"Zenith" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the zenith of its power, has proclaimed itself invincible because its army could shake the earth with its tread and its ships could fill the seas, but these nations are dead, and we must build upon a different foundation if ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... determining influence which fixed the chief city of the West in his choice as the forum and arena of his professional and public life. After spending four years in Washington, gaining his subsistence by teaching, a law-student with Mr. Wirt—then at the zenith of his faculties and his fame—studying men and manners at the capital, watching the new questions then shaping themselves for political action, observing the celebrated statesmen of the day, conversant with the great Chief-Justice Marshall and his learned associates on the bench of the ...
— Eulogy on Chief-Justice Chase - Delivered by William M. Evarts before the Alumni of - Dartmouth College, at Hanover • William M. Evarts
... fingers and scorched them, but I scarcely noticed. My sense of high-gear adventure had reached its zenith now. There was something thrilling, something stimulating in this stealthy night entrance into a deserted castle. It was an experience, at all events; there was no concierge to stump before one through dim passages and up winding staircases; no flood of dates and names and anecdotes ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... hut before nightfall, with threats of crevasses, cold, avalanches. Finally, with the point of their ice-picks they showed him the enormous accumulation of ice, of neve not yet transformed into glacier rising before them to the zenith in blinding repetition. ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... gives a picture of the growth of the Socialist vote in the three most Socialistic countries on the Continent of Europe, and in Great Britain. It shows that Socialism has apparently passed the zenith on the Continent of Europe, but that it has not yet reached maturity in ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... wave reached its zenith in 1853. What more natural than that the army of miners, with the decadence of the California fields, ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... envy, ignorance, folly, or uncongenial force, must ever ensure the deepest sympathy of all those who can appreciate the spirit of its qualities;" let the initiative skyward struggles towards the zenith-abysses of the inane impalpable ——, &c. &c. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... came as if the sun had suddenly appeared in the zenith at midnight. Instantly I saw in human bodies a vast reserve of predigested food, with the brain in possession of power so to absorb as to maintain structural integrity in the absence of food or power to digest it. This eliminated the brain ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... my brother-in-law, Fritz Brockhaus, he and Devrient gave us a good deal of music, he playing her accompaniment to a number of Schubert's songs. I here became conscious of the peculiar unrest and excitement with which this master of music, who, though still young, had already reached the zenith of his fame and life's work, observed or rather watched me. I could see clearly that he thought but little of a success in opera, and that merely in Dresden. Doubtless I seemed in his eyes one of a class of musicians to whom he attached no ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... little, as he lay motionless, the sun stole toward the zenith. But to Paul, alone with his memories, the earth seemed bathed in a luminous pall—a ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... of the usual slow sunrises of this time of the year, and the sky, pure violet in the zenith, was leaden to the northward, and murky to the east, where, over the snowy down or ewe-lease on Weatherbury Upper Farm, and apparently resting upon the ridge, the only half of the sun yet visible burnt ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... the two armies remaining in face of each other. No engagement of any importance occurred during this period of inactivity, but once or twice the Federal commander sent heavy reconnoitring forces across the Potomac; and Stuart, now mounting to the zenith of his reputation as a cavalry-officer, repeated his famous "ride around ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... ebon folds hamper us, and darken us, and shut out the visions of God and blessedness, and all the glorious blue above us. The heavy, dark mist settles down on the plains, though the sky above is undimmed by it, and the sun is blazing in the zenith. Not one beam can penetrate through the wet, chill obstruction, and men stumble about in the fog with lamps and torches, and all the while a hundred feet up it is brightness and day. Or, if at some points the obstruction is thinned and the sun does come through, it is shorn of all its gracious ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... the farce of exchanging salutations. This was war and we should both know it. It was now nearly noon and the sun was rapidly approaching the zenith. I led the ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... slept the prenatal sleep of dawn. A pale greenish veil hung over the roofs, through which day must peer before awakening those who slept beneath. I had often noticed this greenish color in the sky, made doubtless by the flare of gas and electricity against the blue-black zenith, yet never before had I felt its depressing character. It was the green of jealousy, of disappointment, of envy, hatred, and malice and all uncharitableness! The city trembled in its sleep and the throbbing of its mighty pulse beat evilly upon my ears with distant hostile rumblings. I was alone ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... magnificent fury. Trot, trot, trot, trot, we trundled over the hard sand. The sound of the horse's hoofs rang out sharp against the monotone of the thunderous surf, as we drew nearer and nearer to the long line of the cliffs. At our left, almost from the lofty zenith of the pale evening sky to the high western horizon of the tumultuous dark-green sea, was suspended, so to speak, one of those gorgeous vertical sunsets that Turner loved so well. It was a splendid confusion of purple and green and gold,—the clouds flying and flowing in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... the vestiges of her wondrous beauty discernible in her perfectly moulded features?—not La Belle Bibi! Oh, Fate—Destiny—how cruel are you who guided her straying feet through the mazes of life! Why could she not have died at her zenith—when her portrait was painted? ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... nests far below in the crevices of the rock, and enjoyed their wild wheeling and screaming about him as he stood there. From this high look-out he often stood looking upon such sunsets as he had never seen before. High up toward the zenith the sun shot its great banners of flame as it dipped in the sea, and made the vast expanse glow and glitter. In the east the sails flitted along the purple line of the horizon, and down in the dusk ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... will be found at the zenith of its power about 300 years before Christ. The founding of Alexandria and the wars with Rome began then to diminish both its wealth ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... century, when Jefferson first came into power. He treated the British navigation laws as if they had been invented on purpose to wrong Americans, though they had been in force for a hundred and fifty years, and though they had been originally passed, at the zenith of Cromwell's career, by the only republican government that ever held sway in England. Jefferson said that British policy was so perverse, that when he wished to forecast the British line of action on any particular point he would first consider what it ought to be and then infer the opposite. ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... at his heels. Even the women, God bless them (for the feeling against the law ran high in the city), opened the doors and lifted the windows of their houses, the ladies crying, "Shame on you, shame on you!" and the cooks and chamber maids from the nadir and zenith of their household worlds, with homelier and more piquant phrase and saucier tongues, scoffed him for the miserable work he was doing; but in spite of the popular uprising, now almost swelled to the dimensions of a mob, and the verbal uproar, through the hoarse murmur of which the boy's ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... suspicion, says he had it from the most unquestionable authority. It is not in itself unlikely; and who is there that would not wish it true? What a satisfactory spectacle to a philosophical mind, to see the oppressor, in the zenith of his power, envying his victim! What an acknowledgment of the superiority of virtue! What an affecting and forcible testimony to the value of that peace of mind which innocence alone can confer! We know not who this man was; but when we reflect that the guilt which agonised him was ...
— A History of the Early Part of the Reign of James the Second • Charles James Fox
... thee with those seductive charms of thine, heaven-born! In truth thou'rt like a living fairy from the azure skies! The spring of life we now enjoy; we are yet young in years. Our union is, indeed, a happy match! But. lo! the milky way doth at its zenith soar; Hark to the drums which beat around in the watch towers; So raise the silver lamp and let us soft ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... his pluck, his courage, his adventurous spirit, his contempt for danger, his shrewd insight, his unfailing good humour, his reckless energy: all qualities that stood out at a period when the most active virtues of our race had reached their zenith, the period of the motor car and ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... morbid curiosity to discover whether the Ti might furnish any evidence of what had taken place there, I proposed to Kory-Kory to walk there. To this proposition he replied by pointing with his finger to the newly risen sun, and then up to the zenith, intimating that our visit must be deferred until noon. Shortly after that hour we accordingly proceeded to the Taboo Groves, and as soon as we entered their precincts, I looked fearfully round in, quest of some memorial of the scene which had so lately ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... smoke from the cannon and the clouds from the heated and heavy air continued to gather in both heavens and were now meeting at the zenith. The skies were dark, obscure and somber. Most trying of all was the continuous, heavy jarring sound made by the thunder of the guns. It got upon the nerves, it smote the brain cruelly, and once Helen clasped her hands over her ears to shut it out, but she could not; the sullen mutter was still ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... in the house was there still. She resolved to go out no more until day, which soon began to discolour the east with a fainter blue, then purple streaks, intermingled with a dusky whiteness, ascended in pyramidical columns to the zenith; these fading slowly away, the eastern horizon became fringed with the golden spangles of early morn. A spot of ineffable brightness succeeded, and immediately the sun burst over the verge of creation, deluging the world in a flood of unbounded ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... (1483-1520 A.D.), died before he was forty, but not before he had produced the "Sistine Madonna," now at Dresden, the "Transfiguration," in the Vatican Gallery at Rome, and many other famous compositions. In Raphael Italian painting reached its zenith. All his works are masterpieces. Another artist, the Venetian Titian (1477?-1576 A.D.), painted portraits unsurpassed for glowing color. His "Assumption of the Virgin" ranks among the greatest pictures in the world. ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... the year this festival did not draw so many as the summer one. All through the year the pilgrims came and went, and instead of falling off in numbers as the martyrdom receded, the popularity of the saint did not reach its zenith until the fifteenth century. Royal visits were of frequent occurrence, and of all the cities of England, after London, Canterbury would appear to have entertained more ...
— Beautiful Britain • Gordon Home
... done wrong. I am afraid, Captain Atkinson, you have mistaken me; I have punished Harcourt for his conduct towards me—deserved punishment. I had claims on him; but I have not upon the hundreds, whom, when in the zenith of my popularity, I myself, perhaps, was not over courteous to. I cannot run the muck which you propose, nor do I consider that I shall help my character by so doing. I may become notorious, but certainly, I shall not obtain that species of notoriety which will be of service to me. No, no; I have ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... rain-drops have ceased; the wind, in sympathy, is diminished. And of a sudden, arousing us to a consciousness of time and place, the sun peeps forth through a rift in the scattering clouds, and at a point a bit south of the zenith. ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... you want us to undress and go to bed?" And with that she brushed Katie aside and proceeded on her way. A dapper little man in a dress-suit, the only man anywhere in sight, popped out from behind a great palm and demanded, "Name, please, madam?" Elizabeth regarded him with awe. He represented the zenith point of Estella's ambition. They always had such a functionary at swell receptions in the city, she had explained to Elizabeth, a man who announced the names of the guests to the hostess. No one had ever ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... natural heat being withdrawn inwardly at night-time on account of the surrounding cold of the night), and the humor spread about through the limbs (to which result the heat of the day conduces until the sun has reached its zenith), and again because it is then chiefly that the nature of the human body needs assistance against the external heat that is in the air, lest the humors be parched within. Hence, in order that those who fast may feel some pain in satisfaction for their sins, the ninth hour is ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... of France, were destined before long to give a new face to affairs, while it secured the ascendancy of the Catholic party in the kingdom. Disastrous eclipse had come over the house of Montmorency and Coligny, while the star of Guise, brilliant with the conquest of Calais, now culminated to the zenith. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of the rarest and most beautiful things which could be seen anywhere; and so I looked out of my window at the furious storm, hoping that it might not strip the bushes at Live Oaks of their bloom, which recent tourists at Mrs. Trevise's had described as drawing near the zenith of its luxuriance. The other excursion to Udolpho with John Mayrant was not so likely to fall through. Udolpho was a sort of hunting lodge or country club near Tern Creek and an old colonial church, so old that it bore the royal arms upon a ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... orient heights to the zenith, that balanced the crescent,— Up and far up and over,—the heaven grew erubescent, Vibrant with rose and with ruby from the hands of the harpist Dawn, Smiting symphonic fire on the firmament's barbiton: And the East was a priest who adored with offerings of gold ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... the broken surface of the river, and glistening on the ice cakes that swirled down with the swift current. Then the southern end of the bow began to twist on itself until it had produced a queer elongated corkscrew appearance half-way up to the zenith, while the northern end spread out and bellied from east to west. Then the whole display moved rapidly across the sky until it lay low and faint on the western horizon, and it seemed to be all over. But before one could turn to go indoors a new point of light appeared ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... cafe. Conversation in France was at its zenith. There were less eloquence and rhetoric than in '89. With the exception of Rousseau, there was no orator to cite. The intangible flow of wit was as spontaneous as possible. For this sparkling outburst there is no doubt that honor should be ascribed ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... Latona's twins Cover'd of Libra and the fleecy star, Together both, girding the' horizon hang, In even balance from the zenith pois'd, Till from that verge, each, changing hemisphere, Part the nice level; e'en so brief a space Did Beatrice's silence hold. A smile Bat painted on her cheek; and her fix'd gaze Bent on the point, at which my vision fail'd: When thus her words resuming she began: "I speak, nor what ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... acknowledges the "gross, flagrant and shameful injustice" to woman sixty years ago in Christian England, what can be said of woman's condition six hundred, or sixteen hundred years ago, when the Bible held the greatest sway over the human mind and Christianity was at the zenith of its power, when it was denied that woman has a soul, when she was bought and sold as the cattle of the field, robbed of her name, her children, her property, and "elevated" (?) on the gibbet of infamy, and on the high altar of lust by the ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... attained the zenith of its power when it arraigned President Johnson at the bar of the Senate for high crimes and misdemeanors in office. It had shackled his appointing power by the Tenure of Office Act; it had forced its plan of reconstruction over his veto; and now it led him, dogged and defiant, to a political ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... Then two. The stars winked out, and the dawn whitened. The air became warmer. The whole east, clean of clouds, flamed opalescent from horizon to zenith, crimson at the base, where the earth blackened against it; at the top fading from pink to pale yellow, to green, to light blue, to the turquoise iridescence of the desert sky. The long, thin shadows of the early hours drew backward like receding serpents, then suddenly the sun looked over the ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... father and mother, Asher and Virginia Aydelot, who, through labor and loneliness and hopes long deferred, won a desert to fruitfulness, a wilderness to beauty—these two, in the zenith of their days, have proved their service not in vain, for that they have also won the second generation back to the kingdom whose scepter is ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... dips into an ocean, so far off, so twin-like with the sky, that the doubtful horizon, unmarked by a line, leaves no point of rest: and now, as in a flickering arch, the fascinated eye seems to sail upward like a bird, wheeling its flight through a mottled labyrinth of clouds, on to the zenith; whence, gently inflected by some shadowy mass, it slants again downward to a mass still deeper, and still to another, and another, until it falls into the darkness of some massive tree,—focused like midnight in the brightest noon: there stops the eye, instinctively closing, and ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... face upon the pillow. Awed in the presence of death, the meaning of which he began vaguely to understand, he stood listening to a "solemn wind" that began to blow—"the saddest that ear ever heard." What followed should appear in De Quincey's own words: "A vault seemed to open in the zenith of the far blue sky, a shaft which ran up forever. I, in spirit, rose as if on billows that also ran up the shaft forever; and the billows seemed to pursue the throne of God; but that also ran on before ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... would be better with us! Certainly could one generation of men be forced to live without rhetoric, babblement, hearsay, in short with the tongue well cut out of them altogether,—their fortunate successors would find a most improved world to start upon! For Cant does lie piled on us, high as the zenith; an Augean Stable with the poisonous confusion piled so high: which, simply if there once could be nothing said, would mostly dwindle like summer snow gradually about its business, and leave us free to use our ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... descent was checked. Then abruptly the sky was hidden, the last vestiges of daylight gone, and he was falling rapidly in an evening twilight through a whirl of fine snowflakes that streamed past him towards the zenith, that drifted in upon the things about him and melted, that touched his face with ghostly fingers. He shivered. His breath came smoking from his lips, and everything was instantly bedewed ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... arrived; the fair Goddess of the night shone forth in all her radiant splendor, seemingly conscious, that she was shedding forth the magnetic influence necessary for the sacred Rites now about to be performed. It had almost reached the Zenith when the solemn march of the Priestesses, Vestals and attendants that were to conduct Sarthia to the Holy Sanctuary of the Temple started. The Priestess walked beside Sarthia. Sarthia was clothed in pure spotless linen, her head was bare with ...
— Within the Temple of Isis • Belle M. Wagner
... was reduced, at the time we introduce her to the reader, to a state of inaction by the dead calm which prevailed. The sea resembled a sheet of clear glass. Not a cloud broke the softness of the sky, in which the sun glowed hotter and hotter as it rose towards the zenith. The sails of the schooner hung idly from the yards; her reflected image was distorted, but scarcely broken, by the long, gentle swell; her crew, with the exception of the watch, were asleep either on deck or down below; and so deep was the ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... the circumference of the earth. This was done by measuring on the ground the distance between Syene, a city exactly under the tropic, and Alexandria, situated on the same meridian. The distance was found to be five thousand stadia. The meridional distance of the sun from the zenith of Alexandria he estimated to be 7 deg. 12', or a fiftieth part of the circumference of the meridian. Hence the circumference of the earth was fixed at two hundred and fifty thousand stadia,—which is not very different from our modern computation. The circumference being known, the diameter ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... also every day nearer to us, till at last we found ourselves in the latitude of 20 degrees; and having passed the tropic about five or six days before that, in a few days more the sun would be in the zenith, just ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... absence of refracting power may not be owing to the extreme tenuity of the fluid; or does the comet consist of separated particles, constituting a cosmical stratum of clouds, which, like the clouds of our atmosphere, that exercise no influence on the p 105 zenith distance of the stars, does not affect the ray of light passing through it? In the passage of a comet over a star, a more or less considerable diminution of light has often been observed; but this has been justly ascribed to the ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... stir of breath! Dead—dead,—dead in his prime of years—dead in the zenith of his glory!—all the delicate, dreaming genius turned to dust and ashes! ... all the ardent light of inspiration quenched in the never-lifting darkness of the grave! ... and in the first delirious paroxysm of his grief Theos felt as though life, time, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... chalk downs away out by Letherhead and Guildford. We took the early train to a point at the base of the hills, and wound our way up into the woods at the top. We were beyond the smoke, which rested like a low black cloud over the city in the north-east, reaching a third of the way up to the zenith. The beech had changed colour, and glowed with reddish-brown fire. We sat down on a floor made of the leaves of last year. At mid-day the stillness was profound, broken only by the softest of whispers descending from the great trees which spread ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... afternoon, cloudless and brilliant, waned, and the air in the recess grew warm and heavy. Had it not been for the necessity of keeping guard Robert could have gone to sleep again. The flood in the river passed its zenith and was now sinking visibly. No more trees or bushes came floating on the water. Willet showed disappointment over the failure of the besiegers ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... governing the world? Does it not leave the fate of the universe at the mercy of the chance-possibilities, and so far insecure? Does it not, in short, deny the craving of our nature for an ultimate peace behind all tempests, for a blue zenith above ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... is now only the remains of a state, although at one period, when the Moors were in the zenith of their power, it was a splendid country. Still, however, the inhabitants entertain the loftiest ideas of themselves and their native land, and half-naked creatures as they are, they style the Europeans 'agein,' or barbarians, ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... morning, and they did not leave until midnight. If his first impression upon Olivia Langdon had been meteoric, it would seem that he must now have become to her as a streaming comet that swept from zenith to horizon. One thing is certain: she had become to him the single, unvarying beacon of his future years. He visited Henry Ward Beecher on that trip and dined with him by invitation. Harriet Beecher Stowe was present, and others of that eminent family. Likewise ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... bookstore, at a central situation by the Park, with works of taste classically displayed, afforded an admirable lounge for the litterateurs of that day. Here, when Hodgkinson, and Hallam, and Cooper, and Cooke were at the zenith of their histrionic career in the Park Theatre, adjacent, might be seen a group of poets and prose writers, who, in their generation, added to the original off-spring of the American press—Brockden Brown, Dunlap, Verplanck, Paulding Fessenden, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... mornings, with a brass circle of horizon flaming all around in the most extraordinary fireworks topped by an azure zenith, found them still crawling south-westwards making perhaps a ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... up with earth with the broken spade that he had used in digging it. All these things required a long time. He didn't observe how the night was passing, nor that the sky became clear and the stars shone and the moon crossed the zenith and began to descend in the west. He didn't notice that the stars began to pale. But he worked on until he had finished, and then ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... color music, a far-away, long-drawn-out melody on muted strings. Is not all life's beauty high, and delicate, and pure like this night? Give it brighter colors, and it is no longer so beautiful. The sky is like an enormous cupola, blue at the zenith, shading down into green, and then into lilac and violet at the edges. Over the ice-fields there are cold violet-blue shadows, with lighter pink tints where a ridge here and there catches the last reflection of the vanished day. Up in the blue of the cupola shine the ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... woman of my house carried eggs to the market to sell. Be covered, Kissbreech, said Pantagruel. Thanks to you, my lord, said the Lord Kissbreech; but to the purpose. There passed betwixt the two tropics the sum of threepence towards the zenith and a halfpenny, forasmuch as the Riphaean mountains had been that year oppressed with a great sterility of counterfeit gudgeons and shows without substance, by means of the babbling tattle and fond ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... with which Hawthorne faded away and died, when at the zenith of his fame, is no less strange and sad and visionary now than it was a poignant anguish then. He returned from Europe somewhat lingeringly, as we have seen, knowing too well the difference between the regions ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... wonderful cathedrals of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, the epoch of that beautiful Gothic style which I shall show was founded upon the highest mystical form of Symbolism possible to those who lived at the then zenith of Mystical Thought in the history of the world. The number of cathedrals built during those three centuries was so prodigious that, without the documentary evidence which we have, it would be absolutely incredible. Every ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... salaam, ominous of the advent of imperialism; the sun's rim visible, and a ray shot up to the zenith. ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... homeward went, oppressed with sheaves, Just as a moist dawn blotted pale the east, And the first drops fell, overfed with mist, O'ergrown and helpless. Darker grew the morn. Upstraining racks of clouds, tumultuous borne Upon the turmoil of opposing winds, Met in the zenith. And the silence ceased: The lightning brake, and flooded all the earth, And its great roar of billows followed it. The deeper darkness drank the light again, And lay unslaked. But ere the darkness came, In the full revelation of the flash, He saw, along the road, borne on a horse ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... now, from this zenith of history, look out upon the world. Behold! the American idea is everywhere prominent. The world itself is preparing to take an American holiday. The wise men, not only of the Orient, but everywhere, ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... name of Buenaventura, who had been a servant in a convent in Buenos Ayres, on this occasion was the instrument used by their enemies. For a short time everyone believed him, and excitement was intense; but, most unluckily, Buenaventura happened at the zenith of his notoriety to run away with a married woman, and, being pursued, was brought to Buenos Ayres, and then in public incontinently whipped. In any other country Buenaventura after his public whipping would have been discredited, ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... and very often on a capitalist basis. "A new phase in the development of the Venetian silk industry began with the arrival of traders and silk-workers from Lucca, whereby the industry reached its zenith. The commercial element came more and more to the fore; the merchants became the organizers of production, providing the master craftsman with raw materials which he worked up." So we read in Broglio d'Ajano. We are told a similar tale about the silk industry in ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... another, and returns again in a corresponding direction. Hence, the sun, which in the space of a year, performs the revolution of this circle, must in that time be twice vertical to every place in the torrid zone, except directly under the tropics, and his greatest distance from their zenith at noon, cannot exceed 47 degrees. Thus his rays being often perpendicular, or nearly so, and never very oblique, must strike more forcibly, and cause more intense heat in that spot. Being little acquainted with the extent and situation of the earth, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... in the zenith of her glory; her beauty was striking; yet, notwithstanding the brightness of the finest complexion, with all the bloom of youth, and with every requisite for inspiring desire, she nevertheless was not attractive. The Duke of York, however, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... friend? Was he exhibiting ingratitude and insanity, or a truly wise and honest statesmanship? We need not "pause for a reply." It has been sounding ever since in our ears, in the accents of national concord, and of admiration of the Minister who, in his very zenith of popularity and success, perilled all, to obey the dictates of honour and conscience, fearlessly proposed a measure which seemed levelled directly at those gifted and powerful classes by whom he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... Cambodians consider themselves to be Khmers, descendants of the Angkor Empire that extended over much of Southeast Asia and reached its zenith between the 10th and 13th centuries. Attacks by the Thai and Cham (from present-day Vietnam) weakened the empire ushering in a long period of decline. The king placed the country under French protection in 1863. Cambodia ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... seaport town. The only sign of greatness to be detected in his early life was an assault upon a schoolmaster, and he made ample atonement for this by years of hard work upon a farm. He was for a while a typical hayseed, an expert reaper, ready to match himself against all comers. He reached his zenith when he was offered fifty dollars in gold for six weeks' toil, and he records with a justified pleasure that "no man had ever been paid such high wages as that." But his energetic spirit soon wearied of retirement, and he found his way to New York, not ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... was creeping up from the horizon and tinting the heavens. A filmy veil was mounting the zenith, and swinging gently. Swiftly the glory grew. The veil became a curtain of rainbow colouring, edged with royal purple and faint red, and lined, here with orange, there with green, again ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... into the deep arch of the firmament and had lifted his hands to pray, a cloud, though no wind was stirring, hurried across the zenith and hid the brightening stars. The blue sky was still visible, except directly overhead, where this black mass of cloud was sweeping swiftly northward. Aloft in the air, as if from the depths of the cloud, ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... awakening thrill exquisitely poignant and sweet. For this slight, unsophisticated, Convent-bred creature, slender as a lily, reared in innocence among the blameless, was rich as her frail, lovely mother had been before her in the mysterious allure of sex. Beautiful Lady Bridget-Mary at the zenith of her stately beauty had never possessed one-tenth of the seductive charm that emanated from this young girl. Thoughts of the stored-up golden honey seen gleaming through the translucent waxen cells of the virgin comb made the senses reel as you looked at ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... of thought was thicker than that, if not quite so brilliant; and it was not until low growls of thunder began to salute his ear, that he looked up and found the silver edge fast mounting to the zenith and the curtain drawing its folds all around over the clear blue sky. His next look was earthward, for a shelter; for at the rate that chariot of the storm was travelling he knew he had not many minutes to seek one before the storm would be upon ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... it with a trembling hand, for the subject is a delicate one—a subject of intense interest, under the existing circumstances, to every American citizen. To me, the signs of the times appear to be ominous—to forebode evil! I sometimes fear that our political sun has passed the zenith—lowering clouds intercept his rays, and at times obscure his former brightness, majesty and glory. The ship of State is tossed by furious winds, and threatened by boisterous waves—rocks and quicksands are on the right and left—an awful wreck awaits her, and can only be averted by vigilance, ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... first magnitude, with a planet here and there, that were visible to the naked eye, in the neighbourhood of her crystal bright globe; but the clear depth, and dark translucent purity of the profound, when the eye tried to pierce into it at the zenith, where the stars once more shone and sparkled thick and brightly, beyond the merging influence of the pale cold orb, no man can describe now——one could, once—but rest his soul, he is dead and then to look forth far into the night, across the dark ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... P.M. brilliant coruscations of the Aurora Borealis appeared, of a pale ochre colour with a slight tinge of red, in an arched form, crossing the zenith from North-West to South-East, but afterwards they assumed various shapes and had ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... her heart light with contentment. Her star of happiness had reached its zenith when Everett Brimbecomb had asked her to be his wife. Rich in her own right, of the bluest blood in the state, soon to marry the man who had been her ideal since their childhood days, why should she ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... have been seriously undermined. Now, however, a new table of valuations must be placed over mankind—namely, that of the strong, mighty, and magnificent man, overflowing with life and elevated to his zenith—the Superman, who is now put before us with overpowering passion as the aim of our life, hope, and will. And just as the old system of valuing, which only extolled the qualities favourable to the weak, ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... back that her whole face was turned up to the sky and her eyes gazed straight up at the stars-an attitude only possible to so supple a spine. In this torturing attitude she sang one invocation after another, to the zenith of the blue vault over their heads, in a clear voice of fervent appeal. Her body was thrown forward, her mass of hair no longer stood up but was turned towards the two young women, who every moment expected that the supplicant would be suffocated by the blood ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... took me up three hours in every morning, when it did not rain; thirdly, the ordering, cutting, preserving, and cooking what I had killed or caught for my supply; these took up great part of the day. Also, it is to be considered, that in the middle of the day, when the sun was in the zenith, the violence of the heat was too great to stir out; so that about four hours in the evening was all the time I could be supposed to work in, with this exception, that sometimes I changed my hours of hunting ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... the invasion of the Mughals, who founded an Empire which at its zenith (1556-1707) included all India except the extreme south. In its decadence the Marathas and Sikhs became powerful and ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... its base before the threatening appearance of the sky caught his attention. A dense black cloud had climbed up from over the opposite hills, and stretched from their jagged summits to the zenith. There it hung in mid-air, its sombre shadow falling across the valley, and reaching high up the craggy slope, where the boy's home was perched. The whole landscape wore that strange, still, expectant aspect which precedes ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... one tries to get at the daily life of a man. But Salvini has given us merely splendid results, without showing us how he obtained them. Yet what a lesson the telling would have been for some of our indolent actors! Why, even at the zenith of his career, Salvini attended personally to duties most actors leave to their dressers. He used to be in his dressing-room hours before the overture was on, and in an ancient gown he would polish his armour, his precious weapons or ornaments, ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... obscure night in early May. An unvaried pall of cloud muffled the whole expanse of sky from zenith to horizon. If the same multitude which had stood as eye-witnesses while Hester Prynne sustained her punishment could now have been summoned forth, they would have discerned no face above the platform nor hardly the outline of a human shape, in the dark grey ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... year of the Crimean War, Bright reached the zenith of his oratorical power, and at the same time touched the nadir of his popularity. Public opinion was setting strongly against Russia. In stemming the tide of war the so-called 'Manchester school' had a difficult ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... grand and most important event! At the latter end of January, the literaryworld was favoured with the first publication of the ingenious, learned, and most profound Fanny Burney! I doubt not but this memorable affair will, in future times, mark the period whence chronologers will date the zenith of the polite arts in ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... a steel comb with a battle-ax attachment which threatens to cut passing boats in two occasionally, but never does. The gondola is painted black because in the zenith of Venetian magnificence the gondolas became too gorgeous altogether, and the Senate decreed that all such display must cease, and a solemn, unembellished black be substituted. If the truth were known, it would ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... arms of his own grandfather. She now perceived that the exorbitant power of the house of Austria would be as dangerous to the liberty of Europe as ever that of the family of Bourbon had been, in the zenith of its glory. She might have remembered the excessive power, the insolence, the ambition of Charles V. and Philip II. who had enslaved so many countries, and embroiled all Europe. She was sincerely desirous of peace, from motives of humanity and compassion to her subjects and fellow-creatures; ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... papal dominions, became in reality, if not nominally, a dependency of the emperor after the sack of Rome. [Sidenote: 1527] Tuscany, Savoy and Venetia maintained a semblance of independence, but Savoy was at that time hardly Italian. Venice had passed the zenith of her power, and Florence, even under her brilliant Duke Cosimo de' Medici [Sidenote: Cosimo de' Medici, 1537-1574] was amenable to the pressure of the Spanish soldier and the ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... wears a crown or talks in a pulpit. Facts, reasons, are better than names. But it seems to me that nothing can be plainer than that the church is losing ground—that the people are discarding the creeds and that superstition has passed the zenith of its power. ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... south-westerly wind into the eastern sky, where they lay in a long, low, grey band. Not a sound was to be heard, save every now and then the crow of a cock or the short cry of a just-awakened thrush. High up on the zenith, the approach of the sun to the horizon was proclaimed by the most delicate tints of rose-colour, but the cloud-bank above him was dark and untouched, although the blue which was over it, was every moment ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... to recover the truants. By the time they were settled once more under the tree, the sun was nearing the zenith and they ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... Aztec ceremonial of lighting a holy fire and communicating it to the multitude from the wounded breast of a human victim, celebrated every 52 years at the end of one cycle and the beginning of another—the constellation of the Pleiades being in the Zenith (Prescott's Conquest of Mexico, ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... after disposing of his late breakfast, a la mode du pays, sauntered off to parts unknown to the others. The day was one of remarkable beauty. No dim foggy city sun cast a sullen glance at the landscape. The sun stood in the zenith of a sky of the deepest azure, like a flaming, sparkling, dazzling meteor. Still its heat ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... were, its flowering instant, its one and only moment of expansive grace and radiant kingship. Each star passes but once in the night through the meridian over our heads and shines there but an instant; so, in the heaven of the mind each thought touches its zenith but once, and in that moment all its brilliancy and all its greatness culminate. Artist, poet, or thinker, if you want to fix and immortalize your ideas or your feelings, seize them at this precise and fleeting moment, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward |
