays; resurrect the lost art of making books, books such as were made only in the olden time as a loving, religious service; who lived a clean, wholesome, manly life—beloved by those ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... like the borders of nearly all the streets in Charlesbridge, with the pallid azure flame of the succory. The neighborhood was in all things a frontier between city and country. The horse-cars, the type of such civilization— full of imposture, discomfort, and sublime possibility—as we yet possess, went by the head of our street, and might, perhaps, be available to one skilled in calculating the movements of comets; while two minutes' walk would take us into a wood so wild and thick that no roof was visible through ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... certain of those ancient and experienced men who grow gray about a court in the profound study of forms and ceremonials, with whom a point of punctilio is as a vast political right, and who contract a sublime and awful idea of the external dignity of the throne. Certain of these court sages propounded the momentous question whether the Moorish monarch, coming to do homage as a vassal, ought not to kneel ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... mixture of pride and shamelessness. Drunkenness, filthy conversation, debauchery of the vilest kind, and impiety, were her diversions, varied, as has been seen, by occasional religious fits. Her indecency in everything, language, acts, behaviour, passed all bounds; and yet her pride was so sublime that she could not endure that people should dare to speak of her amid her depravity, so universal and so public; she had the hardihood to declare that nobody had the right to speak of persons of her rank, or blame their most ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... will have conveyed only the ridiculous side of his appearance; but the ridiculous and the sublime are near, and the grotesque fiendishness of Chowbok's face approached this last, if it did not reach it. I tried to be amused, but I felt a sort of creeping at the roots of my hair and over my whole body, ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... of war, and the same extreme interest and concern in the men and things of war. He, too, declares that 'the loftiest and most generous sentiments are probably to be found in the soldier;' and that war, if terrible, is divine and splendid and fascinating, the manifestation of a sublime law of the universe. We must, however, do De Maistre the justice to point out, first, that he gave a measure of his strange interest in Surgery and Judgment, as Mr. Carlyle calls it, to the public executioner, a division of ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... to an almost interminable extent, there is a most superb view of the surrounding country; nothing can be more varied, grand, and sublime; every spot spared by the all-devastating lavas, is highly cultivated; the vines and other productive fruit-trees are seen laden with the most delicious fruits; the groves of olives, the towns and villages, in almost endless aerial perspective, all terminated ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20. No. 568 - 29 Sept 1832 • Various
... Europe over all the five continents and the seven seas which has marked the past five centuries, the Englishman found a roomy place in the sun. By luck or pluck, by trusted honesty or sublime assurance, and with little aid from his government, he soon outdistanced Frenchman and Dutchman, Spaniard and Portuguese, in the area and richness of the regions over which his flag floated and in which his ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... that profoundly philosophical suspicion, that a rose, or a violet, did actually smell, to a person occupying this sublime position, very much as it did to another; a suspicion which, in the mouth of a common man, would have been literally sufficient to 'make a star-chamber matter of'; and all that thorough-going analysis of ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... dangerous. During this time, the party continued to float with the current, no one speaking, and, it might almost be said, no one breathing, so strong was the general desire to catch the minutest sound that should come from the shore. But the same solemn, we might, indeed, say sublime, quiet reigned as before; the washing of the water, as it piled up against some slight obstruction, and the sighing of the trees, alone interrupting the slumbers of the forest. At the end of the period mentioned, the snapping of dried branches was again faintly heard, and the Pathfinder ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... decrees to effect the levee en masse, the Convention have discovered that this sublime and undefined project was not calculated for the present exhausted state of martial ardour. They therefore no longer presume on any movement of enthusiasm, but have made a positive and specific ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... aristocratic blood imparts. But her eyes and hair were her crowning features. How shall I describe the deep, dreamy languor of her large, dark eyes, made a hundred-fold more effective by the silvery whiteness of her hair, which had partly escaped from her comb, and fell upon her neck! And then her sublime, tranquil indifference! That I was near, spellbound with admiration, did not interest her so much as a sail, no larger than a gull's wing, far out ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... much criticism of Shakespeare, for example, which, with all its cleverness and partial truth, still shows that the critic never passed from his own mind into Shakespeare's; and it may still be traced even in so fine a critic as Coleridge, as when he dwarfs the sublime struggle of Hamlet into the image of his own unhappy weakness. Hazlitt by no means escaped its influence. Only the third of that great trio, Lamb, appears almost always to have rendered the conception ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley
... But the large world of such Has thousands—better taught, alike absurd, And less sublime. Of fame he soon got much, Where distant cataracts spout, of him men heard. Alas for Sam! Had he aright preferred The kindly element, to which he gave Himself so fearlessly, we had not heard That it was now his winding sheet and ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... longer in its original state, but is obliged with great labour to recall by reminiscence—which is called philosophy—the old but now sadly obscured ideas. I will not here enter upon any literary investigation of the sense which this sublime philosopher attached to this expression. I shall content myself with remarking that it is nothing unusual, in common conversation as well as in written works, by comparing the thoughts which an author has delivered upon a subject, to understand him better than he understood himself inasmuch as he ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... father, to hold him up. She had to be the one who kept her calmness and energy at the critical moment. Renovales let his daughter lead him; he rested his face on her shoulder, with sublime, dramatic grief, with beautiful, artistic despair, still holding absent-mindedly in his hand the letter of ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Songs," and Hervey's "Meditations," had formed the whole of my reading. The collection of songs was my companion, day and night. I pored over them driving my cart, or walking to labour, song by song, verse by verse; carefully noting the true, tender, or sublime, from affectation and fustian. I am convinced I owe to this practice much of my critic-craft, such ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... "Regained," We might, enchanted, wander evermore. Of all the genius-gifted thou hast reigned King of our hearts; and, till upon the shore Of the Eternal dies the voice of Time, Thy name shall mightiest stand—pure, brilliant, and sublime. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... and awful throne where sits Destiny—the phalanx of Macedon, the Roman legion, the black banner of the Abbassides, the jewelled mail of Akbar's chivalry, and the Ottoman's crescent moon. And their resolution, serene, implacable, sublime, is the resolution of the gladiators, "Ave, imperator, morituri te salutant! Hail, Caesar, those about to ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... the Sublime, etc. While Beattie had given the preference to psychological and aesthetic questions, James Oswald (1772) appealed to common sense in matters of religion, describing it as an instinctive faculty of judgment concerning truth and falsehood. The most eminent among the followers ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... winter of 1916-17 one dreamed already of loans and imports from the United States during the peace negotiations. Mr. Gerard came back from America with alms for the wounded and the result of his sublime patience and of the sublime patience of Mr. von Bethmann-Hollweg was pictured by the Gerard ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... Semnai Theai, or Sublime Goddesses, these were the Eumenides, or Gracious Ladies (so called by antiquity in shuddering propitiation) of my Oxford dreams. Madonna spoke. She spoke by her mysterious hand. Touching my head, she beckoned to our ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... reed, is thatcht the hut it self, Where, besides what is on a smoaky shelf, Ripe service-berries into garlands bound, And savory-bunches with dry'd grapes are found. Such a low cottage Hecale confin'd, Low was her cottage, but sublime her mind. Her bounteous heart, a grateful praise shall crown, And muses make ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... Kaunitz listened with sublime indifference, and evinced not a spark of sympathy. When the empress had concluded ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... country Glenmutchkin is unrivalled; but it is by the tourists that its beauties will most greedily be sought. These consist of every combination which plastic nature can afford: cliffs of unusual magnitude and grandeur; waterfalls only second to the sublime cascades of Norway; woods of which the bark is a remarkably valuable commodity. It need scarcely be added, to rouse the enthusiasm inseparable from this glorious glen, that here, in 1745, Prince Charles Edward Stuart, then in the zenith of his ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... the daily hunt, the red hunter comes upon a scene that is strikingly beautiful or sublime—a black thundercloud with the rainbow's glowing arch above the mountain; a white waterfall in the heart of a green gorge; a vast prairie tinged with the blood-red of sunset—he pauses for an instant in the attitude ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... order of truths to a person's sublime conviction of himself, comes the attraction of one person for another, and all that we ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... new undertaking (for all cool-headed and cool-hearted men would have pronounced against it), but in obedience, I believe, to a higher Power. And I can say, that both on the moment of this resolution, and for some time afterwards, I had more sublime and happy feelings than at any former period of ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... think that Mr. Biglow has been too hasty in attributing it to me. Though Time be a comparatively innocent personage to swear by, and though Longinus in his discourse {Peri Hypsous} has commended timely oaths as not only a useful but sublime figure of speech, yet I have always kept my lips free from that abomination. Odi profanum vulgus, I hate your swearing and hectoring ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... sublime to the ridiculous is but a little step. Among the many who journeyed to the insurance patrol station to see the hero of the great fire, there came, one day, a woman. She was young and pretty, the sweetheart ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... for the solution of their social problems. Their, longing for the brotherhood of mankind can only be satisfied when they acknowledge the sway of a common father. Tell them that they are the children of God. Announce the sublime and solacing doctrine of theocratic equality. Fear not, falter not. Obey the impulse of thine own spirit, and find a ready ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... task of finding a colleague to share the risks and glory of my enterprise. I did not conceal from myself that upon him would devolve a role far more difficult and complicated than my own. From me, the subject of the proposed experiment, was only required sublime heroism for the sacrifice. But the man who should perform the operation must possess moral courage to face public criticism, perhaps opprobrium; a trained intellect, already habituated to discussion of the problem in question, and impassioned for its solution; ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... up your granite piles Around my trembling isles," I hear the River's scornful Genius say: "Raise for eternal time Your palaces sublime, And flash your ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... "Of all the particulars in which the modern stage falls short of the ancient, there is none so much to be lamented as the great scarcity of ghosts. Whence this proceeds I will not presume to determine. Some are of opinion that the moderns are unequal to that sublime sort of language which a ghost ought to speak. One says ludicrously that ghosts are out of fashion; another that they are properer for comedy; forgetting, I suppose, that Aristotle hath told us that a ghost is the ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... sublime a horror, that it is impossible to describe them. Yet, in the midst of these catastrophes, swift as thought, one catches sometimes a momentary glimpse of a picture, rapid and fleeting, as if illumined by a ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... a circumspection recalling the ceremonial usage of the Sublime Porte by the second female infirmarian to the junior medical officer in residence, who in his turn announced to the delegation that an heir had been born, When he had betaken himself to the women's apartment to ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Came in sight of Laramie Peak,[55] its dark outline resting against the clouds had a sublime appearance. Passed where they were diging a grave for a girl 12 years old; how hard it must be to leave ones children on these desolate plains, but "God will watch over all their dust till He shall bid it rise." [June 10—58th day] To-day & yesterday the roads ...
— Across the Plains to California in 1852 - Journal of Mrs. Lodisa Frizzell • Lodisa Frizell
... there set in a great flood upon the town of Sidmouth, the tide rose to a terrible height. In the midst of this sublime and terrible storm, Dame Partington, who lived upon the beach, was seen at the door of her house, with mop and pattens, trundling her mop, squeezing out the sea-water, and vigorously pushing away the Atlantic Ocean. ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... the direction of the wind, forming a very striking and majestic appearance. The eagles are here seen sailing about, sometimes losing themselves in this thick column, and again reappearing in another place, with such ease and elegance of motion, as renders the whole truly sublime. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 494. • Various
... this sublime and mysterious Egyptian deity degenerates into an insignificant, and yet malignant power, and though she also deals in mysteries, they are, as we shall see, of a totally different character, and altogether inimical to ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... himself was a prominent actor. In the bitter feuds of the Guelfs and Ghibellines he bore the sufferings of failure, persecution, and exile. But above all these trials rose his heroic spirit and the sublime voice of his poems, which became a quickening prophecy, realized in the birth of Italian and of European literature, in the whole movement of the Renaissance, and in the ever-advancing development of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.—It is not, then, to be supposed that any one, who holds that sublime notion of Poetry which I have attempted to convey, will break in upon the sanctity and truth of his pictures by transitory and accidental ornaments, and endeavour to excite admiration of himself by ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... The eye sees with its own power, whereas man sees with the eye. The tongue does not speak with another tongue, man speaks with a tongue, and so on. So we say of God, though in a manner a thousand-fold more sublime, that he is living, but not with a life which is distinct from his being; and so of the other attributes, hearing, seeing, and so on, that we find in ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... which led from the aisle to the cloisters. I can at this moment recall to memory the sensations I then experienced—the tones that seemed to thrill through my heart, the longing which I felt to unite my feeble voice to the full anthem, and the awful though sublime impression which the church service never failed to make upon my feelings. While my brothers were playing on the green before the minster, the servant who attended us has often, by my earnest entreaties, suffered me to remain beneath the great eagle which ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... Isaiah: "Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake, and sing, ye that dwell in the dust: for thy dew is as the dew of herbs. The earth also shall cast out her dead." This, taken with the sublime spectacle of Hades in the fourteenth chapter, seems a forecast of the future, but Jesus instructed Mary and her sister and Lazarus; and Martha without hesitation spoke of the resurrection at the last day as a familiar doctrine, far in advance of the Mosaic ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... realized by ingenuity and industrious exertion; behold, accordingly, an intellect full of device, and a fabric of the faculties which would go to pieces or destroy itself if it were not kept in constant occupation. Nature presents to us much that is sublime and beautiful: behold faculties which delight in contemplating these properties of hers, and in rising upon them, as upon wings, to the presence of the Eternal. It is also a world of difficulties and perils, and see how a large portion of our ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... of this scheme, the Prince has applied all his energies to the acquisition of independent power. He first endeavoured to effect it by means of a deputation to the Sublime Porte. Failing in this, he resorted to the internal means at his disposal, and has gained his point. The principal objects which he had in view, and which he has succeeded in carrying out, were the declaration of hereditary succession, and ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... spread rapidly, upward through the tarred rigging and the masts, downward to the lower decks, where her heroic crew, still ignorant of the approaching doom, labored incessantly at their guns. As the sublime sight forced itself upon the eyes of all about, friends and enemies alike busied themselves with precautions for their own safety in the coming catastrophe. The ships to windward held on; those to leeward for the most part veered or slipped their cables, the ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... to hear from the pulpit. Solemn, simple, and direct, it lifted the hearts of all present up to the throne of God, to the place of strength and of peace. There was no attempt to explain the "mystery of the Providence," but there was a sublime trust that refused to despair even in ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... little, and so thin that her papa did her no injustice when he called her skin and bones; but her thin brown face, with the aid of a pair of very large deep Italian-looking eyes, was so full of brilliant expression, and showed such changes of feeling from sad to gay, from sublime to ridiculous, that no one could have wished one feature otherwise. And if instead of being "like the diamond bright," they had been "dull as lead," it would have been little matter to Alex. Beatrice had been, she was still, his friend, his own cousin, more than what he could ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... line is certainly a masterpiece, and, indeed, the whole volume is full of gems of this kind. The Professor remarks in his elaborate preface that Mr. Peacock 'frequently rises to the sublime,' and the two passages quoted above show how keenly critical is his taste in these matters and how well the ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... them is train or traveller? what to them the flight of time? But we draw too near the station to indulge in the sublime. ...
— The Scarlet Gown - being verses by a St. Andrews Man • R. F. Murray
... is come! I see the sign. I am directed, and I will follow it. There is yet one hope. The immolation! I shall be saved, yet so as by fire. It is for this my hair has become white;—the sublime warning for my self-sacrifice! The color of ashes!—white—white! It is so! I will sacrifice my body in material fire, to save my soul from that which is eternal! But I had anticipated the sign. ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... the brain for its centre, belongs to life animal; his passions to life organic, centred in the heart, in the viscera. Alas! if the noblest passions through which alone we lift ourselves into the moral realm of the sublime and beautiful really have their centre in the life which the very vegetable, that lives organically, shares with us! And, alas! if it be that life which we share with the vegetable, that can cloud, obstruct, suspend, annul that life centred in the brain, which ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... women in this story are children of the soil. Their strength is in their nearness to nature. Their minds are vigorous, their bodies powerful, their passions elemental, their courage sublime. They are loyal in friendship, persistent in ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... endured it with less anguish than the other wretched hostages. He had the sublime confidence of youth in its own destiny and he had found a chum in a boyish pirate named Joseph Hawkridge who said he had sailed out of London as an apprentice seaman in a ketch bound to Jamaica. He had been taken out of his ship by Blackbeard, somewhere off the ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... after, smiled with the whispered conviction that the fresh and ingenuous young stranger had been "chucked" like others until they met his kindly, tolerant, and even superior eyes, and were puzzled. Meanwhile Barker, who had that sublime, natural quality of abstraction over small impertinences which is more exasperating than studied indifference, after his brief hesitation passed out unconcernedly through the swinging mahogany doors into the blowy street. Here the ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... one even to those whose hearts were not in sympathy with it in any respect. Many who had been the hardest fighters against the South were in sympathy with much of it, if not with all. But to those who were of the South, it was sublime. It passed beyond mere enthusiasm, however exalted, and rested in the profoundest and most sacred deeps of their being. There were many cheers, but more tears; not tears of regret or mortification, but tears of sympathy and ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... distinguished in the refined arts of fighting and whiskey-drinking,) when they call for a rope to put about the neck of every man not sufficiently stupid to acknowledge himself a secessionist. We imagine ourselves the gigantic and sublime theatre of chivalry, as we have a right to do; we raise up heroes of war and statesmanship, compared with whom your Napoleons, Mirabeaus, and Marats-yes, even your much-abused Roman orators and Athenian philosophers, sink into mere insignificance. Nor are we bad imitators ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... too easy admission to doctrines borrowed from the ancient schools, and to rites borrowed from the ancient temples. Roman policy and Gothic ignorance, Grecian ingenuity and Syrian asceticism, had contributed to deprave her. Yet she retained enough of the sublime theology and benevolent morality of her earlier days to elevate many intellects, and to purify many hearts. Some things also which at a later period were justly regarded as among her chief blemishes were, in the seventh ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... she, almost with solemnity, "as a queen and as a woman I thank you for the noble and sublime lyrics which you have composed in honor of a woman! And for that the grace of my king has exalted me to be the first woman in England, it becomes me, in the name of all women, to return to you my thanks. To the poet is due a reward other than that of the warrior. ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... will be found the best sentiments of the best writers. The pupil will find fables, nature studies, tales of travel and adventure, brave deeds from history and fiction, stories of loyalty and heroism, examples of sublime Christian self-sacrifice, and selections that teach industry, contentment, respect for authority, reverence for all things sacred, attachment to home, and fidelity to faith ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... from Brahmanism, which represent revolts against idolatry, priestly domination, and the bondage of caste and ritual. These things Nanak unhesitatingly condemned, and in the opening lines of his Japji, the morning service which every true Sikh must know by heart, he asserted in sublime language ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... Words he particularizes one of those Fruits of Friendship which is described at length by the two famous Authors above-mentioned, and falls into a general Elogium of Friendship, which is very just as well as very sublime. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... of romance, I could not banish from my mind the glorious ideal I had formed of this wonder of the world; but still continued to speculate about the mighty cataract, that sublime "thunder of waters," whose very name from childhood had been music ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... rolling in solemn silence to the ocean; her trackless forests, where vegetation puts forth all its magnificence; her skies, kindling with the magic of summer clouds and glorious sunshine;—no, never need an American ok beyond his own country for the sublime and beautiful ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... of a good woman is sometimes simply sublime," replied Rutherford, "and a mother's love is something wonderful. To me it seems the nearest divine of anything ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... ancient days of Caledon, [10] Was thy voice mute amid the festal crowd, When lay of hopeless love, or glory won, Aroused the fearful or subdued the proud. At each according pause was heard aloud Thine ardent symphony sublime and high! Fair dames and crested chiefs attention bowed; For still the burden of thy minstrelsy Was Knighthood's dauntless deed, ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... but I'm the king of the mountain and fairy school, which is a far higher ane than yours!" "This," says Professor Veitch, a philosopher, a scholar, and a man of letters, "though put with an almost sublime egotism, is in the main true." Almost equally characteristic is the fact that, after beginning his pamphlet by calling Lockhart "the only man thoroughly qualified for the task" of writing Scott's life, Hogg elsewhere, in one of the extraordinary flings ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... very comforting to know That every other day or so A Book by Bennett will appear To charm the Western Hemisphere. I see him now, with zeal sublime, Pounding from dawn to dinner-time Four typewriters, with hands and feet. When the four novels are complete, He'll fold, and send a grande ...
— Confessions of a Caricaturist • Oliver Herford
... disregarding individual character would make virtue a matter of statute law and ordain uniformity of conduct by act of conventicle or assembly, is likelier to produce moral chaos than to reach the sublime ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... Papyra taught To paint in mystic colors sound and thought. With Wisdom's voice to print the page sublime, And mark in ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... was wondrous impudence, for Conde had left their faith, and had persecuted them; to call on the Catholics was not less impudent, for he had betrayed their cause scores of times; but to call on the whole people to rise in defence of their treasury was impudence sublime, for no man had besieged the treasury more persistently, no man had dipped into it more ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... what we don't want—the picture of man's weakness. It is made all the worse when it is presented with the power of a sublime work." ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... many a joke went forth, though lips were drawn and teeth pounded together. I have not the heart to recall these jokes,—it would seem a sacrilege. There were quarrels, too, the men striving to push one another from the easier paths; and deeds sublime when some straggler clutched at the bole of a tree for support, and was helped onward through excruciating ways. A dozen held tremblingly to the pirogue's gunwale, lest they fall and drown. One walked ahead with a smile, or else ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... swarms of shooting stars, have been observed at various times all through the ages; but this phenomenon, coming in the order given by the prophecy, that is, following the darkening of the sun, constituted the sublime display answering to the pen-picture of the Apocalypse,—as if all the stars of heaven were falling to ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... above, we see a continual striving to say something for effect, which the writer invents by his ingenuity as he goes on, without any honest impulses from the heart to guide him. He soars one minute and breaks down the next, in absurd alternations of the sublime and the ridiculous. How honest Charles was in such professions, and what was the kind of connubial happiness which he was preparing for his bride, is shown by the fact that he was even now spending all his time with Lady Castlemaine; ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... Meditations on the Island of St. Helena, or the Devil addressing the Sun, in which the idea is manifestly borrowed from a design by James Gillray; The Corsican's Last Trip under the Guidance of his Good Angel [the devil]; The Genius of France Expounding her Laws to the Sublime People; and a very admirable and original design, The Pedigree of Corporal Violet; all of which are etched from the designs of ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... really, I advise you to speak contemptuously of Bohemia. Why, your clientage as a fashionable physician, O sublime Jenkins, is made up of nothing else. Bohemia of manufacturing, of finance, of politics; fallen stars, the tainted of all castes, and the higher you go the more of them there are, because high rank gives impunity and wealth closes ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... Auld Acquaintance be Forgot," and the Americans and English sang, the French humming the air. The wine flattened in the glasses and open bottles, but no one cared. They gathered in the garden, where the perfume of the tiare scented the night, and the stars were a million lamps sublime in the sky. Song followed song, English and French, and when the lazy current pulsated again, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... up in arms against the Duke's prosecution of the 'Morning Journal,' which appears to me, though many people think he is right, a great act of weakness and passion. How can such a man suffer by the attacks of such a paper, and by such attacks, the sublime of the ridiculous?—'that he is aiming at the Crown, but we shall take care that he does not succeed in this.' The idea of the Duke of Wellington seeking to make himself King, and his ambition successfully resisted ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... the Unpropitious Messengers," a picture of great power and truly sublime in the simplicity of its dramatic expression, the vision falls without hesitation on the figure of Pharaoh, easily passing over the three prostrate forms in the immediate foreground. These might have ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... whether his example has prejudiced the nation, we still find that on our stage something must be done as well as said, and inactive declamation is very coldly heard, however musical or elegant, passionate or sublime. ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... the lark in the sunshine and bright blue heaven, and all is a delirious dream of soul and sense,—when suddenly a friend at your elbow laughs aloud, and offers you a piece of Bologna sausage. As in real life, so in his writings,—the serious and the comic, the sublime and the grotesque, the pathetic and the ludicrous are mingled together. At times he is sententious, energetic, simple; then again, obscure and diffuse. His thoughts are like mummies embalmed in spices, and wrapped about with curious envelopements; but within these the thoughts themselves are ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... content, and ecstasy supreme. When that strange essence, author of all faith, That subtle something, which cries for the light, Like a lost child who wanders in the night, Shall solve the mighty mystery of Death, Shall find eternal progress, or sublime And satisfying slumber for all time. This ...
— Poems of Cheer • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... never heard real live prayer before. Here the little hand gripped his hard, as she wrestled; and the heart seemed to rise out of the bosom and fly to Heaven on the sublime and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... Our treaty with the Sublime Porte is producing its expected effects on our commerce. New markets are opening for our commodities and a more extensive range for the employment of our ships. A slight augmentation of the duties on our commerce, inconsistent with the spirit of the treaty, had been imposed, but on the representation ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... to the times when the gods, descending upon earth, took an active part in the everyday life of mortals. Nothing reminds one of a modern drama, though the exterior arrangement is the same. "From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but a step," and vice versa. The goat, chosen for a sacrifice to Bacchus, presented the world tragedy (greek script here). The death bleatings and buttings of the quadrupedal offering of antiquity have been polished by the hands of ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... which shall not know whence their sharpened impulse springs; the page shall reflect the working of that woman's face, daughter of the people; and when exulting posterity shall draw new patriotism from it, and declare that it is proud, pathetic, resolved, sublime, they shall not yet call it by its Christian name, for that will be concealed with moss upon her ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... we do what we like with History, and make up our minds for asses telling us to go home and read our 'student's Rome.' Then that scene where she and the king dance the dactyls, and the anapaests go to the chorus. Sublime! Let's go into the woods and begin. We might give the first song or two to-night. In composition, mind, always strike out your great scene, and work from it—don't work up to it, or you've lost fire when you reach the point. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... new fire of expression. They are eloquent, ruggedly strong Essays, those of Mirabeau Junior upon Free Trade:—they contain, in condensed shape, everything we were privileged to hear, seventy years later, from all organs, coach-horns, jews-harps and scrannel-pipes, PRO and CONTRA, on the same sublime subject: "God is great, and Plugson of Undershot is his Prophet. Thus saith the Lord, Buy in the cheapest market, sell in the dearest!" To which the afflicted human mind listens what it can;—and after seventy years, mournfully asks itself and Mirabeau, "M. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... and population to the silence and solitude of a dead icy desert; from the redundancy of animal and vegetable life to its "solemn syncope and pause." The ideas of obscurity, danger, and infinity, all powerful and acknowledged sources of the sublime, are excited at the view of a range of frozen summits, cold, fixed, and everlasting as the imaginary nature of those destinies, with whom a noble bard has peopled them; alternately glittering in sunshine, and enveloped in clouds, ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... condemn him judicially, and pursuant to that sentence of condemnation to put him to death. After the performing so glorious an action as this, you ought to do nothing that is mean and little, not so much as to think of, much less to do, anything but what is great and sublime." ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... is done for freedom, through the broad earth's aching breast Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from East to West; And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb, To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... lips might pour out in thy praise A fitting melody—an air sublime,— A song sun-washed and draped in dreamy haze— The floss and velvet of luxurious rhyme: A lay wrought of warm languors, and o'er-brimmed With balminess, and fragrance of wild flowers Such as the droning bee ne'er ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... the world by their political power. Yet these simple and outstanding truths are persistently ignored by our political and historical philosophers and theorists. For the most part our history is written with a more sublime disregard of the simple facts of the world than is shown perhaps in any other department of human ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... President hovered between life and death, showing ever the same sublime spirit of cheerful patience and Christian resignation which had adorned his life. At length the end came, and on the 19th of September 1881 he fell asleep. His body was removed to Washington, where he was laid in state. On the bier a wreath of white roses rested, bearing the simple inscription—"From ...
— The Story of Garfield - Farm-boy, Soldier, and President • William G. Rutherford |
