"Bottomless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... no doubt, was this 'bottomless Whig.' When Johnson said 'so they all are now,' he was perhaps thinking of the Coalition Ministry in which Lord North and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... long. And if he followed and insisted upon seeing her, the result might be more fatal still. He knew nothing of those personalities she may have concealed from him. For all he knew she might have depths in her nature as black as the bottomless pit. ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... wholesome summer pleasures, and Nat found them more costly; for the hospitable ladies expected some return from the stranger; and carriages, bouquets, theatre tickets, and all the little expenses a young man cannot escape at such times, told heavily on the purse which seemed bottomless at first. Taking Mr Laurie for his model, Nat became quite a gallant, and was universally liked; for through all the newly acquired airs and graces the genuine honesty and simplicity of his character plainly shone, winning confidence ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... (ii. 14). Revelation describes the war in heaven between God with his angels and Satan or the dragon, the "old serpent," the deceiver of the whole world (xii. 9), with his hosts of darkness. After the overthrow of the Beast and the kings of the earth, Satan is imprisoned in the bottomless pit a thousand years (xx. 2). Again loosed to deceive the nations, he is finally cast into the lake of fire and brimstone (xx. 10; cf. Enoch liv. 5, 6; 2 Peter ii. 4). In John's Gospel and Epistles Satan is opposed to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... when you were squeezed up against them, and you were always being squeezed up against them, wherever you went. And you could smell them, and hear them wheeze and cough, and you went falling down with them into a bottomless pit where your head began to throb and throb and it was hard to move away from all that heat and pressure. It was hard enough ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... of his prentice, to commence learning Mungo some few of the mysteries of our trade; so having showed him the way to crock his hough, (example is better than precept, as James Batter observes,) I taught him the plan of holding the needle; and having fitted his middle-finger with a bottomless thimble of our own sort, I set him to sewing the cotton-lining into one leg, knowing that it was a part not very particular, and not very likely to be seen; so that the matter was not great, whether the stitching was exactly ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... coolness and skill of a young goddess all would have failed. This goddess was named Lu-o. She had been idly watching the growth of the planet, when, to her horror, she saw the newly made ball slipping slowly from its place. In another second it would have shot down into the bottomless pit. Quick as a flash Lu-o stopped it with her magic wand and held it firmly until the chief god came dashing up to ...
— A Chinese Wonder Book • Norman Hinsdale Pitman
... was hunger, the two spiritual things were a feeble love for Clare, and a strong horror of water of any seeming depth. Now a new element was added to this terror by the meddling of the moon in the fiendish mystery—the secret of which must, I think, have been the bottomless depth she ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... Pony Riders actually paled. This was indeed the next thing to a bottomless pit. Walter Perkins recalled afterwards that his head had spun dizzily, Ned that he was too frightened to ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Grand Canyon - The Mystery of Bright Angel Gulch • Frank Gee Patchin
... would be better to wait and see who it is coming up behind. Our young friend there is safe. The current has him, and the tarn is bottomless." ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... gradually ceased and for a time the Go Ahead Boys were chiefly interested in the fantastic figures cast by the flames and in the marvelous tints of the clouds as the moonlight was shining through them. Nearby was the bottomless gulf. They were unable to see the mighty chasm, but the knowledge that they were near its brink produced a feeling all ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and Simon's Mine • Ross Kay
... for his untidy autograph upon a blue paper. As for me, I planted myself there at his back in an attitude of expectancy and determination to await his leisure. He was cramming the money into his trousers pocket as he turned round and beheld me. He was embarrassed. He, the universal debtor, the bottomless pit of loans and obligations, to be ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... devoured the fat, and were not satisfied. [1854]Austin therefore defines covetousness, quarumlibet rerum inhonestam et insatiabilem cupiditatem a dishonest and insatiable desire of gain; and in one of his epistles compares it to hell; [1855]"which devours all, and yet never hath enough, a bottomless pit," an endless misery; in quem scopulum avaritiae cadaverosi senes utplurimum impingunt, and that which is their greatest corrosive, they are in continual suspicion, fear, and distrust, He thinks his own wife and children are so many thieves, and ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... other by threats and sabre-rattling, edging slowly forward, each hoping that his adversary will retreat rather than do battle"; but the Emperor's comparison was not exact, for one of these swordsmen had behind him a bottomless pit, ready to engulf him at the first backward step, so that having to choose between an ignominious death and a combat in which he might be successful he had to choose the latter. This was the situation in which Alexander found himself, a situation made worse ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... to vex thee. O, I am the curse And blight of the existence, which to bless Is all my thought! Alarcos, dear Alarcos, I pray thee pardon me. I am so wretched: This fell suspense is like a frightful dream Wherein we fall from heights, yet never reach The bottomless abyss. It wastes my spirit, Wears down my life, gnaws ever at my heart, Makes my brain quick when others are asleep, And dull when theirs is active. O, Alarcos, I could lie ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... it might be death itself to any one who got off the trail, and became bewildered. The mud is deceptive, and once one gets fast in it an hour or two is apt to see him swallowed up; nor will his fate ever be known, for the bottomless mire of the bog never ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster
... floods filled the gullies. Scouts went ahead blazing trees to show the way. Bushwhackers followed, cutting away windfall and throwing logs into sloughs. Horses sank to their withers in seemingly bottomless muskegs,[2] so that packs had to be cut off and the unlucky bronchos pulled out by all hands straining ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... children—were employed, under the few officers who had any knowledge of engineering, in throwing up batteries and forming entrenchments round the town. In some cases the walls were strengthened by the aid of a machine, consisting of a large square bottomless box, into which the mud was thrown, and then beaten down hard. A number of these boxes were used at a time, and it was extraordinary with what rapidity a strong wall could thus be erected. The mud was brought ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston
... the accumulation of experience brought to my mind the full and vivid horror of what the poor lad had suffered and was suffering. Why, when he had looked out of that window into the sky, he was looking down into a bottomless abyss, from which he was sustained only by the frail plaster and planking under his feet! The whole earth, with its trees and buildings, was suspended over his head, seemingly about to fall at any moment with him into ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... once Jesus bareth, And I of him right sure can be, How soon a living glory scareth The bottomless obscurity! Manhood in him first man attaineth; His fate in Him transfigured glows; On freezing Iceland India gaineth, And round the loved one blooms ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald
... Well, perhaps you did in your fashion, and you may take this comfort for reward. Believe me, who have tried, hell is bottomless, but in its own way. Should ever you attain to it—and there may in another world be such a place for the cruel—go down boldly; and it may be you will ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... went down. The others crowded about the hole, waiting impatiently for him to go through, and then began piling down after him. Gloria could see their figures dimly; they went down and down along a long, steep, slanting passage-way; they had smoking torches and looked like so many fiends in the bottomless pit. She heard them calling back and forth excitedly; they went on, still downward; she heard their grinding boot-heels, but could no longer see them. Suddenly they were silent. Then there were swift mutterings. And then a great, triumphant, many-voiced shout. In Gus ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... also, when she was worn out at night, he had to stop work and let her sleep. Under such circumstances it was small wonder that he was sometimes nervous and irritable; and, of course, there could be nothing hid between them, and when he was out of sorts, Corydon would be plunged into a bottomless ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... to stand at the elbow of the buxom, indefatigably good-natured English lady who wielded the porridge spoon and watch the long, hungry file which melted away toward the tables when it reached the tall, bottomless urn that held the fragrant, steaming cereal. First came a dozen boys and girls who had lost their parents but not the irresistible gayety of hungry youth in the presence ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... a bit. There is no getting out of it, and it tells no tales. Once a man is thrown into that, he sinks out of sight in a few minutes, and that is the last of him. It is our graveyard. There are about fifty in there now. The place is bottomless." ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... statesmen called them long ago, came at length to love the institution which their fathers had condemned while they tolerated. It is the fearful realization of that vision of the poet where the lost angels snuff up with eager nostrils the sulphurous emanations of the bottomless abyss,—so have their natures become changed by long breathing the atmosphere ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... bow-bulkhead is recessed for the lift-shunting apparatus as the stern is pierced for the shaft-tunnels. The engine-room lies almost amidships. Forward of it, extending to the turn of the bow tanks, is an aperture—a bottomless hatch at present—into which our coach will be locked. One looks down over the coamings three hundred feet to the despatching-caisson whence voices boom upward. The light below is obscured to a sound of thunder, ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... side of the road: and if one o'clock, the hour of dinner, drew near, you might observe columns of blue smoke curling up from a row of chimneys, some made of wicker creels plastered over with a rich coat of mud; some, of old, narrow, bottomless tubs; and others, with a greater appearance of taste, ornamented with thick, circular ropes of straw, sewed together like bees' skeps, with a peel of a briar; and many having nothing but the open vent above. But the smoke by no means escaped by ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... chicken bones and eggshells to offend all subsequent picnickers. At Woodbridge people did not make public messes of themselves. If they picnicked on a glacier they did up their eggshells in a neat package, which, in default of a handy bottomless pit, they took home with them and put in their garbage pails. That's the way nice people behaved, and what on earth was there to be ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... projected it, at a cost of two million francs.[13] His career was splendid. He was clever, industrious, and persevering after his fashion, astute, lively, pretentious, a person ever by well-planned hints leading you to suppose his unrevealed profundity to be bottomless; in a word, in all respects an impostor.[14] He espoused that richly dowered bride the Church, rose to be Archbishop of Toulouse, and would have risen to be Archbishop of Paris, but for the King's over-scrupulous conviction that 'an Archbishop of Paris must ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... How bottomless the pit! Does claim me too, O Death? What is this word he saith, This woeful messenger? Say, is it fit To slay anew a man already slain? Is Death at work again, Stroke upon stroke, ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... A single question more would have been a plunge into a bottomless sea, and there might ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... which she stabbed her bridegroom. Only one had pity, and though the other forty-nine were not punished here, yet, when they died and went to Tartarus, they did not escape, but were obliged to be for ever trying to carry water in bottomless vessels. The people of Argos called themselves Danai, and no doubt some of ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Beware the bottomless abyss!" This was Discretion's last Good-night. He gurgled, as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 25, 1917 • Various
... celestial forces that perform the movement of the spheres;—the Destruction of the world, where all the fountains and rivers and lakes and seas of earth have formed one cataract, that thunders with cities and nations on its rapids down a bottomless gulf; while all the winds and hurricanes of the air have grown into one blast, that carries men like dead leaves up to judgment;—the Plague of the fiery serpents, with multitudes encoiled and writhing on a burning waste of sand;—the Massacre of the Innocents, ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... mothers, how many Christian men, are sleeping now while their children wander over the terrible precipice right into the bottomless pit. Father, where is your ...
— Moody's Anecdotes And Illustrations - Related in his Revival Work by the Great Evangilist • Dwight L. Moody
... beasts when the sun arises, because the light has shaken them out of the world. All the horrid phantasms of the Valley of the Shadow of Death that had risen from the pit with the vaporous night had sunk to escape the arrows of the sun, once more into its bottomless depth. If any horrid deed was doing now, how much more horrid in the awful still light of this first hour of a summer morn! How many evil passions now lay sunk under the holy waves of sleep! How many heartaches were gnawing only in dreams, to wake with the brain, and gnaw in earnest again! ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... and fed to all their fulness in your heart, and all the world and all that it contains will only leave the more room in your boundless heart for God and for your brother. All that God has made, or could make with all His counsel and all His power laid out, will not fill your boundless and bottomless heart. He must come down and come into your boundless and bottomless heart Himself. Himself: your Father, your Redeemer, and your Sanctifier and Comforter also. Let the whole universe try to fill your heart, O man of God, and after ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... he loses his caste, does not fall into an inferior order, the Chittery, the Bice, or the Soodur, but he is thrown at once out of all ranks of society. He is precipitated from the proudest elevation of respect and honor to a bottomless abyss of contempt,—from glory to infamy,—from purity to pollution,—from sanctity to profanation. No honest occupation is open to him; his children are no longer his children; their parent loses that name; the conjugal bond is dissolved. Few survive this most terrible ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... mouth. Outside those public-houses that advertised ice, crowds stood waiting their turn of entry; while half-naked barmen, their linen trousers drenched with sweat, worked like niggers to mix drinks which should quench these bottomless thirsts. Mahony believed he was the only perfectly sober person in the lobby of the court. Even Ocock himself would seem to have ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... was needed, for as he felt his way onward with the pole the General had suddenly felt it go down into a rift stretching right across their road; and as it proved to be bottomless as far as he could tell, and went to right and left for some distance, there was nothing to be done but to camp just as they were, and wait through the ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... conveyed from the fermentary to the drying trays or floors. The planter often has some rough check-weighing system. Thus, for example, he notes the number of standard baskets of wet cacao put into the fermentary, and he measures the fermented cacao produced with the help of a bottomless barrel. By this means he finds that on fermentation the beans lose weight by the draining away of the "sweatings," according to the amount and juiciness of the pulp round them. The beans are still very wet, and on drying lose a high percentage of their moisture ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... place in the University means; I perhaps better than you, because I've seen my father's experience. I don't often get bitter, but I come very near it when I look back and think how my mother had to plan and scrimp. I feel like condemning the whole University to the bottomless pit. I suppose Margery Randall would resent it if I told her so, but honestly I pity her; the more so because I've always envied her in a way. She's not used to denying herself anything, and there's bound ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... clothes, fine shoes, and soon he brought her gifts as well. Much he learned from her red, smart mouth. Much he learned from her tender, supple hand. Him, who was, regarding love, still a boy and had a tendency to plunge blindly and insatiably into lust like into a bottomless pit, him she taught, thoroughly starting with the basics, about that school of thought which teaches that pleasure cannot be be taken without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every look, every spot ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... none. The few that were undertaken sprang from absolute necessity. The town got through the summer season fairly well, but, as the winter that year proved to be an unusually rainy time, it soon became evident that something must be done. The streets became bottomless pits of mud. It is stated, as plain and sober fact, that in some of the main thoroughfares teams of mules and horses sank actually out of sight and were suffocated. Foot travel was almost impossible unless across some sort of causeway. ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... hard to describe the terrible prestige which, after the event I have been speaking of, attached itself to Ralph Mohun. As for attempting a second attack on the fatal house, the peasantry would as soon have thought of storming the bottomless pit. They did not even try a shot at him from behind a wall; considering him perfectly invulnerable, they deemed it a pity to waste good powder and lead that might be usefully employed on an agent or process server. As his gaunt, erect figure went by, the men shrunk out of his path, ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... the cry of a lost spirit, saying again and again for ever, 'Carling Mr. Anderson.' One felt that he never would find Mr. Anderson. Perhaps there never had been any Mr. Anderson to be found. Perhaps he and every one else wandered in an abyss of bottomless scepticism; and he was but the victim of one out of numberless nightmares of eternity, as he wandered a shadow with shadows and wailed by impassable streams. This is not exactly my philosophy, but I feel sure it was his. And it is a mood that may frequently visit the mind ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... having large, indented glaucous foliage. It has one fault, however; it spreads rapidly and soon takes possession of the whole bed, and therefore should be in an individual hole of its own. The plantings are sometimes made in large bottomless tubs, ...
— Making a Garden of Perennials • W. C. Egan
... hours later in the great rift which bisects the massive plateau that is the most outstanding feature of the regular surface of Avis Solis. At the end of this rift there is a natural cave that opens into the sheer wall of the plateau. Within it is a bottomless chasm. It was here that we found certain of Jenny's garments, but of Jenny, naturally, there was no trace. He had ...
— The Marooner • Charles A. Stearns
... the magnetic declination, prevents the confusion which might arise from terrestrial influences in the boundaries of land, when, with an utter disregard for the correction of declination, estates are, after long intervals, measured by the mere application of the compass. "The whole mass of the bottomless pit of endless litigation by the invariability of the magnetic declination in Jamica and the surrounding Archipelago during the whole of the last century, all surveys of property there having been conducted ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... And in reality, as they had placed her in the hospital on the floor, upon a straw mattress, so did she remain upon it without getting up from it to her very death; submerging more and more into the black, bottomless abyss of quiet feeble-mindedness; but she died only half a year later, from bed-sores and infection of ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... glass windows, the sides of which could be dropped flat on to the deck for the gun to be trained outboard by simply pressing an electric button on the steamer's bridge. Two life-boats, one on each side of the aft deck, were bottomless, and formed covers for two additional 12-pounder guns. A false deck in the bow shielded a pair of wicked-looking torpedo tubes, each containing an 18-inch Whitehead ready for launching; and the crew for each gun were able to reach ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... The sail hung lifeless from the mast, sweeping back over the deck at times as a capricious zephyr headed the course. Looking down over the sides, the eye plunged deep into the blue waters, where the sky, the clouds and the boat were mirrored in bottomless mystery. Schools of fish darted by underneath, shining like bits of tin. Dolphins were playing about on the surface close at hand, showing their absurd muzzles and their black sides sprinkled with diamond dust. Flying fish, the butterflies of the ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... matter of fact, and I like you immensely and would enjoy having you as a friend, but—" Here he pressed a button on the arm of his throne chair and the section of the floor where Rinkitink stood suddenly opened and disclosed a black pit beneath, which was a part of the terrible Bottomless Gulf. ...
— Rinkitink in Oz • L. Frank Baum
... the door of the magician's shop, he was busy with some scraps of leather. Around him were bottomless chairs, topless tables, and melancholy sofas with sagging springs exposed to view, and in one corner a tall, empty clock-case. With his spectacles on the tip of his nose and a pair of large shears in his hand, Morgan might have sat for the picture of some wonder-working genius. ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... there had been feasting there last week because Henri Deslois was married. I heard him say a few words more which I didn't understand. Then the daylight in the kitchen turned into black night, and I felt the tiles give way under my feet and drag me down into a bottomless hole. I remember Sister Desiree-des-Anges coming to help me, but an animal had fastened itself on my chest. It made a dreadful sound which it hurt me to hear. It was like a horrible sob which always stopped at the same place. Then the light came back again, and I could see ...
— Marie Claire • Marguerite Audoux
... was like a bottomless pit of intense light. The circular sheet of water reflected a luminous sky, and the shores enclosing it made an opaque ring of earth floating in an emptiness of transparent blue. The hills, purple and arid, stood ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... girl has consented to buy the right to earn her living by the sacrifice of her virtue, then she is treated as a slave and an outcast by the very men who have ruined her. Her word becomes unbelievable, her life an ignominy, and she is swept downward ever downward, into the bottomless perdition of prostitution. But there, even in the lowest depths, excommunicated by Humanity and outcast from God, she is far nearer the pitying heart of the One true Saviour than all the men who forced her down, aye, and than all the ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... Croydon, doing a prosperous stroke of business all along, we should show like a little firework in the light frosty air, and be the next best thing to the blacksmith's forge. Very agreeable, too, to go on a chair-mending tour. What judges we should be of rushes, and how knowingly (with a sheaf and a bottomless chair at our back) we should lounge on bridges, looking over at osier-beds! Among all the innumerable occupations that cannot possibly be transacted without the assistance of lookers-on, chair-mending may take a station in the first rank. When we sat down with our backs against ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... Constitution' clutched in its ancient, failing arm. New Haven began to cave in. Doctors of Divinity, orthodox, heterodox, with only a doxy of doubt, 'no settled opinion,' had great alacrity in sinking, and went down quick, as live as ever, into the pit of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, the bottomless pit of lower law,—one with his mother, cloaked by a surplice, hid beneath his sinister arm, and an acknowledged brother grasped by his remaining limb. Fossils of theology, dead as Ezekiel's bones, took to their feet again, and stood up for most arrant ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... Christ's minister, that you are not to direct your course according to your own desires. You are not to say, -'I will give up this and that so that I may be saved.' Did not St. Paul wish himself accursed from Christ for his brethren? If God should command you to go down to the bottomless pit in fulfilment of His blessed designs, it is your place to go. Out with self—I was about to say this damned self; and if Israel calls, if Christ calls, take not a sheep or ox— that is easy enough—but take your choicest possession, ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... ancestors, shrunken to scarcely more than three acres and a cow. You 're wanting money? What do you do with your money? What secret profligacy must a man be guilty of, who squanders such stacks of money? Burst me, if I might n't as well be steward to a bottomless pit. However, Providence be praised,—and my own supernatural diligence,—I 'm in command of quite unhoped-for resources. Craford New Manor ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... spiritual life. Every true life is death-born, and the deeper the dying the truer the living. We doubt not the months that have been passing have shown us all many a place where there ought to be a grave, and many a lingering shred of the natural and sinful which we would gladly lay down in a bottomless grave. God help us to pass the irrevocable sentence of death and to let the Holy Ghost, the great undertaker, make the interment eternal. Then our life shall be ever budding and blossoming and ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... poverty He joins the peace of humble content, a solid faith in the bliss of a future state, and the rough enjoyment of perfect health. But the poetic temperament is the choicest gift of all; it may have occasional glimpses of the bottomless pit, but it can make its own heaven, and paint its own rainbow upon ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... outside, his feet on the stone sill and his hands clasping the iron bar. He felt sheer and absolute terror. The spires of the cathedral were invisible and only a few far lights showed dimly. It seemed to him that he was suspended over a bottomless pit, and he ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... have reached me from the Philippines that made me think it was my duty to go there. Into these islands, inhabited, as has been said, by people 'half devil, half child,' has been introduced the worst crime of America, the drink evil, the worst demon outside the bottomless pit, making of sane, good men brutes and demons, a danger to themselves and ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... it is better to fall down a precipice and die than be laughed at by such a woman; so I clenched my teeth, and in another instant I was on that horrible, narrow, bending plank, with bottomless space beneath and around me. I have always hated a great height, but never before did I realise the full horrors of which such a position is capable. Oh, the sickening sensation of that yielding board resting on the two moving supports. ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... to bring his legs down on a level with Zene's, and enjoyed the jolting in every piece of his backbone. He had had a surfeit of woman-society. Even the horsey smell of Zene's clothes was found agreeable. And above all, he wanted to talk about J. D. Matthews, and tell the terrors of a bottomless ford and a house ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... voice had dropped very low; as he stopped Helen was trembling within herself. She was drinking still more from the bottomless cup of her humiliation and remorse, for she was still haunted by the specter of what she had done. The man went on ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... woman attempted to protest her innocence, and again the Count paid no heed to her. "I wished too," resumed he, "to save some portion of our property, for your insatiable extravagance swallowed up all like a bottomless abyss. At last your trades-people, believing me to be ruined, refused you credit, and this saved me. I had my daughter to think of, and have gathered together a rich dowry for her, and yet——" he hesitated, and ceased speaking for ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... book, swung his arm, and Pope crashed into a lilac bush. "There," he said, "goes meekness, patience, and the eighteenth century. This is the nineteenth. Time is no endless draught, no bottomless cup. Waste of life is the cankered rose. You know ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... to be continued, and if the same ministers were to be again employed, a million a year would not be sufficient to carry on the exorbitant expenses so often and so justly complained of in this House." He deplored the vast sum "sunk in the bottomless gulf of secret service." "I heartily wish," he exclaimed, "that time, the great discoverer of hidden truths and concealed iniquities, may produce a list of all such—if any such there were—who have been perverted from their public ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... requires for its explanation another cosmos than the cosmos of necessity." "Nature is the virtuality of mind, the soul the fruit of life, and liberty the flower of necessity." Consciousness is the one fixed point in this boundless and bottomless gulf of things, and the soul's inward law, as it has been painfully elaborated by human history, the only revelation ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in theory is corrupting, and in practice destroying both Church and State;—it is this that they feel pledged to do battle upon, till by the just judgment of Almighty God it is thrown, dead and damned, into the bottomless abyss. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... tranquillity of soul. O Kali, the fool that wisheth to curse Nala bearing such a character, curseth himself, and destroyeth himself by his own act. And, O Kali, he that seeketh to curse Nala crowned with such virtues, sinketh into the wide bottomless pit of hell rife with torments.' Having said this to Kali and Dwapara, the gods went to heaven. And when the gods had gone away, Kali said unto Dwapara, 'I am ill able, O Dwapara, to suppress my anger. I shall possess Nala, deprive ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... connection with the proceedings at [82] Birmingham of Mr. Murphy, already mentioned. Speaking in the midst of an irritated population of Catholics, the Rev. W. Cattle exclaimed:—"I say, then, away with the mass! It is from the bottomless pit; and in the bottomless pit shall all liars have their part, in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone." And again: "When all the praties were black in Ireland, why didn't the priests say the hocus-pocus over them, ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... stomach truss you, the bloody flux seize upon you, the cursed sharp inflammations of wild fire, as slender and thin as cow's hair strengthened with quicksilver, enter into you,... and, like those of Sodom and Gomorrha, may you fall into sulphur, fire, and bottomless pits, in case you do not firmly believe all that I shall relate unto ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... yet, again, for that very reason, the loss of all but a chip, leaves behind riches so appallingly too rich, that everybody is careless about the four cubits. Enough is as good as a feast. Two bottomless abysses take as much time for the diver as ten; and five eternities are as frightful to look down as four-and-twenty. In the Ceylon legend all turns upon the inexhaustible series of ages which this pillar guarantees. But, as one inexhaustible is quite enough for one race of men, and ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... imagination had pictured as bottomless, proved to be not more than a hundred feet in depth; but as its walls were smoothly polished it might as well have been a thousand feet, for I could never hope to escape without ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... all his might. At first he heard nothing except the faint whistle of the wind somewhere in the roof. Then he heard three or four metallic noises, as if from the depths of a bottomless hit, faint and minute; and then, quite distinctly, three strokes ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... was distrusted by the Whig aristocracy. He felt, too, a real affection and gratitude for the patron to whom he owed so much. Shelburne had done him a great service.[230] 'He raised me from the bottomless pit of humiliation. He made me feel I was something.' The elder Bentham was impressed by his son's acquaintance with a man in so eminent a position, and hoped that it might lead by a different path to ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... bottomless pit that spewed you forth to prey upon mankind! The world will have to burn. Tell those hounds of hell that bay at the gibbous moon the world will have to burn. Every cat, every rat, every mouse, every louse has a thousand ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... for some time to send the whole into the ports of Holland. The government of New England, more consistently, passed a complete interdict against tobacco, the smoke of which they compared to that of the bottomless pit. Yet tobacco, like other proscribed objects, throve under persecution, and achieved a final triumph over all its enemies. Indeed, the enmity against it was in some respects beneficial to Virginia, as drawing forth the most strict prohibitions against 'abusing and misemploying ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... won big, he lost big; but he won always more than he lost, and what he paid out at one game with one hand, he drew back with his other hand at another game. His winnings from the Comstock he sank into the various holes of the bottomless Daffodil Group in Eldorado County. The wreckage from the Benicia Line he turned into the Napa Consolidated, which was a quicksilver venture, and it earned him five thousand per cent. What he lost in the collapse of the Stockton boom ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... hurried away like a haunted man. There was little room in his mood for sustained thought: his wits were fathoming a bottomless pit of black despair. He felt like a man born blind, through skilful surgery given the boon of sight for a day or two, and suddenly and without any warning thrust back ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... scene of righteous retribution through which he is led; it is the apportionment of punishment and reward to crime or virtue, in this upper world, that he is doomed to witness. We enter the city of lamentation—we look down the depths of the bottomless pit—we stand at the edge of the burning lake. His survey is not a mere transient visit like that of Ulysses in Homer, or of AEneas in Virgil. He is taken slowly and deliberately through every successive ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... was once no heaven above nor earth beneath, but only a bottomless deep, and a world of mist in which flowed a fountain. Twelve rivers issued from this fountain, and when they had flowed far from their source, they froze into ice, and one layer accumulating over another, the great ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... produced heroes, but not gentlemen. Julius Caesar was the flower of the Latin race. Nothing approximates him. Great qualities cluster in him like stars in the deep sky. But his ambition was like to that of Milton's Satan, and his lust was a bottomless pit. As a national heroic figure, Julius Caesar is dazzling as a sun at summer noon; but as a gentleman he cuts poorer figure than Lancelot or Sir Tristram. The gentleman is not an evolution, but a creation. Christ ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... described its use as a 'custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fumes thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.'" As one contrasts this sentiment with the practice of the present sovereign of England, his breath is almost taken away in his great fall from the sublime to ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... stopped still. It was as if he had found himself suddenly confronted by a bottomless abyss. He shrank back from it. He could not face the thought in his own mind. Waterman! It was Dan Waterman! It was something which he had planned! It was the vengeance that he had threatened! He had been all this time plotting it, setting his nets ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... surmisings among professors, are tokens of a carnal mind, injurious to spiritual peace, and abominable to God. The envious, discontented, and malicious, are the devil's working tools. If such die unsubdued by divine grace, they plunge themselves into the bottomless pit. True wisdom avid strife and contention, is moderate in doubtful opinions, patient ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... all the gods can rede him saving I. But to me all is known. Then let him sit Triumphant while his thunders roll through heaven, And his hand grasps the flaming thunderbolt; All his artillery shall not save its lord From utter shame and ruin bottomless. Such the antagonist himself arrays Against himself, dread and invincible, One who a fiercer than the lightning's flame, A louder than the thunder's peal shall find, And wrest the truncheon that makes earth to quake, Poseidon's trident, ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... He always adds, "Wonderful boy!" to Chatterton's name as if it were a university degree (W.B.), and he invariably refers to Moore as the Bard of Erin, and to Milton as the Bard of Paradise—though Bard of the Bottomless Pit would be more appropriate. However, we are not concerned with Mr. Miller's language so much as with a very fruitful suggestion he throws out, that "it is surely worth while to trace a resemblance between the flower and the emblem it represents" ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... absurdly; the hayfields were so small. At the turn lay the pond with yellow duckweed and a bent iron railing that divided it to keep the cows from crossing. Formerly, of course, that railing had been put to prevent children drowning in its bottomless depths; all ponds had been bottomless then, and the weeds had spread to entice the children to a watery death. But now he could have jumped across it, weed and railing too, without a run, and he looked in vain for the shores that once had been so seductively far away. They were ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... notice of assessment on my stock in the Aladdin mine the other day, reminded me that I was still interested in a bottomless hole that was supposed at one time to yield funds instead of absorbing them. The Aladdin claim was located in the spring of '76 by a syndicate of journalists, none of whom had ever been openly accused of wealth. If we had been, we could ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... flowers of literary art. Nothing, in especial, once you were face to face with it, could show for more consummately DONE. When once it came out it came out, was there with a splendour that made you ashamed; and there hadn't been, save in the bottomless vulgarity of the age, with every one tasteless and tainted, every sense stopped, the smallest reason why it should have been overlooked. It was great, yet so simple, was simple, yet so great, and the final knowledge of it ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... bear up bravely with your Brute my lads, Higgen hath prig'd the prancers in his dayes, And sold good penny-worths; we will have a course, The Spirit of Bottom, is grown bottomless. ...
— Beggars Bush - From the Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10) • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... doffed his dress; then, girding his loins with a zone, he entered the chauldron whereat the Sage cried out to him, "O my lord, sit thee down and duck thy head." But when this was done the Caliph found himself in a bottomless sea and wide dispread and never at rest by any manner of means, so he fell to swimming therein, when a huge breaker threw him high ashore and he walked up the beach mother-naked save for his zone. So he said in his mind, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... placed before me there A most delicious salad. 'It would appear,' I thought aloud, 'that if these pewter dishes, Green hearts of lettuce, tarragon, slips of thyme, Slices of hard boiled egg, and grains of salt. With drops of water, vinegar and oil, Had in a bottomless gulf been flying about From all eternity, one sure certain day The sweet invisible hand of Happy Chance Would serve them as a salad.' 'Likely enough,' My wife replied, 'but not so good as mine, Nor so well dressed.'" They laughed. Susannah's voice Broke in, "I've made a better one. The receipt Came ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... Cuddie; "ou, the country's weel eneugh, an it werena that dour deevil, Claver'se (they ca' him Dundee now), that's stirring about yet in the Highlands, they say, wi' a' the Donalds and Duncans and Dugalds, that ever wore bottomless breeks, driving about wi' him, to set things asteer again, now we hae gotten them a' reasonably weel settled. But Mackay will pit him down, there's little doubt o' that; he'll gie him his fairing, I'll be ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... deceived. It is the wife's lack of sympathy in the hour of distress, her incapacity to solace the troubled mind and heart of the man who has loved her, that drives the young husband from his home, to seek distraction in the bottomless wine-cup. It is a repulsive picture, but a true one, and those who have not seen it yet for themselves will meet the stern reality some day, perhaps, before ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... had drawn—it revealed its true nature in the perspective of days. There was no mistaking what it was. It was The Abyss. It could widen and it could engulf. How much light would a Leadership Star cast in that bottomless inkiness? ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler
... places a single leap will carry you into water over your head; and were it not for its remarkable transparency, that would be the last to be seen of its bottom till it rose on the opposite side. Some think it is bottomless. It is nowhere muddy, and a casual observer would say that there were no weeds at all in it; and of noticeable plants, except in the little meadows recently overflowed, which do not properly belong to it, a closer scrutiny does not detect a flag nor a bulrush, nor even ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... presume is the one that will be pursued. When men who are statesmen of the Quay-Reid-McKinley calibre start in wrong their pride keeps them in the same downward path till they tumble the whole outfit into the bottomless pit. ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... about his dear, old, noble neck; I leaned my quivering face against his bosom. "I always loved you," I said. "I am so sorry, so sorry, Mr. Stanbury!" I knew no more—the words forsook my lips. Again that wild whirl of waters surged upon my ears; I seemed to be falling, falling down a black, steep, bottomless shaft, beneath which the sea was roaring—falling head-foremost—hurled as if with a strong impulse down ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... Jack agreed. "I would as soon think of jumping into the bottomless pit as of diving into ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... his mind constantly turning upon women; and if his thoughts of them are often cruelly false, it is not Hamlet but his mother who is to blame: her conduct has hurled him from the peak of optimism into the bottomless pool of pessimistic doubt, above the foul waters of which he keeps struggling to lift ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... gambler, who last night took that young man's thousand dollars—nothing! For that man who broke in upon the purity of a Christian household, and by a perfidy and adroitness that beat the strategy of hell, flung that girl into the chasm of earthly despair, from which her lost soul goes shrieking to the bottomless pit—nothing! For those who "fleeced" a young man, and induced him to filch from his employers vast sums of money, until, in his agony, he came to an officer of the church, and frantically asked what he ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... and defendant; Laid out their apostolic functions On carnal orders and injunctions; And all their precious Gifts and Graces On outlawries and scire facias; 50 At Michael's term had many a trial, Worse than the Dragon and St. Michael, Where thousands fell, in shape of fees, Into the bottomless abyss. For when like brethren, and like friends, 55 They came to share their dividends, And ev'ry partner to possess His Church and State Joint-Purchases, In which the ablest Saint, and best, Was nam'd in trust by all the rest, 60 To pay their money; and, instead Of ev'ry Brother, pass the deed; ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... fearful gulf, so wide and deep that the superstitious Romans viewed it with awe and affright. Whether it was due to an earthquake or the wrath of the gods is not for us to say. The Romans believed the latter; those who prefer may believe the former. But, so we are told, it seemed bottomless. Throw what they would in it, it stood unfilled, and the feeling grew that no power of man could ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... to and fro several times—and did not sit down again. Folding his arms, he leaned his shoulders against the stone embrasure; and stood so, a long while, absorbing—with every faculty of flesh and spirit—the stillness, the mystery, the pearl-grey light and bottomless gulfs of shadow; his mind emptied of articulate thought ... his soul poised motionless, as it were ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... without letting him know the truth, for I knew that if he suspected he was merely doing a good turn for the chum he left behind him, he, like the Home Secretary himself, without the right kind of inducement would have left his friend to stop where he was until the bottomless pit was frozen over hard enough to hold a barbecue on it. Barton, by my directions, told Smith of his good fortune, and that he hoped on his father's return to be liberated. Smith then did exactly what ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... not been oppressed? Have not our children been butchered and our gains wrung from us to fill the bottomless greed and lust of the Lagidae? Have not the temples been forsaken?—ay, have not the majesties of the Eternal Gods been set at naught by these Grecian babblers, who have dared to meddle with the immortal truths, and name the Most High by another name—by the name of Serapis—confounding the ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... few minutes afterwards, "step this way; I want to have a word with you. Now, tell me are you goose enough to expect you will ever see the money again you so foolishly threw into the bottomless pit ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... of architectural beauty, yet Quito looks palatial to the traveler who has just emerged from the dense forest on the coast, "crossing bridgeless rivers, floundering over bottomless roads, and ascending and descending immense mountains." He is astonished to find such elegant edifices and such a proud aristocracy in this lofty lap of the Andes. The Indian habitations which girdle the city have no more architectural pretensions ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... lobster trap, washed ashore, three buoys, a section of a hen-coop, a bottomless chopping tray, a drift-wood stump with ten fantastic roots sending up blue and green flame, a portion of the wheel of an outworn cart, some lobster shells, the eyes glowing, some mussel shells, light green, and seaweed over all, shining, ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... question—about 1848. It probably cost four dollars when it was new. It was ripped, it was frayed, it was napless and greasy. I could not resist showing him where it was ripped. It so affected him that I was almost sorry I had done it. First he seemed plunged into a bottomless abyss of grief. Then he roused himself, made a feint with his hands as if waving off the pity of a nation, and said —with what seemed to me a manufactured emotion—"No matter; no matter; don't mind me; do not bother about it. I can ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... had, I should never see the light of another day, and your lives would be made a hell for sitting here to-night. The iron grasp of superstition would hold you and your children forever over the bottomless pit of religious persecution, and cover your fair fame with infamous slander, because you dared to sit here and hear me strike ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... of black radiance, as are certain diamonds, spanned across with vaults of rock, and carrying no image, neither showing marge nor end, but centred (at it might be) with a bottomless indrawal. ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... of her tent, crouched on her bed, silent, locked, motionless, she yet was the embodiment of all terrible strife and storm in nature. Her heart was a maelstrom and would have whirled and sucked down to hell all the beings that were men. Her soul was a bottomless gulf, filled with the gales and the fires of jealousy, superhuman ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... candlesticks; also a tabernacle, temple, ark, and altar in heaven; a book sealed with seven seals; the book opened, and horses going forth thence; four animals around the throne; twelve thousand chosen out of every tribe; locusts ascending out of the bottomless pit; a dragon, and his combat with Michael; a woman bringing forth a male child, and flying into a wilderness on account of the dragon; two beasts, one ascending out of the sea, the other out of the earth; a woman sitting upon a scarlet beast; the dragon cast out into a lake of fire and brimstone; ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... what they could. It was decided to give him a perpetual penance, which might keep the evil spirits at a distance. He was led away to the shores of Dosmare Pool, on the desolate Bodmin Moors, and there set to drain the pool with a leaky limpet-shell. In those days Dosmare was supposed to be bottomless—a reputation which it has since destroyed by drying in hot summers. For long years Tregeagle toiled at his hopeless task. If he ceased from his labour for a moment he would be at ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... of a feeling of awe with which the place inspired me, I prepared for the solution. It was no light task, and I have no shame in owning that I felt a strange reluctance to proceed along a rugged path wherein might at any time be yawning some fearful bottomless chasm, ready to swallow up the adventurer; but I would not show my dread, and if Tom felt any he was too obstinate ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... centres round the stupendous Bromo, possessing the largest crater in the world, a fathomless cavity three miles in diameter, veiled in Stygian darkness, and suggesting the yawning mouth of hell. This bottomless pit, bubbling like a boiling cauldron, pouring out black volumes of sulphureous smoke, and clamouring with unceasing thunder, was for ages a blood-stained altar of human sacrifice. Every year the fairest maiden of the Tengger was the chosen victim offered ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... Maine, is a lake of salt water, which, like dozens of shallow ones in this country, is locally reputed to be bottomless. Yet Kidd was believed to have sunk some of his valuables there, and to have guarded against the entrance of boats by means of a chain hung from rock to rock at the narrow entrance, bolts on either side showing the points of attachment, while ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... that thou sawest, was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition" Revel. xvii: 8. The Papal monarchy, which disappeared for a certain time, had to re-appear, and that re-appearance is its ascension from the abyss, from so deep a cave that its bottom is not seen, from the realm of ...
— Secret Enemies of True Republicanism • Andrew B. Smolnikar
... th' candles?" he cried excitedly. "Thar sart'in is a cave in thar; but it is as dark as the bottomless pit. We must have lights before we can ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... toads are reared, and so passed through the mists of Tartarus, with due care of the wild lightning, and took the second turn to his left—"always in seeking Heaven be guided by your heart," had been the advice given him by devils,—and thus avoiding the abode of Jemra, he crossed the bridge over the Bottomless Pit and the solitary Narakas. And Brachus, who kept the toll-gate on this bridge, did that of which the fiends had forewarned Jurgen: but for this, of course, there ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell |
