"Vastness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... question had been propounded almost took his breath away. He raised his eyes to hers, and looked long and wonderingly into their infinite depths. And then the vastness of the problem enunciated by her demand loomed before him. What, after all, did he know about Jesus? Had he not arrived in Simiti in a state of agnosticism regarding religion? Had he not come there enveloped in confusion, baffled, beaten, hopeless? And then, after ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... greatest city in the whole world, so great indeed that I should scarcely venture to tell of it, but that I have met at Venice people in plenty who have been there.... And if anyone should desire to tell of all the vastness and great marvels of this city, a good quire of paper would not hold the matter, I trow. For 'tis the greatest and noblest city, and the finest for merchandise, that the ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... was swung across seeming great distances, till a strong arm out of the night and the vastness of things seized her, and the tension of the struggle passed from her limbs, leaving a sense of appeasement as sweet as sleep. She heard a man's voice directing her, and obeyed without understanding. Now the sea supported her like a soft and pleasant bed, she had no fear ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... consists merely of samples like the outfit of a commercial traveler; yet a commercial traveler who knows his business can so arrange his samples on the table of his room in a hotel that they give the onlooker an idea of the vastness and wealth of the warehouses from ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... overhead, or a frightened serpent rose with hissing mouth, and then glided in a flash back through the undergrowth. One, that seemed to me of a pure silver-white, started almost from under my feet, and darted away before I could recover myself. We hardly spoke; the vastness of Nature hushed our tongues. It seemed presumption to raise my gun against any of the inhabitants of this spot where man seemed so mean, so strangely out of place. Once I paused to cut back with my knife the creepers that hid in inextricable tangle a solitary ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... word regarding these pictures would be waste of space and time. Let Mr. Menpes put away his camera, let him go out into the streets or the fields, and there let him lose himself in the vastness and beauty of Nature. Let him study humbly the hang of a branch or the surface of a wall, striving to give to each their character. Let him try to render the mystery of a perspective in the blue evening or its harshness and violence in the early dawn. There is no need to go to Burma, there is mystery ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... elephants; I conquered Porus; I crossed the Tanais, and worsted the Scythians—no mean enemies—in a tremendous cavalry engagement. I heaped benefits upon my friends: I made my enemies taste my resentment. If men took me for a god, I cannot blame them; the vastness of my undertakings might excuse such a belief. But to conclude. I died a king: Hannibal, a fugitive at the court of the Bithynian Prusias—fitting end for villany and cruelty. Of his Italian victories I say nothing; they were the fruit not of honest legitimate warfare, ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... abound with what artists consider bits of the picturesque. The quadrupeds and birds must surely rejoice at their removal from the murky dens of Exeter 'Change to so delightful a region as the present, even slightly as it assimilates with the luxuriance and vastness of their native ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 528, Saturday, January 7, 1832 • Various
... says Jehovah, "all their wickedness." What an idea does this statement furnish of the unlimited vastness of the Divine mind! For if He remembered all the evil deeds of all the Israelites, He remembered the evil deeds of all other persons. If He remembered all the evil deeds of all then living, He remembered all the evil deeds of all who ever had lived. And if He remembered all evil deeds, assuredly ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... be the only water in this region; I believe there was plenty more in the immediate neighbourhood, as the natives never came to water here. It was singular how we should have dropped upon such a scene, and penetrated thus the desert's vastness, to the scrub-secluded fastness of these Austral-Indians' home. Mr. Young and I collected a great many specimens of plants, flowers, insects, and reptiles. Among the flowers was the marvellous red, white, blue, and yellow wax-like flower of a hideous little gnarled ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... enchanted bow until it seemed as if it could be no mere violin making that music, it was the Angel Israel, playing on his own heart strings. As Sahwah sat and listened there suddenly came over her a great feeling of sadness, and unrest, a sense of the vastness and seriousness of life, and she felt desperately unhappy. She had never felt so before. All her life she had been happy-go-lucky, and scatterbrained, and life had stretched out before her as one vast picnic, without a single solemn ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... observe, all these superiorities are matters plainly measurable and calculable, not in any wise to be referred to estimate of sensation. Of the grandeur or expression of the hills I have not spoken; how far they are great, or strong, or terrible, I do not for the moment consider, because vastness, and strength, and terror, are not to all minds subjects of desired contemplation. It may make no difference to some men whether a natural object be large or small, whether it be strong or feeble. But loveliness of color, perfectness of form, endlessness of change, wonderfulness of ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... a great white radiance streamed through the vastness of the aisles. The moon, that was at her height, had broken through the clouds. The snow had ceased to fall. The light reflected from the snow without was clear as the light of dawn. It fell through the arches full upon the two pictures above, from which the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... one dreads that it may be meditating evil. Moreover, an angry sea looks less vast in extent than a calm one. Its mounting waves bring the horizon nearer, and one does not discern how for many leagues the pitiless billows repeat themselves. To appreciate the hideous vastness of the ocean one must see ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... that they should speak always respectfully of their elders, but especially in the most tender and solemn tones of the dead; after pointing out to them the perniciousness of a low and vulgar curiosity, and expatiating on the vastness and superiority of the spiritual life, compared with the earthly and carnal, I paused, only to give, further on, a fuller illustration ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... "The vastness of their numbers, and their exceeding minuteness, are circumstances, discovered in the examination of these animalcules, of uncommon interest. In a drop of water examined by a power of 28.224 (magnified ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... timorous under the stars. The vastness of the plains, the sweep of the wind under the unbroken arch, frighten them; they are made for the close comforts of the barn-yard; and the apprehension is contagious, as every ranchman knows. Waite realized the need of becoming good friends with his animals. ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... of the Indians and the vastness of the swamp, it was a faint chance indeed that he or his companion would live to see any of the tribe, but, faint as it was, no other hope remained and Walter sent the canoe onward with ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... was founded by Ethelbert, King of the Saxons, and being from time to time re-edified, increased to vastness and magnificence, and in revenue so much, that it affords a plentiful support to a bishop, dean, and precentor, treasurer, four archdeacons, twenty-nine prebendaries, and many others. The roof of this church, as of ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... close together, was the signal that they had been found, and for the searchers to return. Immediately all those who were able to act as searchers, without themselves becoming lost, scattered to their work. On account of the vastness of the forest Mr Ross positively refused to allow Frank, Alec, or Sam to go any distance away on the search. This was a keen disappointment to the boys, but Mr Ross was wise in his decision. The searchers ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... sat with his head leaning forward over his silver plate. A heavy silence fell. Death hovered over that table—and also, as it were, the breath of past ages. The multitude of lights, the polished floor of costly wood, the bare whiteness of walls wainscotted with marble, the vastness of the room, the imposing forms of furniture, carved heavily in ebony, impressed me with a sense of secular and austere magnificence. For centuries there had always been a Riego living in this fortress-like palace, ruling this portion of the New World with the whole majesty ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... and grass as they left the river valley and crossed a succession of ridges or plateaus. At last they reached vast black basaltic masses and lava fields, proof of former subterranean fires which seemingly had forever dried out the life of the earth's surface. The very vastness of the views might have had charm but for the tempering feeling of awe, ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... have almost finished our work—on the fifth day from this—God willing—we shall march. I engaged two more pagazis besides two guides, named Asmani and Mabruki. If vastness of the human form could terrify any one, certainly Asmani's appearance is well calculated to produce that effect. He stands considerably over six feet without shoes, and has shoulders broad ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... now half-dry, grass-choked stream. A few stunted cottonwood trees followed its windings, and one little clump of wild plum bushes bristled in a draw leading down to the shallow place of the dry watercourse. All else was distance and vastness void of life ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... to gaze at the distant purple peaks and watch the sun set in that lonely land as if I was witnessing it for the first time. As my eyes roamed over the stupendous distance and unnamed mountains I felt my own puny insignificance, as who has not when confronted with the vastness of nature. ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... Causation is change; but it is nothing but substance assuming attributes, and attributes assuming modes. Phenomena are only the bubbles which arise on the bosom of the ocean and disappear, absorbed in its vastness. The universe is bound in one vast chain of fatalism, one grand and perfect whole. Man's perfection is to know by contemplation the universe in which he has ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... beyond sight, beyond thought, stretched the still deeps of aether, blazing with innumerable worlds. Eye could rove nowhither without beholding a star, nor could star be beheld from which the Gods' hall, with all its vastness, would not have been utterly invisible. Elenko leaned over the battlements, and watched the racing meteors. Prometheus stood by her, and pointed out in the immeasurable distance the little speck of shining dust ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... 1834. A small chapel on the south side was called Our Lady of the Pew. The oldest part of the ancient palace remaining is Westminster Hall, built by William Rufus as a part of a projected new palace. He held his Court here in 1099, and, on hearing a remark on the vastness of his hall, he declared that it would be only a bedroom to the palace when finished. However, he himself had to occupy much narrower quarters before he could carry out his scheme. Richard II. raised the hall and gave it the splendid hammer-beam roof, one of the finest feats ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... railroads dwindled to insignificance. But the railroads could not affect the navigation of the lake quite so disastrously as that of the river; the lake in such a rivalry had some such advantage as that of the sea from its mere vastness, and from the expanses where the railroads could not follow the steamer in the mere nature of things. The iron horse had his way with the canals, though, and these monuments of a former period of enterprise grow more and more like its sepulcher, where he drank them ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... and din indistinguishable. It seems hardly possible that these dream-like masses, with their sparkling lights, like reversed heavens, are the rude, restless, discordant gehennas which they sometimes seem to us by day. And yet I realize the awfulness and vastness of these great living creatures far more than in the belittling and disillusionizing daylight. The anchored or passing vessels only add to the sense of seclusion,—the former with a solitary lantern at the stern, the latter perhaps a galaxy of many-colored lights. On a dark night it has ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... waved aside the interruption. "They are satisfied, as the common people were, with a degraded literalism," she went on. "Nut was the Heavens, who spread herself across the earth in the form of a woman; Shu, the vastness of space; the ibis typified Thoth, and Hathor was the Patron of the Western Hills; Khonsu, the moon, was personified, as was the deity of the Nile. But the high priest of Ra, the sun, you notice, remained ever the Great ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... before the eyes of the world as a type of character which Christian men should emulate—a vision of life whose influence has touched millions with its inspiration. The price which had to be paid to attain this nobleness of character and this vastness of holy influence was ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... irrigation canals which it has given to the province. Its great alluvial plain traversed by large rivers drawing an unfailing supply of water from the Himalayan snows affords an ideal field for the labours of the canal engineer. The vastness of the arid areas which without irrigation yield no crops at all or only cheap millets and pulses makes his works of inestimable benefit to the people and a source of revenue ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... Pacific explained itself to him in part, explained its vastness, its secrecy and inviolability. The schooner lifted veil upon veil of distance, and veil upon veil lay beyond. He could only move in a right line; to search the wilderness of water with any hope, one would have to be endowed with the gift of moving ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... Works of Nature and Art, as they are qualified to entertain the Imagination, we shall find the last very defective, in Comparison of the former; for though they may sometimes appear as Beautiful or Strange, they can have nothing in them of that Vastness and Immensity, which afford so great an Entertainment to the Mind of the Beholder. The one may be as Polite and Delicate as the other, but can never shew her self so August and Magnificent in the Design. There is something more bold and masterly in the rough careless ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... can furnish; and the larger the knowledge of the thinker, the more pressing and tremendous the problem appears, and the more hopelessly unanswerable. To Herbert Spencer himself it must have assumed a vastness beyond the apprehension of the average mind; and it weighed upon him more and more inexorably the nearer he approached to death. He could not avoid the conviction—plainly suggested in his magnificent Psychology and in other volumes of his great work—that there exists no ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... who had never quailed before man or gun, looked at each other, their faces full of sudden seriousness, and there was just a shadow of fear in both blue eyes and black. The silence and the vastness of an empty earth and sky can bring up undreamed of things from the bottom of men's minds. Ellhorn's more skeptical nature was the first to gird ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... about her pressing in too close there was something freeing and saving in that glimpse of herself as part of all the life there had ever been. Because the crowds had seemed the all—were suffocating her—something in that vastness of vision was as fresh air after a stifling room. It was not that it did away with the crowds—made her think they did not matter; they were, after all, the more vital—imperative—but she had more space in which ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... it was not Egypt herself that the Greeks saw, but her external artistic aspect and the outward setting of Egyptian civilisation. The vastness of her monuments, the splendour of her tombs, the pomp of her ceremonies, the dignity and variety of her religious formulas, attracted their curiosity and commanded their respect: the wisdom of the Egyptians had passed into a ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... asked Adelaide, timidly laying her hand on his arm. Though she knew he was simple, she felt the vastness in him that was awe-inspiring—just as a mountain or an ocean, a mere aggregation of simple matter, is in the total majestic and incomprehensible. Beside him, the complex little individualities among ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... young, healthy, well-educated, to be living on one's own estate!" And at the same time the endless plain, all alike, without one living soul, frightened her, and at moments it was clear to her that its peaceful green vastness would swallow up her life and reduce it to nothingness. She was very young, elegant, fond of life; she had finished her studies at an aristocratic boarding-school, had learnt three languages, had read a great deal, had travelled ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... gusts of hilarity. Their pistols, aimed at cans or prairie dogs or anything, cracked as they galloped at large. Their speeding, clear-cut forms would shine upon the bluffs, and, descending, merge in the dust their horses had raised. Yet all this was nothing in the vastness of the growing day. ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... will marvel to see all along the beach from Sandy Hook, fifty miles of crowded street, of hotels, and houses, and behind these still others. How this vast seaside population thrills one, bringing visions of the "vastness and wealth of teeming millions" of this great nation of ours. One author says, and with truth, that Atlantic City could accommodate all of France and still have room for more while Asbury Park would furnish ample room as a seaside resort for Belgium ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... was a common fate, and yet it seemed an awful thing to say of any man. She listened without a word, and her stillness now was like the protest of an invincible unbelief. What need she care for the world beyond the forests? I asked. From all the multitudes that peopled the vastness of that unknown there would come, I assured her, as long as he lived, neither a call nor a sign for him. Never. I was carried away. Never! Never! I remember with wonder the sort of dogged fierceness I displayed. I had ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... to sit back in the corner of the seat and feed his senses on the lovely creature before him. He had never seen her so beautiful, so utterly worth having as now. He was conscious of a great, overwhelming sense of pride, somewhat smothering in its vastness. She was a creature to be proud of! ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... shrank, Muttering they pointed toward that peak, Than vastness vaster, Whereon a darkness brooded, "Who shall look and live," they sighed; And I sensed The folding and unfolding ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... who can describe them? Is not all nature indescribable? every leaf infinite and transcendental? How much more those mighty downs, with their enormous sheets of spotless turf, where the dizzy eye loses all standard of size and distance before the awful simplicity, the delicate vastness, of those grand curves and swells, soft as the outlines of a Greek Venus, as if the great goddess-mother Hertha had laid herself down among the hills to sleep, her Titan limbs wrapt in a thin veil ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... And the vastness of it as you look on every side on you impresses you so you feel sunthin' as you would if you wuz sot down on the Desert of Sara, and Sara wuz turned into vistas of bewilderin' beauty towards every pint ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... speak of DREW—they brought good audiences. There is, it must be confessed, a curious fascination in hearing deep things talked about, even tho neither we nor the disputants understand them. We get the problematic thrill, we feel the presence of the vastness. Let a controversy begin in a smoking-room anywhere, about free-will or God's omniscience, or good and evil, and see how everyone in the place pricks up his ears. Philosophy's results concern us all most vitally, and philosophy's queerest arguments ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... all-important truth that men stand or fall according as they look up to the Ideal or not. For example, the Architecture of Egypt, her pyramids and temples, cumbrous and inelegant, but imposing from their vastness and their gloom, express the ideal of Sense or Matter—elevated and purified indeed, and nearly approaching the Intellectual, but Material still; we think of them as of natural scenery, in association with ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... magnificent bay, bounded at either extremity by far-stretching promontories rising from a beach of the purest white sand, on which the yet whiter foam of the surf is ever seething, as waves on waves break one behind the other. The whole bold view possesses all the sublimity that vastness and space can bestow; but it is that sublimity which is to be seen, not described, which the heart may acknowledge and the mind contain, but which no mere words may delineate—which even painting ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... into vastness, King became aware of frame beds, placed at intervals in a row, each with a mat beside it. And there were several brass basins and ewers for water. Also there were some little bronze lamps; the guide lit three of them, and King took ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... which a people is surrounded, will modify and almost control its mode of being. The soft, rich landscapes of Italy enervate, while the rough mountainous country of the North imparts force and vigor. Mountains and seas are nature's healthful stimulants. Man grows in their vastness and is energized in their strength. Whatever may be the scenery of a people, it will mirror itself in the mind, and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the mood to dwell upon the mere arithmetic of vastness. Invaded by the vision of the mighty structure, its aspect rendered yet more imposing by the time which now suited with it, she forgot lady Margaret's presence, and stood still ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... these bauble-toys of Time When Thy "forever" dawns upon the heart; Thy perfect fullness, Saviour, how divine, E'en while we taste its blessedness in part! Still yesterday, to-day, while ages roll In grand, eternal vastness, still the same, Oh! potent Healer! every whit made whole, I sing glad ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... worth the difficult scramble up and the apprehensive slide down. Being raised so high above all objects that divide attention or in some degree obstruct the view, permits a freedom of outlook that sensibly increases the appreciation of the vastness of the enclosed chamber and its enclosing walls. Efforts to establish the age of the deposit by observations on the yearly growth, would afford little satisfaction, for the obvious reason that conditions governing the growth are dependent, in a measure, on each season's vegetation. ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... Columbus belong exclusively to no age or country. They are the enduring heritage of all people. Your President has truly said: 'In all the transactions of history, there is no act which, for vastness and performance, can be compared to the discovery of the continent of America.' In the modest words of the great navigator, he 'only opened the gates'; and lo! there came in the builders of ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... the Reindeer, running under her weather quarter and shouting in chorus, before they brought anybody on deck. Sail was then made at once, and together the two cockle-shells plunged away into the vastness of the Pacific. This was necessary, as 'Frisco Kid informed Joe, in order to have an offing before the whole fury of the storm broke upon them. Otherwise they would be driven on the lee shore of the California coast. Grub and water, he said, could be obtained by running into the land when ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... mountain now, scanning the depths closely, and from time to time shouting, uttering a loud, prolonged cry, which soon died away in that silent vastness. Then, he put his ear to the ground, to listen; he thought he could distinguish a voice, and so he began to run, and shouted again, but he heard nothing more and sat down, worn out and in despair. Towards midday, he breakfasted ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... robbed their country of a trans-Atlantic empire. New France could not grow with a priest on guard at the gate to let in none but such as pleased him. One of the ablest of Canadian governors, La Galissoniere, seeing the feebleness of the colony compared with the vastness of its claims, advised the King to send ten thousand peasants to occupy the valley of the Ohio, and hold back the British swarm that was just then pushing its advance-guard over the Alleghanies. It needed no effort of the King to people his waste domain, not with ten thousand peasants, but with ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... and then another bosky-looking spot, which you learn to be about the same amount of manorial umbrage belonging to Lord Some-One-Else. And to right and left of these, in shaded stretches, lie other estates of equal consequence. It was therefore not the smallness but the vastness of the country that struck me, and I was not at all in the mood of a certain American who once, in my hearing, burst out laughing at an English answer to my inquiry as to whether my interlocutor often ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... from the circle of saints the idea of the repeated Star figure. The colonnade not only encloses the court but is produced along the sides of the Palaces of Agriculture and Transportation to form two corridors of almost Egyptian vastness. These two features, the arches and the colonnades, here at the center of the palace group, strike the Exposition's note of breadth. Their decoration is the key to the festal richness of all ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... bold, rocky bluffs; sweeping across undulating plains; rising with the uplifting mountains; peering into and over romantic mountain gorges; and growing up through the interstices of bowldered cascades. Or, standing on the mountain peaks, I have seen them sweep away into the vastness and grandeur of mighty, varied, and almost boundless expanse. These are but parts of my evergreen pictures. I have looked upon a simple holly bush when the wind of winter was upon it, scattering in lovely fragments its pure white robe of snow, revealing the gleaming of the rich ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... expressive music and tell their own tale. But, of course, when one has heard the opera many times—and twenty performances, supplemented by a study of Von Buelow's incomparable piano arrangement of the score, are hardly enough to enable us to begin to comprehend the real richness and vastness of Tristan—then gradually new features are found, new lights are thrown by the use of leit-motifs, and slowly the music yields us that multiplicity of complex delights—delights intellectual, emotional, or purely sensuous—that ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... just at the foot of a lodge-pole that had been erected on the very summit for a flagstaff. Certainly it was a sight to be remembered for many a day—a marvelous wonderland, stretching out in every direction. The detail of plants, trees, and winding trails was swallowed up, and only the vastness of the valleys and canyons could be seen, with here and there a silver ribbon of a stream. Far up in the blue vault two great eagles soared and circled. Here and there the last golden rays of sunlight fell on ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... find that quarter of the globe subjected to great and terrible revolutions, which confined and curbed the power of its various despotisms. Its empires for the most part built up by the successful invasions of Nomad tribes, contained in their very vastness the elements of dissolution. The Assyrian Nineveh had been conquered by the Babylonians and the Medes (B. C. 606); and Babylon, under the new Chaldaean dynasty, was attaining the dominant power of western Asia. The Median monarchy was scarce recovering ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the infinite relief of my narrow cell when I found myself back in solitary. It was all so safe, so secure. I felt like a lost child returned home again. I loved those very walls that I had so hated for five years. All that kept the vastness of space, like a monster, from pouncing upon me were those good stout walls of mine, close to hand on every side. Agoraphobia is a terrible affliction. I have had little opportunity to experience it, but from that ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... appoint you at once to the command of a galley; but to do so would do you no service, for it would excite against you the jealousy of all the young nobles in the fleet. Besides, you are so young, that although the council at home cannot but acknowledge the vastness of the service you have rendered, they might make your age an excuse for refusing to confirm the appointment; but if you like to come as my third officer, I can promise you that you shall have rapid ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty
... Samson lies," and yet the effect is amazing; and though the "for ever" is as old as Purcell, here it is newly used—used as if it had never been used before—to utter a depth of emotion that passes beyond the pathetic to the sublime. This very vastness of feeling, this power of stepping outside himself and giving a voice to the general emotions of humanity, prevents us recognising the personal note in Handel as we recognise it in Mozart. But occasionally the personal note may be ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... a cheery thing to go bowling along behind a spicy team, but especially so when traversing a wild and half-cultivated country, where everything around you is strange to the eye, and where the vastness of space conveys a feeling of grandeur; nor is it the less enjoyable when the scenery is decked in the rich attire of autumn, and seen through the medium of a clear and cloudless sky. Then, again, there is something peculiarly pleasing ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... the sale at Strawberry Hill must remember with peculiar interest, sounded well on paper. It was 56 feet long, 17 high, and 13 wide; yet was neither long enough, high enough, nor wide enough to inspire the indefinable sentiment by which we acknowledge vastness. We beheld it the scene of George Robins's triumphs—crowded to excess. Here strolled Lord John Russell; there, with heavy tread, walked Daniel O'Connell. Hallam, placid, kindly, gentle—the prince of book-worms—moved ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... of that series of monotonous and monstrous battles, a series punctuated only by names: Liege, Antwerp, Mons, Ypres, Verdun and Arras. And if nothing had happened besides the Titanic conflict of material armaments I believe that we should not yet be anywhere near realizing its vastness and its significance. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... perpetual game; and this, like Cleopatra's "worm, will do its kind" in the veins of man, wherever obstructions, natural or artificial, temporary or permanent, interfere with its prompt diffusion in the vastness of the general atmosphere. Our "house of life" stands generously open, for every "inmate bad" to come and go through the absorbent, unquestioned, except in the stomach, where the tangible poisons have to go by the act of swallowing and where they are often challenged and ejected. It seems at first ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... chaos of his mind. It seemed that the whole of his small imagined world had gone to pieces, and the immensity of the real world had been left to him in exchange—crushing him with an idea of its unexplored vastness, of its many countries, its myriad races. And yet, big as it all was, it could not provide breathing space for that ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... clearings threw shadows like trees. Then suddenly, as they peered in front of them between the trunks, the green of the sward turned to the blue of the water, and they saw a broad river running swiftly before them. In France it would have seemed a mighty stream, but, coming fresh from the vastness of the St. Lawrence, their eyes were used to great sheets of water. But Amos and De Catinat had both been upon the bosom of the Richelieu before, and their hearts bounded as they looked upon it, for they knew that this was the straight path which led them, the one ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... bell, yet not made of gross metal dug out of earth, but of an ethereal, sublimer material that floats impalpable and invisible in space—a vital bell suspended on nothing, giving out sounds in harmony with the vastness of blue heaven, the unsullied purity of nature, the glory of the sun, and conveying a mystic, a higher message to the soul than the sounds that ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... ascending continually for the conversion of the heathen; and I know that many of you are praying specially for the heathen of Melanesia. And so one's thoughts float out to India, and China, and Japan, and Africa, and the islands of the sea, and the very vastness of the work raises one's thoughts to God, as the only One by ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... dealing with men, and with human goods considered as means. It is a Greek rule: for the Greeks were of all nations the fondest admirers of man and the things of man. But when we ascend to God, we are out among the immensities and eternities. The vastness of creation, the infinity of the Creator,—there is no mode or measure there. In those heights the Hebrew Psalmist loved to soar. Christianity, with its central dogma of the Incarnation, is the meeting of Hebrew and Greek. That mystery clothes ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... tiny white disk on his right, hanging between rosy coronal wings; his native Earth, a bright greenish point suspended in the dark gulf below it; Mars, nearer, smaller, a little ocher speck above the shrunken sun. Above him, below him, in all directions was vastness, blackness, emptiness. Ebon infinity, sprinkled ...
— Salvage in Space • John Stewart Williamson
... applied in the library or study or laboratory, or in the workshop or factory or counting-house or council chamber, has not been keeping pace with the growth of our population, our wealth, our responsibilities. It is not to-day sufficient for the increasing vastness and complexity of the problems that confront a great nation. We in Great Britain have been too apt to rely upon our energy and courage and practical resourcefulness in emergencies, and thus have tended to neglect those efforts to accumulate knowledge, ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... continent. Sky, land, and sea disappear together out of the world when the Placido—as the saying is—goes to sleep under its black poncho. The few stars left below the seaward frown of the vault shine feebly as into the mouth of a black cavern. In its vastness your ship floats unseen under your feet, her sails flutter invisible above your head. The eye of God Himself—they add with grim profanity—could not find out what work a man's hand is doing in there; and you would be free to call the devil to your aid with impunity if even his ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... time drift round me, and within There is the knell of passing and decay: The sun-smit vastness of the world doth weigh Upon my riddling soul like hidden sin, And bids it speak. Thou desert art my kin! I crumble to thee, waning day by day; But I am cursed with questions that betray The end of life before death's hours begin, My eyes are staring, yet their sight is blind. My ears are hollow, ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... along; the riders, their hats thrust back, lolled in their saddles, shouting conversation to each other, relaxing after the day's work; through the clouds strong shafts of light belittled the living creatures, threw into proportion the vastness of ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... understand him not. Nature would measure time by the succession of thoughts and acts which constitute real life, and not by hours of emptiness. They pass up the church-aisle, and raise their eyes to the ceiling. Had our Adam and Eve become mortal in some European city, and strayed into the vastness and sublimity of an old cathedral, they might have recognized the purpose for which the deep-souled founders reared it. Like the dim awfulness of an ancient forest, its very atmosphere would have incited them to prayer. Within ...
— The New Adam and Eve (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in his mental vision the walls of the room seemed to fade, and he was only conscious of a vastness of space, and knew that for this brief moment he was looking into eternity and realising for the first time the wonder ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... very act of springing out. Lower down were six reapers all in a litter, their limbs crossing, their dead, unwinking eyes gazing upwards at the glare of heaven. These things I see as in a photograph. But soon, by the merciful provision of nature, the over-excited nerve ceased to respond. The very vastness of the horror took away from its personal appeal. Individuals merged into groups, groups into crowds, crowds into a universal phenomenon which one soon accepted as the inevitable detail of every scene. Only here and there, ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... this and whose power sustains it, to see how utterly beyond our adequate comprehension he must be. As men in old tales used to take diffused superhumans, the genii, and by magic word bring them down into a stoppered bottle where they could be held in manageable form, so man has taken the vastness of God and run ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... door looking up at the summer blue sky that held a few soft white clouds, such as might have overhung the same place at the same hour thousands of years before, and such as would lazily drift over it in a thousand years to come. The morning had an immeasurable vastness, through which some crows flying across the pasture above the house sent their voices on the spacious stillness. A perception of the unity of all things under the sun flashed and faded upon her, as such glimpses do. Of ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... air became salty, the wind rose and soon the little boat was bobbing up and down in a manner to give discomfort to my stomach. The water, building terraces and battlements, reflected enough light to impress me with the diminutiveness of the boat, set in the vastness on which it floated. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... or of the Monument can anything like a view of the city as a whole be obtained. It is indispensable, however, to make one or the other of those ascents when a clear day can be found, not so much because the view is fine, as because you will get a sensation of vastness and multitude not easily to be forgotten. There is or was, not long ago, a point on the ridge that connects Hampstead with Highgate from which, as you looked over London to the Surrey Hills beyond, the modern Babylon presented something like ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... another conception and made another attempt. Like more than one great barbaric warrior, he admired the Roman empire that had fallen, its vastness all in one, and its powerful organization under the hand of a single master. He thought he could resuscitate it, durably, through the victory of a new people and a new faith, by the hand of Franks and Christians. With this view he labored to conquer, convert, and govern. He tried ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... filling the woods with cries, swelling the murmuring rivulets with tears, her noble parents with a generous rage reviling her, and her betray'd sister loading her bow'd head with curses and reproaches, and all about her looking forlorn and sad. Judge, oh judge, my adorable brother, of the vastness of my courage and passion, when even this deplorable prospect cannot defend me from the resolution of giving you admittance into my apartment this night, nor shall ever drive you ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... therefore, and best for the reputation of him who in his Subitanes hath thus censured, to recall his sentence. And if, out of the abundance of his volumes, and the readiness of his quill, and the vastness of his other employments, especially in the great Audit for Accounts, he can spare us aught to the better understanding of this point, he shall be thanked in public, and what hath offended in the book shall willingly submit to his correction— provided he be sure not to come with those ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... canoe without chafing against it, or rebounding, so that they were noiseless. No fishes rose to the surface. There was nothing living near, except a blue butterfly, which settled on the mast, having ventured thus far from land. The vastness of the sky, over-arching the broad water, the sun, and the motionless filaments of cloud, gave no repose for his gaze, for they were seemingly still. To the weary gaze motion is repose; the waving boughs, the foam-tipped ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... the triumvirate of soldiers who achieved the highest distinction in the Civil War. In the Senate one speaker gave him the highest place, but on the contrary I cannot rank him above either Grant or Sheridan. When we consider the vastness of the command with which Grant was entrusted through a period of more than a year, the magnitude and success of his operations, and the tenacity with which he prosecuted all his varied undertakings, it must appear that neither Sherman nor Sheridan was entitled to the ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... Vastness and swiftness of the Spanish conquests, 6. Conversion by the sword, 7. Rapid success and sudden downfall of missions in Florida, 9. The like story in New Mexico, ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... an intense, glowing epic of the great desert, sunlit, barbaric, with its marvelous atmosphere of vastness and loneliness. ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... detect them. In places the forest was like the stately aisles of a great shadowy cathedral, with giant cedars and camphor-wood trees rising in towering columns high above where the graceful festoons of liana and moss imparted an imposing scene of vastness and tropical beauty. In such places the ground was clean and springy to the footfall and the impression of a splendid solitude was such as one feels in a great deserted cathedral. At times we crossed matted and snaky-looking little streams ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... have my doubts still; and I should say that it might be as difficult for a very cultivated and agreeable man servant to get on in London society, as for an artist or poet to feel at home in the first circles of New York. Possibly, however, London society, because of its almost immeasurable vastness, can take in more of more sorts of people, without the consciousness of differences which keeps our own first circles so elect. I venture, somewhat wildly, somewhat unwarrantably, the belief that English society is less sensitive to moral differences than ours, ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... he will find again all that the first had, finding still in these others the same thing without end and without cessation. Let him lose himself in wonders as amazing in their littleness as the others in their vastness. For who will not be astounded at the fact that our body, which a little while ago was imperceptible in the universe, itself imperceptible in the bosom of the whole, is now a colossus, a world, or rather a whole, in respect of the nothingness which we cannot reach? He who regards himself ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... appointed room of one of America's great hotels that night, he might have wondered at the manner in which five of Chicago's great men hung upon the words of one little Japanese, who, now and then as he spoke, as if to indicate the vastness and grandeur of his theme, spread his hands ...
— Triple Spies • Roy J. Snell
... land, dim land, oh, how the vastness calls! Far land, star land, oh, how the stillness falls! For you never can tell if it's heaven or hell, And I'm taking the trail on trust; But I haven't a doubt That my soul will leap out On ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... of tons, boy. I am not exaggerating. You do not understand the vastness of these places. That glacier you are looking at is only one of the outlets of a huge reservoir of ice and snow, extending up there in the mountains for miles. It is forced down, as you see, bending into the irregularities of the valley where they are not too great; ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... rigid, in the happy tomb of Thi; but he glanced at them unheeding, did not recognize his ancestors. And he did not care to penetrate into the tombs of Mera and Meri-Ra-ankh, into the Serapeum and the Mestaba of Ptah-hotep. Perhaps he was right. The Serapeum is grand in its vastness, with its long and high galleries and its mighty vaults containing the huge granite sarcophagi of the sacred bulls of Apis; Mera, red and white, welcomes you from an elevated niche benignly; Ptah-hotep, priest of the fifth dynasty, receives you, seated at a table that ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... in the darkness face to face, the silence of the sky, arched in its vastness above the little hill, the only witness ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... attempt to treat of the animosities of parties, and of the morals of the state, with minuteness of detail, and suitably to the vastness of the subject, time would fail me sooner than matter. I therefore return ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust
... that my readers should not be intimidated by the apparent vastness and complexity of this enterprise of forming the literary taste. It is not so vast nor so complex as it looks. There is no need whatever for the inexperienced enthusiast to confuse and frighten himself with thoughts of "literature ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... The vastness, the silence, the catastrophic desolation of the place, were all the more impressive because of the relatively recent date of the buildings. As Moulay-Ismael had dealt with Volubilis, so time had dealt with his own Meknez; and the destruction which it had taken thousands ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... the stature of a man. This is perhaps one reason why the French and English cathedrals, even those of moderate dimensions are more truly impressive than even the largest of the great Renaissance structures, such as St. Peter's in Rome. A gigantic order furnishes no true measure for the eye: its vastness is revealed only by the accident of some human presence which forms a basis of comparison. That architecture is not necessarily the most awe-inspiring which gives the impression of having been built ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... drill-sergeant in verse, capable, beyond any other English poet, of putting great masses through the most complicated evolutions without clash or confusion, but he was not curious that every foot should be at the same angle. In reading "Paradise Lost" one has a feeling of vastness. You float under an illimitable sky, brimmed with sunshine or hung with constellations; the abysses of space are about you; you hear the cadenced surges of an unseen ocean; thunders mutter round the horizon; and if the scene change, it is with an elemental movement like the shifting ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... near the end of their little expedition, entirely new feelings got the mastery of the whole party. The solitary and gloomy grandeur of the coasts, the sublime sterility,—for even naked sands may become sublime by their vastness,—the heavy moanings of the ocean on the beach, and the entire spectacle of the solitude, blended as it was with the associations of Africa, time, and the changes of history, united to produce sensations of a pleasing melancholy. The spectacle of the ship, bringing ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... Desire, Dreaming 'neath the August sun, Thus my meditations run— What if that great Ember bright Were a monster Pipe alight, Or the glowing from afar Of some Fire-God's cigar? If the Smoker's Peace abide In that sun fire, multiplied By its vastness, I will be Henceforth a ...
— The Smoker's Year Book • Oliver Herford
... thousands of human hearts as it was borne out upon the night wind to the ships. Those dread shapes we saw through our periscopes are dust: "the pestilence that walketh in darkness" and "the destruction that wasteth at noonday" are already images of speech: only the vastness of the stakes; the intensity of the effort and the grandeur of the sacrifice still stand out clearly when we, in dreams, behold the Dardanelles. Why not leave that shining impression as a martial cloak to cover the ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... sympathetic being at his side, so without hesitation he spoke—in what he believes even now must have been a very decorative manner—of the many thousand persons who were then wrapped in sleep, of the constantly changing lights which appeared in the city beneath, and of the vastness which everywhere lay around. ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... this vastness was as fraught with mystery as the scene, and was broken only by the scrambling of the horses over the stones and their heavy breathing. Thus throughout the rest of the night they wended steadily upward, only pausing now and then to ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the fair earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in the awful vastness of the universe. In the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built for themselves, mankind were to remain no longer. And now it is all gone—like an unsubstantial pageant faded; and between us and the old English themselves a gulf of mystery which the prose ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... of the apartment opened like a veranda, giving a view of the green country and the gray sky beyond. By way of a chair, they gave me a square cushion of black velvet; and behold me seated low, in the middle of this large, empty room, which by its very vastness is almost chilly. The two little women (who are the servants of the house and my very humble servants, too), awaited my orders, in attitudes expressive of ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... season, was the end of Barney Bill, and Paul found himself thrillingly alone in London. At first its labyrinthine vastness overwhelmed him, causing him to feel an unimportant atom, which may have been good for his soul, but was not agreeable to his vanity. By degrees, however, he learned the lay of the great thoroughfares, especially ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... deep-embrasured windows, from which the defences had now been removed and through which the inmates could have noble views of the lawns and gardens beyond the moat. The little company of three seemed, as it were, lost in the vastness of the chamber as they sat at meat together at the oak table by the hearth at one end of the room, Brilliana at the head, with Halfman at her right and Evander at her left as the guest and stranger. It ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... mere handful; for the whole mountain round them was full of that heavenly army. Chariots of fire and horsemen of fire thronged it in every part. High up into the viewless air mounted their wheeling bands: rank beyond rank, and army beyond army, they seemed to stretch on into the vastness of space, until the gazer's wearied eye was unable to gaze on them. And all of these were gathered round his master. They were God's host, keeping guard over God's servant. And they who would injure him must ...
— The Rocky Island - and Other Similitudes • Samuel Wilberforce
... vastness and wealth of the empire will be still farther encreased, if we regard the cities which it contained, though it is impossible to decide in most instances the extent and population of many places which were honoured with the appellation of cities. ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... of its kind standing on the face of the globe; and yet, after all, what would it be even then as compared with one of the great pyramids? Modern attempts cannot bear comparison with those of the old world in simple vastness. But in lieu of simple vastness, the modern world aims to achieve either beauty or utility. By the Washington monument, if completed, neither would be achieved. An obelisk with the proportions of a needle may be very graceful; but an obelisk which requires an expanse of flat-roofed, sprawling ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... may be days before we really get to work," said Venning, when the vastness of the Congo was forced on his attention by a casual ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... egoist in one's joy; not to be a craven in one's sorrow. You see, a great view suggests the world, the vastness of things, the multiplicity of life. I think that must be it. And of course it reminds one, too, that one ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... great To set Thyself so far above! But we partake of Thine estate, Established in Thy strength and in Thy love: That love hath made eternal room for me In the sweet vastness of its ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... with those I had already experienced in the air. He told me that my wish might easily be gratified; adding that, although he had never been beyond the top of a steeple, he could take it upon him to assure me, that the feeling of vastness and sublimity induced by an aerial ascent, was almost in direct contrast to the sensations of the diver—the one being comparable to the effects produced by the enlarged views of generalization, indulged in by speculative ontologists—the other, to those that result from the inductive ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various |
