"Pinnacle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of reason will be unheard; the passions only will bear sway; famine, distress, havoc, and dismay will spread around; hatred, violence, war, and bloodshed will be the infallible consequence, and from the pinnacle of happiness, peace, refinement, and social advantage, we shall be hurled once more into a profounder abyss of misery, want, and barbarism than ever, by the sole operation of the principle of population!"—Such is a brief abstract of the argument of the Essay. Can any thing be ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... the first encounter after the death of their redoubtable chief the Carlists met with defeat. The decline in the fortunes of Don Carlos had begun. One man had lifted them from the lowest ebb almost to the pinnacle of success. With the fall of Zumalacarregui Carlism received a death-blow in Spain, for there is little hope that one of this dynasty of claimants will ever reach ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... Coleridge or Byron. Almost all questions of criticism labor under this difficulty, that in the end they are questions of taste. You or I were so made in the beginning that the so-called romantic school or the so-called classical school seems to us to have reached the pinnacle of art; and all the argument in the world cannot make us over again in this respect. Every question which in the end involves questions of aesthetic taste is as futile to argue as questions ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... almost impassable barrier. The mountain range, with its moon-shaped windings, walls off the accessible parts of the plain. There is but one entrance, of which we are the masters. My hut is built on another point, which uplifts a lofty pinnacle on the summit, so that this plain is outspread before the gaze, and from the height I can catch a glimpse of the river flowing round, which to my fancy affords no less delight than the view of the Strymore as you look from Amphipolis. ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... replied Jose, "this paper says that from here one should be able to see, close at hand, a large pinnacle of rock in the shape of a pyramid. It is from that pinnacle that the bearings of the treasure- cave are to be taken and—and I can see no such ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... light forward, fearing to betray its passage through these guarded waters. They congratulated themselves on the fog. The Grande Etape was reached; the mist was so dense that the lofty outlines of the Pinnacle were scarcely visible. They heard it strike ten from the belfry of Saint-Ouen,—a sign that the wind was still aft. All was going well; the sea grew rougher, because they were ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... upon those dreary crags, but at one point, as I looked up at them, I saw—poised statue-like above a mighty pinnacle of rock—a solitary eagle. Pausing, with outstretched wings above its nest, it seemed to look disdainfully upon us human pygmies crawling far below. Living at such a height, in voluntary isolation, that king of birds appeared the very embodiment of strength and majesty. ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... opinion. I explained nothing. I let him continue to believe what he believes; because it is the only way to keep you on the pinnacle where he has placed you. Let any other reason for your conduct than an almost infantine ignorance of men and things be suggested and accepted, and down you will come, my poor Jane, and great will be the fall. Mine shall not be the hand thus to hurl you headlong. As you say, I might have said so ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... Tula, at the pinnacle of success. The army is his own; the keys of numerous towns are brought to him. Moscow alone appears to offer resistance. He is mild and amiable, testifies a noble emotion at the intelligence of the death of Boris, pardons ...
— Demetrius - A Play • Frederich Schiller
... round to the point of original impetus, where you have to be unwound for another whirl; your point of original impetus being the grossly material, not at all the spiritual. It is most true that sentimentalism springs from the former, merely and badly aping the latter,—fine flower, or pinnacle flame-spire, of sensualism that it is, could it do other? and accompanying the former it traverses tracts of desert here and there couching in a garden, catching with one hand at fruits, with another at colours; imagining a secret ahead, and goaded ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... I never heard of anything so delicious!" exclaimed Jasmine. "Long before the five years are out I'll be on the pinnacle of fame. London will inspire me; oh, it is the home of beauty and delight! Where is Mrs. Ellsworthy's letter?—we will never finish it? I am going to burn it on the spot rather than allow any other idea to be put into your ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... Banian. "O Omar, have you saved me only to cast me down from the highest pinnacle of joy to the depths of despair? Persuade your father to spare me, that I may owe my life to you ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... the knobby, brown rock pinnacle that formed the head of Sunlight Basin and stared resentfully out over the baked desert and the forbidding hills and the occasional grassy hollows that stretched away and away to the skyline. So clear was the air that every slope, every ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... days when the doctrine of evolution had reached its pinnacle, one sees how the human mind, by its habit of continual crystallisations, had destroyed all the meaning of the process. Witness, for example, that sterile phenomenon, the pagoda of 'caste'! Like this Chinese building, so was Society then ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the pinnacle occupies but a few lines only of the poem. Hitherto Satan admits that Jesus had conquered, but he had done no more than any wise ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... Ecclesiastes was written, altered the simple phrase in Exodus xxiv. 10, "They saw the God of Israel," to "They saw the place where the God of Israel stood." In Psalm lxxxiv. 11 they altered "God is a sun (or pinnacle?) and shield" to "God loves mercy and truth." They altered "God" to "an angel" in Job xx. 15, "God will cast them (i.e., the riches) out of his belly"; or even to "an angel will cast them out of his house." These alterations have ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... every moment lest the support break beneath them and hurl them down along the sloping side of the pinnacle to death. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... America in the heart of Minnesota is also the pinnacle of its watershed—the central source of the majestic rivers whose vast basins determine the physical contour, climates, products, commerce, industry, and political destiny of two-fifths of ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... even when seen from the side and from behind (N.N.W. view), "Church-rock" retained all the semblance of a castle and church perched up on that high pinnacle. From the N.N.W., besides the castellated towers which surmounted all, there appeared a perfect representation of a gabled roof over the body of the church, as well as the flying buttresses of the ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... of these last words. You cannot look at the canopy work or the pinnacle work of this cathedral without seeing that they do not merely suggest buds and leaves, but that the buds and leaves are there carven before your eyes. I myself cannot look at the tabernacle work of our stalls without being reminded ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... gate up through the wood. He ascended the hill with its dark ascending firs, to its crown of silvery birches, above which, as often as the slowly circling road brought him to the other side, he saw rise like a helmet the gray mass of the fortress. Turret and tower, pinnacle and battlement, appeared and disappeared as he climbed. Not until at last he stood almost on the top, and from an open space beheld nearly the whole front, could he tell what it was like. It was a grand pile, but looked a gloomy one to ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... kindlier road, Hazel would have found that nook in the Klappan Range a pleasant enough place. She could not deny its beauty. It snuggled in the heart of a wild tangle of hills all turreted and battlemented with ledge and pinnacle of rock, from which ran huge escarpments clothed with spruce and pine, scarred and gashed on every hand with slides and deep-worn watercourses, down which tumultuous streams rioted their foamy way. And nestled amid ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... and stripes had been planted on a high ice-pinnacle, a rather solemn supper was eaten in the lee of a giant ice-cake. Then, with the jazz band playing "Star Spangled Banner," the submarine sank and ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... description of Eveline's feelings at this hour would be a vain task. In a moment, she was brought down from the pinnacle of hope to the depths of despair; for she saw in all this that had passed the hand of Duffel, her avowed enemy; and, indeed, as the reader has doubtless already concluded, she was in the hands of ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... good manners, morals, methods, and [5] means. It points to the scientific spiritual molecule, pearl, and pinnacle, that everybody needs. May the Christlikeness it reflects rest on the dear readers, and throw the light of penetration on the page; even as the dawn, kindling its glories in the east, lightens earth's ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... peas, from the ground, and scattered them in a hail about us. I despair of giving any idea of that glacial blast: it was as if one stood, deprived of clothing, of skin and flesh—a jabbering anatomy—upon some drear Caucasian pinnacle. And I thought upon the gentle rains of London, from which I had fled to these sunny regions, I remembered the fogs, moist and warm and caressing: greatly is the English winter maligned! Seeing that this part of Tunisia is covered with the forsaken cities of the Romans ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... bird with as much ease as a pigeon poises himself on his wings, or an Indian steers his canoe. See! we are approaching the crown of the pinnacle." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... and mind that it be no beggarly desire. Wish to the very summit of wealth, or the topmost pinnacle of thy ambition, for ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... this earth was made No keel hath ploughed it, and to mortal ear No wind hath told its secrets.... With this tide I sail; if all be well, this very moon Shall see my ship beyond the southern cape Of Greenland, and far up the bay through which, With diamond spire and gorgeous pinnacle, The fleets of winter pass to warmer seas. Whether, my hardy shipmates! we shall reach Our bourne, and come with tales of wonder back, Or whether we shall lose the precious time, Locked in thick ice, or whether ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... asked, for I felt that I should like to climb to the topmost pinnacle of the highest peak in all the world and shout the good news to the four corners ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... the door she said: "I thought I had reached the pinnacle of disappointment and pain when compelled to leave the ship, for it meant that I should lose you and have to marry Louis of France. But I have found that there is still a possible pain more poignant than either, and I cannot ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... the Norfolk coast, where she had been lying for two or three days, the day before she was lost, and was then intending to cruise round the coast of Great Britain. The baron was immediately raised from the depths of despair to the highest pinnacle of hope on hearing this, for he felt sure Leon had gone ashore at Yarmouth to place the baby with some Englishwoman, and had remained there some days on purpose. Confiding his new hope to Pere Yvon, he at once decided to start that night for England by Dover and ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 • Various
... is impossible for you to understand the anxiety with which Mr. Smith and his associates awaited the news from the Commissioners, without first realizing the astounding progress of Mr. Smith in the three past years, and the pinnacle of public eminence ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... both exchanged unbounded empire for absolute seclusion. But Diocletian was born in the lowest abyss of human degradation—the slave and the son of a slave. For such a man, after having reached the highest pinnacle of human greatness, voluntarily to descend from power, seems an act of far greater magnanimity than the retreat of Charles. Born in the purple, having exercised unlimited authority from his boyhood, and having worn from ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... war, the concentration of power in the Tudor crown, the Dissolution itself, and the Reformation which followed, all left this as they found it, or left it stronger still. To this constitution alone the noble church was indebted for its preservation. The King could grasp all else from pinnacle to basement, but the nave was the parishioners', and that he could not touch. The result is a church surviving entire and substantially as its vanished patrons and banished brethren left it. Therefore if this church is a monument of baronial and ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury - with some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst Gloucestershire • H. J. L. J. Masse
... class, descends to the popular strata; that, from one end of France to the other, a sullen hostility prevails against the new institutions; for now the political and social constitution is joined to the ecclesiastical constitution like an edifice to its spire, and, through this sharp pinnacle, seeks the storm even within the darkening clouds of heaven. The evil all springs out of this unskillful, gratuitous, compulsory fusion, and, consequently, from those who ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... that such work would properly demand, some speculation to be incurred requiring great means and courage as well, and Roger Scatcherd had been found to be the man for the time. He was then elevated for the moment to the dizzy pinnacle of a newspaper hero, and became one of those "whom the king delighteth to honour." He went up one day to kiss Her Majesty's hand, and come down to his new grand house at Boxall Hill, ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... in at the tail end of the company, with the cook and an officer's servant, and the orderly sergeant came back and wanted to know if the company had got to have me around again. Here was promotion with a vengeance. From the proud pinnacle from which I had soared, as chaplain's clerk, and colonel's orderly, I had dropped with one fell swoop to the rear end of my company, and nobody wanted me, because I had kicked against stealing hens in one ...
— How Private George W. Peck Put Down The Rebellion - or, The Funny Experiences of a Raw Recruit - 1887 • George W. Peck
... adventure. There was a significance in the extraordinary encounter with Keeko that dimmed to the commonplace every thrill he had ever experienced in the past. It had lifted him at a bound to that pinnacle of manhood, which until the moment when woman presents herself upon youth's stage of ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... to be sure, this mote of life and light; but before it is a vast evolution, Dane, on the pinnacle of which are to be found men and women, Hester Stebbins, my ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... intellectual indifference to the world set in. She read Milton in a garret and ate very little. When addressed, she gave the impression of being suddenly dragged down from some sublime pinnacle of thought. This was the period of absent-mindedness, of untidiness, of unpunctuality, for she was convinced that these three ingredients compose the spiritual life. But it was not a success. True, her cheeks lost their roses, but without attaining an interesting transparent whiteness and her figure ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... Russell & Joy to her mind was a synonym for heartless destruction of happiness and life. The traffic itself was a great evil generality, and as such met condemnation. But in generalities, as in mountain ranges, there are specific points that tower out distinctively for consideration. Such a pinnacle of iniquity this liquor firm had seemed to Jean to be since her ...
— The Daughter of a Republican • Bernie Babcock
... to the highest pinnacle of the Mountain of the Thunders, and there fell to musing, the while scratching the side of his head with his mighty claw. At last he bethought himself of a spell or charm, which was taught him by his father, who lived before time was, and survived its commencement many ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... and walked rapidly all the night. As day dawned he began to feel hopeful; but, ere the sun rose, distant sounds, which grew louder and louder, reached his ear. He knew them to be the voices of his pursuers and again he became sorely afraid. He hurried on and came near the foot of a high isolated pinnacle of rock, whose top appeared to be inaccessible. Glancing to the summit, however, he beheld standing there a black mountain sheep. Thinking that this singular vision was sent to him as a sign from the yays (gods) and boded well for him, he came to the base of the rock, when the sheep addressed ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews
... is said that one of the domestics about his person informed him of the abdication of Napoleon; upon which he put himself in a great passion, and swore "it was a lie." This wretched old man was reduced from the highest pinnacle of grandeur to the most pitiable condition; none of his subjects were admitted to see him for many years; even his children were excluded, except upon particular occasions, and then they were admitted only in the presence of certain individuals. The old Queen ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... his importance, and scrutinize him with due power of vision! We enjoyed, what not three men Weissnichtwo could boast of, a certain degree of access to the Professor's private domicile. It was the attic floor of the highest house in the Wahngasse; and might truly be called the pinnacle of Weissnichtwo, for it rose sheer up above the contiguous roofs, themselves rising from elevated ground. Moreover, with its windows it looked towards all the four Orte or as the Scotch say, and ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... greatest students of the modern world, a fact which has made his case one of unparalleled notoriety. I was his roommate during the several years we spent in law school, and, although he shot to the pinnacle of his branch of jurisprudence while I was left to more prosaic routine, we never lost the contact which has now become so valuable. Our correspondence was frequent and regular since we were graduated, and I can say with ...
— The Homicidal Diary • Earl Peirce
... the things called miracles, related in the New Testament, is that of the devil flying away with Jesus Christ, and carrying him to the top of a high mountain; and to the top of the highest pinnacle of the temple, and showing him and promising to him all the kingdoms of the world. How happened it that he did not discover America? or is it only with kingdoms that his sooty ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... Wilson," cried Ellis, "you talk of lofty views; but this is a pinnacle of loftiness to which I, for one, could never aspire. Positively, to rejoice in the extinction of the individual with his faculties undeveloped, his opportunities unrealized, his ambitions unfulfilled—why it's sublime! its Kiplingese—there's no ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... trembling, her lips pressed to his. In that supreme moment he felt not happiness, but a bitter desire to bear her out of the world into some higher sphere where the conditions of happiness might possibly exist. "On the highest pinnacle we reach," he thought, "we are granted the tormenting and chastening glimpse of what might be, had God, when he compounded his victims, been in a generous mood and ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... shade! This is the pinnacle, the very noon Of summer in these lands. One hour of sun Unshaded—and poor Oldham and poor I Might have a maniac or ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... score did him no harm. Sir Harry had made up his mind that day. Sir Harry had at that time learned a good deal of his cousin George's mode of life in London, and had already decided that this young man was not one whom it would be well to set upon the pinnacle. ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... we stand on the dividing ridge of Time, the topmost pinnacle of humanity; and, looking backward over the vast ocean of life, we can discern amidst the rolling, heaving, struggling surges, which have engulfed so many grand hopes, and towering aims, and strong endeavors during the world's voyage of half a century, that important victories have been ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... rather than rely upon the Father's providence, Satan went to the other extreme and tempted Jesus to wantonly throw Himself upon the Father's protection.[298] Jesus was standing upon one of the high parts of the temple, a pinnacle or battlement, overlooking the spacious courts, when the devil said unto Him: "If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... dimly lighted corridors at the base of the temple, and in the first tiers of the tower, are wonderfully realistic representations of a sensual and ferocious deity. But, as you stand in the court, and look up the sides of the tower to the gilded pinnacle on its dome, you discover that all the upper rows of gods and demons are of stucco. Money evidently gave out, as the structure rose, and plaster took the place ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... enter and put down his pack and kneel beside his burden on the hard floor of that cathedral. And tears of deep emotion came into my eyes, as I said to myself: "There is a soul worth more than all the material surroundings. That man will live after the last pinnacle has fallen, and not one stone of all that cathedral glory shall remain uncrumbled. He is now a Lazarus in rags and poverty and weariness, but immortal, and a son of the Lord God Almighty; and the prayer ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... agreed. "I'm afraid we'll shock the ladies terribly, Dick. We ought to get out on a pinnacle with a ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... flag-pole, the British Royal Ensign bound closely about it, its colours being distinctly visible through its casing of ice; for an immense quadruple-faced light was placed high up in the fork of a tree opposite the great window of the vaulted saloon, casting its beam to the very pinnacle of the ensign-staff; lighting the castle from end to end upon its northern side, where the great avenues converged. A shaft reluctantly and gloomily effused the near density of the forest; another ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... returned the supper was already laid in the little kitchen. The cards were put away, and young MacLean and Wallace Hunter were replacing the cover and the lamp on the card-table. Stewart was orating from a pinnacle ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... business of the artist to touch the heart? True,—and it is his high privilege, as its liege-lord, to sound its very depths; nay, from its lowest deep to touch alike its loftiest breathing pinnacle. Yet he may not even approach it, except through the transforming atmosphere of the imagination, where alone the saddest notes of woe, even the appalling shriek of despair, are softened, as it were, by the tempering dews of this visionary region, ere they fall upon the heart. Else how ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... not to interfere in business. These complicated laws balance each other, you might say. Our whole legal system is based upon them. Right now, we've got government right where we want it. This is free enterprise, Mathers, at its pinnacle. Did you ever hear of Jim Fisk and his attempt to corner gold in 1869, the so-called Black Friday affair? Well, Jim Fisk was a peanut peddler ...
— Medal of Honor • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... the Saturday noon crowd and yet the same type. Free women, happy women, regular women. Women who can recall a judge or so and still be graceful and dainty. It is very significant that a San Francisco woman stands at the very pinnacle of the city, graceful and alert on that tall slender column in ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... the grim background of mean streets, and the cheerful virtues which throw a glamour over their humble homes. His advocacy of these social causes came to be known far and wide and contributed a second element to the popularity won by his novels; long before his death Dickens stood on a pinnacle alone, loved by the vast reading public among those who toil in our towns and villages, and wherever English is read and understood. He was not only their entertainer, but their friend and brother; he had been through his days of sorrow and suffering ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... till then, the Chieftain awoke. The Chieftain showed as a chocolate, golden-brown, wedge-shaped mass of feathers, perched on a lonely pinnacle of rock, and, his appalling, razor-edged claws being hidden under the overhanging feathers of his legs, he was scarcely striking. Next moment he opened his eyes, and was no longer mean, for he was a golden eagle, and the eyes of a golden eagle are terrible. In them are written hauteur, ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... believe that two angels, one good and one bad, are perched continually on the shoulders of every man to record his good and evil deeds. And when an eclipse occurs they say that the sun and moon have gone behind a pinnacle or tower of the heavens. For exorcising evil spirits they write texts of the Koran on paper and burn them before the sufferer. The caste bury the dead with the feet pointing to the south. On the way to the grave each one of the mourners places ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... Calpurnia fast asleep, but heard her utter in her dream some indistinct words and inarticulate groans. She fancied at that time she was weeping over Caesar, and holding him butchered in her arms. Others say this was not her dream, but that she dreamed that a pinnacle which the senate, as Livy relates, had ordered to be raised on Caesar's house by way of ornament and grandeur, was tumbling down, which was the occasion of her tears and ejaculations. When it was day, she begged of Caesar, if it were possible, not ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... the Giralda, the cathedral tower at Seville, is a square of fifty feet. The pinnacle of the filigree belfry, which surmounts the original Moorish tower, "is crowned with El Girardillo, a bronze statue of La Fe, The Faith.... Although 14 feet high, and weighing 2800 lbs., it turns with the slightest breeze."—Ford's Handbook for ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... love; and so Harry, who was a right good son, began to inquire what it was that was specially weighing on his mother's mind, determined to do anything in reason to re-place her on the little harmless social pinnacle from which she was wont to look down on all the other mothers and sons of the parish. He soon found out that her present grievance arose from his having neglected his place as ringer of the heavy bell in ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... Count, at length, rose from the table, and addressing himself to the company, said, "Gentlemen, I was willing to convince you how well I can rely upon the officers of my artillery; for I ordered them to fire during the time we continued at dinner, at the pinnacle of the tent, and they have executed my orders ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... them a line of stunted firs edged limits of perpetual snow, and rocks and glistening fields of crag-broken white carried the eye on upward to the dazzling pinnacle of the Col de la Reine, splitting the ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... and idle who may chance to stumble across his entertainment. His living auditors, unsolicited for the tribute of worship or an alms, find themselves conceived of in the likeness of what he would have them to be, raised to a companion pinnacle of friendship, and constituted peers and judges, if they will, of his achievement. ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... or solar. Their symbolism, like that of every other Deity, was coextensive with nature, and with the mind of man. Yet the astrological character is assigned even to Jehovah. He is described as seated on the pinnacle of the Universe, leading forth the Hosts of Heaven, and telling them unerringly by name and number. His stars are His sons and His eyes, which run through the whole world, keeping watch over men's deeds. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... he at once reached the pinnacle of success, and became in his profession the most famous figure of his day, was the capture of the Rajah of Kishmoor's great ship, The Sun of the East. In this vessel was the Rajah's favorite Queen, who, together with her attendants, were set upon a pilgrimage to Mecca. The court of this great ...
— The Ruby of Kishmoor • Howard Pyle
... revolutionary mind to the climax of all utterances possible to it, has said that 'men are degraded when considered as the members of a political organisation.'[2] Shelley's position was on a yet more remote pinnacle than this. Of mankind he was barely conscious, in his loftiest and divinest flights. His muse seeks the vague translucent spaces where the care of man melts away in vision of the eternal forces, of which man may be but the fortuitous manifestation ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... retorted, with increasing ardor. "Call it blessing; call it heavenly boon; call it the pinnacle of my desire, the apogee of my hopes—call it anything in the ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... white and red and blue. But all is fairer still by night: Each rock reflects a softer light, When the whole mount from foot to crest In robes of lambent flame is dressed; When from a million herbs a blaze Of their own luminous glory plays, And clothed in fire each deep ravine, Each pinnacle and crag is seen. Some parts the look of mansions wear, And others are as gardens fair, While others seem a massive block Of solid undivided rock. Behold those pleasant beds o'erlaid With lotus leaves, for lovers made, Where mountain birch and costus ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... a smiling morn in May, When the Commodore Jacques Cartier to the westward sailed away; In the crowded old Cathedral, all the town were on their knees, For the safe return of kinsmen from the undiscovered seas; And every autumn blast that swept o'er pinnacle and pier, Filled manly hearts with sorrow, and gentle ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... hill that led out of town—two lovers on two chestnut sorrel steeds, riding out and away to honeymoon through the warm summer day. Daylight felt himself drunken as with wine. He was at the topmost pinnacle of life. Higher than this no man could climb nor had ever climbed. It was his day of days, his love-time and his mating-time, and all crowned by this virginal possession of a mate who had said "Oh, ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... sometimes "swap ends" so many times, that it was a marvel that a broken neck was not the result. But to his own mind these airy flights were always sublime, and especially so when he struck the quotation, which usually closed each missionary speech, that placed the herald of the Gospel on the highest pinnacle of time, and made him "look back over the vista of receding ages" and "forward over the hill-tops of coming time," and "lift up his voice until it should echo from mountain top to mountain top, from valley ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... or that neglect of his private interests which almost inevitably accompanies the absorbing duties of public life, his affairs were always somewhat confused, and Lady Montfort, who wished to place him on a pinnacle, had resolved that he should marry an heiress. After long observation and careful inquiry and prolonged reflection, the lady she had fixed upon was Miss Neuchatel; and she it was who had made Lord Roehampton cross the room and address Adriana ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... its name to the one I was born in, somewhat gloomy. But the next morning it brightened up, and our own spirits were correspondingly improved; insomuch that I struck my head a violent blow against the stone roof of the topmost pinnacle of St. Botolph's tower, such was the zeal of my ascent into it. All this happened two years after the aquarium, in 1857, when I was older and wiser, but had not yet outgrown the ambition to climb to the top of all high places; this bump may have been an admonition not to climb too high. We went ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... Germains stretch in dark luxuriance around and afar. There you may see sleeping on the verge of the landscape the mighty city,—crowned with the thousand spires from which, proud above the rest, rises the eyry of Napoleon's eagle, the pinnacle of Notre Dame. ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... incredible distances. As far as the eye could travel with utmost straining, away to the dark, imposing background of the Djurdjura range, billowed ridges and ravines, ravines and ridges, each pointing pinnacle or razor-shelf adorned with its coral-red hamlet, like a group of poisonous fungi, or the barnacles on a ship's steep side. Such an extraordinary landscape Stephen had never imagined, or seen except on a Japanese fan; and it struck him that the scene ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... wished to show that Paradise was regained by the resistance of Christ to temptation, Satan's defeat signifying the regaining of Paradise for men by giving them the hope of Christ's second coming. Therefore the poem naturally ends with Satan's rebuff and his final abandonment of the attempt on the pinnacle of ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... it is: oak, trained and chosen for such work, sound now as four hundred years since. Under the carver's hand it seems to cut like clay, to fold like silk, to grow like living branches, to leap like living flame. Canopy crowning canopy, pinnacle piercing pinnacle—it shoots and wreathes itself into an enchanted glade, inextricable, imperishable, fuller of leafage than any forest, and fuller of story than ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... revolt until four or five years afterward! And of course the old count, who so kindly left the family group that was bidding Madelaine de Livilier good-bye, was not the Prime Minister Maurepas, who was not "only a few months returned from exile," and who was not then "at the pinnacle of royal favor"; for these matters were of earlier date, and this "most lovable old man in the world" wasn't any longer in the world at all, and had not been for eight years. ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... the coulee, the man gazed about him, searching for a familiar landmark. A quarter of a mile away, a conical butte rose to a height of a hundred feet above the level of the broken plain, and the Texan walked over and laboriously climbed its steep side. He sank down upon the topmost pinnacle and studied the country minutely. "Just below the edge of the bad lands," he muttered. "The Little Rockies loom up plain, an' the Bear Paws an' Judiths look kind of dim. I'm way off my range down here. This part of the country don't look like it had none too thick of a population." ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... thirteenth century we are confronted by the anomaly of a church grossly corrupt but widely obeyed. She is nearing the pinnacle of her power and the zenith of her glory, although the parochial clergy have sunk into vice and incapacity, and the monks, as a class, are lazy, ignorant and notoriously corrupt. Two things, especially, command the attention,—first, the immorality and laxity of the monks; and second, ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... he caught, that St. Michael the Archangel had been from early days a very important and powerful Cornish personage, and that he clung to high places on the tors and rocks because he had to fight and subdue the Prince of the Air, whom he always destroyed at last on some pointed pinnacle. And now that he came to think of it, Eustace vaguely recollected he had always seen St. Michael, in pictures or stained glass windows, delineated just so —with drawn sword and warrior's mien—in the act of triumphing over ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... one single point above that level; for where on the whole surface of the globe can we find a single chain of mountains, even a few hundred miles in length, with their many summits rising within a few feet of a given level, and not one pinnacle above it? If then the foundations, whence the atoll- building corals sprang, were not formed of sediment, and if they were not lifted up to the required level, they must of necessity have subsided into it; and this at once solves the difficulty. For as mountain after mountain, and island after ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... he kept himself so aloof and apart from others that he was little known, save by the benefits the waste of his wealth conferred. That the hate of any one could reach the austere statesman on his high pinnacle of esteem,—you would have smiled at the idea! But Hate is now, as it ever has been, an actual Power amidst "the Varieties of Life;" and, in spite of bars to the door, and policemen in the street, no one can be said to sleep in safety ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the sea. It may seem mournful that he did not survive to enjoy the thanks and honors with which a grateful country would have rejoiced to recompense this crowning triumph. But he had reached the pinnacle of fame; and his death in the hour of victory has tended far more than a few years of peaceful life, to keep alive his memory in the hearts of a people which loved, and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... a niche, nigh to its pinnacle, Twelve Saints had once stood sanctified in stone; But these had fallen, not when the friars fell, But in the war which struck Charles from his throne, When each house was a fortalice—as tell The annals of full many a line ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... climbed after him, till they stood together, right on the conical pinnacle, with only just room for them to remain erect, the great boiling crater below on one side, the glorious view of the fairy-like isle, with its ring of foam around, and the vivid blue lagoon, circling the emerald green of the coast. ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... Burmah, in Siam, Sumatra, and Ceylon, the districts in which the elephants most abound, are all hilly and mountainous. In the latter, especially, there is not a range so elevated as to be inaccessible to them. On the very summit of Adam's Peak, at an altitude of 7,420 feet, and on a pinnacle which the pilgrims climb with difficulty, by means of steps hewn in the rock, Major Skinner, in 1840, found the spoor of ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... allowed them, had gone a score of paces deeper into the canon, the crack of a rifle shouted its reverberating message of menace back and forth in the rocky ravine, a spurt of flame showed where the rifleman stood upon a pinnacle of rock almost directly above their heads and there came the further sounds of men's startled voices and the scampering of horses' hoofs, fleeing southward through ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... chap. 17. "A little Home-bred Slave, that was a darling favourite to Pericles, Prince of the Athenians, and who, while a temple was building in the Prince's palace, had climbed up to the very top of the pinnacle, and tumbled down from that prodigious height; is said to have been cured of his fall by the herb Parthenium, or mug-wort, which was shown to Pericles in a dream, by Minerva. From hence it originally took the name of Parthenium, and is attributed to ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey
... which we approach the pinnacle of MASTERY OF SELF now takes a new turn. It is neither that of Business and Financial achievement, as we studied in the First Division of the course, nor is it that of Success and Magnetism as was taught in the Second Division. For many students we now come to the real battle- ground ...
— Mastery of Self • Frank Channing Haddock
... experience with the drug. He says, "I existed by turns in different places and various states of being. Now I swept my gondola through the moonlit lagoons of Venice. Now Alp on Alp towered above my view, and the glory of the coming sun flashed purple light upon the topmost icy pinnacle. Now in the primeval silence of some unexplored tropical forest I spread my feathery leaves, a giant fern, and swayed and nodded in the spice-gales over a river whose waves at once sent up clouds of music and perfume. My soul changes to a vegetable essence, thrilled ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... had any claim upon this foreigner who received him coldly and yet would hear nothing of his departure. Pride had little share in this, for the issues were momentous. It was sufficient to know that a hand had suddenly drawn him from the abyss, had put him on this pinnacle—beyond all, had placed him in Anna Gessner's home as the first-born, there to embark upon a career whose goal lay beyond the ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... pass over his stormy life, and hear what he says when, on the pinnacle of earthly power and glory, he was approaching ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... Falling water was everywhere. We rode above the clouds, under the clouds, and through the clouds! and every now and then a shaft of sunshine penetrated like a search-light to the depths yawning beneath us, or flashed upon some pinnacle of the crater-rim thousands of feet above. At every turn of the trail a waterfall or a dozen waterfalls, leaping hundreds of feet through the air, burst upon our vision. At our first night's camp, in the Keanae Gulch, we counted thirty-two waterfalls from a single ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... been published, and a fourth was preparing. I was in high favour. Men of all ranks visited the earl; and dukes, lords, and barons became as familiar to me as gowns and caps had formerly been in the streets of Oxford. I stood on the very pinnacle of fortune; and, proud of my skill, like a rope-dancer that casts away his balancing pole, I took pleasure in standing on tiptoe. Noticed by the leading men, caressed and courted by their dependants, politics encouraging me on this hand, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... grim, grotesque head is peering; the massive cornices; the heavy corbels carved into ten thousand strange and uncouth fancies; but finer than all, the taper and stately spire, fretted and perforated like some piece of silver filigree, stretches upward towards the sky, its airy pinnacle growing finer and more beautiful as it nears the stars it points to. How full of historic associations is every dark embrasure, every narrow casement around! Here may have stood the great emperor, Charles the Fifth, meditating upon that greatness ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... this old rotten world, of what there is yet to be found in America," cried Du Mesne. "For myself, I have been no farther than the great falls of the Ontoneagrea—a mere trifle of a cataract, gentlemen, into which ye might pitch your tallest English cathedral and sink it beyond its pinnacle with ease. Yet I have spoke with the holy fathers who have journeyed far to the westward, even to the vast Messasebe, which is well known to run into the China sea upon some far-off coast not yet well charted. I have also read the story of Sagean, who was far to the west of that mighty river. ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... and save them, for his mercy's sake, in this hour of their extremity. Mingled with their personal apprehension and anxiety for their wives and their children would be thoughts of "the daughter of their people"—their beautiful queen—so young, so fair, so lately exalted to the pinnacle of honour and glory; adorned with gems and wreathed with flowers, the pride of a monarch and the ornament of a court; now, neglected, abject, forsaken—included in the doom of her race, prostrate in some secluded apartment of the palace—her ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... mountains towering high above their heads to the eastward, while the mountainsides and valleys were still dark with the shadows of night; and everywhere the flaming light of morning struck the crystal-white of the snow on mountain top and pinnacle, that peak was crowned with a glorious halo that glowed, first with grayish violet lights, swiftly changing to crimson and rose, and from rose to gold, until, suddenly, the whole peak blazed forth in the glorious light of the full-risen sun. A vision ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... proof of this. I have a score of females, all at the height of their splendour, in a wire-gauze cage in the open air. A tuft of thyme forms a grove in the centre of their establishment. When night comes, my captives clamber to this pinnacle and strive to show off their luminous charms to the best advantage at every point of the horizon, thus forming along the twigs marvellous clusters from which I expected magnificent effects on the photographer's plates ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... years a member of the cathedral foundation, and lived just opposite the west front. He made a special study of the history and fabric of the cathedral. Hardly a year passed without something falling down; sometimes a piece of a pinnacle, sometimes a crocket or other ornament, sometimes a shaft. Old engravings of the spires show the pinnacles broken. Many of the shafts are wanting. Some have been replaced in wood. Many wholly new ones were put up by Dean Monk. And concerning the north ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... moment of their greatest value, clear opportunities that none but a hopeless blunderer could have disregarded. What men call Chance operated in my favour as though with superb calculation, lifting me to this miniature pinnacle I could never have reached by my own skill ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... which treat of the placental animals that suckle their young. And finally,—last born of creation,—man appears upon the scene, in his several races and varieties; the sublime arch of animal being at length receives its keystone; and the finished work stands up complete, from foundation to pinnacle, at once an admirably adjusted occupant of space, and a wonderful monument of Divine arrangement and classification, as it exists in time. Save at two special points, to which I shall afterwards advert, the particular arrangement unfolded by geologic history is exactly that which the greatest ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... those days the stopping-place of the majority of the famous men and women visiting New York, represented to the young boy who came to see these celebrities the very pinnacle of opulence. Often while waiting to be received by some dignitary, he wondered how one could acquire enough means to live at a place of such luxury. The main dining-room, to the boy's mind, was an object of special interest. He ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... the barren bluff the slender woman's figure stands on the pinnacle of night, outlined against a starry sky. The cool night breeze wafts to her burning ear snatches of song and drum. With desperate hate she ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... is dead and buried. But I want you to realize that during those few minutes I was not John Trenholme, an artist struggling for foothold on the steep crags of the painter's rock of endeavor, but a master of the craft gazing from some high pinnacle at a territory he had won. If you know anything of painting, Miss Manning, you will go with me so far as to admit that my indiscretion was impersonal. I, a poet who expressed his emotions in terms of color, was alone with Aphrodite and a nymph, on a June morning, in a leafy English ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... planted a kitchen chair. On the back of this he had rested a long telescope, which usually adorned the big glass case which stood against the wall behind the shop-counter. This formidable instrument he had focussed upon the pinnacle of a wooded height, which stood conspicuous behind the line of foot-hills, and, as he peered at the distant mountain-top, he gave vent to a string of ejaculations, expressive of ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... obsessed with his thoughts and feelings against the man James. With every passing day his resentment against him piled up, till now he could think of nothing much else but a possible way to dislodge him from the pinnacle of his local notoriety, and so rid the district of the threat of ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... business as a hermitess on Helmet Rock came into the bar-room at the Cliff House, and there, amidst the crushing thunders and lightnings spilling all over the horizon, she related that she had seen a young seal in a comfortable overcoat, sitting pensively upon the pinnacle of Seal Rock, and had distinctly heard the familiar words of a Methodist hymn. Upon inquiry the tale was discovered to be founded upon fact. The identity of this seal could no longer be denied without downright blasphemy, and in all the old chronicles of ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... no doubt, who were also possest of this double gift. The French, for instance, might well urge the claim of Bossuet to be raised to the same pinnacle; but the English and the Germans have not yielded to the spell of his majestic periods. Perhaps we here in the United States should not be extravagant if we set up also a claim for Daniel Webster; but, however firm our faith, and however solid our justification, ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... minions? It is E. whose life is once more in your hands—it is E. whom you are to save from being plucked of her borrowed plumes, discovered, branded, and trodden down, first by him, perhaps, who has raised her to this dizzy pinnacle!—The enclosure will reach you twice a-year—do not refuse it—it is out of my own allowance, and may be twice as much when you want it. With you it may do good—with ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... parted with her husband and child. The house was quiet, fearfully quiet to Sophy. There was a depressing hush about it altogether different from the cheerful tranquillity of her own home. Very few visitors broke through its monotony, for Mrs. Bolton's social pinnacle was too high above her immediate neighbors for them to climb up to it; whilst those whose station was somewhat on a level with hers lived too faraway, or were too young and frivolous for friendly intercourse. There were formal dinner-parties ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... force—the sound of a trumpet, a mere breath of air—may dislodge it, and cause it to descend, carrying destruction into the valley. But the force of gravitation is necessary to bring it down and give it the impetus of ruin. So the might of a great people may be poised on some lofty pinnacle of human destiny; but unless there he involved in the existing sentiments and convictions, the situation and surroundings of that people, the elements of force and action, for good or evil, no individual agency and no combination of men can impart the power which they lack. All ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... meddle with the young Mercian, who outdid them all in manly sports. The envy of the young Normans was held in check by Gilbert, and by a wholesome dread of Hereward's strong arm; until, in Gilbert's absence, an incident occurred which placed the young exile on a pinnacle so far above them that only by his death could they hope to rid themselves of their ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... send one boat-load on shore, but there was the risk of their falling into the hands of the savage inhabitants. Anxiously they awaited the return of day. It came at length. They forthwith made another attempt to carry out an anchor, but no holding ground was found. They were apparently on the very pinnacle of a rock. It was the top of high water. There appeared every probability that, when the tide became lower, the ship would fall over on her bilge ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... unfolded, secrets reveal themselves, hidden things are proclaimed, and courts and juries, awed and abashed, yet elevated and inspired, accept and act upon his conclusions as infallible. For one hour he touches the pinnacle ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... securities: she has the security of her own doctrines; she has the security of the piety, the sanctity, of her own professors,—their learning is a bulwark to defend her; she has the security of the two universities, not shook in any single battlement, in any single pinnacle. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... because it has not as much attraction for the great sovereign voter as the blessed protective tariff, which, to use your own fantastic expression, you should "cosset on your heaving brisket" for its splendid success as a survivor of its primogenitors. Look at the pinnacle of political success to which the McKinley bill has brought Bill McKinley (excuse the paltry little pun) and sound money (saving your presence) brought Grover Cleveland, and then contemplate the ignominy and obscurity has brought George ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... contrary, I have not a doubt that your extraordinary voice will lift you to the highest pinnacle of musical celebrity; and, because your career on the stage promises to prove so brilliant, I shudder in anticipating the temptations that will unavoidably ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... thick black shadows athwart hollow and gorge, bringing out details as well as the main massive features of the architecture; while all the rocks, as if wild with life, throb and quiver and glow in the glorious sunburst, rejoicing. Every rock temple then becomes a temple of music; every spire and pinnacle an angel of light ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... Fauntleroy was always left to speak to his mother in the porch alone, or perhaps to go home with her. And yet, every day, fruit and flowers were sent to Court Lodge from the hot-houses at the Castle. But the one virtuous action of the Earl's which had set him upon the pinnacle of perfection in Cedric's eyes, was what he had done soon after that first Sunday when Mrs. Errol had walked home from church unattended. About a week later, when Cedric was going one day to visit his mother, he ...
— Little Lord Fauntleroy • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... had its vicissitudes. Of course you know that your Civil War produced a cotton famine in Europe; but it raised this city to the pinnacle of prosperity. A reign of speculation came here, and it was believed that Bombay would be the leading cotton mart of the world. Companies were organized to develop the resources of the country in the textile plant; and the fever raged as high as it did when the South Sea ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... by a look. She had long worshipped Mr. Pickwick at a distance, but here she was, all at once, raised to a pinnacle to which her wildest and most extravagant hopes had never dared to aspire. Mr. Pickwick was going to propose—a deliberate plan, too—sent her little boy to the Borough, to get him out of the ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... defects than Abraham Lincoln; and yet we now know that within his soul there burned the fires of an unbounded ambition, sustained by a self-reliance and self-esteem that bade him fix his gaze upon the very pinnacle of American fame and aspire to it in a time so troubled that its dangers appalled the soul of every American. What were this man's thoughts when he was left alone? Did a faint shadow of the future rest upon his soul? Did he feel in some mysterious ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... we turned upon our homeward way, A drear northeastern storm came howling up The valley of the Saco; and that girl Who had stood with us upon Mount Washington, Her brown locks ruffled by the wind which whirled In gusts around its sharp, cold pinnacle, Who had joined our gay trout-fishing in the streams Which lave that giant's feet; whose laugh was heard Like a bird's carol on the sunrise breeze Which swelled our sail amidst the lake's green islands, Shrank from its harsh, chill breath, and visibly ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... merriment. Talking to Mrs. Eve about apples in the form of a serpent; whispering in David's ear that a census would be a good thing, while Jehovah whispers a similar suggestion on the other side; asking Jesus to turn pebbles into penny loaves, lugging him through the air, perching him on a pinnacle, setting him on the top of a mountain whence both squinted round the globe, and playing for forty days and nights that preposterous pantomime of the temptation in the desert; getting miraculously multiplied, bewildering a herd of swine, and driving ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... in the first rankling sting of humiliation and despair, he could almost have struck a murderous blow at the man whom fortune had set on such a pinnacle of pride and insolence, as it seemed to his galled fancy. He was not in the mood to be either just or generous, and he saw in Ralph Gowan nothing but a man who had both the power and will to rival him, and rob him of peace and hope forever. If Dolly had been ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... inheritance to the world of art. All his powers were swept impetuously into one current, the poetic side of art, and alike as critic and composer he stands in a relation to the music of the pianoforte which places him on a pinnacle only less ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... hang for the space of three hours until he be dead; and thereafter to be cut down by the hangman, his head, hands, and legs to be cut off, and distributed as follows—viz., His head to be affixed on an iron pin, and set on the pinnacle of the west gavel of the new prison of Edinburgh; one hand to be set on the port of Perth, the other on the port of Stirling; one leg and foot on the port of Aberdeen, the other on the port of Glasgow. If at his death penitent, and relaxed from excommunication, then the trunk of his body to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... natum, Metropolitan Archbishop, Primate of England. Who was more earnest then in defence of the real presence of Christ's body and blood in the sacrament of the altar than ye were? Then was your candle shining to be a light to all the world, set on high on a pinnacle. But after you began to fall from the unity of the Catholic Church by open schism, and would no {p.226} longer acknowledge the supremacy of the pope's holiness by God's word and ordinance;—and that by occasion, that you, in whose hands then rested the sum of all, being ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... whenever it comes," he said. "I had hoped against hope for so long. I never told you that our good King had a son, the pride and anguish of his life, the beautiful youth for whose restoration to health yonder church was set on the highest pinnacle of these mountains. Sometimes we get our wish and find it a weapon that wounds our flesh. 'Any price,' King Robert prayed—'any price for my son's life.' And life came back to the dying child, but it ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... the road it came. In an instant it was in its claws, the poor little creature screaming with terror. So rapid was its flight, that even if we had wished it we could not have killed the bird. Off it went to the pinnacle of the rock from whence it had descended, and there began tearing its prey, which, happily, it soon must have put out of pain. Though we waited some minutes, not another klipdach appeared, and we had to go on some considerable ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... of the animal, a kind of small sword, in short, with which no hunter who was not exceedingly cunning in fence could have a chance. Others maintained that all the animal's strength lay in its horn, and that when hard pressed in pursuit, it would throw itself from the pinnacle of the highest rocks horn foremost, so as to pitch upon it, and then quietly march off not a whit the worse for ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... and goddesses together—tug as you will, you will not drag Jove the supreme counsellor from heaven to earth; but were I to pull at it myself I should draw you up with earth and sea into the bargain, then would I bind the chain about some pinnacle of Olympus and leave you all dangling in the mid firmament. So far am I above all others ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... breast, so racking an anguish in my brain, as I had known in those hours when, tortured with anxiety, I had been commanded to smile; when, degraded in my own eyes, and condemned by my own heart, I had been placed by him on a pinnacle, from which I dreaded each moment to be hurled. His praises had often run like daggers into my heart; but now his reproaches, his upbraidings, were answered by the mute consciousness of a love, which in the midst of guilt and misery, and bitter humiliation, had remained pure, sacred, ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... with the silken favorite who by calculated adultery had bought the power to ruin France. The Marquise de Pompadour, who began life as Jeanne Poisson,—Jane Fish,—daughter of the head clerk of a banking house, who then became wife of a rich financier, and then, as mistress of the King, rose to a pinnacle of gilded ignominy, chose this time to turn out of office the two ministers who had shown most ability and force,—Argenson, head of the department of war, and Machault, head of the marine and colonies; the one because he was not subservient to her ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... faith,—he considered the monk of Assisi as a lover of nature, whose heart was big enough to love everything that lives, to suffer with all that suffers. He strove to comprehend him by placing him upon a pinnacle, well aware that the sublime ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... of what was dignified, but she knew that she had cut a poor figure. She felt humiliated, hurt, helpless. Sir Francis Forcus had been for her her ideal of what a man and a gentleman should be. He had helped her in the day of her necessity, and she had set him at once as her hero on a pinnacle, and had looked up to him and worshipped him secretly, and from afar. She knew that she had sat before him this afternoon shamed, and helpless, and childish; filled with as much sorrow for him who was so clumsily wounding her as for herself. ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... fountain in the Hall of the Abencerrages, over the blood-stains made by the decapitation of those gallant chiefs, and I lay half an hour looking upward: and this is what I made out of the dome. From its central pinnacle hung the chalice of a flower with feathery petals, like the "crape myrtle" of our Southern States Outside of this, branched downward the eight rays of a large star, whose points touched the base of the dome; yet ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... removed, it was yet in complete accordance with my tastes. I dressed myself in this, and went out. The whole palace shone like silver in the sun. The marble was partly dull and partly polished; and every pinnacle, dome, and turret ended in a ball, or cone, or cusp of silver. It was like frost-work, and too dazzling, in the sun, for ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... the contrary, it is considered rather as matter to be proud of; the idea that out of ignominy, surrounded by conditions devoid of all decency, justice, and piety, an individual can elevate himself up to the highest pinnacle of human power and glory, has always, and will always be regarded as an example to be followed, and the badge of success stretched to cover the means of its attainment. This is the universal custom where success has been ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... been impossible to trace the original course of the streets, but that some gable, pinnacle, or portion of walls, of churches, halls, or mansions, indicated where they had stood. The narrower thoroughfares were completely blocked by rubbish; massive iron chains, then used to prevent traffic at night in the streets, were melted, as were likewise iron gates of prisons, ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... cases where the pinnacles of the same turret of a church have been struck where one has had a rod attached to it; but it is clear that the other pinnacles were outside the cone; and therefore, for protection, each pinnacle should have had its own rod. It is evident also that every prominent point of a building should have its rod, and that the higher the rod the greater is the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... betray the man she loves? No human plummet has sounded the depths of a woman's devotion; no surveyor's chain will ever mark the limits of a woman's faithful, patient endurance; and only the wings of an archangel can transcend that pinnacle to which the sublime principle of self-sacrifice exalts a ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... publishers, the rebel of manners, the ingenious and honored metaphysician. When Kant declared he was the only one of his critics that understood The Critique of Pure Reason, Maimon returned to Berlin to devote himself to the philosophical work that was to give him a pinnacle apart among the Kantians. Goethe and Schiller made flattering advances to him. Berlin society was at his feet. But he remained to the end, shiftless and feckless, uncouth and unmanageable, and not ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... a pinnacle, Presley, from where he now stood, dominated the entire country. The sun had begun to set, everything in the range of his vision was overlaid with a ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... vogue before her translation of his temporarily famous novel was finished. However, the languid prosecution of the work had invested Mrs. Gaspilton with a certain literary dignity, even in Kensingate circles, and would place her on a pinnacle in St. Chuddocks, where hardly any one read French, and assuredly no one had ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... lay motionless upon the sward; but the murderer minded him not a whit, cleansing his blood-stained knife the while upon a whisp of grass. Everything else was unchanged, the sun still shining mercilessly upon the steaming marsh and the tall pinnacle of the mountain, and I could scarce persuade myself that murder had actually been done and a human life cruelly cut short a moment since, before ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fixed on the dark mass ahead. Onward it seemed to glide through the darkness. Every one felt certain that their eyes did not deceive them. There still appeared, they all believed, the sails of the stranger, a huge towering pinnacle reaching to the sky. Yet so near the ground were they that it was dangerous for the frigate, though of course drawing much ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... its headlong course till it reached level ground, where it flowed in the midst of a beautiful but confined prairie. There was something sylvan and savage in the mountains on the farther side, clad from foot to pinnacle with trees, so closely growing that the eye was unable to obtain a glimpse of the hill sides, which were uneven with ravines and gulleys, the haunts of the wolf, the wild boar, and the corso, or mountain-stag; ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... fell on to the stage. But the proud one of Seville did not deign to return to pick them up, and one of the gentlemen in livery was deputed for that purpose. When, however, her measure was encored, she stepped down from her pinnacle and actually condescended to accept an additional bouquet that had been tossed by a fair one from ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... the towering Andes. Behind him lay the belt of woodland that separated the basin from the open sea, a scant league away. The cleft through the hill lay almost directly ahead. It's walls apparently were perpendicular; a hundred feet or less from the pinnacle, the opening spread out considerably, indicating landslides at some remote period, the natural sloughing off of earth and stone in the formation of this narrow, unnatural passage through the very centre ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... Savans," &c., 1763, 8vo.—and "Reponse a une Critique de la Bibliographie Instructive," 1763, 8vo.—as replies to the tart attacks of the Abbe RIVE. The Catalogue of Gaignat, and the fairness of his answers to his adversary's censures, served to place De Bure on the pinnacle of bibliographical reputation; while Rive was suffered to fret and fume in unregarded seclusion. He died in the year 1782, aged 50: and was succeeded in his bibliographical labours by his cousin WILLIAM; ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... some time at the lovely view, we turn our attention to the very interesting church of Notre Dame de la Garde. On the highest pinnacle is a colossal gilt figure of the Virgin Mary, looking over the seas, and, as it were, guarding her poor sailor ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... Enterprize would it not be better for us, provided it be practicable, to wrest those Places from the Hands of the Enemy than trust to the Uncertainty of Treaty? I confess we have a Choice of Difficulties. I pray God we may surmount them all! None however reach the Pinnacle of Eminence & Glory but the virtuous & brave. Adieu my dear Sir. I hope to see & live with you shortly; but I shall expect another Letter from you before ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... many of the thrilling scenes in the life of W.F. Cody, Buffalo Bill, from boyhood to manhood, and shown what indomitable pluck he possesses, and the pinnacle of fame he has reached unaided, and by his own exertions and will, I can only now say that much remains to be told of his riper years, from the time he stepped across the threshold from youth to man's estate, for since ...
— Beadle's Boy's Library of Sport, Story and Adventure, Vol. I, No. 1. - Adventures of Buffalo Bill from Boyhood to Manhood • Prentiss Ingraham
... rope he skilfully cast it up and over the pinnacle of rock nearest to him. It was now a comparatively easy matter to climb by going hand over hand up the rope and bracing his feet against the side of the ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Ozarks • Frank Gee Patchin
... time, it must have been Elizabeth's secret wish that she would die, since her death would release the princess from all the embarrassments and restraints of her position, and raise her at once to the highest pinnacle of honor and power. She remained, however, quietly at Hatfield, acting in all things in a very discreet and cautious manner. At one time she received proposals from the King of Sweden that she would accept of his son ...
— Queen Elizabeth - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... gate-tower and archway, pure Tudor-English in character, and, like many an old house in the English counties, elegant and almost piquant in its design. The arch is flanked by slight hexagonal tourelles, each capped by a pinnacle decorated with niches in front. Within is a little courtyard, and fragments of the building running round in the same Tudor style, but given up to squalor and decay, evidently let out to poor lodgers. This charming fragment excites a deep melancholy, ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... these took the humble place of mere accessories to the Enchanted Garden, jealously guarded against Asticot by great high gilded railings and by blue-coated, silver-buttoned functionaries at the gates. Within rose two Wonder Houses gorgeous with dome and pinnacle, bewildering with gold and snow, displaying before the aching sight the long cool stretch of verandahs, and offering the baffling glimpse of vast interiors whence floated the dim sound of music and laughter; and bright, happy beings, in wondrous raiment, wandered in and ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke |
