"Vastness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... modern man, they are all so small in girth as to betoken a race with arms and legs hardly any bigger than the Finns or Laplanders. Of the clasps, buttons, and buckles I will say nothing here. I have enumerated enough to suggest to even the most casual observer the vastness of the revolution which the Bronze Age wrought in the mode of life and the ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... on the ocean think of its vastness; of the many shores in many climes visited by its waves to ply "their priest-like task of clean ablution;" of cities and empires that rose beside its waters, flourished, decayed, and became a memory; of others that shall ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... usurping Richard buried here, That King of hate, and therefore slave of fear? Dragg'd from the fatal Bosworth field where he, Lost life, and what he liv'd for,—Cruelty: Search, find his name, but there is none: O Kings, Remember whence your power and vastness springs; If not as Richard now, so may you be, Who hath no tomb, but scorn and memory. And tho' from his own store, Wolsey might have A Palace or a College for his grave, Yet here he lies interred, as if that all Of him to be remembered were his fall. Nothing but Earth on ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... with the advance,[525] Like climbing some great Alp, which still doth rise, Deceived by its gigantic elegance— Vastness which grows, but grows to harmonize—[po] All musical in its immensities; Rich marbles, richer painting—shrines where flame[pp] The lamps of gold—and haughty dome which vies In air with Earth's chief structures, though their frame Sits on ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... below, awakened by being shot out from their collapsing bunks, shivered incessantly, and kept on groaning even as we went about our work. But they all worked. That crew of Liverpool hard cases had in them the right stuff. It's my experience they always have. It is the sea that gives it—the vastness, the loneliness surrounding their dark stolid souls. Ah! Well! we stumbled, we crept, we fell, we barked our shins on the wreckage, we hauled. The masts stood, but we did not know how much they might be charred down below. It ...
— Youth • Joseph Conrad
... enough that they spoke with a peculiar accent—everything they said must be barbarous; but she was pleased once more to eat off plate, and to find herself in rooms which, though grotesque and comfortless, yet wore an air of state, and whose vastness enabled her to keep aloof from those with whom she never willingly came in contact. It was therefore with regret she saw the day of her departure arrive, and found herself once more an unwilling inmate of her only asylum; particularly as her situation ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... voice was heard, a whisper, Coming from the starry distance, Coming from the empty vastness, Low, and musical, and tender; And the voice said: 'O Osseo! O my son, my best beloved! Broken are the spells that bound you, All the charms of the magicians, All the magic powers of evil; ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... dimensions of the pyramids, the precise height of the terraces, the width and height of the inner passages, would give us much more definite ideas of those structures than he who should paint to us the effects produced on his own mind by their vastness, their antiquity, and the solitude that surrounds them. So in descriptions of natural scenery, the geographer who gives us the measurement of mountains, and rivers, and plains, is much more accurate than he who describes them solely from the picture that exists in his fancy. We wish to be ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... like a caged wild thing. Something was coming to new reality in his soul; he was scarce conscious of the walls that shut him in. Once he stopped by the open port. He looked out at the tumbling rollers of the wide Pacific. And as he looked he thought of the vastness of this sea, how its waters washed the icy shores of Alaska and the palm-fronded atolls of the Marquesas; how they carried on their bosom the multitudinous commerce of a hundred peoples; how from Santiago to Shanghai and from the Yukon to New Zealand it was one ocean, serving ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... as large as the Malaspina in Alaska, which was the largest known glacier until Shackleton discovered the Beardmore. Those who knew the Ferrar Glacier professed to find the Beardmore unattractive, but to me at any rate it was grand. Its very vastness, however, tends to dwarf its surroundings, and great tributary glaciers and tumbled ice-falls, which anywhere else would have aroused admiration, were almost unnoticed in a stream which stretched in places forty miles from bank to bank. It was only when the theodolite ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... vast abroad on his times, uncomprehended by them, and requires a long local distance to be seen; suggest, as Aristotle, Bacon, Selden, Humboldt, that a certain vastness of learning, or quasi omnipresence of the human soul in nature, is possible. His superb speculations, as from a tower, over nature and arts, without ever losing sight of the texture and sequence of things, almost realizes his own picture, in the "Principia," of the original integrity of ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... great men are mere illusions sprung out of a national hunger for greatness. Some day a wise man, one who has not read too many books but who has gone about among men, will discover and set forth a very interesting thing about America. The land is vast and there is a national hunger for vastness in individuals. One wants an Illinois-sized man for Illinois, an Ohio-sized man for Ohio, and a ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... vividness—these were but froth on the stream. The stream itself was a steady and somber flood. Beyond this picturesqueness of environment very few have cared to go, and therefore sometimes have had little realization of the vastness of the cowboy's kingdom, the "magnitude of the interests in his care, or the fortitude, resolution, and instant readiness essential to his daily life." The American cowboy is the most modern representative of a human industry that is second to very ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... anniversary exercises of our schools. They will occupy largely this number and the next, and will appear somewhat in the order of time in which the schools closed. When the whole are published, they will make an impression of the vastness, variety and usefulness of the work. It will show institutions of higher grade in nearly all the States of the South, normal and graded schools in nearly all the large cities, and parochial schools connected with many ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 48, No. 7, July, 1894 • Various
... and more than once had sat down with her pencil to transcribe her thoughts. She thought that it was not exactly fear, but an overpowering realization of her own atomity; a sort of cringing of the soul away from the utter vastness of the world; a growing consciousness of the unlimited bigness of things; an insight of the infinite power of God—the yearning of the soul for understanding of the mysteries ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... mane; the ounce, The libbard, and the tiger, as the mole Rising, the crumbled earth above them threw In hillocks; the swift stag from underground Bore up his branching head; scarce from his mould Behemoth, biggest born of earth, upheaved His vastness; fleeced the flocks and bleating rose As plants; ambiguous between sea and land, The river-horse and scaly crocodile. At once came forth whatever creeps the ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... and well equipped. The vastness of our country, her poor roads, and her severe climate are her defenses. The French frontier is strongly fortified. A quick surrender is unthinkable, and there is no reason for surrender, for the war will continue ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... your demands! Surely the vastness of this war, its grim battles, its heroism, its anguish, its sublime earnestness, should sink all schemes of revenge. Before the grandeur of its simple story our children will walk with uncovered heads. Conquered soil! The South has never been out of this Union. Secession ...
— A Man of the People - A Drama of Abraham Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... filled with the glory of the eternal throne, where seraphim, its shining guardians, veil their faces in adoration, could find, in the most magnificent structure ever reared by human hands, but a faint reflection of its vastness and glory. Yet important truths concerning the heavenly sanctuary and the great work there carried forward for man's redemption, were taught by the ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... city of glittering palaces and stately mansions; or else as an immense landscape, with mountains, plains, rocks, waters, forests, animals, and a thousand objects, glorious and beautiful in the sunlight. Theology became visibly a shrivelled thing. Men grew to be conscious of the vastness of the universe. At the same time and by the same process the Encyclopaedia gave them a key to the plan, a guiding thread in the immense labyrinth. The genealogical tree, or classification of arts and sciences, which with a few modifications was borrowed from Bacon and ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... which induced the Egyptians to undertake sea-trafficking in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. The knowledge and experience thus acquired ultimately made it possible for the Egyptians and their pupils to push their adventures further afield. It is impossible adequately to estimate the vastness of the influence of such intercourse, not merely in spreading abroad throughout the world the germs of our common civilization, but also, by bringing into close contact peoples of varied histories and traditions, in stimulating progress. Even if the practice of ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... death, oh how deplorable! for thee. To whom Atrides' spirit thus replied. Blest son of Peleus, semblance of the Gods, At Ilium, far from Argos, fall'n! for whom 40 Contending, many a Trojan, many a Chief Of Greece died also, while in eddies whelm'd Of dust thy vastness spread the plain,[112] nor thee The chariot aught or steed could int'rest more! All day we waged the battle, nor at last Desisted, but for tempests sent from Jove. At length we bore into the Greecian fleet Thy body from the field; there, first, we ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... me? What is it you seek of me, O Russia? What is the hidden bond which subsists between us? Why do you regard me as you do? Why does everything within you turn upon me eyes full of yearning? Even at this moment, as I stand dumbly, fixedly, perplexedly contemplating your vastness, a menacing cloud, charged with gathering rain, seems to overshadow my head. What is it that your boundless expanses presage? Do they not presage that one day there will arise in you ideas as boundless as yourself? Do they not presage that one day ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... fell on her, Rachel, dressed in robes of white skin, turning her long, outspread hair to gold. They fell upon little people with faces of a dusky pallor, one of them crouched against the bole of a tree, a wizened monkey of a man who in all that vastness looked small. They fell upon another man, white-skinned, half-naked, with a yellow beard, who was lashed by hide ropes to a second tree. It was Richard Darrien grown older, and at his feet lay a ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... seemed to rise before the eye of Montalvo's mind a measureless black gulf, and, falling, falling, falling through its infinite depths one miserable figure, a mere tiny point that served to show the vastness it explored. The point turned over, and he saw its face as in a ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... a hard struggle for Pen to adjust her new self that she had found up in the high altitudes where all the tepid, petty things of life had dropped from her—where she had found the famous fleece, the truth. In the vastness of that uncharted land, like a flash in the dark something had leaped at her. Her dream of a dream had come true. She had learned the great human miracle, the meaning of a love that had the strength to renounce. ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... burning almost alone. They made the circuit slowly, Sommers leading his frightened animal among the refuse of the grounds. Mrs. Preston walked tranquilly by his side, her face still illuminated by the fading glow. The prairie lay in gloomy vastness, lighted but a little way by the waning fire. Along the avenue forms of men and women—mere mites—were running to and fro. The figures were those of gnomes toiling under a gloomy, uncertain firmament, or of animals furtively peeping ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... mainly of cattle trucks, puffed away from the coast town next morning, and attached to it were the cars containing the new air squadron. Late that night it had reached one of the huge airdromes, the vastness of which unfolded itself to the astonished gaze of the boys at daybreak of the morning after. They had not dreamed that such acres and acres of hangars existed along the whole front. The war in the air assumed new proportions to ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... At first, the vastness of this plan seemed to keep the public mind in a state of suspense. For nearly a month, indeed, after its introduction, no indications of serious or determined opposition were discernible, although Fox, when ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... as her wondering eyes can reach, A vastness heaving gray in gray To the frayed edges of the day Furls his red standard on the breach Between the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... spirit or glorified as a redeemed one, ready to throw not merely his mortal life, but his immortality even, into the forlorn hope, to bridge with a never-dying soul the chasm over which white-robed victors should pass to a commonwealth of glory and splendor whose vastness dwarf the misery of all ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... be more ingeniously contrived to express the vastness of Lord Bateman's family mansion than this remarkable passage. The proud young porter had to thread courts, corridors, galleries, and staircases innumerable, before he could penetrate to those exquisite apartments ...
— The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman • Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray
... and precipices of the Alps, and along the almost miraculous coast of the Mediterranean; and I shall not pretend that the view I now beheld approached many, in magnificence, that are to be met with in those magic regions. Nevertheless, it was both grand and soft; and it had one element of vastness, in the green mantle of its interminable woods, that is not often to be met with in countries that have long submitted to the sway of man. Such as it was, I shall endeavour to ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... stream of men, supplies, ammunition, and guns pouring into the British lines made a mighty spectacle, one that cannot be described. It has to be witnessed with your own eyes to appreciate its vastness. ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... old French tracing the progress of the language, which he often declared would be his principal claim to fame. In 1842 the name "La Comedie Humaine" was after much consideration given to the whole structure, and in the preface he explains this title by saying: "The vastness of a plan which includes Society's history and criticism, the analysis of its evils, the discussion of its principles, justifies me, I think, in giving to my work the name under which it is appearing to-day—'The Human Comedy.' Pretentious, is it? ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... view of the snows from Darjiling, grand and almost overpowering though it is, has warmth in it too. The main impression is one of magnitude and amplitude, of vastness and immensity, and withal of serene composure. The first view of the mountain seen through a rent in the clouds was perhaps more uplifting, though this view excites a sense of elevation also, for the eye is continually being drawn to the highest point. But in this full view the impression of breadth ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... which to admire most—the audacity and vastness of the labour undertaken by these insects, or the ingenious foresight by which they ensure to their delicate larvae a comfortable youth. There can be no doubt that these animals show themselves very superior to Man, taking into consideration his enormous size compared to theirs, in the ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... he sees around, the traveler becomes lost in an effort to form some idea of the grandeur and vastness of the original. ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes
... the bow. Her eyes roved from the sun-glittering stream to the hills that rose above the tree-fringed valley floor, as if sight had been restored to her so that her eyes could dwell upon the green-leaved alder and maple, the drooping spruce bows, the vastness of those forests of somber fir where the deer lurked in the shadows and where the birds sang vespers and matins when dusk fell and dawn came again. There were meadow larks warbling now on stumps that dotted the floor of the Big Bend, and above the voices of those yellow-breasted ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the mountains, the silence of the plain, the vastness, the emptiness, the seeming purposelessness of it all, irritated and oppressed her spirit. And she so yearned to be where the world ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... on to the nodding wheat, the rivers, cliffs, and islands, to the cities and the people everywhere for thousands of miles. What is the effect of this vastness on the thought of a child? Can you not realize for yourself any clear night that you may gaze at the numberless stars in the arching skies? How small, how infinitely little are we in all the great universe! Have we the imagination to grasp the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... disappear as science unfolds more and more new infinities of time and space, new infinities of worlds and forms of life. The curious notion has crept in, that man must sink lower into insignificance with every new discovery of the vastness and huge design of creation. God would seem to have over-reached Himself in disclosing His power and majesty, stunning and overwhelming the intellect and heart with the crushing weight of the evidences of His Infinity. We have modern thinkers regarding Christian ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... [the decurions] who were in command of the cavalry, were gradually disconcerted. Such of them as wished to be considered less alarmed said that they did not dread the enemy, but feared the narrowness of the roads and the vastness of the forests which lay between them and Ariovistus, or else that the supplies could not be brought up readily enough. Some even declared to Caesar that when he gave orders for the camp to be moved and the troops to advance, the soldiers would not be obedient ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... immensity, and its solemn vastness—but unlike any temple ever raised by human toil. In no ruin of earth's youth giants' work now crumbling under the weight of time had I ever sensed a shadow of the strangeness with which this was instinct. No—nor in the shattered fanes that once had held the gods of old Egypt, nor in the ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... have been in the habit of meaning. I have already said-I fear, too often-that no conception of God can have any value or meaning for us which does not involve his existence as an independent Living Person of ineffable wisdom and power, vastness, and duration both in the past and for the future. If such a Being as this can be found existing and made evident, directly or indirectly, to human senses, there is a God. If otherwise, there is no ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler
... his hand. It was a common fate, and yet it seemed an awful thing to say of any man. She listened without a word, and her stillness now was like the protest of an invincible unbelief. What need she care for the world beyond the forests? I asked. From all the multitudes that peopled the vastness of that unknown there would come, I assured her, as long as he lived, neither a call nor a sign for him. Never. I was carried away. Never! Never! I remember with wonder the sort of dogged fierceness I displayed. I had the illusion of having got the spectre by the throat ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... musical flow of sounds. Thus of the thirty-two feet in the eight lines, seventeen are iambs and eleven anapests, two are weak iambs (-orous, -ylus), one a spondee (bright night-), and one monosyllabic with a rest ([] Fills). Tennyson's Vastness may also be studied for its combinations of trochees, dactyls, and spondees. Here is ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... he knew that venom dwelt there, but he said nothing. The one and only chance of successfully transplanting the Folk must be to regions warm as these. All dangers must be braved a time till they could grow acclimated to the upper air. After that—but the vastness of the future deterred even speculation. Perils were inevitable. The more there were to overcome ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... fiction was a new and interesting figure in English literature. Disraeli, indeed, had flashed into the literary world with 'Coningsby,' that eloquent vindication of the Jewish race. His grandiose 'Tancred' had revealed to an astonished public the strange life of the Desert, of the mysterious vastness whence swept forth the tribes who became the Moors of Spain and the Jews of Palestine. Disraeli, however, stood in no category, and established no precedent. But when Miss Aguilar's stories began to appear, they were eagerly welcomed by a public with whom she had already won ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... fled away incontinent and would not be conjured back; though, indeed, the original discoverers would have had yet further occasion to gaze at one another "with a wild surmise" if they had seen shrieking companies "shooting the chutes." But here was vastness, here was desolation, here was silence; jagged ice masses in the foreground and boundless expanse beyond, solemn and mysterious. The Arctic Ocean was even as ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... her harder than ever, since amazement made me weak. We were in some vast place whereof the roof seemed almost as far off as the sky at night. At least all that I could make out was a dim and distant arch which might have been one of cloud. For the rest, in every direction stretched vastness, illuminated far as the eye could reach by the soft light of which I have spoken, that is, probably for several miles. But this vastness was not empty. On the contrary it was occupied by a great city. There were streets much wider than Piccadilly, ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... instead of condemning it, justify it, its diversity producing its adaptation and its adaptation producing benefits.—This is no barren formula. A sentiment of such grandeur, of such comprehensive and penetrating insight, an idea by which Man, compassing the vastness and depth of things, so greatly oversteps the ordinary limits of his mortal condition, resembles an illumination; it is easily transformed into a vision; it is never remote from ecstasy; it can express itself only through symbols; it evokes divine figures.[3308]Religion ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... gazed about, lowering her glance from the sixth floor to the paving stones, then raising it again, surprised at the vastness, feeling as it were in the midst of a living organ, in the very heart of a city, and interested in the house, as though it were ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... we have much knowledge, for it only serves to better show the vastness of the unknown, and to compare the little we have discovered for ourselves with the amplitude of that which we owe to the ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... it was not Egypt herself that the Greeks saw, but her external artistic aspect and the outward setting of Egyptian civilisation. The vastness of her monuments, the splendour of her tombs, the pomp of her ceremonies, the dignity and variety of her religious formulas, attracted their curiosity and commanded their respect: the wisdom of the Egyptians had ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... since the firstborn of Eve. At a day old he would make three of any of the new-born babes that a month since blessed the Union bf Sevenoaks. There is, however, a remarkable providence in this. The Prince of Wales is born to the vastness of a palace; the little Princes of Pauperdom being doomed to lie at the rate of fifteen in "two beds tied together," are happily formed of corresponding dimensions, manufactured of more "squeezeable materials." There is, be sure of it, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 18, 1841 • Various
... The vastness of the problem of the city slum, and the impossibility, even with unlimited resources of men and money, of permanently raising the standards of living of many of our immigrants as long as they are crowded together, and as long as the stream of newer immigrants pours into these same slums, has naturally ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... a great white radiance streamed through the vastness of the aisles; the moon, that was at her height, had broken through the clouds, the snow had ceased to fall, the light reflected from the snow without was clear as the light of dawn. It fell through the arches full upon the two pictures above, from which ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... that lonely land as if I was witnessing it for the first time. As my eyes roamed over the stupendous distance and unnamed mountains I felt my own puny insignificance, as who has not when confronted with the vastness ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... character of these landscapes to suggest at once a vastness, diversity, and seclusion. When a man comes upon them unexpectedly he can forget the perpetual toil of men and imagine that those who dwell below in the near side before him are exempt from the necessities ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... fared forth with the troops, leaving Hasan alone in the palace. It was not long before his breast grew straitened and his patience shortened: solitude and sadness were heavy on him and he sorrowed for his severance from them with passing chagrin. The palace for all its vastness, waxed small to him and finding himself sad and solitary, he bethought him of the damsels and their pleasant converse and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... different,—rather, how utterly dissimilar,—is the phenomenon before us! Here is a singularly confused and shallow thinker oppressed with the vastness of his discovery, that the Bible—has nothing in it! Here is a Clergyman of the Church of England, and a Lecturer in Divinity, whose difficulty is how he shall convince the world that the Bible is—like any other book! Here is the sceptical fellow ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round—for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost—do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... conveying more in the way of sympathy than any words would have done, while the discomforts of the novel ride seemed to die away, and the soft dreaminess of the night grew soothing; the vast silvery grey expanse, melting away in its vastness, became lit-up with a faint halo of hope, and with his spirits rising, Frank seemed another man when the ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... undertaker. Peggy nearly cried. She wished she had chosen another hotel. But where else could she have gone? She had stayed at few hotels in London: once at the Savoy; once at Claridge's; every other time at Sturrocks's. The Savoy? Its vastness had frightened her. And Claridge's? No; that was sanctified for ever. Oliver in his lordly way had snapped his fingers at Sturrocks's. Only the best was good enough for ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... which, in a certain group of human beings, life is distributed and conducted with mathematical precision from one to another, taking into account the environment—a vast bible, the genesis of families, of societies, of all humanity. He hoped that the vastness of such a plan, the effort necessary to develop so colossal an idea, would take complete possession of him, restoring to him his health, his faith, his pride in the supreme joy of the accomplished work. But it was ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... will seek not the shadowy region; Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear; And visions rising, legion after legion, Bring the unreal world ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... faithful in fulfilling her promise. She took a private opportunity, when she was alone with Darius, to propose that he should engage in some plans of foreign conquest. She reminded him of the vastness of the military power which was at his disposal, and of the facility with which, by means of it, he might extend his dominions. She extolled, too, his genius and energy, and endeavored to inspire in his mind some ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... it was not altogether the divine rage of the artist that had wrought this havoc. The confusion argued a power at war with itself rather than with its creations; the very vastness of it all suggested a deity tied as to time, but apparently unshackled as to space. That was it. There really wasn't as much time as there used to be. It was in his free evenings and on Sundays that his best thoughts came to him, the beautiful shy thoughts that ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... other vistas equally far stretching, going off at right angles to the one which you are traversing; and the murky atmosphere which, settling upon the remoter end of every long avenue, wraps its termination in gloom and uncertainty,—all these are circumstances aiding that sense of vastness and illimitable proportions which forever brood over the aspect of London in its interior. Much of the feeling which belongs to the outside of London, in its approaches for the last few miles, I had lost, in consequence of the ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... how utterly beyond our adequate comprehension he must be. As men in old tales used to take diffused superhumans, the genii, and by magic word bring them down into a stoppered bottle where they could be held in manageable form, so man has taken the vastness of God and run it into ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... notwithstanding the vastness of his learning and the gigantic powers of his mind, he can, when it so pleases him, disburden himself of these great matters, and descend from his lofty height to the comprehension of the little folks, with as much ease as a huge balloon, soaring ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... Vastness of the theme; scenical opportunities; the poetry independent of the creed; Milton's choice of subject; King Arthur; Paradise Lost; attractions of the theme: primitive religion, natural beauty, dramatic interest; ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... almost at their feet. It was tremendous, and its vastness set the mind dizzy. Great circling patches of mist rose up from below and added a sense of infinity to its depths. So wide. So deep. The broad river in its bowels was reduced to something like a trickling streamlet. The woodlands crowding the lower slopes, dim, vague in ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... natural thing in the world for him to do so. All his most celebrated poems seemed to live in his memory, and it was easy to start him off by quoting the first line of any of his pieces. Speaking of the vastness of London, he quoted the whole of his sonnet describing the great city, as seen in the morning from Westminster Bridge. When I parted with him at the foot of Rydal Hill, he gave me messages to Rogers and other friends of his whom I was to see in London. As we ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... explored Mammoth Cave in Kentucky—what were these holes in the earth to that in which I stood in speechless admiration! with its vapory clouds, its electric light, and the mighty ocean slumbering in its bosom! Imagination, not description, can alone give an idea of the splendor and vastness of ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... challenge of the storm, indeed, Ashe felt, as many another strong man has felt before him, in a similar emptiness of heart. But it was because of the mere provocation of physical energy which it involved; not, as it would have been with him in youth, because of the infinitude and vastness of nature, breathing power ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... its tales of far countries—their tropical beauty, or, it might be, their ice-bound grandeur, High mountains, terrible volcanoes, placid lakes, swift-flowing rivers—all these spoke to her of a wonderful world outside her own; and she longed to spread her wings and to fly out and away into its vastness. She often wondered how her uncle, who knew about all these things, could be content to stay year in and year out in one place, spending nearly all his time within the four walls of his own study, and her heart would go out to that ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... all human gold discovering has been a mere nothing; that our methods are only faint and feeble imitations of Nature, and that only by circumventing her shall we be able to reach the richer reward. But by the very vastness of her operations we are precluded from imitating the sluice robber, who does not work himself, but "cleans up" the rich boxes of some mining company which has undertaken a scheme too large for any ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... grew tense; she was beginning to realize the vastness of her husband's purchase. She began to wonder, too, how much it had ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... to sit back in the corner of the seat and feed his senses on the lovely creature before him. He had never seen her so beautiful, so utterly worth having as now. He was conscious of a great, overwhelming sense of pride, somewhat smothering in its vastness. She was a creature to be proud of! His heart was ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... monster, no life was discernible. Cacti of all shapes and sizes reared aloft their forbidding spines or spread out along the sand. All was dead, ghastly; all was oppressive, startlingly repellent in its sinister promise; all was the vastness of desolation. ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... Jerome said that with a gasp of horror and admiration at the vastness of it. Sometimes to him that thousand dollars almost represented infinity, and seemed more than the stars of heaven. His childish brain, which had scarcely contemplated in verity more than a shilling at a time of the coin of the realm, reeled ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... began, intoning the words as though he were reciting a ritual, "There was a time, many thousands of Khreelas ago, when the kingdom of Ahhreel was not one small city, as you see it now, but a mighty empire, girdling the world in her vastness. But the people of Ahhreel had become evil in their ways, and her cities were black with sin. It was then that Xheev himself left his kingdom in paradise and appeared to the people of Ahhreel, and he told them ...
— Grove of the Unborn • Lyn Venable
... municipal history. Until times quite recent Tammany has had things all its own way in the Eastern metropolis. The extent of corruption was not suspected until the Lexow investigating committee brought it to light. It is certain that not even the committee itself conceived the vastness of the system of thuggery and blackmail. Having begun its labors, evidence poured in upon it in a constantly increasing stream. It could do no less than go ahead. Its prosecuting attorney, John C. Goff, who not ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... resurrection of the dead could produce no effect. If it be further said that men easily believe what they anxiously desire; I again answer that in my opinion, the very contrary of this is nearer to the truth. Anxiety of desire, earnestness of expectation, the vastness of an event, rather causes men to disbelieve, to doubt, to dread a fallacy, to distrust, and to examine. When our Lord's resurrection was first reported to the apostles, they did not believe, we are told, for joy. This was natural, and is agreeable ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... followed he triumphed, but he also faltered. Rodogune (1644), which he preferred to all his other plays, is certainly, by virtue of the enormity of the characters, the violence of the passions, the vastness of its crimes, the most romantic of his tragedies; it is constructed with the most skilful industry; from scene to scene the emotion is intensified and heightened until the great fifth act is reached; but if by incomparable audacity the dramatist attains the ideal, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... again comes glorious on its predicted return. Were the Eternal Being to slacken the course of a planet, or increase even the distance of the fixed stars, the decree would be soon known on earth. Our ignorance is great, because so is our knowledge; for it is from the mightiness and vastness of what we do know that we imagine the illimitable unknown creation. And to whom has God made these revelations? To a worm that next moment is to be in darkness? To a piece of earth momentarily raised into breathing existence? To a soul perishable ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... Glowed with the burning passion of a love Unspeakable, the ardour of a hope Boundless, insatiate: "Oh! suffering world, Oh! known and unknown of my common flesh, Caught in this common net of death and woe, And life which binds to both! I see, I feel The vastness of the agony of earth, The vainness of its joys, the mockery Of all its best, the anguish of its worst; Since pleasures end in pain, and youth in age, And love in loss, and life in hateful death, And death in ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... was the great black enclosing firmament. The stars blazed with a new white glory never seen through the haze of an atmosphere. Like a little world in the vastness of this awesome void, ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... existence. Everything around me seemed the shadows of somebody's dream, in which I had no part, and could take no interest. I had but two all-absorbing ideas; and these were—injustice and Josephine. So distraught was I with the vastness of the one and with the loveliness of the other, that, when the young and splendid reality stole into the apartment softly, and moved before my eyes in all the fascination of her gracefulness, yet was I scarcely conscious of the actual presence of her whose ideal existence ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... in his mental vision the walls of the room seemed to fade, and he was only conscious of a vastness of space, and knew that for this brief moment he was looking into eternity and realising for the first time ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... the vastness of all that now was not, forgot to care for himself. He, who had been jovial, became silent. Some times, of nights, he would walk alone for hours. The weather made no difference—in fact, he seldom noticed what the weather was. He was ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... Above that we come to pay our tribute of wonder and admiration at the great achievements of our Nation and at the glory which they are shedding around her. The past four years has shown the world the existence of a conspiracy against mankind of a vastness and a wickedness that could only be believed when seen in operation and confessed by its participants. This conspiracy was promoted by the German military despotism. It probably was encouraged by the results of three ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... his daughter and his son, and about Violet Effingham. So sudden, indeed, and so confidential was the conversation, that Phineas was almost silenced for awhile. A word or two had been said about Loughlinter, of the beauty of the place and of the vastness of the property. "I am almost afraid," said Lord Brentford, "that Laura is not ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... scenery, the grandeur of the Columbia, the vastness of the territory, and the fertility of the soil. Here were mountains grander than Olympus, and harbors and water-courses as wonderful as the AEgean. He was almost afraid to map the truth in his extensive correspondence ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... add to these causes of discontent the vastness in number of the regular clergy, the "friars" and "monks" already referred to, who consumed, but were only too obviously unproductive, it will be sufficiently plain that the Protestant Reformation had something very much more than a purely speculative basis to work upon. Religious reformers ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... great yawning chasm itself held no fascination for me. I could appreciate its dizzy depths, its vastness, its marvelous color effects, and its weird contours. I could feel the immensity of it, and it repelled instead of attracted. I seemed to see its barrenness and desolation, the cruel deception of its poisonous springs, and its insurmountable walls. I could ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... glance the vast plain seemed uninhabited, yet here and there were men and horses, tiny in the vastness, but conquering. Here and there also—for it was July—a haymaker sharpened his scythe, and the sound came singing through the air radiant and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... seated in the little ferry-boat, and were crossing the swollen river immediately before both cataracts, I began to feel what it was: but I was in a manner stunned, and unable to comprehend the vastness of the scene. It was not until I came on Table Rock, and looked - Great Heaven, on what a fall of bright- green water! - that it came upon me in ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... the dramatic; but he has all the pathos of sentiment and romance—all that belongs to distant objects of terror, and uncertain, imaginary distress. His strength, in like manner, is not strength of will or action, of bone and muscle, nor is it coarse and palpable—but it assumes a character of vastness and sublimity seen through the same visionary medium, and blended with the appalling associations of preternatural agency. We need only turn, in proof of this, to the Cave of Despair, or the Cave of Mammon, or to the account of the change of Malbecco into Jealousy. The ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... was only another step to suggest that, once they were married, her father's strong liking for him would soon bring about their forgiveness. He pressed and pressed these points, pausing at times to declare the vastness of his affection for her, until at last, against her better judgment, and in spite of a lurking distrust of him, of which she could not rid herself, she yielded to his persistence and the overwhelming influence of his stronger personality, ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... and the conversation languished. The car had climbed out of the San Gregorio and was mounting swiftly along the route to La Questa, affording to the Parkers a panorama of mountain, hill, valley and sea so startling in its vastness and its rugged beauty that Don Mike realized his guests had been silenced as much by awe as by their desire to avoid a painful and ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... came the boom of the bell for evensong. Down Piccadilly ran the roar of the night traffic, wending a blithesome way to places of pleasure. It was the hour when London was wont to awaken to the thrill of its greatness, its power, its vastness, its strength, and its glory, and to send down luminous lanes its carnival crowd of men and women. It was the time when weltering misery shrank shrouded into merciful gloom; when the East End lay far from our hearts; when poverty and sin and shame went skulking ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... into an infinity of fantastic shapes, arrest and weary the eye, lava in all its forms, from a compact phonolite, to the lightest pumice stone, the mere froth of the volcano, exceeding in wildness and confusion the most extravagant nightmare ever inflicted on man. Recollect the vastness of this mountain. The whole south of this large island, down to, and below the water's edge, is composed of its slopes. Its height is nearly three miles, its base is 180 miles in circumference, so that ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... hotel lay rather in the faded pomp of its sleeping-rooms, and the vastness of its salle a manger, than in anything very good to ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... That journey was as fixed, as inevitable, as things mortal can be. She would go to Coniston unless she perished on the way. No loving entreaties, no fears of Mrs. Merrill or her daughters, were of any avail. Mrs. Merrill too, was awed by the vastness of the girl's sorrow, and wondered if her own nature were small by comparison. She had wept, to be sure, at her husband's confession, and lain awake over it in the night watches, and thought of the early days of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... with those I had already experienced in the air. He told me that my wish might easily be gratified; adding that, although he had never been beyond the top of a steeple, he could take it upon him to assure me, that the feeling of vastness and sublimity induced by an aerial ascent, was almost in direct contrast to the sensations of the diver—the one being comparable to the effects produced by the enlarged views of generalization, indulged in by speculative ontologists—the other, to those that result from the inductive ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... form a fitting starting-point for our reflections: for they bring vividly before us both the idealism which should inspire all who labour at the task of government and the vastness and variety of the field with which they are concerned. Looked at in this broad light, the history of man's common life in the world will, I think, show two great streams of progress—the progress of man over Nature, or, as ...
— Progress and History • Various
... architecture, with something of a fancy that it was never made, that it has stood there since the morning of the world. It has the lightness and the strength, the absence of ornament and the essential beauty, the vastness and the perfection, of ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... thumb on his plastic mind without his conscious knowledge. Canada with her young, red-blooded vigour swept into him like a tidal wave of open sea into a sluggish, marshy creek. Canada thrust her vastness and her limitless potentialities at him with a careless hand, as though to say: "Here's opportunity for the taking." Canada taught him in ten days what at home he would never have learnt in a lifetime: that London is ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... no affectation, no light converse—The members, young or old, had come thither to perform a great duty, in strength of purpose, singleness of spirit—and all felt deeply the weight of the present moment, the vastness of the interests concerned. The good and the true were there convened to defend the majesty, perhaps the safety, of their country—the wicked to strive for interest, for ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... the elements mingled and muttered, We stood, each man with a lone dumb heart, Full of the vastness that never was uttered By symbol of words or by ...
— Songs, Merry and Sad • John Charles McNeill
... looked a little flattened. Textbook tables came back to him. He had traveled 47 light-years—he couldn't remember how many billions of miles that was. Even so, it was only the tiniest hop-skip-and-jump in the measureless vastness of space. ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... Frederick the Great was right when he said that if his night-cap knew what was in his head he would throw it into the fire. That kind of secrecy was practicable in Frederick's time, when his whole army was kept closely about him; but when maneuvers of the vastness of Napoleon's are executed, and war is waged as in our day, what concert of action can be expected from generals who are utterly ignorant of what is going on ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... immensity, where shall I find my place? Oh, that I might sleep eternally! Yes, that would be best of all—to sink into sleep never ending, unbroken, and unbreakable, to be absorbed into the cool vastness of the night, and lie in her great arms for ever. Oh, Night! whom I have ever loved, you bring your sleep to wearied millions— bring me sleep eternal. But no, the stars are above the night, and above the stars is—what? Yes; the hour I dread ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... splendid about the West," she generously admitted. "Its vastness and wholesomeness, and especially its men. I'm sure that's why I first liked you, Gordon, because you were different—not like the general run of young men ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... safely on their tops, beneath the stone roof of the Cathedral. A priest was saying mass, and some half-dozen of persons on the wooden benches before the chancel were joining in the service. It was a cold affair; and the vastness of the building but tended to throw an air of insignificance over it. The languid faces of the priest and his diminutive congregation brought vividly to my recollection the crowd of animated countenances I had seen outside the same building, around Punch, the day before. The devotion before ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... in which we are actually placed, the other would concentrate them upon objects which form part of the series of events amongst which we are moving. Which is the more likely to stimulate our best feelings? We must reply by asking whether the vastness or the distinctness of a prospect has the greater effect upon the imagination. Does a man take the greater interest in a future which he can definitely interpret to himself, or upon one which is admittedly ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the fair earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in the awful vastness of the universe. In the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built for themselves, mankind were to remain no longer. And now it is all gone—like an unsubstantial pageant faded; and between us and the old English themselves a gulf of mystery which ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... the greatest city in the whole world, so great indeed that I should scarcely venture to tell of it, but that I have met at Venice people in plenty who have been there.... And if anyone should desire to tell of all the vastness and great marvels of this city, a good quire of paper would not hold the matter, I trow. For 'tis the greatest and noblest city, and the finest for merchandise, that the whole ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... I to attempt to treat of the animosities of parties, and of the morals of the state, with minuteness of detail, and suitably to the vastness of the subject, time would fail me sooner than matter. I therefore ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust
... new; it belonged as truly, as manifestly, to the recent and modern world of democracy and science, as it did to the Middle Ages and the Fathers, to the world of Gregory and Innocent, to the world of Athanasius and Augustine. The majesty, the vastness of an imperial polity, outlasting all states and kingdoms, all social changes and political revolutions, answered at once to the promises of the prophecies, and to the antecedent idea of the universal kingdom of God. Before this great idea, ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... and precipitated itself into the cove below. These were the two things in Nature he had demanded to make his work possible. For the rest, the rugged immensity of scenery, the mighty contours of the aged land about him, the vastness of the harsh primordial world, so inhospitable, so forbidding under the fierce climate which Nature had imposed, made no appeal. It served, and so it was sufficient. The lights and shades under the summer sunlight were full of splendour. ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... disappear together out of the world when the Placido—as the saying is—goes to sleep under its black poncho. The few stars left below the seaward frown of the vault shine feebly as into the mouth of a black cavern. In its vastness your ship floats unseen under your feet, her sails flutter invisible above your head. The eye of God Himself—they add with grim profanity—could not find out what work a man's hand is doing in there; and you would be ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... beings. He has many blazing and terrible forms. All those forms are worshipped in the world and are known to Brahmanas possessed of knowledge. Amongst the gods he has many names all of which are fraught with grave import. Verily, the meanings of those names are derived from either his greatness or vastness, or his feats, or his conduct. The Brahmanas always recite the excellent Sata-rudriya in his honour, that occurs in the Vedas as also that which has been composed by Vyasa. Verily, the Brahmanas and Rishis call ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... sacramental, but jealously keeping the balance between obedience and faith; learned, exact, and measured, but definite and decided. The novelty was in the application of it, in the new life breathed into it, in the profound and intense feelings called forth by its ideas and objects, in the air of vastness and awe thrown about it, in the unexpected connection of its creeds and mysteries with practical life, in the new meaning given to the old and familiar, in the acceptance in thorough earnest, and with keen purpose to call it into action, of what had been guarded and laid by with dull reverence. ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... had got round it he would have seen soaring above him down stream the great mass of Chertsey Abbey. If Reading had the solidity and the barbaric grandeur of Durham, Chertsey had in an ecclesiastical way the vastness of Windsor, and must have seemed like a town to anyone approaching it thus down the river. The enclosed area of the abbey buildings ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... more for it than I do. My love of fiction began with my breath, and will end with it; and goes on increasing; and the heights and depths of the consumption which it has induced you may guess at perhaps, but it is a sublime idea from its vastness, and will gain on you but slowly. On my tombstone may be written 'Ci-git the greatest novel reader in the world,' and nobody will forbid the inscription; and I approve of Gray's notion of paradise more than of his lyrics, when he suggests the reading of romances ever new, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... across undulating plains; rising with the uplifting mountains; peering into and over romantic mountain gorges; and growing up through the interstices of bowldered cascades. Or, standing on the mountain peaks, I have seen them sweep away into the vastness and grandeur of mighty, varied, and almost boundless expanse. These are but parts of my evergreen pictures. I have looked upon a simple holly bush when the wind of winter was upon it, scattering in lovely fragments its pure white ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of an escarpment of the infinite. Nothing was to be seen, but the hostile chill of the water and the stale odor of the wet stones could be felt. A fierce breath rose from this abyss. The flood in the river, divined rather than perceived, the tragic whispering of the waves, the melancholy vastness of the arches of the bridge, the imaginable fall into that gloomy void, into all that ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... handful; for the whole mountain round them was full of that heavenly army. Chariots of fire and horsemen of fire thronged it in every part. High up into the viewless air mounted their wheeling bands: rank beyond rank, and army beyond army, they seemed to stretch on into the vastness of space, until the gazer's wearied eye was unable to gaze on them. And all of these were gathered round his master. They were God's host, keeping guard over God's servant. And they who would injure him must first turn aside those flashing swords, must break up that strong ...
— The Rocky Island - and Other Similitudes • Samuel Wilberforce
... for that makes God seem as if He were here, in this world, which then is all we see (except its great eye, the sun) of these multitudinous worlds He has created, and that are hanging in countless myriads round us. Night suggests the vastness of creation, as day can never do; and darkness, silence, the absence of human fellowship, and the suspension of human activity, interests, and occupations, leave us a less disturbed opportunity of meditating on our ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... them, was confined, like an elemental body-guard, to the head of the mountain-king. But, clear though it was at the moment, they were too high in the air to see anything quite distinctly, yet this hazy aspect had a charm of its own, for it increased the feeling and idea of vastness in connection with surrounding space. Around, and now beneath, stood the mountain nobility of the land, looking, however, somewhat reduced in size and majesty, as seen from the ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... cabins, the lack, thus far, of all signs of the fugitive, the vastness of the hunting-ground magnified by the loneliness of winter, had convinced her finally that her quest was futile. It was all a venture of madness. The idea that a woman, alone and single-handed, with ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... but God's and ours can read;—memories of neglect, of sin, of deep secrets that our hearts have hidden in their innermost folds. Such experiences sometimes there are when we muse upon the external universe; when we reflect upon the vastness of creation, the littleness of human effort, the transciency of human relations; when our souls are drawn away from all ordinary communions, and we feel that we are drifting before an almighty will, bound to an inevitable destiny, hemmed in by irresistible forces. Then, with every tie of association ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... accustomed to them, held the bunch of keys, opened the great door, and then they were in the first cellar—the first of a suite of five. Racksole was struck not only by the icy coolness of the place, but also by its vastness. Babylon had seized a portable electric handlight, attached to a long wire, which lay handy, and, waving it about, disclosed the dimensions of the place. By that flashing illumination the subterranean chamber looked unutterably weird and mysterious, with its rows of numbered bins, stretching ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... All-One, which Goethe in early life found so pacifying to his troubled spirit, and which, vague and barren as it proves on nearer acquaintance, induces at first, above all other systems, a sense of repose in illimitable vastness and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... desire soon gives place to a general state of anguish and hatred of himself. The evil seems too great for him, and its vastness crushes him. In the meantime, the people about him do not suffer; they are indifferent or incredulous. The student feels that he is losing his mind. They confine him. Later on, when, cured, he leaves the alienist, "he blushes ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... vapour ascending from the falling waters; together with the occasional glimpses of the skies here and there—all this induces you to wander with your eyes from one point of view to another, never tiring with its beauty, wildness, and vastness: and, if you do not exclaim with the Mussulman, God is great! you feel it through every sense, and at every pulsation of ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... midst of this vastness and space, Lisbeth felt herself so wonderfully little! But she was not at all terrified; she only felt very ...
— Lisbeth Longfrock • Hans Aanrud
... majesty is properly appreciated. The total span, from end to end, of 556 feet, compared with the 537 feet of Ely, the 525 of York, the 524 of Lincoln, and the 516 of Canterbury, would not alone produce the effect of almost infinite vastness, and is certainly not realised either in a distant prospect from the hills or in a nearer view from the cathedral precincts. But when once the nave is entered, owing partly to the open and comparatively low choir-screen, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant
... splendid, panelled room with deep-embrasured windows, from which the defences had now been removed and through which the inmates could have noble views of the lawns and gardens beyond the moat. The little company of three seemed, as it were, lost in the vastness of the chamber as they sat at meat together at the oak table by the hearth at one end of the room, Brilliana at the head, with Halfman at her right and Evander at her left as the guest and stranger. It proved a vastly pleasant meal to Evander, for the ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... the secret of some of the cardinal effects of literature; strong epithets like "lonely," "supreme," "invisible," "eternal," "inexorable," with the substantives that belong to them, borrow their force from the vastness of what they deny. And not these alone, but many other words, less indebted to logic for the magnificence of reach that it can lend, bring before the mind no picture, but a dim emotional framework. Such words as "ominous," "fantastic," "attenuated," ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... days before we really get to work," said Venning, when the vastness of the Congo was forced on his attention by a casual reference to "hundreds ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... the strange obscure ocean, which no European had yet realised. Just before Christmas the course was altered and the ships were turned to the north-west, in which direction they expected soon to find the Spice Islands. No one had any idea of the vastness of ...
— 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
... it stretched for hundreds of miles, away and away to the land of the north wind. Over its winding undulating course, long years ago, the hardy pioneers of the new world adventured themselves; and as they bravely pushed on they were filled with amazement and awe at the vastness of the great ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... "you", now I was privileged to use the first personal pronoun "we". Almost to the last I did not know what text to choose and trusted to the inspiration of the moment what to say. My mind was confused with the vastness of the outlook. At last the words came to me which are the very foundation stone of human endeavour and human progress, "He that loseth his life for My sake shall find it." I do not know exactly what I said, and ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... And this vastness has a strangely tranquilizing effect upon you in Rome, while you pass from place to place, in order to visit the most remarkable objects. In other places one has to search for what is important; ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... after week we travelled across that endless desert by a way known to Harut on which water could be found, the only living things in all its vastness, meeting with no accidents save that of the sandstorm in which the ivory was lost. I was much alone during that time, since Harut spoke little and Ragnall and his wife were ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... thunderbolt or mouldering crumb of ambrosia. Above, around, below, beyond sight, beyond thought, stretched the still deeps of aether, blazing with innumerable worlds. Eye could rove nowhither without beholding a star, nor could star be beheld from which the Gods' hall, with all its vastness, would not have been utterly invisible. Elenko leaned over the battlements, and watched the racing meteors. Prometheus stood by her, and pointed out in the immeasurable distance the little speck of shining dust from ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... insignificance. But the railroads could not affect the navigation of the lake quite so disastrously as that of the river; the lake in such a rivalry had some such advantage as that of the sea from its mere vastness, and from the expanses where the railroads could not follow the steamer in the mere nature of things. The iron horse had his way with the canals, though, and these monuments of a former period of enterprise grow more and more like its sepulcher, ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... led to the chief room of the mill, where all the corn formerly consumed within the monastery had been prepared, and which the size of the chamber itself, together with the vastness of the stones used in the operation of grinding, and connected with the huge water-wheel outside, proved to be by no means inconsiderable. Strong shafts of timber supported the flooring above, and were crossed by other boards placed horizontally, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... of "preparedness" is the problem of preparing children for life. All other kinds of "preparedness" fade into insignificance before this. The history of nations shows that their strength was not in the size of their armies and in the vastness of their population and wealth, but in the strength and ideals of ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... areas in space. Of the correctness of this hypothesis it is unnecessary to speak. It is to the Darwinian speculation what the infinite is to the infinitessimal, and we only refer to it to bring out the vastness of the conception as compared to the latter theory, and to predicate thereon the more conclusive induction that an Infinite Intelligence ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... in the path of the people of the United States in their struggle toward national life was the vastness of the territory which they occupied. Even the region between the Alleghanies and the sea was as yet imperfectly subdued. Great tracts of wilderness separated communities beyond the fall-line of the rivers. Intercourse was incredibly difficult even between the commercial ports of New ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... to understand or determine all that the enthusiast means. Yet there is well expressed the strange condition of a soul cast down by the knowledge of the difficulty of the operation, the amount of the labour, the vastness of the work on one side, and on the other the ignorance, want of knowledge of the way, weakness of nerves and peril of death. He has no knowledge suitable to the business, he does not know where and how to turn, no place of flight or refuge presents itself; and he sees that, ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... describe them? Is not all nature indescribable? every leaf infinite and transcendental? How much more those mighty downs, with their enormous sheets of spotless turf, where the dizzy eye loses all standard of size and distance before the awful simplicity, the delicate vastness, of those grand curves and swells, soft as the outlines of a Greek Venus, as if the great goddess-mother Hertha had laid herself down among the hills to sleep, her Titan limbs wrapt in a ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... Nature and Art, as they are qualified to entertain the Imagination, we shall find the last very defective, in Comparison of the former; for though they may sometimes appear as Beautiful or Strange, they can have nothing in them of that Vastness and Immensity, which afford so great an Entertainment to the Mind of the Beholder. The one may be as Polite and Delicate as the other, but can never shew her self so August and Magnificent in the Design. There ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... uneasy reflections. The will, being perfectly dead to all its own appetites, was become void of every human inclination, both natural and spiritual, and only inclined to whatever God pleased, and to whatever manner He pleased. This vastness or enlargedness, which is not bounded by anything, however plain or simple it may be, increases every day. My soul in partaking of the qualities of her Spouse seems also to partake of His immensity. My prayer was in an openness and singleness inconceivable. ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... conception of the magnitude or awfulness of this canon. It is clearly one of the wonders of the world, and its vastness is such that to explore it from end to end is a work of the ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... wound through it, and in the scrub upon its banks were many guinea-fowl and other birds. It was a pleasing, lonely place, with lots of game in it, that came here in the winter to eat the grass, which was lacking on the higher veld. Also it gave the idea of vastness, since wherever one looked there was nothing to be seen except ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard |
