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More "Pinnacle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not tell even in a letter. And though, wherever you are, as I have told you before, you are in the same boat, yet I congratulate you on your absence, as well because you don't see what we see, as because your reputation is placed on a lofty and conspicuous pinnacle in the sight of multitudes both of citizens and allies; and it is conveyed to us by neither obscure nor uncertain talk, but by the loud and unanimous voice of all. There is one thing of which I cannot feel certain—whether ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... gaze up the ascent from the low ground, it rested presently on a Tower built boldly upon the Heraclian wall. This was the highest pinnacle of the Palace, first to attract the observer, longest to hold his attention. No courier was required to tell its history to him through whose eyes we are now looking—it was the tower of Isaac Angelus. How clearly ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... is too weak; mortality Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep, And each imagined pinnacle and steep Of godlike hardship tells me I must die Like a sick eagle looking at the ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... great archangel St. Michel will deliver me from all evil. What canst thou do? Canst thou turn children into cats? or canst thou walk across the sea without being drowned? or canst thou stand on the highest pinnacle of the church, where the golden image of St. Michel used to be, and cast thyself down without killing thyself? I will go back with thee to thy house and see what ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... also the introduction of incantations and apparitions, of which romantic style of writing she was a professed admirer. The "Indian Emperor" had the most ample success; and from the time of its representation, till the day of his death, our author, though often rudely assailed, maintained the very pinnacle of poetical superiority, ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... leave this grand pinnacle, we must not tarry longer upon Greylock. Let us now take a trip down the Housatonic valley, close beside the Taconic range. This forms an almost continuous ridge across the State, and its summit is nearly upon the line between our State and New York. There are no peaks of consequence ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... from her sonorous nap, Flame beguiled her with half a doughnut to her appointed chair, boosted her still cautiously to her pinnacle of books, and with various swift adjustments of fasteners, knotting of tie-strings,—an extra breathing hole jabbed through the beak, slipped the canary's beautiful blond countenance over Miss ...
— Peace on Earth, Good-will to Dogs • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... wrote Catherine II., 'the greatest of the queens, and of the ——,' the friend of Voltaire, the greatest lady-freethinker of her age. But she wrote still farther:—'Secondly, the honour of Russia as a state, which has been brought to the highest pinnacle of her victorious arms with the loss of so much blood, is actually trodden under foot through the newly-concluded peace with her bitterest enemy.' And who is this bitterest enemy of the orthodox Russia? The King of Prussia, Frederick II.! ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 238, May 20, 1854 • Various
... interests', [Footnote: Spectator 4.] one 'set to watch the manners and behaviour of my countrymen and contemporaries,' [Footnote: Spectator 435.] and to extirpate anything 'that shocks modesty and good manners', [Footnote: Spectator 34.] such a censor was bound to place himself on a pinnacle above the passions and foibles which he was to rebuke. Yet occasionally Addison does appear a trifle self-satisfied. Pope's indictment of his character in the person of Atticus cannot be entirely set aside. His creed, as implied in Spectator ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... Cluny now, and her hats were nothing but line. A scant two years before she had wondered if she would ever reach a pinnacle of success lofty enough to enable her to wear blue tailor suits as smart as the well-cut garments worn by her mother's friend, Mrs. Emma McChesney. Mrs. McChesney's trig little suits had cost fifty dollars, and had looked sixty. Fanny's now cost one ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... conquering light as it swept down among the shadows, and set the captive crags and forests free. We watched the tinted pictures grow and brighten upon the water till every little detail of forest, precipice, and pinnacle was wrought in and finished, and the miracle of the enchanter ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... shuddered when she saw it fearlessly adventured on by a human being. A feeling of curiosity had afterwards induced her to return and see if the bold hunter had cleared the gulf, or perished in his mad attempt; but when she looked outward from the highest pinnacle of her rocky prison, she could discover no traces of him whatever. It then occurred to her, that, if successful in his leap, his progress must have been finally arrested by the impassable rock that terminated the ridge; in which case she might perchance obtain a nearer sight of his person. With this ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... mean streets, and the cheerful virtues which throw a glamour over their humble homes. His advocacy of these social causes came to be known far and wide and contributed a second element to the popularity won by his novels; long before his death Dickens stood on a pinnacle alone, loved by the vast reading public among those who toil in our towns and villages, and wherever English is read and understood. He was not only their entertainer, but their friend and brother; he had been through his days of sorrow and suffering ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... darling of my soul! stop not till I rise superior to all superlative, till I mount triumphantly the pinnacle of glory, or at least open the way for one of my own family and name to enter ...
— The Fall of British Tyranny - American Liberty Triumphant • John Leacock
... on his divan in the elm, was thinking over the extraordinary good fortune that had befallen him. Yet such was his sagacity that even when thus about to attain almost the topmost pinnacle of his ambition, he did not forget the instability of affairs, but sought to confirm his position, or even to advance it. He reflected that Kapchack was not only cunning beyond everything ever known, but he was just now a prey to anxieties, and consumed with jealousy, which upset the tenor ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... dictated by passion and interest, and the determination of recalling the present members of the audience was thereby confirmed. The presence of Cortes in Spain at this time was also highly favourable to his interests, and he was now rapidly advancing to the pinnacle of his fortune. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... therefore, aiding each other, the steep roof becomes generally adopted, and delighted in, throughout the north; and then, with the gradual exaggeration with which every pleasant idea is pursued by the human mind, it is raised into all manner of peaks, and points, and ridges; and pinnacle after pinnacle is added on its flanks, and the walls increased in height, in proportion, until we get indeed a very sublime mass, but one which has no more principle of religious aspiration in it than a child's tower of cards. What is more, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... work in other fields—by portraits in high and low relief, by ideal figures, and notably by the memorial to Robert Gould Shaw, a work distinctively American and without a counterpart in the annals of art. It is the spiritual quality of Saint Gaudens's work which sets it apart upon a lofty pinnacle—the largeness of the man behind it, the artist ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... were scarcely any of them but what had a foot-path on the side of the road; in others there were bye-paths which led from the road into the country, sometimes to a village, the chimnies only of which were visible; at other times to a chateau, the gilded pinnacle of which shone afar from some distant hill. I observed several fields of flax and hemp, and we passed several cottages, in the gardens of which the flax flourished in great perfection, Mr. Younge informed me, that every peasant grew a sufficient quantity for his own use, ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... was supposed to be the very pinnacle of the top secret stuff. But she was right of course. Four of the earlier models had cracked up. No pilots in them at the time—radio controlled. But jobs ...
— The Very Black • Dean Evans
... to the highest Pinnacle of the Rock, and placing me on the Top of it, Cast thy Eyes Eastward, said he, and tell me what thou seest. I see, said I, a huge Valley, and a prodigious Tide of Water rolling through it. The Valley that thou seest, said he, is the Vale ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... York reporters hanging on his words! To achieve this giddy pinnacle on the heels of calling himself an atom seemed to Shelby almost to ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... after him, till they stood together, right on the conical pinnacle, with only just room for them to remain erect, the great boiling crater below on one side, the glorious view of the fairy-like isle, with its ring of foam around, and the vivid blue lagoon, circling the emerald green of the coast. There it all was stretched out with glorious clearness, and ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... patriotic man. True, he could not go to war himself, on account of me and the children; but, I dare say, if he could have prevailed upon me to give him up to the cause of liberty, he'd have clomb rapidly to the highest pinnacle of earthly glory, and to-day I'd have been Mrs. General Crane, a leader of the brilliant society at Washington, with my name in the papers as 'the wife of our distinguished General Crane,' or the 'stately and dignified lady of the ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... will, you will not drag Jove the supreme counsellor from heaven to earth; but were I to pull at it myself I should draw you up with earth and sea into the bargain, then would I bind the chain about some pinnacle of Olympus and leave you all dangling in the mid firmament. So far am I above all others ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... that these stones become bread. But he answered and said: It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. Then the devil taketh him into the holy city; and he set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and saith unto him, If thou art the Son of God, cast thyself down: ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... these animals are very abundant. The only bird seen was a solitary species of loxia, but upon a steep ledge of rocks I observed one of those nests of which frequent mention has been already made: I examined and found it built upon the pinnacle of some large rocks, very strongly constructed of long sticks; it was about five feet high and exceeded four feet in diameter, with a very slight cavity above; and seemed to have been very recently inhabited. The rocks that formed its base were ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... creation,—man appears upon the scene, in his several races and varieties; the sublime arch of animal being at length receives its keystone; and the finished work stands up complete, from foundation to pinnacle, at once an admirably adjusted occupant of space, and a wonderful monument of Divine arrangement and classification, as it exists in time. Save at two special points, to which I shall afterwards advert, the particular arrangement unfolded ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... do me, at a pinch. If Mateo can get a horse, I want to ride up on this pinnacle and take a look-see over the country. I can get the lay of things a whole lot better than goggling a ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... fashionable world who were passing up the stairs behind. The doctor was somewhat repressed in his mode of address by the communication which had so lately been made to him. Miss Dunstable was now standing on the very top of the pinnacle of wealth, and seemed to him to be not only so much above his reach, but also so far removed from his track in life, that he could not in any way put himself on a level with her. He could neither aspire so high ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... thee now; thou art he who carried Jesus to a pinnacle of the temple, and showed him all the ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... another ended his career in the West, and it may be doubted which of the two Napoleon hated most—Wellington, who finally overthrew him at Waterloo, or Sidney Smith, who, to use Napoleon's own words, made him "miss his destiny," and exchange the empire of the East for a lonely pinnacle of rock in ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... tabernacle work rests. Each compartment consists of a large canopy decorated with quatrefoils, and battlemented. This is surmounted by three smaller canopies and pedestals which were originally occupied by small carved figures. A large pinnacle, richly decorated, like the others, with crockets and ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Carlisle - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. King Eley
... the Cross, Wilson (Provost this long while) broke off a conversation with Templandmuir, to yell, "It's gra-and weather, Mr. Gourlay!" The men had not spoken for years. So to shout at poor Gourlay in his black hour, from the pinnacle of civic greatness, was a fine stroke: it was gloating, it was rubbing in the contrast. The words were innocent, but that was nothing; whatever the remark, for a declared enemy to address Gourlay in his shame was an insult: that was why Wilson addressed him. There ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... would stretch out his right arm over her head, as it were, and he spoke down at that sinner from a height, and with a sense of avenging virtue, with a profound and pure joy as though he could from his steep pinnacle see every weighty word strike and hurt like a ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... reputation, but what is far worse, far more deadly, upon his own conscience. And yet, O wise judgments of God! hard and incessantly though he toiled to establish our fortunes, scarcely had he left empty that supreme seat which we occupy to-day, when we were cast down from the pinnacle whereon we had climbed, abandoned to the fury of the rabble and the vindictive hatred of the Roman barons, who chose to feel offended by our goodness to their enemies. Thus, not only, we tell you, Caesar, not only did we plunge headlong ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... is not large nor is the chapel, but, nevertheless, my soul expanded as in a basilica, soared up as under some vast dome, and touched the pinnacle of high Heaven where blazes the Sign of Signs in the azure of ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... Wyn's "Y Bardd Cwsg." The book would please Borrow, because in the City of Perdition Rome stands at the gate of Pride, and the Pope has palaces in the streets of Pleasure and of Lucre; because the Church of England is the fairest part of the Catholic Church, surmounted by "Queen Anne on the pinnacle of the building, with a sword in each hand"; and because the Papist is turned away from the Catholic Church by a porter with "an exceedingly large Bible." "One fair morning," ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... the tyrant: monstrous birth! I 2 Insolent Pride, if idly nursed On timeless surfeit, plenty accursed, Spurning the lowlier tract of Earth Mounts to her pinnacle,—then falls, Dashed headlong down sheer mountain walls To dark Necessity's deep ground, Where never foothold can be found. Let wrestlers for my country's glory speed, God, I thee pray! Be God my helper in ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... by the look of triumph and satisfaction in Olympia's pretty face, as she ruled queen of the revels, that already she felt herself not far from the pinnacle of her ambition, and saw herself in the now not distant future as Olympia, ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... day arrived. The Duke of Altamont's proposals were made in due form, and in due form accepted. Lady Juliana seemed now touching the pinnacle of earthly joy; for, next to being greatly married herself, her happiness centred in seeing her daughter at the head of a splendid establishment. Again visions of bliss hovered around her, and "Peers ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... always aspiring—ever soaring on the wing—you are likely to become discontented, proud, selfish, time-serving. In whatever position of life God has placed you, be satisfied. What! ambitious to be on a pinnacle of the temple—a higher place in the Church, or in the world?—Satan might hurl you down! "Be not high-minded, but fear." And with respect to others, honor their gifts, contemplate their excellences only to imitate them. Speak kindly, act gently, "condescend ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... rudely constructed machinery, the heavily laden basket was now carefully lowered down among the multitude; and, from the giddy pinnacle, the Romans were seen gathering confusedly round it; but owing to the vast height and the prevalence of a fog, no distinct view of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... her mind thus be made available? She would compose, publish, earn money—some day call papa, show him her hoard, beg him to take it, and, never owning whence it came, raise the building. Spire and chancel, pinnacle and buttress, rose before her eyes, and she and Norman were standing in the porch with an orderly, religious population, blessing the unknown benefactor, who had caused the news of salvation to be ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... Aldegonde, was forced to capitulate on the 16th of August, after a siege of fourteen months. The reduction of Antwerp was considered a miracle of perseverance and courage. The prince of Parma was elevated by his success to the highest pinnacle of renown; and Philip, on receiving the news, displayed a burst of joy such as rarely varied his cold and ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... had knocked into the river, whence it was rescued and brought ashore in triumph. Best of all, the siege had been too short to bring famine in its train. The loss of life was inconsiderable, and in prestige the soldiery of New France now stood on a pinnacle which they had never before attained. When we consider the paucity of the forces engaged, this repulse of the English from Quebec may not seem an imposing military achievement. But Canada had put forth her whole strength and had succeeded where failure would ...
— The Fighting Governor - A Chronicle of Frontenac • Charles W. Colby
... to recur on each successive attempt. Every one must know the feeling of triumph and pride which a grand view from a height communicates to the mind. In these little frequented countries there is also joined to it some vanity, that you perhaps are the first man who ever stood on this pinnacle or ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... would evidently have been this: I should have gone to the Regent and made out a story similar to the real one, but with this difference, all the ridicule of the situation should have fallen upon me, and the little Dubois should have been elevated on a pinnacle of respectable appearances! This, as the Regent told the Abbe everything, would have saved me. I saw the plan; but was too proud to adopt it; I followed another course in my game: I threw away the knave, and played with the king, i.e., with the Regent. After a little preliminary ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... profane and idle who may chance to stumble across his entertainment. His living auditors, unsolicited for the tribute of worship or an alms, find themselves conceived of in the likeness of what he would have them to be, raised to a companion pinnacle of friendship, and constituted peers and judges, if they will, of his ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... it on bells was almost incidental to their main function. One must not neglect, too, that it was in their glorification of the rationality of the cosmos that they had their greatest effect. Through milleniums of civilization, man's understanding of celestial phenomena had been the very pinnacle of his intellect, and then as now popular exhibition of this sort was just as necessary, as striking, and as impressive. One does not have to go far to see how the paraphernalia of these early great astronomical clocks had great influence on philosophers ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... line of stunted firs edged limits of perpetual snow, and rocks and glistening fields of crag-broken white carried the eye on upward to the dazzling pinnacle of the Col de la Reine, splitting the vast, calm ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... for her mother, Eugene for her brother; with the richest endowments of person, mind, and heart, with glowing health, and surrounded by admirers, Hortense seemed now to be placed upon the very highest pinnacle of earthly happiness. ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... somehow invested by historians with a melancholy glamour; and yet this appears to be true only of those royal individuals who came by their thrones in the easiest way—that of inheritance. The kings of high endeavor who have won to the pinnacle by force of their own stoutness of heart—in other words the popular idols of a fickle public, who have scarce begun to get acquainted with the dizzy uncertainty of their pedestals before the pedestal be rudely removed from beneath them—rarely find the world inclined to ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... be the gist of Khalid's gospel. This, through the labyrinths of doubt and contradiction, is the pinnacle of faith he would reach. And often in this labyrinthic gloom, where a gleam of light from some recess of thought or fancy reveals here a Hermit in his cloister, there an Artist in his studio, below a Nawab in his orgies, above a Broker on the Stock Exchange, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... when the procession goes out of the city to the side of the river called Nigondin or Toombuddra, which runs past the walls of the city, to a certain spot where this ceremony is usually performed, where there is prepared a large square pit full of dried wood, having a little pinnacle or scaffold close to one side four or five steps up. On her arrival, a great banquet is prepared, where the victim eats with as much apparent joy as if it were her wedding-day; and at the end of the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... Allen was borne away from the pinnacle of his imaginary triumph as if dead, Zell following, wringing her hands, and with streaming eyes; but Edith reminded one of some wild, timid creature of the woods, which, though in an extremity of danger and fear, is alert and watchful, ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... or even avaricious,—does there mingle a certain sense of doubt and sorrow—a fear of what is to come—a doubt of what is—a retrospect to the past, leading to a prognostication of the future? (The best of Prophets of the future is the Past.) Why is this? or these?—I know not, except that on a pinnacle we are most susceptible of giddiness, and that we never fear falling except from a precipice—the higher, the more awful, and the more sublime; and, therefore, I am not sure that Fear is not a pleasurable sensation; at least, Hope ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... light, but rather, as it were, a promise and a beacon—a glow reflected whence we know not, and lying on this alien earth as the sun's light lies on the dead bosom of the moon. Some declare, again, that they have climbed its topmost pinnacle and tasted of the fresh breath of heaven which sweeps around its heights—ay, and heard the quiring of immortal harps and the swan-like sigh of angels' wings; and then behold! a mist has fallen upon them, and they have wandered in it, and when it cleared ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... publishers, the rebel of manners, the ingenious and honored metaphysician. When Kant declared he was the only one of his critics that understood The Critique of Pure Reason, Maimon returned to Berlin to devote himself to the philosophical work that was to give him a pinnacle apart among the Kantians. Goethe and Schiller made flattering advances to him. Berlin society was at his feet. But he remained to the end, shiftless and feckless, uncouth and unmanageable, and not seldom when the taverns he frequented were closed, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... During one of these lucid intervals it is said that one of the domestics about his person informed him of the abdication of Napoleon; upon which he put himself in a great passion, and swore "it was a lie." This wretched old man was reduced from the highest pinnacle of grandeur to the most pitiable condition; none of his subjects were admitted to see him for many years; even his children were excluded, except upon particular occasions, and then they were admitted only in the presence of certain individuals. The old Queen had ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... faculty doing one hundred per cent service—and the prize place in the tip-top peak of the Wizards of the World is his! He started at the very bottom layer, an orphan newsboy. He made the journey to the pinnacle because early in life he ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... down and gave another ten minutes to the back-breaking work of carrying more boulders from the water to the wall. Then I widened my cairn below, so that I could stand firmly before springing upon the pinnacle with which I completed it. I knew well that this would collapse under me if I allowed my weight to rest more than an instant upon it. And so at last it did; but my fingers had clutched the coping in time; had grabbed it even as the insecure pyramid ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... time, too, and sympathy, and kindness. It's no use, Mrs Willoughby. I've put you on the topmost pinnacle in my mind, and nothing that you can say can pull you down. I think you are the best woman ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... life. The traffic itself was a great evil generality, and as such met condemnation. But in generalities, as in mountain ranges, there are specific points that tower out distinctively for consideration. Such a pinnacle of iniquity this liquor firm had seemed to Jean to be since her acquaintance with ...
— The Daughter of a Republican • Bernie Babcock
... The temptation on the pinnacle occupies but a few lines only of the poem. Hitherto Satan admits that Jesus had conquered, but he had done no more than any wise and good man ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... than in the smooth and solid temper of the modern world, which cannot easily repeat either the triumph of Alexander or the fall of Darius. But the peculiar infelicity of the Byzantine princes exposed them to domestic perils, without affording any lively promise of foreign conquest. From the pinnacle of greatness, Andronicus was precipitated by a death more cruel and shameful than that of the malefactor; but the most glorious of his predecessors had much more to dread from their subjects than to hope ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... a black, bulging ridge like a bastion upon the right side of the terrible khor up which the camels were winding. At one point it rose into a small pinnacle. On this pinnacle stood a solitary, motionless figure clad entirely in black, save for a brilliant dash of scarlet upon his head. There could not surely be two such short, sturdy figures or such large, ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... Oscar with sarcasm. "I am quite aware that you are at the pinnacle of eminence, even if you do flunk ...
— Risen from the Ranks - Harry Walton's Success • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... city, in the year 1533, and the peaks of the mighty mountains that appeared to pierce the bright blue sky, appearing to bear out the fabulous belief of the eastern lands, for their icy summits glowed, and flushed, and sparkled in the rays of the sun, which gilded every pinnacle and turned each glacier into a river of gold, seeming to flow slowly downwards towards the vales and plains of the Andes, as yet flooded with the darkness ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... with brown roofs were settled, like nesting sea-birds, and at intervals cypresses striped the hill with black bars. Mountains whose sides were flushed with red, but whose crowns were bald, rose as a pinnacle, half-concealing another pinnacle behind it. The hour being still early, the whole view was exquisitely light and airy; the blues and greens of sky and tree were intense but not sultry. As they drew nearer and could distinguish details, the effect of ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... out of vogue before her translation of his temporarily famous novel was finished. However, the languid prosecution of the work had invested Mrs. Gaspilton with a certain literary dignity, even in Kensingate circles, and would place her on a pinnacle in St. Chuddocks, where hardly any one read French, and assuredly no one had heard ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... the noble patriot, soon "put out his wings," and soared, ultimately, to a pinnacle of honor and renown attained by few among men. In the winter of 1793 and 1794, the public mind had become highly excited from the inflammatory appeals in behalf of France, by Citizen Genet, the French Minister to the United States. A large portion ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... in Eighteen Hundred Forty, he had known Mrs. Taylor nine years. That she had a considerable hand in this comprehensive work there is no doubt. The book placed Mill upon the very pinnacle of fame. John Morley declared him "England's foremost thinker," a title to which Gladstone added the weight of his endorsement, a thing we would hardly expect from an ardent churchman, since Mill was always an avowed freethinker, and once declared in Gladstone's presence, "I am one ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... quite close to us, that shook the ground; and, starting out upon the lawn, I saw the tops of the trees about the Oriental College burst into smoky red flame, and the tower of the little church beside it slide down into ruin. The pinnacle of the mosque had vanished, and the roof line of the college itself looked as if a hundred-ton gun had been at work upon it. One of our chimneys cracked as if a shot had hit it, flew, and a piece of it came clattering down the tiles and made ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... able to spend the night in a pot-house on Ault Bea. Next day, the sea was unapproachable; but the next they had a pleasant passage to Poolewe, hugging the cliffs, the falling swell bursting close by them in the gullies, and the black scarts that sat like ornaments on the top of every stack and pinnacle, looking down into the PURGLE as she passed. The climate of Scotland had not done with them yet: for three days they lay storm-stayed in Poolewe, and when they put to sea on the morning of the fourth, the ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Gibbons, who had been about the world not a little and who drew sanction for the young architect's doings from more quarters of the Continent than one, instantly rose to the occasion and landed on the topmost pinnacle of the shining temple at a single swoop. Here he stood tiptoe and beckoned. This confident pose, this encouraging gesture, had its effect; the others toiled and scrambled up, each after his own fashion, but they all got there. Even old Oliver Dowd, who had once been a member of ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... the most remarkable trees they met with was the bunya-bunya, a species of pine. It towered like a pinnacle above all the other trees, reaching a height of upwards of two ...
— The Young Berringtons - The Boy Explorers • W.H.G. Kingston
... vent his dissatisfied humour in acts of cruelty and oppression. Cromwell must govern, and govern to his best. The restless and ardent spirit that had ever prompted him onwards and upwards, and which had carried him to that high place, was now upon the wane. It had borne him to that giddy pinnacle, and threatened to leave him there. Men were now aiming at his life; the assassin was abroad; one-half the world was execrating him; we doubt not that he spoke with sincerity when he said, that "he would gladly live under any woodside, and keep a flock of sheep." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... that time the style of hair dressing was one of those styles which are endurable, and perhaps even very beautiful, in the hands of a first-rate artist and on the heads of those very few women who dress well; but which are more and more hideous the farther you get from that distant pinnacle of the mode, and the lower down they spread among the ranks of society. I thought, as I looked from one to another, I had never seen anything so ill in taste, so outraged in style, so unspeakable in ugliness as well as in pretension. I supposed ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... sad. This literature of woe, as Whitman calls it, this Maladie de Rene, as we like to call it in Europe, is in many ways a most humiliating and sickly phenomenon. Young gentlemen with three or four hundred a year of private means look down from a pinnacle of doleful experience on all the grown and hearty men who have dared to say a good word for life since the beginning of the world. There is no prophet but the melancholy Jacques, and the blue devils dance on all ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the highest pinnacle of the rock, and placing me on the top of it, 'Cast thy eyes eastward,' said he, 'and tell me what thou seest.' 'I see,' said I, 'a huge valley, and a prodigious tide of water rolling through it.' ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... days of colony times developed into Muster Days, the crowning pinnacle of gayety, dissipation, and noise in a country boy's life in New England for over ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... Weise, in "Die Komodien des Plautus, kritisch nach Inhalt und Form beleuchtet, zur Bestimmung des Echten und Unechten in den einzelnen Dichtungen" (Quedlinburg, 1866), follows hard on Becker's heels and places Plautus on a pinnacle of poetic achievement in which we scarcely recognize our apotheosized laugh-maker. Every passage in the plays that is not artistically immaculate, that does not conform to the uttermost canons of dramatic art, is unequivocally damned as ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... On the topmost pinnacle of Gibraltar we halted a good while, and no doubt the mules were tired. They had a right to be. The military road was good, but rather steep, and there was a good deal of it. The view from the narrow ledge was magnificent; from it vessels seeming like the tiniest little toy boats ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... thou hast known fear, when from His side Men wandered, seeking alien shrines and new, But still the sky was bountiful and blue And thou wast crowned with France's love and pride. Sacred thou art, from pinnacle to base; And in thy panes of gold and scarlet glass The setting sun sees thousandfold his face; Sorrow and joy, in stately silence pass Across thy walls, the shadow and the light; Around thy lofty pillars, tapers white Illuminate, with delicate sharp flames, The brows of saints with ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... cabin, or rather kennel, for it deserved no better name, towards the adjoining dormitories. Here he took time to assure himself that all his neighbours were buried in deep sleep. Once advised of this important fact, he hesitated no longer, but commenced the difficult ascent which led to the upper pinnacle of the rock. His advance, though abundantly guarded, was not entirely noiseless; but while he was felicitating himself on having successfully effected his object, and he was in the very act of placing his ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... for example, were poisonously puritanic, but thinking people came over to his side in a body. The halo of fame was about him, and the incense of it in his nostrils made him more charming, more irresponsibly gay, more genial-witty than ever. He was as one set upon a pinnacle with the sunshine playing about him, lighting up his radiant eyes. All the while, however, the foul mists from the underworld were wreathing about him, climbing higher ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... with the sun's returning march, And woods were brightened, and soft gales Went forth to kiss the sun-clad vales. The clouds were far beneath me; bathed in light, They gathered mid-way round the wooded height, And, in their fading glory, shone Like hosts in battle overthrown. As many a pinnacle, with shifting glance. Through the gray mist thrust up its shattered lance, And rocking on the cliff was left The dark pine blasted, bare, and cleft. The veil of cloud was lifted, and below Glowed the rich ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Admiralty expense, they urbanely "backed" the regulating captain's warrants, consistently winked at his glaring infractions of law and order, and with the most commendable loyalty imaginable did all in their power to forward His Majesty's service. Even the military, if rightly approached on their pinnacle of lofty superiority, now and then condescended to lend the gangsman a hand. Did not Sloper, Major-General and Commandant at Lewes, throw a whole company ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... A drear northeastern storm came howling up The valley of the Saco; and that girl Who had stood with us upon Mount Washington, Her brown locks ruffled by the wind which whirled In gusts around its sharp, cold pinnacle, Who had joined our gay trout-fishing in the streams Which lave that giant's feet; whose laugh was heard Like a bird's carol on the sunrise breeze Which swelled our sail amidst the lake's green islands, Shrank from its harsh, chill ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... could reply, the tip of the moon's crescent horn peeped up from behind an icy pinnacle, and one slender ray fell on the lake. It shone upon no Shadows. Ere the eye of the king could again seek the earth after beholding the first brightness of the moon's resurrection, they had vanished; and the surface of ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... light aiding the vagaries of an overwrought brain. He put forth his arm and found that it was so—there was no chair there and no figure seated in the chair. It was a trick of the light and an effect of imagination, an imagination that was hounded, day by day, from depth to pinnacle, from pinnacle to depth, back and forth like a shuttlecock in giant hands. No chair was there and no seated figure. He sank back on the settle and found ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... emotions, and meanings behind. And in the long run such a habit of inquiry must bear fruit in understanding and sympathy. Joseph Conrad (who seems, by the way, to be more read by newspaper men than any other writer) put very nobly the pinnacle of all scribblers' dreams when he said that human affairs deserve the tribute of "a sigh which is not a sob, a smile which is ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... then settled at Clifton as a physician, established a flourishing practice, and devoted his leisure to politics and scientific research. Sir Humphry Davy, who was his pupil, and whose merit he was the first to bring to light, declared that 'he had talents which would have exalted him to the pinnacle of philosophical eminence, if they had been applied with discretion.' The words are curiously suggestive of the history of his son; and indeed the poet affords a striking instance of the hereditary transmission of mental ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... the watery waste, In the womb of the ocean it bellow'd alone, The knights said their Aves in terrified haste, And crowded each pinnacle, jetty, and stone: "The high-hearted stripling is whelm'd in the tide, Ah! wail him," was echoed from ...
— The Song of Deirdra, King Byrge and his Brothers - and Other Ballads • Anonymous
... wear a respectable appearance. A third letter had been published, and a fourth was preparing. I was in high favour. Men of all ranks visited the earl; and dukes, lords, and barons became as familiar to me as gowns and caps had formerly been in the streets of Oxford. I stood on the very pinnacle of fortune; and, proud of my skill, like a rope-dancer that casts away his balancing pole, I took pleasure in standing on tiptoe. Noticed by the leading men, caressed and courted by their dependants, politics encouraging ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... the pinnacle upon my anguish by asking me to be the best man. I knew even then whose vanity and whose sense of the appropriate had ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... possession of one of the great views of the world. There is Jerusalem, across the Kidron, spread out like a raised map below us. The mountains of Judah roll away north and south and east and west—the clean-cut pinnacle of Mizpah, the lofty plain of Rephaim, the dark hills toward Hebron, the rounded top of Scopus where Titus camped with his Roman legions, the flattened peak of Frank Mountain. Bethlehem is not visible; but there is the tiny village of Bethphage, ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... round the end of the table the guards closed up round the prisoners, who were staring about them in stupefied bewilderment at the incredible horror of the fate which in a moment had hurled them from the highest pinnacle of earthly power and splendour down to the degradation and misery of the most wretched of their own Siberian convicts. No time was given for protest or appeal, for Mazanoff instantly gave the word "Forward!" and, surrounded ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... though perhaps he is not to be placed on the very highest pinnacle of the Venetian School, must be classed among those few great painters who rose far above the level of most of his contemporaries and who brought in a special note and flavour of his own. His art is an independent art, and he borrows little from predecessors or ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... the paths by which an adventurer could climb in the fifth century to that which was still looked upon as the pinnacle of earthly greatness. For however unworthy a man might feel himself to be, and however unworthy all his subjects might know him to be of the highest place in the Empire, when once he had obtained it his power was ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... in October, 1859, making her first anchorage in the lovely harbor on the west side of Prince's Island. That island, in about 1 30' north latitude, covered with all the luxuriance of tropical growth and verdure, and broken into every conceivable shape of pinnacle, castellated rock and chasm, and frowning precipice, streaked with silvery threads of leaping streams in their dash to the sea, is indeed one of the most enchanting spots the eye ever rested on. The chief inhabitant of the lovely isle was Madame Ferrara, a woman of French extraction, who lived ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... prophet. From that hour, As leisure offer'd, close to Mr. Spring's Box-office door, I've stood and eyed the builders. They had a plan to render less their labours; Workmen in olden times would mount a ladder With hodded heads, but these stretch'd forth a pole From the wall's pinnacle, they plac'd a pulley Athwart the pole, a rope athwart the pulley; To this a basket dangled; mortar and bricks Thus freighted, swung securely to the top, And in the empty basket workmen ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... dwells upon those dreary crags, but at one point, as I looked up at them, I saw—poised statue-like above a mighty pinnacle of rock—a solitary eagle. Pausing, with outstretched wings above its nest, it seemed to look disdainfully upon us human pygmies crawling far below. Living at such a height, in voluntary isolation, that king of birds appeared the very embodiment of strength and majesty. Call ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... that at the time this is written he has reached the pinnacle of fame in France. He is the man in all France who is most talked about, most admired and most trusted. Were he to die now, as Kitchener died, his place in History would be secure. What will happen before the war is over is another ...
— A Journey Through France in War Time • Joseph G. Butler, Jr.
... makes the most egregious mistakes, because most of us have not time to be subtle. He never suspected Eve of being a great authoress, and he never attributed to her any desire to attain that doubtful pinnacle of fame. But he saw very plainly the immense advantage to be gathered in this time from her talent. In his simplicity he hoped that something would turn up for him to do, in a world which has no pity nor charity ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... is built, the country, to the distance of two or three miles from the walls, is perfectly flat and the soil sandy, and apparently not very productive. On the bank the ground rises rather abruptly from the brink of the stream, sloping upwards likewise from the sea, till you arrive at the pinnacle upon which the citadel is erected, and which hangs immediately over the town. Thus, though the Adour in fact separates the city from the suburbs and citadel, yet as the ramparts of the former extend ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... turned his gaze from the broad white trail of ice that was the Coppermine, and as he looked she pointed eagerly toward a huge pinnacle of rock that rose like an oddly placed cenotaph out of the unbroken ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... its true usefulness, they have the grand thought to sustain them, and ennoble their lives, that they go at the call of what seems to them their duty. We watch the Chinese eating and laugh at their chopsticks, but we forget that one reason why John Chinaman prides himself upon being at the pinnacle of civilization is that he uses these very chopsticks. (None of the races of Asia, and until recently he knew no other, have ever got beyond chopsticks, the use of which was first taught China, while most of them don't ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... and pinnacle of this inquirendo into the art and mystery of smoking. That is to say, the last pipe of all before the so-long indomitable intellect abdicates, and the ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... mind, contentment, pleasant speech, renunciation of desire and anger, virtuous conduct and actions regulated according to the ordinances of holy writ, constitute the perfect way of the virtuous. And those who are constant in virtue follow these rules of virtuous conduct, and having reached the pinnacle of knowledge, and discriminating between the various phases of human conduct, which are either very virtuous or the reverse, they escape from the great danger. Thus, O great Brahmana, having introduced the subject of virtuous conduct, have I described to thee all this, according to my ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... castle on its walls, and O'Sullivan and I climbed by a ladder to the top of one of the towers. While there, we looked down into the street beneath, and saw a photographist preparing to take a view of the castle, and calling out to some little girl in some niche or on some pinnacle of the walls to stand still that he might catch her figure and face. I think it added to the impressiveness of the old castle, to see the streets and the kitchen-gardens and the homely dwellings that had grown up within the precincts of this feudal fortress, and the people of to-day ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... decided the professor. "We are in the midst of subterranean disturbances and this is probably one of the effects of some under-sea eruption. The pinnacle of rock rose from the ocean, forced up by some power underneath, just as our ship came over it. That accounts for the sudden rising into the air of the Porpoise. No wonder we were ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood
... metropolitan centers lay—the nearest only forty miles distant by an air line, close to the waters of Puget Sound. Yet here, almost in sight of them, I was enjoying a quietude known only to the haunts of nature. More than seven thousand feet above me towered the majestic dome of the second highest pinnacle in the United States, reserving observation to the north until its summit should be reached, while far toward the east and the south extended range upon range of mountain peaks, like an army of giants gathered around their chief. Here and there among them appeared the sub-chiefs, ...
— The Beauties of the State of Washington - A Book for Tourists • Harry F. Giles
... of an experiment, and for the clearer illustrating this matter—let us for a moment take off one of these two curious ornaments (I care not which) from the point or pinnacle of the chair it now stands on—nay, don't laugh at it,—but did you ever see, in the whole course of your lives, such a ridiculous business as this has made of it?—Why, 'tis as miserable a sight as a sow with one ear; and ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... pinnacle or tree or tower, While earth endures, Will fall on my mound and within the hour Steal on to yours; One robin never haunt ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... came to be made. How a long, long time ago, a big man, "all a same debil-debil," took out with his mighty fingers a plug of rock and put it "on top alonga Hinchinbrook." Now the particular decapitated pinnacle of Hinchinbrook is 20 miles away, and out of all proportion. But these facts do not affect the legitimacy of the legend. There is the hole, and there on the top of the far-away mountain the prodigious plug demonstrative evidence too obvious to be set aside on ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... dirty, unseaworthy little tub, which ran as far north sometimes as the Aleutians; and he had immediately gained official recognition by sticking to his instruments for sixty-eight hours—recorded at fifteen-minute intervals in his log—when the whaler Goblin encountered a submerged pinnacle rock in the Island Passage and flashed ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... loftiness of those mightier summits. He himself was high, and so he could judge the greater height of Seven Sachs; and it was only through the greater height of Seven Sachs that he could form an adequate idea of the pinnacle occupied by the unique Archibald Florance. Honestly, he had never dreamt that there existed a man who habitually smoked twelve-shilling cigars—and yet he reckoned to know a thing ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... people who sat or wandered about in the coolness of the night, they passed through the gates of the kraal unheeded, and walking quickly across the wide stretch of tableland reached the eastern edge of the cliff. Now upon the very verge of this cliff rose a sharp pinnacle of rock fifty feet or more into the air, and upon the top of this pinnacle was that stone shaped like a great chair, in which Suzanne sat day by day, poised like an eagle over the dizzy gulf of space, for the slopes ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... settling for the night presently." She made no sound. Round them all was peace and declining sunshine. Near by, the topmost pinnacle of Malata, resembling the top of a buried tower, rose a rock, weather-worn, grey, weary of watching the monotonous centuries of the Pacific. Renouard leaned his shoulders against it. Felicia Moorsom ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... is the great moment, the pinnacle of all happiness as I have dreamed of it! Now, tell me yourself: Am I not to be envied? Whatever I wish is fulfilled. And, do you know, last year in Heligoland I had a curious experience. We capsised by the dunes and I fell into the water. As I lost consciousness, ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... for me to go away! I did not grieve for Dubetchnya. I grieved for my love which, too, was threatened with its autumn. What an immense happiness it is to love and be loved, and how awful to feel that one is slipping down from that high pinnacle! ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... him to go on long snowshoe hikes. He reached far up the ridges that lifted one after another behind his timber. Once he gained a pinnacle, a solitary outstanding hummock of snow-bound granite rising above all the rest, rising above all the surrounding forest. From this summit he gained an eagle's view. The long curve of Toba Inlet wound like a strip of jade away down to where ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... events placing in my hands, precisely at the moment of their greatest value, clear opportunities that none but a hopeless blunderer could have disregarded. What men call Chance operated in my favour as though with superb calculation, lifting me to this miniature pinnacle I could never have reached by my ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... mind with the learning of the world, winning when others would have failed, profiting by experience allotted to him through fate's kindly offices and association with the healthy, true men. What has been the result? He has risen to the very pinnacle of human endeavor ... no honors await him. He has lived consistently and cleanly and he can look any man in the eye and say honestly: "I have lived as ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... profuse, or that neglect of his private interests which almost inevitably accompanies the absorbing duties of public life, his affairs were always somewhat confused, and Lady Montfort, who wished to place him on a pinnacle, had resolved that he should marry an heiress. After long observation and careful inquiry and prolonged reflection, the lady she had fixed upon was Miss Neuchatel; and she it was who had made Lord Roehampton cross the room and ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... her wish he had not cut himself off from her so completely. When on their last afternoon together he had pleaded so earnestly for her love Grace had been proudly triumphant in the successful accomplishment of what she believed to be her life work. From the lofty pinnacle of achievement she had looked down on Tom pityingly, but with no adequate realization of what she had caused ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... might prove a clew to my whereabouts and had witnessed my short but decisive battle with him. This encounter, together with my set-to with the Martian warrior on the previous day and my feats of jumping placed me upon a high pinnacle in their regard. Evidently devoid of all the finer sentiments of friendship, love, or affection, these people fairly worship physical prowess and bravery, and nothing is too good for the object of their adoration as long as he ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... that the man in the moon smiled at what he saw on the river that night. Seeing the laden board, the pyramid of sandwiches rearing its luscious pinnacle toward heaven, he seemed to wink at Pee-wee—with what purport who shall say? Sufficient that our ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... A whiff of peril, pitfalls to be leaped, some days or weeks of dire uncertainty, men to be won, and factions placated, any or all of these might have appeased the jealous gods. But this instant success would shock Olympus. It cried for contrast by its very flight to the pinnacle. ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... Anne," said he, "it is my right. It is Jean's right. You would love to put him on top of the pinnacle of ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... what old Roman ever dreamed of giving his daughter to the son of a Greek bondsman! Had he done so, what would have become of the name of a Roman citizen? And was it not his duty to fortify and maintain that higher, smaller, more precious pinnacle of rank on which Fortune had placed him ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... fatigued. I had turned the bend of the wooded gorge, and, looking up the river, saw what resembled a dyke of basalt stretching sheer across the stream, with a ruined castle on a bare and apparently inaccessible pinnacle, another ruin on the opposite end of the ridge, and, between the two, a little church on the brink of a precipice. Houses were clustered at the foot of the rocks ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... should have closed, as the stories in books so often do, with the hero and heroine worked up to some wonderful pitch of self-sacrifice and drama. They so seldom tell of the flatness of the afterwards. The impossibility of retaining a balance on this high pinnacle of moral valor, where circumstance, which is a commonplace and often material thing, decrees that the lights shall not be turned out with the ring-down of ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... too, the battlements of the castle had been raised on all four sides. At each corner was a lighted tower, and in the middle of the roof a taller pinnacle had been raised with a red, white, and blue star, in colored electric bulbs, ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... delight, that he heard, as one who hears not, a wagon go rattling along the road, and the shouting, whistling and singing of boys. It was past noon before he recalled the object with which he had left home that morning. He sat upon the very pinnacle of achievement—that is to say, he sat upon the very highest point in the orchard, his head up, his spirits up, with such a decidedly upward tendency that it was hard for him to make up his mind to descend to the plane of common ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various
... the woman was there as well as the artist. Who was she? Would she realize the sanctity of her mission, and keep herself fit and pure for its accomplishment? Had she character to sustain her, and imagination to idealize her calling? She was on a pinnacle now, but it was a pinnacle as dangerous as the feet of woman could press. If only she could keep herself unspotted from the world, which would do its best to drag her down, they all felt, painter, poet, and musician, that her influence with the age might rank with their own. But was it ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a crime for Aquilina's sake. His inmost nature had suddenly asserted itself. His brain had expanded, his senses had developed. His thoughts comprehended the whole world; he saw all the things of earth as if he had been raised to some high pinnacle above the world. ...
