"Apocalyptic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... trifler that Kant, (who knew him only by the most trivial of his pretensions,) eighty years ago, supposed him. Assuredly, Mr. Clowes was no trifler, but lived habitually a life of power, though in a world of religious mysticism and of apocalyptic visions. To him, being such a man by nature and by habit, it was in effect the lofty Lady Geraldine from Coleridge's "Christabel" that stood before him in this infidel lady. A magnificent witch she was, like the Lady Geraldine; having the same superb beauty; the same power of ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... commentators is a sign which in itself might be taken as a presage of new light to come in an epoch of miracle yet to be. Unhappily it is as yet but a partial revelation that has been vouchsafed to them. To the recognition of the apocalyptic fact that a workman can only be known by his work, and that without examination of his method and material that work can hardly be studied to much purpose, they have yet to add the knowledge of a further truth no less recondite ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... between the Apocalypse and the Gospel, in respect of diction; only it is contended that two very potent influences must be taken into account which will explain this difference. In the first place, the subjects of the two books stand widely apart. The apocalyptic purport of the one book necessarily tinges its diction and imagery with a very strong Hebraic colouring, which we should not expect to find in a historical narrative. Secondly, a wide interval of time separates the two works. The Apocalypse was written, according ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... this apocalyptic phrasing of hope has been traced too often to require long rehearsal here. If the Greeks were essentially philosophers and welcomed congenially ideas like endless cosmic cycles, the Hebrews were essentially practical and dramatic in their thinking and they welcomed a picture of God's victory capable ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... Mail Coach it was that distributed over the face of the land, like the opening of apocalyptic vials, the heart-shaking news of Trafalgar, of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo. . . . The grandest chapter of our experience, within the whole Mail-Coach service, was on those occasions when we went down from London with the news of Victory. Five years of life ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... luxury—such is Oriental splendor! We read about it all our days, but we comprehend it not until we see it. Smyrna is a very old city. Its name occurs several times in the Bible, one or two of the disciples of Christ visited it, and here was located one of the original seven apocalyptic churches spoken of in Revelations. These churches were symbolized in the Scriptures as candlesticks, and on certain conditions there was a sort of implied promise that Smyrna should be endowed with a "crown of life." She was to "be faithful unto death"—those were the terms. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... heart still fluttering madly, rose from her knees with the tremulous aid of the old man and opened her eyes. She could hardly believe that she would not find the earth an apocalyptic ruin of uprooted hills. She breathed deeply of the relief, and her eyes ran along the remembered things as if calling the roll. Suddenly her eyes paused, widened. Her hand went out to clutch ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... which seem perpetually to recur, and to lie in ambush for the hours of sickness and distress." Shelley elsewhere writes: "What think you of Lord B.'s last volume? In my opinion it contains finer poetry than has appeared in England since Paradise Lost. Cain is apocalyptic; it is a revelation not before communicated to man." In the same strain, Scott says of the author of the "grand and tremendous drama:" "He has certainly matched Milton on his own ground." The worst effect of those attacks appears in the shifts to which Byron ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... had subsided, David had a suggestion to make. He thought that Lucien's poem, Saint John in Patmos, was possibly too biblical to be read before an audience but little familiar with apocalyptic poetry. Lucien, making his first appearance before the most exacting public in the Charente, seemed to be nervous. David advised him to take Andre de Chenier and substitute certain pleasure for a dubious delight. Lucien was a perfect reader, the listeners would ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... hopes and dreams, we have, as in the musical idiom in which he expresses them, reflections of the imagination and the temperament of Africa and the African. On the other hand, in the themes of this rude rhapsodical poetry—the House of Bondage, Moses, the Promised Land, Heaven, the apocalyptic visions of Freedom—but freedom confined miraculously and to another world—these are the reflections of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... the Empire this decivilization became a definite barbarism, owing to the nearness of wild neighbours who were ready to destroy as deafly and blindly as things are destroyed by fire. Save for the lurid and apocalyptic locust-flight of the Huns, it is perhaps an exaggeration to talk, even in those darkest ages, of a deluge of the barbarians; at least when we are speaking of the old civilization as a whole. But a deluge of ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... the sixteenth century, which in Du Bartas, in Agrippa d'Aubigne, and in passages of the tragedian Montchrestien, strikes notes hardly touched elsewhere in French literature. The Triomphe de l'Agneau displays her at her best in this respect, and not unfrequently comes not too far off from the apocalyptic resonance of d'Aubigne himself. Again, the Bergerie included in the Nativity comedy or mystery, though something of a Dresden Bergerie (to use a later image), is graceful and elegant enough in ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... paper, this incoherence, is ever read, the others will understand it about as much as the investigating hawk. But none the less be it of record that I, Karslake, SAW. It reads like Revelations: 'I, John, saw.' It is just that. There is something apocalyptic in it all. I have seen a vision, but cannot—there is the pitch of anguish in the impotence—bear record. If time were allowed to order and arrange the words of description, this exaltation of spirit, in ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... seen and spoken with her alone; I had ventured boldly; I had been not ill received; I had seen her change colour, had enjoyed the undissembled kindness of her eyes; and now, in a moment, down comes upon the scene that apocalyptic figure with the nightcap and the horse-pistol, and with the very wind of her coming behold me separated from my love! Gratitude and admiration contended in my breast with the extreme of natural rancour. My appearance in her house at past midnight had an air (I could not disguise it from ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... resemblance its imagery bears to that of apocalyptic visions of a later period is interesting, as evidence of the latter's remote ancestry, and of the development in the use of primitive material to suit a completely changed political outlook. But those are points which ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... evangelist, apostle, disciple, saint; the Fathers, the Apostolical Fathers^; Holy Men of old, inspired penmen. Adj. scriptural, biblical, sacred, prophetic; evangelical, evangelistic; apostolic, apostolical^; inspired, theopneustic^, theophneusted^, apocalyptic, ecclesiastical, canonical, textuary^. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... tongue. If she failed when she quitted her own province and attempted to occupy one in which she had neither part nor lot, this reproach is common to her with a crowd of distinguished men. Newton failed when he turned from the courses of the stars and the ebb and flow of the ocean to apocalyptic seals and vials. Bentley failed when he turned from Homer and Aristophanes to edit the "Paradise Lost." Enigo failed when he attempted to rival the Gothic churches of the fourteenth century. Wilkie failed when he took it into his head that the "Blind Fiddler" and the "Rent Day" were unworthy of ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... because she is spoiled as a pet. Among the grandest equipages that sweep through the streets of heaven will be those occupied by sisters who sacrificed themselves for brothers. They will have the finest of the Apocalyptic white horses, and many who on earth looked down upon them will have to turn out to ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... from the Kutrov-Alva variations, for Bill had only been speaking for ten minutes, and could not be expected to arrive at any point whatsoever for at least another fifteen. From the east of us came apocalyptic figures of nuclear physics; from the west, I heard the strains of Mondrian interwoven with Picasso; south of us, a post mortem on the latest "betrayal" of this or that aspiration of "the people", and to the north, we heard the mysteries of atonality. It was while ...
— The Troubadour • Robert Augustine Ward Lowndes
... hideously mimicked the melody. Yet these footfalls murmured as a sea-shell. Every phrase stood out before the pianist, exquisitely clear; his brain had only once before harboured such an exalted mood. There was the expectation of great things coming to pass; dim rumours of an apocalyptic future, when the glory that never was on sea or land should rend the veil of the visible and make clear all that obscures and darkens. The transfiguration which informs the soul of one taken down in epileptic seizure ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... by insisting upon too minute and specific interpretation. But, at the same time, we must not forget that, from the very beginning of the Jewish Revelation, from the time when the seven-branched candlestick was appointed for the Tabernacle, right down to the day when the Apocalyptic Seer saw in Patmos the Son of Man walking in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks, the metaphor has had one meaning. The aggregate of God's people are intended to be, as Jesus told us immediately after He had ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... that he detected the presence of those Greek words in Nebuchadnezzar's edicts, which many modern critics have contended could not be introduced into Chaldaea antecedently to the Macedonian conquest.(209) The peculiarity alleged to belong to the prophetical part is its apocalyptic tone. It looks, it has been said, historical rather than prophetical. Definite events, and a chain of definite events, are predicted with the precision of historical narrative;(210) whereas most prophecy is a moral sermon, in which general moral predictions are given, with specific historic ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... perhaps considerably later. There are indications also that Babylonian ideas found an entrance into the Jewish Kabbala,—the strange mystic system of the middle ages, the sources of which are to be sought in the apocalyptic chapters ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... have lately been making large quotations from the poems of Mr. Rudyard Kipling. They might, if they had been so minded, have laid under similar contribution the Revelation of St. John the Divine. There, too, with all the imagery usual in Apocalyptic literature, is to be found a description of vague and confused fighting, when most of the Kings of the earth come together to fight a last and desperate battle. The Seven Angels go forth, each armed with a vial, the first poisoning the ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... seen any of the Sibylline oracles, now found in the third book of the collection, which contains so strange a syncretism of Mithraic, Greek, and Jewish conceptions, but we can no longer doubt that he was in a general way well informed and quite thoroughly permeated with such mystical and apocalyptic sentiments as every Gadarene and any Greek from the Orient might well know. It speaks well for his love of Rome that despite these influences it was he who produced the most thoroughly ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... fusion of the artist's soul, which kindles, quickens, INFORMS those who contemplate, respond to, reproduce sympathetically within themselves the greater spirit which attracts and absorbs their own. The work of Art is apocalyptic of the artist's own personality. It CANNOT be impersonal. As is the temper of his spirit, so is, MUST be, the temper of his Art product.* It is hard to believe, almost impossible to believe, that 'Titus Andronicus' could have been written by Shakespeare, the external testimony to the authorship, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... and of Lacunza's scheme grounded on the books of Daniel or the Apocalypse, interpreted as either of the two, Irving or Lacunza, understands them. Again, I protest against all identification of the coming with the Apocalyptic Millennium, which in my belief began ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... there is no flour, our tiny portions of bread are made of oats, and rather rotten ones, that had been reserved for the cab-horses. Now the poor things have nothing to eat and have become a collection of Apocalyptic beasts. We go on foot as much as we can, as they ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... hang right across the clouds like the Seven Stars, an apocalyptic constellation, a veritable sky sign; and again the name was an angel standing with a silver trumpet, and again it was a song. The heavens opened, and across the blue rift it hung in a glory of celestial fire, while from behind and above the clouds ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... sunset; he invented metaphors that were worth a king's ransom, and figures of speech that deserve the Prix Montyon. Then reviewing his work, he formulated an axiom which will go down with a nimbus through time: Whomsoever a thought however complex, a vision however apocalyptic, surprises without words to convey it, is not a writer. The inexpressible does not exist." It is impossible to taste at this man's table. One must eat the whole dinner to appreciate its opulent inevitability. Still I may offer a few olives, a branch or two of succulent celery to those ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... opposition or consent, Each thing, or person, or event, Or seeming neutral howsoe'er, All, in the live, electric air, Awoke, took aspect, and confess'd In her a centre of unrest, Yea, stocks and stones within me bred Anxieties of joy and dread. O, bright apocalyptic sky O'erarching childhood! Far and nigh Mystery and obscuration none, Yet nowhere any moon or sun! What reason for these sighs? What hope, Daunting with its audacious scope The disconcerted heart, affects These ceremonies and respects? Why stratagems in everything? Why, why not kiss her in ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... walls of the Valley to speak of the Valley itself, as seen from this great altitude. There lies a sweep of emerald grass turned to chrysoprase by the slant-beamed sun,—chrysoprase beautiful enough to have been the tenth foundation-stone of John's apocalyptic heaven. Broad and fair just beneath us, it narrows to a little strait of green between the butments that uplift the giant domes. Far to the westward, widening more and more, it opens into the bosom of great mountain-ranges,—into a field of perfect light, misty by its own excess,—into ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... suggest that from the commonalty, the "tall clownish young men," were raised up the great champions of the Truth,—though sorely troubled by the wiles of Duessa, by the craft of the arch-sorcerer, by the force and pride of the great powers of the Apocalyptic Beast and Dragon, finally overcomes them, and wins the deliverance of ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... is a symphonic episode (Der Rufer in der Wueste), and we hear "the voice of one crying in the wilderness" in fierce and anguished tones. There is an apocalyptic finale where the choir sing Klopstock's beautiful ode on the promise of ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... this part of the Apocalyptic prediction. Only two years after the death of that northern "scourge of God," Attila, who boasted that "the grass never grew where his horse had trod;" Genseric set sail from the burning shores of Africa; and, like a burning mountain launched into the sea, accompanied by a vast army of ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... Thomas Smith. And if for once my grandfather suffered himself to be hurried, by his sense of humour and justice, into that remark about the case of Providence and the Baker, I should be sorry for any of his children who should have stumbled into the same attitude of criticism. In the apocalyptic style of the housekeeper of Invermay, woe be to that person! But there was no fear; husband and sons all entertained for the pious, tender soul the same chivalrous and moved affection. I have spoken with one who remembered her, and who had been the intimate and equal of her sons, and ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Ishmaelite could. I discoursed theology,—sat with the most docile air possible while he explained to me all the ins and outs in his system of the universe, past, present, and future,—heard him dilate calmly on the Millennium, and expound prophetic symbols, marching out before me his whole apocalyptic menagerie of beasts and dragons with heads and horns innumerable, to all which I gave edifying attention, taking occasion now and then to turn a compliment in favor of the ladies,—never ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... beholding a gorgeous city—the fancied place he had likened to the new Jerusalem, though there was perhaps more of the painter's imagination and less of the diamond merchant's in his dreams thereof than in those of the Apocalyptic writer. And the city acquired a tangibility, a permanence, a hold on his life, mainly from the one nucleus of fact that the man for whose knowledge and purposes he had so much reverence was actually living there; not only so, but living among the more thoughtful ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... my eye caught his, and was fixed as his was fixed in an apocalyptic stare. I had thought him ordinary as he entered, save for his strange, cautious manner; but if the other people had seen him then they would have screamed and emptied the room. They did not see him, and ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... a Paul or a John has won for the Master, in their vocation as 'fishers of men,' are their 'hope and joy and crown of rejoicing, in the presence of our Lord Jesus.' The great benediction which the Spirit bade the Apocalyptic seer write over 'the dead which die in the Lord,' is anticipated in both its parts by this mysterious meal on the beach. 'They rest from their labours' inasmuch as they find the food prepared for them, and sit down to partake; 'Their works do follow them' inasmuch as ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... blossoming of its Mystical Rose,—unless it be the silhouette of some passing gull, whirling his sickle-wings against the crimsoning. Ever, as the sun floats higher, the flood shifts its color. Sometimes smooth and gray, yet flickering with the morning gold, it is the vision of John,—the apocalyptic Sea of Glass mixed with fire;—again, with the growing breeze, it takes that incredible purple tint familiar mostly to painters of West Indian scenery;—once more, under the blaze of noon, it changes to a waste of broken emerald. With evening, the horizon assumes tints of inexpressible ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... favorite portion of the blessed Book, the others listening spellbound. Even Otto Relstaub, who saw and heard little of genuine Christian teachings in his cheerless home, was touched as never before by the indescribably solemn story of the apocalyptic vision. ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... stands in the foreground of it as the chosen people of the God of all the world. Now these predictions, which with the prophets are vague and idealised, were taken by the Jews always more seriously and worked out in detail. After the prophet comes the apocalyptic writer, such as Daniel (the Apocalypse of the New Testament belongs to the same class of literature), who is able to give the exact course of the history which is to lead up to the final judgment, to fix its precise date, and to give many details of the ultimate state of affairs. These ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... stars upon the head of the apocalyptic woman are the twelve constellations of the Zodiac. Clothed with the sun, woman here represents the Divinity of the feminine, its spirituality as opposed to the materiality of the masculine; for in Egypt ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... came the rumour that the Loup-garou was abroad and was sowing panic in its wake. Just what kind of animal the Loup-garou might be, was somewhat difficult to ascertain. No one in our vicinity had ever seen him, and from all I could gather he seemed to be a strange sort of apocalyptic beast, gifted with horns, extraordinary force, and ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... W. W. Jacobs, telling of the smoke and sparkle of the Thames. No; I concede that I am not a Cockney humourist. No; I am not worthy to be. Some time, after sad and strenuous after-lives; some time, after fierce and apocalyptic incarnations; in some strange world beyond the stars, I may become at last a Cockney humourist. In that potential paradise I may walk among the Cockney humourists, if not an equal, at least a companion. ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... fighter, whose right hand has, as it were, been lopped off, and who has continued the contest with his left. In his writings he is always the sufferer, because a temporary and insuperable destiny deprives him of his own and the correct way of conveying his thoughts—that is to say, in the form of apocalyptic and triumphant examples. His writings contain nothing canonical or severe: the canons are to be found in his works as a whole. Their literary side represents his attempts to understand the instinct which urged him to create his works and to get a glimpse of himself through them. If he succeeded ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... light. The wild dash of the waters, as contrasted with the fiery uproar above them, formed a scene of unequaled sublimity. In many districts, the mass of the population were terror-struck, and the more enlightened were awed at contemplating so vivid a picture of the Apocalyptic image—that of the stars of heaven falling to the earth, even as a fig-tree casting her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. A planter of South Carolina, thus describes the effect of the scene upon the ignorant blacks: ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... the year 1000 was regarded with universal terror in Christendom. A fear, based on a supposed apocalyptic prophecy that the end of the world was at hand, paralysed all political and social life. Churches were too small to contain the immense throngs of fearful penitents: legacies and donations from conscience-stricken worshippers ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... hath understood! The breaking of the Apocalyptic seal; Twice rings the summons.—Hail and fire and blood! Then the third ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... of the geographical bearings of the gates of the Celestial City as seen in the apocalyptic vision, were correct or not, we cannot doubt that she was right in the deduction her faith drew from them; and that somewhere, whether North, East, South, or West, to our dim vision, there is a gate that will be opened for our good Harriet, ...
— Harriet, The Moses of Her People • Sarah H. Bradford
... convey might have been told almost as perfectly upon the lute or viol. His world is a strange one—a world not of hills and fields and flowers and men of flesh and blood, but one where the people are embodied ecstasies, the colours tints from evening clouds or apocalyptic jewels, the scenery a flood of light or a background of illuminated gold. His mystic gardens, where the ransomed souls embrace, and dance with angels on the lawns outside the City of the Lamb, are such as were never trodden by the foot of man in any ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... Activity, would achieve that completeness of life which the mystics dare to call "deification." This is the substance of that redemption of the world, which all religions proclaim or demand: the consummation which is crudely imagined in the Apocalyptic dreams of the prophets and seers. It is the true incarnation of the Divine Wisdom: and you must learn to see with Paul the pains and disorders of creation— your own pains, efforts, and difficulties too—as incidents in the travail of that royal birth. Patriots have sometimes been asked ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... at the time when people were talking about some menace of the end of the world, not apocalyptic but astronomical; and the cloud that covered the little town of Beaconsfield might have fitted in with such a fancy. It faded, however, as I left the place further behind; and in London the weather, though wet, was comparatively clear. It was almost as if Beaconsfield ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... like the stream Of John's Apocalyptic dream This mapled ridge shall Horeb be, Yon green-banked ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... as an Apocalyptic message on the soil of the Old Testament, and as the fulfilment of the law and the prophets, and yet is a new thing, the creation of a universal religion on the basis of that of the Old Testament. It appeared when the time was fulfilled, that is, it is not without a connection with the stage ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... explaining to him the particular virtues of books discussed, or of antique works of art inspected. During those halcyon years, before the invasion of Charles VIII., it seemed as though the peace of Italy might last unbroken. No one foresaw the apocalyptic vials of wrath which were about to be poured forth upon her plains and cities through the next half-century. Rarely, at any period of the world's history, perhaps only in Athens between the Persian and the Peloponnesian wars, has culture, in the highest and best sense of that word, prospered ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... respect of doctrine and worship, being an argument against, it is an argument for it. The Romish church, which never knew the predicted wilderness-life, could not, for this very reason, be the woman of the 12th Apocalyptic chapter; that is, could not be the ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... communications of his penned in hours of exaltation, when visions of Constantine's city, the mosque of Aya Sofia towering aloft, warmed his fancy and the sheen of Byzantine brocades and the quaint paraphernalia of bygone days inspired his apocalyptic words. His language in those telegrams and letters was highfaluting and bombastic. And I read other communications of his—mostly abject appeals for help—devoid of dignity and manliness, when the gloom of dissipated illusions was made unbearable by fear of dethronement ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... sudden recollection, all the stormy period here ended rushed in upon my mind; the whole panorama of danger and tempest through which these gallant fellows had so stanchly stood by me—these gallant fellows now parting from me. Rapidly, as in some apocalyptic vision, every scene of strife with Man and Nature, through which these poor men and women had borne me company, and solaced me by the simple sympathy of common suffering, came hurrying across my memory; for each face before me was ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... orthodox productions; or did it bear the name of one renowned for his piety and knowledge of divine things? The stamp of antiquity was necessary in a certain sense; but the theocratic spirit was the leading consideration. Ecclesiastes was admitted because it bore the name of Solomon; and Daniel's apocalyptic writings, because veiled under the name of an old prophet. New psalms were taken in because of their association with much older ones in the temple service. Yet the first book of Maccabees was excluded, ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... worthless, is in reality no claim whatever. Matter is not Mind, to claim aught; but Mind is God, and evil finds no place in good. When we get near enough to God to see this, the springtide of Truth in Christian Science will burst upon us in the similitude of the Apocalyptic pictures. No night will be there, and there will be no more sea. There will be no need of the sun, for Spirit will be the light of the city, and matter will be proved a myth. Until centuries pass, and this vision of Truth is ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... have not understood why the Virgin Mary should continue to wear blue satin garments in heaven. I have even dared to ask myself why those gigantic demons, Enakim and Hephilim, came so frequently to fight the cherubim on the apocalyptic plains of Armageddon; and I cannot explain to my own mind how Satans can argue with Angels. Monsieur le Baron Seraphitus assured me that those details concerned only the angels who live on earth in human form. The visions of the prophet are often blurred with grotesque figures. One ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... permit us now to even touch upon, much less delineate, the all-important principles symbolized by the recorded martyrdom of Jesus, and the doctrine of atonement. But they, and all the eschatology of the Gospels, and with which the apocalyptic book of riddles is filled, will be readily unravelled as we still farther trace the working of those laws already seen, that are not restricted in their operation by relations of time and space, but govern through the ages the travail of the embodied or disembodied ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... him whose prerogative was Victory, what vision did arise? An apocalyptic vision: blackness of darkness forever, and side by side with chaos, fair fields of living green, through which a young girl walked towards a womanhood as fair as hers who sat beside him. Unconscious of wrong that child, and yet how deeply, how variously wronged! If he had meditated a great ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... shines and the sky is still blue. But between it and the American people stretches a veil of printed paper. Curious! the fathers of this nation read nothing but the Bible. That too, it may be said, was a veil; but a veil woven of apocalyptic visions, of lightning and storm, of Leviathan, and the wrath of Jehovah. What is the stuff of the modern veil, we have seen. And surely the contrast is calculated ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... occasion here met and embraced. In very truth, the joys of the redeemed, and the horrors of lost souls, were depicted in colors that only lips "touched with a live coal from the altar" could adequately describe. In the presence of such lurid imagery, even the inspired revelation of the apocalyptic vision seems but sober narrative ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... my child. Do you remember, in the apocalyptic vision, when it was asked, 'What are these, which are arrayed in white robes? and whence come they?' It was answered, 'These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes and made them white in the ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... bloomed out in art, and especially in the cathedrals. In the gargoyles overhanging the walls, in the grotesques clambering about the towers or perched upon pinnacles, in the dragons prowling under archways or lurking in bosses of foliage, in the apocalyptic beasts carved upon the stalls of the choir, stained into the windows, wrought into the tapestries, illuminated in the letters and borders of psalters and missals, these marvels of creation suggested everywhere morals from the Physiologus, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... nameless, elusive rose; emerges, and stares with fixed eyes and smiles. It is so huge it seems unreal, as if it were a reflection cast by some mirror hidden in the moon. . . . And behind this monster face, far away in the rear, on the top of those undefined and gently undulating sandhills, three apocalyptic signs rise up against the sky, those rose-coloured triangles, regular as the figures of geometry, but so vast in the distance that they inspire you with fear. They seem to be luminous of themselves, so vividly do they stand out in their clear rose ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... groups, gathered about their own vociferous stump-orators. The result was babel. Of orators there were a plenty. They abused one another across the Irish Sea. They tried to shout one another down across the Atlantic Ocean. But the hammer-head men of righteousness were gone. After the apocalyptic splendor of mailed knights of Christ charging stern-faced down to Armageddon, the results of victory had been consigned to the weakling care of a ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... church, where the organist was practising; and then out of the windows, and far away on the evening air, rolled the solemn waves of that matchlessly mournful Requiem which, under prophetic shadows, Mozart began on earth and finished, perhaps in heaven, on one of those golden harps whose apocalyptic ringing smote St. John's eager ears among the lonely rocks of Aegean-girdled Patmos. The sun had paused as if to listen on the wooded crest of a distant hill, but as the Requiem ended and the organ sobbed itself to rest, he gathered up his burning rays and disappeared; ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans |
