"Ineffable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with the luscious grape, the silver streams, the sparkling fountains and purple skies of fruitful Campania! Looking on nature with a poet's eye, as did these poets, one and all of them, is it not a psychological mystery that none of them should have detected the ineffable beauty ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various
... and the somber cliffs were inspired with the ineffable beauty of the alpenglow. A solemn calm fell upon everything. All the lower portion of the canon was in gloaming shadow, and I crept into a hollow near one of the upper lakelets to smooth the ground in a sheltered nook for a ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... historian, with affectionate flattery, attributes too absolutely to the merely mortal object of his eulogy: 'Nec illi, quod est rarissimum aut facilitas auctoritatem, aut severitas amorem, deminuit.' Still more beautiful is the Apostles description of superiority to all Human failings, with ineffable pity for human sorrows: 'He can be touched with the feelings of our infirmities, though without sin.' Was there ever in truth a man who could read the appeals of Paul to his converts, and doubt either that the letters were real or that the man was in earnest? ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... About her features when she smiled Were ever dewed with tears that fell With tenderness ineffable; Because her lips might spill a kiss That, dripping in a world like this, Would tincture death's myrrh-bitter stream To sweetness—so ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley
... inasmuch as it requires us to mean something different by the word "God" from what we have been in the habit of meaning. I have already said-I fear, too often-that no conception of God can have any value or meaning for us which does not involve his existence as an independent Living Person of ineffable wisdom and power, vastness, and duration both in the past and for the future. If such a Being as this can be found existing and made evident, directly or indirectly, to human senses, there is a God. If ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler
... endeavor to make me jealous of a little pert French-woman, the wife of a Croix de St. Louis, who I know he despises; I then thought myself at full liberty to play off all my airs, which I did with ineffable success, and have sent him home in a humor to hang himself. Your brother stays the evening, so does a very handsome fellow I have been flirting with all the day: Fitz was engaged here too, but I told him it was impossible ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... dark as night; they also possessed the depth of the tenderest, sweetest summer night, subjugating all those who came in contact with her. Annabel Lee won Maggie's warmest affections at once; she determined to join her friend at St. Benet's. She spoke with ineffable scorn of her London season and resolved, with that enthusiasm which was the strongest part of her nature, to become a student in reality. Under Annabel's guidance she took up the course of study which was necessary to enable her to pass her ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... did so, I perceived that on passing the table, her eyes fell upon the paper I had been scribbling over so long, and I thought that for an instant an expression of ineffable scorn seemed to pass across her features, save which—and perhaps even in this I was mistaken—her manner was perfectly ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... redoubtable Hainteroh, chosen warrior of the Wyandots, the bravest of all races. Sooner or later this demon white youth would tread upon his heels. He could feel already the scrape of his moccasins, the ineffable disgrace. He shuddered from head to foot. Such a thing could not be endured. He fairly leaped through the air, and once more a new impulse ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... their sockets, their knees shook under them, and then, with a wild shout of horror they began to scatter and fly, making a wide pathway for the Man of Mystery who now strode through their ranks with that awful gaze which seemed to pierce the veil of mortality and to peer at things ineffable and beyond human ken. And with His eyes refusing to look again upon the familiar scenes of His youth, He departed from Nazareth, forsaking it forever as His home place. Verily, indeed, the Prophet hath ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... fell on the old towers of S. Marcellino and S. Antonio; if he looked west, the Cathedral, with its tall campanile, rose dark against the sky, and what a sky! full of clear sun in the morning, full of pure heat all day, and bathed with ineffable tints in the cool of the evening, when the light lay low upon vinery and hanging garden, or spangled with ruddy gold the eaves, the roofs, and frescoed ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... Heating his arrows at their beauteous rays, For war with Pallas and with Dian cold. Fairer than mortal mould, She moved majestic with celestial gait; And with her hand her robe in royal state Raised, as she went with pride ineffable. Of me I cannot tell, Whether alive or dead I there was left. Nay, dead, methinks! since I of thee was reft, Light of my life! and yet, perchance, alive— Such virtue to revive My lingering soul possessed thy ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... mystery was attired quite smartly in black, her appearance being very different from the shabby figure she presented in Florence. But her beautiful countenance was just as pathetic, with that strange set expression of ineffable sadness. She passed me by without glancing at me, while the stout, homely woman at her side held ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... him an ineffable sense that she had, in telling him, somehow dropped her burden. Now she said, with as calm a resolution as that of the martyr marching to the fire he is sure his Lord ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... says," responded Cricket, with decision. "Think I'm going to waste this glorious day, knitting washrags?" with ineffable scorn. "You two old grandmothers can knit and read all you want to. I've too much else ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... noble comrade," said Achilles, after he had hurried over his own exculpation, and without noticing the Varangian's light estimation of the crime, "his Imperial Majesty, in his ineffable graciousness, imputes these ill-advised draughts as a crime to no one who partook of them. He rebuked the Protospathaire for fishing up this accusation, and said, when he had recalled the bustle and confusion of that toilsome day, 'I thought myself well off amid that seven times heated ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... celebrities, these conquerors of a former time, retain a gnawing rage in their hearts; others, on the contrary, dwell blissfully upon the past, ruminate in ineffable content all their glorious, bygone joys, seeking only repose, silence and obscurity, wherein they may remember and meditate, so that, when they die, we are amazed to learn that ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... whatever of its previous urgent importance. Founded in the time of the Commonwealth as a symbol for the Company's men who, when in rare moments they looked up from the engrossing business of their dominant hours, desired a reminder of the ineffable things beyond ships and cargoes, the Chapel has survived all the changes which destroyed their ships and scattered the engrossing business of their working hours into dry matter for antiquaries. So little do men really change. They always leave their temples, whether ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... far only Celis, her blue eyes swimming in happy tears, her heart lifted with that tide of race-motherhood which was their supreme passion, could with ineffable joy and pride announce that she was to be a mother. "The New Motherhood" they called it, and the whole country knew. There was no pleasure, no service, no honor in all the land that Celis might not have had. Almost ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... in vain Had she implored, but aided by her charms The wanton's prayers prevailed, and by a night Of shame ineffable, passed with her judge, She ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... in God; but I beheld, as it were, crowned and glorified, one who had loved with our loves, and suffered with our sufferings. Those shining snows were as his garments on the Mount of Transfiguration, and that serene and ineffable atmosphere of tenderness and beauty, which seemed to change these dreary deserts into worlds of heavenly light, was to me an image of the light shed by his eternal love on the sins and sorrows of time, and the dread abyss ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the prelates of thy people; and didst raise David, thy lowly child, to the summit of the kingdom, and didst free him from the mouth of the lion and the paws of the bear, and from Goliath, and from the malignant sword of Saul; who didst endow Solomon with the ineffable gift of wisdom and peace;—look down propitiously on our humble prayers, and multiply the gifts of thy blessing on this thy servant, whom with humble devotion we have chosen to be king of the Angles and Saxons. Surround him everywhere with the right hand of thy power, that, ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip
... one side of the dining-room table, the plump little bey, with his fez and glasses, quick little salutes each time he took a match or cigarette; facing him the tall, urbane Philip, in ineffable flannels or riding-clothes—for the embassy secretary is one of those who believe that clothes should express rather than blot out the inner man. Cigarettes—coffee—assurances to his excellency ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... graceful, courteous and princely in her life. He was a tall, finely proportioned, handsome man, with a superb head, an aquiline profile, and fair hair and fair complexion. The great charm, however, was in the broad, sunny forehead, in the smile of ineffable sweetness, in the low and singularly mellifluous voice, and the manner, gentle ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... and in that invisible life. By the ineffable name of Jehovah, at the sound of which the earth trembles, the sea draws back, fire quenches, and the ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... my eyes to Night, the holy, ineffable, mysterious. Far below lies the world, sunk in a deep vault; void and lonely is its place. Deep melancholy is wafted through the chords of the breast. In drops of dew I'd fain sink down and mingle with the ashes. Far-off memories, desires of youth, dreams of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... under him, and the tomahawking which awaits him from the little army of negrophiles at home. But the most dangerous class of all is the mulatto; he is everywhere, like wealth, irritamenta malorum. The 'bar sinister,' and the fancy that he is despised, fill him with ineffable gall and bitterness. Inferior in physique to his black, and in morale to his white, parent, he seeks strength by making the families of his progenitors fall out. Had the Southern States of America deported all the products of 'miscegenation,' instead of keeping them in servitude, the 'patriarchal ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... correspondence. The place was indeed well worth a careful study; for in 1830 it was not the orderly and decent bazaar of the Second Empire, but was still that compound of Parnassus and Bohemia which is painted in vivid colours in the "Grand Homme de Province" of Balzac,—still the paradise of such ineffable rascals as Diderot has drawn with terrible fidelity in his "Neveu ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... I will not affect to misunderstand your meaning; but I recognise, you know full well, no intermediate essence between my own good soul and that ineffable and omnipotent spirit in whose existence philosophers ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... to Petersburg, go anywhere and every-where—to every battle-field where the negro fought, where danger was greatest and death surest—and tell me, if you can, that 'this is the white man's Government.' And then go to Salisbury and Columbia and Andersonville, and as you shudder at the ineffable miseries of those dens, and think of those who ran the dead-line, and were not shot, but escaped to the woods and were concealed and fed and piloted by the black men, and never once betrayed, but often enabled to escape and return to ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... had dreamed a thousand times, by night and by day, of the ineffable bliss of rescuing Pet from a mad dog, from a runaway horse, from the assault of ruffians, from drowning, from a burning building. He had his plans all laid for doing every one of these things. He ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... of temper, which is wont to make itself known by the waiving a point or renouncing a principle for others' advantage, in him has no place; he either knows it not, or else considers it a poor, mean-spirited, creeping baseness, altogether unworthy of his imitation, and best befitted with ineffable contempt. He neither dreads the contact of the baker—the Scylla of the metropolitan peripatetic, nor yet shuns the dire collision of the chimney-sweep—his Charybdis. Try to pass him as he walks leisurely on, making the solid earth ring with his bold tread, and you will experience more difficulties ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume X, No. 280, Saturday, October 27, 1827. • Various
... to express our thoughts without them. However, we must understand that they are not strictly and exclusively true. God is everywhere; and wherever he is there is heaven to the spirits that are like him and, consequently, see him and enjoy his ineffable blessedness. ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... a midsummer's night, to whose moonlight they bared their shirt-sleeves or their tulle dresses, came from thousands of miles away to calculate the height of this rock, to observe the depth of this chasm, to remark upon the enormous size of this unsightly tree, and to believe with ineffable self-complacency that they really admired Nature. And so it came to pass, that, in accordance with the tastes or weaknesses of the individual, the more prominent and salient points of the valley were christened; and there was ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... Mother of God, not of the seed of man, nor of the will of man, nor by carnal union, being conceived in the Virgin's undefiled womb, of the Holy Ghost; as also, before his conception, one of the Archangels was sent to announce to the Virgin that miraculous conception and ineffable birth. For without seed was the Son of God conceived of the Holy Ghost, and in the Virgin's womb he formed for himself a fleshy body, animate with a reasonable and intelligent soul, and thence came forth in one substance, ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... myself seated by a tall man with a huge red nose, like the beak of an eagle, a copper complexion, jet black piercing eyes, and enormous black bushy whiskers. He looked down at me, I thought, with ineffable contempt. His clothes were of blue cloth, and his hands, which were very large and hairy, were marked on the back with strange devices, among which I observed an anchor, a ship, and a fish, which made me suspect that he must be ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... her hand, and gazing out through the open window, over the banks of the yellow-flowing Arno, with a look of ineffable trust and tenderness in her face, "Alan, did you try to kill the woman who has cursed and degraded you? Did you strike her once in return for her thousand malicious blows? Did you so much as wish her ill to gratify your anger and revenge? No!—there ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... I saw that she was asleep. I watched her face for a long time; it was perfectly colorless and very thin, and yet there was not a look of illness on it. The ineffable serenity, the holy peace, made it look like the face of one who had been transfigured, translated; who had not known and who never could know any death. I cannot account for the sweet calm which I felt through all these weeks. I shed no tears; ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... human being who has not felt them can conceive. My first impulse was to suicide; with the next I cried from the depths of my despair, "God deliver me from the body of this death!" It was but a moment,—and there came, in the place of the cold questioning voice of my daemon, one of ineffable music, repeating words familiar to me from childhood, words linked to everything loved and lovely in my past:—"Ye believe in God, believe also in me." The hot tears for another moment blotted out the world from sight. I said once more to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... pang of compunction and pity. The child looked even more pathetic than when seen from above, and the young girl involuntarily stooped in passing, and touched the wan little cheek. Whereupon one of those ineffable smiles which are the birthright of Italians lighted the little face, and the small hand was lifted with so captivating a gesture that Blythe, clasping it in her own, dropped on ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... pretend to "live up to him" any longer. As Mr. Ingpen says, "it was love, not matrimony," for which Shelley yearned. "Marriage," Shelley had once written, echoing Godwin, "is hateful, detestable. A kind of ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most despotic, most unrequired fetter which prejudice has forged to confine its energies." Having lived for years in a theory of "anti-matrimonialism," he now saw himself doomed to one of those conventional ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... the gain has not been without loss. "When we turn to modern literature," writes Mr. Money, "from the pages in which Fenelon speaks of the education of girls, who does not feel that the world has lost a sacred accent—that some ineffable essence has ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... theirs! To be young; to be drawn together by an affinity which produced a mysterious and ineffable happiness; to wander aimlessly over the earth; to yield to every passing fancy; to dream; to hope; to love. It was the culminating ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... field. Everlasting life is its subject. The Ancient of Days is its awful familiar. It has to do with the righteous conduct of individual men and women here on earth and of their eternal felicity in the world to come. The Ineffable One whose crucifixion has made the cross a symbol of all good and the emblem of our highest hope is ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... repeated in a low voice of ineffable sweetness, 'and deposit it in the upper compartment of my bureau. You know the spot. The bauble has a Chippendale ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... opened, and from out the cabin came a figure clad in black. She looked up, and the light of the expiring lamp showed her a face that was not that of the man she hoped to see. Then a pair of dark eyes beaming ineffable love and pity were bent upon her, and a pair of dripping arms held her above the brine as she had once been held in the misty mysterious days ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... which religious feeling has retained most independence. The new devotions find no favour with it; the people are faithful to the old beliefs and the old saints; the psalms of religion have for them an ineffable harmony. In the same way, Ireland keeps, in her more remote districts, quite unique forms of worship from those of the rest of the world, to which nothing in other parts of Christendom can be compared. The influence ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... here and there a trace of the old occupancy; always her furtive eyes shone with a cold and shifting glitter, as though a frightened imp peeped through a mask of Hecuba; and in every movement there was an ineffable touch of something loosely hinged and fantastic. In a word, the Marchioness was not unconscionably sane, and was known far and wide as a gallant woman resolutely oblivious to the batterings of time, and so avid of flattery that she was ready to smile on any man who durst give the ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... control, when no thoughtful American opened his morning paper without dreading to find that he had no longer a country to love and honor. Whatever the result of the convulsion whose first shocks were beginning to be felt, there would still be enough square miles of earth for elbow-room; but that ineffable sentiment made up of memory and hope, of instinct and tradition, which swells every man's heart and shapes his thought, though perhaps never present to his consciousness, would be gone from it, leaving it common earth and nothing more. Men might gather rich crops ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... said I, with a smile of most ineffable compassion at his simplicity; 'I'm worn out with them. Do you know, Peter, I was thinking seriously of leaving the bar, when you came into the room? Upon my conscience, ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... to be looking upon nature for the first time. I heard with surprise the buzzing of the flies, the song of the birds, and that mysterious and confused noise of the living creation which involuntarily celebrates its Author. Ineffable concert, to which man alone has the sublime privilege of adding the accents of gratitude! Who is the author of this brilliant mechanism? I exclaimed in the transport which animated me. Who is He that, ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... the long months of the middle western summer, fly-blown, torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became as insufferable as they had been in the little yellow house. At school Undine met other girls whose parents took them to the Great Lakes for August; some even went to California, others—oh bliss ineffable!—went "east." ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... Where Universal Love not smiles around, Sustaining all yon orbs, and all their suns; From seeming evil still educing good, And better thence again, and better still, In infinite progression. But I lose Myself in Him, in Light ineffable! Come, then, expressive silence, muse ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... a sun from his person. The group parted as we entered and I immediately felt, resting upon my shoulder like a benediction, the soft, firm hand of the Father of his Country. "Washington!" I exclaimed, fervidly grasping his hand. "At length we have met!" he responded, and a smile of ineffable joy lighted his countenance. He then spoke of the many changes through which the United States had passed since his removal to the spirit land. I was surprised at the extent of knowledge he displayed. Not the slightest variation ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... In contrast with the activity of love, Omnipotence itself dwindles into insignificance, and creation sinks into a puny exercise of power. Love, in a word, is the highest good; and, as such, it has all its worth in itself, and gives to all other things what worth they have. God Himself gains the "ineffable crown" by showing love and saving the weak. It is the power divine, the central energy ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... with fire. Sometimes I would distinguish her at the bottom of a valley, walking quickly, with her elastic English step; and I would go toward her, attracted by I know not what, simply to see her illuminated visage, her dried-up features, which seemed to glow with an ineffable, inward, ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... are a few men permitted to catch a glimpse of these awful Beginnings,—to touch for a minute the knot where all the tangled threads ravel themselves out smoothly. I had found such a place,—had had such an ineffable vision,—and, overwhelmed with tremendous awe, I sank on my knees, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... Pompeian frescoes, with such a beautiful intelligence that doubt of the ultimate future seemed blasphemy. I walked back to his lodging with him, and he was as mild as midsummer moonlight. He has the ineffable something that charms and convinces; my last word about him shall not be a ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... escape her lips, and she 'starts' away 'to deal with grief alone.' The same trait reappears with an ineffable beauty in the stifled repetitions with which she attempts to answer her father in the moment of ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... with people who did not regard Venice simply as affording exceptional opportunities for bathing and adultery, but who were reverently if confusedly aware that they were in the presence of something unique and ineffable, and determined to make the utmost ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... he felt the ineffable which is in all forms of perfection, the mystery of the One, which takes us beyond all thought into the immediate touch of the Infinite. This is the mystery which is for a poet to realise and to reveal. It comes ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... It will be bliss ineffable to see flowery pastures and wooded hills after this pest-haunted town; but oh, Angela, mine angel, why dost thou linger in this poisonous chamber where every breath of mine exhales infection? Why do you not fly while you are still unstricken? Truly ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... breathed Mrs. Carew, when she had read the letters through. "How proud I am of you!" Then suddenly her eyes filled with tears at the look of ineffable ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... of my royal master, His Sublime and Ineffable Majesty, Jaikark the Seventeenth, King of Konkrook and of all the lands of the Konk Isthmus," Gurgurk squeaked and clicked. "I have the honor to bring with me the Lord Ambassador of King Orgzild of Keegark to the court ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... themselves were affected by the names they bore. A knowledge of the secret and ineffable name of a deity was the key to a knowledge of his inner essence and attributes, and conferred a power over him upon the fortunate possessor of it. The patron god of the dynasty to which Khammurabi belonged was spoken of as "the Name," Sumu or Samu, the Shem ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... eyes there escaped a look, an ineffable look, a profound, lugubrious, imperturbable look, incessantly fixed upon a corner of the cell which could not be seen from without; a gaze which seemed to fix all the sombre thoughts of that soul in distress upon ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... Miss Oleander, turning with ineffable calm from a bevy of rose-robed and white-robed young ladies, said, "Yes," as if Mr. Walraven was no more than any other man, and stood up to take ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... lepreuse, Puis la poussa du pied dans l'ombre du chemin, Et, de ce meme geste enorme et surhumain Dont il chassait les rois, Mourad chassa les mouches. Le porc mourant rouvrit ses paupieres farouches, Regarda d'un regard ineffable, un moment, L'homme qui l'assistait dans son accablement; Puis son oeil se perdit ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... of those extraordinary eyes was not less variable than their tint. At times their lids opened like the portals of celestial dwellings; they invited you into elysiums of light, of azure, of ineffable felicity; they promised you the realisation, tenfold, a hundredfold, of all your dreams of happiness, as though they had divined your soul's most secret thoughts; again, impenetrable as sevenfold plated shields of the hardest metals, they flung back your gaze like blunted ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... did we see within? Ah! who can tell? What glory and glow of light Ineffable; What peace in the very air, What hush and calm, Soothing each tired soul ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... consistent plan of conduct — I was even tempted to wish that I had never seen you; or that you had been less amiable, or less compassionate to your poor Wilson; and yet it would be detestable ingratitude in me to form such a wish, considering how much I am indebted to your goodness, and the ineffable pleasure I have derived from your indulgence and approbation — Good God! I never heard your name mentioned without emotion! the most distant prospect of being admitted to your company, filled my whole soul ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... nightmare.... And it's over," she repeated. Her eyes lifted to Billy's in a look of ineffable softness and wonder. "It's over—because ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... cannot: granted. But Scott could. And Montaigne. And Julius Caesar. And many more. And why can't R. L. S.? Does it not amaze you? It does me. I think of the Renaissance fellows, and their all-round human sufficiency, and compare it with the ineffable smallness of the field in which we labour and in which we do so little. I think DAVID BALFOUR a nice little book, and very artistic, and just the thing to occupy the leisure of a busy man; but for the top flower of a man's life it seems to me inadequate. Small is the word; it is a small age, and ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... convents also are distinguished for the severity of their rule and the spiritual privileges accorded them. The Carmelites have every reason to hope for the beatification of their aged Prioress, and among the nuns of the Perpetual Adoration is one who has recently received the ineffable grace of the vulnus divinum. In the conversation of these saintly nuns, and of the holy Abbot of the Barnabites, you will find the surest safeguard against those errors and temptations that beset your age." He leaned back with a gesture of dismissal; but ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... ourselves merely the most agreeable man in the world, till we unfortunately discovered that the blockheads who could not comprehend us when we were serious, were still farther from understanding the ineffable beauty of our nonsense; so that in both cases we were the sufferers. They took our elegant badinage for our sober and settled opinions, and laughed in the most accommodating manner when we delivered our real and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... day as breathes into a man an ineffable yearning, a painful sweetness, a longing that makes him stand motionless, looking at the leaves or grass, and fling out his arms to embrace he knows not what. The earth gave forth a fainting warmth, stealing ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... beyond, blazing with countless lights, which filled the warm air with the scents of frankincense, of jasmine, of violets, of myrrh; all that the most odorous flowers, all that the most costly spices could distil, seemed gathered into one ineffable and ambrosial essence: from the light columns that sprang upwards to the airy roof, hung draperies of white, studded with golden stars. At the extremities of the room two fountains cast up a spray, which, catching the rays of the roseate light, glittered like countless ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... believe that, in the use of the supper, we truly, really, and substantially,—that is to say,—in its proper substance,—receive the true body and the true blood of Jesus Christ, in a spiritual and ineffable ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... beer, as is their custom. Before she had time to be frightened, Mr. Smith appeared,—whence, she knew not,—scattered the gang like chaff, and collaring two of the human hyenas, kicked them, with deliberate, ponderous, alternate kicks, until they writhed in ineffable agony. When he let them crawl away, she turned to him and thanked him warmly, looking very pretty now, with the color in her cheeks. But Mr. Smith answered no word. He stared over her head, grew red in the face, fidgeted nervously, but held ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... there is so much talk and dispute about evil, very few people know what evil essentially is. Now, there are some things, the mere doing of which by the most involuntary agent would at once stamp his soul with the conviction of ineffable sin. He would have touched the essence of evil. And if a wise man has done that, he has had in his hand the ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... Christopher, he looked straight forward, and said not a word till they cleared the town; but when he saw the vast flowery vale, and the far-off violet hills, like Scotland glorified, he turned to Dick with an ineffable expression of sweetness and good fellowship, and said, "Oh, beautiful! We'll ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... widowed of her natural protectors, who, in helplessness and painfully severe imprisonment, in sickness and in grief ineffable, sues for mercy and justice from your hands, may leave a legacy of blessings, sweet as fruition-hastening showers, for those you love and care for, in return for the happiness of fame and home restored, though life be abbreviated and darkened through this world ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... acquiescence, and slackened her pace into a slow movement. The Laird turned the corner quickly, but when he had rounded it the maiden was still there, though on the summit of the brow. She turned round, and, with an ineffable smile and curtsy, saluted him, and again moved slowly on. She vanished gradually beyond the summit, and while the green feathers were still nodding in view, and so nigh that the Laird could have touched them with a fishing-rod, ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... holly and the pine wreathed about the chandelier above the supper-table took fire from the gas, just as we came out from the reading, and Longfellow ran forward and caught the burning garlands down and bore them out. No one could speak for thinking what he must be thinking of when the ineffable calamity of his home befell it. Curtis once told me that a little while before Mrs. Longfellow's death he was driving by Craigie House with Holmes, who said be trembled to look at it, for those who lived there had their happiness so perfect that no change, of all the changes which must come to them, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... she exclaimed, in an accent of ineffable scorn. "I would put a bandage of fire round it as soon. Drive one frantic! I suppose your conduct must make one very calm, very cool and reasonable. But I can tell you, Bryant Clinton, that when you made me the plaything of your selfish ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... from great lilies, and blazing blossoms of hibiscus, and other strange gorgeous tropic flowers. The dream was becoming almost impossibly beautiful to us who for so long had seen naught but the restless, salty sea. Charmian reached out her hand and clung to me—for support against the ineffable beauty of it, thought I. But no. As I supported her I braced my legs, while the flowers and lawns reeled and swung around me. It was like an earthquake, only it quickly passed without doing any harm. It was fairly difficult to catch the land playing these tricks. As ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... Council runs) as a propaganda agency for the UN. It serves as an outlet for UN pamphlets and, with chapters in most key cities throughout the United States, as an organizer of meetings, lecture-series, and other programs which propagandize about the ineffable goodness and greatness of the United Nations as the maker and ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... year, and remained a twelvemonth under my roof, engaged in the study of Shakespeare with that accomplished artiste Mr. Mortimer. She intended to pursue what gift she had of voice and histrionic talent as a means of livelihood, she told me from the first, and to get rid of the ineffable weariness and monotony of her life ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... by securing the unhappy couple in the vestry-room, which they barricaded. They were unable, however, to protect them in the manner they intended. The mob forced the door, seized the accused, and, with ineffable brutality, continued dragging the wretches through a pool of water till the woman lost her life. A brute in human form, who had superintended the murder, went among the spectators, and requested money for the sport he had shown them! The life of the other ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... that month of June. Glancing casually over his left shoulder as he marched one afternoon with head bent and back turned toward the east, Chip saw that which a few minutes before had been but the misty edge of the sky transformed into a range of ineffable white peaks. The unexpectedness with which the glistering spectacle appeared made his heart leap. It was like a celestial vision—like a view of the ramparts of the Heavenly City. He clutched the stone top of the balustrade beside which he stood, ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... of his home on earth had gone on before; he felt lonesome without her, and grew homesick for heaven. His loving flock had crowned him with their grateful benedictions; he waited only for the good-night kiss of the Master he served, and he awoke from a transient slumber to behold the ineffable glory. On the previous day his illustrious Andover instructor, Professor Edwards A. Park, had departed; it was fitting that Andover's most illustrious graduate should follow him; now they are both in the presence of the infinite light, and ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... perfectly inchoate, which she did not recognize, began clawing at her. She pushed it off, scornfully, and turned to Elly, who got up from the table and began collecting her books into her school-bag. Her face was rosy and calm with the sweet ineffable confidence of a good child who has only good intentions. As she packed her books together, she said, "Well, I'm ready. I've done my grammar, indefinite pronouns, and I can say all those river-tributaries backwards. So now I can start. Good-bye, Mother dear." Marise ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... ineffable surrounded old Camp Almy. The Indians lately infesting the neighborhood seemed to have gone away into the mountain fastnesses. Turner had pushed little scouting parties cautiously into the foothills to the west ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... fiercely, "cast me loose, and meet me hand to hand in a fair fight? Surely," he added, changing his tone to one of ineffable scorn, "the pale-face is not weak, he is not a small man, that he should fear ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... hour later, in changed tweeds but with unchanged chin, he took his way to Colet House, thinking with great unkindness of his future stepson. As he drew near it he saw that that stepson was awaiting him at the garden gate; nearer still he saw that he was awaiting him with an air of ineffable serenity. ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... there a shepherd flourishing aloft his pastoral staff. The construction of these august figures was chiefly Dutch: they were intermixed with china images and miserable daubs on paper. In the centre a real fountain, in miniature, squirted forth water to the ineffable delight of crowds ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... no more shall his days Be a toil and a calling For a way to make others to gaze On God's face without falling. He has come to the end of his words, And alone he rejoices In the choiring that silence affords Of ineffable voices. ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... philosophy is correct. On the other hand, what Christ meant was not the recognition of a pantheistic theory, but a real heart-knowledge of the Father's character, a loving experience of his divine mercy, his fatherly love, his ineffable glory. The one was cold philosophy, the other was experience, fellowship, gratitude, ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... Koran (chaps. xxxviii.), and commentators have extensively embroidered it. Asaf, son of Barkhiya, was Wazir to Sulayman and is supposed to be the "one with whom was the knowledge of the Scriptures" (Koran, chaps. xxxvii.), i.e. who knew the Ineffable Name of Allah. See the manifest descendant of the Talmudic Koranic fiction in the "Tale of the Emperor Jovinian" (No. lix.) of the Gesta Romanorum, the most popular book of mediaeval Europe composed in England (or Germany) about the end ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... anger, he'll fight!"—this intense impression made a single mouthful, as it were, of terror and applause. But what was wondrous was that the applause, for the felt fact, was so eager, since, if it was his other self he was running to earth, this ineffable identity was thus in the last resort not unworthy of him. It bristled there—somewhere near at hand, however unseen still—as the hunted thing, even as the trodden worm of the adage must at last bristle; and Brydon at this instant tasted probably of a sensation ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... Noble Mind," are completed by a description of Dodington as irradiating a blaze of virtues, this particular pamphlet becomes somewhat rueful reading. For Dodington was, if report speaks true, a pliant politician as well as an ineffable coxcomb, although it must be admitted that he won eulogies and compliments alike from the perfect integrity of Lyttelton, and the honourable pen of James Thomson. Even Fielding's glowing lines do not outstrip Thomson's panegyric in ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... to receive it, but the child hurried towards him and placed it in his hand. He stuck it in his buttonhole with an air of ineffable complacency for a misanthrope, and leering exultingly at the unconscious Short, muttered, as he laid himself down again, 'Tom Codlin's the friend, ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... putting in the plea of necessity, and defending the government and measures of Mr. Pitt, on the ground of policy. This used to enrage their audience, which consisted of the farmers of the parish and neighbourhood, among whom was frequently some upstart puppy, some ineffable coxcomb, one of their sons, perhaps, apprenticed at the neighbouring town, who came home on a Sunday, at Easter, Whitsuntide, Michaelmas, or Christmas, on a visit, and who had imbibed a double portion of the mania, in consequence of his having licked up the froth and saliva which had been vomited ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... it was no chimera of the imagination was proved by the fact that their footsteps sounded upon the path, and just as they had passed I heard Courtenay address his wife by name. The transformation of her countenance from the ineffable picture of grief and sorrow to the calm, sweet expression of content had been marvellous, to say the least—an event stranger, indeed, than any I had ever before witnessed. In the wild writings of the old romancers the dead have sometimes ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... to them; and so beautifully that they were all but melted to tears—especially the monsieur, who was evidently very sentimental and very much in love. Besides, there was that ineffable charm of the pure French intonation, so caressing to the Belgian ear, so dear to the Belgian soul, so unattainable by Flemish lips. It was one of Barty's most successful ditties—and if I were a middle-aged burgher of ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... would ye put on the leet noo, Mrs. Craig, you that's sic a judge?" said Mrs. Glibbans, with the most ineffable consequentiality. ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... sittest in light and glory unapproachable, parent of angels and of men! next thee I implore omnipotent king, redeemer of that lost remnant, whose nature thou didst assume, ineffable and everlasting love! and thee the third subsistence of the divine infinitude, illuminating spirit, the joy and solace of created things! ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... ill in bed, but with sound judgment, full memory and understanding, believing in the ineffable mysteries of the Holy Trinity, three distinct persons in one God, in essence, and in the other mysteries acknowledged by our Mother, ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach |
