"Abysmal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... human years I stood A naked, probing mind. Aloof I heard the beating blood, The far-brought voices of the blood, Flow round me like a wind; In an abysmal solitude I staggered ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth
... every sin. Backsliding children, we come to Thee as suppliants, Seeking Thee day by day with humble, urgent prayers. Account them unto us as blood and fat of offerings, Like sacrificial steers and rams accept our contrite words. O that our sins might be sunk in abysmal depths, And Thy brooding infinite mercy bring us ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... the Indian the path is forever down—down into the shadowed vale, down into the abysmal canon, balustraded with sombre, cold gray rocks holding in the far recesses secret streams that make their way beneath the mountain to the cloven rock on the sunlit slope. Thither then they rode, solemn but steadfast. Once ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... surrounding mountains seemed to be but excrescent ridges of the plain. Then, too, we could catch only occasional glimpses, as the clouds shifted to and fro. At one time they opened up beneath us, and revealed the Aras valley with its glittering ribbon of silver at an abysmal depth below. Now and then we could descry the black volcanic peaks of Ali Ghez forty miles away to the northwest, and on the southwest the low mountains that obscured the town of Bayazid. Of the Caucasus, the mountains about Erzerum on the ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... into the abysmal distances!—attempt to force the gaze down the multitudinous vistas of the stars, as we sweep slowly through them thus—and thus—and thus! Even the spiritual vision, is it not at all points arrested by the continuous ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... instant there seemed hope. But only that little breath of respite and there came a cry like myriads of lost souls. They were falling, falling, down through fire, with fire above, below, around, everywhere. Down, down,—an abysmal eternity of fire, till his seared soul writhed from his tortured body, and stood aside ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... I wouldn't leave terra firma now for anything." He handed his aunt in, and then Bertie. He exacted from Bertie a perfectly superfluous shake of the hand, bowed over that hand with a sudden access of gravity, and lost himself in an abysmal reverie before he ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... as they stood now at last, about to part, there stretched an abysmal gulf which might never personally be passed ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... I can," protested the Jew, with an eagerness that deceived neither of the detectives. There is no class of liar so abysmal as the East-end criminal Jew. They will hold to a glib falsehood with a temerity that nothing can shake. If there is no necessity to lie, they lie—for practice, it is to be presumed. The best way to extract a truth is to make a direct assertion by the light of apparent knowledge ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... unusually abysmal. He stood with his back to the door of his theater as though shielding it from Philistine assaults ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... beautiful, and the malformation of one of her shoulders appeared as nothing in his eyes. He lost his heart to Josephine, and made passionate love to her. Distracted by such adoration, the beautiful cripple was now lifted to dizzy heights of joy and now plunged into abysmal depths of despair. She had deemed herself irreparably plain; in the eyes of a charming young man, she found herself beautiful. But, could such love endure through life? To be loved was delicious, but to be deceived after so surprising a release from ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... of how she had behaved, and it was a statement that she for the most part found herself able to make. What had happened at present was that nothing, as she felt, was left of her to report to; she was all too sunk in the inevitable and the abysmal. To give an account of herself she must give it to somebody else, and her first instalment of it to her hostess was that she must please let her cry. She couldn't cry, with Milly in observation, at the ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... boarding-house feeder and the restaurant diner. We knew the type; in the feminine, it sits at table with its bonnet on, and a sullen gnawing expression of animal hunger; in the masculine, it puts its own knife in the butter, and uses a toothpick. No cook—no lack of cook—should drive us to these abysmal depths. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... and perish utterly, God, before whom ever lie bare The abysmal deeps of Personality, [39] ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... rose a chaotic mass of saw-toothed mountains cut, to the east, by a stupendous gorge. We stood silent with awe, when we first climbed a winding, white trail to the summit of the mountain and gazed into the abysmal depths. My eye followed an eagle which floated across the chasm to its perch on a projecting crag; thence, down the sheer face of the cliff a thousand feet to the stream which has carved this colossal canyon from the living rock. Like a shining silver tracing it twisted ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... crimson glow of floating clouds and the red brilliance of departing daylight. In a few moments all the stars came out above the intense blackness of the earth and the great lagoon gleaming suddenly with reflected lights resembled an oval patch of night sky flung down into the hopeless and abysmal night of the wilderness. The white man had some supper out of the basket, then collecting a few sticks that lay about the platform, made up a small fire, not for warmth, but for the sake of the smoke, which would keep off the mosquitos. ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... time Sanderson was entering Okar, Alva Dale was letting himself into the door of his office at the Bar D ranchhouse. Dale's thoughts, because of the sensuous longing with which he had always looked upon Peggy Nyland, had become abysmal. Silverthorn had warned him that the dragging of a woman into the plot would be fatal to their aims, but Dale had paid no heed to Silverthorn. During the day he had kept thinking of the girl until now he could ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... ruled. For all which hath been fixt, was fixt by thee. In the beginning, ere the Gods were born, Before the Heavens were builded, thou didst slay The giant Ymir, whom the abyss brought forth, Thou and thy brethren fierce, the sons of Bor, And cast his trunk to choke the abysmal void. But of his flesh and members thou didst build The earth and Ocean, and above them Heaven. And from the flaming world, where Muspel reigns, Thou sent'st and fetched'st fire, and madest lights, Sun, ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... to him that all the cabs and the buses and the little black figures were being hurried by some power straight, fast, along Piccadilly to be pitched, at the end of it, pell-mell, helter-skelter into some dark abysmal ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... is a Song of the Tube. A ballad of sorrow, A grey sort of lay of To-day and a greyer To-morrow; A dismal, abysmal, chaotic, neurotic Creation Of one who was done after running ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... a circular quagmire of festering black mud about a hundred yards across. Near at hand they could see the mud heaving, very slowly, as though abysmal forms of life were tunneling along just under the surface. They glanced toward the center of the bog, which was occupied by one of the smooth black pools, and cried aloud ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... at the eyes he felt plunged into the pathless depths of a vast, powerful brain. He was in contact with an infinity of intelligence far beyond limits of human comprehension. It was a surging intelligence of energy, abysmal, vaporous and limitless, transcending the dimensions, out-reaching boundless time, ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... and Miss Coppinger, the former pale with excitement, the latter doggedly resigned to the convention that compelled her to offer intoxicating drinks to people who, as she said, had but just swallowed their breakfasts. Larry had learned many things since that day of abysmal ignorance when he had spoken of Amazon as a "nice dog." Among his many enthusiasms he now included a passion for the chase, and all that appertains to its elaborate cult, that complied with Christian's, and even Cottingham's, sense of what was becoming, and, ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... myriad not assignable to any class, but who, on such occasions as this, appeared no one could say whence, hungry and smelling of caves and old tombs—bareheaded wretches with naked arms and legs, hair and beard in uncombed mats, and each with one garment the color of clay; beasts with abysmal mouths, in outcry effective as lions calling each other across desert spaces. Some of them had swords; a greater number flourished spears and javelins; though the weapons of the many were staves and knotted clubs, and slings, for which latter selected stones were stored in scrips, and sometimes in ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... incomparable sympathy of the Victim. How shall we account for His recoil from the thought of dying, for His shrinking from this death as from something which sickened Him, for the darkness and anguish of His soul in Gethsemane at the prospect, and for the abysmal sense of forsakenness on the cross? His sensitiveness of heart made Him feel the pain and shame of other men, a pain and shame they were frequently too stolid and obtuse to feel. He could not see able-bodied and willing workmen standing ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... eyes as it pressed the bolster down; and watched the murdered creature's contortions grow fainter, and fainter, until they finally ceased. The eyes then left the room; and from afar off, away below, in the abysmal cellars of the house, came the sound of digging—faint, very faint, but unquestionably digging. This terminated the grim, phantasmal drama for that night at least, and Letty, chilled to the bone, but thoroughly alert, escaped to her room. She spent her few ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... (who seems to be listening to Schoenbergian harmonies) hasn't much colour, a critic tells us, only a sickly rose in her dress. He also paints grey-green landscapes and visions, the latter dug up from the abysmal depths of his subconsciousness. Schoenberg is, at least, the object of considerable curiosity. What he will do next no man may say; but at least it won't be like the work of any one else. The only distinct reminiscence of an older composer that I could discover in his Pierrot ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... my excuses may prevail, Nor, tender white orb, be thou opposite! Life and life's beauty only hold their revels In the abysmal ocean's luminous levels. There, like the phantasms of a poet pale, The exquisite marvels sail: Clarified silver; greens and azures frail As if the colours sighed themselves away, And blent in supersubtile ...
— Sister Songs • Francis Thompson
... in the skies!" mused De Galgenstein, "ye shine as ye did in the olden days! WE change, but YE speak ever the same language. Gazing in your abysmal ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... string round its leg. He resented the aptness of that degrading simile. It was a new sensation; and he did not relish it. The few women he intimately loved had counted for so much in his life that he scarcely realised his abysmal ignorance of the power that is in woman—the mere opposite of man; the implicit challenge, the potent lure. Partly from temperament, partly from principle, he had kept more or less clear of 'all that'. Now, weaponless, he ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... is abysmal, his wants are endless till he becomes truly conscious of his soul. Till then, the world to him is in a state of continual flux— a phantasm that is and is not. For a man who has realised his soul there is a determinate ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... harangue, extending from "the captivity of the nations" to "the near approach of the millennium," and winding up with a quotation describing the latter "glorious state" out of the Religious Musings, inquired what might be the cost of the new publication. Deeply sensible of "the anti-climax, the abysmal bathos" of the answer, Coleridge replied, "Only fourpence, each number to be published every eighth day," upon which the tallow-chandler observed doubtfully that that came to "a deal of money at the end ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... that pit abysmal, The gulf and grave of Maginn and Burns, And pawn'd his soul for the ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... profound, intricate, inexplicable, unfathomable, incomprehensible, recondite, abstruse; abysmal; sagacious, cunning, astute, shrewd; dark, intense; grave, grum, full-toned, guttural. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... with infirm unsearching tread, His hopes to chaos led, He may have stumbled up there from the past, And with an aching strangeness viewed the last Abysmal conflagration of his dreams,— A flame where nothing seems To burn but flame itself, by nothing fed; And while it all went out, Not even the faint anodyne of doubt May then have eased a painful going down From pictured heights of power and lost ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... a vague hope that I might again reach him with the magnetic waves at my command, I had launched into space the single sentence: "Await me! Death is very near." The message that now startled my ears began with an exact answer to that trans-abysmal despatch: ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... a roof of cloud With its weight of thunder bowed; Underneath, to left and right, Blankness and abysmal night. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... man in hand and, from the minute record of his life, emotions, thoughts, fancies, speculations and nightmares, which he has embodied in autobiographical novels and that most remarkable perhaps of all his creations, abysmal in its pessimism, "The Inferno," will be drawn a true ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... his formidable insight can be best enjoyed, not without little side-lights of a laconic irony, in the "Conversations"; while in Wilhelm Meister we learn to become adepts in the art of living in the Beautiful and True, in Faust that abysmal doubt as to the whole mad business of life is undermined with a craft equal to his own in the delineation and defeat of "the queer ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... that even the truck of the tall Yankee clipper staggering along to {123} leeward cannot be seen except when both ships are topping the crest. Wherever you look there seems to be an endless earthquake of mountainous waves, with spuming volcanoes of their own, and vast, abysmal craters yawning from the depths. The Victoria begins to labour. The wind and water seem to be gaining on her every minute. She groans in every part of her sorely racked hull; while up aloft the hurricane roars, rings, and screeches ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... of an abysmal rage that filled me. It seemed like an abominable dream—the futile old man, the ruffians and their wenches below. And I had endured so much for Jacqueline, to find myself immeshed in such things in the end. I stepped forward and swept the entire heap of gold ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... ineffectual efforts to draw Dane into conversation; but at each remark the young man started violently, as if suddenly recalled to his surroundings. Finally Sir James desisted, and the meal concluded in abysmal silence. ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... enormous wave, and apparently about to be flung against the wall of rock which—magnified in the flash—seemed frightfully near to them. The next instant Burgess himself—his boat lifted by the swiftly advancing billow—saw a wild waste of raging seas scooped into abysmal troughs, in which the bulk of a leviathan might wallow. At the bottom of one of these valleys of water lay the mutineers' boat, looking, with its outspread oars, like some six-legged insect floating in a pool of ink. The great cliff, whose every scar and crag was as distinct as though its ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... The rock had that gray, elemental, eternal look which granite alone has. One seemed to be face to face with the gods of the fore-world. Like an atom, like a breath of to-day, we were suddenly confronted by abysmal geologic time,—the eternities past and the eternities to come. The enormous cleavage of the rocks, the appalling cracks and fissures, the rent boulders, the smitten granite floors, gave one a new sense of the power of heat and frost. In one place we noticed ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... an abysmal pitfall for the world and it won't take heed. I tell you, Kirtley—and I want you to mark my words—Deutschland is going to spring at Europe like a tiger. The army and navy are ready for the onslaught. When they spring, it will be farewell to civilization—except the German—unless ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... through nine abysmal days I've fought with his digestion, Being hostile to his processes and loth to pulpify, It is rapidly becoming a most complicated question How much of me is crocodile, how ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... they reached a rocky outcropping which led to the comparatively dry rise of land on which a tribe of Inranians made its home. Their faces were covered with welts made by the hanging filaments of blood-sucking trees as fine as spider webs, and their senses reeled with the oppressive stench of the abysmal jungle. If the pampered ladies of the Inner Planets only knew where their ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... no more loyal and enthusiastic Princetonian ever lived, to my mind, had the right idea. During one of those periods of abysmal depths of despondency into which a losing team is plunged, he rushed into the room, waving his arms over his head in his characteristic manner, and ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... always is; and Elsley saw it at an awful time, as the glare unveiled below him a sea of rock-waves, all sharp on edge, pointing toward him on every side: or rather one wave-crest of a sea; for twenty yards beyond, all sloped away into the abysmal dark. ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... abysmal solemnity: 'I don't know, Willis. Don't you see that it must have been—that I must have ...
— The Garotters • William D. Howells
... warm-blooded men. Yet the work must be pronounced a gem of neo-Hebraic poetry, an earnest of the great creations its author might have produced, if in early youth he had not been caught in the swirling waters, and dragged down into the abysmal depths of Kabbalistic mysticism. Despite his vagaries his poems were full of suggestiveness and stimulation to many of his race, who were inspired to work along the lines laid down by him. He may be considered ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... she is, a star, far, far above his own muddy earth: a thing made of some rare celestial matter, differing altogether from anything to be found here below, fetched by the Creator when he meant to make her from some abysmal intermundane mine, where ocean foam and lunar ooze and sandal-wood and camphor lie jumbled up together with the essence of all curves and smiles and whispers and soft kisses and sweet glances and irresolution and long hair. And the image of the Queen rose up before me, ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... primeval bars, I dared the old abysmal curse, And flashed through ranks of frightened stars Suddenly on ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... has turned the clean white page There shall be sorrow on the earth for years; Abysmal grief, that has no eyes for tears, And youth that hobbles through the earth like age. But better to play this part upon life's stage Than to aid structures that a tyrant rears, To live a stalwart hireling torn with fears, And shamed by feeding on a conqueror s wage. Death, yea, ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... stretched her hands to heaven, Praying the mighty Gods that earth might gape To swallow her, ere she defiled her hand With thralls' work; and a God gave ear, and rent Deep earth beneath her: so by Heaven's decree Did earth's abysmal chasm receive the maid In Troy's last hour. Electra's self withal, The Star-queen lovely-robed, shrouded her form In mist and cloud, and left the Pleiad-band, Her sisters, as the olden legend tells. Still riseth up in sight of toil-worn men Their bright troop ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... paths are offered; that, in velvet-flower, Slopes easily to every earthly prize. Follow the multitude and bind thine eyes, Thou and thy sons' sons shall have peace with power. This narrow track skirts the abysmal verge, Here shalt thou stumble, totter, weep and bleed, All men shall hate and hound thee and thy seed, Thy portion be the wound, the stripe, the scourge. But in thy hand I place my lamp for light, Thy blood shall be the witness ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... sight of the water again, through a ragged gap between high limestone rocks, I could smell a village. The guide approached it cautiously, stopping every minute or so to listen. When we came on it at last it was down below us in abysmal darkness, one light shining through a window two feet square in proof we were not hesitating on the verge ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... his hotel in a sort of baffled fury. He didn't know exactly what had gone wrong about the evening. He couldn't, in phrases, tell himself just what it was he'd wanted. But he did know, with a perfectly abysmal conviction, ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... into her eyes, turned to stone. As for her, during his speech she has listened, paralyzed with horror, terror, her whole personality crushed, beaten in, collapsed, by the terrific impact of this unknown, abysmal brutality, naked and shameless. As she looks at his gorilla face, as his eyes bore into hers, she utters a low, choking cry and shrinks away from him, putting both hands up before her eyes to shut out the sight of his face, to protect her own. This ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... but prove abysmal ignorance of Sourdough's quality. The big husky was not scratched, and of fighting he could hardly be given enough while his heart continued to beat. Before, he had been angered. Before, he had loathed and hated Jan. And now Jan had rolled ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... your forgiveness for having you arrested," said Derec in abysmal sorrow, "but I couldn't do anything ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... and they ran through the night. Overhead there was a luminous mistiness because of the street light, but here were abysmal darknesses between vague areas on which the starlight fell. Lockley said evenly, "We've got to be quiet. Maybe I hit some of the machinery. Maybe. If I didn't, it's ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... juice,—a spectacle which made Freddie feel much as the wounded soldier would have felt if Sir Philip Sidney, instead of offering him the cup of water, had placed it to his own lips and drained it with a careless "Cheerio!" No wonder Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoi's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city reservoir, he turns to the cupboard, only ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... said that the inception of the League was due to a number of public-spirited men who had come to the conclusion, very unwillingly, that the country was still insufficiently instructed as to the inherent and abysmal incapacity of every member of the Government. (Cheers.) It was true that certain sections of the Press did what they could to point this out, and there was also the noble, patriotic and self-sacrificing work carried on in the House at Question-time. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various
... historically. A poet might, I think, so apprehend it: for it is one of the advantages of poetic representation, that it can take up even a slightly supported tradition, and following it can infer the depths of the heart, those abysmal depths in which the storms of passion rage, and those actions are begotten which laugh laws and morality to scorn, and yet are deeply rooted in the souls of men. The informations on which our historical representation must be based ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... its abysmal throat wider and wider, never to close more. A Fourth Estate of able editors springs up, increases ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... they threaded a labyrinth of deep, constricted, reeking ditches, with so little to differentiate one from another that the prisoner wondered at the sure sense of direction which enabled the corporal to find his way without mis-step, with the added handicap of the abysmal darkness. Then, of a sudden, the sides of the trench shelved sharply downward, and the two debouched into a broad, open field. Here many men lay sleeping, with only waterproof sheets for protection from that bitter deluge which whipped the earth ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... before he had had time to gloat over the blood on another boy's nose, or a man's humiliation, or a woman's repentant blush. Instead of heartily disliking people for the spiteful things they sometimes did, he was apt to turn round and wonder if the fault had not been his; if he were not the abysmal beast. ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... It can be so only when we view Nothing on the positive side as identical with All, make annihilating deprivation equivalent to universal bestowment, regard negation as affirmation, and, in the last synthesis of contradictions, see the abysmal Vacuum as a Plenum of fruition. As Oken says, "The ideal zero is absolute unity; not a singularity, as the number one, but an indivisibility, a numberlessness, a homogeneity, a translucency, a pure identity. It is neither great nor small, quiescent ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Emotionally we have lost touch with him as we have with Byron's Corsair. When he stalks across the serious stage and rages and fumes and wipes his bloody sword, we are inclined to smile or to yawn. As for the villain Franz, with his abysmal depravity, and Amalia, with her witless sentimentalism, we find it hard to take them seriously; they do not produce a good illusion. And then the whole style of the piece, the violent and ribald language, the savage ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... change. It answers with odd voluntariness to friend or foe, smile or snarl. As for what we call the laws of Nature, they are pure assumptions to-day, and may be nothing better than scrap-iron tomorrow. Good Heavens, Lawford, consider man's abysmal impudence.' He smoked on in silence for a moment. 'You say ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... father suddenly died. Henry's remorse was pitiful to see. His heart was filled with grief and his eyes swollen with tears. But that torrent of tears so cleansed those eyes that he was able to see, as he had never seen before, into the abysmal depths of his own heart. He was astonished at the baseness and depravity he found there. Years afterwards he writes with emotion of the distressing discovery that he then made. 'I do not remember a time,' he says, 'in which the wickedness ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... about 1,100 different religious creeds in the world, and amongst them all there is not one more energetic, more mysterious, or more wit-shaken than Mormonism. It is a mass of earnest "abysmal nonsense," an olla-podrida of theological whimsicalities, a saintly jumble of pious staff made up—if we may borrow an idea—of Hebraism, Persian Dualism, Brahminism, Buddhistic apotheosis, heterodox and orthodox Christianity, Mohammedanism, Drusism, Freemasonry, Methodism, Swedenborgianism, ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... walls of every town and village, his portrait (how that wrung her!) hawked up and down the country like the image of a hunted criminal; now the little compact, populous island, so policed, surveyed, and administered, revealed itself as a Sphinx-like guardian of abysmal mysteries, staring back into his wife's anguished eyes as if with the malicious joy of knowing ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... sudden blow, This stumbling, how I know not, by this stone, This horrid mouth in which my grave is shown, This cave of many shapes, Through which the melancholy mountain gapes, This mountain's self, a vast Abysmal shadow cast Suddenly on my heart, as if 't were meant To be my rustic pyre, my strange new monument, All fill my heart with wonder and with fear, What buried mysteries are hidden here That terrify me so, And make ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... Portugal, might balk his measures by its deliberate supineness; echoes might reach him of the voices at St. Stephen's that loudly dubbed his dispositions rash, presumptuous and silly; catch-halfpenny journalists at home and men of the stamp of Lord Grey might exploit their abysmal military ignorance in reckless criticism and censure of his operations; he knew what a passionate storm of anger and denunciation had arisen from the Opposition when he had been raised to the peerage some months earlier, after the glorious victory of Talavera, and ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... Folk strained at the ropes, Stern with them; and now the great weight below was surely rising, inch by inch, up, up, toward the black and gleaming surface of the abysmal sea. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... which came under his observation; he also perceived that the star-depths are unfathomable, and discerned that beyond the reach of his telescope there existed systems and galaxies of stars situated at an appalling distance in the abysmal depths of space. Though the magnitude of that portion of the sidereal heavens which came under his observation was inconceivable as regards its dimensions, Herschel was able to perceive that it formed but a part—and most probably a small part—of ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... operation to the blindness of chance. Steps in man and controls and directs them. For the first time in the history of life conscious intelligence forms and transforms life. These yearnings and desires, promptings of the "abysmal fecundity," have in man evolved into what is called "love." They arise in instinct and sensation and culminate in sentiment and emotion. They master man, and the intellect of man, as they master ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... is a common enough expression on the lips of those who know nothing of what they are talking about, and Jill, who had often used the words, stood transfixed at the abysmal ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... Properly and strictly speaking, that 'first' only declares the priority of the divine love towards us over ours towards Him. But we may fairly give it a wider meaning, and say—first of all, ere Creation and Time, away back in the abysmal depths of an everlasting and changeless heart, changeless in the sense that its love was eternal, but not changeless in the sense that love could have no place within it—first of all things was God's ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... it into my mind ever again to cross the threshold of my father's house in my future capacity as acrobat or bareback rider, as he was pleased to express it. His door was not open to such scum! Well, I'll fight it down! Only I'm sorry for my poor, dear mother.—You can't imagine with what abysmal hatred a man of his kind considers the theatre and everything connected with it. The heaviest curse is not strong enough to express his feelings. An actor is, to his mind, a priori, the worst, most ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... quick to perceive, namely, that this man had almost in excess a quality in which every current poet was lacking,—I mean the faculty of being in entire sympathy with actual nature, and the objects; and shows of nature, and of rude, abysmal man; and appalling directness of utterance therefrom, at first hand, without ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... Amir's Herati regiments were ordered from Herat to Kabul, and Kabul regiments took their place. These Herati regiments had seen nothing of the late war: they had never crossed swords with the British; and they were filled with the insensate pride and confidence in their own prowess which abysmal ignorance could alone account for. As they marched through the streets of Kabul they set up, at the instigation of their officers it is said, loud cries of insult and abuse of Cavignari by name, of the British Embassy, ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... preceded them down abysmal and gorgeous stairways, through salons, deep into the dimly magnificent bowels of the ocean giant, then through an endless white corridor twinkling with lights, to a stateroom, where a stewardess ushered ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... to take away from an adversary the legal weapons implicitly relied upon and to arm his client with them. No man understood better than he the abysmal distinction between law and justice; no man knew better than he how to compel—or to assist—courts to apply the law, so just in the general, to promoting injustice in the particular. And whenever he permitted conscience a ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... cleft in the precipice of the coast. And suddenly, at an unsuspected angle, the mouth of another cavern yawns before us; and in another moment our boat touches its threshold of stone with a little shock that sends a long sonorous echo, like the sound of a temple drum, booming through all the abysmal place. A single glance tells me whither we have come. Far within the dusk I see the face of a Jizo, smiling in pale stone, and before him, and all about him, a weird congregation of grey shapes without shape—a host of fantasticalities that ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... From a tower of strength, supporting alone, yet with ease, National Woolens, and the vast structure based upon it, Dumont had crumbled into an obstruction and a weakness. There is an abysmal difference between everybody knowing a thing privately and everybody knowing precisely the same thing publicly. In that newspaper exposure there was no fact of importance that was not known to the entire Street, to his chief supporters in his great syndicate of ranches, railroads, ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... —Knowing not they already slept afar Each of them in his own dear native land. Still on the Painter's fresco, from the hand Of God takes Eve the life-spark whereunto She trembles up from nothingness. Outdo Both of them, Music! Dredging deeper yet, Drag into day,—by sound, thy master-net,— The abysmal bottom-growth, ambiguous thing Unbroken of a branch, palpitating With limbs' play and life's semblance! There it lies, Marvel and mystery, of mysteries And marvels, most to love and laud thee for! Save it from chance and change we most abhor! Give momentary feeling permanence, So ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... exist, except as an eccentricity of some strangely-constructed men which might be used to keep them down. Life presented itself to him as a series of mathematical problems, as an examination in mathematics. To pass it meant a diploma as a success; to fail to pass meant the abysmal disgrace of obscurity. Cheating was permissible, but not to get caught at it. Otherwise Branch was the most amiable of men; and why should he not have been, his digestion being good, his income sufficient, his domestic relations admirable, and his reputation for ability growing apace? No one ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... learn anything of his native land. The officers were wont to question the voyageurs, and Dan played upon their ignorance of the western half of their Empire, which was deep enough to begin with, and made it abysmal. ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... detect the workings of my mind as well as the variations of my body, had noticed these changes when I disembarked the previous week, and had become obsessed with the idea that I stood tottering on the brink of abysmal wretchedness. So, while I was marking time the few days at camp until the hour of demobilization, she summoned into hasty conference my father, our family doctor, and the select near relatives whose advice was a matter of habit rather than value, to devise means ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... on, that abysmal sleep where total oblivion chains and numbs body and spirit. Then he began to dream. He found himself in a spacious, secluded chamber, the centre of which was occupied by a richly decked table. Many people were seated around it; they were carousing and having ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... was the most familiar of exhibits. For Adams's objects its value lay chiefly in its occult mechanism. Between the dynamo in the gallery of machines and the engine-house outside, the break of continuity amounted to abysmal fracture for a historian's objects. No more relation could he discover between the steam and the electric current than between the Cross and the cathedral. The forces were interchangeable if not reversible, but he could see only an absolute fiat in electricity as ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... enough, the unbarring of arena gates; our sucking uplift across the crest of some little swell, nothing less than the haling forth of new worlds; our half-turning descent into the hollow of its mate, the abysmal plunge of God-forgotten planets. Through all these phenomena and more—though I ran with wild horses over illimitable plains of rustling grass; though I crouched belly-flat under appalling fires of musketry; though I was Livingstone, painless, and incurious in the ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... subsequent messages, that this "great shaft" is one of an enormous system of artificial shafts that run, each from what is called a lunar "crater," downwards for very nearly a hundred miles towards the central portion of our satellite. These shafts communicate by transverse tunnels, they throw out abysmal caverns and expand into great globular places; the whole of the moon's substance for a hundred miles inward, indeed, is a mere sponge of rock. "Partly," says Cavor, "this sponginess is natural, but very largely it is due to the enormous ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... honest misunderstanding, in which (to speak mildly) much must be forgiven." Luther unraveled and tore apart a culture he did not appreciate and an authority he did not relish. Behind the formula "every man his own priest" lurked nothing but the abysmal hatred of the low for the higher; the truly plebeian spirit at ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... sounded deliciously romantic. A flavour of the past century—before the endless war and abysmal poverty had killed all chivalry in us—clung to this proposed transaction. There was nothing of the roturier, nothing of a Jean Duval, in this polished man of the world who had thought out this subtle scheme for ingratiating himself ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the Greek tragedians, embodying at intervals this word sin, are more extravagant than would be the word category introduced into the harangue of an Indian sachem amongst the Cherokees; and finally that the very nearest approach to the abysmal idea which we Christians attach to the word sin—(an approach, but to that which never can be touched—a writing as of palmistry upon each man's hand, but a writing which "no man can read")—lies in the Pagan idea of piacularity; which is an idea thus far like hereditary sin, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... piercing the gloomy depths of the valleys, chasing gigantic shadows, like spirits of light contending with the legions of darkness; and, at length, the whole immense sea of mountains brought into majestic view, with their unnumbered abysmal valleys covered with forests of every intermingled variety and shade ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... of hyperdrive, could be accomplished with the ship's radio. Short planetfalls were, psychologically, more trouble than they were worth, often destroying the hard-earned, delicate space orientation which was their only defense against the abysmal boredom. ...
— Unspecialist • Murray F. Yaco
... exclaimed Darrow, "the delicious femininity of the proposal. It displays at once such really remarkable insight into the psychological needs of another human being, and such abysmal ignorance of the demands of what we are pleased ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... the tourist. The real magic of my beautiful city has never entered into your heart. Your little dabble in its vices and frivolities must not count to you as anything final. The joy of Paris to one who understands is the exquisite refinement, the unsurpassed culture, of its abysmal wickedness." ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... civilization, after all, according to the morning Courier-Herald, despite that Democratic paper's colorful prophecies last autumn in the vein of Jeremiah. To the contrary, Major-General McArthur was testifying before the Senate as to the abysmal unfitness of the Filipinos for self-government; the Women's Clubs were holding a convention in Los Angeles; there had been terrible hailstorms this year to induce the annual ruining of the peach-crop, and the submarine Fulton had exploded; the California Limited had been derailed in Iowa, and in ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... was pondering over the unusual position in which he found himself; but analysis of any sort was not his forte; so he soon forgot all save the delicate curve of Madame's chin and throat, the soft ripple of her laughter, the abysmal ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... that sweet Power by which these Lays Alone are lovely, good, and true; Nor credence to the world's cries give, Which ever preach and still prevent Pure passion's high prerogative To make, not follow, precedent. From love's abysmal ether rare If I to men have here made known New truths, they, like new stars, were there Before, though not yet written down. Moving but as the feelings move, I run, or loiter with delight, Or pause to mark where gentle Love Persuades the soul from height to height. Yet, know ye, ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... 'm back," he announced in his guttural bass, as though to bridge a silence that was becoming abysmal. ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... hours at a time in the sunshine. The loss of his accustomed environment, the ennui that ensues from absolute idleness, the consciousness that the light was growing dimmer day by day, combined to plunge him into abysmal gloom. ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... most thoughtless mind. Nothing is more terrible to behold than excessive grief that is rarely allowed to break forth, of which traces were left on this woman's face like lava congealed about a crater. She might have been a dying mother compelled to leave her children in abysmal depths of wretchedness, unable to bequeath them ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... you will, the lecture is and will continue to be an unsatisfactory, even vicious, way of attempting to teach social science. No reputable university tries to teach economics or politics nowadays in huge lecture sections. Only an abnormal conceit or abysmal poverty will prevent sociology departments from doing likewise. Remember that education is always an exchange, ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... a tidal wave of reactionary public feeling, and of the blind selfishness of a decadence born of long freedom from any form of national discipline; of liberties too easily won and but half-understood; of superficial education as to rights, and abysmal ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... had imputed to them conditions it was all his own doing: it came from his inveterate habit of abysmal imputation, the snatching of the ell wherever the inch peeped out, without which where would have been the tolerability of life? It didn't matter now what he had imputed—and he always held that his expenses of imputation were, at the worst, a compliment to those ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... called thee from thy task-field shall not lack Yet bolder champions, to beat bravely back The wrong which, through his poor ones, reaches Him: Yet firmer hands shall Freedom's torchlights trim, And wave them high across the abysmal black, Till bound, dumb millions there shall see them ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... "That's because of your abysmal military ignorance, Dominie. Let me tell you how it is in our army. A fellow can get himself made a captain by pull, or a major by luck, or a colonel by desk-work, or a general by having a fine martial figure, but to get yourself made a sergeant, by Gosh, you've got to show the stuff. You've ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... unity at the top of the tree, for it is there that Jesus must pass with all His gifts. Here Jesus comes, and sees the man, and tells Him in the light of faith that He is, according to His Godhead, immeasurable and incomprehensible, inaccessible and abysmal, and that He surpasses all created light and all finite comprehension. This is the highest knowledge acquired in the active life, to recognise thus, in the light of faith, that God is inconceivable and unknowable. In this light Christ saith to the desire of a man: "Come ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... man to destruction was of deep vengeance: the assuagement of an abysmal hatred that smoldered in her heart against every individual of the terrible man kind, whose cruel traps of iron, blades of steel, and leaden bullets had made her a monstrous, sexless thing, feared and unsought by mating males, hated of ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... you cannot understand my story. Would to God I could tell another tale! Would to God I had such memories as other men have of a father's clasp, a mother's kiss—but no! my grief, already profound, might have become abysmal. Perhaps it is best as it is; only, I might have been a different child, and made for ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... the crucial moment of her long quest, even as she had wondered at her absence of fear, believing as she did, that Bethune was still in the hills. The feeling inspired by the outlaw had been a feeling of rage, rather than terror, and had rapidly crystallized in her outraged mind into an abysmal soul-hate. She knew that, should the man accost her again, she would kill him—and not for a single instant did she doubt her ability to kill him. Vaguely, as she stood looking out over the valley, she wondered if he were following her—if at that ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... seen among the trees between Agra and Delhi and scampering over the parapets of Benares, all thieves and libertines with a charter, and the restriction of these poor cowering mannikins, overcrowded in their cages, with an abysmal sorrow in their eyes. Many died on the voyage, and I think the Indian Government should look into the question of ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... said after a silence that was too abysmal to be ignored, "let's look this thing squarely ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... soft snow, for there was no longer any landmark; all was cloud on every side. Suddenly to my astonishment the ground began to fall away to the north; I stopped; a puff of wind drove off the mists on one side, the opposite side to that by which I had come, and showed the Araxes plain at an abysmal depth below. It was the top ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... the alternative is, what the voice of "deep calling unto deep" really utters, as the constellation of Hercules draws the solar world toward it through the abysmal night. No more ethical foolery; no more pragmatic insolence; no more ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... they invent when they're exceptionally good and clever. When they're not they don't do so well; but it's not for want of trying. There's only one thing in the world better than their incomparable charm: it's their abysmal conscience. Deep calleth unto deep—the one's indeed a part of the other. And when they club together, when they earnestly consider, as in the case we're supposing," Nash continued, "then the whole thing takes a lift; for it's no longer the ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... understood. An agreeable wave of confidence in his own judgment filled him with benevolence. He was to lose that confidence strangely in a little while. It came to him sitting there that he felt much as he had felt in the old care-free past before Brian had deserted, plunging him into abysmal despair. ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple |
