"Immensity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... way an alarming expression in her eyes if we did, that made the medical men uncertain how to act. She had tasted no food since the child died; she was hopeful to the last: it was impossible, she said, that her child could die; her faculties could not comprehend the immensity of the anguish in store for her. So there she sat like stone—cold, and silent, and wan, as the effigy she watched. Who dared to awaken ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... autumn light; when a warm scent of youth would rise from every pore of my vast, soft, green body at the touch of the rays of the mellow sun, and a fresh life, a sweet joy, would be half-consciously secreted and inarticulately poured forth from all the immensity of my being, as it lay dumbly stretched, with its varied countries and seas and mountains, under ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... she doubted if they really forgot, in these vast spaces where there was so much time to think. She herself began to feel that the illimitable skies, where flamed sunsets and sunrises whose miracles no eye saw, might teach her mysteries she had snatched at and lost, in dreams. The immensity of the desert sent her soul straining towards the immensity of the Beyond; and almost, in flashes elusive as the light on a bird's wing, she understood what eternity might mean. She felt that the last days of her childhood had been ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... and formidable, with the look of an indestructible thing against which the furious assault of the waves and storms could not prevail. And it was definite and permanent and grand, despite the grandeur of the cliffy rampart that commanded it, despite the immensity of the space in which ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... savages, and the deepest divines, with respect to the manner of the Deity's existence, may have, in point of ignorance, nothing to reproach one another. It matters very little, whether one sees the sun from the lowest valley, or the highest mountain, when the immensity of its distance contracts the highest advantage of the eminence to little less than nothing. Surely the infinite superiority of the Deity, must still more effectually mock the distinction of the mental eye, at the same time that his ...
— An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton • Antoine Simon Maillard
... Bible is that of imagination and of faith: it is abstract and disembodied: it is not the poetry of form, but of power; not of multitude, but of immensity. It does not divide into many, but aggrandizes into one. Its ideas of nature are like its ideas of God. It is not the poetry of social life, but of solitude: each man seems alone in the world, with the original forms of ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... while great, is probably not comprehended yet in any just measure by our people. We do know, however, that from a very small beginning its products have grown until they are a steady and material contribution to the wealth of the nation. Owing to the immensity of Alaska and its location in the far north, it is a difficult matter to provide many things essential to its growth and to the happiness and comfort of its people by private enterprise alone. It should, therefore, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Ararat. 'I beheld Ararat in all its amplitude of grandeur. From the spot on which I stood, it appeared as if the hugest mountains of the world had been piled upon each other, to form this one sublime immensity of earth, and rock, and snow. The icy peaks of its double heads rose majestically into the clear and cloudless heavens; the sun blazed bright upon them, and the reflection sent forth a dazzling radiance equal to other suns. This point of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 551, June 9, 1832 • Various
... project, she scarcely heeded the crowds of people that thronged the street and rudely jostled her. If she saw them at all, it was only to regard them as so many purchasers of molasses candy. With her brain almost reeling with the immensity and magnificence of her scheme, she reached Temple Street. After a little search, she found the number of Mrs. Gordon's residence on a splendid house, whose grandness quite abashed her. But her courage revived as she thought ...
— Poor and Proud - or The Fortunes of Katy Redburn • Oliver Optic
... The immensity of these aerial summits excited, when they suddenly burst upon the sight, a sentiment of ecstatic wonder, not unallied to madness. And, remember, this was all one scene, it all prest home to our regard and our imagination. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... Fisheries Bureau station at Woods Hole, Mass. This officer, who had a brother in the Bureau, was only too glad to talk to the boy about the service, and Colin monopolized his spare time on the journey. And when, one day, his friend depicted the immensity of the great salmon drives of the Alaskan rivers, the lad grew so excited that the lieutenant laughingly told him he expected some fine morning to find that he had jumped overboard and had started swimming for the Ugashik ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... amicable relations at present subsisting between the two countries, I answer that no one more earnestly desires peace than I do. There is no one entertains a higher estimate than I do of the resources—the immensity of the resources—possessed by that country both in peace and in war—no man living estimates more highly than I do the wisdom of her statesmen and the skill of her generals—no man is more ready ...
— Maxims And Opinions Of Field-Marshal His Grace The Duke Of Wellington, Selected From His Writings And Speeches During A Public Life Of More Than Half A Century • Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington
... this Subject I have already admitted several Quotations which have occurred to my Memory upon writing this Paper, I will conclude it with a little Persian Fable. A Drop of Water fell out of a Cloud into the Sea, and finding it self lost in such an Immensity of fluid Matter, broke out into the following Reflection: Alas! What an [insignificant [4]] Creature am I in this prodigious Ocean of Waters; my Existence is of no [Concern [5]] to the Universe, I am reduced to a Kind of Nothing, and am less then the least of the Works of God. It so happened, that ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... shape so marked by the very lines that enrich and relieve it. It is as if the design had determined the space rather than the space the design. If you had a tracing of the figures in the midst of an immensity of white paper you could not bound them by any other line than that of the actual frame. One of the most remarkable things about it is the way in which the angles, which artists usually avoid and disguise, are here sharply accented. A great part of the dignity and importance given ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... his feet the very clouds from whose sun-painted shapes the poet has figured to himself the golden streets and glittering domes of the materialistic Heaven of a personal God. Below him are all the various objects out of which the world's pantheons have been manufactured: around, above—Immensity. And so also, far down the ascending plane of thought that leads from the earth towards the Infinite, the philosophic Buddhist describes, at different plateaux, the heavens and hells, the gods and demons, of the ...
— The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons • H.S. Olcott
... she therefore departed. When she had gone Sobakevitch inclined his head in an attitude of willingness to listen to Chichikov's business. Our hero began in a sort of detached manner—touching lightly upon the subject of the Russian Empire, and expatiating upon the immensity of the same, and saying that even the Empire of Ancient Rome had been of considerably smaller dimensions. Meanwhile Sobakevitch sat ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... present situation. Yet all the while Lord Chetwynde was filled with a feverish curiosity to know where she was, whether she was still with Obed's family, or had left them; whether she was far away from him, or here in Florence. Such an immensity of happiness or of misery seemed to him at that time to depend on this thing that he did not dare to ask the question. He waited to see whether Obed himself might not put an end to this suspense. But Obed's thoughts were all absorbed by the knotty question which had been raised by the appearance ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... quivered with excitement and passionate wrath, "as you say, I have only a few moments to spare, but they are just long enough for me to tell you that it is you who are mad. I daresay that it is difficult to believe in the immensity of a disaster. M. de St. Genis no doubt has been filling your ears with tales of the allied armies' victories. But look at me, Crystal—look at me and tell me if you have ever seen a man more in deadly earnest. I tell you that I am on my way to aid the Emperor ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... the date of the happy restoration of King Charles the Second. But that she would seldom do, murmuring, "I dare not, I dare not. Tell not Father Ruddlestone." All these things were very strange to me; but I grew accustomed to them in time. And there seems to a solitary child, an immensity of time passing between his first beginning to remember and his coming to eight years ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... with all the trumpets that made the walls of Jericho fall. If Melanchthon did not require a strong faith in the forgiving grace of God for himself, he needed it as a teacher of that grace to others; he must, therefore, familiarize himself with the immensity and power of ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... comfortable to him now: it made mere placidity of his personally foregoing the young man's society in favour of Delia and Francie. He had not hitherto been perfectly satisfied that the streets and shops, the general immensity of Paris, were just the safest place for young ladies alone. But the company of a helpful gentleman ensured safety—a gentleman who would be helpful by the fact of his knowing so much and having it all right there. ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... Allied armies was the greatest amphibious operation in the history of the world. It overshadowed all other operations in this or any other war in its immensity. Its success is a tribute to the fighting courage of the soldiers who stormed the beaches—to the sailors and merchant seamen who put the soldiers ashore and kept them supplied—and to the military and naval leaders who achieved a real miracle of planning and execution. And it is also a tribute ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... feature of the scene. This distinction could more justly be claimed by some mariners—a part of the crew of the vessel from the Spanish Main—who had come ashore to see the humours of Election Day. They were rough-looking desperadoes, with sun-blackened faces, and an immensity of beard; their wide short trousers were confined about the waist by belts, often clasped with a rough plate of gold, and sustaining always a long knife, and in some instances, a sword. From beneath their broad-brimmed hats of palm-leaf, gleamed eyes which, even in ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Yosemite, the Yellowstone, the Columbia, and the Colorado, the total depth of the Chelan canyon reaches in places nearly 8,000 feet, while its waters occasionally cover a bottom 1,700 feet below the surface. Throughout the 55 mile ride from Chelan to Stehekin, views are observed that for immensity, sublimity and color blending are unexcelled. Right into the heart of the Cascades the traveler is drawn, while the solemnity and general impressiveness of the whole increases, as he is gradually brought in closer intimacy with divine nature. Among features ...
— The Beauties of the State of Washington - A Book for Tourists • Harry F. Giles
... passing on to certainty. She peered past me for an expected Something on the street. Her leisure and its new habits had assimilated her in dress and make-up to the women of the wealthier sort in the city; but there was an immensity of trouble in the agonized eye and the pitiful droop of her mouth, which I should have rejoiced to see exchanged again for the ill-groomed exterior and the old fret of the farm. Her first question ignored all reference to the things leading to my being there, "in the dead ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... reform, even if I could. It is not only too late, things are also too desperate. What I chiefly want is to take refuge somewhere where humanity and its deepest needs are the subject of greater mastery, greater understanding; so that I can cease from being distracted by the immensity of modern error. No great intellect, no great creative power can exist in this country; because the moment it becomes conscious it is so obsessed by the shams and the shamelessness that surround it, that instead of devoting itself to the joys and enrichment of life, it feels impelled by the horrors ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... but marvel at the immensity of this great underground grotto. Already I had traversed several hundred yards of it, from many points of which other corridors diverged. The whole cliff must be honeycombed with apartments and passages ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... plume galloping on his black horse from the distant fields. At this time she had a cult for Mary Stuart and enthusiastic veneration for illustrious or unhappy women. Joan of Arc, Heloise, Agnes Sorel, the beautiful Ferroniere, and Clemence Isaure stood out to her like comets in the dark immensity of heaven, where also were seen, lost in shadow, and all unconnected, St. Louis with his oak, the dying Bayard, some cruelties of Louis XI, a little of St. Bartholomew's Day, the plume of the Bearnais, and always the remembrance of the plates painted ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... inhabitant being present in the general assembly and church of the first-born! Utterly beneath our notice are the most magnificent temples raised by human ingenuity and vanity, when compared with that of the Holy City. Its foundation, the immutability of God-its extent, his divine immensity-its walls, the omnipotence of Jehovah-its treasury, the unsearchable riches of Christ-its worshippers, the countless myriads of the nations of those that are saved-its duration, ETERNITY. It is the inheritance ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... waste of waters stirred confusedly in the ominous clear-obscure of immensity. The Matutina was making quick way. She seemed to grow smaller every minute. Nothing appears so rapid as the flight of a vessel melting into the distance ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... doubt, despair, poverty, sick, feeble, or baffled, we have yet to learn reliance. "I will not leave thee or forsake thee" are the words of the most ancient spirit to the spark wandering in the immensity of its own being. This high courage brings with it a vision. It sees the true intent in all circumstance out of which its own emerges to meet it. Before it the blackness melts into forms of beauty, and back of all illusions is seen ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... standing, as they had often stood before, on some high ridge of the desert cliff which overlooked its desolation and immensity. Margaret's face was star-lit; her beauty softened. As Michael gazed at ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... extracts are taken from among some 73 rules, to enumerate which would be useless as they would be meaningless in Europe. But even these few are enough to show the immensity of the difficulties which beset the path of the would-be "Upasaka," who has been born and bred ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... each other their secrets. At last, seven years later, after the Revolution of 1830, when the mob invaded the Archbishop's residence, when Republican agitators spurred them on to destroy the gilt crosses which flashed like streaks of lightning in the immensity of the ocean of houses; when Incredulity flaunted itself in the streets, side by side with Rebellion, Bianchon once more detected Desplein going into Saint-Sulpice. The doctor followed him, and knelt down by him without the slightest notice or demonstration of surprise from his friend. ...
— The Atheist's Mass • Honore de Balzac
... long time before many of the strangers tired of remaining so far from their wigwams: their chief every morning would look for hours towards the rising of the sun, as if the eyes of his soul could see through the immensity of the prairies; he became gloomy as a man of dark deeds (a Medecin), and one day, with half of his men, he began a long inland trail across prairies, swamps, and rivers, so much did he dread to die far from his lodge. Yet he did ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... thy grandeur, Scenes of gorgeous splendour, Visions passing wonder In ocean, sea, and sky; Thunders o'er us pealing, Earthquakes 'neath us reeling, Fiery comets wheeling Through all immensity. ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... have the propensities of a Columbus or Robinson Crusoe united with a habit of trembling at stray dogs in the daytime, and covering one's head with the bedclothes at night. I had longed to be afloat for some time past; but now, that I was fairly out of sight of land, I shuddered at the immensity of the fathomless sea that stretched before me. Whither bound? To the 'Peppersville Academy,' in a town on the border of a lake familiar to me in my geography days at school, but which seemed, practically, to have no more connection with ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the Milky Way had been resolved into a multitude of separate stars, disclosing the immensity of ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... better calculated to foster this mood of his than the one to which his business now brought him—Buenos Aires on the Plate. Leaving Liverpool with steel and cotton, there was an immensity of ocean to be traversed, until one came to the river mouth. Then fifty leagues of hard ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... stood within the park, which it overlooked. But the old keeper had apparently blocked up that side of his dwelling, and had cleared a little garden by the road. And there he lived, facing southwards, with his back turned upon the Paradou, as if unaware of the immensity of verdure that ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... that are benevolently hidden from my view. It is sufficient for me to know that I must be wrecked at last; that my mortal frame must be like a shattered bark upon the beach ere the purer elements that it contains can be wafted through the immensity of immortality. I will commune with my boyish days—I will live in the past only. Memory shall perform the Medean process, shall renovate me to youth. I will again return to marbles and an untroubled breast—to hoop and high ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... and the true bishops, groaned in spirit to see the orthodox act towards error and heretics as heretical tyrants and heathens had acted against the truth, the confessors, and the martyrs. They could not, above all, endure this immensity of perjury and sacrilege. They bitterly lamented the durable and irremediable odium that detestable measure cast upon the true religion, whilst our neighbours, exulting to see us thus weaken and destroy ourselves, profited by our madness, and built designs upon the hatred ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... together in complete accord, was born one Christmas night while the curtains of heaven swung, stirred by the wings angelic. Owner of all things—all the continents, all worlds, and all the islands of light. Capitalist of immensity, crossing over to our condition. Coming into our world, not by gate of palace, but by door of barn. Spending His first night amid the shepherds. Gathering after around Him the fishermen to be His chief attendants. With adze, and saw, and chisel, and ax, and in ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... germ, what dozens can scarcely see today with the germ glued to the spot and with all the aid of stains and dark-field apparatus. After all, it is brain-power focused to a point that moves events, and to the immensity of that power the history of our growing knowledge of syphilis bears ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... to enter. 'Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the imagination of man to conceive' the glory of God, the splendor, the magnificence, the supernal beauty of the Celestial. We know indeed that we shall enter upon a world whose immensity, whose sublimity, whose awful beauty shall far surpass the experience of man; but not even the wildest imagination, fed by all the knowledge that astronomers have gained of world beyond world, and system beyond system, of spheres to which ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... on Monday evening. They would come over the hills out of the pleasant English country-side in which they had wandered, and see Port Burdock spread out below, a network of interlacing street lamps and shifting tram lights against the black, beacon-gemmed immensity of ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... reason, but from what we know? Of man, what see we but his station here From which to reason or to which refer? Through worlds unnumbered though the God be known, 'Tis ours to trace him only in our own. He, who through vast immensity can pierce, See worlds on worlds compose one universe, Observe how system into system runs. What other planets circle other suns, What varied being peoples every star, May tell why Heaven has made us as we are. But of this frame the bearings, and the ties, The strong connections, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... toward the west, seeming to sway in high heaven as Nissr took her long dips with the grace and swiftness of a flying falcon. Some time later the cloud-masses thinned and broke away, leaving the world of waters spread below in terrible immensity. ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... your sublime highness was such as was to be expected from the immensity of your wisdom; but hath not the Prophet warned us, that the wisest of men are too often thwarted by the folly and obstinacy of the other sex? May your slave venture to observe, that many very fine stories were obtained by the caliph Haroun, and his vizier Mesrour, as they walked ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... shadowy, grey thing; immensely broad, immensely shadowy, winding away between immense, half-invisible mountains into the silence of an unknown country. A little band of men, microscopic figures in that immensity, in those mists, crept slowly up it. A man among them was speaking; I seemed to hear his voice, low, monotonous, overpowered by the wan light and the silence ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... with his own lips the bitterness which makes the most wretched death sweeter by comparison than bread and honey to the hungry. At the end of it, when he stole away a madman, he felt within his own soul the cracking and upheaving of some immensity, and saw or felt the opening of abysses from which rose fearful exhalations of crime, shapes of corruption, things without shape that provoked to rage, pain and madness. He was not without cunning, since he closed the doors softly, stole ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... went, inch by inch, leaving the ground covered with their dead. Dick was conscious only of a vast roar and shouting and the continuous blaze of cannon and rifles in his very face. But he understood the immensity of the crisis. By a huge victory in the West the Confederacy would redress the loss of Gettysburg in the East. And now it seemed that they were gaining it. For the first and only time in the war they had the larger numbers ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... and flying reptiles, but if so it made no deep impression on her. Somebody had said, or was saying, that we were descended from monkeys, which was quite absurd, though it might be true enough. On the sea the thrashing hills of green water suggested a kind of immensity and terror, but not the immensity of the poet's heart. The ship was safe, the captain at table in brass buttons and blue uniform, eager to be nice to her—told her so. Her faith really, was in the captain. And there with her, always, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... was that afternoon in a mighty cruel humor. Though I had omitted no reasonable method to convince her of the immensity of my passion, 'twas without the twitch of an eyelash she endured the volley of my sighs and the fusillade of my respectful protestations; and candor compels me to admit that toward the end her silvery laughter disrupted the periods of ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... the end of the walkway and paused, a little stunned, staring at the incredible immensity of the city spread ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... immensity in the dome of the unbroken, seamless, gray threatening sky. There was majesty in the dim plain, across which the morning light slowly fell. The plain, with its dark blue groves, from which thin lines of smoke rose and hastened away, and majesty in the wind that ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... tier they rise to dizzy height— The cells of men who know the world no more. Silence intense from ceiling to the floor; While through the window gleams a lone blue light Which stabs the dark immensity of night. Felt shod and ghostly like a shade of yore, The guard comes shuffling down the corridor; His key-ring jingles . . . and he glides ...
— Bars and Shadows • Ralph Chaplin
... have visited, I locate it on a map. I may not actually get down the atlas and put my finger on the name, but at least I picture to myself its lines and contour and judge its miles in inches. And thereby for a thing of ink and cardboard I have banished from the world its immensity and mystery. But if there were no maps—what then? By other devices I would have to locate it. I would say that it came at the end of some particular day's journey; that it lies in the twilight at the conclusion of twenty miles of dusty road; that it lies one hour nightward of a blow-out. ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... any more than a grain of sand upon the sea-shore. The bulk of which they consist, and the space which they occupy, are so exceedingly little in comparison of the whole, that their loss would leave scarce a blank in the immensity of God's works. If, then, not our globe only, but this whole system, be so very dimunitive, what is a kingdom or a country? What are a few lordships, or the so-much-admired patrimonies of those who are styled ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... immensity pierced by a multitude of lights, without giving a thought to all the heavy slumbers, cruel insomnias, vain dreams, spoilt pleasures, and infinitely diverse miseries that ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... the forest is the refuge of the narrow-minded misanthrope; a hammock on the ocean is the asylum for the generous distressed. The ocean brims with natural griefs and tragedies; and into that watery immensity of terror, man's private grief is lost like ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... events of the early spring, the bloody failure of British generalship at Neuve Chapelle, the naval disaster in the Dardanelles, the sinking of the Falaba, the Russian defeat in the Masurian Lakes, all deepened the bishop's impression of the immensity of the nation's difficulties and of his own unhelpfulness. He was ashamed that the church should hold back its curates from enlistment while the French priests were wearing their uniforms in the trenches; the expedition ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... long and massive extent, with a delightful promenade for the legislative people exactly above the margin of the river. This is certainly a magnificent edifice, and yet I doubt whether it is so impressive as it might and ought to have been made, considering its immensity. It makes no more impression than you can well account to yourself for, and you rather wonder that it does not make more. The reason must be that the architect has not "builded better than he knew." He felt no power ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Vale of the White Horse, and the farmer on the fringe of the shady depths of the New Forest alike live in the presence of the Wiltshire Downs. There is something of grandeur in the immensity of their broad unbroken line stretching as they do, or did, for mile upon mile, limited only by the horizon, a rolling sea ...
— Stonehenge - Today and Yesterday • Frank Stevens
... entire solar system were wiped out of being, there would be left no noticeable void among the countless systems of worlds and suns and stars; in the immensity of space the sun with all his revolving planets is not even as a drop to the ocean or a grain of sand to the composition of the earth. There are millions of other suns of larger dimensions with larger attendants wheeling around them in the illimitable ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... unquestionable that the Duke has too much participated in their sentiments and passions, and, though he never mixed himself with their proceedings, regarded them with a favourable eye, nor does he ever seem to have been aware of the immensity of the peril which they were incurring. The urgency of the danger will unquestionably increase the impatience of those who already think the present Government incapable of carrying on the public business, and now that ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... pulse beat fast With aimless hope, and unexpressed desire— Thou sea, who wast to me a prophet deep Through all thy restless waves, and wasting shores, Of silent labour, and eternal change; First teacher of the dense immensity Of ever-stirring life, in thy strange forms Of fish, and shell, and worm, and oozy weed: To me alike thy frenzy and thy sleep Have been a deep and ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... exercises of the afternoon, being a repetition of those of the morning; after which he had gone to the city in answer to the invitation of Simonides; he might return in the night; but, considering the immensity of the field to be talked over with his friend, it was hardly possible. Ben-Hur, thus left alone, had seen his horses cared for; cooled and purified himself in the lake; exchanged the field garb for his customary vestments, all white, as became a Sadducean of the ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... succession of canons, which were now lofty and arid gullies, divided from each other by every conceivable form of rocky ruin. Rotundas, amphitheatres, castellated walls, cathedrals of unparalleled immensity, facades of palaces huge enough to be the abodes of the principalities and powers of the air, far-stretching semblances of cities tottering to destruction, all fashions of domes, towers, minarets, spires, and obelisks, with a population of misshapen demons and monsters, looked down from sublime ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... The mere suggestion that such thoughts could have been near her was enough to pain him. She was silent, and again her head lay upon his shoulder. She found there still the rest and the peace. Knowing her own life, the immensity of his faith and trust in that other woman were made clear by the simple, heartfelt words. If she had been indeed Beatrice, would he have loved her so? If it had all been true, the parting, the seven years' separation, the utter loneliness, the hopelessness, ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... Cybele in armoured sleep The city lies, fat plenty in her halls, With calm parochial spires that hold in fee The friendly gables clustered at their base, And, equipoised o'er tower and market-place, The Gothic minister's winged immensity; And in that narrow burgh, with equal mood, Two placid hearts, to all life's good resigned, Might, from the altar to the lych-gate, find Long years of peace ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... Germans. Yet it was evident enough already that gigantic preparations had been made to beat in and flatten the Verdun salient; and, surprised to some extent as the French undoubtedly were, not by the attack itself, but by the immensity of the German arrangements for it, that lull after the first attack was at once put to service. Where possible, reinforcements were sent up to the front, while everywhere spades and picks were ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... to the port side, and saw nothing but an immensity of quiet waters. But to starboard, on the bottom appeared a large protuberance, which at once attracted my attention. One would have thought it a ruin buried under a coating of white shells, much resembling a covering of snow. Upon examining the mass ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... trembled in every breeze, had seemed for him to bridge all gaps, to explain all mysteries. Now indeed chaos stretched all about him, full of huge mists, dark chasms, hidden echoes; but he perceived something of its vastness and immensity; he had broken down the poor frail fences of his soul, and was in contact with reality. He did not doubt that he seemed to the younger generation an elderly and sombre personage, stumbling down the dark descent of ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... steer north and seek to go clear of it? Somehow, the presence of this similitude of land made the sea appear as enormous as space itself. Whilst it was all clear horizon the immensity of the deep was in a measure limited to the vision by its cincture. But this ice-line gave the eye something to measure with, and when I looked at those leagues of frozen shore my spirits sank into deepest dejection at the thought of the vastness of the ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... inclusive of all; whose path is among associate planets; whose meek handmaiden is the moon, whose mediate sovereign is the sun; whose life is eternity, whose thought is that of a God; whose enjoyment is knowledge; whose destinies are lost in immensity, whose cognizance of ourselves is akin with our own cognizance of the animalculae which infest the brain—a being which we, in consequence, regard as purely inanimate and material much in the same manner as these animalculae ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... readily because he found that art was beginning to exercise a precious influence over Mary's mind. There was none to guide her studies, but she pursued them with a plan of her own, and though at first the effort sometimes left her weary, yet she persisted until she began to perceive at least the immensity of the knowledge ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... sir.' 'Ah! (a deep-drawn sigh) it is indeed, sir.' 'Great power, sir.' 'Immense—immense!' 'Great deal done by steam, sir.' 'Ah! (another sigh at the immensity of the subject, and a knowing shake of the head) you may say that, sir.' 'Still in its infancy, they say, sir.' Novel remarks of this kind, are generally the commencement of a conversation which is prolonged until the conclusion of the trip, and, perhaps, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... we contemplate the grandeur of science, if we transport ourselves in imagination back into primeval times, or away into the immensity of space, our little troubles and sorrows seem to shrink into insignificance. "Ah, beautiful creations!" says Helps, speaking of the stars, "it is not in guiding us over the seas of our little planet, but out of the dark waters of our own perturbed minds, that we may make to ourselves ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... a very few of the immensity of extravagant powers conferred by the ownership of these railroad bonds and stocks. Bonds they assuredly are, incomparably more so than the clumsy yokes of olden days. Society has improved its outwards forms in these passing centuries. Clanking chains are no longer necessary to keep slaves ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... And The Desert is a fifth part of the African Continent! Yet this gentleman dogmatizes and theorizes on all geological formations, and can tell the whole history of the geology of our planet, from the first moment when it was bowled by the hand of The Omnipotent in the immensity of space, of suns and systems! If such presumption and self-willed ignorance discover themselves in great men, what are we to expect of ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... than that one? Invoke the aid of reason, of habit, of the senses, the head, the heart, and explain it if you can. You will find nothing but two bodies, one here, the other there, and between them, what? Air, space, immensity. O blind fools! who fondly imagine yourselves men, and who reason of love! Have you talked with it? No, you have felt it. You have exchanged a glance with a passing stranger, and suddenly there flies out from you something that can not be defined, that has no name known to man. You have taken ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Harren," he said. "I suppose you have no conception of our business, no realization of its scope—its network of information bureaus all over the civilized world, its myriad sources of information, the immensity of its delicate machinery, the endless data and the infinitesimal details we have at our command. You, of course, have no idea of the number of people of every sort and condition who are in our employ, of the ceaseless yet inoffensive surveillance we maintain. For example, ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... European capitals—with wilderness and universities—with savages and savants—with the lonely rivers of unpeopled wastes—with peaks, pampas, steppes, cliffs and crags—with the progress of the world—with every science known to man and with every star glittering in the immensity of space. Humboldt adopted none of the soul-shrinking creeds of his day; he wasted none of his time in the inanities, stupidities and contradictions of theological metaphysics; he did not endeavor to harmonize the astronomy ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... the ducks quacking down in the "Moggason," and he, too, felt the silence and immensity of the plain outside. It was enormous, incredible in its wildness. "I believe we're going to like it ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... nature," said Trent, much moved. "Your outward semblance doth belie your soul's immensity. I should have expected as soon to see an elephant conducting at the opera as you drinking my health. Dear Cupples! May his beak retain ever that delicate rose-stain!—No, curse it all!" he broke out, surprising a shade of discomfort that fitted over his companion's face as he tasted the wine again. ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... you given a little thought to the great mass of human suffering? Have you raised your eyes above our earth and seen the immensity of the universe?—the worlds beyond worlds which crush our vanity into insignificance, and with our vanity ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... which the children heard what their mother said to them. They were simply annoyed that their amusing play had been interrupted, and did not believe a word of what their mother was saying. They could not believe it indeed, for they could not take in the immensity of all they habitually enjoyed, and so could not conceive that what they were destroying was the very thing ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... all. Thou art! Direct my understanding then to thee; Control my spirit, guide my wandering heart, Though but an atom 'mid immensity. Still I am something fashioned by thy hand! I hold a middle rank 'twixt heaven and earth, On the last verge of mortal being stand, Close to the realms where angels have their birth, Just on the ...
— Half Hours in Bible Lands, Volume 2 - Patriarchs, Kings, and Kingdoms • Rev. P. C. Headley
... removed from the pious horror which that Symbol is intended to arouse in every true believer. It emphasized all the ghastly ugliness of death upon that most barbarous of gallows, without any suggestion of the beauty and immensity of the Divine Martyrdom of Him Who in the likeness of the sinful flesh was Alone ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... reflected lights seemed to originate deep in the water, as if the spectres of suicides were holding them to show where they went down. The wild moon and clouds were as restless as an evil conscience in a tumbled bed, and the very shadow of the immensity of London seemed to lie oppressively ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... Le Gardeur!" replied she, impetuously. She felt the vital soul of this man breathing on her cheek. She knew he spoke true, but she was incapable of measuring the height and immensity of such a passion. She accepted his love, but she could no more contain the fulness of his overflowing affection than the pitcher that is held to the fountain can contain the stream that gushes ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... plunge into the very bosom of night, descending ever lower and lower, exploring depth after depth, until at last they had worked their way through the narrow and winding passages, and stood in the sublime silence of the immensity of space. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... that he parted from her, whom he never expected to see again in this life; and on reaching his American home, he addressed her in words of touching tenderness:—"I stretch out my arms towards you, notwithstanding the immensity of the seas which separate us, while I wait the heavenly kiss which I firmly trust one day to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... purpose, than either by magistrates... or by an irresponsible and multitudinous Committee of Parliament? Finally, a Board elected for this one duty is immeasurably better than the Town Councils, who are distracted by an immensity of other business.... ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... had guided them was still on. Would reversing its process take him back to the base? Lost in the immensity of the cold wilderness, he made the only choice possible and gunned the ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... that the English-speaking world is little aware at present of the immensity and importance of the work Wagner has done for art. Plato declared that the true musician must have poetry and music harmonized in himself; and the world has waited twenty-five hundred years for that combination to appear. Having carefully read the poems all written ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... might have held the deck had not his thirst been greater than his hate cannot be told. Water was what he needed most, for his throat seemed burning, and just overside was an immensity of water. So he leaped. Probably the crew of the Ellen B. believe to this day that they escaped by a miracle from a devil-possessed horse who, finding them beyond his ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... this astounding complexity of harmonious nature! Think of how much we already know of its innumerable laws and processes, and then think that this knowledge only serves to reveal, in a glimmering way, the huge immensity of the unknown. Try to picture the meshwork of contending rhythms which must have been before organic nature was built up, and then let us ask, Is it conceivable, is it credible, that all this can have been the work of blind fate? Must we not feel that had there not ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... of the promontory, and along its narrow ridge to the light-house. This site commands one of the most remarkable views in the accessible civilized world, one of the three or four really great prospects which the traveller can recall, astonishing in its immensity, interesting in its peculiar details. The general features are the great ocean, blue, flecked with sparkling, breaking wavelets, and the wide, curving coast-line, rising into mesas, foot-hills, ranges on ranges of mountains, the faintly seen snow-peaks of San Bernardino and ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... is rimmed on the east by an arid plateau twenty miles wide; and this is, in turn, walled in by a long cordillera. Through the passes, over the summit, Lane climbed, descending through the pineries, park-like in their grandeur and immensity, to the bare, brown plains which stretch eastward to the rising sun. In the midst of the desert lies a chain of salines, accursed lakes of Tigua folk-lore. Beyond them the plain melts and rebuilds itself in the ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... were thickly strewn with black bowlders of sizes ranging from immensity to those applicable to building and paving purposes. Nowhere have I ever seen more convincing ...
— Six Days on the Hurricane Deck of a Mule - An account of a journey made on mule back in Honduras, - C.A. in August, 1891 • Almira Stillwell Cole
... majesty, we who walked with gods As younger sons on this proud central stage, Round which the whole bright firmament revolved For our especial glory, must we creep Like ants upon our midget ball of dust Lost in immensity? I could not take That darkness lightly. I withheld my book For many a year, until I clearly saw, And Rome approved me—have they not brought it yet?— That this tremendous music could not drown The still supernal music of the soul, Or quench the light that shone when Christ was born. ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... trail, which wound around huge fragments of rock riven from the cliffs in prehistoric days. He was awed by the immensity of the chasm and talked continuously to his horse which shuffled along behind paying careful attention to the footing. Arrived at the stream the horse drank. Sundown mounted and rode along the narrow level paralleling the river course. The canon widened, ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs |
