"Unfathomable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have been evident to those who watched the rapid unfolding of Helen's faculties that it would not be possible to keep her inquisitive spirit for any length of time from reaching out toward the unfathomable mysteries of life. But great care has been taken not to lead her thoughts prematurely to the consideration of subjects which perplex and confuse all minds. Children ask profound questions, but they often receive ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... exclaimed Ten-teh, with a pang of unfathomable emotion. "Is there, then, no middle way? Who is Ten-teh, the obscure and illiterate fisherman, that he should thrust himself into the presence of the Son of Heaven? If the mother of the dutiful Chou Yii could destroy herself and her family ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... of pretty sentimental tales, and cheap apologues, Mrs. Sand proclaims HER truth—that we need a new Messiah, and that the Christian religion is no more! O awful, awful name of God! Light unbearable! Mystery unfathomable! Vastness immeasurable!—Who are these who come forward to explain the mystery, and gaze unblinking into the depths of the light, and measure the immeasurable vastness to a hair? O name, that God's people of old did fear to utter! O light, that God's prophet would have perished ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... first full look into those wise unfathomable eyes. Standing close to her, she seemed somewhat older than he had guessed her to be, although her face was unlined. Probably it was her remarkable poise, her air of power and security—and those eyes! What had not they looked upon? She smiled and poured broth from ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... by way of explaining his attachment to the Book, that he had solemnly promised his wife never to omit his weekly devotions while on the deep. Though I never shared the literary tastes of Mr. Wilson Barrett, the captain's unfathomable ignorance of the Gospels, Isaiah and the Psalms startled even me; but on the other hand he had an intimate acquaintance with a number of stories to be found only in the Apocrypha, with which he had thoughtfully provided himself. ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... smile lighted up the thin wan face, full of unfathomable thoughts; and he replied, again ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... the platform, which shakes as the train travels. Amid the unfathomable darkness which envelops the Kara Koum, I experience the feeling of a night ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... however great, but will disappear like a shadow under the searching light of self-abnegation. Problems exist only in our own self-created illusions, and they vanish away when self is yielded up. Self and error are synonymous. Error is involved in the darkness of unfathomable complexity, but eternal simplicity is the glory ...
— The Way of Peace • James Allen
... the tumbled blocks and crags, Huge ridges and sharp juts of flinty peaks, Black caves, and masses of the grim, bald rock. The ethereal, unfathomable sky, Hung over him, the valley lay beneath, Dotted with yellow hayricks, that exhaled Sweet, healthy odors to the mountain-top. He breathed intoxicate the infinite air, And plucked the heather blossoms where they blew, Reckless with light and dew, in crannies green, And scarcely saw ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... might be told in dithyrambic verse. It moves wholly by inspiration; every event is providential, every act unpremeditated. Absolute freedom and absolute helplessness have met together: you depend wholly on divine favour, yet that unfathomable agency is not distinguishable from your own life. This is the condition to which some forms of piety invite men to return; and it lies in truth not far beneath the level of ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... the British Museum frowning beyond the little dingy strip of garden, with a sick longing in her heart for the Murewell cornfield, the wood-path, the village, the free air-bathed spaces of heath and common. Oh! this huge London, with its unfathomable poverty and its heartless wealth—how it oppressed and bewildered her! Its mere grime and squalor, its murky poisoned atmosphere, were a perpetual trial to the countrywoman brought up amid the dash of mountain streams and the scents of mountain pastures. She drooped physically ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... purposeless profusion. It retained all "the cumbrous charge of a Gothic establishment," though all its usage and accommodation had "shrunk into the polished littleness of modern elegance." The outlay was enormous. The expenditure on the court tables only was a thing unfathomable. Waste was the rule in every branch of it. There was an office for the Great Wardrobe, another office of the Robes, a third of the Groom of the Stole. For these three useless offices there were three useless treasurers. They all laid a heavy burden on the taxpayer, ...
— Burke • John Morley
... the most bounteous, the richest and finest wheat in all the world. Strange and unfathomable that so much of the bread of man, the staff of life, the hope of civilization in this tragic year 1917, should come from a vast, treeless, waterless, ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... not understand that such an element could exist among the forces of evil without fatal result to some one. It seemed to her as if a devil were at large, and there could be neither peace nor security until the evil spirit was exorcised, the baneful presence laid in nethermost depths of unfathomable sea. ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... of other poets; in the air and sea, which have been in all times the emblems of change and the similitudes of inconstancy, he has discovered the very principles of permanency. The ocean in his view, not by its vastness, its unfathomable depths, and its limitless extent, becomes an image of deity, by ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... campaign will open as soon as the roads are dried up. The mud in Virginia is much more formidable than at the North, and presents an insuperable, perhaps I should say an unfathomable, obstacle to active operations. I hope General Grant will succeed in taking Vicksburg. The loss of that important stronghold would be a great blow ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... slowly past him, and passing gave him a long and steady look, with an unfathomable expression in her eyes,—an expression neither of anger nor of bitterness nor of disgust nor of anything he might have expected after all he had done that day. He turned, and watched her until she had disappeared in the crowd around the stagecoach; ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... breakfast-room; the one generally used in winter for all purposes. Mrs. Rossitur sat there alone in an easy-chair; and Fleda no sooner caught the outline of her figure than her heart sank at once to an unknown depth,—unknown before and unfathomable now. She was cowering over the fire,—her head sunk in her hands, so crouching, that the line of neck and shoulders instantly conveyed to Fleda the idea of fancied or felt degradation—there was no escaping it—how, whence, what, was all wild confusion. But the language ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... in his Preface, "that my pupils may learn to love Nature, than teach the looking at Nature that they may learn to draw." And no one can study Mr. Ruskin's book without gaining a profounder sense of the infinite beauty and variety of Nature, and of the unfathomable stores of her freely lavished riches,—or without acquiring clearer perceptions of this beauty, and of its relations to the Divine government and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... very high, and at first there seemed to be doubts as to where a landing should be effected, but in a few days the question was settled. Our boat was moored as near the shore as possible, and we joined the immense throng painfully making their way through the unfathomable mud to camps in the dense woods. The first things I observed after reaching the high bluff, were trees that had been torn and shattered by shells from our gunboats, which, it seems, had dislodged a company of Confederates, who had dug rifle-pits ...
— "Shiloh" as Seen by a Private Soldier - With Some Personal Reminiscences • Warren Olney
... that it was taking him far out of his normal course. Even his love for Althea had not taken him out of his course; it had never been incalculable; it had been the ground he walked on, the goal he worked towards; what was happening now was like a current, swift and unfathomable, that was bearing him ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... simpler, and more understandable ones."[599] "What is wanted is neither aristocracy, plutocracy, nor demagoguecracy, but democracy—the one governing system which never has been tried. The people must learn that the game of politics is not an unfathomable science, but a struggle of rival interests in which no delegate can so well represent their needs as themselves."[600] "The referendum quite changes the character of the Federal Assembly. It ceases to be a Parliament, and becomes merely a drafting committee. In other countries ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... is no vault, it is a limitless immensity, inconceivable, unfathomable, that surrounds us on all sides, and in the midst of which our globe is floating. THE HEAVENS ARE ALL THAT EXISTS, all that we see, and all that we do not see: the Earth on which we are, that bears us onward in her rapid flight; the Moon ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... the party in that direction, just in time for them to see the supposed projecting crag—in reality an enormous mass of ice—which supported the snow-bank on which the Flying Fish rested, break off and go thundering down into the unfathomable depths below. The spectators clung to each other in helpless nerveless terror at so appalling a spectacle as the falling of this mass, weighing probably millions of tons; but the full significance and import of the catastrophe did not present itself to their ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... fierce torrent swoln with show'rs, Or sudden Cataracts of melting Snow, Which from the Alps its headlong Deluge pours, And foams, and thunders o'er the Vales below, With desultory fury borne along, Rolls his impetuous, vast, unfathomable ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... faint, expectant, sharp As the first chords one picks out from the harp To prelude paean. Venturing all, he lift His eyes, and there encurtained in a drift Of sea-blue mantle close-drawn, he espies Helen above him watching, her grave eyes Upon him fixt, blue homes of mystery Unfathomable, eternal as the sea, And as unresting. So in that still place, In that still hour stood those two face ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... pointing out their beauties—an office much needed, particularly by certain dullards, the magazine of whose souls are not combustible enough to take fire at the electric sparks shot forth up out of the depths of George Stephens's unfathomable genius! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... fatal news. Now, however, I hope that you have both prepared yourselves to hear the worst; and after giving way to the reasonable and natural impulses of your grief, to submit yourselves at last to the will of God, and to adore his inscrutable, unfathomable, and all-wise providence. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... has given to these lines their impress of an unfathomable peace? For there speaks from them a tranquillity which seems to overcome our souls; which makes us feel in the midst of toil and passion that we are disquieting ourselves in vain; that we are travelling to a region where these things shall not ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... listen to me. There is something more than nerves and a highly strung temperament in this. Next week I want Nannie, not you, to bring the child here on a visit. I know India and her religions as far as any Englishman dare say he knows anything about that unfathomable country—yes! Mam! religions—Hinduism—Brahminism—Buddhism—why, I've passed the best part of my life trying to unravel certain physical and psychical threads knotted up in India; but the years are slipping by, and time is getting shorter and shorter, ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... Scottish subsoil; nature herself had done it all. But, we repeat, it could be compared to nothing but the celebrated Mammoth caves, which, in an extent of more than twenty miles, contain two hundred and twenty-six avenues, eleven lakes, seven rivers, eight cataracts, thirty-two unfathomable wells, and fifty-seven domes, some of which are more than four hundred and fifty feet in height. Like these caves, New Aberfoyle was not the work of men, but ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... simplification as on discrimination. Its true representative defines, rather than analyzes. He aims at no complete catalogue, or interpretation of the subjects of knowledge, but a following out, as far as man can, what in its fulness is mysterious and unfathomable. Taking into his charge all sciences, methods, collections of facts, principles, doctrines, truths, which are the reflexions of the universe upon the human intellect, he admits them all, he disregards none, and, as disregarding none, he allows none to exceed or encroach. His watchword ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... seem like wood. The grain stood out in knee-high ridges in all directions to the limit of visibility. It was like a nightmare picture of a frozen bad-lands, split here and there by six-feet-broad, unfathomable chasms—which were the cracks in ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... is a kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... some great sorrow. It is an unhappy love-affair. I understand." Here he smiled his critical, unfathomable, remote smile. "You are not yet eighteen, and have been capable of a great sorrow! Child," he said, "thank God for it! You have a voice of gold. We will make of that sorrow diamonds and rubies and pearls to set in the voice, so that the world will stand at gaze before you. When you have ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... excellency, to give me all the assistance you can, in tracing out the author of the infidelity, which put extracts from General Conway's letters to me into your hands. Those letters have been stealingly copied; but, which of them, when, or by whom, is to me, as yet, an unfathomable secret. ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... readers' ears; to hurry him, in breathless phrases, hither and thither, back and forward, in time and space; to focus all this about his own momentary personality; and then, drawing the ground from under his feet, as if by some cataclysm of nature, to plunge him into the unfathomable abyss sown with enormous suns and systems, and among the inconceivable numbers and magnitudes and velocities of the heavenly bodies. So that he concludes by striking into us some sense of that disproportion of things which Shelley has illuminated by the ironical flash of these eight words: The desire ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a vivid picture of him as a ragged, little fellow, stumbling about through his unfathomable darkness, bumping into things and leaving jagged holes in his child's black stockings. Whether she wanted to laugh or cry she did not know, but a great, warm surge of motherliness came over her for the child she imaged, and she said ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... For some unfathomable reason she minded—minded intensely—that this man should hold her in such poor esteem. She wanted to put herself right with him, to justify ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... of no more affecting composition among all the productions of Chopin than the "Polonaise-Fantaisie" (in A flat major), Op. 61 (published in September, 1846). What an unspeakable, unfathomable wretchedness reveals itself in these sounds! We gaze on a boundless desolation. These lamentations and cries of despair rend our heart, these strange, troubled wanderings from thought to thought fill us with intensest pity. There are thoughts of sweet ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... looked at him in still greater astonishment, opening her eyes slowly until they seemed like two pellucid lakelets of unfathomable depth into which March felt inclined to fling himself, clothes and all, and be drowned comfortably. She then looked at the fire, then at March again. It was evident that she had not been accustomed to hold intercourse with jocular minds. Perceiving this, March at once changed his tone, and, with ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... had been one long nightmare of remorse, heightened by fear, until he had met Amalia, and after that it had been one unremitting strife between love and duty—delight in her mind, in her touch, in her every movement, and in his own soul despair unfathomable. Now at last it was to end in public exposure, imprisonment, disgrace. A peculiar apathy of peace seemed to envelop him. There was no longer hope to entice, no further struggle to be waged against the terror of fear, or the joy of love, or the horror of ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... was its flow, And, ever gathering to its own New springs of which we had not known, To fairer meadows Swept exultant from the woodland shadows; And when at last upon the baffling plain We thought it scattered like a ravelled skein,— Lo, tranquil, free, Its longed-for home, the wide unfathomable sea! ...
— Songs of Two • Arthur Sherburne Hardy
... but it has no ending. It is the Comforter, but it waves away our joys and hopes like the angel with the flaming sword. Though it is the Resting-place, it stirs to all heroic strife, to outgoing, to conquest. It is the Friend indeed, but it will not yield to our desires. Is it this strange, unfathomable self we think to know, and awaken to, by what is written, or by study of it as so many planes of consciousness. But in vain we store the upper chambers of the mind with such quaint furniture of thought. No ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... water. On the middlemost shoal no rocks were uncovered; but on the south-east end of the Mermaid's Shoal several were observed. These reefs are of a coral formation, and are very dangerous to approach at night, from their vicinity being unfathomable to the depth of 170 fathoms; still, however, the surf that constantly breaks upon them may be heard at a great distance, and will generally be sufficient to warn the navigator of ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... fouled at all, or whether the copper showed any signs of wrinkling. Arrived at the taffrail, he leaned well out over it, and peered down into the water. The first thing which attracted his notice was the deep, pure, beautiful ultramarine tint of the water, as he gazed far down into its unfathomable depths; the next was, the presence of a long greyish-brown object under the ship's counter, which had escaped his notice at first in consequence of its being in the deepest shadow of the hull. A moment sufficed to satisfy him that it was a huge shark; and as the creature caught sight of him, and ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... wide plain. On one side, it was bounded by thick woods, whose dark secret depths looked unfathomable to the eye: on the other, by hills, ever rising higher and higher yet, until they were lost in bright, beautifully white clouds, gleaming in refulgent sunlight. On the side above the woods, the sky was dark and vaporous. It seemed as if some thick exhalation had arisen from beneath ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... to the dim religious light, could perceive human figures crawling and clambering about the roof and pinnacles of the vast cavern in which we now found ourselves, and could observe many narrow rattan ladders hanging in the most precipitous places, or stretching horizontally across almost unfathomable abysses. ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... prognosticated. The fishing banks off the Coast of Newfoundland have suddenly sunk. Cable ships repairing a broken cable, snapped by the earthquake of November 18th, 1929, report that for distances of a hundred miles on the Grand Banks the cables have disappeared into unfathomable depths. And before the subterranean cataclysm, they were within six hundred feet of the surface. And all the bottom of that section of the North Atlantic seems to have caved in. Ten thousand square miles dropped out of the bottom of the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... having the city arms, argent, a cross gules, and in the first quarter a dagger displayed of the second), he thrust the tinklerman's boat away from his own; and at once the bodies of the captains plunged down, down, down, down in the unfathomable waters. ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... heart, in even the worst of all human afflictions; and in the hunted life of his outcast father, whose crime had entailed not that affliction only but other more fearful wretchedness, we have as powerful a picture as any in his writings of the inevitable and unfathomable consequences of sin. But, as the story went on, it was incident to these designs that what had been accomplished in its predecessor could hardly be attained here, in singleness of purpose, unity of idea, or harmony of treatment; and other defects supervened in the management ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... of my own blood, that she ought this outrageous affirmation of what struck me as the intensity of masculine egotism. It centred everything in itself, and deprived woman of her very soul, her inexpressible and unfathomable all, to make it a mere incident in the great sum of man. Hollingsworth had boldly uttered what he, and millions of despots like him, really felt. Without intending it, he had disclosed the wellspring of all these troubled waters. Now, if ever, it ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... The tired girl with the hunted look in her eyes had developed into an amazingly attractive young woman. Her fair skin had taken on a dazzling whiteness; her hair was richer and more luxuriant than of yore; but it was her eyes in which the chief alteration had occurred. These now held an unfathomable depth of tenderness, together with a roguish fear that the former alluring quality might be discovered. If her figure were not as unduly stout as the skinny virgins of Melkbridge declared it to be, there was no denying the rude health apparent in the girl's ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... was the second summer of it—I had come to understand him enough to know that he was unfathomable. Still, for a moment it crossed my thoughts that perhaps now he was discoursing about himself. He had allowed a jealous foreman to fall out with him at Sunk Creek ranch in the spring, during Judge Henry's absence. The man, having a brief authority, parted with him. The ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... in those eyes, listen to that dear voice, notice the feeling of even a single touch that is bestowed upon you by that gentle hand! Make much of it while yet you have that most precious of all good gifts, a loving mother. Read the unfathomable love of those eyes; the kind anxiety of that tone and look, however slight your pain. In after life you may have friends, fond, dear friends, but never will you have again the inexpressible love and gentleness lavished upon you which none ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... burn down, I climbed one of the highest boulders to get a good view, and sighed with admiration at the scene—there lay before me a deep, almost circular sheet or water, about thirty yards across. Directly beneath me I could see the rocky bottom; fifty feet further out towards the centre it was of unfathomable blueness. On the opposite side a tree of enormous girth had fallen, long years before, yet it was still growing, for some of its mighty roots were embedded in the rich ...
— "Martin Of Nitendi"; and The River Of Dreams - 1901 • Louis Becke
... I strive to measure the depths of the Atlantic sea? For as they are unfathomable by man, so do the things which he does daily surpass narration. I, however, admire above all these things his endurance; for night and day he stands, so as to be seen by all. For as the doors are ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... expression was fierce and startling as the expression of a criminal bracing himself to endure inevitable detection. So crude and piercing indeed was this mask confronting her that Domini started and was inclined to shudder. For a minute the man's eyes held hers, and she thought she saw in them unfathomable depths of misery or of wickedness. She hardly knew which. Sorrow was like crime, and crime like the sheer desolation of grief to her just then. And she thought of the outer darkness spoken of in the Bible. It came before her in the sunset. Her father was in it, and this ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... stately column, [276] surmounted by its fat, helmetted Bellona, mysteriously looking round as if pregnant with a mighty unfathomable future. Ask history? Open Capt. Knox's Journal of the Siege of Quebec, and read therein how, in front of that very spot where you now stand, along that identical road, over which you emerged from the ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... mystery of awakened life throbbing about her. The heart of a girl in spring is the home of dreams, and Shirley's heart overflowed with them, until her pulse thrilled and sang in quickening cadences. The wistfulness of April, the dream of unfathomable things, shone in her brown eyes; and a girl with dreams in her eyes is the divinest work of the gods. Into this twentieth century, into the iron heart of cities, she still comes, and the clear, high stars of April nights and the pensive moon of September ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... was Mrs Verloc who would appear at the call of the cracked bell. Winnie Verloc was a young woman with a full bust, in a tight bodice, and with broad hips. Her hair was very tidy. Steady-eyed like her husband, she preserved an air of unfathomable indifference behind the rampart of the counter. Then the customer of comparatively tender years would get suddenly disconcerted at having to deal with a woman, and with rage in his heart would proffer ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... joy! the gladness! of being once more under the canopy of heaven, and of looking up to its unfathomable depths, with no envious bars to obstruct our view. Many a time have I passed the month of May, amidst the most romantic scenery, but never yet did I so deeply feel, that this is indeed a pleasant world, full of beauty and goodness, as on that balmy evening, when the rays of the setting sun, ...
— Daring and Suffering: - A History of the Great Railroad Adventure • William Pittenger
... stood on end, while I gazed afar down within the yawning abysses, letting imagination descend, as it were, and stalk about in the strange vaulted halls, and ruddy gulfs, and red ghastly chasms of the hideous and unfathomable fire. I had indeed made a narrow escape. Had the balloon remained a very short while longer within the cloud—that is to say—had not the inconvenience of getting wet, determined me to discharge the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... generations is to it as a feather before the whirlwind; and all the noise of his commerce, and all the thunder of his navies, it can hush in a moment within the silence of its impenetrable abysses. Whole armies have gone down into that unfathomable darkness, and not a floating bubble marks the place of their disappearing. If all the populations of the world, from the beginning of time, were cast into its depths the smooth surface of its oblivion would close over them in an hour; ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... have a foothold on it; the lake is inaccessible from this direction. A narrow pathway winding in and out edged with water-reeds leads by it on the other side. This lake is said to be so deep that it is unfathomable; it is dark brown in colour, bitter and brackish to the taste. No fish can live in it. Learned men, called geologists, who study the crust of the earth, have decided that this region is not volcanic in origin as it would appear at first sight, but that ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... an expression full of uneasiness and affection at the emperor, who was sitting beside him. But Napoleon's countenance was as calm and cold as it always was. Not a flash of inward anger was seen in those unfathomable eyes. He conversed quietly and almost smilingly with his consort, the Empress Maria Louisa, and did not even seem to notice that the people received him ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... came and led us into disobedience, sin, death, and all evil, so that we fell under His wrath and displeasure and were doomed to eternal damnation, as we had merited and deserved. There was no counsel, help, or comfort until this only and eternal Son of God in His unfathomable goodness had compassion upon our misery and wretchedness, and came from heaven to help us. Those tyrants and jailers, then, are all expelled now, and in their place has come Jesus Christ, Lord of life, righteousness, ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther
... "unfathomable depths" that marked those of Mrs. Salvey, but the child did not otherwise resemble her mother. It was evident that the name Wren fitted her well - so small, so sweet, so timid, and with such ...
— The Motor Girls on a Tour • Margaret Penrose
... disappeared round the hop-bush. Then she turned her unfathomable eyes reproachfully on my face, as ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... appropriated the full richness of experience which is offered to him, man will and should find himself, as it were, flung to and fro between action and contemplation. Between the call to transcendence, to a simple self-loss in the unfathomable and adorable life of God, and the call to a full, rich and various actualization of personal life, in the energetic strivings of a fellow worker with Him: between the soul's profound sense of transcendent love, and its felt possession of ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... he went away, after several failures to get back to the old ground he had held in relation to Alma. He retrieved something of it with Mrs. Leighton; but Alma glittered upon him to the last with a keen impenetrable candor, a child- like singleness of glance, covering unfathomable reserve. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... thought it was Lois who stood there so white and still, looking at me with grey, unfathomable eyes; then I stepped forward uncertainly, bending in silence over the narrow, sun-tanned hand that lay inert under the respectful but ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... what it is that I propose to do. I will write to your uncle, or will get Mr. Merton to write for me, and will explain to him, as well as I can, the depth, and the blackness, and the cruelty,—the unfathomable, heathen cruelty, together with the falsehoods, the premeditated lies, and the general rascality on all subjects,—of my son Augustus. I will explain to him that, of all men I know, he is the least trustworthy. I will explain to him ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... President was now rapidly nearing its climax and becoming a sort of frenzy. Andrew Johnson was no longer merely a "wrong-headed and obstinate man," but a "genius in depravity," whose hoarded malignity and passion were unfathomable. He was not simply "an irresolute mule," as General Schenck had styled him, but was devil-bent upon the ruin of his country; and his trial connected itself with all the memories of the war, and involved ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... And drifted treasure deep, Forever he sinks deeper in Unfathomable sleep— His cannon round him thrown, His sailors at his feet, The wizard sea enchanting them ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... nothing again. That was what he had said. Well, and then his mother had brought out all her good reasons, but Eleseus had said no to them all; he had other plans for his life. Young hearts have their unfathomable depths, and after what had happened, likely enough he did not care about staying on with Barbro as a neighbour. Who could say? He had put it loftily enough in talking to his mother; he could get ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... another entered the breakfast-room, the one generally used in winter for all purposes. Mrs. Rossitur sat there alone in an easy-chair; and Fleda no sooner caught the outline of her figure than her heart sank at once to an unknown depth unknown before and unfathomable now. She was cowering over the fire her head sunk in her hands, so crouching, that the line of neck and shoulders instantly conveyed to Fleda the idea of fancied or felt degradation there was no escaping ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... sleeping-place, constructed after the fashion of a berth on board ship, which was shaded, like the little windows, with fair white curtains, and looked comfortable enough, though by what kind of gymnastic exercise the lady of the caravan ever contrived to get into it, was an unfathomable mystery. The other half served for a kitchen, and was fitted up with a stove whose small chimney passed through the roof. It held also a closet or larder, several chests, a great pitcher of water, and a few cooking-utensils and articles of crockery. These latter ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... good, But just the thing which I desire. With versatility to sing The theme of love to any strain, If oft'nest she is anything, Be it careless, talkative, and vain. That seems in her supremest grace Which, virtue or not, apprises me That my familiar thoughts embrace Unfathomable mystery.' ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... blue waves of the vast Atlantic, as if we were far above the earth. Nothing was there for the weary eye to rest upon but a dreary expanse of ocean and sky. All was still as death, save the hissing at the bows of the vessel, as she parted the unfathomable deep. The crew loitered upon the decks listlessly; and we, as palantines, huddled together around the mainmast, were whiling away the time in songs, or talking of the homes we had left behind, and future hopes in a foreign land. We were suddenly ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... by her visitor, who had that flattering manner which, to those not experienced in the world's ways, seems to imply unfathomable depths of disinterested devotion. Then it was so delightful to look upon a perfectly appointed woman,—one who was as artistically composed as a poem or an opera,—in whose costume a kind of various ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... dark'ning wave, In measured sweep we go, Nor dread th' unfathomable grave, Which yawns below; For He is nigh who trod Amid the foaming spray, Whose billows own'd th' Incarnate ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... room together, and though Mademoiselle de Verneuil was as completely satisfied in heart and vanity as any woman ever could be, the unfathomable gentleness of her eyes, the demure smile on her lips, the rapidity of the motions of a gay dance, kept the secret of her thoughts as the sea swallows those of the criminal who casts a weighted body into its ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... flashes, meteor-like, across the page of Old Testament history, and then disappears without a word as to beginning of life or end of days, who but the Holy Spirit could interpret those silences into spiritual meanings of unfathomable richness? Who but He who was responsible for those omissions could interpret them into some of the richest revelations of all Scripture concerning the eternal Priesthood of the slain and risen Son of God? And if the Holy Spirit can thus seize ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... the country through which it passes is desert and without inhabitants," he explains, his thirst for knowledge unsatisfied. Some priest volunteers this explanation. On the frontiers of Egypt are two high mountain-peaks called Crophi and Mophi; in an unfathomable abyss between the two rose the Nile. But Herodotus does not believe in Crophi and Mophi; he inclines to the idea that the Nile rises away in the west and ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... common destiny of the people of the ocean. The dreams of Benton and of Seward of a regenerated Orient, when the long march of westward civilization should complete its circle, seem almost to be in process of realization. The age of the Pacific Ocean begins, mysterious and unfathomable in its meaning ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... matter if not from the creative word of God? To assign eternity to it is to invest it with an attribute that is Divine, and Pantheists carry such an explanation to its logical conclusion when they affirm that the universe is God. The existence of a single atom is an unfathomable mystery. Man cannot create or destroy even a particle of matter. How overwhelming, then, if we reject the simple statement of the Bible, is the mystery of the great universe, in whose extended space suns, planets, stars, and systems unceasingly revolve, and in which ...
— Exposition of the Apostles Creed • James Dodds
... man,—must lead him, if it can, to the contemplation of truths most personal, central, and essential, must open to him some of those depths where the soul swings almost helplessly in the midst of experiences and powers unfathomable and infinite,—where the intellect falters and hesitates and finds no solution of its perplexities till it yields to faith. Within later years there have been those who have advocated the doctrine that education should be entirely secular,—that the college should have nothing to do with ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... of Genius to penetrate with a lynx's beam into unfathomable abysses and uncreated worlds, and to see what is not, so it is the property of good sense to distinguish perfectly, and judge accurately what really is. Good sense has not so piercing an eye, but it has as clear a sight: ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... Pierre was struck by the great resemblance between Benedetta and the portrait of Cassia hanging on the wall. Each displayed the same delicate youth, the same passionate mouth, the same large, unfathomable eyes, set in the same round, sensible, healthy-looking face. In each there was certainly the same upright soul, the same heart of flame. Then a recollection came to Pierre, that of a painting by Guido Reni, the adorable, candid head of Beatrice Cenci, which, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... further from my own thoughts than play-acting. I was sitting as I should sit at an oratorio, in devout and rapt contemplation. Before my eyes had passed a symbolic vision of prayer and ecstasy, flooding the soul with overpowering thoughts of the divine sacrifice and the mystery of unfathomable love. ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... somehow there is a cord that stretches from that life to his. As he studies the character of Christ he becomes conscious of certain virtues which stand out in bold relief—His purity, His forgiving spirit, and His unfathomable love. The author is correct, Christ presents an example of purity in thought and life, and man, conscious of his own imperfections and grieved over his shortcomings, finds inspiration in the fact that He was tempted in all points like as we are, and yet without sin. I am not sure ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... but the pageant of the dying day had a sort of sullen and pathetic beauty. The blazing sun dropped behind the far-off sea-line, and a great band of saffron rimmed the whole horizon, fading into palest green as it spread upward, and this in turn melted into a blue which at the zenith looked unfathomable. A full moon, which had until now been invisible, looked down from the very centre of the sky. There was none of the lingering twilight of more temperate climates. The change from broad daylight, in which every outline and ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... "Unfathomable Mystery," said the Rosicrucian in a low, sweet voice. "Brave Child with the Vitreous Optic! Thou who pervadest all things and rubbest against us without abrasion of the cuticle. I ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... aspiration. Might not the fact that their marriage did not go deep enough, that father and mother were not of one mind, only of one body, serve to account for the rude results of some marriages of personable people? At the same time we must not forget the endless and unfathomable perpetuations of ancestry. But however these things may be, those two men, brothers born, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... size and slight in figure. His brow was very broad and high. His hair was black, and clustered in curls over his head. His eyes were large, and seemed to possess an unfathomable depth, which gave them a certain undefinable and mystic meaning—liquid eyes, yet lustrous, where all the soul seemed to live and show itself—benignant in their glance, yet lofty like the eyes of a being from some superior sphere. His face was ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... to sustain the splendour. Bury all your books, when you feel the night of scepticism gathering around you—bury them all, powerful though you may have deemed their spells to illuminate the unfathomable—open your Bible, and all the spiritual world will be as ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... blankly away at the blood-red afterglow. How strange, how complicated, how utterly amazing and astounding was it all. If the truth of that dastardly plot were ever told, it would not be believed. The depths of human wickedness were surely unfathomable. ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... thinkers have called it "a state of consciousness," i.e., an impression produced by it within ourselves.[51] It is the result of the will of the supreme Spirit, which creates "differences" (forms) in unfathomable homogeneous Unity, which is incarnated in them and produces the modifications necessary for the development of its powers, in other words, for the accomplishment of their evolution. As this evolution takes place ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... Had waked me from the fiendish dream, O'ercome with sufferings strange and wild, I wept as I had been a child; 40 And having thus by tears subdued My anguish to a milder mood, Such punishments, I said, were due To natures deepliest stained with sin,— For aye entempesting anew 45 The unfathomable hell within, The horror of their deeds to view, To know and loathe, yet wish and do! Such griefs with such men well agree, But wherefore, wherefore fall on me? 50 To be beloved is all I need, And whom I love, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... its inscrutable ramifications than human consciousness. 'What on earth,' we say, 'could So-and-so see in So-and-so to fall in love with?' This very inexplicability I take to be the sign and seal of a profound importance. An instinct so conditioned, so curious, so vague, so unfathomable, as we may guess by analogy with all other instincts, must be Nature's guiding voice within us, speaking for the good of the human race in all ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... touched by Harold's devotion; also, by his anxiety not to obtrude his infirmity upon her notice. She looked at him, to see in his eyes unfathomable depths of sadness. She repressed an inclination to shed tears. She had never been so near foregoing her resolve to make him the instrument of her hatred of his family. But the forces that decide these matters ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... him. Possibly no one could except the Dream Woman, and her he never saw again; so the mystery was unfathomable. He put the rose between the leaves of the Bible his mother had given him when he went to college, and which he had not opened since until that morning; and the rose became dry and faded as the years passed, quite as any ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... party of free contract and political enfranchisement—and the most passionate assertion that between any Labour party, worthy of the name, and either of the great parties of the past there lay and must lie a gulf of hatred, unfathomable and unquenchable, till Labour had got its rights, and landlord, employer, and dividend-hunter were trampled beneath its heel—all these ugly or lurid things emerged with surprising clearness from the torrent of north-country speech. ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... upon a finger nail, are sufficient, on the whole, to maintain the equilibrium of pleasurable existence. Yet, if once that equilibrium is disturbed, where is the science oftentimes deep enough to rectify the unfathomable watch-work? Even the simplicities of planetary motions do not escape distortion: nor is it easy to be convinced that the distortion is in the eye which beholds, not in the object beheld. Let a planet be wheeling with heavenly science, upon arches of divine geometry: ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... uncertainty. The most generally received opinion is, that the insects fasten round the summit of a submarine mountain, and build upwards until they reach the surface of the sea, where they die, and their labours cease. As, however, the sea is sometimes unfathomable close to those islands, it has been supposed that the submarine islands on which the corallines began to build have gradually subsided, and that, as they did so, the insects always built a little more, so as to keep the top of their structures on a level with the sea. Above the sea they cannot ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... stands related to it as Buddha's to Buddhism or as Mohammed's to Mohammedanism, or, even in a slight degree, as Christ's to Christianity? None whatever. Starting with the absolute Brahm, we have seen this Supreme Soul shrouded in unfathomable, unapproachable darkness. We descend to the divine emanations of this eternal Soul and search in vain among the millions of beings which constitute the Hindu pantheon to find one who could become an ideal of life and an inspiration to the soul struggling against sin. "Godlike life ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... Sunday.—Moved on in the morning to Manusbul, a small lake connected with the river by a canal. This lake is about three miles long and one mile wide, it is very deep in the middle, and said by the natives to be unfathomable. In one of the Hindoo Legends we are told a story of a holy man who spent all his life endeavouring to make a rope long enough to reach to the bottom, and failing, at length threw himself in and was never seen again. My boatman to give me an idea of its depth, dropped in white pebbles ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster
... vitality of the Church is decision, which preserves her in spite of the unfathomable stupidity of her sons. She has resisted the disquieting folly of the clergy, and has not even been broken up by the awkwardness and lack of ability in her ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... barrenness and death—here they are dealt with, in order to the more than prevention of the evil. And here, as ever, the remedy propounded is our Lord Jesus Christ, in His personal glory, in His majestic offices, in His unfathomable human sympathy, seen in perfect harmony of light with His ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... never die. Shall it live in consciousness? Can the incomprehensible happen? Yes, yes. My being is incomprehensible. Thou art unfathomable, O Lord. Thy whole world is incomprehensible—a wonder-work of power, ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... well. Only in minor points did their sympathy fail. And as Edwin would be exasperated because Maggie's attitude towards argument was that of a woman, so would Maggie resent a certain mulishness in him characteristic of the unfathomable stupid sex. Once a week, for example, when his room was 'done out,' there was invariably a skirmish between them, because Edwin really did hate anybody to 'meddle among his things.' The derangement of even a brush on the dressing-table ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... overhaul, take stock; affix numbers to, page. amount to, add up to, come to. Adj. numeral, numerical; arithmetical, analytic, algebraic, statistical, numerable, computable, calculable; commensurable, commensurate; incommensurable, incommensurate, innumerable, unfathomable, infinite. Adv. quantitatively; arithmetically; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... The black man, the donkeys, the women and children, the saint's dome, are all part of the inimitable Eastern scene in which inertia and agitation are so curiously combined, and a surface of shrill noise flickers over depths of such unfathomable silence. ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... accompanying him. In the short time which elapsed between their leaving home and entering Headquarters, I embraced the opportunity of observing them, and I found the study equally exciting and interesting. His face was calm but hopeless, and his eye, dark and unfathomable, but neither frenzied nor uncertain. He spoke but once and listened to nothing, though now and then his wife moved as if to attract his attention, and once even stole her hand towards his, in the ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... along over this road, the view presented to our eyes on looking down below was that of an unfathomable abyss, filled up by a mass of clouds and vapours, all rolling about in constant motion, and tumbling the ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... his skull, being the thickest and hardest bone in his body, had withstood the terrible shock to which it had been subjected without damage, though the brain within was, for a time, incapacitated from doing duty. When John rose again to the surface, after a descent into unfathomable water, he floated there in a state of insensibility. Fortunately the wind and tide combined to wash him to the shore, where a higher swell than usual launched him among the coral rocks, and left him there, with only his ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... incalculable elements in his character could be controlled, place and fame were probably before him. Compared with him, the priest realised profoundly his own meaner, obscurer destiny. The humble servant of a heavenly patria, of an unfathomable truth, is no match for these intellectual soldiers of fortune. He does not judge them; he often feels towards them a strange forbearance. But he would sooner die than ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Leopoldine nothing had been seen, and nothing was known. The Marie-Jeanne men—the last to have seen it on the 2d of August—said that she was to have gone on fishing farther towards the north; and beyond that the secret was unfathomable. ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... striking testimony to his indomitable will. Gudule was famous throughout the Ghetto as "the girl with the wonderful eyes," eyes—so the saying ran—into which no man could look and think of evil. During the earlier years of their married life those unfathomable brown eyes exercised on Ascher the full power of their fascination. A time came, however, when he alleged that those very eyes had been the cause of all ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German (V.2) • Various
... the concluding sentence of Mr. Ruskin's fifth chapter in his second volume—"The infinity of God is not mysterious, it is only unfathomable; not concealed, but incomprehensible; it is a clear infinity, the darkness of the pure, unsearchable sea." Plato, if we rightly remember, says—"Truth is the body of God, light is ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... man whom strife sets off, a middling good man in his way, perhaps, with a call to the sword whose justice he has never questioned. I have studied the philosophies; I have reflected on life—this unfathomable problem—and 'fore God I begin to doubt my very right to wear a breastplate against the poignard of fate. Dubiety plays on ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... around, above us. Everything has disappeared in the mist. The balloon itself is no longer visible. We can see nothing except the ropes which suspend us, and these are only visible for a few feet above our heads, when they lose themselves in the fog. We are alone with our wickerwork house in an unfathomable vault. ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... honourable Court of Common Pleas," is audible at the conclusion. The company are not much surprised. There is not much to be surprised at, when slave law and common law come in contact. With Marston's sudden decline and unfathomable connection with Graspum, there is nothing left to make the reading ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... record is that President Fillmore invited me to meet his Cabinet at dinner in the White House, and that I there "met and conversed immensely with Daniel Webster, a colossal unhappy beetle-browed dark-angel-looking sort of man, with a depth for good and evil in his eye unfathomable; also with Home Secretary Corwen, a coarse but clever man, who had been a waggon-driver; and with Graham, Secretary of the Navy, and with Conrad, Secretary at War, both gentlemen and having lofty foreheads; and with many more, including ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... of form, manner. This principle still held out, and it was the only thing between him and submission. When he surrendered, he must surrender in a way that deferred to the undefined code. He longed simply to go to the kitchen and stumble in, but his unfathomable sense of ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... north-country race—which had produced many a hardy fighter, though never yet a thinker nor even a scholar—amid a society as prejudiced and narrow-minded as all privileged communities are bound to become, had nevertheless drifted resistlessly towards that unfathomable sea whither a love for the abstract beautiful, a yearning for super-earthly harmony and justice, must inevitably ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... their place a profound sense of a spiritual truth,—a sin within reach of forgiveness—and as the hymn voices die away, there lies at his feet—not the world, but the figure of the Saviour—he sees an unfathomable courage, an immortality for the lowest, the vastness in humility, the kindness of the human heart, man's noblest strength, and he knows that God is nothing—nothing but love! Whence cometh the wonder of a moment? From sources we know not. ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... listened attentively while they told him how gay she seemed that day, and how jestingly she spoke of the dark thunderhead which even then was mounting the western horizon. They had tried in vain to find her, and it was probable she had sunk into one of the unfathomable holes with which the lake was said by some to abound. Sarah, the waiting-maid, wept passionately, showing that the deceased must have had some good qualities, or she could not thus have ...
— Rosamond - or, The Youthful Error • Mary J. Holmes
... in mortal men and passing hours. Each of us is an angle of its eternal vision, and the only way to be true to our Maker is to be loyal to ourselves. "O rich and various Man!" he cries, "thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain the geometry of the city of God; in thy heart the bower of love and the realms of right ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... the guardian of reason, the bulwark of religion, the sister of prudence, and the sweetener of life. Be temperate; and time will carry you forward on its purest current till it lands you on the continent of a yet purer eternity, as the swelling river rolls its limpid stream into the bosom of the unfathomable deep. ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... The deep, unfathomable blue eyes opened, and the voice said bitterly, "I can never run again. I must lie in this chair all the rest of my life with nothing to do but think, think, think! Do you wonder now that I am not happy? Do you understand now why Aunt ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... O most fatal and potent of mankind, in what terms shall I describe thee? What words are adequate to the just delineation of thy character? How shall I detail the means which rendered the secrecy of thy purposes unfathomable? But I will not anticipate. Let me recover if possible, a sober strain. Let me keep down the flood of passion that would render me precipitate or powerless. Let me stifle the agonies that are awakened by thy name. ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... adopted such a view with considerable complacency. When, however, he was laid up and placed hors du combat in the last three critical days, he needed all his faith to reconcile him to one of the most unfathomable instances of the workings of Providence. His grumbles were loud and long, and the directions which he sent from his sick bed were tinged with irritability. For at last the other side had come to its senses; Sir Winterton was affable again, Lady Mildmay was canvassing, and Mr. Smiley had high hopes. ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... so, I know; but there is an infinite possibility about the sea; it may do what it is not recorded to have done. It is not to be ordered, it may overleap the bounds human observation has fixed for it. It has a potency unfathomable. There is still something in it not quite grasped and understood—something still ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... looks dwelt fondly on the young face, that varied between pride and sadness,—pride ever so gentle, and sad ness ever so nobly touching. She was never weary of gazing on that brow, with its quiet power; but her lids dropped before those eyes, with their serene, unfathomable passion. She felt, as they haunted her, what a deep and holy thing love in such souls must be. Leonard never spoke to her of Helen—that reserve every reader can comprehend. To natures like his, first love is a mystery; ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... dying that the ceaseless daily task, to rest from which is death, is at last finished. We are all galley-slaves, pulling at the levers of respiration,—which, rising and falling like so many oars, drive us across an unfathomable ocean from one unknown shore to another. No! Never was a galley-slave so chained as we are to these four and twenty oars, at which we must tug day and night all ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... it, as he had wished to a few hours ago. As he looked down on the pale head he realised that he did not want Paolo to die. Standing on the sharp edge of the precipice where life ends and breaks off, close upon the unfathomable depths of eternity, himself firmly standing and fearing no fall, but seeing his brother slipping over the brink, he would put out his hand to save him, to draw him back. He would ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... below, he attempts in vain to measure the fulness and beauty of this handiwork of nature. He is too amazed for utterance and remains spellbound, communing only with himself and nature regarding the unfathomable significance of such marvels. When the famous painter, Thomas Moran, desired to reproduce in colors on canvas this masterpiece of nature, he gathered his inspiration from Artist Point, and after he had finished the celebrated painting which now adorns the Capitol at Washington, he acknowledged ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... carefully the vast facade of the Hall of Egypt, and finally fixed his gaze on a perpendicular leaden column, adorned with strange symbols, through which (for it was a rainy night) raging torrents of water were distinctly heard flowing downwards to who knows what abysmal and unfathomable depths? ...
— HE • Andrew Lang
... in the field, I remember, were three faint points of light, three telescopic stars infinitely remote, and all around it was the unfathomable darkness of empty space. You know how that blackness looks on a frosty starlight night. In a telescope it seems far profounder. And invisible to me because it was so remote and small, flying swiftly and steadily towards me across that incredible distance, drawing nearer ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... is inscrutable for any observer, even for a man who prides himself, as I do, on a certain expertness. It is everywhere unfathomable; the dark depths in it are darker than in any other mystery; the colors confused even in the ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... capabilities of man, demands more than a mere mental effort,—a submission of the intellect, an act of faith, a temporary suspension of the critical faculty. This applies not merely to the Christian religion, with its unfathomable mysteries and its inexhaustible fund of truth, but to the fruits of human speculation. Nobody has ever succeeded in writing a history of philosophy without incurring either the reproach that he is ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... just as reptiles that take form and hue, Speckle and blotch, in strange assimilation From thorn and scrub and stone and the waste earth Through which they crawl, so that almost they seem The incarnate spirits of their wilderness, Were these most horrible kindred of the night. Aeonian glooms unfathomable, grim aisles, Grotesque, distorted boughs and dancing shades Out-belched their dusky brood on the dim shore; Monsters with sooty limbs, red-raddled eyes, And faces painted yellow, women and men; Fierce naked giants howling to the moon, And loathlier Gorgons ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... was from childhood, although singularly attractive, of a moody, fitful, unrestful nature,—eager, earnest, but unsteady,—with varying phases of imprudent frankness and of the most stubborn and unfathomable secretiveness. He was a creature of unreasoning antipathies and attractions. As Zephaniah Pennel said of him, he was as full of hitches as an old bureau drawer. His peculiar beauty, and a certain ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe |
