"Sublimity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... "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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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)
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... amid the uninspiring surroundings of that wayside hospital, took on a grandeur and sublimity ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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 Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... "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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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 |
