"Abyss" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... egarements—" she began, breaking off with a stare when Undine interrupted her to explain that the courts had ascribed all the wrongs in the case to her husband. "But then—but then—" murmured the Princess, turning away from the subject as if checked by too deep an abyss of difference. ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... bound with chains, and confined with fetters; and breaking his bonds he had been driven by the demon into solitary places. [8:30]And Jesus asked him, saying, What is your name? And he said, Legion; because many demons had entered into him. [8:31]And he besought him not to command them to go into the abyss. [8:32]And there was a herd of many swine feeding on the mountain, and they besought him to permit them to enter into them; and be permitted them. [8:33]And the demons going out of the man entered ...
— The New Testament • Various
... the level of his epoch: comedy was not the cause, but the effect of the corruption that prevailed in the national life. But it is necessary, more especially with a view to judge correctly the influence of these comedies on the life of the Roman people, to point out the abyss which yawned beneath all that polish and elegance. The coarsenesses and obscenities, which Menander indeed in some measure avoided, but of which there is no lack in the other poets, are the least part of the evil. Features far worse are, the dreadful desolation of life in which the only oases ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... two-thirds to the right; they run more often upward than downward. They do not commonly lie in a single plane. Sometimes a Form has twists as well as bends, sometimes it is turned upside down, sometimes it plunges into an abyss of immeasurable depth, or it rises and disappears in the sky. My correspondents are often in difficulties when trying to draw them in perspective. One sent me a stereoscopic picture photographed from a wire that had been bent into ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... these?' Another voice added, 'These four years heaven and earth have pleaded with you to bring forth fruit to God, but you have refused. Your heart has said "I will fix my seat above the stars of heaven." Now you must go down to the abyss.' Like arrows these words pierced my heart; my strength departed, and others bore me to my home. There my parents were speechless with sorrow. The bed of down was made ready, but it afforded me no rest. I seemed to lie on thorns. Then I appeared ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... all created things—when there was no finite existence by which time could be measured; in that fathomless abyss of duration when there ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... wild and daring sallies of sentiment, in the irregular and eccentrick violence of wit. He delighted to tread upon the brink of meaning, where light and darkness begin to mingle; to approach the precipice of absurdity, and hover over the abyss of unideal vacancy. This inclination sometimes produced nonsense, ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... rock near where the body lay. He alighted and cautiously crept down the steep incline to the body. He raised it in his arms and was about to cast it from him when his foot slipped, and with a cry of horror he fell with his burden over the cliff's edge into the red abyss. ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... which it was aforetime; and it is crude ambergris. Moreover, the trees of the island are all of the most precious aloes-wood, both Chinese and Comorin; but there is no way of issue from the place, for it is as an abyss midmost the sea; the steepness of its shore forbiddeth the drawing up of ships, and if any approach the mountain, they fall into the eddy aforesaid; nor is there any resource[FN205] ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... nothingness of the Court, in which whispering favourites surrounded a foolish young prince, beguiling him into foolish amusements, alarming him with coward fears. Wise men and buffoons alike dragged him down into that paltry abyss, the one always counselling caution, the other inventing amusements. "Let us eat and drink for to-morrow we die." Was it worth while to lose everything that was enjoyable in the present moment, to subject a young sovereign to toils and excitement, and probable loss, for the uncertain ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... animal even is full of sad suggestion. But the human back!—It is the other, the dark side of the human moon; the blind side of the being, defenseless, and exposed to every thing; the ignorant side, turned toward the abyss of its unknown origin; the unfeatured side, eyeless and dumb and helpless—the enduring animal of the marvelous commonwealth, to be given to the smiter, and to bend beneath the burden—lovely in its patience and the tender ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... adhere to the sky's dark blue. Mountains come into view, rough-modeled, and vast as the ruins of a town. One can see the beginning of unending rows of objects, finally plunged in night. One guesses what the great bulks may be whose outermost outlines flash forth from a black abyss of the unknown. ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... you not know why I dread to write to you, and yet why I cannot help it? Since last I spoke to you, such an event has passed, that I tremble to go over the abyss and speak to you again. But you and your children stand, bereft and stricken, on [245] the shore, as it were, of a new and strange world,—for strange must be the world to you where that husband and father is not,—and I would fain express the sympathy which I feel for you, and my ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... of the men who made the first languages.[237] "The original languages must be, in comparison with our languages, like the wildest love-passion compared with marital custom."[238] Every word has a history of accidents which have befallen it, the beginnings of which are lost in the abyss of time.[239] In the Middle Ages the word "Word" came to mean the Word of God with such distinctness that the romance languages adopted parabola, or derivatives from it, for "word."[240] The students of linguistics recognize metaphor as another ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... the grim peaks sink into the cold arms of the unspoken. The little town with the pink and white houses Looses its hold on the ridge of hills And floats among cloud tops. A shaggy donkey, cropping grass in the sequestered church yard, Walks, with a leisurely air, Into a wind driven abyss. ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... repose; Nirvana awaits the Buddhist high and low alike; Islamism sternly sends all mankind across the sharp-edged Bridge, which the righteous only cross in safety, while wicked caliph and wicked slave together reel into the abyss below. The apotheosis of pagan heroes rested on personal merit alone. No eschatology but that of High Calvinism anticipates, in the unseen world, anything resembling the injustice of a civilisation which, of set purpose, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... was on the brink of the fall, which, though not high, was a large body of water and fell with a heavy roar. He raised himself high out of the stream with the vigour of his last struggle, and then fell back into the abyss. ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... chiefly thou, O Spirit! that dost prefer Before all temples, th' upright heart and pure, Instruct me, for thou know'st; thou, from the first, Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread, Dove-like sat'st brooding o'er the vast abyss, And mad'st it pregnant; what in me is dark, Illumine: what is low, raise and support; That, to the height of this great argument, I may assert eternal providence, And justify the ways ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... ensues. Barbara tries to get up a conversation with Mr. Courtenay, but that person, never brilliant at any time, seems now stricken with dumbness. Into this awkward abyss Mabel plunges this time. Evidently she has been dwelling secretly on Tommy's comments on their own cat, and is therefore full of thought about that ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... Scotland (August, 1561) revived all the old dissensions, and introduced new elements into the strife of parties. By every opinion she held on religion, on the relations of prince and subject, on the fundamental principles of life, Mary was separated as by an abyss from the party represented by Knox. If we may judge from the language which each used of the other, Knox and she failed to find one point on which genial intercourse was possible. As the minister of St. Giles (then the only Reformed ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... Yet even He, the Vast Countenance, is hidden and concealed; how much more, then, the AIN! From Negative to Positive, through Potential Existence, eternally vibrates the Divine Absolute of the Hidden Unity of processional form masked in the Eternal Abyss of the Unknowable, the synthetical hieroglyph of an illimitable pastless futureless Present. To the uttermost bounds of space rushes the Voice of Ages, unheard save in the concentrated unity of the ...
— Hebrew Literature
... her two golden apples on a silver dish. She lifts her head and opens her mouth, whereupon he seizes the sword and cuts her head off. As is usual in the stories of this class, his comrades, after hoisting the maidens aloft, cut the cord and let him fall back into the abyss. But he escapes, and eventually "he slays all the three heroes, and flings their bodies on the plain for wild beasts to devour." This Skazka is one of the many versions of a widespread tale, which tells ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... had drifted the snow over the edge of the precipice where some of it had clung. Farther and farther it had crept out, overhanging the abyss, its great weight slowly bending the cornice downward until it ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... itself seemed a poisonous green abyss of creeping, crawling, sneaking death. And though they had faced death too often in another land to fear it in any form, though they marched on with unwavering step, their eyes were somber as in ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... encouraged or put down, taxed or free. These are serious questions. I feel that I do not waste the time, always precious, of this Chamber by examining this article—the Press—and explaining to you its qualities. We are on the verge of an abyss. Undoubtedly the laws have not the nap which they ought to have—Hein?" he said, looking at Jenny. "All orators put France on the verge of an abyss. They either say that or they talk about the chariot of state, or convulsions, or political horizons. Don't I know their dodges? I'm up to ...
— The Illustrious Gaudissart • Honore de Balzac
... required more moral strength than Clare possessed, or was able to command. Early training he had none; and even now there was not a soul near to teach and warn him of the danger. So the unhappy poet kept gliding down the fatal abyss. ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... Stanton, shrinking under the full-lighted blaze of those demon eyes. "I never," said the stranger, in an emphatic tone,—"I never desert my friends in misfortune. When they are plunged in the lowest abyss of human calamity, they are sure to be ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... slightly towards me, and the light within its darkness became more denned and brilliant. Presently an arm and hand, white and radiant—a shape as of living flame—was slowly outstretched from the enfolding black draperies. It pointed steadily to the abyss below me. ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... but, with a look of alarm, the General grasped Jack by the arm, and showed him that the ground sloped so and was so slippery, that to get near enough to see the bottom of the fall would have been to run the greatest risk of falling headlong into the awful abyss. ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... crowding round Spenser and her, were peering at them, with eyes eager and ears a-cock for romance—for nowhere on this earth do the stars shine so sweetly as down between the precipices of shame to the black floor of the slum's abyss. Spenser, stooped and shaking, rose abruptly, thrust Susan aside with a sweep of the arm that made her reel, bolted into the street. She recovered her balance and amid hoarse croakings of "That's right, honey! Don't give him up!" followed the shambling, swaying figure. He was too utterly drunk ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... of Liberty" against which the leagued tyrants are waging a war of extermination with inexorable resolution. Yes, it was a call of distress entrusted to my care, to remind America that there is a tie in the destinies of nations; and that those are digging a bottomless abyss who forsake the Spirit of Liberty, when within the boundaries of common civilization half the world utters in agony the call ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... that he had not discovered America; or to Chaucer that he had not discovered the solar system; or to Dryden that he had not discovered the steam-engine. But we do most frequently feel, with the Victorians, that the very vastness of the number of things they know illustrates the abrupt abyss of the things they do not know. We feel, in a sort of way, that it is a disgrace to a man like Carlyle when he asks the Irish why they do not bestir themselves and re-forest their country: saying not a word about the soaking up of ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... his glory, from which he was to descend with such a rapid step toward the abyss, he experienced a sort of intoxication, forgot all the reproaches that his good sense, the only conscience of conquerors, had addrest to him for two months, and for a moment believed still that his enterprise was a great and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... throws off restraint there is no happiness, there is only misery. One step leads to another; if he would be logical he must go on, and before long, for the descent is very rapid indeed, he finds himself in an abyss of darkness and doubt, a terrible abyss indeed, where nothing exists, and life has lost all meaning. The Reformation was the thin end of the wedge, it was the first denial of authority, and you see what it has led ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... on the other side of the crevasse began to glisten, and soon streams of water were trickling down it, falling with a gentle murmur into the abyss. The workers threw off some of their heavy clothing. The sun's rays began to creep down the other wall, and ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... trained as a woman journalist, she would have regarded this meeting with Stampa as an incident of much value. Long experience of the lights and shades of life might have rendered her less sensitive. As it was, the man's personality appealed to her. She had been vouchsafed a glimpse into an abyss profound as that into which Stampa himself peered on the day he discovered three of the four who fell from the Matterhorn still roped together in death. The old man's simple references to the terrors lurking in those radiant ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... have also voices, a mute eloquence. Everything that a dwelling contains is bathed in an ether of personality. And I find proof of its quality even in the apartments of bachelors and solitary women. What an abyss between one room and another room! Here, all is dead, indifferent, commonplace: the device of the owner is written all over it, even in his fashion of arranging his photographs and books: All is the same to me! There, one breathes in animation, a contagious joy in life. The visitor ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... was some years before he recovered wholly from the sad effects of such reading. His early religious culture, however, and his disposition and ability to perceive the truth, finally saved him from the abyss of infidelity, as will appear more evident in ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer
... horror I ever had felt in the presence of the Thing was slight compared to the fear that presently began to flow upon me as an icy current. There in the pleasantly lighted room, alone, I sank through depths of dread, down into an abyss of despair, down—— ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... earth. In every foreign region of the globe the title of American citizen is held in the highest respect, and when pronounced in a foreign land it causes the hearts of our countrymen to swell with honest pride. Surely when we reach the brink of the yawning abyss we shall recoil with horror from the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Buchanan • James Buchanan
... shapes of many worlds, Cerulean ether's pure inhabitants, 465 These forests unapproachable by death, That shall endure as long as man endures, To think, to hope, to worship, and to feel, To struggle, to be lost within himself In trepidation, from the blank abyss 470 To look with bodily eyes, and be consoled." Not seldom since that moment have I wished That thou, O Friend! the trouble or the calm Hadst shared, when, from profane regards apart, In sympathetic reverence we trod 475 The floors of those ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... needed. Don't try any longer to keep me, for I have made up my mind. My weakness is gone, and I have recovered control of myself and feel I am strong. It is not my destiny alone, but the destiny of another human being that is to be decided down there. Between me and him you are digging an abyss, and the responsibility will rest upon you. I shall never be consoled, and shall accuse you of having destroyed our happiness. Do not hold me back. You can only do it out of egoism, out of jealousy. You lied when you spoke to me ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... be traversing the abodes of the Genii. Although he had only heard of "Vathek," he thought of the Hall of Eblis. It was such an abyss as no artist has ever hinted, excepting Dore in his picturings of Dante's "Inferno." Could Dante himself have looked into it, he would have peopled it with the most hopeless of his lost spirits. The shadow, ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... how it is apropos, I have not leisure to explain,) do you not know that I am almost in love with an acquaintance of yours?—Almost! said I—I am in love, souse! over head and ears, deep as the most unfathomable abyss of the boundless ocean; but the word Love, owing to the intermingledoms of the good and the bad, the pure and the impure, in this world, being rather an equivocal term for expressing one's sentiments and sensations, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... stands, And Milo-like surveys his arms and hands, Then sighing thus, 'And am I now threescore? And why ye gods should two and two make four?' He said, and climbed a stranded lighter's height. Shot to the black abyss, and ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... fiery animal to give one tremendous spring, which brought him to the very brink of the precipice. In his efforts to stop himself, a portion of the earth was detached by his hoofs and fell with a loud noise into the abyss, bounding down its rocky sides, and crashing through bushes and branches of trees in its rapid descent to the bottom. The horse, frightened by the sound, and smarting under the blow of the lasso, reared so straight upon his hind legs that he seemed in imminent danger ...
— Frank Among The Rancheros • Harry Castlemon
... man had been degraded in his own eyes, and in the eyes of her he loved, crime stood beckoning him. He might try, but he could not resist; he must yield, he must fall. It was the only degradation remaining. Better end everything before dropping into that last abyss. ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... the bridge that spans the abyss between life and death, and found his way at last to the barred gates of Hel's dreadful home. There he sprang to the ground, tightened the girths, remounted, drove the spurs deep into the horse, and Sleipner, with a mighty leap, cleared the wall. Hermod rode straight to the gloomy ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... here, and the view from the door was a blank up to ten o'clock, when the mist rolled away and revealed the mystery of last night, the mighty crater whose vast terminal wall is only a few yards from this house. We think of a volcano as a cone. This is a different thing. The abyss, which really is at a height of nearly 4,000 feet on the flank of Mauna Loa, has the appearance of a great pit on a rolling plain. But such a pit! It is nine miles in circumference, and its lowest area, which not long ago fell about 300 feet, just as ice on a pond falls when the water below ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... who has been drawn up from the bottom of an abyss. Fits of joy approaching to delirium seized him. When the time for the third attack had passed by, he nearly suffocated the reporter in his embrace. Since then, he always called ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... not to disturb that coveted letter, which was beginning to change its white tint for a greenish hue—proof enough that it was sinking—and then, with the rope weltering in my hands, slid down into the abyss. ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... character, nay, forms the most striking part of a story; a word acts as a flash of lightning, which displays some gloomy neighbourhood, where a tower is standing, with dreadful faces at the window; or where, at your feet, full of eternal voices, one abyss is beheld dropping out of another in the lurid light of torment. In the present volume a story will be found which tells a long tragedy in half-a-dozen lines. Dante has the minute probabilities of a Defoe in the midst of the loftiest and most generalising poetry; and this feeling of ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... short, but crowded, time since Lanley had first known Mrs. Wayne he had never been otherwise than glad to see her, but now his heart sank. It seemed to him that an abyss was about to open between them, and that all their differences of spirit, stimulating enough while they remained in the abstract, were about to ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... Heaven, what things we mortals be and into what an abyss of terrors we should be for ever plunging if we had but time to think, instead of making laws or planting cabbages. I feel like pulling my slippers off my feet and pitching them out of the window, since they ...
— Marguerite - 1921 • Anatole France
... cheek crimsons with anger and her heart flutters with fear, the woman glories in Joseph's guilty love, sweet incense to her vanity, evidence of her peerless beauty's infernal power. She retreats a step as from the brink of an abyss, but farther she cannot fly, for there is a charm in her companion's voice, potent as old Merlin's mystic chant—tones low and sweet as music in dreams by maids who sleep in Dian's bosom, yet wilder, fiercer than trumpets blown for war. As a sailor drawn to his doom by siren ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... everything on the Tuebingen sand bank. The poor wretches! Religion and theology without philosophy is bad; philosophy without philosophy is a monster! So Comte is a trump-card with many in Oxford! He is so in London. What a fall of intellect! what a decay of life! what an abyss of ignorance! Jowett is a living shoot, and will continue so; but John Bull is my chief comfort, even for my "God in History." America is my greatest misery after my misery for Germany; but the North will ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... sir," continued the priest, "and must feel as other men. Death is a terrible abyss between earth and heaven; but the land is not the less ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... dream, the liver live. He destroys birth and death, and dissipates to mist the paradox of being, until his victim cries out, as in "The City of Dreadful Night": "Our life's a cheat, our death a black abyss." And the feet of the victim of such dreadful intimacy take hold of ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... it came, sloping steep from far. When you looked up, it seemed to come flowing from the horizon itself, and when you looked down, it seemed to have suddenly found it could no more return to the upper regions it had left too high behind it, and in disgust to shoot headlong to the abyss. There was not much water in it now, but plenty to make a joyous white rush through the deep-worn brown of the rock: in the autumn and spring it came down gloriously, dark and fierce, as if it sought the very centre, wild with greed after an ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... reaction that food and company produced. It was not any recovered pleasure in life that he felt, but only a deeper withdrawal into himself. It was easier to go on automatically with the social gestures than to uncover to any human eye the abyss within him. ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... slid off. Scarcely had he done so when there came a gust which fortunately threw him flat down; at the same time his mule staggered over the edge of the precipice. One moment Will saw the poor animal struggling to regain its footing—the next it was rolling down into the abyss, bounding from rock to rock, and he knew, although the swirling snow prevented him seeing it, that his steed was, in a few minutes, dashed to pieces in the gorge a thousand feet below. For some time Will did not dare to rise. The gale grew ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... a madman if he did not frame some answer to the questions which the doctors asked him. This new acuteness was perhaps the precursor to a return of his memory; but as yet the Past was like a dead wall, an abyss of darkness surrounding him. Now and then flashes of light seemed to dart across that darkness: he seemed on the point of recalling something—he knew not what; for the flashes faded as quickly as they came, and made the darkness all the greater ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... harm all that God says and does. [And again] If, outside of Christ, you wish by your own thoughts to know your relation to {626} God, you will break your neck. Thunder strikes him who examines. It is Satan's wisdom to tell what God is, and by doing so he will draw you into the abyss. Therefore keep to revelation ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... consuming fire, and my body was chill or hot with the fever of the long exposure, did I, from such a pinnacle, cast my eyes around the foam-decked waste, and finding it all barren, feel my heart sink as the dinghy swept again into the dark-green abyss, and all around me were the walls of water! How many prayers did not I send up in the silence of my heart: how many thoughts of Roderick and of Mary, how many farewells to them! And when I prayed for life, and no answer seemed to come, and I remembered the years ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... Duke's appearance as he sprang up and clawed with his hands, like one who is sinking into an abyss. Then, with an extraordinary effort of aristocratic self-command, he sat down and sank his face in his hands. It was some minutes ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... million torches lighted by Thy hand Wander unwearied through the blue abyss: They own Thy power, accomplish Thy command, All gay with life, all eloquent with bliss. What shall we call them? Piles of crystal light— A glorious company of golden streams— Lamps of celestial ether burning bright— Suns lighting systems ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... richly-stored minds that have, within the limits of these three centuries, bequeathed their art treasures to all time; and if here we cannot suppress a comparison of the art world of the present Italy with that of the periods named, still less can we fail to be astonished as we discover the abyss into which Italy must be judged to have sunk in point of merit, when measured by the high standard which in former days she set herself. But perhaps the greatest marvel of all is the rapidity of the decadence when it once set in, as it did immediately after the culminating point of artistic ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... natural and useful or harmless way. There is no other. And the real misery is not to do this. The hell of the old world's literature is to be taxed beyond one's powers. This country has expressed in story—I suppose because it has experienced it in life—a deeper abyss of intellectual asphyxia or vital ennui, when powers conscious of themselves are denied ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... e.g., his timidity, his lack of resourcefulness, his conscience. As I have said, they are not. The vast majority of those who appear in the public haunts of sin are there, not to engage in overt acts of ribaldry, but merely to tremble agreeably upon the edge of the abyss. They are the same skittish experimentalists, precisely, who throng the midway at a world's fair, and go to smutty shows, and take in sex magazines, and read the sort of books that our vice crusading friend reads. They ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... of rock touch, one overlying the other, and absolute difference in texture and color, and no union between them. How account for their juxtaposition? Rock begat rock, undoubtedly, and the aerial forces played the chief part, but the origin of each kind is hidden in the abyss of geologic time, as is that of the ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... the girl? I called, but no answer came. I gazed about on every side, but no trace of her was visible. Unless she had plunged into the narrow abyss at my feet, there was no place where she could have concealed herself—none at least that I could discover. She had vanished, nevertheless; and since her disappearance must have been premeditated, I finally came to the conclusion that it was ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... heaps, By melancholy fogs concealed. Amid the snowdrifts which surround A stream, by winter's ice unbound, Impetuously clove its way With boiling torrent dark and gray; Two poles together glued by ice, A fragile bridge and insecure, Spanned the unbridled torrent o'er; Beside the thundering abyss Tattiana in despair unfeigned Rooted ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... population of Le Havre hurried towards the jetties and every look was directed towards the little bark; at one moment it flew suspended on the crest of the foaming waves, then suddenly glided downwards towards the bottom of a raging abyss, where it seemed utterly lost. At the expiration of an hour's struggling with the waves, it reached the spot where the admiral's vessel was anchored, and from the side of which two boats had already been dispatched towards their aid. Upon the quarter-deck ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... recuperated rapidly, and after a nervous headache I was always conscious of renewed vital power and of keener sensations. I would try the experiment once more—hazarded under circumstances so different that it made me tremulous but to think of the vast abyss between my now and then—and essay to magnetize ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... the Willow's lips moved. After all, it is the mother soul that gives us faith to meet eternity—and it was to the spirit of her mother that the Willow called in the hour of death. With the call on her lips she plunged into the abyss, her wind-whipped hair clinging to her in a ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... frames, which formed what was put down on the real estate agent's list as a coloured neighbourhood. The inhabitants of the little cottages were people so poor that they were constantly staggering on the verge of the abyss, which they had been taught to dread and scorn, and why, clearly. Life with them was no dream, but a hard, terrible reality, which meant increasing struggle, and little wonder then that the children of such parents ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... hard egotist; and yet his offer seemed a blessing in her helpless condition, and with the second-sight of a loving heart she divined a meaning in it that she did not fully understand, but which shone into her abyss of sorrow like a distant ray of hope. However he might phrase it, this offer proceeded from no ordinary motives; and her convulsive sobs giving way to quiet tears, she tried to rise from the sofa, but sank to the floor near his chair, the very picture ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... step would destroy the spell and bring the reproach of banality and ridicule upon the tale. But the catastrophe never occurs. It was necessary to stand poised upon the brink of the precipice to realize the depth of the abyss and feel ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... have seen it as ye came this way; it looks as if four hills were laying their heads together, to shut out daylight from the dark hollow space between them. A d—d deep, black, blackguard-looking abyss of a hole it is, and goes straight down from the roadside, as perpendicular as it can do, to be a heathery brae. At the bottom, there is a small bit of a brook, that you would think could hardly find, its way out from the hills that are ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... inconceivableness by ourselves. There is one thing certain, namely, that we can have nothing certain; therefore it is not certain that we can have nothing certain. We are as men who will insist on looking over the brink of a precipice; some few can gaze into the abyss below without losing their heads, but most men will grow dizzy and fall. The only thing to do is to glance at the chaos on which our thoughts are founded, recognise that it is a chaos and that, in the nature of things, no theoretically firm ground is even conceivable, and then to turn ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... perceived the device I had concluded it to be impossible for me to leave this abyss, which I regarded as my grave; but now I changed my opinion, and began to think upon the means of my deliverance. I began to collect the largest diamonds I could find, and put them into the leather bag in which I used to carry ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... she had so often loitered, and in looking once more on the scene of her childhood. But, as she thought of this, she remembered the darkness of the stream, and the softly-gurgling but rapid flow with which it hurried itself on beneath the black abyss of the building. She had often shuddered as she watched it, indulging herself in the luxury of causeless trepidation. But now, were she there, she would surely take that plunge into the blackness, which would bring her to the end ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... in it but one chair and one spinning wheel. He closed it, and opened the next—to start back in terror, for he saw nothing but a great gulf, a moonless night, full of stars, and, for all the stars, dark, dark!—a fathomless abyss. He opened the third door, and a rush like the tide of a living sea invaded his ears. Multitudinous wings flapped and flashed in the sun, and, like the ascending column from a volcano, white birds innumerable shot into the air, darkening the day with ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... said you were not—very serious," she replied. It was fascination to torment him this way, yet it hurt her, too. She was playing on the verge of a precipice, not afraid of a misstep, but glorying in the prospect of a leap into the abyss. Something deep and strange in her bade her make him show her how much he loved her. If she drove him to desperation ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... took the lyre, and sang of Chaos, and the making of the wondrous World, and how all things sprang from Love, who could not live alone in the Abyss. And as he sang, his voice rose from the cave, above the crags, and through the tree tops, and the glens of oak and pine. And the trees bowed their heads when they heard it, and the gray rocks cracked and rang, and ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... shrub about ten paces away from us, casting a shadow so deep that the ground it covered looked like a bottomless abyss. But nevertheless, something bright moved in it—perhaps the sheen of that lone light in an upper window reflected on a knife-hilt or a button—something that moved in time to ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... immediately afterwards lost in the darkness. Where had the triumphal island sunk? In the depths of that flow of water? Claude still gazed, gradually fascinated by the great rushing of the river in the night. He leant over its broad bed, chilly like an abyss, in which the mysterious flames were dancing. And the loud, sad wail of the current attracted him, and he listened to its call, ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... thither by the wind. Once standing near the bottom of the fall And gazing up, he saw upon the verge Of the dark cliff above him, gathering flowers, His master's child, sweet Coralline; she leaned Out over the blank abyss, and smiled. He climbed the bank, but ere he reached the height, A shriek rang out above the water's roar; The babe had fallen, and a quadroon girl Lay fainting near, upon the treacherous sward. The babe had fallen, but with no injury yet. Karagwe slipped down upon a narrow ledge, And ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
... the vegetation, he walked the hemp carpet that ran diagonally across his office, and chased phantom after phantom of hope that lured him up to the rim of a solution of the problem, only to push him back into the abyss. He walked with his hands deep in his trousers pockets and his head down, and as General Ward was out organizing the farmers in a revolt against the dominant party in the state, Barclay was alone most of the time. ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... forever on The twin deft with the flight of years; And man in calm delight inhales The fragrance of pure classic lore! But Greece is gone! Her statues fair Are mingled with the dust; each god Has flown some fairer clime to rule, Or, subdued, walks the dark abyss. ...
— The Sylvan Cabin - A Centenary Ode on the Birth of Lincoln and Other Verse • Edward Smyth Jones
... gulf of sex—down, down, down where, immeasurably below the world of little things, the changeless, dreadful machinery of Life itself worked, clashing and resistless in its grooves. It was a glimpse fortunately brief, a vision that does not come too often, lest reason, brought to the edge of the abyss, grow giddy at the sight and, reeling, topple headlong. But quick the vision passed, the gulf closed, and she felt the firm ground ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... withheld me from uttering the few words which would have made the future wholly ours, and sculptured my dream of love in monumental permanance. Ah! with what narrow and trembling planks do we bridge the abyss of misery and despair! But be patient while I linger for a moment here. The evening before my departure, I went to take leave of her. There were other guests in the drawing-room, the atmosphere was heated and oppressive, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... journalist's trick of instantaneous composition. Like the Ouidaesque hero, who could ride a Derby Winner with one hand, and stroke a University Crew to victory with the other, Jaffery could with one hand hang on to a rope over a yawning abyss, while with the other he could scribble a graphic account of the situation on a knee-supported writing-pad. In ordinary circumstances—that is to say in what, to Jaffery, were ordinary circumstances—he performed these literary gymnastics ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... and moved his host by night, And ever pushed Sir Modred, league by league, Back to the sunset bound of Lyonnesse— A land of old upheaven from the abyss By fire, to sink into the abyss again; Where fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt, And the long mountains ended in a coast Of ever-shifting sand, and far away The phantom circle of a moaning sea. There the pursuer could pursue no more, And he that ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... where no comfort is, Speak not at all: can words make foul things fair? Our life's a cheat, our death a black abyss: Hush and be ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... of pity, hovering over an abyss of ruin, whose darkest horrors you only imagine faintly. What can you do? Nothing, but pray to God to paralyze my tongue, and grant me death, before I lose my last clutch on faith, and curse my Creator, and drift down to eternal perdition! It was hard enough before, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... these encomiastic requiems, having all the attraction of the abyss for weak minds and ambitious vanities, many of these yielding to this attraction have thought that fatality was the half of genius; many have dreamt of the hospital bed on which Gilbert died, hoping that they would become poets, as ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... not pretend I thought it so near. I rather imagined France would have instigated or winked at Spain's beginning with us. Here is a solution of the Americans declaring themselves independent. Oh! the folly, the madness, the guilt of having plunged us into this abyss! Were we and a few more endued with any uncommon penetration? No: they who did not see as far, would not. I am impatient to hear the complexion of to-day. I suppose it will, on the part of administration, have ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... over the prolongation of her exile. Her heart longed to be with Christ; she soared in spirit over the abyss that separated her from the object ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... of a week of which his Scottish captain used to say afterwards, 'Man! it's a pairfect meeracle to me how she lived through it!' spent many days stretched on his back, dazed, battered, hopeless, and tormented as if at the bottom of an abyss of unrest. He did not care what the end would be, and in his lucid moments overvalued his indifference. The danger, when not seen, has the imperfect vagueness of human thought. The fear grows shadowy; and ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... here, on account of the text stating that it is placed in the cave?—Well, we reply, /s/ruti as well as sm/ri/ti speaks of the highest Self as placed in the cave. Compare, for instance (Ka. Up. I, 2, 12), 'The Ancient who is hidden in the cave, who dwells in the abyss;' Taitt. Up. II, 1, 'He who knows him hidden in the cave, in the highest ether;' and, 'Search for the Self entered into the cave.' That it is not contrary to reason to assign to the omnipresent Brahman a special locality, for the purpose ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... assurance, in the light and joy of which she had exulted for months in Pittsfield, and been so comforted in these subsequent months of hardship and false accusation, strangely faded before these childhood and recent instructions; and gradually this pupil of Augustine and Calvin sank into the doctrinal abyss of the "horrible decrees." Nor would her broken and depressed spirits allow these sudden conclusions to affect her as abstract dogmas. They struck her, by Satanic power, like lightning, as terribly personal realities. "I, even I, Elizabeth Ward, have been awfully deceived! I am one of the reprobates! ...
— Elizabeth: The Disinherited Daugheter • E. Ben Ez-er
... only chance of escape, which was to leap the creek, afterwards ascertained to be twenty-two feet wide and twenty deep. Determined never to fall alive into the hands of the Indians, he made a mighty effort, sprang across the abyss of waters and stood rifle in hand upon the opposite bank. As quick as lightning, he proceeded to load his rifle. A large Indian, who had been foremost in pursuit, came to the opposite bank, and after magnanimously doing justice to the captain by exclaiming "Blady make good ...
— Heroes and Hunters of the West • Anonymous
... paths still, but well marked out and accessible—these are the paths of the life of Illumination—at length, a wide road almost smooth, the road of the life of unity, at the end of which the soul throws itself into the furnace of Love, and falls into the abyss of the ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... rouse the slack'ning flame; Just is my lot—but oh! must it transcend The reach of time, despair a distant end? With dreadful growth shoot forward, and arise, Where thought can't follow, and bold fancy dies? "Never! where falls the soul at that dread sound? Down an abyss how dark, and how profound? Down, down, (I still am falling, horrid pain!) Ten thousand thousand fathoms still remain; My plunge but still begun—And this for sin? Could I offend, if I had never been, But still ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... His remark rang true: I knew that nothing had ever turned up for him. I felt faint at looking into such an abyss of hopelessness. Instantly I saw that the truth of this delirious statement concerned me more than all ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... are certainly a great poet, and you are something more,—an honest man. After showing such loyal frankness to a young girl who was stepping to the verge of an abyss, have you enough left to answer without hypocrisy or evasion ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... her chamber, and embraces her with frantic passion, she pushes him backwards towards the balcony, and throws him over the parapet into the abyss, from whence his mutilated remains are dragged by his companions. They at once arm themselves against the presumed treachery, and call for vengeance; tumult and confusion fill the courtyard: the interrupted wedding ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... referring to the holy places of Babylonia is a tiny tablet found at Nineveh, and preserved in the British Museum. This text begins with the word Tiawthu "the sea," and goes on to enumerate, in turn, Tilmun (identified with the island of Bahrein in the Persian Gulf); Engurra (the Abyss, the abode of Enki or Ea), with numerous temples and shrines, including "the holy house," "the temple of the seer of heaven and earth," "the abode of Zer-panitum," consort of Merodach, "the throne of the holy place," "the temple of the region of Hades," "the supreme temple of life," "the temple of ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Theophilus G. Pinches
... my calm asylum, It mocks my soul with charming witchery, It lures me forward in a seraph's shape, 120 I see it near, I see it nearer floating, It draws, it pulls me with a god-like power— And lo! the abyss—and thither am I moving— I have no power within me ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... esquiring a Princess dedicated to Fatal Enchantment—that Kismet was a quaint fallacy, one with that whimsical conceit of Orient fatalism which assigns to each and every man his Day of Days, wherein he shall range the skies and plumb the abyss of his Destiny, alternately ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... could not try to win her affections by showing that he had paid for them beforehand. She seemed to be utterly unconscious of the fact that it was he who had been with her in the abyss of waters. If the thought came to her of itself, and she ever asked him, it would be time enough to tell her the story. If not, the moment might arrive when he could reveal to her the truth that he was her deliverer, without accusing ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... hypocrisy towards ourselves, with which even noble minds attempt to disguise the almost inevitable influence of selfish motives in human nature. This secret irony of the characterization commands admiration as the profound abyss of acuteness and sagacity; but it is the grave of enthusiasm. We arrive at it only after we have had the misfortune to see human nature through and through; and when no choice remains but to adopt the melancholy truth, that "no virtue or greatness is ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... tree at the head of our father's grave, its top shall reach up to the skies, its branches shall shade all the inhabitants of the earth, and its roots shall grow down deep into the earth, unto the abyss. For from him are sprung twelve tribes, and from him will arise kings and rulers, chapters of priests prepared to perform the service of the sacrifices, and companies of Levites ready to sing psalms and play upon ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... from His presence to the uttermost bounds of the universe. If they had been banished TOGETHER it would have been no punishment; so Zerah was exiled to a star on one side of the universe, and Zulamith was sent to a star on the other side of the universe; and between them was a fathomless abyss which thought itself could not cross. Only one thing could cross it—and that was love. Zulamith yearned for Zerah with such fidelity and longing that he began to build up a bridge of light from his star; and Zerah, not knowing this, but loving and longing for him, began to ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... changing or growing less or greater, eternally The Same Good. The Good which would be just as good, and just, and right, and lovely, and glorious, if there were no world, no men, no angels, no heaven, no hell, and God were alone in his own abyss. That very good which is the exact pattern of His Son Jesus Christ, in whose likeness man was made at the beginning, God hath showed thee, O man; and hath told thee that it is neither more nor less than thy ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... the fear which makes great masses of men rush into the abyss without due reason. It is, in fact, a mass sentiment with which there is no reasoning. Yet at one time or another in his career every man in business will be confronted with a stampede of this character, and if he ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... About eight we left the Banks. Just then we observed, that the sailor who sounded, having sung out five, then six, then in a few minutes seven, suddenly found no bottom, as if we had fallen off all at once from the brink of the Bank into an abyss. ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... hardly less vast must separate these from the close of the glacial age, when man roamed the plains of Europe, and sketched the herds of mammoths as they cropped the leaves. That huge beast, too, has long since departed into the abyss; but man the artist, who recorded the massive outline, the huge bossed forehead, the formidable bulk of the shaggy arctic elephant, engraved in firm lines on a fragment of its tusk,—man still remains. Man was present when rhinoceros and elephant ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... bade defiance to the waves, which broke over the ship and wetted me all over, as though to cool my feverish heat. I could now form a clear and vivid conception of a storm at sea. I saw the waves rush foaming on, and the ship now diving into an abyss, and anon rising with the speed of lightning to the peak of the highest wave. It was a thrilling, fearful sight;—absorbed in its contemplation, I soon ceased to think of ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer |
