"Vastness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hilarity. Their pistols, aimed at cans or prairie dogs or anything, cracked as they galloped at large. Their speeding, clear-cut forms would shine upon the bluffs, and, descending, merge in the dust their horses had raised. Yet all this was nothing in the vastness of ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... prime minister of European Protestantism. There was none other to rival him, few to comprehend him, fewer still to sustain him. As Prince Maurice was at that time the great soldier of Protestantism, without clearly scanning the grandeur of the field in which he was a chief actor, or foreseeing the vastness of its future, so the Advocate was its statesman and its prophet. Could the two have worked together as harmoniously as they had done at an earlier day, it would have been a blessing for the common weal of Europe. But, alas! the evil genius of jealousy, which so often forbids cordial relations ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... indefinite one of mechanics. He hacks his way up and down, as near as he can to the absolute, the oneness of all nature both human and spiritual, and to God's benevolence. To him the ultimate of a conception is its vastness, and it is probably this, rather than the "blind-spots" in his expression that makes us incline to go with him but half-way; and then stand and build dogmas. But if we can not follow all the way—if we do not ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... extraordinary as his extent of information, is its singular activity. His energies never seem to flag—even for an instant; he does not seem to know what it is to be fatigued, or jaded. Some such quality as this, indeed, the vastness and universality of his acquirements called for, in order to make the weight endurable to himself, and to bear him up during his long career of political excitement. Take the routine of a day for instance. In his early life he has been known to attend, in his place in court, on circuit, ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... hotel lay rather in the faded pomp of its sleeping-rooms, and the vastness of its salle a manger, than in anything very good to eat ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... with shafts steeds of the noblest breed and high mettle, resembling elephants (in size and strength), worn out with toil, were seen to tremble with great effort, as they drew vehicles whose wheels had sunk in the earth. The whole of that host, O Bharata, resembling the ocean for vastness, then became agitated, and afflicted, inspired with terror, with the exception only of Drona and Arjuna. Those two became the refuge, these two became the saviours, of the warriors of their respective ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... real and deep. All durable love begins by dreamy meditation. It was suitable that these two beings should first see each other in the softer light of the moon, that love and its splendors might not dazzle them too suddenly; it was well that they met by the shores of the Ocean,—vast image of the vastness of their feelings. They parted filled with one another, fearing, each, to have ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... Texans, who had never quailed before man or gun, looked at each other, their faces full of sudden seriousness, and there was just a shadow of fear in both blue eyes and black. The silence and the vastness of an empty earth and sky can bring up undreamed of things from the bottom of men's minds. Ellhorn's more skeptical nature was the first to gird itself against ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... perished in 1834. A small chapel on the south side was called Our Lady of the Pew. The oldest part of the ancient palace remaining is Westminster Hall, built by William Rufus as a part of a projected new palace. He held his Court here in 1099, and, on hearing a remark on the vastness of his hall, he declared that it would be only a bedroom to the palace when finished. However, he himself had to occupy much narrower quarters before he could carry out his scheme. Richard II. raised the hall and gave it the splendid hammer-beam roof, one of the finest feats in carpentry extant. ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... distant objects of terror, and uncertain, imaginary distress. His strength, in like manner, is not strength of will or action, of bone and muscle, nor is it coarse and palpable—but it assumes a character of vastness and sublimity seen through the same visionary medium, and blended with the appalling associations of preternatural agency. We need only turn, in proof of this, to the Cave of Despair, or the Cave of Mammon, or to the account of the change of Malbecco into Jealousy. The following stanzas, ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... proved the vastness of his good intentions. Besides there's something about our old giant—steadiness and breeding, I believe—that uniformly makes Tom knock under to him; and there's a peculiar affinity of good sense between him and Marilda, that ought to ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... three days of the Chicago Commune, and the vastness of it and of the slaughter may be imagined when I say that in all that time I saw practically nothing outside the killing of the people of the abyss and the mid-air fighting between sky-scrapers. I really saw nothing of the heroic work done by the comrades. I could hear ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... cycle of tales is more influenced by Christianity than the others are. The mythological cycle is not only fully pagan, it is primeval. It has the vastness, the savagery, the relentlessness of nature-myths, and what beauty there is in it is akin to terror. Gentleness is unknown. There is only one exception to this, so far as I know, and that is in the story of The Children of Lir. It is plain, ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... experience too, one would think, to have remembered the vastness of the karroo," said Hans, dismounting and making the fastenings of the springbok more secure, "A man soon dwindles to the size of a crow in plains like this, when you gallop away from him. Men not accustomed to them misjudge distances and ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... did not know what to do. She had wit enough to realize that she was almost ridiculous in her discontent, but for that Notya must be blamed, and her own immediate necessity was to find amusement. In all the vastness of the moor, George Halkett was the only being who could give her a taste of what she wanted, and she had quarrelled with George Halkett. She sat and glowered at the white road cutting the darkness of the moor and she thought it had the cruel look of a sharp ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... of its divine mysteries: for that historian alludes to the British Christians as reconstructing the churches which had, in the Dioclesian persecution, been levelled to the ground. But in the fifth century Rome, oppressed on every side by enemies, and distracted with the vastness of her conquests, which she was no longer able to maintain, recalled her legions from Britain; and the Romanized Britons being left without protection, and having, during their subjection to the Romans, lost their ancient valour and love of liberty, in a short ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... with the Samaneans of the Ganges, with the astrologers of Chaldea, with the magi of Babylon, with the Gaulish druids, with the priests of the negroes. I have climbed the fourteen Olympi; I have sounded the Lakes of Sythia; I have measured the vastness ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... an intense, glowing epic of the great desert, sunlit barbaric, with its marvelous atmosphere of vastness ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... long I stood there, admiring the clean sweep and vastness of the scene, before I saw something rise sharply, with a flashing of bright wings, from some hidden courtyard or terrace of the building. It was followed closely by another and then another, like a flight of birds. They shot up swiftly, circled once or twice, ...
— The Chamber of Life • Green Peyton Wertenbaker
... throbs and pulsates with an ambition to give the world a life-work that shall be marvelous in its scope, and weirdly entrancing in the vastness of ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... suppose it is only those who really live upon the world of waters, sailing away in a swift ship, day after day, for thousands of watery miles, and seeing nothing but the two oceans, "the blue above and the blue below," as that same sailor-song says, who can really know anything of its vastness. How strange it must seem, to be neither a fish nor a bird, and yet to live as it were between sea and sky; each morning finding yourself farther away from land, each night lying down to be "rocked in the cradle of the ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... pride which for the first few months of innovation had made her treat the new rector merely with distant rudeness, and descended upon him in the three rooms of Brodnyx Rectory which he inhabited with cheerful contempt for the rest of its howling vastness. ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... angles to the one which you are traversing; and the murky atmosphere which, settling upon the remoter end of every long avenue, wraps its termination in gloom and uncertainty,—all these are circumstances aiding that sense of vastness and illimitable proportions which forever brood over the aspect of London in its interior. Much of the feeling which belongs to the outside of London, in its approaches for the last few miles, I had lost, in consequence of the stealthy route of by-roads, lying near ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Westward, the Tetons lifted their peaks pale and keen as steel through the high, radiant air. Deep down between the blue gashes of their canons the sun sank long shafts of light, and the glazed laps of their snow-fields shone separate and white upon their lofty vastness, like handkerchiefs laid out to dry. Opposite, above the valley, rose that other range, the Continental Divide, not sharp, but long and ample. It was bare in some high places, and below these it stretched everywhere, high and low, in brown ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... Dreaming 'neath the August sun, Thus my meditations run— What if that great Ember bright Were a monster Pipe alight, Or the glowing from afar Of some Fire-God's cigar? If the Smoker's Peace abide In that sun fire, multiplied By its vastness, I will be Henceforth a ...
— The Smoker's Year Book • Oliver Herford
... shapes, arrest and weary the eye, lava in all its forms, from a compact phonolite, to the lightest pumice stone, the mere froth of the volcano, exceeding in wildness and confusion the most extravagant nightmare ever inflicted on man. Recollect the vastness of this mountain. The whole south of this large island, down to, and below the water's edge, is composed of its slopes. Its height is nearly three miles, its base is 180 miles in circumference, so that Wales might be packed away within it, leaving room to spare. ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... superstitions, and religions have their origin. While France and Germany and some other nations have achieved distinction in this field, England has been especially remarkable for the nature of her attempts, and the vastness of her achievements in every direction. We pass over many great minds which were first in the field in order to dwell on the two men who, as it seems to me, have summed up the knowledge of others, and have formulated a theory in great measure ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... sees her beautiful, and knows That he must love her; and the doom is sealed Of all his happiness and all the woes That shall be born of pregnant years hereafter. The swift poise of a head, a flutter of laughter— And love flows in on him, its vastness pent Within his narrow life: the pain it brings, Boundless; for love is infinite discontent With the poor lonely ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... of the new tariff, let us observe, that the suddenness and vastness of its changes (some of which we consider to be of questionable propriety) for a time unavoidably deranged mercantile operations; and in doing so, as necessarily produced many cases of individual dissatisfaction and distress. Some of the persons ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... at night, in a snowstorm, without the guidance of a solitary star, to find a single point in the vastness ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... Nature and Art, as they are qualified to entertain the Imagination, we shall find the last very defective, in Comparison of the former; for though they may sometimes appear as Beautiful or Strange, they can have nothing in them of that Vastness and Immensity, which afford so great an Entertainment to the Mind of the Beholder. The one may be as Polite and Delicate as the other, but can never shew her self so August and Magnificent in the Design. There is something more bold and masterly in the rough careless Strokes of Nature, than ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... much in vogue in Boston), I might perhaps find reasons for my rambling off. To say that Boston did not interest me would be the reverse of the truth. It interested me deeply; but it did not excite me with a sense of novelty or vastness. One can only repeat the obvious truth that it is like an exceptionally dignified and stately English town. One instinctively looks around for a cathedral, and finds the State House in its stead. To the founders of this city, the glory of God was not a thing to be furthered, or even typified, by ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... Buddhist is provided for the defence of his faith with the very armor best fitted to protect him in his particular social and intellectual sphere. The enlightened Lamas of Thibet take refuge in the vastness and antiquity of their system, which we ought, perhaps, rather to term a philosophy than a religion. Their comprehensive creed can tolerate all others which appear but as subdivisions of itself—partial and limited views of the great ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... Something within her seemed to sing piercingly for joy, as though she had been a strange wild bird escaping from captivity to wing her way westward to the open spaces by the sea. London had frightened her. Its crowded vastness had suffocated her, its indifference had appalled her. She had felt so hopelessly alone there; far lonelier than she had ever been in Cornwall or Norfolk. Nature could be brutal, but never indifferent. She could ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... the lord of the soul, Shall the dust be the ultimate goal— I will storm the black bastions of Night! I will tread where my vision has trod, I will set in the darkness a light, In the vastness, a god!" ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... standing disgrace to these States—I say it were a disgrace to any nation, distinguish'd above others by the variety and vastness of its territories, its materials, its inventive activity, and the splendid practicality of its people, not to rise and soar above others also in its original styles in literature and art, and its own supply of intellectual ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... prejudice about the degeneracy of modern man, they are all so small in girth as to betoken a race with arms and legs hardly any bigger than the Finns or Laplanders. Of the clasps, buttons, and buckles I will say nothing here. I have enumerated enough to suggest to even the most casual observer the vastness of the revolution which the Bronze Age wrought in the mode of life and the civilisation ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... great length and unwieldiness. We thought of it not as a dramatic epic, but as a dramatized novel—a mistake. We thought that Hardy was taking the long way around, when in truth he had found a short cut to his issues. That "The Dynasts," considering the vastness of its Napoleonic subject, was far more concise, more direct, clearer than his novels, did not become manifest, although the sharper- eyed may ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... which to admire most—the audacity and vastness of the labour undertaken by these insects, or the ingenious foresight by which they ensure to their delicate larvae a comfortable youth. There can be no doubt that these animals show themselves very superior to Man, taking into consideration his enormous size compared to theirs, ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... But so modest was he that he would not let it be known that he was in the station, for fear of interrupting the pleasure. He was much the same as I had known him, only grown older and his reputation now increased to vastness. He and Clark sat on a door log talking for a long time on Kentucky matters, the strength of the forts, the prospect of new settlers that autumn, of the British policy, and finally of a journey which Colonel Clark was soon to make back to Virginia ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the fields are green, Lie still, where the wild rose fashions a screen, While the brown thrush calls to his love-wise mate, And know what they profit who trade with Hate." Said he: "Whenever the great skies spread, In the beckoning vastness overhead, A tent for the blue wren building a nest, Then, down in the heart of ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... of the map, and bearing in mind the statements made with respect to the upraised organic remains, we must feel astonished at the vastness of the areas which have suffered changes in level either downwards or upwards, within a period not geologically remote. It would appear also that the elevatory and subsiding movements follow nearly the same laws. Throughout the spaces ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... the Court of the Universe towards the Nations of the West, the vastness of the Court and the commanding effect of these great groups of the nations impress us. The high columns of the Rising and Setting Sun fountains, the monumental groups of the "Elements," the classic "Music" and "Dance" of heroic size, are merged in the ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... that Roosevelt knew thirty-five years ago—the hot desolation of noon in the scarred butte country; the magic of dawn and dusk when the long shadows crept across the coulees and woke them to unexpected beauty; the solitude of the prairies, that have the vastness without the malignancy of the sea. I have come to know the thrill and the dust and the cattle-odors of the round-up; the warm companionship of the ranchman's dinner-table; such profanity as I never expect to hear again; singing and yarns and hints of the tragedy of prairie women; and, ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... "queenly beauty" first; and, later on, he hinted At the "vastness of her intellect" with compliment unstinted. He went with her a-riding, and his love for her was such That he lent her all his horses and—she ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... take up the Slavonic countries, beginning with Russia, which stands first, not only because of its vastness, but also because of its liberality toward women. The position of the Russian women before the law is very peculiar. Children, whatever their age and whether male or female, are never emancipated from the control of their parents. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... a verandah on to the green country and the gray sky beyond. By way of a chair, I am given a square piece of black velvet, and behold me seated low, in the middle of this large empty room, which by its very vastness is almost chilly. The two little women (who are the servants of the house and my very humble servants too), await my orders, in attitudes expressive ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... Nothing was to be seen, but the hostile chill of the water and the stale odor of the wet stones could be felt. A fierce breath rose from this abyss. The flood in the river, divined rather than perceived, the tragic whispering of the waves, the melancholy vastness of the arches of the bridge, the imaginable fall into that gloomy void, into all that shadow was full ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... to the country, that a radical reform in the relations between Great Britain and Ireland would be the main work of the present Parliament.... The country had no sufficient warning—I think I may say the country had no warning at all—that any proposals of the magnitude and vastness of those which were unfolded to us last night were to be considered in the present Parliament, much less were to form the first subject of consideration upon the meeting of this Parliament. I am perfectly aware that there exists in our Constitution no principle of the mandate. I know ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... screaming overhead, or a frightened serpent rose with hissing mouth, and then glided in a flash back through the undergrowth. One, that seemed to me of a pure silver-white, started almost from under my feet, and darted away before I could recover myself. We hardly spoke; the vastness of Nature hushed our tongues. It seemed presumption to raise my gun against any of the inhabitants of this spot where man seemed so mean, so strangely out of place. Once I paused to cut back with my knife the creepers that hid in inextricable tangle a solitary and exquisitely ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... all things, like disembarking from the Styx into the desolated underworld, was this landing at night. There was the raw, half-lighted, covered-in vastness of the dark place, boarded and hollow underfoot, with only desolation everywhere. Ursula had caught sight of the big, pallid, mystic letters 'OSTEND,' standing in the darkness. Everybody was hurrying with a ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... a space in silence. The foremost two rode downcast upon the trail, the hindmost man watched the haze that crept down the vastness of the valley, nearer and nearer, and noted how the wind grew in strength moment by moment. Far away on the left he saw a line of dark bulks—wild hog perhaps, galloping down the valley, but of that he said nothing, nor did he remark again upon the ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... by the great gulf of the unseen. The unseen is the obscurity of infinitude, and nothing is more alluring. In that sombre vastness fires flash, and furrow and color the abyss with fancies like those of Martin. For a busy man like Canalis, an adventure of this kind is swept away like a harebell by a mountain torrent, but in the more unoccupied life of the young secretary, this ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... once more conscious of the power still at his command, and the mighty stake for which he was about to play, Alroy in a great degree recovered his usual spirit and self-possession. His energy returned with his excited pulse, and the vastness of the impending danger seemed only to stimulate the fertility of ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... anniversary exercises of our schools. They will occupy largely this number and the next, and will appear somewhat in the order of time in which the schools closed. When the whole are published, they will make an impression of the vastness, variety and usefulness of the work. It will show institutions of higher grade in nearly all the States of the South, normal and graded schools in nearly all the large cities, and parochial schools connected with ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 48, No. 7, July, 1894 • Various
... note of the drum, and unconsciously our feet beat time. We hear the first deep chords of the orchestra, and involuntarily our fingers mark the time of the measure. With the soft, mellow harmony of triplet melodies we are transported to the solemn vastness of a mountain beside a, gayly rippling stream. With the deep, sonorous bursts of triumphant melody, we are transported to the ocean's edge, where the rumbling of the waves holds us in awed ecstasy. Thoughts of sorrow, of gladness, of ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... declared would be his principal claim to fame. In 1842 the name "La Comedie Humaine" was after much consideration given to the whole structure, and in the preface he explains this title by saying: "The vastness of a plan which includes Society's history and criticism, the analysis of its evils, the discussion of its principles, justifies me, I think, in giving to my work the name under which it is appearing to-day—'The Human Comedy.' ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... pursuit or capture had arisen to perplex him. He had seemed such a tiny thing out there amidst the vastness of rolling hills, of woods, and plain that there had been induced within him an unconscious assurance that no one could find him even though they ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Pentonhook already forming or formed, and when he had got round it he would have seen soaring above him down stream the great mass of Chertsey Abbey. If Reading had the solidity and the barbaric grandeur of Durham, Chertsey had in an ecclesiastical way the vastness of Windsor, and must have seemed like a town to anyone approaching it thus down the river. The enclosed area of the abbey buildings alone ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... clouds, sea-horses ridden by Tritons, patrician warriors in Roman armour, balustrades and columns and amoretti. He does not even need to pounce his design, but puts in all sorts of improvised modifications with a sure hand. The vastness of his frescoes, the daring poses of his countless figures, and the freedom of his line speak eloquently of the mastery to which his hand had attained. He revels, above all, in effects of light—"all the light of the sky, and all the light of the ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... hall, lined with rich hangings, shrunk us to dwarfs by its vastness. Golden goblets were at each place. A butler, dressed in antique livery, threw a red cloak over Hobson's fat shoulders. It was a ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... Monico in the March wind, and went in with a group of Italians, passing the woman who sells foreign papers, and seeing names that transported them to Paris, to Milan, to Rome, to Berlin. A vastness of marble contained a myriad of swarthy strangers, releasing souls astoundingly foreign in vivid gesture and talk. They had coffee with cream like a burgeoning cloud floating ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... vastness of the things among which we live, the existence of nothingness holds the first place; its function extends over all things that have no existence, and its essence, as regards time, lies precisely between the past and the ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... a voice of singular eloquence and power. Probably his greatest achievement was his remarkable, unerring ability to create atmospheres of widely varied kinds in his music, and in this respect there is no composer quite his equal. The soft beauty, grandeur, vastness and might of Nature; the joys and sorrows of Humanity; the romance of History and imaginative Legend; the buoyancy of sunshine and wind; the mysteriousness of enchanted woods; all these he translated with inimitable vividness into music. He could suggest with as definite and unmistakable a musical ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... glow of the dwindling fire and the sweep of sand, covered sparsely with ragged bushes. New stars flared out; the spirit of the night descended upon the desert. As the world seemed to draw further and further away from them, these two beings, strange to the vastness engulfing them, huddled closer together. They spoke little, always in lowered voices. Between words they were listening, awaiting that ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... fields of verdure and the forests and the hills of green, and are limited in view and shut in by that which we love, after all, better than the arid land, I have a great longing to see again the desert, to be a part of its vastness, and to feel once more the freedom and inspiration of its ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... the All-One, which Goethe in early life found so pacifying to his troubled spirit, and which, vague and barren as it proves on nearer acquaintance, induces at first, above all other systems, a sense of repose in illimitable vastness and immutable necessity. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... foggy morning; rather dark. Sea smooth, swelling, heaving. Mysterious, like a shadowed opal. Long mounds of water waved noiselessly, wonderfully, ethereally from the distance, and the air was hazy, veiled, and dim. A lonely, silent vastness. ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... and wet and unsociable. You couldn't get chummy with it. I turned to my great barn of a room. You couldn't get chummy with that, either. I began to unpack, with furious energy. In vain I turned every gas jet blazing high. They only cast dim shadows in the murky vastness of that awful chamber. A whole Fourth of July fireworks display, Roman candles, sky-rockets, pin-wheels, set pieces and all, could not have made that room take on ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... absolutely motionless, taking it in. His intellectual faculties were as though non-existent. All the sensitiveness of his nature, like the sensitiveness of a photographic plate, was exposed to that which took place before him. No little detail of the scene would he ever forget; and nothing of what its vastness and mystery and turmoil signified in the world of further meanings would be lost to him, though for many years he would ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... Textbook tables came back to him. He had traveled 47 light-years—he couldn't remember how many billions of miles that was. Even so, it was only the tiniest hop-skip-and-jump in the measureless vastness of space. ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... realized the vastness of our country, nor the wonderful opportunities which the West affords those in search of wealth, until I lived there six months. There are untold undeveloped resources, the like of which does not exist in the over-crowded East. May this ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... it was a fact that, after passing Baldy, these hundreds could scatter so far through the labyrinth of the Sierras that in a whole summer's journeying they were extremely unlikely to see each other—or indeed any one else, save when they stumbled on one of the established cow camps. The vastness of the California mountains cannot be conveyed to one who has not travelled them. Men have all summer pastured illegally thousands of head of sheep undiscovered, in spite of the fact that rangers and soldiers were out looking for them. One may journey diligently throughout the season, ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... genius of the author never grasps, in their wholeness, the characters which he attempts to copy; they are distorted images of the Greek originals, and the shadowy grandeur of the godlike heroes of Aeschylus stands forth in corporeal vastness, and appears childish and unnatural, like the giants of a story-book. The Greeks believed in the gods and heroes whose agency and exploits constituted the machinery of tragedy, but the Romans did not, and ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... works of Mr. Bolton, at a place which he has called Soho, about two miles from Birmingham, which the very ingenious proprietor shewed me himself to the best advantage. I wish Johnson had been with us: for it was a scene which I should have been glad to contemplate by his light[1348]. The vastness and the contrivance of some of the machinery would have 'matched his mighty mind.' I shall never forget Mr. Bolton's expression to me: 'I sell here, Sir, what all the world desires to have—POWER.' He had about seven hundred people at ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... shivered incessantly, and kept on groaning even as we went about our work. But they all worked. That crew of Liverpool hard cases had in them the right stuff. It's my experience they always have. It is the sea that gives it—the vastness, the loneliness surrounding their dark stolid souls. Ah! Well! we stumbled, we crept, we fell, we barked our shins on the wreckage, we hauled. The masts stood, but we did not know how much they might ...
— Youth • Joseph Conrad
... Alps, and along the almost miraculous coast of the Mediterranean; and I shall not pretend that the view I now beheld approached many, in magnificence, that are to be met with in those magic regions. Nevertheless, it was both grand and soft; and it had one element of vastness, in the green mantle of its interminable woods, that is not often to be met with in countries that have long submitted to the sway of man. Such as it was, I shall endeavour to ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... bow. Her eyes roved from the sun-glittering stream to the hills that rose above the tree-fringed valley floor, as if sight had been restored to her so that her eyes could dwell upon the green-leaved alder and maple, the drooping spruce bows, the vastness of those forests of somber fir where the deer lurked in the shadows and where the birds sang vespers and matins when dusk fell and dawn came again. There were meadow larks warbling now on stumps ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... this civilization... simply appalling in its vastness. The countless millions of your people, the wealth you have piled up... it seems like a huge bubble that may burst any minute. And the one device by which it is all kept ...
— Prince Hagen • Upton Sinclair
... laughing, the gibing, the glitter, and dazzle, stands that wonderful Cathedral, that silent witness, that strange, pure, immaculate mountain of airy, unearthly loveliness,—the most striking emblem of God's mingled vastness and sweetness that ever it was given to human heart to devise or hands to execute. If there be among the many mansions of our Father above, among the houses not made with hands, aught purer and fairer, it must be the work of those grand spirits who inspired and presided ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... poems preserve the dim tradition down to the present moment, there has occurred no calamity at once so sudden and of such appalling magnitude as the famine which in the spring and summer of 1770 nearly exterminated the ancient civilization of Bengal. It presents that aspect of preternatural vastness which characterizes the continent of Asia and all that concerns it. The Black Death of the fourteenth century was, perhaps, the most fearful visitation which has ever afflicted the Western world. But in the concentrated misery which it occasioned the Bengal famine ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... wondrous lights and shades of sound given in many of the oratorios, are little behind the dramatic achievement. The aspect of Exeter Hall on an oratorio night is one of the grandest things in London. The vastness of the assemblage, the great mountain of performers, crested by the organ, and rising almost to the ceiling, are thoroughly impressive, while the first burst of the opening chorus is grand in the extreme. The oratorio is, in fact, the Opera of the 'serious' world. It is at once a place in which ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... Marouin, being very uneasy, had sent at all hazards to her husband. The king took a glass of wine and water and ate an orange, and got up for a moment to see whether the boat he was expecting was nowhere visible on the vastness of the sea. There was not a boat in sight, only the brig tossing gracefully on the horizon, impatient to be off, like a horse ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MURAT—1815 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... The vastness of the scheme of Paradise Lost may become more apparent to us if we remark that, within its embrace, there to be equal place for both the systems of physical astronomy which were current in the seventeenth century. In England, ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... and telegrams have kept you pretty well up to date as to all that has occurred in this most God-forsaken corner of the world. The longer one stays here the more does the spirit of the moor sink into one's soul, its vastness, and also its grim charm. When you are once out upon its bosom you have left all traces of modern England behind you, but on the other hand you are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of the prehistoric people. On all sides of you as you walk are the houses of these forgotten folk, ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... again all that the first had, finding still in these others the same thing without end and without cessation. Let him lose himself in wonders as amazing in their littleness as the others in their vastness. For who will not be astounded at the fact that our body, which a little while ago was imperceptible in the universe, itself imperceptible in the bosom of the whole, is now a colossus, a world, or rather a whole, in respect of the nothingness which we cannot reach? He who regards himself in this ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... sense was at first doubtless vague, ill-defined, or undefined, and in this form it is now found in certain tribes.[9] Gradually, as the processes of human life and of the external world become better known, and the vastness of the extrahuman control becomes evident, the Something is conceived of as great, then as indefinitely great, and finally, under the guidance of philosophic thought, as infinite. Thus the sense of the infinite may be said to ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... same organic poison that is engendered wherever life and death are plying their perpetual game; and this, like Cleopatra's "worm, will do its kind" in the veins of man, wherever obstructions, natural or artificial, temporary or permanent, interfere with its prompt diffusion in the vastness of the general atmosphere. Our "house of life" stands generously open, for every "inmate bad" to come and go through the absorbent, unquestioned, except in the stomach, where the tangible poisons have to go by the act of swallowing ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... by the word "God" from what we have been in the habit of meaning. I have already said-I fear, too often-that no conception of God can have any value or meaning for us which does not involve his existence as an independent Living Person of ineffable wisdom and power, vastness, and duration both in the past and for the future. If such a Being as this can be found existing and made evident, directly or indirectly, to human senses, there is a God. If otherwise, there is no God, or none, at any rate, so far as we can know, none with whom we need concern ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler
... he exclaimed, "put as you put it, you almost make me tremble at the vastness of the responsibility that I am about to undertake. But you shall see. I will at once go down to the huts, choose my men, and bring them up here for your approval." And with that shot at me he walked out at the ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... difficulties that might have increased ill-feeling. An army regulation which allows the Church of England chaplain only to minister to Church of England men, and the Roman Catholic to Roman Catholic men, etc., reduced the chances of such conflict; and at the same time, the vastness and urgency of the work the chaplains had to do swallowed up all other thoughts. As a writer in The Church in the Furnace said, "We have heard with mingled irritation and amusement that good folk at home have been exercised ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... said that with a gasp of horror and admiration at the vastness of it. Sometimes to him that thousand dollars almost represented infinity, and seemed more than the stars of heaven. His childish brain, which had scarcely contemplated in verity more than a shilling at a time of the coin of the realm, reeled at ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... speech, saving their breath for the work of their bodies. On every side was the silence, pressing upon them with a tangible presence. It affected their minds as the many atmospheres of deep water affect the body of the diver. It crushed them with the weight of unending vastness and unalterable decree. It crushed them into the remotest recesses of their own minds, pressing out of them, like juices from the grape, all the false ardours and exaltations and undue self-values of the human soul, until they perceived themselves ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... when the fate of Jotapata was related at Jerusalem, a great many at the first disbelieved it, on account of the vastness of the calamity, and because they had no eye-witness to attest the truth of what was related about it; for not one person was saved to be a messenger of that news, but a fame was spread abroad at random that the city was taken, as such fame usually spreads ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... was a thing at once old and new; it belonged as truly, as manifestly, to the recent and modern world of democracy and science, as it did to the Middle Ages and the Fathers, to the world of Gregory and Innocent, to the world of Athanasius and Augustine. The majesty, the vastness of an imperial polity, outlasting all states and kingdoms, all social changes and political revolutions, answered at once to the promises of the prophecies, and to the antecedent idea of the universal kingdom of God. Before this great idea, embodied in concrete form, and not a paper doctrine, ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... grass as they left the river valley and crossed a succession of ridges or plateaus. At last they reached vast black basaltic masses and lava fields, proof of former subterranean fires which seemingly had forever dried out the life of the earth's surface. The very vastness of the views might have had charm but for the tempering feeling of awe, of doubt, ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... Mexico at last! It appeared a continuation and a magnifying of all the color and wildness and vastness. Sand dunes and wastes of black lava, dry lake beds and cone-shaped extinct volcanoes, with the ragged crater mouths gaping, low ranges of yellow cedar-dotted hills, valleys of purple, and green forests on the mountain slopes—all these in endless variety were new to the cowboy of the plains. Water ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... penetrate the little cell in the heart of the mammoth stone building where he spent his evenings over those masterpieces with which, they said, he was more familiar than the average member of the Senate. When he read those things Victor Hugo said of the vastness of the night, he could only look around at the walls that enclosed him and try to reach back over the twelve years for some satisfying conception of ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... the lawn, the sycamores, the flat meadows. She could see herself standing there now, looking about her at the bedroom where gaiety and gauntness were oddly mingled in the faded carnations and birds of paradise on the chintzes and in the vastness of the four-poster, the towering wardrobes, the capacious, creaking chairs and sofas. Everything was very clean and old; the dressing-table was stiffly skirted in darned muslins and near the pin-cushion stood a small, tight nosegay, ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... degrees almost neglected. Both the dining-room and drawing-room grew very cold, cold as with the coldness of what is dead; and though he slept in the same part of the house by choice, not often did the young laird enter either. But he had concerning them, the latter in particular, a notion of vastness and grandeur; and along with that, a vague sense of sanctity, which it is not quite easy to define or account for. It seems however to have the same root with all veneration for place—for if there were not a natural inclination to venerate place, would any ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... look, above or below us, to the right or the left, we find a boundless expanse teeming with life and its enjoyments. This earth, large as it may appear to us, is less than a grain of sand in size, when compared with the vastness ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... not seem strange that ambassadors and nuncios should become confused and lose all recollection of the addresses they had committed to memory, in the presence of a prince whose exterior so ill accords with the grandeur of his titles and the vastness of his power? His form is below the middle height and very slender, the limbs having even an attenuated look. The whole appearance is that of a man of delicate and even feeble organization. The blonde complexion, the pale blue eyes, and the light sandy hue—save where they ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... small numbers of the Indians and the vastness of the swamp, it was a faint chance indeed that he or his companion would live to see any of the tribe, but, faint as it was, no other hope remained and Walter sent the canoe ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... worked and thought and dreamed only a little time before they began to explain the marvelous earth on which they found themselves and the strange things that happened in it; the vastness and beauty of the fields, woods, sky and sea, the force of the wind, the coming and going of the day and night, the warmth of summer when everything grew, and the cold of winter when everything died, the ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... At first, the vastness of this plan seemed to keep the public mind in a state of suspense. For nearly a month, indeed, after its introduction, no indications of serious or determined opposition were discernible, although Fox, when the subject was first started, pointed out many objections ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... He could see the swifter beat of it in the flush that rose into her face and the joy glowing tremulously in her eyes as she looked at him. They would get ready quietly. They might go tomorrow, the next day, any time. It would be a glorious adventure, just they two, with all the vastness of that mountain paradise ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... cloth-of-gold. These halted, saluted, wheeled, and between their shining ranks St. George and Amory footed quietly on, followed by Rollo carrying the yellow oil-skins. To St. George there was relief in the motion, relief in the vastness, and almost a boy's delight in the pastime of ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... him less than he had expected. Of its vastness he could form no opinion; but in strength, and beauty, it appeared to him inferior to Jerusalem. When he landed, he saw how many were the stately palaces and temples; but of the former none were more magnificent ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... every beholder; but most imposing, indeed, is its distant view, when the broad banner floats or sleeps in the sunshine, amidst the intense blue of the summer skies, and its picturesque and ancient architectural vastness harmonizes with the decaying and gnarled oaks, coeval with so many departed monarchs. The stately, long-extended avenue, and the wild sweep of devious forests, connected with the eventful circumstances of English history, and past regular grandeur, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 327, August 16, 1828 • Various
... for, in the midst of my narrations, I find myself almost as ready to doubt the reality of the scenes I have attempted to describe as the most skeptical of my listeners. They pass along my memory like the faintly defined outlines of a dream. And when I dwell upon their strange peculiarities, their vastness, their variety, and the distinctive features of novelty which mark them all, so entirely out of the range of all objects that compose the natural scenery and wonders of this continent, I who have seen them can scarcely realize that in those far-off recesses ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... went, hunting as straight in line as though staghounds streamed in front of them, and no phaeton rocked and swayed in a dead and dragging weight behind them. In a moment he gauged the closeness and the vastness of the peril; there was nothing for it but to trust to chance, to keep his grasp on the reins to the last, and to watch for the first sign of exhaustion. Long ere that should be given death might have come to them both; but there was a gay excitation in that headlong rush through the ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... Dr. Sprat, was written in so young an age, that if we shall reflect on the vastness of the argument, and his manner of handling it, he may seem like one of the miracles that he there adorns; like a boy attempting Goliah. This perhaps, may be the reason, that in some places, there may be more youthfulness and redundance of fancy, than his riper judgement ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... entered my head to doubt him. The realness, the vividness, the overwhelming loneliness and vastness of the sight I had seen—yes, and the suggestion of cosmic grandeur and aloofness that was conveyed—banished any other feeling but ...
— The Seed of the Toc-Toc Birds • Francis Flagg
... famous of the Cadorine's works. Though the whole has abundant movement and passion, and the mise-en-scene is undoubtedly imposing, the combat is not raised above reality into the region of the higher and more representative truth by any element of tragic vastness and significance. Even though the Imperialists are armed more or less in the antique Roman fashion, to distinguish them from the Venetians, who appear in the accoutrements of their own day, it is still that minor and local combat the Battle of Cadore that we have before us, and not, ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... disposed, and be in a better tone for the general work of prayer, if he will first tarry a little, and put himself into the right frame, casting off every distracting and disturbing thought, and with his best endeavour recalling to mind the vastness of HIM to whom he is drawing near, and how unholy a thing it is to approach him with a carelessness and indifference, and, as it were, contempt; laying aside also every thing foreign to the subject;—so to come to prayer as one who stretcheth ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... hats thrust back, lolled in their saddles, shouting conversation to each other, relaxing after the day's work; through the clouds strong shafts of light belittled the living creatures, threw into proportion the vastness ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... he, Lord? where is he? Hast thou deprived me of the power once bestowed, to see and hear him through the vastness of intervening space? Oh, in this mighty moment, restore me that divine gift—for the more I feel these human infirmities, which I hail and bless as the end of my eternity of ills, the more my sight loses the power to traverse immensity, and ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... a cheery thing to go bowling along behind a spicy team, but especially so when traversing a wild and half-cultivated country, where everything around you is strange to the eye, and where the vastness of space conveys a feeling of grandeur; nor is it the less enjoyable when the scenery is decked in the rich attire of autumn, and seen through the medium of a clear and cloudless sky. Then, again, there is something ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... the uneven tops of the trees, some green, some tinted, are apparently so close together as to hide aught else, and the shadows of the clouds move over it as over a sea. A haze upon the horizon brings plain and sky together there; on one side, in the far distance a huge block, a rude vastness stands out dusky and dimly defined—it is a spur ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... and soon the little boat was bobbing up and down in a manner to give discomfort to my stomach. The water, building terraces and battlements, reflected enough light to impress me with the diminutiveness of the boat, set in the vastness on which ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... Wordsworth, on the contrary, they seemed directly to dignify human nature, as tending to tranquillize it. He raises physical nature to the level of human thought, giving it thereby a mystic power and expression; he subdues man to the level of nature, but gives him therewith a certain breadth and vastness ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... Colosseum, the Parthenon, the courts of Baalbec, the pillars of Palmyra and Girgenti,—sink into insignificance when compared with the structures that line the banks of an African river. The mind makes a leap amid their vastness, their variety, and their number. New combinations rise upon our limited invention and contract the taste,—the pyramid, the propylon, the colossus, the catacomb, the obelisk, ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... but the speech seemed to come out of vastness and hollow distance; he could not realize it fairly. He felt as if in a dream, far off somewhere in loneliness, with a big, shadowy form looming before him. He heard the chill wind in the thickets round about, and beyond Long-Hair rose a ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... last, the wall of ice, durable like iron, sets, deathlike, its white teeth against us out of the polar twilight. And, having once traversed in thought its gradation of the zoned iris of the earth in all its material vastness, let us go down nearer to it, and watch the parallel change in the belt of animal life: the multitudes of swift and brilliant creatures that glance in the air and sea, or tread the sands of the southern zone; striped zebras and spotted leopards, glistening ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... plan for making his own fortune by selling his escort as slaves. Men began to desert whenever they came to an attractive stopping-place where there was food and water. They feigned illness, or fled in the night with their camels into the vastness of the desert, their faces turned once more to the west. For soon, if they stayed, they would pass beyond the zone of known oases, into the terrible land of mystery, charted by no man, a land where it was said the sun had dried up all ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... flowing. I could not clearly distinguish their faces, but they looked handsome, though desperately frightened. Accompanying this was an indescribable sense, which I have sometimes had in dreams, of an overwhelming intense vastness—space-immensity rushing over one with a terrible power; and at the same time the feeling of numbers, as if I was in the presence of a multitude of people. All this quite momentary; in an instant I was conscious of the tall avenues of red stems, with their dark background, and the heavy ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... on the even, throbbing voice, "surely, the vastness of this war, its titanic battles, its heroism, its sublime earnestness, should sink into oblivion all low schemes of vengeance! Before the sheer grandeur of its history our children will walk with silent lips and ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... look on the ocean think of its vastness; of the many shores in many climes visited by its waves to ply "their priest-like task of clean ablution;" of cities and empires that rose beside its waters, flourished, decayed, and became a memory; of others that shall rise and also pass away, while the moving element ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... on their tramp up the slopes, peering right and left as they went for any indication of the absent woman. Wingate's old grief was knocking at his heart once more. A woman lost in the appalling vastness of this great Western land was entering into his life again. It took them a full hour to go that mile, although both were experts on the shoes, but as they reached the rim of the canyon they were rewarded by seeing a thin blue streak of smoke ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... had gone, she returned to her place at the window. It was a fine night: there was no moon; but the stars glittered furiously in the inky-blue sky, a stretch of which was visible above the gardens. The vastness of the night, the distance of sky and stars, made her shiver. Leaning her wrists on the cold, moist sill, she looked down into the street; it was not very far; but a jump from where she was, to the ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... the established doctrine that the number of men damned eternally will be incomparably greater than that of the saved, we must say that the evil could not but seem to be almost as nothing in comparison with the good, when one contemplates the true vastness of the city of God. Coelius Secundus Curio wrote a little book, De Amplitudine Regni Coelestis, which was reprinted not long since; but he is indeed far from having apprehended the compass of the kingdom of heaven. ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... till it branched off in two directions (the one to the left being the real continuation), but at this point we turned off into a field, deep in grass and studded with flowers, where some comfortable-looking boulders invited us to rest. Miss Blunt,—whose soul thrills with delight at the vastness and beauty of nature,—never allowed opportunities of committing the choicest bits to canvas or paper, to escape her; and, some picturesque display having caught her eye, directly she had located herself on an accommodating boulder, she was at work. Herrick's good advice, ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... Mrs Bosenna, dropping knife and fork and clasping her hands. "Yes, to be sure, the vastness of it—the great distances! . . . And so you met my late husband in a boxing tent? Sport of all kinds appealed to him. But isn't boxing a-er—more or less ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... sight at all of that series of monotonous and monstrous battles, a series punctuated only by names: Liege, Antwerp, Mons, Ypres, Verdun and Arras. And if nothing had happened besides the Titanic conflict of material armaments I believe that we should not yet be anywhere near realizing its vastness and its significance. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... University, and when only eighteen years of age Erasmus said of him, "What hopes may we not conceive of Philipp Melanchthon, though as yet very young, almost a boy, but equally to be admired for his proficiency in both languages! What quickness of invention! What purity of diction! What vastness of memory! What variety of reading! What modesty and gracefulness of behavior! And ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... its loathsome folds, is now coiled about the whole land. Thus do I expose the extent of the present contest, where we encounter not merely local resistance, but also the unconquered sustaining arm behind. But out of the vastness of the crime attempted, with all its woe and shame, I derive a well-founded assurance of a commensurate vastness of effort against it by the aroused masses of the country, determined not only to vindicate Right ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... into silence; never yet had the vastness of the park filled them with such pleasure. They joyed at knowing that they were alone in so far-spreading a domain that even they themselves could not reach ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... mountainsides, shuddering and failing; then it is lost in the vastness, like the sound of a pebble pitched into rushing waters. The woodland chorus takes it up in its own wolfish tongue, and it plunges forth again, magnified by the din ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... forms. At the Bridge you feel yourself to be looking into another world; at the Cave you find yourself already arrived there. The one presents to us a God who is very "wonderful in working;" the other exhibits the same power, but with it is blended loveliness in a thousand forms. In each is vastness. Greatness constitutes the whole of one; but the other is elegant, as well as great. Of each we must retain lively impressions; and to witness such displays of the Creator's power, must ever be considered as happy events in our lives. While viewing ...
— The Book of Enterprise and Adventure - Being an Excitement to Reading. For Young People. A New and Condensed Edition. • Anonymous
... different,—rather, how utterly dissimilar,—is the phenomenon before us! Here is a singularly confused and shallow thinker oppressed with the vastness of his discovery, that the Bible—has nothing in it! Here is a Clergyman of the Church of England, and a Lecturer in Divinity, whose difficulty is how he shall convince the world that the Bible is—like any other book! Here is the sceptical fellow of ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... great arched ceiling, after the narrative manner of Paolo Veronese, lent such vastness to the apartment that moving across it, or sitting in her great overstuffed armchair beside a window, she hardly struck a note. Great wealth lay in canopied silence over that room. A rug out of Persia, so large that countless ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... concerning the nature of government, the sanctions of law, etc., but there is no room for debate concerning the meaning of the parental relation. It interprets itself. Tell a child that a man is his father, and he can be told no more. The name interprets the relation. In earlier times the vastness of the creation was but dimly appreciated, and then the idea of God was equally contracted. Jesus taught that the Deity, whether the conception of Him was small or large, was to be interpreted in terms of fatherhood. What an ideal father is to his family God is ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... the darkness a great white radiance streamed through the vastness of the aisles; the moon, that was at her height, had broken through the clouds, the snow had ceased to fall, the light reflected from the snow without was clear as the light of dawn. It fell through the arches full upon the two pictures above, from which the boy on his entrance had flung ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... darkness into some piled and castled fortress; a fortress of Science held by Intelligence. Lights were in the towers, as of genii at their work; lights glimmered here and there on the face of the farther cliff, as though to measure the vastness of the gorge and of that resounding vacancy towards which they moved. In front, the arch of the vast suspension bridge, pricked in light, crossed the gulf, from nothingness to nothingness, like that sky bridge on which the gods marched to Walhalla. Otherwise, no shape, no ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... looking about the marvellous cavern that, formed by the pine-crowned hills, lay like a cup at their feet. In and out wound the railroad track, a lonely, isolated bit of man's handiwork threading through the vastness of nature. It was the only sign of human life visible, until, after a long, lazy hour, Benny sat up staring with round eyes into the valley below. A thin scarf of blue smoke was indolently curling up from a spot apparently in the forest. He called the ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... rabbits darting now and then between the rocks. Suddenly from the top of a little hill they came out to a spot where they could see far over the desert. Forty miles away three square, flat hills, or mesas, looked like a gigantic train of cars, and the clear air gave everything a strange vastness. Farther on beyond the mesas dimly dawned the Black Mountains. One could even see the shadowed head of "Round Rock," almost a hundred miles away. Before them and around was a great plain of sage-brush, and here ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... utterly beyond our adequate comprehension he must be. As men in old tales used to take diffused superhumans, the genii, and by magic word bring them down into a stoppered bottle where they could be held in manageable form, so man has taken the vastness of God and run it ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... great sweep of colonnades. There, too, they borrowed from the circle of saints the idea of the repeated Star figure. The colonnade not only encloses the court but is produced along the sides of the Palaces of Agriculture and Transportation to form two corridors of almost Egyptian vastness. These two features, the arches and the colonnades, here at the center of the palace group, strike the Exposition's note of breadth. Their decoration is the key to the festal richness of ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... of Russia Much as we may dread Russia for is from the vast extent of its the vastness of her territory and territory, and the great and of her rapidly increasing numbers, rapidly increasing number of there is greater cause for fear its (54) subjects, (5) it is in the military spirit ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... thoughts and acts which constitute real life, and not by hours of emptiness. They pass up the church-aisle, and raise their eyes to the ceiling. Had our Adam and Eve become mortal in some European city, and strayed into the vastness and sublimity of an old cathedral, they might have recognized the purpose for which the deep-souled founders reared it. Like the dim awfulness of an ancient forest, its very atmosphere would have incited them to prayer. Within the snug walls of a metropolitan church ...
— The New Adam and Eve (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Quarterly Review, in Dickens' day,—and it may be inferred things have only changed to a degree since that time,—illustrated, in a whimsical way, the vastness of the supply system. The following is described as the supply of meat, poultry, bread, and beer, for one year: 72 miles of oxen, 10 abreast; 120 miles of sheep, do.; 7 miles of calves, do.; 9 miles of pigs, do.; 50 acres of poultry, ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... immeasurable improvement! We have assumed heavy burdens, heavy responsibilities. I have no sympathy with the men who cry out against our assuming them. If this great nation, if this nation with its wealth, with its continental vastness of domain, with its glorious history, with its memory of Washington and Lincoln, of its statesmen and soldiers and sailors, the builders and the wielders of commonwealths, if this nation is to stand cowering back because it is afraid to undertake tasks lest they ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various |