— Melmoth Reconciled • Honore de Balzac
... we saw across the stream the city of Quebec, a hanging town of fairyland, with pinnacle and spire, bastion and citadel delicate against the quick sky. A city of romance and charm, to which we hurried by the very humdrum route of the steam ferry that crosses to it from the ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... and speaking of business, he avoided thinking of the unexpected resistance. How was this! She—the woman for whom the highest favor, the pinnacle of happiness had been the possibility of remaining at the head of his house, in the brilliancy of wealth and general respect, dared—had the shamelessness to oppose his will! He felt such contempt that, in thought, he threw that woman on the ground to trample her; in spite of this, ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... precious inheritance to the world of art. All his powers were swept impetuously into one current, the poetic side of art, and alike as critic and composer he stands in a relation to the music of the pianoforte which places him on a pinnacle only less lofty ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... honour, so much the greater the favour of God. You entered this service with an upright mind and pure intent; and here, therefore, can you most safely remain, instead of casting yourself down from the pinnacle of the temple, which, you know, the Son of God refused to do. Remember His words, 'Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.' Be not tempted yourself, by pride of heart, to compare your lot with that of ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... and Mary succeeded to the throne. Mary was now at the very height of European grandeur, for she was queen of two powerful countries, and heir presumptive of a third. She stood unluckily on too high a pinnacle to be able to retain her position long. Francis died after a short reign of seventeen months, and the heir to the throne Charles IX., being a minor, Catharine de Medicis became once more virtually queen of France; and from her Mary ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... narrow limits which are set by law and custom to the actions of private individuals. We draw back just as we seem to have reached the goal, we let him fall whom we had raised, and lift him, whom we had stricken to the earth, to the pinnacle of glory, in short we profess—and for thousands of years have professed—the doctrine that every path is a right one that leads to the great end of securing to the priesthood the supreme power in the land. Rameses, saved by a miracle, vowing temples to the Gods, will for ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... devil (represented as an old man) tempts Christ to turn stones into bread. Above on left the two are seen on the high mountain: on right they stand on the pinnacle of the temple. ...
— A Short Account of King's College Chapel • Walter Poole Littlechild
... to whom it was given to afflict the earth. They believed the devil could carry persons hundreds of miles, in a few seconds, through the air. They believed this, because they knew that Christ had been carried by the devil in the same manner and placed on a pinnacle of the temple. "The prophet Habakkuk had been transported by a spirit from Judea to Babylon; and Philip, the evangelist, had been the object of a similar miracle; and in the same way Saint Paul had been carried in the body ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... complimentary about the garden party, the freshness and unique manner in which it was arranged, and the pretty serving. She heard it again at the Dyckmans', and is now far up the pinnacle ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... only my hereditary enemy; I was high in the favor of the Emperor; I was in a fair way to marry the youngest, the most lovely and the richest widow in Rome. In the twinkling of an eye I was cast down from the pinnacle of good fortune into an abyss of adversity. And upon what did my catastrophe hinge? Upon the whims of a friend and upon one oversight of my secretary. I should have had no story to tell, I should have been a man continuously happy, affluent and at ease, ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... to life by fairy fans. His last thoughts had been of his vast wealth, his uninterrupted prosperity, and his great power. He was king of kings, and the whole world trembled at his feet. He had attained to the highest pinnacle of glory. Earth had yielded to him its most costly treasures, and had nothing more that she could give. Men had profusely showered upon him their highest flatteries, and ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... the course of which its creed and liturgy were formed. The evidence of these transactions lies wide; much of it is still in the British Museum; and it may be possible to produce something sufficient to sustain Falkland on the pinnacle on which Mr. Arnold and the Dean of Westminster have placed him. But we cannot help surmising that he has in some measure undergone the process which, in an age prolific in historic fancies as well as pre-eminent in historic research, has been undergone by almost ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... ridge like a bastion upon the right side of the terrible khor up which the camels were winding. At one point it rose into a small pinnacle. On this pinnacle stood a solitary, motionless figure clad entirely in black, save for a brilliant dash of scarlet upon his head. There could not surely be two such short, sturdy figures or such large, colourless faces in the Libyan ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... last on a buttelike pinnacle. The lights of the ship were close over us. And there were moving lights up there, tiny moving spots on the adjacent rocks. The brigands had come out, prowling about ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... lips that trembled, and voice that would not obey her will, but broke and quavered, and failed at times, like a strange instrument one has not learned how to master,—Miss Vesta told her story, of the dark stranger who had come three days before and taken her up to a pinnacle, and showed her ...
— Melody - The Story of a Child • Laura E. Richards
... own conscience. And yet, O wise judgments of God! hard and incessantly though he toiled to establish our fortunes, scarcely had he left empty that supreme seat which we occupy to-day, when we were cast down from the pinnacle whereon we had climbed, abandoned to the fury of the rabble and the vindictive hatred of the Roman barons, who chose to feel offended by our goodness to their enemies. Thus, not only, we tell you, Caesar, not only did we plunge headlong from the summit of our grandeur, losing ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... forced to regard it in sections. Far to the north east lies Virginia, from which the long waving line of the Blue Ridge comes, and passes directly under the Black, making a point of junction, near which it towers into the steep Pinnacle and stately Graybeard—so called from the white beard which it wears when a frozen cloud has iced its rhododendrons. From our greater eminence we overlook the Blue Ridge entirely, and see the country below spreading into azure distance, ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... then carefully put his briarwood away and began to uncoil a lariat from around his middle. As he loosened the braided rawhide from his waist his gaze was roaming over the opposite rocks. Presently he fixed his attention upon a pinnacle which reared its cube-like form above the top of the opposite side of the chasm; the latter was of itself much higher than the brink upon which we stood. Swinging the loop around his head he sent it whistling across the chasm, where it settled and encircled ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... succeed in all your aims, you might realise every ambition of your life, and yet I tell you it is Heaven's own truth, that if you took Golden Star to sit beside you on the throne of the Incas as your wife and queen, you would place her upon a pinnacle of infamy which men would spit upon and women turn their backs on. The reward of all your labours, the price of all your treasures, no matter how great they might be, would be nothing but a curse that would fall heavily on you, but a thousand times more heavily on the woman whom you have ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... of Cornisk, and drove us to the lee of rocks and the shelter of our ponchos, to watch the mists drifting, to listen to the swell and lull of the wind and the patter of the cold rain. There were glimpses now and then of the inner Cuchullins, a fragment of ragged sky line, the sudden jab of a black pinnacle through the mist, the open mouth of a ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... like land now, any more than other banks do. However, I'll see my principal about it. But, George, I can't possibly get up to the Castle at eleven. I have got a churchwardens' meeting at a quarter to, about that west pinnacle, you know. It is in a most dangerous condition, and by-the-way, before you go I should like to have your opinion, as a practical man, as to the best way to deal with it. To rebuild it would cost a hundred and twenty pounds, and that is more than we see our way to at present, though ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... said suddenly, lighting another match, 'I want to see you again—soon.' He paused, astonished at his own abruptness, and an awkward smile expanded until it crinkled the very pinnacle of his nose. ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... in those days the stopping-place of the majority of the famous men and women visiting New York, represented to the young boy who came to see these celebrities the very pinnacle of opulence. Often while waiting to be received by some dignitary, he wondered how one could acquire enough means to live at a place of such luxury. The main dining-room, to the boy's mind, was an object of special interest. ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... Above this level the construction of the clock tower is of white-painted wood, one story with Corinthian pilasters and another balustraded, rising in four-sided diminutions to the octagonal, open arched belfry and superstructure, above which is a tapering pinnacle and gilt weathervane. It is a tower of grace, dignity and repose, a tower suggestive of ecclesiastical work, perhaps, yet withal in complete harmony with its situation and purpose. In the base of this ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... line to his mother that very night and tell her all about it, and put E. S. after his name. Eagle Scout. The bicycle his father had promised him when he should attain that pinnacle of scout glory, he would now demand. That would be where dad ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... more than adventure. There was a significance in the extraordinary encounter with Keeko that dimmed to the commonplace every thrill he had ever experienced in the past. It had lifted him at a bound to that pinnacle of manhood, which until the moment when woman presents herself upon youth's stage of life can never ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... imagery, thicker and quainter than ever filled the depth of midsummer dream; those vaulted gates, trellised with close leaves; those window labyrinths of twisted tracery and starry light; those misty masses of multitudinous pinnacle and diademed tower; the only witnesses, perhaps, that remain to us of the faith and fear of nations. All else for which the builders sacrificed has passed away. * * * But of them and their life and their toil upon earth, one reward, one evidence, is left to us in those great heaps of deep-wrought ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... last over, Madame found herself back again in her dear Paris, raised to a higher pinnacle of Queendom than ever, basking in the splendours of the husband whose glories she so gladly shared, though she held his love in such light esteem. But for him, at least, there was no time for dallying. Within a few months he was waving farewell to her again, ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... to perfection, and he now laid his discovery before mankind; but their lukewarmness quickly convinced him that, although the greatest inventor of his age, he and his family would soon perish with hunger unless his genius continually displayed itself in some new forms. Hurled from the pinnacle of hope, oppressed by heavy debts,—which he had incurred by generosity and extravagant living, and by his becoming security for false friends,—he now surveyed the world through a gloomy medium. His domestic ties, when he no longer knew how to support his family, became an intolerable ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... Jose, "this paper says that from here one should be able to see, close at hand, a large pinnacle of rock in the shape of a pyramid. It is from that pinnacle that the bearings of the treasure- cave are to be taken and—and I can see no such rock ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... indeed, but P. Crandall Crane! and I'm proud to say that I'm the wife of that patriotic man. True, he could not go to war himself, on account of me and the children; but, I dare say, if he could have prevailed upon me to give him up to the cause of liberty, he'd have clomb rapidly to the highest pinnacle of earthly glory, and to-day I'd have been Mrs. General Crane, a leader of the brilliant society at Washington, with my name in the papers as 'the wife of our distinguished General Crane,' or the 'stately and dignified lady of the brave ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... company had the intensity of feeling which filled my breast. Knowing that every downward step was leading me rapidly toward a determination of my fate, I could scarcely control my emotions. Either I was soon to find my heart's life and be raised to the highest pinnacle of happiness, or I was to undergo a disappointment from which I might not recover. For if Mona was not here, where could I look for her? Could I ever regain my hopeful spirits if I should lose her now? I tried to crowd out ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... a kindlier road, Hazel would have found that nook in the Klappan Range a pleasant enough place. She could not deny its beauty. It snuggled in the heart of a wild tangle of hills all turreted and battlemented with ledge and pinnacle of rock, from which ran huge escarpments clothed with spruce and pine, scarred and gashed on every hand with slides and deep-worn watercourses, down which tumultuous streams rioted their foamy way. And nestled ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... inferred that these animals are very abundant. The only bird seen was a solitary species of loxia, but upon a steep ledge of rocks I observed one of those nests of which frequent mention has been already made: I examined and found it built upon the pinnacle of some large rocks, very strongly constructed of long sticks; it was about five feet high and exceeded four feet in diameter, with a very slight cavity above; and seemed to have been very recently inhabited. The rocks that formed its base were ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... When he heard of the threat, in order to prevent its execution he built this strange monument, and instead of being buried beneath it he was said to have been buried near the summit; but the woman was not to be out-done, for after the tutor's funeral she climbed to the top of the pinnacle and kept ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... about, and, very quickly it seemed, the sun came up over the horizon, for it was after four o'clock, and I must have stood on that little pinnacle of sand longer than I knew, afraid to come down at close quarters with the willows. I returned quietly, creepily, to the tent, first taking another exhaustive look round and—yes, I confess it—making a few measurements. ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... vicinity. Cod are sometimes abundant here all winter; haddock are found here from December 1 to February and are more abundant than the cod. Hake are plentiful on this ground and in 60 fathoms on the mud off the edge SE. of this ground during the summer season. Marks: The high pinnacle on the eastern end of Wooden Ball, showing just out by Matinicus Rock, SW. by S. from ...
— Fishing Grounds of the Gulf of Maine • Walter H. Rich
... jackals had already polished white. Bawr, the Chief, came last, seeing to it that there were no laggards; and as the tail of the straggling procession left the pass he climbed swiftly to the nearest pinnacle of rock to take observation. He marked Grom and the girl, the tribe strung out dejectedly behind them, winding off to the left along the foot of the bare hills; and a pang of grief, for an instant, ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... fellows!" came the far cry of Innocent Smith, apparently from some remote pinnacle. "Come up here; and bring some of my things to eat and drink. It's just the spot for ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... at those days when the doctrine of evolution had reached its pinnacle, one sees how the human mind, by its habit of continual crystallisations, had destroyed all the meaning of the process. Witness, for example, that sterile phenomenon, the pagoda of 'caste'! Like this Chinese building, so was Society then formed. Men were living ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... that she had cut a poor figure. She felt humiliated, hurt, helpless. Sir Francis Forcus had been for her her ideal of what a man and a gentleman should be. He had helped her in the day of her necessity, and she had set him at once as her hero on a pinnacle, and had looked up to him and worshipped him secretly, and from afar. She knew that she had sat before him this afternoon shamed, and helpless, and childish; filled with as much sorrow for him who was so clumsily wounding her as for herself. She had ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... be—nay, ought to be— if the universe were of Divine making. And now it burst upon him, an apocalypse of giant glories, an empire of absolute being, independent and careless of human presence, affirming itself eternally to its own immeasurable solitudes. "I have reached the top and pinnacle of life," cried the poet; "this is the world wherein all things are made!" And now, indeed, save for the fairy bird, he trod his path alone. Now and then great clouds of mist swept down from the heights, or rose from the icy gorges, and wrapped him in their soft gray folds, hiding from ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... adventure placed him securely on the pinnacle of local fame. Where, in all the world, was there another Grammar School boy who had been through as much, or shown as ...
— The Grammar School Boys of Gridley - or, Dick & Co. Start Things Moving • H. Irving Hancock
... murmur of a rising tide; and the earth seemed to sink from beneath him. His feet no longer touched the ground; a sense of supernatural buoyancy pervaded every fibre of his body: he felt himself floating in obscurity; then sinking softly, slowly, like a feather dropped from the pinnacle of a temple. Was this death? Nay, for all suddenly, as transported by the Sixth Supernatural Power, he stood again in light,—a perfumed, sleepy light, vapory, beautiful,—that bathed the marvellous streets of some Indian city. Now the ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... friends there, and to those whom he wished to make his friends. The result of this munificence, and of the renown which his victories in Spain had procured for him, was to raise him to the highest pinnacle of influence and honor. The Carthaginians chose him ...
— Hannibal - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... injustice. It is sought after not for itself, but for the sake of vanity. Envy often avails itself of it as a fit instrument subservient to its own purposes. Soon, in fact, the works of Osmyn only were spoken of, and after languishing a long time unnoticed, he saw himself at once raised to the pinnacle, without having passed the steps which lead from misery to fortune, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 495, June 25, 1831 • Various
... gazed around with bewildered eye. There was neither chapel nor convent, nor humble hermitage, to be seen; nothing but a moss-grown stone pinnacle, rising out of the centre of the area, surmounted by a cross. The greensward around appeared to have been sacred from the tread of man or beast, and the surrounding trees bent toward the cross, as ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... drag from heaven to earth Zeus, counsellor supreme, not though ye toiled sore. But once I likewise were minded to draw with all my heart, then should I draw you up with very earth and sea withal. Thereafter would I bind the rope about a pinnacle of Olympus, and so should all those things be hung in air. By so much am I ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... reports that Luther had frequently predicted that after his death his doctrine would wane and decline because of false brethren, fanatics, and sectarians, and that the truth, which in 1530 had been placed on a pinnacle at Augsburg, would descend into the valley, since the Word of God had seldom flourished more than forty years in one place. (Richard, Conf. Hist., 311.) Stephanus Tucher, a faithful Lutheran preacher of Magdeburg, wrote in 1549: "Doctor Martin Luther, of sainted memory, has frequently repeated ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... nor is the chapel, but, nevertheless, my soul expanded as in a basilica, soared up as under some vast dome, and touched the pinnacle of high Heaven where blazes the Sign of Signs in the azure of Paradise, ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... of the world from Homer to Humboldt, Shakspere never had an equal or superior, standing on the pinnacle of the pyramid of human renown, and lifting his mammoth mental form above the other philosophers of the earth as Mount St. Elias soars above its ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... surface of the earth, drawn as it were to a single apex, without any neighbouring mountain for the senses and imagination to rest upon, and recover from their astonishment in their way down to the world—and this point, or pinnacle raised on the brink of a bottomless gulf, often discharging rivers of fire, and throwing out burning rocks, with a noise that shakes the whole island. Add to this, the unbounded extent of the prospect, comprehending the greatest diversity, and the most beautiful scenery ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 265, July 21, 1827 • Various
... comparison with you, he is but as a pinnacle to a buttress. I acknowledge his weaknesses, and cannot wink upon his crimes: but that which you visit as the heaviest of them perhaps was not so, although the most disastrous to both parties—the bearing ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... moment take into his hand all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them; they saw his life in danger; they saw him at last expire in agonies, though they believed that, had he so willed it, no danger could harm him, and that had he thrown himself from the topmost pinnacle of the temple he would have been softly received in the arms of ministering angels. Witnessing his sufferings, and convinced by the miracles they saw him work that they were voluntarily endured, men's hearts were touched, and pity for weakness blending strangely with wondering admiration ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... during the previous century, in the course of which its creed and liturgy were formed. The evidence of these transactions lies wide; much of it is still in the British Museum; and it may be possible to produce something sufficient to sustain Falkland on the pinnacle on which Mr. Arnold and the Dean of Westminster have placed him. But we cannot help surmising that he has in some measure undergone the process which, in an age prolific in historic fancies as well as pre-eminent in historic research, has been ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... present situation, and that of my dear Prince too, can leave no room to suspect me of flattery) that as I have been his companion in the lowest degree of adversity that ever prince was reduced to, so I have beheld him too, as it were, on the highest pinnacle of glory, amidst the continual applauses, and I had almost said, adorations, of the most brilliant Court in Europe; yet he was always the same, ever affable and courteous, giving constant proofs of his great humanity, and of his love for his friends and his country. ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... march, And woods were brightened, and soft gales Went forth to kiss the sun-clad vales. The clouds were far beneath me; bathed in light, They gathered mid-way round the wooded height, And, in their fading glory, shone Like hosts in battle overthrown. As many a pinnacle, with shifting glance. Through the gray mist thrust up its shattered lance, And rocking on the cliff was left The dark pine blasted, bare, and cleft. The veil of cloud was lifted, and below Glowed the rich valley, and the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... subtly states a new suggestion. If Association is this glorious truth to renovate the nations, then glorious should be its announcement; loud, wide, startling, should be its call; sudden, as from the skies, its appearing. Here on the pinnacle of the temple of peace (or of Salem), shalt thou stand, and cast thyself down among the multitudes like an angel. Some splendid boldness should introduce thy reign. Take no heed of care and caution; count not the ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... that here the Queen of the Adriatic was indeed resuscitated and the Venetian Republic born to a sublimer destiny. Surely the same indomitable spirit, the same high courage, that had reared that wondrous city out of the sea, was here before me, piling story upon story, pinnacle beyond pinnacle, till our old-world hearts sickened and our unaccustomed brains ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... felt far too excited to sit down. From the depths of poverty she suddenly felt herself raised almost to a pinnacle of ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... for day arrived. The Duke of Altamont's proposals were made in due form, and in due form accepted. Lady Juliana seemed now touching the pinnacle of earthly joy; for, next to being greatly married herself, her happiness centred in seeing her daughter at the head of a splendid establishment. Again visions of bliss hovered around her, and "Peers and ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... the Hirondelle had left Yarmouth, on the Norfolk coast, where she had been lying for two or three days, the day before she was lost, and was then intending to cruise round the coast of Great Britain. The baron was immediately raised from the depths of despair to the highest pinnacle of hope on hearing this, for he felt sure Leon had gone ashore at Yarmouth to place the baby with some Englishwoman, and had remained there some days on purpose. Confiding his new hope to Pere Yvon, he at once decided to start that night for England by Dover ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 • Various
... here! and oh, grip tight!" and she knelt and crawled on hands and knees round the base of the nearest pinnacle. ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... took my place at the tiller, the sheet in my hand, and headed across channel. The skiff heeled over and plunged into it madly. The spray began to fly. I was at the pinnacle of exaltation. I sang "Blow the Man Down" as I sailed. I was no boy of fourteen, living the mediocre ways of the sleepy town called Oakland. I was a man, a god, and the very elements rendered me allegiance as I bitted them to ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... these opportunities it would seem that Michelangelo was a most fortunate person. Nor did he lack proper appreciation; the Pieta placed him at once on a pinnacle of fame, and the David ...
— Michelangelo - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Master, With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... of the many topsy-turvy things in topsy-turvy China that this prosaic people is so addicted to picturesque and significant terms. I found the names of some of the monasteries quite as interesting as anything else about them. From the "Pinnacle of Contemplation" you ascend to the "Monastery of the White Clouds," stopping to rest in the "Hall of the Tranquil Heart," and passing the "Gate to Heaven" you enter the ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... carried to and from the threshing fields, piled on donkeys that one meets everywhere at this season, with their black, unbridled heads just visible beneath a pinnacle ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... must return to our story. The triumph was complete. The timid and obscure girl found herself on the highest pinnacle of fame. Great men, on whom she had gazed at a distance with humble reverence, addressed her with admiration, tempered by the tenderness due to her sex and age. Burke, Windham, Gibbon, Reynolds, Sheridan, were among her most ardent eulogists. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... time past been displaying, in a series of complicated and difficult operations in the Mediterranean, those splendid qualities which had already won for him unusual honours and fame, and which were about to raise him to that proud pinnacle which he ultimately attained as England's greatest naval hero. His address and success in matters of diplomacy had filled his superiors and the Government with sentiments of respect; his moral courage in risking reputation and position, with unflinching ...
— The Battle and the Breeze • R.M. Ballantyne
... on the watery waste, In the womb of the ocean it bellow'd alone, The knights said their Aves in terrified haste, And crowded each pinnacle, jetty, and stone: "The high-hearted stripling is whelm'd in the tide, Ah! wail him," was echoed ...
— The Song of Deirdra, King Byrge and his Brothers - and Other Ballads • Anonymous
... of the thirteenth century we are confronted by the anomaly of a church grossly corrupt but widely obeyed. She is nearing the pinnacle of her power and the zenith of her glory, although the parochial clergy have sunk into vice and incapacity, and the monks, as a class, are lazy, ignorant and notoriously corrupt. Two things, especially, command the attention,—first, the immorality and laxity of the monks; and ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... kneel beside his burden on the hard floor of that cathedral. And tears of deep emotion came into my eyes, as I said to myself: "There is a soul worth more than all the material surroundings. That man will live after the last pinnacle has fallen, and not one stone of all that cathedral glory shall remain uncrumbled. He is now a Lazarus in rags and poverty and weariness, but immortal, and a son of the Lord God Almighty; and the prayer he now offers, though amid many superstitions, I believe God will hear; and ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... singularity of their entertainment. The Count, at length, rose from the table, and addressing himself to the company, said, "Gentlemen, I was willing to convince you how well I can rely upon the officers of my artillery; for I ordered them to fire during the time we continued at dinner, at the pinnacle of the tent, and they have executed my orders with ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... wonder of his love, rose to the surface. He knew what her singing meant to her, and, from their conversation together just now, how keen was her eagerness for the strict judgment of those who knew, how she loved that austere pinnacle of daylight. Here was an ideal opportunity; never yet, since she had won her place as a singer, had she sung in Germany, that Mecca of the musical artist, and in her case, the land from which she sprung. Had the scheme implied a postponement ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... Petrie, in his "Revolutions of Civilization," has demonstrated that civilization comes in waves, that races rise to a pinnacle of power and culture, and decline from that, and fall into decadence, from which they do not emerge until there has been a crossing of races, a fresh intermingling of cultures. He showed in ancient Egypt eight such periods, and after every decline ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... termination of the Council there was nothing left for Pius but to die. He stood upon a pinnacle which might well have made him nervous—lest haply the Solonian maxim, 'Call no man fortunate until his death,' should be verified in his person. During the two years of peace and retirement which he ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... gentle breezes stirred up to life by fairy fans. His last thoughts had been of his vast wealth, his uninterrupted prosperity, and his great power. He was king of kings, and the whole world trembled at his feet. He had attained to the highest pinnacle of glory. Earth had yielded to him its most costly treasures, and had nothing more that she could give. Men had profusely showered upon him their highest flatteries, and addressed ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... people and of their reaction was Horace Greeley. He was destined many times to make plain that he lived mainly in his sensibilities; that, in his kaleidoscopic vision, the pattern of the world could be red and yellow and green today, and orange and purple and blue tomorrow. To descend from a pinnacle of self-complacency into a desolating abyss of panic, was as easy for Greeley as it is—in the vulgar but pointed American phrase—to roll off a log. A few days after the election, Greeley had rolled off his log. He was wallowing in ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... of three hours until he be dead; and thereafter to be cut down by the hangman, his head, hands, and legs to be cut off, and distributed as follows—viz., his head to be affixed on an iron pin, and set on the pinnacle of the west gavel of the new prison of Edinburgh; one hand to be set on the port of Perth, the other on the port of Stirling; one leg and foot on the port of Aberdeen, the other on the port of Glasgow. If at his death penitent, and relaxed from excommunication, then the trunk ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... driven back by severe gales and contrary winds until it seemed as though the spirit of the new ocean had arisen in wrath, forbidding his further progress. He was even driven south of the strait to Cape Horn, where he landed and looked from the southernmost pinnacle of the cape to the mysterious southern sea, declaring triumphantly that he had been farther south than any man in the world and had placed his foot on the extreme of the new continent. Then all at once the weather changed and Drake sailed ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... Zal cast his noose on a pinnacle, And descended from those happy battlements, As the sun was rising redly above the mountains, And the bands of warriors were gathering in their ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... mademoiselle laid me forbade me to indulge in the luxury of evincing my gratitude. Gladly would I have escorted her back to her home—even if I could not make that home again what it had been, or restore her husband to the pinnacle from which I had dashed him—but I dared not do this. I was forced to content myself with less, and was about to offer to send one of my men with her, when a hurried knocking at the outer door arrested the words on ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... by modern geometers have deposed Euclid from his pinnacle of correctness. It was thought, until recent times, that, as Sir Henry Savile remarked in 1621, there were only two blemishes in Euclid, the theory of parallels and the theory of proportion. It is now known that these are almost the only points in which Euclid is free from ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... Epist. montes etiam et animalia transferri possunt: as the devil did Christ to the top of the pinnacle; and witches are often translated. See more in Strozzius Cicogna, lib. 3. cap. 4. omnif. mag. Per aera subducere et in sublime corpora ferre possunt, Biarmanus. Percussi dolent et uruntur in conspicuos cineres. Agrippa, lib. 3. cap. de ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... hollow and gorge, bringing out details as well as the main massive features of the architecture; while all the rocks, as if wild with life, throb and quiver and glow in the glorious sunburst, rejoicing. Every rock temple then becomes a temple of music; every spire and pinnacle an angel of light and song, ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... it illustrated with engravings, wrought with enormous power to spread and deepen it. In every peasant's cottage some one could spell out the story of the devil bearing Christ through the air and placing him upon the pinnacle of the Temple—of the woman with seven devils—of the devils cast into the swine. Every peasant's child could be made to understand the quaint pictures in the family Bible or the catechism which illustrated ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... which Cromwell had helped to form, but which in turn had made Cromwell possible, the servile courtiers of the false king unearthed the Protector's body, three years buried, hanged it on a gallows in Tyburn for a day, beheaded it, and threw the trunk into a pit. His head they mockingly set on a pinnacle of the Parliament Hall, whence for some weeks it looked over the city which he had served. Then, during a great storm, it came clattering down, only a poor dried skull, and disappeared no one knows where. But when you stand opposite the great Parliament buildings ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... and quiver. His words were often unintelligible to her, until Miss Merriman, silent-footed and efficient, translated them into action, as, before the wide eyes of the mountain child, there began to unfold the swift drama of modern surgical science at its pinnacle, ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... contending swarm with something of the philosophic composure suitable to a survivor of Pelasgic and Etruscan revolutions. These grey ramparts are in great part still visible, and form the chief attraction of Cortona. It is perched on the very pinnacle of a mountain, and I wound and doubled interminably over the face of the great hill, while the jumbled roofs and towers of the arrogant little city still seemed nearer to the sky than to the railway-station. ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... power on earth which can longer postpone my fate.' 'Alas, my master!' said the baron, 'and must I then lose the benefit of your direction, just when your guiding hand becomes necessary to place me on the very pinnacle of the temple of wisdom?' 'Be not discouraged, my son,' answered the sage; 'I will bequeath the task of perfecting you in your studies to my daughter, who will come hither on purpose. But remember, if you value the permanence of your family, look not upon her ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XIII, No. 370, Saturday, May 16, 1829. • Various
... inability to recollect that Mallinson had ever considered literature as a means to his end. Long sojourning in the wilderness, moreover, had given Drake an exaggerated reverence for the printed page. He was inclined to set Mallinson on a pinnacle, and scourge himself at the foot of it for his earlier distrust of him. He opened the book again at the beginning, and let the pages slip across beneath his thumb from cover to cover; 413 was marked ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... be lived, and when death was to be met, he met it like a man. It was among such men and surroundings that I spent so many years of my life and there I met men some of whom are famous now, while others never lived long enough to reach the pinnacle of fame, but their memory is held no less sacred by the men who knew ...
— The Life and Adventures of Nat Love - Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" • Nat Love
... Rachael Closs was at the pinnacle of her hopes. She could scarcely understand that this lofty position had not always belonged to her. To dispense almost regal hospitality came to her as the most natural thing on earth, and as each day brought some noble guest to the castle, she received them with more finished grace and ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... finally,—last born of creation,—man appears upon the scene, in his several races and varieties; the sublime arch of animal being at length receives its keystone; and the finished work stands up complete, from foundation to pinnacle, at once an admirably adjusted occupant of space, and a wonderful monument of Divine arrangement and classification, as it exists in time. Save at two special points, to which I shall afterwards advert, the ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... the vizier Khacan's distraction at this account of the insolence of his son. "Ah!" cried he, beating his breast, and tearing his beard, "miserable son! unworthy of life! hast thou at last thrown thy father from the highest pinnacle of happiness into a misfortune that must inevitably involve thee also in his ruin? neither will the king be satisfied with thy blood or mine, to avenge the affront offered to his ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 2 • Anon.
... a power for good or evil; it may be likened to a magazine, holding within its throbbing sides an explosive deposit of untold energy and puissance, capable of all things within the range of the human. While it may lift man to the very pinnacle of goodness, it may also sink him to the lowest level of infamy. Only, in one case, it is spiritualized love, in the other, it is carnal; in one case it obeys the spirit, in the other, the flesh; in one case ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... both boys accepted gladly, and during the trip there were many long discussions between the three as to the future of the Circus Boys. They had worked hard during the season and had won new laurels on the tanbark. But they had not yet reached the pinnacle of their success in the canvas-covered arena, though each had saved, as the result of his season's ...
— The Circus Boys Across The Continent • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... The few must live their lives out to the full in order that all others may live their lives completely; for the temple of humanity has not only the broad floor, but the Cross glittering above the pinnacle. ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... comfortable, too indulgent, many, perhaps, too selfish. And the stern hand of fate has scourged us to an elevation where we can see the great everlasting things that matter for a nation; the great peaks of honour we had forgotten—duty and patriotism clad in glittering white: the great pinnacle of sacrifice pointing like a rugged finger to Heaven. We shall descend into the valleys again, but as long as the men and women of this generation last they will carry in their hearts the image of ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... as of old at the city gates, the fatuity of human aspirations may be studied advantageously. Soldiers were there, at Victoria, hundreds of them, lined up on a distant platform, and they symbolised the spirit of an age which exalts Mechanism to the pinnacle of a deity and which offers itself as a sacrifice upon his ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... in his heart, determination in his eye, and a cold bite in his pocket. He went from hill to hill, from mountain to mountain; always ascending, satisfied that each height was the last, and that he had but to step from the next pinnacle to the throne of his ambition. Alas! the peak was as far away as ever, even at the close of the second day; so famished, foot-frozen and well-nigh in extremity, he dragged his weary bones back to camp, defeated. That peak bears his name to this day, and probably he deserves ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... of European history, and with the broad level of obscurity stretching over the ages at its feet, there rises one shining pinnacle. Considered as man or sovereign, Charlemagne is one of the most impressive figures in history. His seven feet of stature clad in shining steel, his masterful grasp of the forces of his time, his splendid intelligence, instinct even then with the modern ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... would never in the world find Cowbell "Holler" alone, so I will tell you how to get there. You come over the Big Hill pike until you reach West Pinnacle. It was from the peak of West Pinnacle that Daniel Boone first looked out over the blue grass region of Kentucky. You follow the pike around the base of the Pinnacle, and there you are, right in the heart of Cowbell ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... each human entity to become a live personality. They will enable you to live fully, joyously. They will help you to feel, enjoy, suffer, every moment of each day. It is only when you are thus thrilled with the eternal force of life that you reach the highest pinnacle of attainable capacities and powers. Hidden forces, sometimes marvelous and mysterious, lie within nearly every human soul. Develop, expand and bring out these latent powers. Make your body splendid, your mind supreme; for then you become your real self, you possess all your attainable powers. ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... look of the old guardsman, as he stood perched upon the high pinnacle of rock, was again too much for the muleteers; and one and all of them gave utterance to fresh peals of laughter. His young masters were too much concerned about their faithful Pouchskin to give way to mirth; but on ascertaining that he had only received a few insignificant ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... Marie Antoinette had now reached the pinnacle of human greatness, as sovereigns of one of the noblest empires in the world. Yet the first feelings which their elevation had excited in both, and especially in the queen, were rather those of dismay and ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... child he had been brought here to church, and as he stood in the choir with the obsequient verger at his elbow he recollected how he had got through the minutes of a long sermon,—a sermon that had seemed to be very long,—in planning the way in which, if left to himself, he would climb to the pinnacle which culminated over the bishop's seat, and thence make his way along the capitals and vantages of stonework, till he would ascend into the triforium and thus become lord and master of the old building. How much smaller his ambitions ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... observe at the Lotus Club the same afternoon that it was a favourite amusement of his. Now, however, for a while he objected to playing. He was a poor man, he said, and the rest were all rich; why should he throw away the value of a dozen golden sonnets just to add one more pinnacle to the gilded roofs of a millionaire's palace? Besides, he was half-way through with an ode he was inditing to Republican simplicity. The pristine austerity of a democratic senatorial cottage had naturally inspired him with memories of Dentatus, the Fabii, Camillus. ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... outwardly seemed trivial enough, but already his keen and calculating mind had seen various side issues which might tend to place him—Robespierre—on a yet higher and more unassailable pinnacle. ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... flood of golden radiance to pour out like the steady flowing of a broad stream. The kneeling woman's figure remained plainly discernible, but seemed to be gradually melting into the light which surrounded it. And then— something—I know not what—shook me down from the pinnacle of vision,—hardly aware of my own action, I withdrew my hand from my companion's, and saw—just the solemn grandeur of Loch Coruisk, with a deep amber glow streaming over the summit of the mountains, flung upward by the setting sun! Nothing more!—I heaved ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... of these last words. You cannot look at the canopy work or the pinnacle work of this cathedral without seeing that they do not merely suggest buds and leaves, but that the buds and leaves are there carven before your eyes. I myself cannot look at the tabernacle work of our stalls without being reminded of the young pine forests which clothe the Hampshire moors. But ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... stood at what seemed the very pinnacle of his power Destiny once more marked him for its own. He had scarcely announced his Cabinet when the world was electrified by the news of the German peace proposal. By his own action Lloyd George had placed himself at the head of the Council charged with ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... had in view a soap, he recognized that as the one criterion. It is not amiss, but open, also, to serious objections; because there are tribes who live in such conditions that they can get neither water nor soap; and the Arabs, distinctly clean, are not by any means at the highest pinnacle of civilization. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... Wolsey in the senate." This high-toned memorial struck with astonishment the English ministers, who did not hesitate to hint, that, in a reign less merciful, it would not have passed with impunity. In Ireland it raised the hardy earl to the pinnacle of popular favour. A medal was struck in his honour, representing him guarding a heap of treasure with a drawn sword, and the motto—"Touch not, says Kildare." At the opening of the next Parliament, he was a full hour making his way among the enthusiastic crowd, from his house in Kildare street ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... that shook the ground; and, starting out upon the lawn, I saw the tops of the trees about the Oriental College burst into smoky red flame, and the tower of the little church beside it slide down into ruin. The pinnacle of the mosque had vanished, and the roof line of the college itself looked as if a hundred-ton gun had been at work upon it. One of our chimneys cracked as if a shot had hit it, flew, and a piece of it came clattering down the tiles and made a heap of broken ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... urged on by his necessities and aided by his senses, he successively discovered the natural productions necessary for his subsistence and the arts which ministered to his wants, until step by step he mounted to the pinnacle of civilization. But these are merely reveries of the closet, dreams of the inexperienced, and have no real foundation in as far at least as Australia is concerned. That the first natives who were placed on that ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... swiftly by. He was so absorbed in his delight, that he heard, as one who hears not, a wagon go rattling along the road, and the shouting, whistling and singing of boys. It was past noon before he recalled the object with which he had left home that morning. He sat upon the very pinnacle of achievement—that is to say, he sat upon the very highest point in the orchard, his head up, his spirits up, with such a decidedly upward tendency that it was hard for him to make up his mind to descend to the plane ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various
... the moose to-day, with his young men; and tomorrow, as I hear, they pass further into the forests, and nigher to the borders of Canada. The elder maiden is conveyed to a neighboring people, whose lodges are situate beyond yonder black pinnacle of rock; while the younger is detained among the women of the Hurons, whose dwellings are but two short miles hence, on a table-land, where the fire had done the office of the axe, and prepared the place for ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... moment-, in the first rankling sting of humiliation and despair, he could almost have struck a murderous blow at the man whom fortune had set on such a pinnacle of pride and insolence, as it seemed to his galled fancy. He was not in the mood to be either just or generous, and he saw in Ralph Gowan nothing but a man who had both the power and will to rival him, and rob him of peace and hope forever. If ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... we journeyed for about two hours, and the sun was just setting when we entered a region infinitely more dreary than any yet seen. It was a species of tableland, near the summit of an almost inaccessible hill, densely wooded from base to pinnacle, and interspersed with huge crags that appeared to lie loosely upon the soil, and in many cases were prevented from precipitating themselves into the valleys below merely by the support of the trees ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... little less than ruination. But Roscoe Orlando Gibbons, who had been about the world not a little and who drew sanction for the young architect's doings from more quarters of the Continent than one, instantly rose to the occasion and landed on the topmost pinnacle of the shining temple at a single swoop. Here he stood tiptoe and beckoned. This confident pose, this encouraging gesture, had its effect; the others toiled and scrambled up, each after his own fashion, but they all got there. Even old Oliver Dowd, who had once been a member of the ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... central one, in the very middle of the facade, the steeple boldly sprang. Here again columns resting on piers supported archivaults with simple mouldings. Against the gable, at a point where there was a pinnacle, and between the two lofty windows lighting the nave, was a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes under a canopy. Up above, were other bays with freshly painted luffer-boards. Buttresses started from the ground at the four corners of the steeple-base, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... exclaimed the ever ready Dickie; and in another moment he had mounted the parapet and was reaching for it. Whether it were Gertrude's shriek, or the natural recoil away from the grasping hand, or that his hold on the side of the adjoining pinnacle was insecure, he lost his balance, and with a sudden ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... people were at Pleasure Bay, wandering about under the trees in front of the hotel. Down between them and the bank was a lot of men piling up a heap of round stones and crossing sticks of wood over them till a high sort of a cross-beam pinnacle was built, to which one of the men set fire. Mercy, how it blazed up and flashed through the cracks in the wood! They seemed to enjoy the blaze, and worked like beavers around it—though I don't know how a beaver ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... barren bluff the slender woman's figure stands on the pinnacle of night, outlined against a starry sky. The cool night breeze wafts to her burning ear snatches of song and drum. With desperate hate she bites ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... Myra. Why should he resent the noble name she bore, the high rank which was hers? Even if it placed her socially far above him, had she not just expressed her readiness—her longing—to resign all, for him? Had not her love already placed him on the topmost pinnacle of her regard? Was it generous, was it worthy of Jim Airth ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... prisoner will accept death rather than betray the man she loves? No human plummet has sounded the depths of a woman's devotion; no surveyor's chain will ever mark the limits of a woman's faithful, patient endurance; and only the wings of an archangel can transcend that pinnacle to which the sublime principle of self-sacrifice exalts a ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... to ripe maturity, not as a church, indeed, but rather as a beautiful petrifaction, a growth of prolific, exuberant nature. Why should not the yeasty brain of man, fermenting, froth over in such crestwork of Gothic pinnacle, spire, and column? ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... of Queen Elizabeth raised the device to the highest pinnacle of importance it ever possessed in this country, Hentzner, a German traveller, who visited the palace of Whitehall in 1598, says, that he saw in her majesty's bedroom 'a variety of devices on paper, cut in the shape of shields, with mottoes, used by ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... had received a letter from Mary, saying that she and her aunt intended spending the summer at Fabyans, and he felt that Quincy, being near Mary, would probably be on a higher pinnacle than any mountain could supply, and the "eternal hills" would become objects of secondary importance. But, Tom wisely refrained from mentioning these thoughts, for lovers do not seek ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... valour conquered fear, and rashness scorned peril; thinking nothing hard to do if it were only to his mind, he crossed the hissing eddies on horseback. When he had passed these, he came upon defiles surrounded on all sides with swamps, the interior of which was barred from easy approach by the pinnacle of a bank in front. He took his horse over this, and saw an enclosure with a number of stalls. Out of this he turned many horses, and was minded to put in his own, when a certain Tok, a servant of Gunn, angry that a stranger should wax so insolent, attacked him fiercely; but ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... nothing improbable in the idea that witches had the power, in virtue of their compact with the Devil, of riding aloft through the air, because it is recorded, in the history of our Lord's temptation, that Satan transported him in a similar manner to the pinnacle of the temple, and to the summit of an exceedingly high mountain. And Cotton Mather declares, that, to his apprehension, the disclosures of the wonderful operations of the Devil, upon and through his subjects, that were made in the course of the witchcraft prosecutions, ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... teacher can find a thousand dramas in the books on geography if she knows how to interpret the pages of the books, and with these inspiring dramas she can lift her pupils to the very pinnacle of appreciation. Such tales are as fascinating as fairy stories and have the added charm of being true to the teachings of science. A raindrop seems a common thing, but cast in dramatic form it becomes of rare charm. It slides from the roof of the house and finds ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... to Doria, I elaborated her reasons for setting Adrian on his towering pinnacle. Liosha nodded. She understood. False gods, whatever degree of godhead they usurped, had for a time the mystifying power of concealing their falsehood. And during that time they were gods, real live dwellers ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... many of its inhabitants, and there was little security for life and property. The aristocracy of the emperors' courts was mainly that of office, and only to a limited degree that of blood and ancient possession. We find persons of mean birth rising to greatness, and persons on the very pinnacle of honour cast down to the ground. There was a succession of emperors called Slave Emperors, as they had originally been slaves in the court, whence they rose to supreme power. When we consider the teaching of the Quran respecting those who do ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... There was one big star directly over Brooklyn, and another that seemed to be just above Plainfield. We pondered, as the ferry slid toward its hutch at Liberty Street, that there were no stars above Manhattan. Just at that moment—five minutes after seven—the pinnacle of the Woolworth blossomed a ruby red. New York ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... captain's warrants, consistently winked at his glaring infractions of law and order, and with the most commendable loyalty imaginable did all in their power to forward His Majesty's service. Even the military, if rightly approached on their pinnacle of lofty superiority, now and then condescended to lend the gangsman a hand. Did not Sloper, Major-General and Commandant at Lewes, throw a whole company into ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... the roof, and, though the stones chilled me to the bone and the frost-bitten iron hasps of the fastenings burned me like fire, I opened the trap-door and looked out. There above me was the crow-stepped gable of the Red Tower, with the axe set on the pinnacle rustily bright in the coming light of the morning—all swept clean of snow. ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... awful reverence for my grandfather. He never petted, and he often frowned, and such people are generally reverenced. Besides, he was a just man, everybody said; a just man who might have been a great man if he had chosen, and risen to almost any pinnacle of worldly glory. That he had not so chosen was held to be a convincing proof of his greatness; for he was plainly too great to be great in the vulgar sense, and shrouded himself in the dignity of ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... wish he had not cut himself off from her so completely. When on their last afternoon together he had pleaded so earnestly for her love Grace had been proudly triumphant in the successful accomplishment of what she believed to be her life work. From the lofty pinnacle of achievement she had looked down on Tom pityingly, but with no adequate realization of what she ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... expected downfall of Walpole's Ministry seems obvious. Passages of similar import to the advertisement occur in the piece itself. Thus the play is declared to convey a "beautiful image of the instability of human greatness"; and the spectacle is promised of the 'author of a mighty farce' at the pinnacle of human greatness and adored by a crowd of dependants, become by a sudden turn of ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... they were only of small extent. There was a pinnacle of rock and a single sea might possibly carry them over it; but the peril of being washed off was none the less. Now they could see the huge rise of the combing sea with its frowning black top rushing at the shoal, and smashing into an avalanche of snowy foam. They could hear the ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... till Hakon dozed or slept, then swiftly cut off Hakon's head, and plunged out with it to the presence of Tryggveson. Tryggveson, detesting the traitor, useful as the treachery was, cut off the slave's head too, had it hung up along with Hakon's on the pinnacle of the Lade Gallows, where the populace pelted both heads with stones and many curses, especially the more important of the two. "Hakon the Bad" ever henceforth, instead of Hakon ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... when we were near a cluster of crumbling pinnacles that formed the summit, I had ceased to feel anxiety about the mountaineering strength and skill of my companion, and pushed rapidly on. In passing around the shoulder of the highest pinnacle, where the rock was rapidly disintegrating and the danger of slipping was great, I shouted in a warning voice, "Be very careful here, this ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... halo which rests upon its slopes is no earthly light, but rather, as it were, a promise and a beacon—a glow reflected whence we know not, and lying on this alien earth as the sun's light lies on the dead bosom of the moon. Some declare, again, that they have climbed its topmost pinnacle and tasted of the fresh breath of heaven which sweeps around its heights—ay, and heard the quiring of immortal harps and the swan-like sigh of angels' wings; and then behold! a mist has fallen upon them, and they have wandered in it, and when it cleared they were on the mountain paths ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... additional smiles. Groups of citizens of the better class appeared here and there, in earnest conversation. Magnificent chariots, drawn by fiery steeds, halted at the king's gate about the third hour. A splendid national flag proudly waved on the high pinnacle of the students' building, while each window presented ingenious mottoes appropriate ...
— The Young Captives - A Story of Judah and Babylon • Erasmus W. Jones
... worried. He was walking to and fro in an aimless manner like a headless chicken. After having paced backward and forward past a pile of mess-chests several times, each time sizing it up, he suddenly began to mount it, planted himself on the very pinnacle, and with a fog-horn voice began a ...
— Bamboo Tales • Ira L. Reeves
... of the conqueror of Marathon. The last act of it," continues Mr Grote, "produces an impression so mournful, and even shocking—his descent from the pinnacle of glory, to defeat, mean tampering with a temple-servant, mortal bodily hurt, undefended ignominy, and death under a sentence of heavy fine, is so abrupt and unprepared—that readers, ancient and modern, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... after the discovery of America, when Spain was at the highest pinnacle of her glory, the gentle character of the Guanches was the fashionable topic, as we in our times laud the Arcadian innocence of the inhabitants of Otaheite. In both these pictures the colouring is more ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... distant figure in this effective picture: his action, as well as that of the cavalry, about him is admirably expressed: he appears on the pinnacle of triumph; his charger snuffs the very gale of glory, and the uncurbed energy of exultation seems to animate those immediately around him. The eye descends to the checkered toil beneath: the brawny soldier bearing the delicate form of his lovely wife, which is well contrasted with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 541, Saturday, April 7, 1832 • Various
... to-day, with his young men; and tomorrow, as I hear, they pass further into the forests, and nigher to the borders of Canada. The elder maiden is conveyed to a neighboring people, whose lodges are situate beyond yonder black pinnacle of rock; while the younger is detained among the women of the Hurons, whose dwellings are but two short miles hence, on a table-land, where the fire had done the office of the axe, and prepared the place for ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... at Clifton as a physician, established a flourishing practice, and devoted his leisure to politics and scientific research. Sir Humphry Davy, who was his pupil, and whose merit he was the first to bring to light, declared that 'he had talents which would have exalted him to the pinnacle of philosophical eminence, if they had been applied with discretion.' The words are curiously suggestive of the history of his son; and indeed the poet affords a striking instance of the hereditary transmission of mental qualities. ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... accept death rather than betray the man she loves? No human plummet has sounded the depths of a woman's devotion; no surveyor's chain will ever mark the limits of a woman's faithful, patient endurance; and only the wings of an archangel can transcend that pinnacle to which the sublime principle of self-sacrifice ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... halfway up the slope, when my hunter sank into the grass, pointed upward, and whispered, "pan-yang" (wild sheep). There, on the very summit of the highest pinnacle, stood a magnificent ram silhouetted against the sky. It was a stage introduction to the greatest game animal in all ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... them. These were pleasures enough for her young like. Hammond's letters were such as any woman might be proud to receive. They were not love-letters only. He wrote as friend to friend; not descending from the proud pinnacle of masculine intelligence to the lower level of feminine silliness; not writing down to a simple country girl's capacity; but writing-fully and fervently, as if there were no subject too lofty or too grave for the understanding of his betrothed. He wrote as one sure of being sympathised with, ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... the internal evidence of the works themselves, and formed a brilliant ideal picture of what the astonishing author must have been in his daily walk, correspondence, and conversation. But, unfortunately, enthusiasm worked up to its pitch, sweeping the clouds for a bird's-eye view of the high pinnacle of human greatness commensurate with the 'local habitation and the name' of such a genius, is at once 'cabined, cribbed, confined,' by the authentic recorded whatabouts, whenabouts, and whereabouts of William Shakspeare, actor, owner, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... deep down between the mountains, was pointed out to us. The principal one is the Arros River, which from the west embraces most of the mesas, and then, turning south, receives its tributaries, the Tutuhuaca and the Mulatos, the latter just behind a pinnacle. West of the Arros River stretches out the immense Mesa de los Apaches, once a stronghold of these marauders, reaching as far as the Rio Bonito. The plateau is also called "The Devil's Spine Mesa," after a high ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... Provinces on a still higher pinnacle of glory than they had ever reached. Intestine disputes were suddenly calmed. The Algerines and other pirates were swept from the seas by a succession of small but vigorous expeditions. The mediation of the States re-established peace in several of the petty states of ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... like Michael Angelo's Pope Julius, and Browning's Bishop, who was so preoccupied about his tomb in St. Praxed's Church. The Renaissance, the late Middle Ages, felt better than this: on the extreme pinnacle, high on the roof, they might indeed place against the russet brick or the blue sky, amid the hum of life and the movement of the air, the living man, like the Scaligers, the mailed knight on his charger, lance in rest: but ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... sphere to run, Many an eccentric and unthrifty motion make, And thousand incoherent journeys take, Whilst all th'advantage by it got, Was but to light earth's inconsiderable spot. The herd beneath, who see the weathercock of state Hung loosely on the church's pinnacle, Believe it firm, because perhaps the day is mild and still; But when they find it turn with the first blast of fate, By gazing upward giddy grow, And think the church itself does so; Thus fools, for being strong and num'rous known, Suppose the truth, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... questioner. Erik said he was the man who came everywhere and was found nowhere. Then the king, when an interpreter was brought, asked what work Frode was about. Erik replied, "Frode never waits at home for a hostile army, nor tarries in his house for his foe. For he who covets the pinnacle of another's power must watch and wake all night. No man has ever won a victory by snoring, and no wolf has ever found a ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... he must resolutely shut his eyes to any qualities which appeal, even to him, as good qualities, while dwelling with ferocious zest upon every point that he can possibly magnify into a flaw. Or he may even fly at one bound to a pinnacle of wisdom by basing his criticism entirely upon the first chapter or the last chapter of a book, or the first act or the last act of a play. Or he may win his spurs for smartness by deliberate misstatements, born, perhaps, of carelessness, perhaps of the genuine desire to be downright ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... with a visible effort, after the coffee was come and our pipes lighted, "you can never understand the gratitude and loyalty I bear you. You don't know what a boon it is to be taken up by a man that stands on the pinnacle of civilization; you can't think how it's refined and purified me, how it's appealed to my spiritual nature; and I want to tell you that I would die at your door ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... at length all doubts were cleared in the certainty that the long wished-for object was absolutely before us. It is impossible to describe the feelings of interest experienced by the sight of these gigantic remains. The eastern transept still rises above the woods, a point, pinnacle, and round tower. Descending the hill towards Hindon we lost sight of the Abbey. A most singular specimen of country life was presented by an old shepherd, of whom we inquired the way. "How far is it to Hindon?" "About four miles." "Is this the right road?" "Yes, you cannot ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... sheep-pastures and over great slabs of lava, growing steeper and steeper; we entered the crater at last, walled with snows of which portions might be of untold ages, for it is never, I believe, wholly empty; we climbed, in such a gale of wind that the guides would not follow us, the steeple-like central pinnacle, two hundred feet high; and there we reached, never to be forgotten, a small central crater at the very summit, where steam poured up between the stones,—and, oh, from what central earthy depths of wonder that steam ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... streaming through them! but their rich hues only dim and deface his light. I can feel what you say, when I look at the cathedral on the outside; there, indeed, every line sweeps the eye upward—carries it from one pinnacle to another, each with less and less standing-ground, till at the summit the building gradually vanishes in a point, and leaves the spirit to wing its way, unsupported ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... some high moral level, Raising at once his eye-balls and the devil? Great King of Cant! if Nature had but made Your mouth without a tongue I ne'er had prayed To have an earless head. Since she did not, Bear me, ye whirlwinds, to some favored spot— Some mountain pinnacle that sleeps in air So delicately, mercifully rare That when the fellow climbs that giddy hill, As, for my sins, I know at last he will, To utter twaddle in that void inane His soundless organ he will ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... their greatest value, clear opportunities that none but a hopeless blunderer could have disregarded. What men call Chance operated in my favour as though with superb calculation, lifting me to this miniature pinnacle I could never have reached by my own ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... stretch in dark luxuriance around and afar. There you may see sleeping on the verge of the landscape the mighty city,—crowned with the thousand spires from which, proud above the rest, rises the eyry of Napoleon's eagle, the pinnacle of Notre Dame. ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... compared with it for vastness and magnificence, and that, by the side of this, seems a huge prison, so gay and pleasing are the thoughts and sensations which this dream-like combination of arch upon arch, of pinnacle, dome, and tower—all enriched with the most minute and costly work—inspires ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... town. Hotels: Ambassadeurs; Europe; Nord. To visit Le Puy, the best plan is to begin with the Cathedral. From the high side of the Place de Breuil, at the N.W. corner, ascend by the streets St. Gilles, Chenebouterie, and Raphal, to the Place des Tables, with a stone pinnacle fountain in the centre. From this ascend by the R. des Tables to the flight of 40 steps, leading up to the tetrastyle portico in front of the church. Forty-one more steps lead up through this portico to the portal of the west faade of the church, built up ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... little too simple; and so it will have to be modified by adding that the mere fact of a place having a fine position is not quite sufficient, because the place must be of such a character that it is capable of having resources and strength added to it; a sharp pinnacle rock in the middle of the Mediterranean, for instance, might have a fine strategic position, and yet be unavailable as a naval base. Even here, however, we must pause to note that energy and will could do much toward making even a ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... go on long snowshoe hikes. He reached far up the ridges that lifted one after another behind his timber. Once he gained a pinnacle, a solitary outstanding hummock of snow-bound granite rising above all the rest, rising above all the surrounding forest. From this summit he gained an eagle's view. The long curve of Toba Inlet wound ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... theoretic way, what earthly right we have to lay claim to civilisation. How much better it would be always to speak of ourselves as barbarians. We should then, perhaps, make some endeavour to improve. The barbarian who imagines himself on the pinnacle of refinement is in a parlous state—far more likely to retrograde ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... the final obstacles; it was by giant struggles over the debris of crumbling hopes, and through jungles of despair, and up the cliffs of apparent impossibility, that Bunyan forced his way to the pinnacle of his eventual joy; but no sooner was he standing there, than his eagle-eye detected the easier path, and he made it the business of his benevolent ministry to guide others into it. Though not the truth, an illustration ...
— Life of Bunyan • Rev. James Hamilton
... historians with a melancholy glamour; and yet this appears to be true only of those royal individuals who came by their thrones in the easiest way—that of inheritance. The kings of high endeavor who have won to the pinnacle by force of their own stoutness of heart—in other words the popular idols of a fickle public, who have scarce begun to get acquainted with the dizzy uncertainty of their pedestals before the pedestal be rudely removed from ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... dangers; and his successful resistance to the armies which his own offensive war had raised up against him, has given him his claims to the epithet of Great. Although he provoked the war, his successful defence of his country placed him on the very highest pinnacle of military fame. He would gladly have been relieved from the contest, but it was inevitable; and when the tempest burst upon his head, he showed all the qualities of ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... and, with Wolf sliding along ahead in his typical wolf-trot, they went up the hill that led out of town—two lovers on two chestnut sorrel steeds, riding out and away to honeymoon through the warm summer day. Daylight felt himself drunken as with wine. He was at the topmost pinnacle of life. Higher than this no man could climb nor had ever climbed. It was his day of days, his love-time and his mating-time, and all crowned by this virginal possession of a mate who had said "Oh, Elam," as she had said it, and looked ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... galley the ship was out of sight at times when it came thundering down out of the blackness aft, white as any smother of spume. She pitched with the majesty of a line-of-battle ship, as she launched herself in long floating rushes from gleaming pinnacle to seething valley with a heavy, melancholy sobbing of water all about her decks, and her narrow, distended band of maintopsail hovering overhead black as a raven's pinion in the flying hoariness. We were washing through it at twelve or thirteen knots an hour, though ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... in the enjoyment of peace in England, Ireland, and France, (except only so far as the Dauphin was yet unsubdued,) in the enjoyment, too, of a union with the most beautiful Princess of the age, seems to have reached the highest pinnacle of his ambition and his hopes. The Queen was crowned with great solemnity and magnificence in Westminster Abbey,[213] on the third Sunday in ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... From the deck of the little ferry-boat that steamed its way across from Garrison's on that eventful afternoon I viewed the hills about West Point, her stone structures perched thereon, thus rising still higher, as if providing access to the very pinnacle of fame, and shuddered. With my mind full of the horrors of the treatment of all former cadets of color, and the dread of inevitable ostracism, I approached tremblingly ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... in thy spacious vault perhaps may sleep An echo of the voice of Charlemagne. For God thou has known fear, when from His side Men wandered, seeking alien shrines and new, But still the sky was bountiful and blue And thou wast crowned with France's love and pride. Sacred thou art, from pinnacle to base; And in thy panes of gold and scarlet glass The setting sun sees thousandfold his face; Sorrow and joy, in stately silence pass Across thy walls, the shadow and the light; Around thy lofty pillars, tapers white Illuminate, with delicate sharp flames, The brows of saints ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer
... its continuation, the Quai Vert. Pacing these silent promenades, which are bordered by humble cottages, you have opposite, across the water, as also from the adjacent Quai du Rosaire, grand groupings of pinnacle, tower, and gable, more delightful even, in perfection of combination and in mellow charm of colour, than those "domes and towers" of Oxford whose presence Wordsworth confessed, in a very indifferent sonnet, to overpower his "soberness of reason." ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... husband, it was supposed that she was a widow, and, in consequence of her well-regulated establishment, she received much attention from several Irish and foreign bachelors. In short, my mother obtained almost the pinnacle of her ambition when she was once fairly settled at Cheltenham. I ought to observe that when she arrived there she had taken the precaution of prefixing a name to her own to which by baptismal rite she certainly was not entitled, and called herself ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... will, I think, own to a feeling of awe in looking up at it. Few can look down from a great height without creepings and crispations, if they do not get as far as vertigos and that aerial calenture which prompts them to jump from the pinnacle on which they are standing. It does not take much imagination to make one experience something of the same feeling in looking up at a very tall steeple or chimney. To one whose eyes are used to Park Street and the Old South steeples as standards of height, a spire which climbs four hundred feet ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... hath befallen me is of the abundance of my sins and my tyranny, for, indeed, I have slain much people unrighteously and this is the requital of my deeds and that which I have wrought whilome of oppression." As he was thus pondering in himself, there came a bird and lighted down on the pinnacle of the prison, whereupon, of his passing eagerness in the chase, he took a stone and threw it at the bird. Now the king's son was playing in the exercise-ground with the ball and the bat,[FN208] and the stone lit on his ear and cut it off, whereupon the Prince fell down in ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... her shrink and quiver. His words were often unintelligible to her, until Miss Merriman, silent-footed and efficient, translated them into action, as, before the wide eyes of the mountain child, there began to unfold the swift drama of modern surgical science at its pinnacle, ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... was a favourite amusement of his. Now, however, for a while he objected to playing. He was a poor man, he said, and the rest were all rich; why should he throw away the value of a dozen golden sonnets just to add one more pinnacle to the gilded roofs of a millionaire's palace? Besides, he was half-way through with an ode he was inditing to Republican simplicity. The pristine austerity of a democratic senatorial cottage had naturally ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... command that these stones become bread. But he answered and said: It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. Then the devil taketh him into the holy city; and he set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and saith unto him, If thou art the Son of God, cast thyself down: ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... human being. A feeling of curiosity had afterwards induced her to return and see if the bold hunter had cleared the gulf, or perished in his mad attempt; but when she looked outward from the highest pinnacle of her rocky prison, she could discover no traces of him whatever. It then occurred to her, that, if successful in his leap, his progress must have been finally arrested by the impassable rock that terminated the ridge; in which case she might perchance obtain a nearer ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... indeed, with a kind of large detachment, as though from the height of some soaring pinnacle one might watch, with only half-awakened interest, the doings of the dwellers on the plain; and Owen, who liked to be in the midst of things, to add his quota to the world's doings, found in this attitude of mind a pose, a half-insolent pretence ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... from him, as he were stuck with swords, Great streams of light go upward. Then the lords Of havoc and unrest prepare their storms, And o'er the silent city, vulture forms— Eris and Enyo, Alke, Ioke, The biter, the sharp-bitten, the mad, the fey— Hover and light on pinnacle and tower: The gray Erinnyes, watchful for the hour When Haro be the wail. And down the sky Like a white squall flung Ate with a cry That sounded like the wind in a ship's shrouds, As shrill and wild at once. The ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... dream some indistinct words and inarticulate groans. She fancied at that time she was weeping over Caesar, and holding him butchered in her arms. Others say this was not her dream, but that she dreamed that a pinnacle which the senate, as Livy relates, had ordered to be raised on Caesar's house by way of ornament and grandeur, was tumbling down, which was the occasion of her tears and ejaculations. When it was day, she begged ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... Johnstone's range. A night alarm. Beautiful trees. Wild ducks. A tributary. High dark hill. Country rises in altitude. Very high sandhills. Quicksands. New ranges. A brush ford. New pigeon. Pointed hill. A clay pan. Christopher's Pinnacle. Chandler's Range. Another new range. Sounds of running water. First natives seen. Name of the river. A Central Australian warrior. Natives burning the country. Name a new creek. Ascend a mountain. Vivid green. Discover ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... at a distance, appears the pinnacle of a lofty pagoda, a structure like most of those bearing the name, with eight corners and nine stories. Originally designed for the mere purposes of look-outs, these airy edifices have degenerated into appliances of superstition to attract ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... not dare to say it, for I see Bourne on the pinnacle of prosperity, but still looking sadly for his castles in Spain; I see Titbottom, an old deputy bookkeeper, whom nobody knows, but with his chivalric heart loyal to children, his generous and humane spirit, full ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... in one of the Christmas Margamores, (* Big Markets) and fully sustained the anticipations which were formed of him by his relations. For a year or two afterwards no quarrel was fought without him; and his prowess rose until he had gained the very pinnacle of that ambition which he had determined to reach. About this time I was separated from him, having found it necessity, in order to accomplish my objects in life, to reside with a relation in another ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... obey her will, but broke and quavered, and failed at times, like a strange instrument one has not learned how to master,—Miss Vesta told her story, of the dark stranger who had come three days before and taken her up to a pinnacle, and showed her ...
— Melody - The Story of a Child • Laura E. Richards
... sense, looked out on a good deal of life, and one of the things it had most shown him was that there is nobody so bereft of joy as not to be able to command for twopence the services of somebody less joyous. Mrs. Ryves was a struggler (Baron scarcely liked to think of it), but she occupied a pinnacle for Miss Teagle, who had lived on—and from a noble nursery—into a period of diplomas ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... nightmare from which there was no waking. He considered the stability of his days—a lifetime followed upon high principles and founded on religious convictions that had comforted his sorrows and countenanced his joys. It seemed a trial undeserved, that in his old age he should be thrust upon a pinnacle of publicity, forced into the public eye, robbed of dignity, denied the privacy he esteemed as the most precious privilege that wealth could command. Stability was destroyed; to count upon the morrow seemed impossible. His thought, strung to a new morbidity, unknown till now, ran on and pictured, ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... beside the Samaritan, who was leaning on the curb of the well, the astronomic dial with its zodiac, the grotesque stone mask pouring out the water drawn up from the river below, the stout figure of Hercules supporting the whole thing, and the hollow statue, perched on the topmost pinnacle, that served as a weathercock, like the Fortune on the Dogana at Venice and the Giralda at Seville. As the hands on the clock-face at last pointed to ten and twelve respectively, the little chime of bells struck ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... by a host of admirers, pouring into your ears their admiration and love, and then what shall I have to support me, but that 'yes,' with which you once raised me from the depths of despair to an elevation of happiness that was high as the highest pinnacle of the caverns of Kentucky; raising me from ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... ridiculous figure. With the people filing off at the door he held, who he knew would carry what had passed to the whole town, to be given to the four winds, he could not have looked a Bully more shorn and forlorn, if he had had his ears cropped. Even that unlucky female, Mrs. Sparsit, fallen from her pinnacle of exultation into the Slough of Despond, was not in so bad a plight as that remarkable man and self-made Humbug, Josiah Bounderby ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... the side of Madame von Rosen, along that mountain wall, her servant following with both the horses, and all about them sunlight, and breeze, and flying bird, and the vast regions of the air, and the capacious prospect: wildwood and climbing pinnacle, and the sound and voice of mountain torrents, at their hand: and far below them, green melting into sapphire ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... And yet, O wise judgments of God! hard and incessantly though he toiled to establish our fortunes, scarcely had he left empty that supreme seat which we occupy to-day, when we were cast down from the pinnacle whereon we had climbed, abandoned to the fury of the rabble and the vindictive hatred of the Roman barons, who chose to feel offended by our goodness to their enemies. Thus, not only, we tell you, Caesar, not only did we plunge headlong from the summit of our grandeur, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and left the god behind. We saw the earth spread vaster than the sea, With infinite surge of mountains surfed with snow, And a silence that was louder than the deep; But on the utmost pinnacle Life again Hid me, and I heard ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... in the thicket of pines, trapped and hemmed in by the darkness of their stems and branches. The wind was so fierce and strong, that he could scarcely keep his feet,—every now and again the moon flew out of a great cloud- pinnacle and glared on the scene, but not with sufficient clearness to show him his way. Yet he knew the place well—often had he and Gloria trodden that path down to the sea, and yet to-night it seemed all unfamiliar. How the sea roared! Like a thousand lions clamouring for prey! Against ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... that I didn't know just what it was I wanted to do, except ride over to that little pinnacle just out from King's Highway, and watch for Beryl King; that, of course, was out of the question, and ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... should swing from its orbit, disintegrate into its original atoms, and its place remain forever vacant in the universe, than that we should survive, with such memories of departed glory, and such a burning sense of unutterable infamy and degradation. Fallen—fallen—fallen! from the highest pinnacle to the lowest depth, to rise no more forever! What American would wish to live, and encounter such a destiny? And why fallen? From a cause more damning than our fate. Fallen, let the truth be told, as history would record, because ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... no other in his time had grander and nobler aims—aims, however mistaken, for the greatness and good of England; aims for the enlargement of knowledge and truth, and for the benefit of mankind. So ended a career which had mounted slowly and painfully, but resolutely, to the highest pinnacle of greatness—greatness full of honour and beneficent activity—suddenly to plunge down to depths where honour and hope were irrecoverable. So closed, in disgrace and disappointment and neglect, the last sad chapter of a life which had begun so brightly, ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... can exist here without food or water, whereas to-morrow, or next day at the utmost, will see most of us dead. But in a few hours you will realize what it means to be kept on this bare rock under a tropical sun. You can do one thing. Your party greatly outnumbers mine. Climb to the top-most pinnacle and signal to the island. You ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... mountains, existing under appointed laws of birth and endurance, death and decrepitude? There can be no doubt as to the answer. The rock itself answers audibly by the murmur of some falling stone or rending pinnacle. It is not as it was once. Those waste leagues around its feet are loaded with the wrecks of what it was. On these perhaps, of all mountains, the characters of decay are written most clearly; around these are spread most gloomily the memorials of ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... must have seemed to many who knew him, and to himself, like enough, that Mark Twain at forty had reached the pinnacle of his fame and achievement. His name was on every lip; in whatever environment observation and argument were likely to be pointed with some saying or anecdote attributed, rightly or otherwise, to Mark ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... receiving visits and speaking of business, he avoided thinking of the unexpected resistance. How was this! She—the woman for whom the highest favor, the pinnacle of happiness had been the possibility of remaining at the head of his house, in the brilliancy of wealth and general respect, dared—had the shamelessness to oppose his will! He felt such contempt that, in thought, he threw that woman on the ground to trample her; in spite of this, that, ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... but God. His fellow man is by his side, his equal, and all other material creations are beneath his feet, and he is not to permit his fellow man to lift up the inferior thing and place it above him. If he does he must step down from the pinnacle on which he was placed by his God and which his own consciousness demands ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... was standing at a window, looking out at the aged row of cedars, now laden with snow, and thinking of Horace and Soracte. Suddenly, beneath a jutting pinnacle of white boughs which left under themselves one little spot of green, I saw a cardinal hop out and sit full-breasted towards me. The idea flashed through my mind that this might be that shyest, most beautiful fellow whom I had found in September, and whom I tried to make out as the son of my last ...
— A Kentucky Cardinal • James Lane Allen
... I asked, for I felt that I should like to climb to the topmost pinnacle of the highest peak in all the world and shout the good news to the four corners ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... since the time of Louis XIV has been the contribution of individual artists, who by giving expression to their own original ideas have thus advanced the art to the pinnacle attained by the modern Russian ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... only a hundred or so have the privilege of sitting around in my parlor. As to the mulatto South, if you Southerners have one boast that is stronger than another, it is your women; you put them on a pinnacle of purity and virtue and bow down in a chivalric worship before them; yet you talk and act as though, should you treat the Negro fairly and take the anti-inter-marriage laws off your statute books, these ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... day. Just before evening the rain-clouds parted and the sun flamed out across the misty Lombard plain. The Castello burned like a hero's funeral pyre, and round its high-built turrets swallows circled in the warm blue air. On the moat slept shadows, mixed with flowers of sunset, tossed from pinnacle and gable. Then the sky changed. A roof of thunder-cloud spread overhead with the rapidity of tempest. The dying sun gathered his last strength against it, fretting those steel-blue arches with crimson; and all the fierce light, thrown from vault to vault of cloud, was reflected back ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... that it comes to this: if spiders are useless because they eat each other, the bees do much the same thing (only wholesale), but it makes them commercially useful. The bee therefore we place upon a pinnacle of respectability, but the spider we despise. Faugh! the hypocrisy of it makes me sick. My children will be taught to venerate the spider and despise ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... trees they met with was the bunya-bunya, a species of pine. It towered like a pinnacle above all the other trees, reaching a height of upwards of ...
— The Young Berringtons - The Boy Explorers • W.H.G. Kingston
... Antoinette had now reached the pinnacle of human greatness, as sovereigns of one of the noblest empires in the world. Yet the first feelings which their elevation had excited in both, and especially in the queen, were rather those of dismay ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... princess he loved; so all the keys, joyfully submitting to the magic power of the master, combine to aid him, the low notes rushing in like demons to give him the base on which to build his airy structure; the high notes like angels throwing decoration of carving and tracery on pinnacle and flying buttress, till in verse three its outline, rising ever higher and higher, shows in the clouds like St. Peter's dome, illuminated and towering into the vasty sky; and it seems as if his soul, upborne on the surging waves of music, had reached its highest elevation. ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... aloud to rouse you, with a voice stronger than the eternal thunder, why should I seek to warn you? Whom his own, his wife's, children's, country's safety, the glory of his great forefathers, the veneration of the everlasting Gods awaiting his decision from the tottering pinnacle of Rome's capitol—whom all these things excite not to action—no voice of man, no portent of the Gods themselves can stir to energy or valor; and I but waste my words in exhorting you ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... distinguished fashionable world who were passing up the stairs behind. The doctor was somewhat repressed in his mode of address by the communication which had so lately been made to him. Miss Dunstable was now standing on the very top of the pinnacle of wealth, and seemed to him to be not only so much above his reach, but also so far removed from his track in life, that he could not in any way put himself on a level with her. He could neither aspire so high nor descend so low; and thinking ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... dwells the Ice-Maiden, the Queen of the glaciers. She, the murderess, the destroyer, is half a child of air and half the powerful ruler of the streams; therefore, she had received the power, to elevate herself with the speed of the chamois to the highest pinnacle of the snow-topped mountain; where the most daring mountaineer had to hew his way, in order to take firm foot-hold. She sails up the rushing river on a slender fir-branch—springs from one cliff to another, with her long snow-white hair, fluttering around her, and with her bluish-green ...
— The Ice-Maiden: and Other Tales. • Hans Christian Andersen
... the tender mercies even of the "institution." But he had not known and he had trusted him. The thought was a sudden spur, urging him as nothing else could have done, bringing out all that was best and strongest in his nature. In a few hours he had crashed from the pinnacle on which he had soared in the blindness of egoism down into depths of self-realisation that seemed bottomless, and at the darkest moment when his world was lying in pieces under his feet—this had come. Another chance ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... could ye not drag from heaven to earth Zeus, counsellor supreme, not though ye toiled sore. But once I likewise were minded to draw with all my heart, then should I draw you up with very earth and sea withal. Thereafter would I bind the rope about a pinnacle of Olympus, and so should all those things be hung in air. By so much am I ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... They stood on a pinnacle where time-corroded shoulders of sandstone broke eruptively through the soil. In a cluster of paw-paw trees there was a carpet of moss spread over ancient boulders, and off behind them stretched the nobility of forests unspoiled; of oak and ash and poplar and the ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... meantime his friend may somewhere lose one and enable him to get on level terms again. When two players with plus handicaps are engaged in a match, a bunkered ball will generally mean a lost hole, but others who have not climbed to this pinnacle of excellence are far too pessimistic if they assume that this rule operates in their case also. The second matter in which the philosophic golfer rises superior to his less favoured brother when there is a bunker stroke to be played, ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... meditations. He himself had opened out wide horizons of public life before an ambitious poet, with a vacillating will, it is true, but not without aspirations; and the journalists had already shown the neophyte, from a pinnacle of the temple, all the kingdoms of the world of letters and ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... get him. Very high. Most to sky," the chief told Rand, and indicated in "pigeon" that the cliff was a pinnacle of three spires of rock standing alone and utterly inaccessible from any side. He said it was two days' journey by easy trail, and that they would ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... breezes and the cattle bells afield. And there was something satisfactory in the sight of that great mountain that enclosed us to the north; whether it stood, robed in sunshine, quaking to its topmost pinnacle with the heat and brightness of the day; or whether it set itself to weaving vapours, wisp after wisp growing, trembling, fleeting, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reporters hanging on his words! To achieve this giddy pinnacle on the heels of calling himself an atom seemed to Shelby almost to pass belief. ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... accepted gladly, and during the trip there were many long discussions between the three as to the future of the Circus Boys. They had worked hard during the season and had won new laurels on the tanbark. But they had not yet reached the pinnacle of their success in the canvas-covered arena, though each had saved, as the result of his season's work, ...
— The Circus Boys Across The Continent • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... course, was nonsense; but it was proof to the unhappy Hook that Peter did not know in the least who or what he was, which is the very pinnacle of ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... appeared high against the dome of the Statehouse. The strains of "The Star-Spangled Banner" burst upon the ear; and amid cheers and cries of "Old Glory! Old Glory!" that echoed to the distant hills the old sea flag unfurled and floated above the topmost pinnacle of the Capitol of Tennessee. And thus Old ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... shilling, for which he was to receive a mouse with a "plum saddle," and two others had invested ninepence each in white mice. With Porter's half-crown, the total came to precisely five shillings—all Paul had in the world, the one rope by which he could ever hope to haul himself up to his lost pinnacle! ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... was roofed in before my foundations were laid. Not that I could not build as quickly and as well as he, if I chose. I could, but I never chose. While he, with serious face and rapt attention, piled layer upon layer, and pinnacle upon pinnacle, absorbed in his architectural ambition, I sat by watching him, or wondering who drew the beautiful picture on the lid of my box, or speculating on the quantity of bricks I should use in my building, but always neglecting ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... flowers and green grass, with quaint Prebendal houses of every style and date, breathing peace and prosperity. A genial parson or two pace gravely about; and above you soars the huge church, with pinnacle and parapet, the jackdaws cheerily hallooing from the lofty ledges. You are a little weary of air and sun; you push open the great door, and you are in the cool, dark nave with its holy smell; you sit for a little and let the spirit of the place creep into ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... possessed of either or both of the first two, and that utterly ignores the third, can never attain to the full status of man, nor reach the zenith of full racial development or the pinnacle of civilization. To-day we hear much about the survival of the fittest and the "superior race and the inferior races." The earnest, thoughtful student of life and its affairs immediately raises the question, To whom do such titles "fittest," "superior" and "inferior" refer, and ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... and fatigued. I had turned the bend of the wooded gorge, and, looking up the river, saw what resembled a dyke of basalt stretching sheer across the stream, with a ruined castle on a bare and apparently inaccessible pinnacle, another ruin on the opposite end of the ridge, and, between the two, a little church on the brink of a precipice. Houses were clustered at the foot of the rocks by the ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... a shepherd, and ascended farther; came to some snow in patches, upon which my forehead's perspiration fell like rain, making the same dints as in a sieve; the chill of the wind and the snow turned me giddy, but I scrambled on and upwards. Hobhouse went to the highest pinnacle; I did not, but paused within a few yards (at an opening of the cliff). In coming down, the guide tumbled three times; I fell a laughing, and tumbled too—the descent luckily soft, though steep and slippery: Hobhouse also fell, but nobody ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... expected to make the fortune which I have acquired here; indeed, I myself have no use for it, for a man who has fallen from the pinnacle of his hopes needs very little. It costs but little to live, the idler's life alone is a costly one, and I am not sure that the unproductive consumer is not robbing the community at large. There was some discussion about Napoleon's pension ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... trusted. As Lord Stanhope well says of him "His slender and pliant intellect was well fitted to crawl up to the heights of power through all the crooked mazes and dirty by-paths of intrigue; but having once attained the pinnacle, its smallness and meanness were exposed to all the world." Even his private life had not the virtues which one who reads some of the exalted panegyrics paid to him by contemporary poets and others would be apt to imagine. He was fond of drink and fond of pleasure ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... with sympathetic trust to the intricate whisperings of Nature—the goddess, as she has been called, of a hundred voices—until here and there he can pick out a few simple notes to which his own powers can resound. If, then, at a moment when he finds himself placed on a pinnacle from which he is called upon to take a perspective survey of the range of science, and to tell us what he can see from his vantage ground; if at such a moment after straining his gaze to the very verge of the horizon, and after ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... the genius and the wonder of the thing!" he cried. "The man pervades London, and no one has heard of him. That's what puts him on a pinnacle in the records of crime. I tell you, Watson, in all seriousness, that if I could beat that man, if I could free society of him, I should feel that my own career had reached its summit, and I should be prepared to turn to ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... obdurate. No, he would not go to the Brookes' again, since Ethel had once objected to his going. And on this pinnacle of austere virtue he remained, thereby reducing Ethel to a state of self-abasement, which spoke well for his chances of mastery in the married ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Packard, making what haste was possible in the thick dark and with what silence was allowed them, had gone a score of paces deeper into the canon, the crack of a rifle shouted its reverberating message of menace back and forth in the rocky ravine, a spurt of flame showed where the rifleman stood upon a pinnacle of rock almost directly above their heads and there came the further sounds of men's startled voices and the scampering of horses' hoofs, fleeing southward through ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... Norton Sound. Stuart's Island. Cape Stephens. Point Shallow-Water. Shoals on the American Coast. Clerke's Island. Gore's Island. Pinnacle Island. Arrival at Oonalashka. Intercourse with the Natives and Russian Traders. Charts of the Russian Discoveries, communicated by Mr Ismyloff. Their Errors pointed out. Situation of the Islands visited by the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... pocket-handkerchief. Then up again, up, up, up, through a yet smaller staircase, till we emerged into another stone gallery, above the jackdaws, and far above the roof beneath which we had before made a halt. Then up another flight, which led us into a pinnacle of the temple, but not the highest; so, retracing our steps, we took the right turret this time, and emerged into the loftiest lantern, where we saw level Lincolnshire, far and near, though with a haze on the distant horizon. There were dusty roads, a river, and canals, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... tub, which ran as far north sometimes as the Aleutians; and he had immediately gained official recognition by sticking to his instruments for sixty-eight hours—recorded at fifteen-minute intervals in his log—when the whaler Goblin encountered a submerged pinnacle rock in the Island Passage and flashed the old C.Q.D. ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... of the way this game went on establishing a position of moral superiority for Mr. Pellew and his partner, who looked down on the irregularities of their opponents from a pinnacle of True Whist. Their position as superior beings tended towards mutual understandings. A transition state from their relations in that easy-going life at the Towers to the more sober obligations of the metropolis was at least acceptable; and this isolation by a better understanding ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... teaching. But Art has still higher aims. Every living thing belongs to her. The Venus, the horse . . . which of those two pictures won Apelles the greater fame? Not only copying, but creating original ideas, leads to the pinnacle of art. Moor praised your vivid imagination. We must use what we possess. Remember Buonarotti, Raphael! Their compositions and frescos, have raised their names above all others. Antonio has tormented you sufficiently with drawing lifeless things. When you ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Strait of San Bernardino, between Luzon and Samar, and passed for a day through a region of isles. The sea was glassy save when a school of porpoises tore it apart in their pursuit of the flying fish. On its deep sapphire the islands seemed to float, sometimes a mere pinnacle of rock, sometimes a cone-shaped peak timbered down to the beach where the surf fell over. Toward evening, when the breeze freshened slightly, we seemed almost to brush the sides of some of these islets, and they invited us with ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... the Bay of Traitors, that arm of the sea which curved into the little bays of Taka-Uka and Atuona. At one side, a mere pinnacle through the vapor about his throat, rose the rugged head of Temetiu, and ranged below him the black fastnesses of the valleys he commands. In the foreground the cocoas, from the rocky headlands to the gate of Calvary, stood like an army bearing palms of victory. In ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... Kentuckians, ploughing, smit in the unfinished furrow? Nay, if the six-footer stand by running water, the cloud will sometimes select him as its conductor to that running water. Hark! Sure, yon black pinnacle is split. Yes, a man is a good conductor. The lightning goes through and through a man, but only peels a tree. But sir, you have kept me so long answering your questions, that I have not yet come to business. Will you order one of my rods? Look at this specimen ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... and tens, Threes and fours and twelves, All the volte face of decimals, The whirligig of dozens and the pinnacle of seven, Turn him on his back, The kicking little beetle, And there again, on his shell-tender, earth-touching belly, The long cleavage of division, upright ...
— Tortoises • D. H. Lawrence
... Not infrequently, too, he would wink at us and make secret signs when Grandmamma was beginning to scold us and find fault with us all round. "So much for us children!" he would say. On the whole, however, the impossible pinnacle upon which my childish imagination had placed him had undergone a certain abasement. I still kissed his large white hand with a certain feeling of love and respect, but I also allowed myself to think about him and to criticise his ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... experience—of an ecstasy. Something drew me forth with a sense of inexpressible yearning towards the being of this strange old man in the window seat, and for a moment I knew what it was to taste a mighty and wonderful sensation, and to touch the highest pinnacle of joy I have ever known. It lasted for less than a second, and was gone; but in that brief instant of time the same terrible lucidity came to me that had already shown me how the past and future exist in the present, and I realised and understood that pleasure and pain ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... bishop, is placed on the pinnacle of one buttress that terminates the splendid facade, or west front of Lincoln Cathedral, and the Swineherd of Stow, with his horn in his hand, on the other. The tradition is in the mouth of every Lincolner, that this effigied honour was conferred on the generous rudester ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... skull-less vertebrae, and came up and up and up, and finally produced Shakespeare, who found the human intellect wallowing in a hut, and touched it with a wand of his genius, and it became a palace—dome and pinnacle. I would rather belong to a race that commenced then, and produced Shakespeare, with the eternal hope of an infinite future for the children of progress leading from the far horizon, beckoning men forward—forward ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... charms and graces of women—a susceptibility which continued always fresh—was tempered and ennobled by the most chivalrous admiration for the sex as a whole. He placed them on an almost romantic pinnacle, and his actions always conformed to his romantic ideal, although in his writings he sometimes adopts the conventional satire which was more common fifty years ago than now. In a letter to Miss ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... shoulder of the Island mountain stands the Sentinel, a coarse, truncated pinnacle of granite, roughened and wrinkled by the toll of the moist breezes, alternating with the scorching flames of the sun. It overlooks the league-long sweep of the treacherous bay, with its soft and smothering sands, the string ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... sister Sorais would levy war upon me. So be it. She shall not prevail against me. I, too, have my friends and my retainers. There are many, I say, who will shout "Nyleptha!" when my pennon runs up on peak and pinnacle, and the light of my beacon fires leaps tonight from crag to crag, bearing the message of my war. I will break her strength and scatter her armies. Eternal night shall be the portion of Sorais of the Night. Give me that ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... valley we had left. The scene from this point is excelled in grandeur only by extent and variety. An amphitheatre of mountains 200 miles in circumference, enclosing a valley nearly as large as the State of Rhode Island, with all its details of pinnacle, peak, dome, rock and river, is comprehended at a glance. In front of us at a distance of twenty miles, in sullen magnificence, rose the picturesque range of the Madison, with the insulated rock, ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... had taken it for granted that lemonade was sacred to the Fourth of July picnics, just as oranges grew for Christmas trees only. She followed Belle dumbly into the house, and once inside she remained dumb with awe at what seemed to her to be the highest pinnacle of grandeur. ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... on the dividing ridge of Time, the topmost pinnacle of humanity; and, looking backward over the vast ocean of life, we can discern amidst the rolling, heaving, struggling surges, which have engulfed so many grand hopes, and towering aims, and strong endeavors ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... scene which follows Aeschylus reaches the pinnacle of tragic power. Cassandra advances to the palace, but starts back in horror as a series of visions of growing vividness comes before her eyes. These find utterance in language of blended sanity and madness, creating a terror whose very vagueness increases its intensity. First she sees Atreus' ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... universally allowed, my lords, and therefore it would be superfluous to prove, that the liberties of Europe are now in the utmost danger; that the house of Bourbon has arrived almost at that exalted pinnacle of authority, from whence it will look down with contempt upon all other powers, to which it will henceforward prescribe laws at pleasure, whose dominions will be limited by its direction, and whose armies will march ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... because it has not as much attraction for the great sovereign voter as the blessed protective tariff, which, to use your own fantastic expression, you should "cosset on your heaving brisket" for its splendid success as a survivor of its primogenitors. Look at the pinnacle of political success to which the McKinley bill has brought Bill McKinley (excuse the paltry little pun) and sound money (saving your presence) brought Grover Cleveland, and then contemplate the ignominy and obscurity has brought George and free ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... conceit is dead and buried. But I want you to realize that during those few minutes I was not John Trenholme, an artist struggling for foothold on the steep crags of the painter's rock of endeavor, but a master of the craft gazing from some high pinnacle at a territory he had won. If you know anything of painting, Miss Manning, you will go with me so far as to admit that my indiscretion was impersonal. I, a poet who expressed his emotions in terms of color, was alone with Aphrodite and a nymph, on a June morning, in a leafy English park. ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... East did not long remain at the pinnacle of greatness to which Justinian had raised it. His conquests, indeed, weakened rather than strengthened the empire, since now there were much more extensive frontiers to defend. Within half a century after his death it ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... a lofty and insulated shore, the great central peak of the island came in sight; domineering over the neighboring hills; the same aspiring pinnacle, descried in drawing near ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... century, in the course of which its creed and liturgy were formed. The evidence of these transactions lies wide; much of it is still in the British Museum; and it may be possible to produce something sufficient to sustain Falkland on the pinnacle on which Mr. Arnold and the Dean of Westminster have placed him. But we cannot help surmising that he has in some measure undergone the process which, in an age prolific in historic fancies as well as pre-eminent in historic research, has been ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... conscience. And yet, O wise judgments of God! hard and incessantly though he toiled to establish our fortunes, scarcely had he left empty that supreme seat which we occupy to-day, when we were cast down from the pinnacle whereon we had climbed, abandoned to the fury of the rabble and the vindictive hatred of the Roman barons, who chose to feel offended by our goodness to their enemies. Thus, not only, we tell you, Caesar, not only did we plunge headlong from the summit of our grandeur, losing the worldly goods and ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... a time when Percival was nineteen years of age that he stood upon a pinnacle of rock and looked down into a certain valley. And it was very early in the spring-time, so that the valley appeared, as it were, to be carpeted all with clear, thin green. There was a shining stream of water that ran down through the midst of the ...
— The Story of the Champions of the Round Table • Howard Pyle
... grand pinnacle, we must not tarry longer upon Greylock. Let us now take a trip down the Housatonic valley, close beside the Taconic range. This forms an almost continuous ridge across the State, and its summit is nearly upon the line between our State and New York. There are no peaks of consequence ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... black against the last coral-tinted glow of the sunset, as a sailor steers by a star. There was further assurance that he was not losing himself or wandering in a circle, when from some chance outlook he ventured to glance backward and saw the pinnacle of Windy Mountain or the dome of the Pilot straight behind him. There lay the natural retreats of the lynx, the bear, and the outlaw like himself; and, as he fled farther from them, it was with the same frenzied instinct to return that the driven ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... for the breezes and the cattle bells afield. And there was something satisfactory in the sight of that great mountain that enclosed us to the north; whether it stood, robed in sunshine, quaking to its topmost pinnacle with the heat and brightness of the day; or whether it set itself to weaving vapours, wisp after wisp growing, trembling, fleeting, and fading in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... shriveled up into the size of a pea. I can't deny having streaks of conceit, but I know enough about myself to make my rational moments bid me keep in the background, and it excruciates me to be set up on a pinnacle. So don't blame me if I fled in terror, and that I am looking forward to your visit, when I hope to have delightful pow-wows ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... last Cape canary through moulting; he was a beautiful singer. Yesterday afternoon we went some way up the mountain just above the settlement. We walked for some distance up the Goat Ridge, crossed a ravine to our left, and then got on to what is called the Pinnacle, where we had a view which was awe-inspiring. There lay before us two or three yawning chasms stretching away down the mountain side. I hardly liked to look at them. One was Hottentot Gulch, whose sides, ...
— Three Years in Tristan da Cunha • K. M. Barrow
... limestone flanks are clad at most with stunted shrubs and barely leave room for a few precarious mule-tracks. These heights often rise in the frontierranges of Tymphrestus, Oxia and Corax to more than 7000 ft.; the snow-capped pinnacle of Krona attains to 8240 ft. A few defiles pass through this barrier to the other side of the north ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... course to Westminster Abbey, is highest compliment possible for public man. On reflection I say not quite. LULU stands on triple pinnacle of fame. On one or other the New Zealander, bored with the monotony of the ruins of London Bridge, sure to hap upon ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... the far cry of Innocent Smith, apparently from some remote pinnacle. "Come up here; and bring some of my things to eat and drink. It's just the ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... of the profession. Only continuous work can develop the powers of any artist, and this is particularly true of the art of the theatre. Under the present conditions an artist is, with an entire want of reason, raised to a pinnacle of importance when playing a good part in a successful play; but she may with equal suddenness be dashed into a gulf of failure and non-productiveness, also ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... 'Fidelity,' that she turned away and shuddered when she saw it fearlessly adventured on by a human being. A feeling of curiosity had afterwards induced her to return and see if the bold hunter had cleared the gulf, or perished in his mad attempt; but when she looked outward from the highest pinnacle of her rocky prison, she could discover no traces of him whatever. It then occurred to her, that, if successful in his leap, his progress must have been finally arrested by the impassable rock that ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... contemplation of an air-vision. "The natural beauty of Sampaolo is to my thinking unparalleled. At a distance, as your ship approaches it, Sampaolo lies on the horizon like a beautiful soft cloud, all vague rose-colours and purples, a beautiful soft pinnacle of cloud. Then gradually, as you come nearer, the cloud changes, crystallises; and Sampaolo is like a great wonderful carving, a great wonderful carved jewel, a cameo cut on the sea, with a sort of aureole about it, an opalescence of haze and sunshine. Nearer still, ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... more love for their Master and for his cause, women that do not do this work from a sense of duty, but because they love their Lord and Saviour. It seems to me we ought to put love in the same place where Christ put it, on the same pinnacle where Paul put it: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not love, it profiteth me nothing; though I understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing; and though ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 1, January, 1896 • Various
... of the old guardsman, as he stood perched upon the high pinnacle of rock, was again too much for the muleteers; and one and all of them gave utterance to fresh peals of laughter. His young masters were too much concerned about their faithful Pouchskin to give way to mirth; but on ascertaining that ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... Degree. He knew that any one who aspired to this Eminent Honor had to be a Pippin. But he hoped that he could make some Contribution to the World of Thought that would jar the whole Educational System and help him to climb to the topmost Pinnacle of ...
— People You Know • George Ade
... Satires, &c. by Pope; but I remember but one imitative Ode in his works, and none any where else. I can hardly suppose that they have lost any fame by the fate of the farce; but even should this be the case, the present publication will again place them on their pinnacle. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... companions along its gentler slopes, and gives them a helping-hand to lift them over the final obstacles; it was by giant struggles over the debris of crumbling hopes, and through jungles of despair, and up the cliffs of apparent impossibility, that Bunyan forced his way to the pinnacle of his eventual joy; but no sooner was he standing there, than his eagle-eye detected the easier path, and he made it the business of his benevolent ministry to guide others into it. Though not the ...
— Life of Bunyan • Rev. James Hamilton
... found him a fugitive from injustice and dishonesty—a lonely traveler on the path of life. Seeking Fortune, to find and be treated by that whimsical goddess with good or ill. To be smiled or frowned upon, to be mounted upon the triumphing waves, rising higher and higher, until he had reached the pinnacle of Fame, or drifted about, sinking lower and lower in the dark waters, at last reaching the pool of Dishonesty, ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... brought here to church, and as he stood in the choir with the obsequient verger at his elbow he recollected how he had got through the minutes of a long sermon,—a sermon that had seemed to be very long,—in planning the way in which, if left to himself, he would climb to the pinnacle which culminated over the bishop's seat, and thence make his way along the capitals and vantages of stonework, till he would ascend into the triforium and thus become lord and master of the old building. How ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... known Robert Denver for fifteen years—watched his rise through all the stages of journalism to the Olympian pinnacle of the Investigator's editorial office. In the thick-set man with grizzling hair there were few traces left of the hungry-eyed young reporter who, on his way home in the small hours, used to "bob in" on Granice, while the latter ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... I append, for I have been examining the mechanism of the gate since I came in, and have made a discovery which dislodges my savant from his pinnacle; namely, that the only fastening on the gate is a huge wooden latch, which not one of us had sense enough to lift; but then who thinks of taking a fort by assault and battery on the latch? Halicarnassus hit upon it by mere accident, and I therefore remorselessly expose him. Then we saunter ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... began to feel hopeful; but, ere the sun rose, distant sounds, which grew louder and louder, reached his ear. He knew them to be the voices of his pursuers and again he became sorely afraid. He hurried on and came near the foot of a high isolated pinnacle of rock, whose top appeared to be inaccessible. Glancing to the summit, however, he beheld standing there a black mountain sheep. Thinking that this singular vision was sent to him as a sign from the yays (gods) ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews
... incidents haunted Ellesborough's imagination. One moment he shrank from the thought of them; the next he could not restrain the protesting rush of passion—the vow that his love should put her back on that pinnacle of honour and respect from which fate should never have allowed ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to sanction and establish my glory and to set it on the topmost pinnacle of fame? I ask you, what is there lacking? Aemilianus Strabo, who has already held the consulship and is destined, as we all hope and pray, soon to be a proconsul, proposed the resolution conferring these honours upon me in the senate-house ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... severe gales and contrary winds until it seemed as though the spirit of the new ocean had arisen in wrath, forbidding his further progress. He was even driven south of the strait to Cape Horn, where he landed and looked from the southernmost pinnacle of the cape to the mysterious southern sea, declaring triumphantly that he had been farther south than any man in the world and had placed his foot on the extreme of the new continent. Then all at once the weather changed and Drake sailed rapidly ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... brochures—"Appel aux Savans," &c., 1763, 8vo.—and "Reponse a une Critique de la Bibliographie Instructive," 1763, 8vo.—as replies to the tart attacks of the Abbe RIVE. The Catalogue of Gaignat, and the fairness of his answers to his adversary's censures, served to place De Bure on the pinnacle of bibliographical reputation; while Rive was suffered to fret and fume in unregarded seclusion. He died in the year 1782, aged 50: and was succeeded in his bibliographical labours by his cousin WILLIAM; who, with Mons. Van-Praet, prepared the catalogue of the Duke de la Valliere's library, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... monument in the cemetery. It consists of a chapel formed out of the ruins of the Abbey of Paraclete, which was founded by Abelard, and of which Heloise was the first abbess. It is fourteen feet in length, by eleven in breadth, and is twenty-four feet in height. A pinnacle rises out of the roof in a cruciform shape, and four smaller ones exquisitely sculptured stand between the gables. Fourteen columns, six feet high, support beautiful arches, and the cornices are wrought in flowers. The gables of the four fronts have trifoliate ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... to its pinnacle, Twelve Saints had once stood sanctified in stone; But these had fallen, not when the friars fell, But in the war which struck Charles from his throne, When each house was a fortalice—as tell The annals of full many a line undone,— The gallant Cavaliers,[672] who fought in vain ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... self-forgetfulness comes to him again and as a diviner thing. By and by, as the man walks up the mountain, he seems to pass out of the cloud which hangs about the lower slopes of the mountain, until at last he stands upon the pinnacle at the top, and there is in the perfect light. Is it not exactly like the mountain at whose foot there seems to be the open sunshine where men see everything, and on whose summit there is the sunshine, but on whose sides, and half way up, there seems to linger a long ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... enrolled among the gods, the court-poets, of course, were not allowed to neglect the praise of the queens, and they were called upon to celebrate the royal weddings;[316] nay, in the extravagance of their gallant homage they rose to a level of bad taste the pinnacle of which was reached by Callimachus in his elegy—so well-known through the imitation of Catullus—on the hair of queen Berenice placed among the constellations by the courtesy of the ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... borne away from the pinnacle of his imaginary triumph as if dead, Zell following, wringing her hands, and with streaming eyes; but Edith reminded one of some wild, timid creature of the woods, which, though in an extremity of danger ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... precipices;— indeed, here Nature, in her wildest and most romantic forms, was fully represented. The beauty of the wondrous spectacle was heightened when the sun arose, from the varied gorgeous tints which flashed from mountain-top and beetling cliff, from tower, turret, and pinnacle, where its bright rays fell on them as they slowly moved round in their eccentric courses. No words, however, can describe the dazzling whiteness and brilliancy of the floating masses. From some of the most lofty, fountains might be seen gushing ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... have supposed that, by this time, the theme of universal admiration was lifted to the very pinnacle of popularity. No such thing. The curate began to cough; four fits of coughing one morning between the Litany and the Epistle, and five in the afternoon service. Here was a discovery—the curate was consumptive. How interestingly melancholy! If the young ladies ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... at this moment that there occurred a most strange and unexpected thing. We had risen from our rocks and were turning to go home, having abandoned the hopeless chase. The moon was low upon the right, and the jagged pinnacle of a granite tor stood up against the lower curve of its silver disc. There, outlined as black as an ebony statue on that shining background, I saw the figure of a man upon the tor. Do not think that it was a delusion, Holmes. I assure you that ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... listen. Yonder unhappy wretch I have loaden with benefits, rescued from poverty, disgrace; lifted him to the pinnacle of his ambition—the highest rank in art. Base ingrate, he threatened to betray, to denounce, and I crushed the reptile. He is now what thou shalt be shortly unless my power be put forth for thy rescue. Not all the united efforts of man can deliver thee. Beyond ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... occupied with speculations about the decision of arms than with a change which was, after all, only another phase of a protracted, tiresome struggle in which the papacy had long since fallen from its pinnacle. It was, however, an element of terrific demoralization in the house of Austria, which thus saw the consolidation of Italy under the Napoleon family complete, and their last hope to regain their European influence by enlargement ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... and arrogantly leaving the turtle behind them, they went to have the matter decided at Pinnacle, the capital of a king called Conqueror. When they came there, and had been announced and introduced by the door-keeper, they told their story to the king. And when the king had heard all, he said: "Stay here. I will examine you one after another." So they ...
— Twenty-two Goblins • Unknown
... uncharted, trackless sea of white lying below the rocky shores to which the castaways still clung. Through the marvelously clear air the smoke of the pastoral village of Poker Flat rose miles away. Mother Shipton saw it, and from a remote pinnacle of her rocky fastness hurled in that direction a final malediction. It was her last vituperative attempt, and perhaps for that reason was invested with a certain degree of sublimity. It did her good, she privately informed the Duchess. ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... which, brought to the light, would make the art a perfect one and us perfect in it. Now it is time for us to separate. Some of the more ambitious of us will, by dint of hard and unremitting labor, reach the pinnacle of our hopes. ...
— Silver Links • Various
... deeper significance, that here the Queen of the Adriatic was indeed resuscitated and the Venetian Republic born to a sublimer destiny. Surely the same indomitable spirit, the same high courage, that had reared that wondrous city out of the sea, was here before me, piling story upon story, pinnacle beyond pinnacle, till our old-world hearts sickened and our unaccustomed brains grew dizzy at ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... and sympathy, and kindness. It's no use, Mrs Willoughby. I've put you on the topmost pinnacle in my mind, and nothing that you can say can pull you down. I think you are ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... them, and ennoble their lives, that they go at the call of what seems to them their duty. We watch the Chinese eating and laugh at their chopsticks, but we forget that one reason why John Chinaman prides himself upon being at the pinnacle of civilization is that he uses these very chopsticks. (None of the races of Asia, and until recently he knew no other, have ever got beyond chopsticks, the use of which was first taught China, while most of them don't ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... by any means. The smooth, picturebook slope had become jagged and bruised while the regular, evenlyrounded apex had turned into a sort of phrygian cap with its pinnacle woundedly askew. The outlines which had been sharp were now blurred, its evenness had become scraggly. The placid surface was vexed; the attempt on its being had hurt. But not mortally, for even with outline altered, ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... hand all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them; they saw his life in danger; they saw him at last expire in agonies, though they believed that, had he so willed it, no danger could harm him, and that had he thrown himself from the topmost pinnacle of the temple he would have been softly received in the arms of ministering angels. Witnessing his sufferings, and convinced by the miracles they saw him work that they were voluntarily endured, men's ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... the first rankling sting of humiliation and despair, he could almost have struck a murderous blow at the man whom fortune had set on such a pinnacle of pride and insolence, as it seemed to his galled fancy. He was not in the mood to be either just or generous, and he saw in Ralph Gowan nothing but a man who had both the power and will to rival him, and rob him of peace and hope forever. If Dolly had been with him, in all probability ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... a window, looking out at the aged row of cedars, now laden with snow, and thinking of Horace and Soracte. Suddenly, beneath a jutting pinnacle of white boughs which left under themselves one little spot of green, I saw a cardinal hop out and sit full-breasted towards me. The idea flashed through my mind that this might be that shyest, most beautiful fellow whom I had found in September, and whom I tried to make out as the son of my ...
— A Kentucky Cardinal • James Lane Allen
... kindlier road, Hazel would have found that nook in the Klappan Range a pleasant enough place. She could not deny its beauty. It snuggled in the heart of a wild tangle of hills all turreted and battlemented with ledge and pinnacle of rock, from which ran huge escarpments clothed with spruce and pine, scarred and gashed on every hand with slides and deep-worn watercourses, down which tumultuous streams rioted their foamy way. And nestled amid this, like a precious stone in ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... pointed hill will form two small islands (or more, according to the number of the hills) included within one annular reef. Let the island continue subsiding, and the coral-reef will continue growing up on its own foundation, whilst the water gains inch by inch on the land, until the last and highest pinnacle is covered, and there remains a perfect atoll. A vertical section of this atoll is shown in the woodcut by the dotted lines;—a ship is anchored in its lagoon, but islets are not supposed yet to have been formed ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... had opened out wide horizons of public life before an ambitious poet, with a vacillating will, it is true, but not without aspirations; and the journalists had already shown the neophyte, from a pinnacle of the temple, all the kingdoms of the world of letters and ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... father's notice, went forth the palace to the horse and mounting it, turned the pin of ascent, whereupon bird-like it flew with him high in air and soared towards the upper regions of the sky. In early morning his father missed him and, going up to the pinnacle of the palace, in great concern, saw his son rising into the firmament; whereat he was sore afflicted and repented in all penitence that he had not taken the horse and hidden it; and he said to himself, "By Allah, if but my son return to me, I will destroy the horse, that my heart may be at rest ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... city of the South. Rubens, who might fairly be styled the Flemish Titian, and who indeed owed much to his Venetian predecessor, though far less than did his own pupil Van Dyck, was during the first forty years of the seventeenth century on the same pinnacle of supremacy that the Cadorine master had occupied for a much longer period during the Renaissance. He, too, was without a rival in the creation of those vast altar-pieces which made the fame of the churches that owned them; he, too, was the finest painter ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... fortified and occupied by Confederate and Union soldiers in turn. Later, in 1889, the first railroad entered the Gap. Today Skyline Highway—U. S. 25 and 58—leads from the saddle of the historic Gap to the top of Pinnacle Mountain, commanding a view of six states, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, North ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... then trace out how, urged on by his necessities and aided by his senses, he successively discovered the natural productions necessary for his subsistence and the arts which ministered to his wants, until step by step he mounted to the pinnacle of civilization. But these are merely reveries of the closet, dreams of the inexperienced, and have no real foundation in as far at least as Australia is concerned. That the first natives who were placed ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... horizontal outlines and heavy expression of all these churches, have a character very remote from that of the airy, upspringing, fantastic German architecture, in which every shaft, arch, vault-girdle, pillar, window-frame, pinnacle, seems struggling and panting upward with an almost audible eloquence. This is not the expression of the duomo here. There is no perpetual Excelsior ringing from point, spire, and turret. On the contrary, the grave, almost rigid aspect ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... the dawning of redemption. The dawning of the morning is compared by them with the horns of the hind, on account of the rays of light appearing like horns. According to their tradition the lamb was offered as the sacrifice in the morning as soon as the watcher on the pinnacle of the temple cried out "Behold the first ...
— The Lord of Glory - Meditations on the person, the work and glory of our Lord Jesus Christ • Arno Gaebelein
... Elysees, the playing fountains, the spacious streets, and the moving masses of people, presented a scene which for variety, splendour, and I may add, solemnity, could not be excelled by any prospect that might have been commanded on the pinnacle of Jerusalem's Temple. In fifty years the mass of this vast multitude will be numbered amongst a bygone generation; and these stately works of art shall perish. What a worm am I amongst such a multitude! yet I am destined to immortality; ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... termination; the mouldings are carried up in high pointed pediments, and from these a cinquefoil arch at each angle, surmounted also by a pediment, with a quatrefoil in the spandril, connects them with the spire in the centre, and sustains a lofty triangular pinnacle, which, like the pediments below, is decorated with crockets and a finial. In this respect the south spire differs from the other, which has no connection with the side pinnacles. Both are pierced with pointed windows in two ranges, ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips
... Threes and fours and twelves, All the volte face of decimals, The whirligig of dozens and the pinnacle of seven, Turn him on his back, The kicking little beetle, And there again, on his shell-tender, earth-touching belly, The long cleavage of division, ...
— Tortoises • D. H. Lawrence
... special service held at the Great Synagogue in Aldgate, and Juda was exalted in public estimation to a dizzy pinnacle. ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... felt that it was indeed a proud moment for him. To be called Mr. Trotter by the great Bunsby, and to have his hand shaken into the bargain, put him on a pinnacle of greatness which he had never hoped ...
— Mark Mason's Victory • Horatio Alger
... the wonder of his love, rose to the surface. He knew what her singing meant to her, and, from their conversation together just now, how keen was her eagerness for the strict judgment of those who knew, how she loved that austere pinnacle of daylight. Here was an ideal opportunity; never yet, since she had won her place as a singer, had she sung in Germany, that Mecca of the musical artist, and in her case, the land from which she sprung. Had the scheme ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... brick, square and unlovely but many-windowed and glowing, alight, throbbing with the hum of pent industry. Johnnie gazed steadily up at those windows; the glow within was other than that which gilded turret and pinnacle and fairy isle in the Western sky, yet perchance this light might be a lamp to the feet of one who wished to climb that way. Her adventurous spirit rose to the challenge, and she said softly, more to herself ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... progress can hold no truce. As for my wife, I would as soon think of breaking in upon her innocent prayers, as she would of carrying off the works of philosophy from my study table. She is not narrow in her views; but if one could stand upon the very topmost pinnacle of broad-mindedness, one would doubtless see from it that even the narrow have ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... a fraction of a principle? If so, then the XVth Amendment is a fitting capstone to their labors. Were the earnest women who fought and endured so heroically with them, but tools in the hands of the leaders, to place "manhood suffrage" on the highest pinnacle of the temple dedicated to Truth and Justice? And are they now to bow down, and worship in abject submission this fractional part of a principle, that has hitherto proclaimed itself, as knowing neither bond nor free, male nor ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... became a student of his fellow-men; and being strong and untiring, he became rich. This was but the nucleus of his ambitions, and it came to him late in life, but not too late for him to build round it his happy home, and to surround himself with the luxuries of leisure for attaining the pinnacle of wide information that he had always craved. His was merely the prosperity of an intellectual, self-made man whose time ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... descendant of a long race of mountains, existing under appointed laws of birth and endurance, death and decrepitude? There can be no doubt as to the answer. The rock itself answers audibly by the murmur of some falling stone or rending pinnacle. It is not as it was once. Those waste leagues around its feet are loaded with the wrecks of what it was. On these perhaps, of all mountains, the characters of decay are written most clearly; around these are spread most gloomily the memorials of their ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... The pinnacle, when they reached it, appeared very little less difficult than Milton had guessed it would be. The north side offered no hope whatever. It rose smooth and perpendicular toward the heavens. But the south side ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... rock the river surges tumultuously forward, writhing and leaping as if inspired by a demon. It is pressed by the straits into a visibly convex form. Great planes of water slide past. Sometimes it is thrown up into a pinnacle of foam higher than a house, or leaps with incredible speed from the crest of one vast wave to another, along the shining curve between, like the spring of a wild beast. Its motion continually suggests muscular action. The power manifest in these rapids ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... Here we have the topmost pinnacle of authority! (Takes the Mayor's official hat carefully between his finger-tips and holds ...
— An Enemy of the People • Henrik Ibsen
... window.) What they disvizor'd also! shatter'd chaos Cast into stately shape and masonry, Between whose channel'd and perspective sides Compact with rooted towers, and flourishing To heaven with gilded pinnacle and spire, Flows the live current ever to and fro With open aspect and free step!—Clotaldo! Clotaldo!—calling as one scarce dares call For him who suddenly might break the spell One fears to walk without ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... can see that, once I'm located, I'm goin' to be as onpop'lar as a b'ar in a hawg pen; I'll come tumblin' from my pinnacle in that proud commoonity as the glass of fashion an' the mold of form. You can go your bottom peso, the thought causes me to ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... not be seen in his absence; and Mr Paton's enquiries from the Mutsellim, who acted as their cicerone, as to the height of the rock on which the citadel was built above the valley, only made him suspected of being an engineer surveying the stronghold with a view to its capture. After climbing up a pinnacle of rock which overlooked the abyss, he was compelled to return re infecta; "and when we got a little way along the valley, I looked back; Sokol looked like a little castle of Edinburgh placed in the clouds; and a precipice on the other side of the valley presented a perpendicular ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... vessel. Most persons will, I think, own to a feeling of awe in looking up at it. Few can look down from a great height without creepings and crispations, if they do not get as far as vertigos and that aerial calenture which prompts them to jump from the pinnacle on which they are standing. It does not take much imagination to make one experience something of the same feeling in looking up at a very tall steeple or chimney. To one whose eyes are used to Park Street and the Old South steeples as standards of height, a spire which climbs ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... so absorbed in his delight, that he heard, as one who hears not, a wagon go rattling along the road, and the shouting, whistling and singing of boys. It was past noon before he recalled the object with which he had left home that morning. He sat upon the very pinnacle of achievement—that is to say, he sat upon the very highest point in the orchard, his head up, his spirits up, with such a decidedly upward tendency that it was hard for him to make up his mind to descend to the plane of common life. However, he thought ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various
... those mightier summits. He himself was high, and so he could judge the greater height of Seven Sachs; and it was only through the greater height of Seven Sachs that he could form an adequate idea of the pinnacle occupied by the unique Archibald Florance. Honestly, he had never dreamt that there existed a man who habitually smoked twelve-shilling cigars—and yet he reckoned to know a thing or ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... left, spied a small pinnacle of rock about three yards away, fit for his purpose, sidled towards it, and, grasping, made sure that it was firm. Next, reeving one end of the rope into a running noose, he flung it over the pinnacle, and with a tug had it taut. This done, he tilted ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... nowhere. Then the king, when an interpreter was brought, asked what work Frode was about. Erik replied, "Frode never waits at home for a hostile army, nor tarries in his house for his foe. For he who covets the pinnacle of another's power must watch and wake all night. No man has ever won a victory by snoring, and no wolf has ever found a ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... from this place, as I think I have mentioned, stood, and I suppose still stands, a very curious pinnacle of rock, which, doubtless being of some harder sort, had remained when, hundreds of thousands or millions of years before, the surrounding lava had been washed or had corroded away. This rock pillar was perhaps fifty feet high ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... only reply by a look. She had long worshipped Mr. Pickwick at a distance, but here she was, all at once, raised to a pinnacle to which her wildest and most extravagant hopes and never dared to aspire. Mr. Pickwick was going to propose—a deliberate plan, too—sent her little boy to the Borough, to get him out of the ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... perhaps, too selfish. And the stern hand of fate has scourged us to an elevation where we can see the great everlasting things that matter for a nation; the great peaks of honour we had forgotten—duty and patriotism clad in glittering white: the great pinnacle of sacrifice pointing like a rugged finger to Heaven. We shall descend into the valleys again, but as long as the men and women of this generation last they will carry in their hearts the image of these great mountain peaks, whose foundations ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... Jehovah were not merely planetary or solar. Their symbolism, like that of every other Deity, was coextensive with nature, and with the mind of man. Yet the astrological character is assigned even to Jehovah. He is described as seated on the pinnacle of the Universe, leading forth the Hosts of Heaven, and telling them unerringly by name and number. His stars are His sons and His eyes, which run through the whole world, keeping watch over men's deeds. The stars and planets were properly the angels. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... statesman's tact of discriminating between the possible and the impossible, and has not broken down in the task which for greatly gifted natures is the most difficult of all— the task of recognizing, when on the pinnacle of success, its natural limits. What was possible he performed, and never left the possible good undone for the sake of the impossible better, never disdained at least to mitigate by palliatives evils that were incurable. But where he recognized ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Roman Empire reached the highest pinnacle of literary fame and political power in the reign of Augustus Caesar, the period was called the Augustan age. There was a period that existed eminently in the Jackson administration and a few years after that might be called the Augustan age of Congress. So extraordinary ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... withdrew, numbers of bouquets fell on to the stage. But the proud one of Seville did not deign to return to pick them up, and one of the gentlemen in livery was deputed for that purpose. When, however, her measure was encored, she stepped down from her pinnacle and actually condescended to accept an additional bouquet that had been tossed by a fair one from ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... were held by King Wan, he served with that portion the House of Yin. We speak of the virtue of the House of Chow; we may say, indeed, that it reached the pinnacle of excellence." ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... by the wall awhile and watched; the sorrow of it all sank into us. There in the holiest place of all, according to their thinking, close to the emblems of deity, they had set this grievous perversion of the holy and the pure. Right on the topmost pinnacle of everything known as religious there they had enthroned it, and robed it in starlight and crowned it as queens are crowned. "Oh, worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness!" "One thing have I desired of the Lord . . . ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... neglect, too, that it was in their glorification of the rationality of the cosmos that they had their greatest effect. Through milleniums of civilization, man's understanding of celestial phenomena had been the very pinnacle of his intellect, and then as now popular exhibition of this sort was just as necessary, as striking, and as impressive. One does not have to go far to see how the paraphernalia of these early great astronomical clocks ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... as he were stuck with swords, Great streams of light go upward. Then the lords Of havoc and unrest prepare their storms, And o'er the silent city, vulture forms— Eris and Enyo, Alke, Ioke, The biter, the sharp-bitten, the mad, the fey— Hover and light on pinnacle and tower: The gray Erinnyes, watchful for the hour When Haro be the wail. And down the sky Like a white squall flung Ate with a cry That sounded like the wind in a ship's shrouds, As shrill and wild at once. The driving clouds Surging ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... counts for nothing, the only possible conception of the authority of law is that it proceeds from a superior being—the highest ruler. And in order to secure the full advantage of authority, the supreme ruler must be raised to the highest possible pinnacle, must be apotheosized. That national laws should be the product of the unvalued units which compose the nation was unthinkable in an age when the worth of the individual was utterly unrecognized. The apotheosis of the Emperor was neither an unintelligible nor an unreasonable practice. ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... hot war of politics he had scarcely a personal foe; and in private life he kept himself so aloof and apart from others that he was little known, save by the benefits the waste of his wealth conferred. That the hate of any one could reach the austere statesman on his high pinnacle of esteem,—you would have smiled at the idea! But Hate is now, as it ever has been, an actual Power amidst "the Varieties of Life;" and, in spite of bars to the door, and policemen in the street, no one can be said to sleep in safety ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... me again. I retained even then a clinging hope of some quasi-human evidence, some pinnacle of building, some house or engine, but everywhere one looked spread the tumbled rocks in peaks and crests, and the darting scrub and those bulging cacti that swelled and swelled, a flat negation as it ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... walking by the side of Madame von Rosen, along that mountain wall, her servant following with both the horses, and all about them sunlight, and breeze, and flying bird, and the vast regions of the air, and the capacious prospect: wildwood and climbing pinnacle, and the sound and voice of mountain torrents, at their hand: and far below them, green melting into ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... spirit and power of Elijah: that spirit and power are for us too. Just as the dawn touches the highest peaks of the Alps, and afterwards, as the morning hours creep on, the tide of light passes down into the valley, so the Spirit that smote that glorious pinnacle Elijah, and that nearer pinnacle the Baptist, is waiting to ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
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