"Abysm" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... form the motto to the poem, and a key to the sympathy which the writer felt for her:—"The loving soul launches itself out of the created, and creates in the infinite a world all its own, far different from this dark and fearful abysm." The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... that they were blacksmiths, and Walked out of quarters in somnambulism; Round the red anvils you might see them stand Like Cyclopses in Vulcan's sooty abysm, Beating their swords to ploughshares;—in a band 645 The gaolers sent those of the liberal schism Free through the streets of Memphis, much, I wis, To the annoyance ...
— The Witch of Atlas • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... leisure to explore the history of the past, to peer into the dark backward and abysm of Time, must of necessity become smitten with a kind of sad and kindly cynicism. When one has travelled over a wide tract of history, and when, above all, he has mused much on the minor matters which dignified ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... resignation to her horrible calamity! And, again, another one was plunging and battling in the act of realizing her doom: a fierce, furious, red cow, glaring and bellowing at the soft, yielding inexorable abysm under her, the bustards settling afar off, and her own species browsing securely ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... and shadow—"in the dark backward and abysm of time," in the dawn of the great civilizations of Egypt and Babylon, in the bright morning of Greece, and in the full noontide of modern life, together have grown up these two diametrically opposite views of man's relation to nature, ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... that any heart of man ever tholed the appalling nightmare and black abysm of sensations in which, during those four long desert months, I weltered: for though I was as a brute, I had a man's heart to feel. What I had seen, or dreamed, at the Pole followed and followed me; and if I shut my poor weary eyes to sleep, those others ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... wonder on the gigantic image of a solar spot thrown by means of the diagonal eye-piece upon the ceiling of the observing-room. Blurred and indistinct through over-magnifying, yet with a new meaning to me, there the vast abysm lies pictured; vague imaginings of the vast and incomprehensible agencies at work in the great centre of our system crowd unbidden into my mind; and I seem to feel—not merely think about—the stupendous grandeur ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor
... deep-sea form we might find it necessary to trace back the food by thousands of steps before we found the creature which had access to the vegetable matter. It is easy to see how such conditions profoundly limit the development of organic being in the abysm ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... educated opinion, is against you, that you are now a 'sport,' a peculiarity, an abnormality, a man with six fingers: not a 'sport' that is, full of promise for the future, but a 'sport' of the dim backward and abysm of time, an ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... quickly all things vanish away—their bodily structure into the general substance; the very memory of them into that great gulf and abysm of past thoughts. Ah! 'tis on a tiny space of earth thou art creeping through life—a pigmy soul carrying a dead body ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... until they came into a very different land, scarce inhabited of any folk, and found a little castle in a combe. They came thitherward and saw that the enclosure of the castle was fallen down into an abysm, so that none might approach it on that side, but it had a right fair gateway and a door tall and wide whereby one entered. They beheld a chapel that was right fair and rich, and below was a great ancient hall. They ...
— High History of the Holy Graal • Unknown
... Somme—to mention alone the battles in which up to that time the Canadian Corps had been engaged—all ended in failure; and to a sensitive and foreboding mind there were sounds and signs that it would be given to this generation to hear the pillars and fabric of Empire come crashing into the abysm of chaos. He was not at the Somme in that October of 1916, but those who returned up north with the remnants of their division from that place of slaughter will remember that, having done all men could do, ...
— In Flanders Fields and Other Poems - With an Essay in Character, by Sir Andrew Macphail • John McCrae |
