"Abyss" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... contradicting God's truth. We have tested a supernaturally inspired Bible for ourselves. As my eloquent and much loved friend, Dr. McLaren, of Manchester has finely said: "We decline to dig up the piles of the bridge that carries us over the abyss because some voices tell us that it is rotten. It is perfectly reasonable to answer, 'We have tried the bridge and it bears.' Which, being translated into less simple language, is just the assertion ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... I cannot tell yet. When my mind gets clear I shall understand. But I seem to be falling and falling and falling into a bottomless abyss just now." ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... actor, yet were I a haughty duke or prince, my head would not be on a level with your beauteous feet, and there would be, all the same, between your heavenly height and my kneeling adoration, as great a distance as from the soaring summit of the loftiest Alp to the yawning abyss far, far below. You must always stoop to reach a heart that adores you. I dare to say, madame, that mine is as proud as it is tender, and she who would deign not to repulse it, would find in it the most ardent love, the most perfect delicacy, the most absolute respect, and unbounded ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... pushed her forward. Somewhat terrified, she uttered a scream, but finding herself unhurt, she endeavoured to turn round, when, horrible to relate, the railing gave way, and she was precipitated into the abyss. Picture to yourselves, if possible, the consternation caused by this dreadful occurrence. The alarm was given, ropes, &c. provided, a man immediately lowered, but all their efforts were ineffectual, for the body was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 333 - Vol. 12, Issue 333, September 27, 1828 • Various
... age of twelve, to a preparatory school in Cheltenham. Before the first term was half over they sent for her and asked her to remove him. The head master confessed that the case was beyond him. On the surface the boy was one of the most charming in the whole school, but his heart was an abyss of the most appalling blackness. Mrs. Payne entreated him to tell her the worst. He hedged, said that it wasn't just one thing that was wrong, but everything—everything. She asked him if he had ever known a case that resembled Arthur's. ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... conceive what it must have been to be hurled from a home of love and light into the dark abyss of slavery; to be compelled to take your place among a people you have learned to look upon as inferiors and social outcasts; to be in the power of men whose presence would fill you with horror and loathing, and to know that there is no ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... mighty river, as it onward rushes To pour its floods in ocean's dread abyss, Checks at thy feet its fierce impetuous gushes, And gently fawns thy rocky base to kiss. Stern eagle of the crag! thy hold should be The mountain home of ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... inadequate expression of contrition—was it not?—conceded to a life whose sins outnumbered its years. Yet the slight thread of hope drawn therefrom has been able since to hold back Cecil Tresilyan from the abyss of utter desperation. She forbore to press him farther then, seeing his increasing weakness, and trusting, perhaps, that a more favorable opportunity ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... to my own quarters, I tried to recall the description I had read of the "Children of the Abyss," the dwellers in ancient city slums. There was a certain kinship, no doubt, between those former submerged workers in the democratic world and this labour breed of Berlin. Yet the enslaved and sweated workers of the old regime were always depicted as ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... 'twere vain; No hero now Rome's downfall may restrain. If gods there were, upon this ruined soil No god could bring forth fruit; but that weak lad! Nay, nay, not him—the spirits stern and sad That dog my steps and mock at all my coil, The Furies of the abyss that drive me mad, Them—them and chaos—leave I of my toil The ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... his triumphs. Next came the liberals, a portion of whom were sincerely devoted to political progress, for which the country was not yet prepared—and, finally, the Jacobins, old relics of 1793, who sought to precipitate France into that abyss of horror, the very trace of which the wonderful genius of Napoleon had effaced. All these opinions, advocated by intelligent and capable men, of gifted minds, but also of turbulent and dangerous spirits, to whom agitation is the natural element—all these were secretly ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... cry of approval which almost prostrated me. The effect made upon me was so powerful that at the second representation I had to request them to turn down the footlights in case I should be called out; for the blinding light seemed a hell to me, like a fiery abyss ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... to Virgil that he had not discovered America; or to Chaucer that he had not discovered the solar system; or to Dryden that he had not discovered the steam-engine. But we do most frequently feel, with the Victorians, that the very vastness of the number of things they know illustrates the abrupt abyss of the things they do not know. We feel, in a sort of way, that it is a disgrace to a man like Carlyle when he asks the Irish why they do not bestir themselves and re-forest their country: saying not a ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... as if the wind drove them. Horsemen are galloping on the turf at the edge of the arable, which is doubtless heavy going. The troop that has worked through the wood labours hard to overtake; the vapour follows again, and horsemen and hounds are lost in the abyss. ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... sights are nothing to him now; there is nothing but the old man and the sky—nothing between him and the heaven now, and he knows it and is glad. A few months more, and those way-worn features shall have crumbled to their dust, and that strong, meek spirit shall be in the abyss of eternity, before the God ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... concept (of freedom) problematically as not impossible to thought, without assuring it any objective reality, and merely lest the supposed impossibility of what it must at least allow to be thinkable should endanger its very being and plunge it into an abyss of scepticism. ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... deepening the newly acquired dignity of a bass voice. What were the wounded men writhing on the slope above to this raw youth, what the red-haired coward with his whine, what the children robbed of their provider growing up to be beggars, to a life in the abyss, perhaps to a life in jail? All these were mere supers, a stage background for Lieutenant Weixler's heroism to stand out in relief. Fourteen bloody bodies lined the path he had trodden without fear. How should his eyes ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... out his hand for his mother's letter. A decision of great moment was impending. He would know what she had to say before finally making that decision. He wondered bitterly, grimly, whether her words would plunge him yet deeper in this abyss ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... its state, the great grace given it by our Lord, and how in all reason it should not belong to earth; because He, of His goodness, seems to make it here a denizen of heaven, unless it be itself in fault. And miserable will that soul be if it turns back; it will go down, I think so, even to the abyss, as I was going myself, if the mercy of our Lord had not brought me back; because, for the most part, it must be the effect of grave faults—that is my opinion: nor is it possible to forsake so great a good otherwise than through the ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... well-nigh As ghastly, as this terrible Peace whereby We halt for ever on the crater's brink And feed the wind with phrases, while we know There gapes at hand the infernal precipice O'er which a gossamer bridge of words we throw, Yet cannot choose but hear from the abyss The sulphurous gloom's unfathomable hiss And ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... animals. A general stampede ensued at times, which often led the herd into morasses, or the quick-sand of the rivers, where they perished miserably. The destruction was still greater when the leader of the herd came upon some yawning abyss. Those behind drove him down into the deep, and the entire herd followed blindly, only to be dashed ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... geological causes, such as the fissures and other irregularities of surface which could not fail to accompany upheaval, and hence the valley makes the river, not the river the valley. But even if we suppose a basin of the hardest rock to be elevated at once, completely formed, from the submarine abyss where it was fashioned, the first shower of rain that falls upon it, after it rises to the air, will discharge its waters along the lowest lines of the surface, and cut those lines deeper, and so on with every successive rain. The disintegrated rock from the upper part of the basin ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... was at that time, and been converted at a stroke into Mrs. Linton, the lady of Thrushcross Grange, and the wife of a stranger: an exile, and outcast, thenceforth, from what had been my world. You may fancy a glimpse of the abyss where I grovelled! Shake your head as you will, Nelly, you have helped to unsettle me! You should have spoken to Edgar, indeed you should, and compelled him to leave me quiet! Oh, I'm burning! I wish I were out of doors! I wish I were a girl again, half savage and ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... prisoner in his dominions. And while he suffers this inconceivable persecution from the enemies without, the faction which reigns within keeps me a hostage at one hundred and twenty leagues from the capital. Judge, then, at what distance I am from him. In this abyss of misery, the idea of owing to the United States and to Washington the life and liberty of M. de Lafayette kindles a ray of hope in my heart. I hope everything from the goodness of the people with whom he has set an example of that liberty of which he is now made the victim. And shall I dare speak ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... cry again. It was an hour before any of this family had recovered sufficient poise to realize, with the shuddering gratitude of adventurers spared from the abyss, that, under Providence, Hedrick ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... Politi stood so near the edge of a monstrous quarry that it seemed as if it might topple into the abyss at any moment. Our friends were on historic ground, indeed, for these quarries—or latomia, as they are called—supplied all the stone of which the five cities of ancient Syracuse were built—cities which ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... Paris to-morrow? . . . to be the Chevalier du Cevennes till the end? Ah well!" How often man over-reaches himself in the gratification of an ignoble revenge! "We all have our pastimes," went on the marquis, deepening the abyss into which he was finally to fall. "You were mine. I had intended to send you about some years ago; but I was lonely, and there was something in your spirit which amused me. You tickled my fancy. But now, I am weary; the pastime ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... how the baffled leader seizeth, With fetter'd hands, his Iron Crown— A dread abyss his spirit freezeth! Down, down he goes, to ruin down! And Europe's armaments are driven, Like mist, along the blood-stain'd snow— That snow shall melt 'neath summer's heaven, With the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... croaked into our ears: 'Love your neighbour as yourself, and know that gentleness, obedience, and the fear of God are man's fairest adornments.' Then came certain strong, honest, fanatical men who said: 'Come and join us, and we'll throw ourselves into the abyss so that the coming race shall live in light and freedom.' But I never understood a word of this. Who do you suppose is going to show me, in a convincing way, in what manner I am linked to this 'neighbour' of mine—damn ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... before Theodora's mind a vision of all her enemies, of all those who envied her rise, of all whose hatred and contempt would rise into a clamour of delight could they see the daughter of the bearward hurled down again into that abyss from which she had been dragged. Her face hardened, her lips tightened, her little hands clenched in the agony of her ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... In lines distinct, in colors clear defined, The typic groups and figures of mankind. Behold within the cool and liquid glass Bright child-folk sporting with smooth yellow shells, Astride of dolphins, leaping up to kiss Fair mother-faces. From the vast abyss How joyously their thought-free laughter wells! Some slumber in grim caverns unafraid, Lulled by the overwhelming water's sound, And some make mouths at dragons, undismayed. Oh dauntless innocence! The gulfs profound Re-echo strangely with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... orders and getting the boats manned, for even in this short time the steamer was settling. The hissing swash of the waves beating into the breach, the prayers, the imprecations, the hysterical sobs, the agonized cries of the struggling passengers, the darkness, the terror, the yawning abyss of death beneath them,—combined to sweep away all human feelings save the instinct of self-preservation. The brute side of human nature revealed itself with a hideousness more horrible than the terror of the night and the sea. Unprotected women were ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... lowest hell in its uttermost abyss and yonder highest heaven, where standeth the throne of a just God, is not greater than the chasm that separates that unspeakable butcher, the Kaiser, from General Pershing and the American soldier boys, who have never betrayed in France, the noblest ideals of ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... been brought by those very maxims and councils which would now deter us from adopting the proposed Constitution; and which, not content with having conducted us to the brink of a precipice, seem resolved to plunge us into the abyss that awaits us below. Here, my countrymen, impelled by every motive that ought to influence an enlightened people, let us make a firm stand for our safety, our tranquillity, our dignity, our reputation. Let us at last break the fatal charm which ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... the dangers of France, Spain would add nothing to its resources. With what contemptuous bitterness did Spain, in fact, watch the long train of disasters which from the pinnacle of power brought Louis XIV. to the brink of an abyss by one of those vicissitudes the effect of which is never more rapid upon the popular mind than when fortune deserts men who have been long ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... by the evolution of the phenomena of consciousness. For any demonstration that can be given to the contrary effect, the "collection of perceptions" which makes up our consciousness may be an orderly phantasmagoria generated by the Ego, unfolding its successive scenes on the background of the abyss of nothingness; as a firework, which is but cunningly arranged combustibles, grows from a spark into a coruscation, and from a coruscation into figures, and words, and cascades of devouring fire, and then vanishes into the ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... anon, startling you with its white flash, a jet of spray leaps hissing out of the fall, like a rocket, bursting in the wind, and driven away in dust, filling the air with light; and how, through the curdling wreaths of the restless, crashing abyss below, the blue of the water, paled by the foam in its body, shows purer than the sky through white rain-cloud, while the shuddering iris stoops in tremulous stillness over all, fading and flashing alternately through the choking spray and shattered sunshine, hiding itself at last ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... often happens thus. So real is this search for some truth outside of me, that it seems as if my soul were a thing apart from me, a thing which left me to go alone on its dim and perilous way. I behold it as it were a shadow floating away from me out into that abyss of shadows which are the thoughts of many men long dead. And on this occasion the silence into which the Searcher went forth was vaster and more obscure than ever before, filled with unfathomable darkness as a clear night might look wherein no moon or ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... threw Maurice back into the old misery from which he had emerged for a brief moment, and, indeed, plunged him into an abyss of despair such as he had never known before. For now he had sincerely hoped for salvation, and his hope had been frustrated. He had clung to a belief that Lily's love, Lily's companionship might avail to rescue him from the phantom, or the reality, that was destroying his power, shattering ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... fared well and attained the objects of thy desire. And by good luck it is that thy enemies have been immersed in a sea of dangers that is difficult to cross. The sons of Pandu are now exposed to the fire of Durvasa's wrath. Through their own fault they have fallen into an abyss of darkness.'" ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Misty with eld, the mute of time, A castle, dawn-enchanted, there Above th' abyss sheer, shimmering fair, Hung like a perilous dream in air. Poised on a dizzy turret high, Enfolded with the gorgeous sky, We listened, she and I, In wonder, 'mazed. Without a word A soul had spoken, ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth
... with the mule. The smoke of his wide steaming nostrils was mingled with the breath of the terrified mule, and he held his head downward, and evidently with the intention of rushing forward upon the latter. Neither could have gone back, and of course the fierce bull would drive the mule into the abyss. The other bull stood close behind, ready to continue the work if the first one failed, and, perhaps, ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... Valley of the Shadow? Though I could not speak to you I knew you were there. Your hand, so cool, so strong, and gentle was what I clung to. On that last awful point of land, beyond which all was a black abyss, I clung to it. I heard your voice when I had passed beyond all other earthly sounds. It was the one link left me between that world and this. Maggie! Maggie! You cannot tell how sorry I am about ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... His remark rang true: I knew that nothing had ever turned up for him. I felt faint at looking into such an abyss of hopelessness. Instantly I saw that the truth of this delirious statement concerned me more than all the wisdom ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... her mother and whispering to her things which I could not hear. Mrs. Trescott sat upon a sort of divan, shaking with terrible, soundless sobs, and clasping and unclasping her hands, but making no other gesture. I stood helpless at the hidden abyss of woe so suddenly uncovered before me and until this very moment screened by the conventions which keep our souls apart like prisoners in the cells in some great prison. These two women had been bearing this for a long time, and we, their nearest friends, had stood aloof from them. As I stood thinking ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... comparison with our languages, like the wildest love-passion compared with marital custom."[238] Every word has a history of accidents which have befallen it, the beginnings of which are lost in the abyss of time.[239] In the Middle Ages the word "Word" came to mean the Word of God with such distinctness that the romance languages adopted parabola, or derivatives from it, for "word."[240] The students of linguistics recognize metaphor as another great mode of modifying ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... liberalities?" But he persuaded himself that her majesty would after all not persist in her fell resolution. To do so, he vowed, would only be boiling milk for the French papists, who would be sure to make the most of the occasion in order to precipitate the king into the, abyss, to the border of which they had already brought him. He so dreaded the ire of the queen that he protested he was trembling all over merely to see the pen of his secretary wagging as he dictated his despatches. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... understand how Toby must be dreaming of his recent trouble, as he hung over that terrible abyss by his ...
— With Trapper Jim in the North Woods • Lawrence J. Leslie
... overtakes the community, we hear much and sharp censure of all speculation. Speculators, one and all, are forthwith consigned to an abyss of obloquy. The virtuous public outside of trade washes its hands of all participation in the iniquity. This same virtuous public knows very little of what it is talking about. What is speculation? Shall we say, in brief and in general, that it consists ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... temple. And seven of the great stones he set up as stelae, and he gave them favourable names. The text then recounts the various parts and shrines of the temple, and it describes their splendours in similes drawn from the heavens and the earth and the abyss, or deep, beneath the earth. The temple itself is described as, being like the crescent of the new moon, or like the sun in the midst of the stars, or like a mountain of lapis lazuli, or like a mountain of shining marble. Parts of it are said to have been terrible ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... representation of the state after death. For it is only after the decay and fall of this temple of life, which, as masons, we have been building, that from its ruins, deep beneath its foundations, and in the profound abyss of the grave, we find that divine truth, in the search for which life was spent, if not in vain, at least without success, and the mystic key to which death ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... wanted; and reason could only say that one must indeed leave them and begone, and she could not look forwards nor forecast anything; she could but bid one note the crag-faces and the monstrous ledges of the abyss into which the spirit was for ever falling, falling. ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 2, say: "I am Khepra who gives to itself a form on high, from the thigh of its mother, making a wolf-dog, for those who are in the celestial abyss, and the phoenix, for those who are among the divine chiefs." That ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... with wandring Feet The dark unbottom'd Infinite Abyss, And through the palpable Obscure find out His uncouth way, or spread his airy Flight Upborn with indefatigable Wings ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... from Atlas faster than she had gone up. After all, the climate there is frightfully cold, and there are passes on that lonely mountain which overhang the bottomless pit, where some have perished very miserably. Katherine had escaped the abyss, and left behind her the dreams and the golden mists and the starry peaks of ice. It was dark in the studio, and a voice was heard inquiring whether the young gentleman was going to stay for supper, "Because, if a bysin of hoatmeal porridge yn't ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... every one, especially from her husband, and they made a marked contrast, by the irony of fate, with the pleasures and amusements that surrounded her. She was too clear-sighted and intelligent to proceed to question the Emperor. She feared light and dreaded the truth. She hesitated before the abyss that awaited her, and shuddered before the Emperor's glance. She suffered on the throne, as if it were an instrument of torture. It was then that Fouche took some steps which doubled her anguish. The incident is thus recounted, ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... "I have come to the conclusion,—that in order to be One and Somewhat, it is necessary to begin by being Nought and All—Thus ranging myself in security on both sides of a great abyss of metaphysics. What ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... coming. All the abundant human life is smoothed and levelled, the abruptness of the individuals lost in the flowing current, like separate flowers drawn along in a border, like music heard so far off that the notes are molten and the theme only remains. The abyss of the sky over and the ancient sun are near. They only are close at hand, they and immortal thought. When the yellow Syrian lions stood in old time of Egypt, then too, the sunlight gleamed on the eyes ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... American, scenery is a pleasing hodge-podge of mountains, valleys, plains, lakes, and rivers. To him, the glacier-hollowed valley of Yosemite, the stream-scooped abyss of the Grand Canyon, the volcanic gulf of Crater Lake, the bristling granite core of the Rockies, and the ancient ice-carved shales of Glacier National Park all are one—just scenery, magnificent, incomparable, meaningless. As a people we have been content to wonder, not to ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... that his contempt for the adultress had not originated in hatred of her character; but that he had required, to enhance his gratification, that his victim, the partner of his guilt, should be hurled from the pinnacle of unsullied virtue, down to the lowest abyss of infamy and degradation: in fine, that all those females whom he had sought, apparently on account of their virtue, had, since his departure, thrown even the mask aside, and had not scrupled to expose the whole deformity of their ...
— The Vampyre; A Tale • John William Polidori
... light began to pierce the darkness, and I perceived that I stood on the lowest step of a staircase, vast as the foot of a mountain. Behind me were thousands of steps of lurid iron; before me, nothing but a void—an abyss, and ether; the blue gloom of midnight beneath my feet, as above my head. I became delirious, and quitting that staircase, which methought it was impossible for me to reascend, I sprung forth into the void with an execration. But, immediately, when I had uttered the curse, the void began to ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... blessed than the finding of it is, and in which it is always true that 'he that seeketh findeth.' Nor does such finding deaden the spirit of seeking, for in every finding there is a fresh discovery of new depths in God, and a consequent quickening of desire to press further into the abyss of His Being, so that aspiration and fruition ever beget each other, and the upward, Godward progress of the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the cage, sounded depths, but there was a suggestion here somehow of an abyss quite measureless. "Of course I know she would never ...
— In the Cage • Henry James
... named—the pledge of love. The soul's abyss, Christ saw, the heart of night, the purse, the end; Knew all, a Man, and knowing stui could bend With soul ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... performs his work in righteousness. The common critical mind would have him left the fatherless, motherless, loverless, almost friendless king of a justifiably distrusting nation—with an eternal grief for his father weighing him down to the abyss; with his mother's sin blackening for him all womankind, and blasting the face of both heaven and earth; and with the knowledge in his heart that he had sent the woman he loved, with her father and her brother, ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... dawn I woke from a dream with a jerk as I slid down an endless black abyss. The abyss was my bed's edge and I found myself on the floor. When I went to rise again, I had to clutch things to stand up. I was so weak I sat on the bed breathing heavily. I tumbled backward into bed again and lay in a daze during ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... brilliant being slowly rising from out the darkness of the night, raising itself by its own might higher and higher, till it stood triumphant on the arch of heaven, and then descended and sank down in its fiery glory into the dark abyss of the heaving and hissing sea. In the hymns of the Veda the poet still wonders whether the sun will rise again; he asks how he can climb the vault of heaven? why he does not fall back? why there is no dust on his path? And when the rays of the morning ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... without a moment's weariness: lost in the contemplation of the black rocks, the tremendous heights and depths, the fields of smooth snow lying, in the clefts and hollows, and the fierce torrents thundering headlong down the deep abyss. ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... doubtingly on the vehicle. Even in the darkness the red dust of Wingdam was visible on its roof and sides, and the red slime of Slumgullion clung tenaciously to its wheels. I opened the door; the stage creaked easily, and in the gloomy abyss the swaying straps beckoned me, like ghostly hands, to come in now and have ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... my thoughts are scarce consistent, when I tell you how they are distracted. Every hour of my life my mind is strangely divided; this minute perhaps I am above the stars, with a thousand systems round about me, looking forward into a vast abyss, and losing my whole comprehension in the boundless space of creation, in dialogues with Whiston and the astronomers; the next moment I am below all trifles, grovelling with T—— in the very centre of nonsense: now I am recreated with ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... why she stoops at once Into the vast and unexplored abyss, What full-grown power informs her from the first, Why she not marvels, strenuously beating The silent boundless regions of ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... the pines. Since then she had been living vividly and fervently. The question with her, now, was how best to voice herself—the self that Jude in no wise knew. Womanlike, she did not want to plunge into what might prove an abyss. She wanted to take her own way, but with a half-unconscious coquetry she desired to drag her captives ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... execution to the destruction of nearly fifty victims in the Murder Hole which they pointed out, and near which they suffered the penalty of their crimes. The bones of several murdered persons were with difficulty brought up from the abyss into which they had been thrust; but so narrow is the aperture, and so extraordinary the depth, that all who see it are inclined to coincide in the tradition of the country people that it is unfathomable. The scene of these events still continues nearly as it was 300 years ago. The ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 355., Saturday, February 7, 1829 • Various
... of release came, and I was free to turn my back upon the spires of my prison city, I had already plumbed an abyss of misery. The very thought of life in the conflict of the world was abhorrent; and if I had been of the Roman Church I should have become a Benedictine and sought a lettered and cloistered peace. I despaired of finding anywhere upon earth the profound ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... the most sacred bonds, to escape from the most salutary restraints. They strike their country to make it obey them. But they will be overcome by the weight of public animadversion, vituperation, indignation, fury, execration, and abomination. That is the abyss to which they have been led by atheism, free thought, and the monstrous claim to judge for themselves and ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... equality with the men of the Revolution of 1793." The Moniteur, Napoleon's Parisian organ, said in August, 1809, after the conclusion of the war, "The mighty hand of Napoleon has snatched Germany from the revolutionary abyss ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... has long toiled up a dangerous precipice, and when he is within one perilous stride of the top, finds his progress arrested when retreat has become impossible. I see above me the pinnacle which I cannot reach—beneath me the abyss into which I must fall, as soon as my relaxing grasp and dizzy brain join to hurl me ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... last agony. According to contemporary accounts, the shaft was a low and narrow kiln, into which nine entered at a time, and in which the penitents passed a day and a night, huddled and tightly pressed against one another. Popular belief imagined an abyss underneath, to swallow up the unworthy and the unbelieving. On emerging from the pit they went and bathed in the lake, and so their Purgatory was accomplished. It would appear from the accounts of eye-witnesses that, to this day, things happen very ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... abyss that separated wealth and the wealthy from mass poverty in the cities and the countryside. The abyss was widened and deepened by the presence of slavery. More extensive and more frequent foreign conquests added to the ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... leaning against a tree, listening to the monotonous voice of a poet who was reading from Plato. She felt the disinterested greatness of Sandro, she knew the grandeur of his intellect—she was filled with a desire to be of service to him. Certainly she did not love him—a social abyss separated them—but could not her beauty and power in some way be allied with his, so that the world ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... people. If a censored press permitted them to know the real truth with respect to the present crisis, that people, still sound in heart and steadfast in soul, would repudiate a policy of duplicity, cunning, and arrogance, which has precipitated their great nation into an abyss of disaster. The normal German is an admirable citizen, quiet, peaceable, thrifty, industrious, faithful, efficient, and affectionate to the verge of sentimentality. He, and not the Junker, has made Germany the most efficient political State in the world. If to ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... observers such conduct was entirely incomprehensible; but we may easily suppose that at this moment the unfortunate man first realized the fearful nature of the circumstances which surrounded him, and perceived the abyss which had yawned so suddenly at his feet. And no wonder that he shrank back from the prospect, overwhelmed for the moment with consternation and despair,—not the prospect of death, but of a degradation ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... baleful fires no light to be seen; the brooding silence unbroken by any sound save those half-heard mutterings that pass through the air like harbingers of evil; about them, everywhere, the unfathomable abyss, dead and lifeless. Off there in the distance, very far away, perhaps, perhaps upon the ramparts, was a sound of someone weeping. It was all in vain that he strained his eyes to pierce the veil, to see something of Liry, ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... laid aside. It is the same with all these things as with the working-men's cities. Louis Bonaparte subscribes, but does not pay. As for the budget, the budget controlled by the blind men in the Council of State, and voted by the dumb men in the Corps Legislatif, there is an abyss beneath it. There was no possible or efficacious budget but a great reduction in the army: two hundred thousand soldiers left at home, two hundred millions saved. Just try to touch the army! the soldier, who would regain his freedom, would applaud, but what would the officer say? And in reality, ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... above the horizon. We fixed our eyes upon it with regret, to salute for the last time our dear country. Now, imagine the ship born aloft, and surrounded by huge mountains of water, which at one moment tossed it in the air, and at another plunged it into the profound abyss. The waves, raised by a stormy north-west breeze, came dashing in a horrible manner against the sides of our ship. I know not whether it was a presentiment of the misfortune which menaced us that had made me pass the preceding night in the most ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... they betrayed, to be gazing, for the first time, at the wonder of the western world. A profound silence was observed by each, until the companion of the officer that we have described suddenly started, and pointing eagerly with his sword into the abyss beneath, exclaimed,— ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... turning pale with agony to find on the brink of what an abyss of loss his zeal had set him, 'wilt thou, then, never speak to me more, and I love thee ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... few people thought at that moment of coming back to the principle the proof of whose title lies in the centuries of unity and greatness assured by it to France—the one and only principle capable of checking her on her descent into the abyss of dismemberment, depopulation, and social destruction, down which ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... girls that summer and even more about his life after graduation from college. What was he going to do? Life stretched ahead of him for one year like a smooth, flowered plain—and then the abyss. He felt prepared to do nothing at all, and he was not swept by an overpowering desire to do anything in particular. Writing had the greatest appeal for him, but he doubted his ability. Teach? Perhaps. But teaching ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... scenes of which my said diary is full, to my day at the spar caverns of Kingston. "At the bottom of a stone quarry, we clad ourselves in sack garments that mud wouldn't spoil, and with lit candles descended into the abyss, hands, knees, and elbows being of as much service as our feet. Now, I am not going to map my way after the manner of guide-books, nor to nickname the gorgeous architecture of nature according to the caprice of a rude peasant on the spot or the fancy of a passing stranger. ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... antagonist, who might lose his life. With a desperate effort he flung his boat-hook toward him and succeeded this time in laying hold of the leather girdle about his waist. One hundred feet below yawned the foaming, weltering abyss, from which the white smoke ascended. If Marcus lost his grip, if the branch snapped no human power could save them; they were ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... and a mirror, a powerful stream of light, I approached my eye to the minute hole drilled through the axis of the lens. For an instant I saw nothing save what seemed to be an illuminated chaos, a vast luminous abyss. A pure white light, cloudless and serene, and seemingly limitless as space itself, was my first impression. Gently, and with the greatest care, I depressed the lens a few hairs' breadths. The wondrous illumination still continued, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... a strange and grotesque vision, or waking-dream, that she had dreamt a few nights before: of a vast abyss, black and silent, which had to be filled up to the top with the bodies of women, hurled down to the depths of the pit of darkness, in order that the survivors might, at last, walk over in safety. Human bodies take but little room, and the abyss seemed to swallow them, as some greedy animal its ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... Crowned with free will, walking on the crest of the world, enfeoffed with individual faculties, served by vassal nature with tributes of various joy, he cannot bear the thought of losing himself, of sliding into the general abyss of matter. His interior consciousness is permeated with a self preserving instinct, and shudders at every glimpse of danger or hint of death. The soul, pervaded with a guardian instinct of life, and seeing death's steady approach to ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... disquieted her more than she had yet confessed: had she been taking a way of her own, and choosing a guide instead of receiving instruction in the way of understanding? Were these things sent for her warning, to show her into what an abyss of death her conduct was leading her?—But the moment she found herself in the open air of Donal's company, her doubts and fears vanished for the time. Such a one as he must surely know better than those others the way ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... Aurelius and Commodus and their magistrates and officials and constabulary; I was right in fearing nothing from Pertinax and Julianus; but I was an ass to think I could cope with Septimius Severus. That man is deeper than the deepest abyss of mid-ocean! ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... have already seen, the Northern races imagined that the giants were the first creatures who came to life among the icebergs which filled the vast abyss of Ginnunga-gap. These giants were from the very beginning the opponents and rivals of the gods, and as the latter were the personifications of all that is good and lovely, the former were representative of all ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... accepting these conditions; for she would then have three enemies and not a single ally. Not only honor, but also prudence commands us to reject the treaty. Not to obey the dictates of those two powers would be to hurl Prussia into an abyss of wretchedness, where she would not hear the sympathetic lamentations of a single ally, but the scornful laughter of the world. I hope that the king may preserve Prussia from such consequences, and graciously permit us to maintain, amid our ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... the captain; "hard down your helm!" The order was hardly given, when they were thrown on their beam ends; down, down they went, as if never to rise again, completely engulfed in the dark abyss! The boy, where is he? down in the hold, his arm made fast to the collar of old Neptune, that they may go down together; he kneels, his mother's gift, the bible, in his hand, calmly awaiting his time. Nature seems terrified, yet that boy knows no fear. Crash succeeds ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... I know there is not an abyss depths upon depths below me—down into the very bowels of the earth! I had better ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... cheek crimsons with anger and her heart flutters with fear, the woman glories in Joseph's guilty love, sweet incense to her vanity, evidence of her peerless beauty's infernal power. She retreats a step as from the brink of an abyss, but farther she cannot fly, for there is a charm in her companion's voice, potent as old Merlin's mystic chant—tones low and sweet as music in dreams by maids who sleep in Dian's bosom, yet wilder, fiercer than trumpets blown for war. As a sailor drawn ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... up the mountain side, while at our feet an unfathomable abyss seemed ready to engulf us. A little later we were passing through a charming village with its cottages and graceful belfry, above which light fleecy clouds floated lazily. Farther on a great lake with its blue waters, so calm and clear, ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... aforetime; and it is crude ambergris. Moreover, the trees of the island are all of the most precious aloes-wood, both Chinese and Comorin; but there is no way of issue from the place, for it is as an abyss midmost the sea; the steepness of its shore forbiddeth the drawing up of ships, and if any approach the mountain, they fall into the eddy aforesaid; nor is there ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... him pressed close to the bank and face to face with the on-coming grizzly. At any instant the horse might disregard the guiding hand as well as the friendly words of encouragement, and in mad terror attempt to swerve suddenly around, and thus hurl itself and rider into the yawning abyss below. ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... Moreover, the priest's robe hampered my movements sadly, while, being no light-weight, the strands of the small cord cut my hands. I durst not hurry, but took the passage inch by inch, gritting my teeth as I hung suspended above the abyss, lest I might emit a cry. In truth I thought my arms would pull out of the sockets before I finally came alongside the spar. Yet, thanks be to God, the rope held nobly, though it required every pound of remaining strength to haul my dangling body up, that I could rest across ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... overshadowed by a beyond which is both mysterious and terrible. Of the world beyond he has no single comprehensive idea, but he acknowledges it in his {235} expectation of the injuries and benefits which he may at any time receive from it. It is an abyss whose depths he has never sounded, but which he is forced practically to recognize, since he is at the mercy of forces ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... ground and stretched out my other arm. Still it was vacancy. I stretched a little more violently; feeling forward, and on each side; and I seemed to be projected upon a point, my head and shoulders inclining over a dark abyss, which ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... his intention to turn off the gas burning in the middle of the shop, Mr Verloc descended into the abyss of moral reflections. With the insight of a kindred temperament he pronounced his verdict. A lazy lot—this Karl Yundt, nursed by a blear-eyed old woman, a woman he had years ago enticed away from a friend, and afterwards had tried more than once to shake off into the gutter. Jolly lucky for ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... to facilitate the descent, Hans wound his way down the cone by a spiral path. Our route lay amidst eruptive rocks, some of which, shaken out of their loosened beds, rushed bounding down the abyss, and in their fall awoke echoes remarkable for their loud and ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... of mother or sister? But who believes entirely in a mother or a sister? Absolutely and unconditionally? Who has never caught mother or sister in a falsehood or a subterfuge? Who has not sometimes seen in the heart of mother or sister, as by a lightning flash, an abyss which the profoundest love cannot ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... that it is natural that we should remain at home, in our own world, as long as we can, as long as we are not violently driven from it by a series of irresistible and incontrovertible proofs coming from the neighbouring abyss. The survival of a spirit is no more improbable than the prodigious faculties which we are obliged to attribute to the mediums if we deny them to the dead. But the existence of mediums is beyond dispute, whereas that of spirits is not; and it is therefore for the spirits or for those who make ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the Chinese pavilion, as much for a little rest as to leave the field to the doctors and not embarrass them. As he walked along the winding gravelled path which led to the pavilion, Thaddeus seemed to himself in the depths of an abyss described by Dante. The unfortunate man had never dreamed that the possibility might arise of becoming Clementine's husband, and now he had drowned himself in a ditch of mud. His face was convulsed, when he reached the kiosk, with an agony ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... sleep. For the first time in her extraordinary life fear had come to her, and she had shivered on the very edge of the abyss. She felt the shudder she could not repress and shook herself impatiently. Then she extinguished the light and went to the window and looked out. Somewhere there in the darkness she knew her enemy was hidden, and again that sense of ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... anything about it. I should have to be crazy to believe such a thing. Could the earth turn over, and we not fall heels over head to the devil and clear down into the abyss? Ha, ha, ha! But, my Monsieur Berg, how is it that the moon is sometimes so small ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... beginning to take rank as a religious heresy as well, I have no hesitation in placing modern Spiritualism. Those who associate this latest mystery only with gyrating articles of furniture, rapping tables, or simpering planchettes, are simply in the abyss of ignorance, and dangerously underrate the gravity of the subject. The later development of Spirit Faces and Spirit Forms, each of which I have examined thoroughly, and made the results of my observations public, fail to afford ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... wern alle Then soon came the seventh day when assembled were all, & alle woned in e whichche e wylde & e tame. And all abode in the ark (hutch), the wild and the tame. en bolned e abyme & bonke[gh] con ryse Then swelled the abyss and banks did rise, Waltes out vch walle-heued, in ful wode streme[gh] Bursts out each well-head in full wild streams, Wat[gh] no brymme at abod vnbrosten bylyue There was no brim (stream) ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... to tell of his young brother Claude; of the ruin she has made of his life; of the little green devils that lurk in a glass of absinthe, and clutch their victim, and drag him down deeper, ever deeper, into the great, green abyss. ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... am I? Am I looking at Baal's priest? What, David's daughter speaking to that traitor? And will you tolerate his speech with you? Do you not fear that a profound abyss Will yawning open underneath his feet, So that its flames at once will compass you? Or that these walls will crush you fallen on him? What wants he? Wherefore comes, this enemy Of God, to taint the air we ...
— Athaliah • J. Donkersley
... depths had it gone, those other times? True, it had come back. But it had brought no tidings of that dumb, black vast into which it had sunk. And thinner and thinner had grown the thread that had drawn it back from that unsensed abyss until now he knew that it was ready to break. His soul was numb with the conviction that, let it be thrust once more over the brink, it would drop beyond ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... intended still to keep her terrible secret to herself; still to have leaned upon Sir Peregrine's arm as on the arm of a trusting friend. But he had overcome her by his generosity; and in her fixed resolve that he should not be dragged down into this abyss of misery the sudden determination to tell the truth at least to him had come upon her. She did tell him all; and then, as soon as the words were out of her mouth, the strength which had enabled her to do so deserted her, and she fell at his feet overcome ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... practice, or one idea with another, has been considered as an exhibition of remarkable political common sense. The light-headed Frenchmen really believed in their ideas, and fell thereby into a shocking abyss of anarchy and fratricidal bloodshed, whereas we have avoided any similar fate by preaching a "noble national theory" and then practicing it just as far as it suited our interests or was not too costly in time and money. ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... scenes which find a parallel only in the infernal regions imagined by prophets and poets. This is what human nature is capable of; for Frenchmen are men, and we shudder for our race. But, at all events, what hope is to be seen for France in this seething abyss? This tragedy is the end of eighty years of revolutions, of an eighty years' struggle after Liberty and Fraternity, eighty years of attempts again and again renewed to rebuild French Society on a new and harmonious basis. The end is a fiercer hatred, ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy
... the chamberlain threw him into the deep abyss, shut the window, and ran to tell the king that there was no longer a suitor for ...
— Fairy Tales of the Slav Peasants and Herdsmen • Alexander Chodsko
... brains whirled with the vertigo which seized them as they peered appalled and shrinkingly down upon the sharp crags, the sheer precipices, the steeply-sloping snow-fields with their lower edges generally overhanging some fathomless abyss, the great glaciers, the awful crevasses spanned here and there by crumbling snow bridges—the effect of the scene being heightened and intensified in its impressive grandeur by the deathlike silence which prevailed, ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... I remarked that fringing-reefs are almost universally breached, where streams enter the sea. (Lieutenant Wellstead and others have remarked that this is the case in the Red Sea; Dr. Ruppell ("Reise in Abyss." Band. i., page 142) says that there are pear-shaped harbours in the upraised coral-coast, into which periodical streams enter. From this circumstance, I presume, we must infer that before the upheaval of the strata now forming the coast-land, fresh ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... stood with Ralph on the terrace outside the hut. Her eyes plunged into the awful abyss at their feet, swept along the moonlit valley thousands and thousands of feet below them, and fastened themselves upon the sinister crags of the Lyskamm and the stupendous dome of Mont Blanc. A ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 5th, 1914 • Various
... your fell design; Dig the gulf and draw the line; Fire beneath your feet the mine: Deeply, when the wide abyss Yawns between your land and this, Shall ye feel ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark
... loitered, and in looking once more on the scene of her childhood. But, as she thought of this, she remembered the darkness of the stream, and the softly-gurgling but rapid flow with which it hurried itself on beneath the black abyss of the building. She had often shuddered as she watched it, indulging herself in the luxury of causeless trepidation. But now, were she there, she would surely take that plunge into the blackness, which would bring her to the end of ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... me from indulging in unjust suspicions! but there is an abyss before me, into which I scarcely ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... understanding; all that affectionate gaiety and innocent fawning; all those kind and devoted looks, which turned to man to ask for his assistance against unjust death; all those flickering gleams which came from the profound abyss of a world that is no longer ours; all those nearly human little habits lie sadly in the cold ground, under a flowering elder-tree, in a corner ...
— Our Friend the Dog • Maurice Maeterlinck
... garment of God. Again, the evanescence of the atom into galaxies of "electrons" destroys the only physical theory that ever threatened us with Atheism; and the infinitesimal electrons themselves open up an immeasurable perspective into the abyss of an Unknowable in which all things "live and move and have their being." Therefore it matters little to us, except as a matter of antiquarian interest, to know what the Vedic singers may have ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... the spring is an abyss, in which water is continually seething, but never rises into the air. At a little distance, on a high rock, rising out of the river Sidumule, not far from the shore, are other springs. They are three in number, each at a short distance from the next, and occupy nearly the entire ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... them to do any thing themselves, with their last look toward the ship they saw that the coolies had escaped from their prison through doors which the concussion had made for them, and stood clustering together, helpless and despairing, upon the decks, and gazing upon the abyss which was opening its jaws to receive them. My friend assures me that he knows these poor creatures were completely imprisoned all the night these terrible occurences were going on, the hatches being "battened down," and made as secure as a jail ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... you find any of their books securing the respectful attention of those competent to judge concerning them? I think not; and I think also you know as well as I do why it is that they have sunk back into the abyss from which they for a time emerged: it is because after the most careful and patient examination by the ablest and most judicial minds of many countries, their arguments were found so untenable that they themselves renounced them. They fled from the ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... compacts, and the sanctity of engagements—all seem to have been thrown into one melting pot. The mere fact that the expression "a scrap of paper" has become a household word, bandied about by orators and scribblers, shows the distance we have descended into the abyss. The whole structure of our international relations seems to have fallen to the ground and the labored work of centuries to have been undone in a few months. Now, the Jews have been from the earliest times a people that have ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... the most idiotic things out of sheer obstinacy; possibly they deceive even themselves, and act in good faith; but unfortunately, when the veil falls from before their eyes, they see but the profound abyss into which their folly ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... about six miles distant. We rode over field and meadow, when suddenly my companion reined in his horse, and came for me to dismount. "But where are the falls?" said I. "You will see soon." A few steps brought me to the brink of an abyss. What a beautiful scene burst upon my astonished eye! Right before me was this huge sheet of water, pouring into a dark circular pool beneath. One side of the fall was heavy, the other so thin that it seemed as if ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson
... a Republic from destruction, either by civil war or the dry-rot. They tend to decay, do all we can to prevent it, like human bodies. If they try the experiment of governing themselves by their smallest, they slide downward to the unavoidable abyss with tenfold velocity; and there never has been a Republic that has not ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... women. French and English women are psychologically very similar; the standpoint from which they see life is the same, the same thoughts interest and amuse them; but the attitude of a Frenchman's mind is absolutely opposed to that of an Englishman; they stand on either side of a vast abyss, two animals different in colour, form, and temperament;—two ideas destined to remain irrevocably separate ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... bowed his head in salute, stood for a moment as though lost in thought, then, turning suddenly, walked with a steady step to the edge of the abyss and leapt. For an instant the sunlight shone on his white and fluttering robe, then from the depths of that darksome place floated up the sound of a heavy ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... against the knotted trunk of the tree by which he stood and howled, not like a man, but like a savage beast, as he besought her ghost to haunt him. "Be with me always—take any form!" he cried. "Only do not leave me in this abyss, where ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... bowed before the Throne, veiled in their golden hair; Four white wings lessened swiftly down the dark abyss of air. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of fruit and wine By the runlet's rim, where we sat to dine; And when we had drunk from the glass together, Arched by the oak-copse from the weather, I held the vessel to rinse in the fall, Where it slipped, and sank, and was past recall, Though we stooped and plumbed the little abyss With long bared arms. There the glass still is. And, as said, if I thrust my arm below Cold water in basin or bowl, a throe From the past awakens a sense of that time, And the glass both used, and the cascade's rhyme. The basin seems the pool, and its edge The hard smooth ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... she had reached Euston, and driven through a tumultuous and shabby thoroughfare to King's Cross, and taken another ticket, and installed herself in another train, that Hilda began to feel suddenly, like an abyss opening beneath her strength, the lack of food. Meticulous in her clerical duties, and in many minor mechanical details of her personal daily existence, she was capable of singular negligences concerning matters which the ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... resistance to the whole of Northern Europe, wherein their island was included. For, the whole of Northern Europe rebelled against the Church at the beginning of the sixteenth century, to enter upon a new road of progress and civilization, as it has been called, ending finally in the frightful abyss of materialism and atheism which now gapes under the feet of modern nations—an abyss in whose yawning womb nullus ordo, sed sempiternus horror habitat. The end of that progress is now plain enough: political and social convulsions, without ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... hospitable hermit. Issuing from the grotto, he bent his steps, in obedience to the direction of Madoc, to that secret path, which had never before been discovered by any mortal unassisted by the goblins of the abyss. Before he reached it the golden sun had begun to decline from his meridian height. He passed along the winding way beneath the impending precipices, which formed a dark and sullen vault over his head. Ever and ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... the value of stones and setting at sight (Heaven knows how!), delight and severity struggling in the expression of his face the meanwhile. The Countess had plunged in a kind of stupor; to me, watching her, it seemed that she was fathoming the depths of the abyss into which she had fallen. There was remorse still left in that woman's soul. Perhaps a hand held out in human charity might ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... sadly perplexed. There was a depth in Bigot's character which she could not fathom, a bottomless abyss into which she was falling and could not save herself. Whichever way she turned the eidolon of Caroline met her as a bar to all further progress in her design upon ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... both sides of the gorge, at its opening, began to burn upwards towards the summits of the cliffs. Soon the very spot where she had slept, and where she now paused once more in her terrible perplexity and fear, would be an abyss ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... of God and the dread hereafter never entered, had encased his spiritual being in a sort of brazen armor, through which no ordinary blow of conscience could penetrate. Still he had fearful glimpses of recent events, and his soul, hanging as it was over the abyss of eternity, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... dust,—by the fortunate contact of cooling cinders of the right chemical properties and temperature, he secretes and hatches into life an egg, or cell of throbbing protoplasm; to this pulsating mass of jelly there comes from the unconscious abyss at length a vague instinct, a drowsy awakening of desire; next a feeble gleam of definite thought; reason then faintly dawns, and lo! at last this fair universe burst into glorious light, clothed in surpassing loveliness, throbbing with love, tender sympathy ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... of a Being of infinite benevolence to punish them with an infinity of torments. The legislator, having by his side men perfectly enlightened, unfettered, and unbiassed, presumes that he has attained by their means the exact truth; and so, when he sees his people ready to plunge headlong into an abyss of fire, shall he not stretch forth his hand ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... was actually mistaken for one of the conspirators against Caesar and murdered by the crowd. He dreamt, on the night before he met his death, that Caesar invited him to supper, and when he refused the invitation, took him by the hand and forced him down into a deep, dark abyss, which he ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... time I saw Luerson, with a countenance of supernatural malignity, and the expression of a fiend, murdering poor Frazer. At another, our boat seemed drawn by some irresistible, but unseen power, to the verge of a yawning abyss, and began to descend between green-glancing walls of water, to vast depths, where undescribed sea-monsters, never seen upon the surface, glided about in an obscurity that increased their hideousness. Suddenly the feeble light that streamed ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... must we estimate the wondrous power of books, since through them we survey the utmost bounds of the world and time, and contemplate the things that are as well as those that are not, as it were in the mirror of eternity. In books we climb mountains and scan the deepest gulfs of the abyss; in books we behold the finny tribes that may not exist outside their native waters, distinguish the properties of streams and springs and of various lands; from books we dig out gems and metals and the materials of every kind of mineral, and learn the virtues of herbs and trees ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... aloft created such a din that I could not have made myself heard even had I been foolish enough to have attempted it. But I was confident that I had seen something; and when the ship reached the bottom of the abyss, where we on deck were becalmed, and the roar of the surge under our bows had died away, I mentioned the matter to the mate; so that when we were swung aloft again both of us were eagerly on the lookout for the object. As almost invariably ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... that Orpheus is "the mythological expression of the delight which music gives to the primitive races," while yet others accept without hesitation the idea that Orpheus is the sun that, when day is done, plunges into the black abyss of night, in the vain hope of overtaking his lost bride, Eurydice, the rosy dawn. And, whether they be right or wrong, it would seem that the sadness that comes to us sometimes as the day dies and the last of the sun's rays vanish to leave ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... cannot be too slow about it. Give no ear to any man's praise or censure; know that that is not it: on the one side is as Heaven if you have strength to keep silent, and climb unseen; yet on the other side, yawning always at one's right-hand and one's left, is the frightfulest Abyss and Pandemonium! See Fenimore Cooper;—poor Cooper, he is down in it; and had a climbing faculty too. Be steady, be quiet, be in no haste; and God speed you well! ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... and been succeeded by Innocent VIII. Innocent had given place to Alexander. The very nadir of the abyss had been reached. Then Savonarola saw a vision and heard a voice: Ecce gladius Domini super terram cito et velociter. The sword turned earthward; the air was darkened with fiery sleet and arrows; thunders rolled; the world was filled with pestilences, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... of four years, some youths, climbing by a ladder in search of pigeons' nests, detected the fatal secret; and, as Andronicus felt himself touched and bound by the excommunication, he trembled on the brink of the abyss which had been so treacherously dug under his feet. A synod of bishops was instantly convened to debate this important question: the rashness of these clandestine anathemas was generally condemned; but as the knot could be untied only by the same hand, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... into an abyss of wounded feeling). Oh, well, if you're determined to be unfriendly, I s'pose I'd better go. (He moves reluctantly towards the door. Morell makes no sign. He lingers.) I didn't hexpect to find a hunforgivin' spirit in ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... The light emitted by the sun 10,000 years ago is to-day pursuing its way in a sphere whose surface is 10,000 light-years distant on all sides. Science has nothing even to suggest the possibility of its restoration, and the most delicate observations fail to show any return from the unfathomable abyss. ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... reason it is always a false step in mathematical science, a step over its brink into the abyss beyond, when we try to reduce its elements to anything not essentially sensible. Intuition must continue to furnish the subject of discourse, the axioms, and the ultimate criteria and sanctions. Calculation and transmutation can never make their own counters or the medium in which ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... to occupy an intermediate position in the development of language. Those who have endeavored to talk with them speak of their utterance as being inarticulate in sound. It appears to be a sort of link between articulate and inarticulate speech. In short, the great abyss which was of old thought to lie between the languages of man and the lower animals has largely vanished through the labors of philologists, and we can trace stepping-stones over every portion of the wide gap. The language of man has not alone been evidently a product of evolution, but also ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... know what was, I feel full well what is, And I should rage, if spirits could go mad; Though I forget the taste of earthly bliss, That paleness warms my grave, as though I had A Seraph chosen from the bright abyss To be my spouse: thy paleness makes me glad; Thy beauty grows upon me, and I feel A greater love through all my essence ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... and glorious triumphs, which must be passed by, for it will be the Lord's will to have them published some day by him who may write the general history of these islands, so that so heroic exploits may not remain buried in the abyss of oblivion. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIII, 1629-30 • Various
... propriety, and dismissed them in the same way, and hence there was that rule. But now-a-days, princes bring their ministers forward as if they were going to take them on their knees, and send them away as if they would cast them into an abyss. If they do not treat them as their greatest enemies, it is well.— How can you expect the ancient practice to be observed in such circumstances [1]?' These instances may suffice to illustrate the character of Tsze-sze, as it ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... Romance is a shy bird, and not to be hunted with a brass band. Where is the heart of life, if not at one's elbow? At the farthest, one has only to turn the corner of the street. It is useless to look for prodigies in the abyss, but every stream has its straws that float; I have determined ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen |
