... this reflection and by a certain note of sublimity in her experience, Missy leaned against the gatepost upon which a lantern was blinking its last shred of life, and gazed at ... — Missy • Dana Gatlin Read full book for free!
... prowl there, the mountains of gold that lie waiting there, the mystery and the splendor! Oh keep with me, my friend, for a little while in the Sierras; breathe their balm and health, see their sublimity, feel their might and their majesty; step upward, as on stepping stairs to heaven; and my word for it, you ... — Shadows of Shasta • Joaquin Miller Read full book for free!
... had gazed, and dreamed, and raved by turns. I had been melted into tears of tenderness by the perfect harmony and loveliness of some scenes, and had been frozen into awe by the magnificent grandeur and terrible sublimity of others. And, after those six years of travel in foreign lands, I had returned, my brain one endless panorama of hills, valleys and cloud-capped mountains, earth, skies, wood and water. Not one of those gorgeous scenes, however, ... — Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various Read full book for free!
... the infinite;—hence their passions, their obscure hopes and fears, their wandering through the unknown, their grander moral feelings, their more august conception of man as man, their future rather than their past—in a word, their sublimity. ... — Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge Read full book for free!
... at different periods conferred a kind of lustre upon Bangor by residing in it, Taliesin in the old, and Edmund Price in comparatively modern time. Both of them were poets. Taliesin flourished about the end of the fifth century, and for the sublimity of his verses was for many centuries called by his countrymen the Bardic King. Amongst his pieces is one generally termed "The Prophecy of Taliesin," which announced long before it happened the entire ... — Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow Read full book for free!
... a fair heritage to lose through a feeble vanity—that beautiful Constantinople!" she said musingly. "The East and the West—what an empire! More than Alexander ever grasped at—what might not have been done with it? Asian faith and Oriental sublimity, with Roman power and Gothic force; if there had been a hand strong enough to weld all these together, what a world there might ... — Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida Read full book for free!
... I confess with shame that my reverend preceptor's religious dissertations began, about this time, to lose their relish very much, and by degrees became exceedingly tiresome to my ear. They were so inferior, in strength and sublimity, to the most common observations of my young friend that in drawing a comparison the former appeared as nothing. He, however, examined me about many things relating to my companion, in all of which I satisfied him, save in one: I could neither tell him who my friend was, what ... — The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg Read full book for free!
... the hoarse sighs of the November wind through the naked trees, the rustling of the withered leaves which strewed the glades, the repeated halloos of the different parties, which often drew them together in expectation of meeting the objects of their search, gave a cast of dismal sublimity to the scene. ... — Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott Read full book for free!
... conveyed. Who can tell what would be the effect of such a church music? What a feeling of earnestness and sincerity would it not lend to services now often marred by the shallowness or meretricious glitter of their musical portions? The range is wide, the field broad; there is scope for grandeur, sublimity, power, jubilation, the brightest strains of extatic joy, mourning, pathos, and the passionate pleading of the human soul severed from its highest good; but all should be in accordance with the dignity of the personalities ... — Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various Read full book for free!
... offered to read me a few sonnets. He had the manuscript about him, and I could not escape the penance. He read a dozen or so, which I thought mediocre, and a mediocre sonnet is necessarily a bad sonnet, as this form of poetry demands sublimity; and thus amongst the myriads of sonnets to which Italy gives birth very few can be ... — The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt Read full book for free!
... purpose and unfaltering power, are the early stages in the redemptive work—the unseen approach of that Kingdom whose strange mark is that it "cometh without observation." And these Kingdoms rising tier above tier in ever increasing sublimity and beauty, their foundations visibly fixed in the past, their progress, and the direction of their progress, being facts in Nature still, are the signs which, since the Magi saw His star in the East, have never been wanting from the firmament ... — Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond Read full book for free!
... Pepeeta were to share with him in the excitement of this conflagration, and David had postponed it until dusk, in order that they might enjoy its entire sublimity. He had taken the precaution to plow many furrows around the cabin and also around the edge of the clearing, so the flames could neither destroy his ... — The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss Read full book for free!
... to your sublimity, that the sect of dervishes, of which I had become a member, were then designated by the name of howling dervishes; all our religion consisted in howling like jackals or hyenas, with all our might, until we fell down in real or pretended convulsions. My howl was considered ... — The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat Read full book for free!
... principal poems of Collins. There is a fire of mind which supersedes labour, and produces what labour cannot. It has been said that Collins is neither sublime nor pathetic; but only ingenious and fanciful. The truth is, that he was cast in the very mould of sublimity and pathos. He lived in an atmosphere above the earth, and breathed only in a visionary world. He was conversant with nothing else, and this must have been the secret by which he produced compositions so entirely spiritual. He who has daily intercourse with the world, and feels the ... — The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins Read full book for free!
... absolutely necessary,' argued Sir Matthew, 'to have justice kept up at all times,' whatever flaws may exist in the title of the men in whom the supreme authority may chance to be vested. Never yet was there a simpler proposition; but there is sublimity in its breadth. It involves the true doctrine of subjection to the magistrate, as enforced by St. Paul. The New Testament furnishes us with no disquisitions on political justice: it does not say whether the title of Domitian to the supreme authority was a ... — Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller Read full book for free!
... knowledge of mythology in her honour, calling her Melpomene, the tragic Muse, for had she not made men weep with her song that very night? Song, did he say? nay, hymn it was! She was Polyhymnia, singer of sublimity. He named her Philomele, and desired the lute of Orpheus that he might play an accompaniment to her wondrous singing. He asked her in which enchanted ocean she had lived. 'Mademoiselle Sirene, lurer of ... — A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay Read full book for free!
... the orator seem to him like the cheapest acting. Yet to us who understand it, it does not seem that Patrick Henry in the old church at Richmond need yield the palm to Chatham in St. Stephen's Chapel, either for the grandeur of his theme or of his stage, or the sublimity of ... — Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar Read full book for free!
... perspective. Objects are softened, and rounded, and rendered doubly graceful; the harsher and more ordinary points of character are mellowed down, and those by which it is remembered are the more striking outlines that mark sublimity, grace, or beauty. There are mists too in the mental as well as the natural horizon, to conceal what is less pleasing in distant objects, and there are happy lights, to stream in full glory upon those points which can profit by ... — Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott Read full book for free!
... scenery, consisting of cliffs from six to eight hundred feet in height, rising perpendicularly from their bases, below which were recesses, into which the sun never shone, and whose gloomy grandeur imparted a melancholy cast to the thoughts and feelings, in unison with the sublimity of the ... — Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre Read full book for free!
... recommended by Gluck for her good natural voice. At Her Majesty's request, Gluck himself taught Madame Saint Huberti the part of Armida. Sacchini, also, at the command of Marie Antoinette, instructed her in the style and sublimity of the Italian school, and Mdlle. Benin, the Queen's dressmaker and milliner, was ordered to furnish the ... — The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 4 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe Read full book for free!
... struck horror into the gods themselves." His imagination dwells in the loftiest regions of the old mythology of Greece; his tone is always pure and moral, though stern and harsh; he appeals to the most violent passions, and is full of the boldest metaphors. In sublimity Aeschylus has never been surpassed. He was in poetry what Phidias and Michael Angelo were in art. The critics say that his sublimity of diction is sometimes carried to an extreme, so that his language becomes inflated. His characters, like his sentiments, were sublime,—they ... — Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord Read full book for free!
... unable to go farther without assistance; but he offered none, and they stood for several moments in absolute silence—for a quick spasm of fright had shot across his soul! The sublimity of her partial surrender, contingent only upon his transportation to a foreign battlefield, suddenly brought the war from three thousand miles away to his very door. But his next feeling was one of self-contempt, and squaring his shoulders ... — Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris Read full book for free!
... I felt my ears ringing in the silence. She had walked to the sacrificial altar with so steady a step, and laid upon it her precious all with so gallant a front of quiet resolution, that for an instant I failed to take in the sublimity of her self-immolation. Mrs. Purdon asking for charity! And asking the one woman who had most reason to refuse ... — Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield Read full book for free!
... not purchase thy history with salt and shelter," he said, with a certain sublimity... — The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller Read full book for free!
... nearest path towards the Meer, losing sight of it as they advanced into the low flat sands, scarcely above its level. When again it opened into view its wide waveless surface lay before them, reposing in all the sublimity of loneliness and silence. The rapture of the child was excessive. She surveyed with delight its broad unruffled bosom, giving back the brightness and glory of that heaven to which it looked; to her it seemed another sky ... — Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby Read full book for free!
... beauty and sublimity of the true life, by what is sacred and pathetic in this strife of humanity for truth, justice, and brotherly love, his heart holds the fascination of it. Gradually everything subordinates itself to this powerful and persistent charm. The necessary hierarchy of powers ... — The Simple Life • Charles Wagner Read full book for free!
... came, cold, black, and tempestuous. At midnight, her friends took her in a hack, and conveyed her, with her children, to the house of her pastor. Hence, after an hour of weeping, for the voice of prayer had passed away into the sublimity of unutterable anguish, they conveyed this mother and her children to one of the Cunard steamers, which fortunately was to sail for Halifax the next day. They took them in the gloom of midnight, through the tempest-swept streets, ... — Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various Read full book for free!
... presents few greater characters—few that excite at once more love and admiration, and in which we see tenderness, humor, and a certain picturesque grace and poetic sensibility more happily combined with a lofty and magnanimous, if sometimes rugged, sublimity. ... — Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various Read full book for free!
... and presented to us as God manifest in the flesh, is at once the very opposite of the characters given in the myths. The distance between the two is the distance between the lowest degradation of God-like power exercised in the lowest passions, and the sublimity of Heaven's own spotless life. I love the religion of the Scriptures, because it restores to the race the lost knowledge of God and the additional life of Jesus—the only perfect model known in the history of the race. ... — The Christian Foundation, April, 1880 Read full book for free!
... right in defining Sublimity as "the ring, or resonance, of greatness of soul," one sees in part where the sublimity of the Agamemnon comes from. And it is worth noting that the faults which some critics have found in the play are in harmony with this conclusion. For the sublimity that is rooted in religion tolerates some ... — Agamemnon • Aeschylus Read full book for free!
... described as inspired common sense. The great artist never loses touch of fact; he may let his imagination soar as high as the stars, but he keeps his feet firm-planted on the ground. All the world recognises the sublimity of Greek sculpture and Shakespeare's plays, because they are both true to nature and fact and coincident with everlasting laws. The true sublime is not fantastic; it is solid and satisfying, like a mighty Alp, deep-rooted first of all ... — Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote Read full book for free!
... "every eye shall see," and seeing, recognise his divine dignity. In the next verse he is styled God, not to identify him, but as a matter of course in the narrative.—No sooner did the Judge take his seat, than "the earth and the heaven fled away." The simplicity and sublimity of this language are inimitable by human genius; and rarely if at all equalled, even by those who spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. The first inspired writer uses language very similar. (Gen. i. 3.) We are frequently and sufficiently ... — Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele Read full book for free!
... "Sublimity of conception, grandeur of form, and breadth of manner, are the elements of Michael Angelo's style. By these principles, he selected or rejected the objects of imitation. As painter, as sculptor, as architect, he attempted—and above any other man, succeeded—to unite magnificence of plan, ... — Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various Read full book for free!
... and sublimity is the result of geological conditions and the action of water, which together have produced many similar phenomena in the region of the causses, but in no other case, I believe, with such power in composing the picturesque. Imagine an open plain which in the truly Dark ... — Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker Read full book for free!
... Peterhof were quite eclipsed by the Oriental splendours of Moscow, which naturally made a great impression upon a mind accustomed to the cold sublimity... — The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood Read full book for free!
... perching on the fence, or singing from a tree-top in the old familiar way. Where the robin is at home, there at home am I. But many other things helped to win my heart to the Yosemite—the whole character of the scene, not only its beauty and sublimity, but the air of peace and protection, and of homelike seclusion that pervades it; the charm of a nook, a retreat, combined with the power and grandeur of nature ... — Time and Change • John Burroughs Read full book for free!
... human reason fails to grasp poetical expressions on account of their being lacking in truth, so does it fail to grasp Divine things perfectly, on account of the sublimity of the truth they contain: and therefore in both cases there is need of signs by means of ... — Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas Read full book for free!
... reading the writings of the Hebrew Prophets, and of those other gifted bards who communed so intently with nature and with nature's God, it has seemed to me impossible that any one could enter fully into all the tenderness, beauty, and sublimity of their language, or receive into his heart all its peculiarity of meaning, unless his own eye had been used to trace the skill of that hand which framed and fashioned every thing that is, and to descry the delicacy of that pencil which has painted all the flowers of the field, nor unless ... — Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew Read full book for free!
... expand the body and inform it with the quality of immortality; Ajax, in his magnificent gesture of defiance, is all spirit. Cleggett, with his hand on his hip, uttered these words, not without their sublimity: ... — The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis Read full book for free!
... measure of his labor will be that of his reward.[9] The style of the martyr everywhere follows the impulses of a burning charity, rather than the rules of grammar, and his pen is never able to express the sublimity of his thoughts. In every word there is a fire and a beauty not to be paralleled: every thing is full of a deep sense. He everywhere breathes the most profound humility and contempt of himself as an abortive, and ... — The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler Read full book for free!
... believed in virtue, and of the selfish who have not been able to attain to it. The favorite phrase of Jesus continues, therefore, full of an eternal beauty. A kind of exalted divination seems to have maintained it in a vague sublimity, embracing at the same ... — The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan Read full book for free!
... of salvation to the Negroes, he died a death excelled in sublimity only by that of the Saviour of men. Both died for men; one, for all mankind, the other willing to risk all that he might open the prison door to those confined, and to strike off the bands ... — John Brown: A Retrospect - Read before The Worcester Society of Antiquity, Dec. 2, 1884. • Alfred Roe Read full book for free!
... these later days of Browning's has ceased to yield high, or even serious poetry, and Baldinucci's tale of shabby trickery cannot be compared, even for grotesque humour, with the powerful grotesquerie of Holy-Cross Day, while it wholly lacks the great lift of Hebraic sublimity at the close. The Epilogue returns to the combative apologetics of the title poem; but, unlike that, does attempt some reply to the cavils of the discontented. They cannot have the strong and the sweet—body and bouquet—at once, he tells them in ... — Robert Browning • C. H. Herford Read full book for free!
... catches sight of a prairie landscape, especially if that landscape be one of those great rolling ones to be seen nowhere so well as in Minnesota. Charlton had crossed Illinois from Chicago to Dunleith in the night-time, and so had missed the flat prairies. His sense of sublimity was keen, and, besides his natural love for such scenes, he had a hobbyist passion for ... — The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston Read full book for free!
... and colour in such common objects as a tree-trunk or a bit of old wall. Nature, moreover, in spreading out her spaces of earth, sea and sky, and in exhibiting the action of her forces, does so on a scale which seems to make sublimity her prerogative in which art vainly endeavours to ... — Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia Read full book for free!
... upon acquiring some false emotion, not his own, but belonging to the past, or to other persons, because he has been taught that such and such a result of it will be fine. Every attempted sentiment in relation to art is hypocritical; our notions of sublimity, of grace, or pious serenity, are all secondhand: and we are practically incapable of designing so much as a bell-handle or a door-knocker, without borrowing the first notion of it from those who are gone—where ... — Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin Read full book for free!
... surf of the symbolists. Thinking of him, I could not forget that it is the spirit and not the flesh that is eternal; that, as it was thought that in the first instance gave man speech, so to the end it shall still be thought that shall make speech beautiful and rememberable. The grandeur and sublimity of Balzac's thoughts seem to me to rise to the loftiest heights, and his range is limitless; there is no passion he has not touched, and what is more marvellous, he has given to each in art a place equivalent to the place it occupies in nature; his ... — Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore Read full book for free!
... would pardon such lapses, and very rightly so. But you subject every word that I utter to the closest examination, you weigh it carefully, you try it by the plumb-line and the file, you test it by the polish of the lathe and the sublimity of the tragic buskin. Such is the indulgence accorded to mediocrity, such the severity meted out to distinction. I recognize, therefore, the difficulty of the task that lies before me, and I do not ask you to alter the opinions you entertain of me. Yet I would not have you ... — The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius Read full book for free!
... because the murmur of life, the calls of the birds, the splashing of the fountains, and the light-hearted joy of the crowd around, all meet and mingle in its chorus. He echoed them all with the sublimity of the power which he controlled, and all—bird-calls, fountain-drip, desultory laughter, and careless joy, all flowed from him, and took from him as they flowed that subtle and precious subconsciousness which lines our every cloud with the infinite hope that is better than ... — A Woman's Will • Anne Warner Read full book for free!
... grandeur and sublimity that indicate Universal Life, but smallness and commonplace do the same. A sage of old awakened to the faith[FN151] when he heard a bell ring; another, when he looked at the peach blossom; another, when he heard the frogs croaking; and ... — The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya Read full book for free!
... he walked home and it amused him, and he thought of how unexpected their lives would be, and he hummed beautiful music as he went along the roads, Schumann's Lotus Flower and The Moonlight. Then he recalled the beautiful duet, Siegmund's and Sieglinde's May Time, and turning from sublimity suddenly into triviality he chanted the somewhat common but expressive duet in Mireille, and the superficiality of its emotion pleased him at the moment and he hummed it until he arrived ... — The Untilled Field • George Moore Read full book for free!
... intellectual beauty, the latter expresses, also, the majesty of sorrow, the grandeur of endurance, the idea of triumph refined from agony. In all those shapes of old there is nothing like the glory of the martyr; the sublimity of patience and resignation; the dignity ... — The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin Read full book for free!
... image—is the veritable hero of the Gerusalemme; and by a curious unintended propriety he disappears from the action before the close, without a word. The force of the poem is spiritualized and concentrated in Clorinda's death, which may be cited as an instance of sublimity in pathos. It is idyllized in the episode of Erminia among the shepherds, and sensualized in the supreme beauty of Armida's garden. Rinaldo is second in importance to Tancredi; and Goffredo, on whom Tasso bestows the blare of his Virgilian trumpet from the first line to the last, is poetically ... — Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds Read full book for free!
... overwhelming reverses of fortune. Those disasters which break down the spirit of a man and prostrate him in the dust seem to call forth all the energies of the softer sex, and give such intrepidity and elevation to their character, that at times it approaches to sublimity.—WASHINGTON IRVING. ... — Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various Read full book for free!
... erected! No empire or kingdom, at least since imperial Rome perished from the earth, ever unrolled a surface so vast and so variegated, so manifold in its fertilities and so various in its aspects of beauty and sublimity. From the Northern wastes, where the hunter and the trapper pursue by force or guile the fur-bearing animals, to the ever-perfumed latitudes of the lemon and the myrtle,—from the stormy Atlantic, where the skiff of the fisherman rocks fearlessly ... — The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various Read full book for free!
... for the first six months of 1823—if it can be called living, to leave food untasted, and go in neglect of person and dress. He wrestled so desperately with the difficulties, that anybody but the Cointets would have seen the sublimity of the struggle, for the brave fellow was not thinking of his own interests. The moment had come when he cared for nothing but the victory. With marvelous sagacity he watched the unaccountable freaks of the semi-artificial substances ... — Eve and David • Honore de Balzac Read full book for free!
... in the extreme to observe the pompous grandiloquence in the advertisements of the amusement-furnishing public, about Christmas and New-Year. Sublimity glares from the theatrical hand-bill, and the menagerie affiche. Curiosities, then, have a 'most magnanimous value.' I remember, not long ago, that I desired a lovely lady, a French countess, to accompany ... — The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various Read full book for free!
... performances which were by no means ordinary, and our repertory included everything of this nature that had ever been written for the theatre. I was particularly pleased with the presentation of Spohr's Jessonda, which was truly not without sublimity, and raised us high in the esteem of all cultured lovers of music. I was untiring in my endeavours to discover some means of elevating our performances above the usual level of excellence compatible with the meagre resources of provincial ... — My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner Read full book for free!
... rationality is clearly developed, and is allotted its just place in Moral Science, that the universal structure to which we have already alluded, and which, as we saw, culminated in the will, assumes its peculiar sublimity. For the voluntariness which is consciously realized in reason gives man the mastery over constitutional processes, not merely to direct, but even to thwart them; nor this merely for himself, but it is in his power, through ... — Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various Read full book for free!
... Wilsonii) are our peers of song. The Mocking-Bird undoubtedly possesses the greatest range of mere talent, the most varied executive ability, and never fails to surprise and delight one anew at each hearing; but being mostly an imitator, he never approaches the serene beauty and sublimity of the Hermit-Thrush. The word that best expresses my feelings, on hearing the Mocking-Bird, is admiration, though the first emotion is one of surprise and incredulity. That so many and such various notes should proceed from one throat is a marvel, ... — The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various Read full book for free!
... Alice, while the chorus of sound about them swelled almost to sublimity, "that I've been getting engaged—to ... — A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull Read full book for free!
... charge of the neighbouring parish of St. Anthony, and though he liked the place less than his former residence by the mouth of the Exe, he admitted that "in the walks to St. Anthony, the tufted creeks, the opening sea, the prospect of Pendennis Castle, there was picturesque beauty—there was even sublimity." Polwhele was magistrate as well as parson, and on one occasion the famous Captain Bligh (himself a Cornishman) was brought before him, charged with plots of treachery by the officious Manaccan constables; he had been detected surveying the harbour of Helford. Bligh appears at first ... — The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon Read full book for free!
... to a certain type of radical mind and his translators and editors have generally been men who were often over-enthusiastic. For example, Mr. Wilkinson says of the Systeme de la Nature, [64:15] "No work, ancient or modern, has surpassed it in the eloquence and sublimity of its language or in the facility with which it treats the most abstruse and difficult subjects. It is without exception the boldest effort the human mind has yet produced in the investigation of Morals and Theology. ... — Baron d'Holbach • Max Pearson Cushing Read full book for free!
... happens that Greylock, in our immediate vicinity, is the highest mountain in the Commonwealth, and gives a view from its summit 'that for vastness and sublimity is equalled by nothing in New England except the White Hills.' And it is an ancient observance to go up from this valley once in the year to 'see the world.' We were not of the number who availed themselves of this lex non scripta, ... — A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall Read full book for free!
... young painter and to frustrate an accident that might perhaps prove fortunate? For those had also been cooling words at the hour, though Peter blushed on the morrow to think that he felt in them anything but Nash's personal sublimity. He was ashamed of having been refreshed, and refreshed by so sickly a draught—it being all his theory that he was not in a fever. As for keeping an eye on Nick, it would soon become clear to that young man and that young man's charming friend ... — The Tragic Muse • Henry James Read full book for free!
... impossibility cannot be a duty. It is not my duty to fly, because I have not wings; and conversely, no doubt, it would follow that if it were my duty I must possess the organs required. Thus understood, however, the phrase loses its sublimity, and yet, it is only because we have so to understand it, that it has any plausibility. Admitting, however, that people who differ from me can use grander language, and confessing my readiness to admit error whenever they can point to a single fact attainable by the pure reason, ... — Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen Read full book for free!
... of single unconnected ones, with extensive valleys between them. In some places, several were piled behind each, and those most distant from them appeared like dark indistinct clouds. Nothing could surpass the singularity, and it may be added the sublimity of the whole view from the top of the granite hill which they had ascended, and they contemplated it silence for a few seconds, with emotions of astonishment ... — Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish Read full book for free!
... crime, was his bad English. He spoke our language, but not well. Our literature he was incapable of enjoying or understanding. He never once appeared in the theatre. The poets who wrote Pindaric verse in his praise complained that their flights of sublimity were beyond his comprehension. But his wife did her best to supply what was wanting. She was excellently qualified to be the head of the Court. She was English by birth and also in her tastes and feelings. The stainless purity of her ... — The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee Read full book for free!
... melody, transcendent and sentimental enough for the enthusiast or the cynic respectively, reflecting an innate hope—a common interest in common things and common men—a tune the Concord bards are ever playing, while they pound away at the immensities with a Beethovenlike sublimity, and with, may we say, a vehemence and perseverance—for that part of greatness is not so ... — Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives Read full book for free!
... murmured to herself that the horrible forebodings she had in reference to the island, were but the precursor of what might be expected. The grandeur and sublimity of its scenery, its isolated position, being surrounded by the waters of the Atlantic—the unnatural music and noises, all conspired to fill the mind of this young girl with the idea that something was about to transpire of no ordinary nature,—and ... — Blackbeard - Or, The Pirate of Roanoke. • B. Barker Read full book for free!
... to discriminate between animal courage and true valor—between the defender of his country and the ravager of other states. In short, I see in Thaddeus Sobieski all that my fancy hath ever pictured of the heroic character. Whilst I contemplate the sublimity of his sentiments and the tenderness of his soul, I cannot help thinking how few would believe that so many admirable qualities could belong to one mind, and that mind remain unacquainted with the throes of ambition or ... — Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter Read full book for free!
... religiously undertook that pilgrimage. But Madame Magnan had died of consumption. It was not without deep emotion that I burned the letter of which I was the bearer. You will perhaps smile at my German imagination, but I see a drama of sad sublimity in the eternal secrecy which engulfed those parting words cast between two graves, unknown to all creation, like the cry uttered in a desert by some lonely ... — The Red Inn • Honore de Balzac Read full book for free!
... inform your Sublimity,' he said, with all the indifference he could assume, 'that the lady Aurelia despatched two days ago a courier to Rome apprising the noble commandant Bessas of her father's death, and of her intention to arrive in the city as soon as possible, and to put her means at his disposal for ... — Veranilda • George Gissing Read full book for free!
... contact with the infinite that surrounds us. She became the sinner awakening to repentance, and yearning for the atoning peace of the cloister, a Magdalen of Art, touched on the high road of worldliness and frivolity by the mystic sublimity of the Beautiful; and she cast herself at the feet of Him, the supreme Master, as the most victorious of men, lord of the mystery ... — The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez Read full book for free!
... intellectual, a moral, and a religious faculty. It is the mother and mistress of faith, hope, and love. It is the source of great thoughts, of high aspirations, and of heavenly dreams. Without it the illimitable starlit expanse loses its sublimity, oceans and mountains their awfulness and majesty, flowers their beauty, home its sacred charm, youth its halo, and the grave ... — Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding Read full book for free!
... continuance of these cliffs might prove to us, there was a grandeur and sublimity in their appearance that was most imposing, and which struck me with admiration. Stretching out before us in lofty, unbroken outline, they presented the singular and romantic appearance of massy battlements of masonry, supported by huge buttresses, glittering in the morning sun which had ... — The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc Read full book for free!
... overwhelming in my then uncloyed condition, I speak of it the more freely. My companions rushed about as if each one had had a searchwarrant in his pocket; but I was content to uncover my head and drop into a seat, and busy my mind with some simple object near at hand, while the sublimity that soared about me stole into my soul and possessed it. My sensation was like that imparted by suddenly reaching a great altitude: there was a sort of relaxation of the muscles, followed by a sense of physical weakness; and after half an hour or so I felt compelled to go out ... — Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs Read full book for free!
... world's mightiest master of enchantment, who had himself penned so many works which were the admiration of his fellows, were those brief words uttered, when the spirit hung between two worlds, 'There is but one book.' Would you learn true sublimity? Throw away Virgil, the Greek and Roman classics, and even Milton and Shakspeare, and go ... — Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various Read full book for free!
... worthy of note that the very variety and irregularity that attracts us so much in these buildings does not meet with universal approval in the French schools. In the 'Grammaire des Arts du Dessin,' M. Charles Blanc lays down as an axiom, that "sublimity in architecture belongs to three essential conditions—simplicity of surface, straightness, and continuity of line." Nevertheless we find many modern French houses built in the style of the 13th and 14th century; especially ... — Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn Read full book for free!
... storm, or of snow, if only he may reach the summit and lave his soul in the glory that crowns the marriage of earth and sky. They feel that the aspirant is but yielding obedience to the behests of his better self to scale the heights where sublimity dwells." ... — The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson Read full book for free!
... of the Roman mind does not express itself, nor is it at all to be sought, in their poetry. Poetry, according to the Roman ideal of it, was not an adequate organ for the grander movements of the national mind. Roman sublimity must be looked for in Roman acts, and in Roman sayings. Where, again, will you find a more adequate expression of the Roman majesty, than in the saying of Trajan—Imperatorem oportere stantem mori—that ... — The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein Read full book for free!
... pure imagination. That is what ought to have been—perhaps was. Now, see how I tell a pathetic negative. Nobody knows what became of her—that is finely indicated by the series coming to a close. There is no sixth picture." Here Hans pretended to speak with a gasping sense of sublimity, and drew back his head with a frown, as if looking for a like impression on Deronda. "I break off in the Homeric style. The story is chipped off, so to speak, and passes with a ragged edge into nothing—le neant; can anything be more sublime, especially in French? The vulgar ... — Daniel Deronda • George Eliot Read full book for free!
... they never show their most delicate and divinest colors until we shall have dissolved away their grosser actualities by steeping them long in a powerful menstruum of thought. And seeking to actualize them again, we do but renew the crust. If this were otherwise,—if the moral sublimity of a great fact depended in any degree on its garb of external circumstances, things which change and decay,—it could not itself be immortal and ubiquitous, and only a brief point of time and a little neighborhood ... — Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne Read full book for free!
... account as of a fact observed and proved, saying if man is on one side a "fierce and lascivious gorilla," on the other side he is a mystic animal, and that in "a double nature, mysterious hymen," as Hugo wrote, lay the explanation of all the baseness in ideas and actions as well as all the sublimity in ideas and actions of humanity. Personally he was a Stoic and his practice was the continuous development of the intelligence regarded as the ... — Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet Read full book for free!
... fateful wanderings, his unparalleled pilgrimage, through the lands and the centuries, along an endless, thorny path, drenched with blood, watered with tears, across nations and thrones, lonely, terrible, sublime with the stern sublimity of tragic scenes. They are not the sights and experiences to inspire joyous songs—melody is muffled by terror. Only lamentation finds voice, an endless, oppressive, anxious wail, sounding adown, through two thousand years, like a long-drawn sigh, reverberating in ... — Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles Read full book for free!
... called Alingavia. We stopped to examine its castle, which is celebrated in the history of France, as the scene of the marriage of Charles the Eighth and Anne of Bretagne. The castle, as may be expected, is now in ruins; but enough remains of it, to prove its former magnificence. It frowns with much sublimity over the subject land. I never remember to have passed through a more lovely country, more varied scenery, abounding in vines, corn, meadow, wood, and water, than the whole of the road between Saumur and Tours. ... — Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney Read full book for free!
... cities, where you would see very little more than you can in Saint Petersburg itself. It is Nature I wish you to become acquainted with, and you must see it in its most primitive forms. There only can you appreciate Nature in all its sublimity and grandeur." ... — Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid Read full book for free!
... men, dressed in gowns and head-wreaths, in representation of the Jews who persecuted our Saviour, rushing about the streets in tawdry attire before and after the ceremony in such apparent ignorance of the real intention that it annulled the sublimity of the ... — The Philippine Islands • John Foreman Read full book for free!
... perhaps St. Peter refers. In point of time Jonah comes just with his message of woe to the city of Nineveh. Amos the herdman and Hosea his contemporary follow. Then Joel with his thunder, and Isaiah with his evangelism; Micah with his earnestness; Nahum with his sublimity; and Zephaniah with his severity, take their place in about equal succession. Jeremiah then appears with all his weightiness of matter and solemnity of manner. Habakkuk in briefer form takes up the same subjects. Daniel with great grandeur ... — The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King Read full book for free!
... the head we have Modesty and Reverence, the former running down into Bashfulness and the latter into Humility or Servility. Next to these we find Sublimity, which was correctly suggested by the Edinburgh phrenologists. It lies between Reverence ... — Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various Read full book for free!
... was obliged to confess that it had many of the characteristic features of the real phenomenon. The wind had the orthodox howl through the rigging, the sea was fully up to the prescribed standard, and the vessel pitched and rolled in a way to satisfy the most critical taste. The impression of sublimity, however, which I had anticipated, was almost entirely lost in the sense of personal discomfort. A man who has just been pitched over a skylight by one of the ship's eccentric movements, or drenched to the skin by a burst of spray, is not in a state of mind ... — Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan Read full book for free!
... Alps, The palaces of Nature, whose vast walls Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps, And throned Eternity in icy halls Of cold sublimity, where forms and falls The Avalanche—the thunderbolt of snow! All that expands the spirit yet appals, Gather around these summits, as to show How Earth may pierce to Heaven, yet ... — Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux Read full book for free!
... woods on the rocky wall of the mountain, and that small span of star-lit heaven above; all those frightened, maddened, running, crouching, creeping men and women around, with the chanting Jew, in his long silken caftan and dangling locks, in the midst of them, made a picture of terrible sublimity. ... — Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai Read full book for free!
... nothing but the clock that tells us our woes; the vine shall grow, but we shall never see it," etc. Is not the last circumstance exquisite? I mean not to lay myself open by saying they exceed Milton, and perhaps Collins in sublimity. But don't you conceive all poets after Shakspeare yield to 'em in variety of genius? Massinger treads close on their heels; but you are most probably as well acquainted with his writings as your humble servant. My quotations, in that case, will only ... — The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb Read full book for free!
... ancestral seat of the celebrated family of Courtenay. All the county flocks to them, some persons coming fifty miles for this purpose. Apropos of one of these meetings, we shall venture to interpolate an anecdote which deserves to be recorded for the sublimity of impudence which it displays. The railway from London to Plymouth skirts the park of Powderham, running so close beside it that each train sends a herd of deer scampering down the velvety glades. One afternoon a bouncing young lady, who belonged to a family which had lately emerged ... — Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various Read full book for free!
... even more than his duty; but when he went, without absolute need, and shared in the repugnant cares which the most devoted servants of Christ in the hospitals undertake only after struggles and heroic victory over revolted nature he rose to sublimity. It was because he saw in the poor the suffering members of the Saviour; to love the poor man, it is not enough to wish him well, we must respect him, and we cannot respect him as much as any child of God deserves without seeing in him the image of Jesus Christ himself. No one acquires love ... — The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath Read full book for free!
... to that central form or habitual idea of mediocrity, from which every deviation is so much deformity and littleness? Michael Angelo's figures are raised above our diminutive race of beings, yet they are confessedly the standard of sublimity in what regards the human form. Grandeur, then, admits of an exaggeration of our habitual impressions; and 'the strong, marked, and peculiar character which Michael Angelo has at the same time given ... — Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt Read full book for free!
... this reason a better idea of his range and capacity. That given is not always of his best; but, for all this, it may have been the best for some of those who heard it. In the changing topics and style of the innumerable extracts in this volume, we find passages of pure sublimity, of solemn and pathetic eloquence, of flower-like grace and sweetness, followed by exhortations apparently modelled upon those of Mr. Chadband, but doubtless comforting and edifying to Mrs. Snagsby in the congregation, and not, we suppose, without use to Mrs. Snagsby ... — The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various Read full book for free!
... tremendous in sublimity! Could I behold thee in thy loftier mood, Wand'ring at eve, with finely frenzied eye, Beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood! Awhile, with mute awe gazing, I would brood, Then weep aloud in ... — The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt Read full book for free!
... cultivated her understanding with the most scrupulous care. He gave her a general view of the sciences, and an exact acquaintance with every part of elegant literature. He taught her Latin and English, chiefly that she might understand the sublimity of their best poets. She discovered in her early years a taste for works of genius; and it was St. Aubert's principle, as well as his inclination, to promote every innocent means of happiness. 'A well-informed mind,' he would say, 'is the best security against the contagion of folly ... — The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe Read full book for free!
... concepts, 91. Criticism of his attempt to transcend ordinary logic, 92. Examples of the 'dialectic' constitution of things, 95. The rationalistic ideal: propositions self-securing by means of double negation, 101. Sublimity of the conception, 104. Criticism of Hegel's account: it involves vicious intellectualism, 105. Hegel is a seer rather than a reasoner, 107. 'The Absolute' and 'God' are two different notions, 110. ... — A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James Read full book for free!
... there is nothing in it which seems to conflict with the dictates of reason, or with the infinite perfections of God. On the contrary, the revelations of modern science have given an emphasis and a sublimity to the language of inspiration, that "the heavens declare the glory of the Lord," which had, for ages, been concealed from the loftiest conception ... — A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe Read full book for free!
... firmament was revealed to me as it had never been on the earth, where it is often veiled with clouds and mist, or marred by houses and surrounding objects—where the quietude of the mind is also apt to be disturbed by sordid and perplexing cares. Its awful sublimity overwhelmed my faculties, and its majesty inspired me with a kind of dread. In presence of these countless orbs my own nothingness came home to me, and a voice seemed to whisper in ... — A Trip to Venus • John Munro Read full book for free!
... London about 1726, when the poet was visiting this country as a fugitive before the wrath of Louis the Well-beloved; and naturally in the opening passage he determined to astonish the weak minds of us islanders by a flourish on the tight-rope of sublimity. But to his vexation a native Greek (viz., a Smyrniot), then by accident in London, called upon him immediately after the publication, and, laying his finger on a line in the exordium (as it then stood), said, 'Sare, I am one countryman of Homer's. He write de Iliad; you write de Henriade; ... — The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey Read full book for free!
... cannot be painted, not because it is too difficult, but because it is no landscape, but like a vast illuminated capital letter filling the whole page, or the sublime monotony of the mosque-inscriptions, declaring in thousandfold repetition that God is great. The soaring sublimity of the Moslem monotheism comes partly from its narrowness and abstractness. Is it because we are a little hard of hearing that it takes such reiteration ... — The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various Read full book for free!
... satisfying portion. Brother Henry, let us eat and be joyful; let us even meditate on a good meal as an ardent maiden consecrates her thoughts to a love-poem which she will write in her album in honor of her beloved. Truly there are fools who in the sublimity of their folly wish to appear indifferent to such earthly pleasures, declaring that they are necessary evils, most uncomfortable bodily craving, and nothing more. They are fools who do not understand that eating and drinking is ... — Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach Read full book for free!
... the Avon crawfish, and a little iced punch. It would be still better for good pedestrians to walk the distance by the fields and push on to the inn for refreshment, without which all tame scenery is so very flat. In the sublimity of the Alps, the Pyrenees, or even the great Highland hills, a man may forget his dinner; but, when within the verge of the horizon church-towers and smoking chimneys of farm-houses continually occur, visions of fat, brown, sucking pigs, rashers of ham and boiled fowls, with foaming ... — Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney Read full book for free!
... the Sea" ("Les Travailleurs de la Mer"), published in 1866, was written during his exile in Guernsey. Of all Hugo's romances, both in prose and in verse, none surpasses this for sheer splendour of imagination and diction, for eloquence and sublimity of truth. It is, in short, an idyll of passion, adventure, and self-sacrifice. The description of the moods and mysteries of the sea is well-nigh incomparable; and not even in the whole of Hugo's works can there be found anything more vivid than Gilliatt's battle with ... — The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds. Read full book for free!
... twisted in a knot at the back of his head, from which a ribbon of enormous length was pendant. A small three-cornered hat, of extraordinary elegance, rested on the toupet of curls which hung down on either side of his head and shaded the forehead, which displayed the dignity and sublimity of a Jupiter. ... — Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach Read full book for free!
... peculiar boast, so that the city together combines within its precincts, if you take the word of the inhabitants on the subject, as much of historical interest as of natural beauty. Our claims in behalf of the Canongate are not the slightest. The Castle may excel us in extent of prospect and sublimity of site; the Calton had always the superiority of its unrivalled panorama, and has of late added that of its towers, and triumphal arches, and the pillars of its Parthenon. The High Street, we acknowledge, had the distinguished ... — The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott Read full book for free!
... together; and after more than a year and a half close contact with smoke we find no very good excuse for not remaining in it; and papa is going on with his eternal hunt for houses—the wild huntsman in the ballad is nothing to him, all except the sublimity—intending very seriously to take the first he can. He is now about one in particular, but I won't tell where it is because we have considered so many houses in particular that our considerations have come to be a jest in general. I shall be heartily glad, at least I think so, for ... — The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon Read full book for free!
... tragedies; and their heroes, bursting with this extraordinary egoism, assume even more towering proportions in their self-abnegation than in their pride. Then the thrilling clarion-notes of their defiances give way to the deep grand music of stern sublimity and stoic resignation. The gigantic spirit recoils upon itself, crushes itself, ... — Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey Read full book for free!
... of a rough-bearded man, are seven years more terse and juvenile for one single operation; and if they did not run a risk of being quite shaved away, might be carried up by continual shavings, to the highest pitch of sublimity—How Homer could write with so long a beard, I don't know—and as it makes against my hypothesis, I as little care—But let us return ... — The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne Read full book for free!
... truck with me," she said. It struck Maddox that the denial had a sublimity and pathos of its own. She dropped the bag into her lean ... — The Divine Fire • May Sinclair Read full book for free!
... is the magnificent Amphitheatre. In viewing this grand specimen of architecture, as well as the old temples, cathedrals, and castles, I felt that we moderns are comparative pigmies. Our architecture wants breadth, grandeur, sublimity. ... — James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth Read full book for free!
... extremely uninteresting to outside humanity, simply because outside humanity was the last thing he would have thought worth troubling himself about. And still his unremitting zeal in the pursuit of his aim, and his cool self-possession in the presence of danger, were not without a sublimity of their own; and the lustrous intensity of his vision as he grasped some new fact corroborative of some favorite theory, might well have stirred a sympathetic interest even in a mind of ... — Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen Read full book for free!
... have been drawn from those five sources ("pegai") to which Longinus alludes. In the 8th chapter of his fragment "On the Sublime," he observes, that if we assume an ability for speaking well, as a common basis, there are five copious fountains from whence sublimity in eloquence may be said to ... — Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke Read full book for free!
... unequalled for grace and dignity, began to recite a poem he remembered to have written when he was about twenty years of age,—a poem daringly planned, which when published had aroused the bitterest animosity of the press critics on account of what they called its "forced sublimity." The sublimity was by no means "forced"—it was the spontaneous outcome of a fresh and ardent nature full of enthusiasm and high-soaring aspiration, but the critics cared nothing for this, . . all they saw was a young man presuming to be ... — Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli Read full book for free!
... geologist is right; and due reflection on his teachings, instead of diminishing our reverence and our wonder, adds all the force of intellectual sublimity to the mere aesthetic ... — Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley Read full book for free!
... heavy, gold is heavier; Ossa and Olympus are rough and unequal; the steppes of Tartary, though high, are of uniform elevation: there is not a rock, nor a birch, nor a cytisus, nor an arbutus upon them great enough to shelter a new-dropped lamb. Level the Alps one with another, and where is their sublimity? Raise up the vale of Tempe to the downs above, and where are those sylvan creeks and harbours in which the imagination watches while the soul reposes; those recesses in which the gods partook the weaknesses of mortals, and mortals the enjoyments ... — Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor Read full book for free!
... argued Sir Matthew, 'to have justice kept up at all times,' whatever flaws may exist in the title of the men in whom the supreme authority may chance to be vested. Never yet was there a simpler proposition; but there is sublimity in its breadth. It involves the true doctrine of subjection to the magistrate, as enforced by St. Paul. The New Testament furnishes us with no disquisitions on political justice: it does not say whether the title of Domitian to the supreme authority ... — Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller Read full book for free!
... vivid impression that afflicted me when I saw my first Ryder, a marine of rarest grandeur and sublimity, incredibly small in size, incredibly large in its emotion—just a sky and a single vessel in sail across a conquering sea. Ryder is, I think, the special messenger of the sea's beauty, the confidant of its majesties, its hauteurs, its supremacies; ... — Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley Read full book for free!
... Christianity, which are so plain that all can both comprehend them and feel their truth. They teach us to love God, the surest way to obey him, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Any one can understand this; all can see how just it is, and how much of moral sublimity it contains. It is Godlike, and brings us near the very essence of the Divinity, which is love, mercy, and truth. Yet how few are content to accept the teachings of the Saviour in this respect, without embarrassing them with theories that ... — Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper Read full book for free!
... his remarks to a height of moral sublimity. "We talk of freedom," said he, "while slavery exists in this land; and speak with horror of the tyranny of the Turk. We foster an evil which the highest interests of the community require should be removed, ... — The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various Read full book for free!
... non altius inseret Ammon:' all this is truly Roman in its sublimity; and so exclusively Roman, that there, and not in poets like the Augustan, expressly modelling their poems on Grecian types, ought the Roman ... — Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey Read full book for free!
... so new, so overpowering, I could not analyze them. They were sweet as the strains of Edith's harp, yet grand as the roaring of ocean's swelling waves. The bliss of confidence, the rapture of repose, the sublimity of veneration, the tenderness of love, all blended like the dyes of the rainbow, and spanned with an arch of peace the retreating clouds of ... — Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz Read full book for free!
... has never been presented with such sublimity of expression, such noble simplicity and force of thought, as in the majestic and touching legend of Job. But its completeness, as a presentation of the human tragedy, is impaired by the excessive ... — Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley Read full book for free!
... is not only in such sublimity of language and exalted imagery that the literature of the Hebrews surpasses the writings of the most learned and ingenious portion of the heathen world. A distinction not less remarkable is to be found in the humane and compassionate ... — Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell Read full book for free!
... himself and to the spirit of his age—perhaps of most ages. When he sought for material outside of his own experience, he went curiously to books, and was captivated by the "recherche." He was also caught by the rising cult of sublimity in his two great pindaric odes, and by the cult of the picturesque in his flirtations with Scandinavian materials. In these later poems he broadened the field of poetic material notably; but in them he hardly deepened the imaginative or emotional tone: his manner, rather, became ... — An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray Read full book for free!
... "Prisoner of Chillon." I have lots of spunk and pride, if I am bashful; and so I never let on to those at home—when I sent them a letter once in two months by the little tug that brought my oil and provisions—that I was homesick. I said the ocean was glorious; that there was a Byronic sublimity in lighting up the lantern; that standing behind a counter and showing dry-goods to silly, giggling girls couldn't be compared with it; that I hadn't blushed in six months, and that I didn't think I should ever be willing ... — The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor Read full book for free!
... preserving my gravity with a pertinacity, which nearly made Vincent and the rest of our compatriots assembled lose their's "Madame must allow, that there is a striking resemblance in their persons, and the sublimity of their acting?" ... — Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton Read full book for free!
... accustomed, by reason of their grandeur and sublimity, to personify mountains as masculine, the old fable of Phadrus about the "mountain in labour, that brought forth a mouse,"—as Horace has it, Montes laborabant et parturitur ridiculus mus,—shows that another concept was ... — The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain Read full book for free!
... the charm; and he, with his mind full of the lovely creature before him. Surely, never so angelic a being gazed upon that scene! As, with kindling countenance and suspended breath, her dark eyes flashing with enthusiasm, her soul drank in the sublimity and sparkling radiance that enveloped her, she seemed no being of mortal mould, but some celestial visitant. The rapt expression of her face gradually settled into awe, and she softly murmured these lines, ... — The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams Read full book for free!
... as contrition, her silence as delicacy, her changeing of colour as flying hues of shame: the partial coldness at their meeting he attributed to the burden on her mind, and muttering in a magnanimous sublimity that he forgave her, he ... — The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith Read full book for free!
... imposing effect of the building by the alteration of its details, there is still, taking it as a whole, a simple grandeur in the design, a magnificence in the material employed, and a quiet harmony in the illumination, that impart to the interior a character of sublimity which nothing can impair. The rectangular portico was added at some subsequent period, and consists of sixteen splendid Corinthian columns (Fig. 138), eight in front supporting the pediment, and the other eight dividing the portico into three bays, in ... — Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith Read full book for free!
... simplicity, was twisted and tortured into needless intricacy. The religious exaltation of Balfour, or the religious pigheadedness of Davie Deans, are indeed given from the point of view of the kindly humourist, rather than of one who can fully sympathise with the sublimity of an intense faith in a homely exterior. And though many good judges hold the 'Bride of Lammermoor' to be Scott's best performance, in virtue of the loftier passions which animate the chief actors in the tragedy, we are, after all, called upon to sympathise as much with the gentleman ... — Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen Read full book for free!
... the deepest of his own juvenile predilections. His friendly critic was just, as well as delicate; and unmerciful severity as to the mingled absurdities {p.187} and vulgarities of German detail commanded deliberate attention from one who admired not less enthusiastically than himself the genuine sublimity and pathos of his new favorites. I could, I believe, name one other at least among Scott's fellow-students of the same time, whose influence was combined in this matter with Erskine's; but his was that which continued to be exerted the longest, and always in the same direction. That it was not ... — Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart Read full book for free!
... Inclination Your Lordship discovers to promote Natural Knowledge: As it justifies the Discernment of that Assembly, to pitch upon Your Lordship for their President, so does it no less discover the Candor, yea, I presume to say, the Sublimity of your Mind, in so generously honoring them with your Acceptance of the Choice they ... — Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets • John Evelyn Read full book for free!
... national peculiarity of air, habit, and countenance; and although he often adopts a beautiful expression of nature, there is generally a peasant-like simplicity in his ideas. He gives occasional instances of great sublimity of expression, but it is a sublimity which neither forces nor enlarges nature: truth and simplicity are never out of sight. It is what the painter sees, not what he conceives, which is presented to you. Herein he is distinguished from his preceptor ... — The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various Read full book for free!
... their temples, but in their tombs and pyramids and all the sculptured monuments of the Egyptians, there is the same insistence upon the sublimity, mystery and awefulness of life, which they seem to have felt so profoundly. But more than this, the conscious thought of the masters who conceived them, the buildings of Egypt give utterance also to the ... — The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon Read full book for free!
... which he dedicated himself to me for ever, he relieved me, by suddenly calling upon Jupiter, Juno, Mars, and Hercules, and every god, and every goddess, to witness his oath. And then, content with his sublimity, he ... — The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay Read full book for free!
... robbery, outrage, and villany, the despised, insulted flag of the Union rises from its burial, and waves once more above them in stainless purity and glory! Take all under consideration, if you would feel the moral sublimity of the hour! ... — My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin Read full book for free!
... images in such a manner as to bring them within the circle of our vision, and to subject them to the power of the pencil, renders him little better than grotesque, where Milton has since taught us to expect sublimity." It is true that Dante has never shrunk from embodying his conceptions in determinate words, that he has even given measures and numbers, where Milton would have left his images to float undefined in a gorgeous haze of language. Both were right. Milton ... — The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay Read full book for free!
... soft and tender blending of dark blue and green; in places the water was like blue vitriol, and in places it seemed as though the moonlight were liquefied and filling the bay instead of water. And what harmony of colours, what an atmosphere of peace, calm, and sublimity! ... — The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov Read full book for free!
... Babbage, and he, saw the Giant's Causeway on a stormy day, when the foamy waves beat high against the rocks, and added to the sublimity of the scene. Then he went from the great sublime of Nature to the sublime of Art. He arrived at the place where Colonel Colby is measuring the base line, just at the time when they had completed the repetition of the operation; and he saw, by the instrument, which had not been raised from the spot, ... — The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth Read full book for free!
... and masterful handling of the raw material of music, there is so little depth of thought in their compositions that many of them have failed to live. Neither Haydn nor Mozart can be considered as a great character and we miss the note of sublimity in their music, although it often has great vitality and charm. Beethoven, however, was a thinker in tones and often ... — The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke Read full book for free!
... passing idly over the sweep of grassy hills. Exactly thus had he often listened to it swishing through the crannies of high rocks, tuneless yet searching. In it, too, there lay some accent of a secret, dim sublimity, deeper far than any other human sound could touch. The terror of a great freedom caught him, a freedom most awfully remote from the smaller personal existence he knew Today ... for it suggested, with awe and wonder, the kind of primitive utterance that was before ... — The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood Read full book for free!
... position on the mountain-tops completely overlooked us and our movements. The second day was beautifully clear, and many a time, in the midst of its carnage and noise, I could not help stopping to look across that vast field of battle, to admire its sublimity. ... — The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman Read full book for free!
... grandeur, and all excellence consist in an approximation to that central form or habitual idea of mediocrity, from which every deviation is so much deformity and littleness? Michael Angelo's figures are raised above our diminutive race of beings, yet they are confessedly the standard of sublimity in what regards the human form. Grandeur, then, admits of an exaggeration of our habitual impressions; and 'the strong, marked, and peculiar character which Michael Angelo has at the same time given to his ... — Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt Read full book for free!
... or to the wolf, there is no botany to the cows and the sheep. All these sciences are creations of the mind of man; they are the order and the logic which he reads into Nature. Nature interprets man to himself. Her beauty, her sublimity, her harmony, her terror, are names which he gives to the emotions he experiences in her presence. The midnight skies sound the depths of his capacity for the emotion of grandeur and immensity, the summer landscape reveals to ... — Under the Maples • John Burroughs Read full book for free!
... head-wreaths, in representation of the Jews who persecuted our Saviour, rushing about the streets in tawdry attire before and after the ceremony in such apparent ignorance of the real intention that it annulled the sublimity of the whole function. ... — The Philippine Islands • John Foreman Read full book for free!
... girlish fancy, thrilled her even to-day as the proof of an ennobling purpose. She remembered that he had gone whistling into the burning cabin, and coming out again had coolly taken up the broken air; and to her this inherent recklessness was clothed with the sublimity of her ... — The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow Read full book for free!
... time, precede time: else shouldest Thou not precede all times. But Thou precedest all things past, by the sublimity of an ever-present eternity; and surpassest all future because they are future, and when they come, they shall be past; but Thou art the Same, and Thy years fail not. Thy years neither come nor go; whereas ours both come and go, that they all may come. ... — The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine Read full book for free!
... sheets, entertain the gentle expectation of being transported to the fantastic regions of Romance, where Fiction is coloured by all the gay tints of luxurious Imagination, where Reason is an outcast, and where the sublimity of the Marvellous rejects all aid from sober Probability. The heroine of these memoirs, young, artless, ... — Evelina • Fanny Burney Read full book for free!
... been truly remarked, that tragedy, in no small degree, owed its downfall to Euripides. Poetry was gradually superseded by rhetoric, sublimity by earnestness, pathos by reasoning. Thus, Iphigenia and Macaria give so many good reasons for dying, that the sacrifice appears very small, and a modern wag in the upper regions of the theatre would, at the end of the speech of the latter heroine, almost ... — The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides Read full book for free!
... noblest order; an almost unequaled command of musical expression; perfect power over all the resources of his science; the faculty of wielding huge masses of tone with perfect ease and felicity; and he was without rival in the sublimity of ideas. The problem which he so successfully solved in the oratorio was that of giving such dramatic force to the music, in which he clothed the sacred texts, as to be able to dispense with all scenic and ... — The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris Read full book for free!
... sciences. But it is not the power of the individual that accomplishes this, but the Spirit alone, that diffuses itself over all. For Art especially is dependent on the tone of the public mind, as the more delicate plants on atmosphere and weather; it needs a general enthusiasm for Sublimity and Beauty, like that which, in the time of the Medici, as a warm breath of spring, called forth at once and ... — The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various Read full book for free!
... rode among the Andean peaks, enveloped in their greatness and sublimity. The mightiest cousins, furthest removed, in nature's great family become conscious of the tie. Among those huge piles of primordial upheaval, amid those gigantic silences and elongated fields of distance the littlenesses of men are precipitated as one chemical throws ... — Whirligigs • O. Henry Read full book for free!
... survey of the previous evening had concluded, the current having, during the night, carried us to the south-west, at the rate of about a mile and a half per hour. The part of the island we were now coasting along, was possessed of a very considerable degree of sublimity, the shore being bold and rocky, with various picturesque cataracts descending from the mountains; and the whole face of the country having a wild appearance. During the forenoon, we had two high peaks in view, one of which Captain Owen named after Dr. Burn, the surgeon of the Eden, ... — A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman Read full book for free!
... critics have been but too indulgent to these servile imitators. These were held up as correct modern classics, while the great truly living and popular poets, whose reputation was a part of their nations' glory, and to whose sublimity it was impossible to be altogether blind, were at best but tolerated as rude and wild natural geniuses. But the unqualified separation of genius and taste on which such a judgment proceeds, is altogether untenable. Genius is the almost ... — Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel Read full book for free!
... soonly. Cyclone, having drawn on his personal account at a Vancouver branch of the Ashcroft bank for enough to pay his next meal and car fare, and Skookum having jotted down the usual morning poetic inspiration on the sublimity of the situation, the army, led by Father, marched full breast upon the curling rink building. There were no knights at the gate to defend the castle, nor did the band meet them at the portal—neither did the Vancouver curling club. Their ... — Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming) Read full book for free!
... which there will be need more especially to prove, is the subtilty and constancy of curvature in all natural forms whatsoever. I believe that, except in crystals, in certain mountain forms admitted for the sake of sublimity or contrast, (as in the slope of debris,) in rays of light, in the levels of calm water and alluvial land, and in some few organic developments, there are no lines nor surfaces of nature without curvature, though as we before saw in clouds, more especially in their under lines towards ... — Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin Read full book for free!
... reverses of fortune. Those disasters which break down the spirit of a man and prostrate him in the dust seem to call forth all the energies of the softer sex, and give such intrepidity and elevation to their character, that at times it approaches to sublimity.—WASHINGTON IRVING. ... — Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various Read full book for free!
... governing influence, but much of the choice of colour and thread was left to the weaver. This made of him a more important factor in the composition than a mere artisan; he was, in fact, an artist, must needs be, to execute a work of such sublimity as ... — The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee Read full book for free!
... and later his fire, he jerked off his clothes and getting into bed, rolled himself in the bedclothes and lay listening to the mournful sublimity... — The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen Read full book for free!
... of Burke appear to have been drawn from those five sources ("pegai") to which Longinus alludes. In the 8th chapter of his fragment "On the Sublime," he observes, that if we assume an ability for speaking well, as a common basis, there are five copious fountains from whence sublimity in eloquence may be said to ... — Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke Read full book for free!
... might, for instance, find some striking analogies between mountebank Murat, with his irresistible bravery and horsemanship, who was a kind of mixture of Dugueselin and Ducrow, and Mountebank David, a fierce, powerful painter and genius, whose idea of beauty and sublimity seemed to have been gained from the bloody melodramas on the Boulevard. Both, however, were great in their way, and were worshipped as gods, in those heathen times of false belief ... — The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray Read full book for free!
... reaches a higher pitch of ethical sublimity than Cato's reply to Labienus when entreated to consult the oracle of Jupiter Ammon: [51] "What would you have me ask? whether I ought to die rather than become a slave? whether life begins here or after death? whether evil can hurt the good man? whether it be enough to will what is ... — A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell Read full book for free!
... had caught the fire of the future statesman in his dark eye; perhaps she had heard the ring of sublimity in the melodious voice that afterward said "Honor thy father and thy mother." Perhaps she had seen the shrewdness of the future great diplomat in his maneuvers to have his baby way, and being a bright woman she set her wits to work to defy the ... — Fair to Look Upon • Mary Belle Freeley Read full book for free!
... which makes me comprehend how even an unregenerated soul—and how much more the Christian—can long for that which we call death, but which is but the initiation into the mysteries of the Beyond. It is this which, even aside from religious aspirations and fears, wraps our departure in an awful sublimity. To die that we may KNOW—to give up the transitory, the perishing, the earthly, that we may grasp the all-enduring, the imperishable, the divine; to pass from blindness to far-stretching, unimpeded sight! to be able at a single glance to count the very stars of heaven, and to see the network of ... — The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various Read full book for free!
... pictures of the life of hut and hovel are as sincere and as touching; and there is in them, instead of the anger and bitterness of the older author, righteous as that was, a certain heroism of pity and devoted sublimity of complaint, which lift the soul up from resentment into divine moods of compassion and resolve, and stir us like a tale of noble action.[307] It was Rousseau, however, who first sounded the note of which the religion that had once been the champion and consoler of the ... — Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley Read full book for free!
... above; all those frightened, maddened, running, crouching, creeping men and women around, with the chanting Jew, in his long silken caftan and dangling locks, in the midst of them, made a picture of terrible sublimity. ... — Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai Read full book for free!
... monotonous grouping of the heads of the crowd behind him. This mode of rendering the presence of a large multitude, showing only the crowns of the heads in complicated perspective, was long practised in mosaics and illuminations before the time of Giotto, and always possesses a certain degree of sublimity in its power of suggesting perfect unity of feeling and ... — Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin Read full book for free!
... concealed—and that the Lord alone is exalted, and that those who now shut their eyes will then be compelled to acknowledge these truths. That Isaiah has this general judgment in view, is too clearly proved by the sublimity of the whole description, by the express mention of the whole earth, e.g., ii. 19, and by not limiting, in the individualized description in ver. 12 sqq., the high and lofty which is to be brought low ... — Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg Read full book for free!
... of the Babylonians is not inferior in interest to the stories just mentioned. The hymns to the gods are characterized by a sublimity and depth of feeling which remind us of the odes of the Hebrew Psalter. The penitential hymns appear to contain expressions of sorrow for sin, which would indicate a high development of the religious consciousness. These hymns, apparently ... — Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner Read full book for free!
... and he thought of how unexpected their lives would be, and he hummed beautiful music as he went along the roads, Schumann's Lotus Flower and The Moonlight. Then he recalled the beautiful duet, Siegmund's and Sieglinde's May Time, and turning from sublimity suddenly into triviality he chanted the somewhat common but expressive duet in Mireille, and the superficiality of its emotion pleased him at the moment and he hummed it until he arrived ... — The Untilled Field • George Moore Read full book for free!
... superior to the scene. It was the passion with which she threw herself into the representation, with a distinct conception of the whole, and a thorough knowledge of the means necessary to produce its effect, that secured the success. There was a sublimity of self-control in the spectacle, for, if she had allowed herself to be overwhelmed by the excitement, the play must have paused; real feeling would have invaded that which was represented, and we should, by a rude shock, have been staring in wonder at the weeping woman Rachel, instead of thrilling ... — Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis Read full book for free!
... that which will bear the inspection of a being of infinite purity. This character seems to correspond with that high tone of morals enjoined in the sacred writings. Its elements are defined and clear;—would we seek to estimate its sublimity and its truth, we have only to compare it with those distorted and temporizing systems which have resulted from the inventions of men. A feeling of dissatisfaction, the same in kind, though it may differ in degree, will attach to them all; and there is none in which we can confidently rest, until ... — The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings • John Abercrombie Read full book for free!
... after the noon of that period we usually denominate dark. But they were the realization of a dream which had often passed through the monkish heart—the embodiment, of a wish which had often brought tears into the eyes of genuine enthusiasts. There was, surely, as much sublimity in the first conception as in the execution. What indeed were the crusades, but the means of bringing to light, feelings, desires, passions, a lofty disinterested heroism, which the very depth of the former darkness had tended to foster ... — Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various Read full book for free!
... and resentful expressions. And though these things were excusable in early times, and were, in fact, not wicked, but only a lower form of virtue, we cannot but feel their great inferiority to the teachings and spirit of Jesus. But taken as a whole, the Psalms are miracles of beauty and sublimity, of tenderness and majesty, of purity and piety, of wisdom and righteousness. They are a heaven of bright constellations; a world of ... — Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker Read full book for free!
... young cripple hobbles to the front, leaning upon a crutch, his sallow face flushed with a hectic glow of pride and pleasure. He also makes a glib speech,—I have never seen a Spaniard who could not,—disclaiming all credit for himself, but lauding the sublimity of the acting and the perfection of the scene-painting, and saying that the memory of this unmerited applause will be forever engraved upon his ... — Castilian Days • John Hay Read full book for free!
... worthlessness which you can only begin to realize by successively excluding all the virtues, and contrasting it with the sort of abandon of faith on the part of the king; this in the common imbecility, the triune madness of the strange group, has its sublimity. In the next room are two pieces of Goya's which recall in their absolute realism another passage of Spanish history with unparalleled effect. They represent, one the accused heretics receiving sentence before ... — Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells Read full book for free!
... Judge [Mr. Breese] on the birth of a grandson.... As to the child, I saw him asleep, so can say nothing of his eye or his genius peeing through it. He may have the sagacity of a Jewish rabbi, or the profundity of a Calvin, or the sublimity of a Homer for aught I know. But time will ... — Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse Read full book for free!
... was Anaxagoras of Klazomenae who had most to do with forming Perikles's style, teaching him an elevation and sublimity of expression beyond that of ordinary popular speakers, and altogether purifying and ennobling his mind. This Anaxagoras was called Nous, or Intelligence, by the men of that day, either because they ... — Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch Read full book for free!
... eye and the ear, but so it is, that while I have been reading the writings of the Hebrew Prophets, and of those other gifted bards who communed so intently with nature and with nature's God, it has seemed to me impossible that any one could enter fully into all the tenderness, beauty, and sublimity of their language, or receive into his heart all its peculiarity of meaning, unless his own eye had been used to trace the skill of that hand which framed and fashioned every thing that is, and to descry the delicacy of that pencil which has painted ... — Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew Read full book for free!
... I began to lie about the classics. I said to people who knew no Greek that there was a sublimity, a majesty about Homer which they could never hope to grasp. I said it was like the sound of the sea beating against the granite cliffs of the Ionian Esophagus: or words to that effect. As for the truth of it, I might as well have said that it was like the sound of a rum distillery running ... — Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock Read full book for free!
... how I tell a pathetic negative. Nobody knows what became of her—that is finely indicated by the series coming to a close. There is no sixth picture." Here Hans pretended to speak with a gasping sense of sublimity, and drew back his head with a frown, as if looking for a like impression on Deronda. "I break off in the Homeric style. The story is chipped off, so to speak, and passes with a ragged edge into nothing—le neant; can anything be more sublime, especially ... — Daniel Deronda • George Eliot Read full book for free!
... could endure agony and insult, and even thus commemorate his sufferings, with no unpoetical conception, almost degrades his own sublimity when the poetaster sets our teeth ... — Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli Read full book for free!
... simplicity of the pillars which sustain the roof; partly to the darkness which involves them: these Dominican churches being, in fact, little more than vast halls for preaching in, and depending little on decoration, and not at all on light. But the sublimity of shadow soon fails when it has nothing interesting to shade; and the chapel or monuments which, opposite each interval between the pillars, fill the sides of the aisles, possess no interest except in their arabesques of cinque-cento sculpture, of which far better ... — On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin Read full book for free!
... strokes of nature, of which no extracts give an adequate idea, and are painted with a force that brings men, events and prospects before the eye with the vividness of reality. In this power of verbal delineation Mr. Borrow has never been outdone. . . . His descriptions of scenery have a peculiar sublimity and grace." A little later, W. Bodham Donne, a Norfolk man and acute critic, said, "We all read Mr. Borrow's books," but lamented his "plunge into the worse than Irish bogs of Polemical Protestantism." Mr. ... — Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper Read full book for free!
... the place, and its natural sublimity, combined with the recollection of his late deadly peril, tinged the young man's thoughts with an unusual seriousness; and yet he could not restrain the cynicism that was habitual to him whenever his attention was compelled to ... — Bred in the Bone • James Payn Read full book for free!
... plains and valleys, climbed the Sierras to the clouds, and looked down upon summer-clad California. And I will remark here, in passing, that all scenery in California requires distance to give it its highest charm. The mountains are imposing in their sublimity and their majesty of form and altitude, from any point of view—but one must have distance to soften their ruggedness and enrich their tintings; a Californian forest is best at a little distance, for there is a sad poverty of variety in species, the trees being chiefly of one monotonous family—redwood, ... — Innocents abroad • Mark Twain Read full book for free!
... JOHNSON, whence thy verse is fraught With so much grace and such energy of thought; Whether thy JUVENAL instructs the age In chaster numbers, and new-points his rage; Or fair IRENE sees, alas! too late. Her innocence exchang'd for guilty state; Whatever you write, in every golden line Sublimity and elegance combine; Thy nervous phrase impresses every soul, While harmony gives rapture to ... — Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill Read full book for free!
... manners of being one suggest, for their accurate ascertainment, so many distinct programs of scientific work. Thus the pragmatic question 'What is the oneness known-as? What practical difference will it make?' saves us from all feverish excitement over it as a principle of sublimity and carries us forward into the stream of experience with a cool head. The stream may indeed reveal far more connexion and union than we now suspect, but we are not entitled on pragmatic principles to claim absolute oneness in any ... — Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James Read full book for free!
... madmen? In others of course you would pardon such lapses, and very rightly so. But you subject every word that I utter to the closest examination, you weigh it carefully, you try it by the plumb-line and the file, you test it by the polish of the lathe and the sublimity of the tragic buskin. Such is the indulgence accorded to mediocrity, such the severity meted out to distinction. I recognize, therefore, the difficulty of the task that lies before me, and I do not ask you to alter the opinions you entertain of ... — The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius Read full book for free!
... suspected, and where to be suspected was almost certain death—Thomas Paine had the courage, the goodness, and the justice to vote against death. To vote against the execution of the king was a vote against his own life. This was the sublimity of devotion to principle. For this he was arrested, imprisoned, and doomed to death. There is not a theologian who has ever maligned Thomas Paine that has the courage to do this thing. When Louis Capet was on ... — Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll Read full book for free!
... visions of greatness, these lofty aspirations, not for renown, but for the inward consciousness of intellectual elevation, of moral sublimity, of heroism, had no influence, as is ordinarily the case with day-dreams, to give Jane a distaste for life's energetic duties. They did not enervate her character, or convert her into a mere visionary; on the contrary, they but roused ... — Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott Read full book for free!
... an extraordinary scene," said Eve, who clung to her father's arm, as she gazed around her equally in admiration and in awe; "a dreadful exhibition of the sublimity... — Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper Read full book for free!
... man so constituted that the pleasure of doing a noble thing and the pain of doing a base thing are to him the greatest of pleasures and pains.' He was fond, too, of quoting, with admiration, Kant's famous saying about the sublimity of the moral law and the starry heavens. The doctrine of the 'categorical imperative' would express his feelings more accurately than Bentham's formulae. But his reasoning was different. He declares himself to be a utilitarian in the sense that, according ... — The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen Read full book for free!
... charge on the batteries of Port Hudson, and were mown down like summer's grass, the survivors, many with mutilated limbs, closing up the thinned ranks and pressing on again, careless of life, and mindful only of honor and duty, with a sublimity of courage unsurpassed in the annals of war, and leaving there to all mankind an immortal record for ... — Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various Read full book for free!
... power to detain him; but so it is, and he falls asleep with his closing eyes fixed upon the face on the canvas, and the beloved name on his lips. There are a good many in to look upon him as he lies there so majestically calm. There is such a sublimity in the noble countenance now stamped with so sacred ... — The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith Read full book for free!
... mountains of the United States. On the west are the Olympic Mountains, the highest peaks of which reach up to 8,000 feet. Both ranges, brilliantly snow-crowned, are within view at the same time from various points, and the scenery in its entirety, with its continual changefulness and features of sublimity, can not be excelled. Strangers and travelers who have visited every part of the world never leave the deck of the steamers while going through the waters of the Sound country. In noting a single ... — Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax Read full book for free!
... in their praise of the truth and uniform consistency of his characters, of his heartrending pathos, and his comic wit. Moreover, they extol the beauty and sublimity of his separate descriptions, images, and expressions. This last is the most superficial and cheap mode of criticising works of art. Johnson compares him who should endeavour to recommend this poet by passages ... — Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black Read full book for free!
... an island in the ice—a rock which is covered with a beautiful herbage, and enamelled in August with flowers. This is the Jardin of this palace of nature, and nothing can exceed the beauty of such a spot, amidst the overwhelming sublimity of the surrounding objects, the Aiguilles of Charmoz, Bletiere, and the Geant," &c. "Herbage," "flowers"!! Why, the jardin is merely a rock protruding out of the glacier, and covered with lichens; but, after all, was it reasonable to expect a better flower-show ... — Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various Read full book for free!
... Perhaps Laura, perhaps Tanqueray, had divined him and were endeavouring in kindness to take from him the poison of a preposterous hope. He preferred, however, not to explain them or the situation or himself thus. He was, with all possible sublimity, renouncing Jane. ... — The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair Read full book for free!
... put them all away from her, Lucy bent over him and lifted him to her bosom. The nurse made a step forward to interfere, but then stepped back again wringing her hands. The mother had risen into a sort of sublimity, irresponsible in her great woe—if she had killed him to forestall her agony a little, as is the instinct of desperation, they could not have interfered. She sat down, and gathered the child close, close in her embrace, his head ... — Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant Read full book for free!
... revealed in its faithlessness and low carnal propensities. What rankled most poignantly in this spectacle of his final self-exposure was the fact that the cloven hoof should have been found on noble mountain tops—that he should have attempted to better his disguise by dwelling near regions of sublimity. Of all hypocrisy the kind most detestable to her was that which dares live within spiritual fortresses; and now his whole story of the Christmas Tree, the solemn marshalling of words about the growth of the world's spirit—about the sacrifice of the lower in ourselves to the higher—this cant now ... — Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen Read full book for free!
... most important ally of the Peloponnesian sovereign; the preeminent value of the ancient poetry on the Trojan war may thus have forced the national feeling of the Athenians to yield to their taste. The songs which spoke of their own great ancestor were, no doubt, of far inferior sublimity and popularity, or, at first sight, a Theseid would have been much more likely to have emanated from an Athenian synod of compilers of ancient song, than an Achilleid or an Olysseid. Could France have ... — The Iliad of Homer • Homer Read full book for free!
... generally think of it as entirely flat. But this edge of it at least stands up on the horizon, as a line of wrinkled and hollow hills like the scalps of bald men; or worse, of bald women. For it is impossible not to think of such repulsive images, in spite of real sublimity of the call to the imagination. There is something curiously hostile and inhuman about the first appearance of the motionless surges of that dry and dreadful sea. Afterwards, if the traveller has happened ... — The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton Read full book for free!
... of his works, he offered to read me a few sonnets. He had the manuscript about him, and I could not escape the penance. He read a dozen or so, which I thought mediocre, and a mediocre sonnet is necessarily a bad sonnet, as this form of poetry demands sublimity; and thus amongst the myriads of sonnets to which Italy gives birth very ... — The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt Read full book for free!
... now ascertained that there is beauty and sublimity in nature, in ideas, in feelings, and in actions. After all this it might be supposed that a unity could be found amidst these different kinds of beauty. The sight of a statue, as the Apollo of Belvedere, of a man, of Socrates expiring, are adduced as producing impressions of the beautiful; ... — The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller Read full book for free!
... from the construction of the work throughout that it was his purpose simply to give free rein to his fancy and to express, even at the risk of being theatrical, the emotions of sublimity, terror, and awe called up by the associations of the subject. This he could not have done with a free hand had he been bound down to the set ... — The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton Read full book for free!
... mere animal excitement. No white soldier who marched to the music of the Union possessed a more lofty conception of the sacredness of the war for the Union than the Negro. The intensity of his desires, the sincerity of his prayers, and the sublimity of his faith during the long and starless night of his bondage made the Negro a poet, after a fashion. To him there was poetry in our flag—the red, white, and blue. Our national odes and airs found a response in his soul, and inspired him to the performance of heroic deeds. He was always ... — History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams Read full book for free!
... to-day, and forever." And if there be any thing sublime in the idea of an almighty mind, in perfect peace itself, and, therefore, at leisure to bestow all its energies on the wants of others, there is at least a reflection of the same sublimity in the character of that human being who has so quieted and governed the world within, that nothing is left to absorb sympathy or distract attention from ... — The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe Read full book for free!
... flesh that is eternal; that, as it was thought that in the first instance gave man speech, so to the end it shall still be thought that shall make speech beautiful and rememberable. The grandeur and sublimity of Balzac's thoughts seem to me to rise to the loftiest heights, and his range is limitless; there is no passion he has not touched, and what is more marvellous, he has given to each in art a place equivalent ... — Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore Read full book for free!
... God, and taught as one having Divine authority. There was an energy in his preaching that was irresistible. His subjects, his language, his gestures, the tone of his voice, and the turn of his countenance, all conspired to fix the attention and affect the heart. Without aiming at sublimity, he was truly sublime, and uncommonly ... — Fletcher of Madeley • Brigadier Margaret Allen Read full book for free!
... heighten the interest. It was not long after the invention of gunpowder, when firearms and artillery mingled the flash and smoke and thunder of modern warfare with the steely splendor of ancient chivalry, and gave an awful magnificence and terrible sublimity to battle, and when the old Moorish towers and castles, that for ages had frowned defiance to the battering-rams and catapults of classic tactics, were toppled down by the lombards of the Spanish engineers. ... — Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving Read full book for free!
... began expounding the deepest part of the Holy Scripture, namely, the First Epistle of John, by which, above all other, even above all other inspired writings, I advise every young preacher to form his style. Here are sublimity and simplicity together, the strongest sense and the plainest language! How can any one that would speak as the oracles of God use harder words than are to be found here?' With which illuminating extract from ... — Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham Read full book for free!
... firmly planting Arches white on rosy heel! Whence the life-spring, throbbing, panting, Pulses upward to reveal! Fairest things know least despising; Foot and earth meet tenderly: 'Tis the woman, resting, rising Upward to sublimity, Rise the limbs, sedately sloping, Strong and gentle, full and free; Soft and slow, like certain hoping, Drawing nigh the broad firm knee. Up to speech! As up to roses Pants the life from leaf to flower, So each blending change ... — Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald Read full book for free!
... me for the perilous dangers I had courted and conquered. I had gazed, and dreamed, and raved by turns. I had been melted into tears of tenderness by the perfect harmony and loveliness of some scenes, and had been frozen into awe by the magnificent grandeur and terrible sublimity of others. And, after those six years of travel in foreign lands, I had returned, my brain one endless panorama of hills, valleys and cloud-capped mountains, earth, skies, wood and water. Not one of those gorgeous scenes, however, had moved me as I was moved when once again I beheld my ... — Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various Read full book for free!
... must either be ruined herself or else ruin Girard, she would far sooner accept the former result. A demon, Guiol of course, tempted her in this very way, with the wondrous sublimity of such a sacrifice. God, she wrote, asked of her a bloody offering. She could tell her of saints who, being accused, did not justify, but rather accused themselves, and died like lambs. This example Cadiere followed. When Girard was accused before her, she defended him, saying, "He is right, ... — La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet Read full book for free!
... given each day by the Feldherrnhalle, a concert that knows no discord, because the murmur of life, the calls of the birds, the splashing of the fountains, and the light-hearted joy of the crowd around, all meet and mingle in its chorus. He echoed them all with the sublimity of the power which he controlled, and all—bird-calls, fountain-drip, desultory laughter, and careless joy, all flowed from him, and took from him as they flowed that subtle and precious subconsciousness which lines our every ... — A Woman's Will • Anne Warner Read full book for free!
... that thy grief might find express To gather in some vast cathedral's hall, That then in unity we might kneel and hear Sublimity in sounds, ... — Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore Read full book for free!
... her; he toasted her; he praised her; he exhausted his knowledge of mythology in her honour, calling her Melpomene, the tragic Muse, for had she not made men weep with her song that very night? Song, did he say? nay, hymn it was! She was Polyhymnia, singer of sublimity. He named her Philomele, and desired the lute of Orpheus that he might play an accompaniment to her wondrous singing. He asked her in which enchanted ocean she had lived. 'Mademoiselle Sirene, lurer of men's souls,' ... — A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay Read full book for free!
... York does present pictures on which the artist would seize with avidity; but, the instant nature attempts any of her grander models, on this, a spot that seems never to rise much above the level of commercial excellencies, it is found that the accessaries are deficient in sublimity, or even beauty. ... — Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper Read full book for free!
... The sublimity of his egotism stands unrivaled. It is so great that it is admirable. We lift our hats to this man. Napoleon gained the field without prejudice; but this man enters the list with hate and prejudice ... — Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard Read full book for free!
... hundred islands, fragments of the main, striking in their diversity on the west; low, wooded and grassy to the water's edge, and rising eastward through bolder types to the crowns and cliffs of Mount Desert and Quoddy Head, an advancing series from beauty to sublimity: and behind all these are deep basins and broad river-mouths, affording convenient and spacious harbors, in many of which the navies of nations might safely ride at anchor.... Especially attractive was the region between ... — Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain Read full book for free!
... of Mortain, to say nothing else, is certainly one of the most beautiful to be found in any region which does not aspire to the sublimity of mountain scenery. The waterfalls have been famous ever since Sir Francis Palgrave connected them with the story of the place and its counts. But the whole position of town, castle, everything about Mortain, is lovely. The town itself ... — Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman Read full book for free!
... "Who are our accusers?" and he turns on the priests like a new Erasmus, who does not, like the old, delight in satire for its own sake or in a literature which scourges men by holding up the mirror to vice, but who feels the sublimity of virtue so deeply that witticisms at the expense of vice are abhorrent to him. He takes up the charges in detail: it is said that the doctrine is new, doubtful, and uncertain, unconfirmed by miracles, opposed to the fathers and ancient custom, schismatical and productive ... — The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various Read full book for free!
... investigation it was but a step to sublimity itself. His soul seemed separate from his body; he was dispassionate, superhuman, all-seeing and all-comprehending. Now he could see men as winged ants, crossing each other, nearing, drifting apart, interweaving, floating in a cloud, blown high, blown low by ... — The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett Read full book for free!
... and sentimental enough for the enthusiast or the cynic respectively, reflecting an innate hope—a common interest in common things and common men—a tune the Concord bards are ever playing, while they pound away at the immensities with a Beethovenlike sublimity, and with, may we say, a vehemence and perseverance—for that part of greatness is not so ... — Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives Read full book for free!
... regarded the modern Highlanders as being incapable of estimating poetry otherwise than in the returning harmony of similar sounds. They were seduced, he remarks, by the charms of rhyme; and admired the strains of Ossian, not for the sublimity of the poetry, but on account of the antiquity of the compositions, and the detail of facts which they contained. On this subject a different opinion has been expressed by Sir Walter Scott. "I cannot dismiss ... — The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various Read full book for free!
... as she looked upon Alley was, though filled with a melancholy lustre, expressive at the same time of a spirit so lofty, calm, and determined, that its whole character partook of absolute sublimity. Alley, in obedience to her words, withdrew; but not without an anxious and earnest ... — The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton Read full book for free!
... his whole figure shrunk firmly together by the intense malignity with which he was about to hiss out his venomous imprecations against the defaulter, he presented at least one instance in which the low, sordid vice of avarice rose to something like wild grandeur, if not sublimity. ... — Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton Read full book for free!
... from Milton with as little change as Milton made in transplanting it from Marlowe. The author's own favourite passage, the invocation to the sun (act iii., sc. 2), has some sublimity, marred by lapses. The lyrics scattered through the ... — Byron • John Nichol Read full book for free!
...
