"Sublimity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the millennium. It is American in its vast applications of arithmetic; in the facility with which it brings the breadth of a continent within the limits of a summer's ride; in the eloquence which rises to sublimity over mining stock, and dwindles to the verge of commonplace before unmarketable natural beauties. Of course, it is the best book on the theme it handles, for it is the latest; it is lively, readable, instructive; but no descriptions ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.—It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It's the unnatural ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... long, it might be a case for some article of toilet; being two hundred feet high, its prettiness develops into grandeur as well as beauty, and it becomes really one of the wonders of the world. The design of the Pantheon, on the contrary, would retain its sublimity on whatever scale it ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... building by the alteration of its details, there is still, taking it as a whole, a simple grandeur in the design, a magnificence in the material employed, and a quiet harmony in the illumination, that impart to the interior a character of sublimity which nothing can impair. The rectangular portico was added at some subsequent period, and consists of sixteen splendid Corinthian columns (Fig. 138), eight in front supporting the pediment, and the other eight dividing the portico into three bays, in precisely the same way as if it formed the pronaos ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... towards the Arctic Sea. Throughout this extensive area the Laurentian Rocks for the most part present themselves in the form of low, rounded, ice-worn hills, which, if generally wanting in actual sublimity, have a certain geological grandeur from the fact that they "have endured the battles and the storms of time longer than any other mountains" (Dawson). In some places, however, the Laurentian Rocks produce scenery of the most magnificent character, ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... but more from the life: it is the sublimity of an angel, mingled with all that is attractive in woman. But who is the friend we may venture to trust? To whom may I give my bond? And from whom may I receive a treasure which for the rest of my life will constitute ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... "Twelfth Night," I do not recollect more than one thing said adequately on the subject of music in all literature; it is a passage in the Religio Medici {14} of Sir T. Brown, and though chiefly remarkable for its sublimity, has also a philosophic value, inasmuch as it points to the true theory of musical effects. The mistake of most people is to suppose that it is by the ear they communicate with music, and therefore that they ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... uncovered. We want ammunition: give us powder and ball, and we will go and revenge his death upon our enemies.' Their public speeches are full of bold metaphor, energy and pathos. "No Greek or Roman orator ever spoke perhaps with more strength and sublimity than one of their chiefs when asked to remove with his tribe to a distance from their native soil." 'We were born,' said he, 'on this ground, our fathers lie buried in it, shall we say to the bones of our fathers, arise, and come with us into ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... explained Homer or taught ancient history a special fervor animated him; for he was one of the chosen few whose eyes were opened by destiny to the full beauty and sublimity of ancient Greece. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and evident rhythm is capable of union with the dance; the more complex and subtle music, aside from the impossibility of making its delicate rhythms fit into those of a dance, has a variety and sublimity of meaning so far transcending the personality of any human being, that to attempt to focus it in a dancer, no matter how ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... its rise in the sense of sublimity. It seems at times to be a fulfilment of the religious impulse. The religion which balks at work, stopping at prayer and contemplation, is a ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... truth was it held him. He despised sentiment, tenderness, and, by the strangeness of the human mind, he went, by way of paradox, to the tenderest, most sublime spot in a book supreme in tenderness and sublimity. ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... horizon; vast masses of dark low-hung clouds were mingled with the smoky canopy, and the dome of St. Paul's, like the enormous idol of some terrible deity, throned amidst the smoke of sacrifices and magnificence, darkness, and mystery, presented altogether an object of vast sublimity. I felt touched with reverence, as if I was indeed approaching the city of THE ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... all get blind drunk, when Johnny comes marching home." The best way of distinguishing Bret Harte from the rest of American humour is to say that if Bret Harte had described that scene, it would in some subtle way have combined a sense of the absurdity of the incident with some sense of the sublimity and pathos of the theme. You would have felt that the organist's tune was funny, but not that the Prodigal Son was funny. But America is under a kind of despotism of humour. Everyone is afraid of humour: the meanest of human nightmares. Bret Harte ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... opera, was a German by birth, and strongly recommended by Gluck for her good natural voice. At Her Majesty's request, Gluck himself taught Madame Saint Huberti the part of Armida. Sacchini, also, at the command of Marie Antoinette, instructed her in the style and sublimity of the Italian school, and Mdlle. Benin, the Queen's dressmaker and milliner, was ordered to furnish the complete ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 4 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... arts and sciences. But it is not the power of the individual that accomplishes this, but the Spirit alone, that diffuses itself over all. For Art especially is dependent on the tone of the public mind, as the more delicate plants on atmosphere and weather; it needs a general enthusiasm for Sublimity and Beauty, like that which, in the time of the Medici, as a warm breath of spring, called forth at once and ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... that has corns, and is about to be operated on by a chiropodist. There is a largeness, approaching to sublimity, in the idea of an elephant with corns, though it naturally suggests ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various
... the action is the same, though more varied and complicated, and the general effect is unsatisfactory from the same cause. Prose is less ambitious than poetry. There is an absence of attempts at grand effects. There is no effort after sublimity, and there is consequently a lighter sense of incongruity in the failure to reach it. On the other hand, there is the greater fulness of detail so characteristic of Bunyan's manner; and fulness of detail on a theme so far beyond our understanding is as dangerous as vague grandiloquence. ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... be that come to us from the gods; but when these very things come by the gods too, this is what occasions vast satisfaction and unspeakable assurance, a sublimity of mind and a joy that, like a smiling brightness, doth as it were gild over our good things with a glory. But now those that are persuaded otherwise obstruct the very sweetest part of their prosperity, and leave themselves nothing to turn to ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... Demosthenes, equally profuse of a patriotism as lofty and of personalities as {11} base as Milton's, to those of a whole line of the scholars of the Renaissance who lived with the noblest literature of the world and wrote of each other in the language of Billingsgate fishwives. So the sublimity of his life is wholly that of an irresistible will, set from the first on achieving great deeds and victoriously achieving them in defiance of adverse men and fates. But this is quite compatible with qualities the reverse of agreeable. It is the business of sublimity to compel amazed admiration, ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... Savonarola. Gradually he gained ground, made head, and the Prior of Saint Mark's did what the Prior of Saint Dominico's had done at Bologna—he sent the man out on preaching tours among the churches and monasteries. The austerity and purity of his character, the sublimity of his faith, and his relentless war upon the extravagance of the times, made his presence valuable to the Church. Then in all personal relationships the man was most lovable—gentle, sympathetic, kind. Wherever he went his influence ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... form. One of large size remained for some time almost stationary in the zenith, over the Falls of Niagara, emitting streams of light. The wild dash of the waters, as contrasted with the fiery uproar above them, formed a scene of unequaled sublimity. In many districts, the mass of the population were terror-struck, and the more enlightened were awed at contemplating so vivid a picture of the Apocalyptic image—that of the stars of heaven falling to the earth, even as a fig-tree casting her untimely figs, when she ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... to hear him. I have seen them swoon during his sermons; they declared him an angel, and touched his garment and kissed his hands when he descended from the pulpit. It is certain that, unless it be his beauty, nothing could equal the sublimity of his discourses, ever full of inspiration. The pure honey of the gospel combined on his lips with the flashing flame of the prophecies; and one recognized in the sound of his voice a heart overflowing with holy pity for the evils to which ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... was seated in the tiny room with her back to the door, her hand on a cradle, and as she rocked she sang softly. She was a plain little woman, the cradle was cheap and common, and her singing was only a monotonous chant; but the scene had a sort of sublimity—it was so old, ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... "Sublimity of conception, grandeur of form, and breadth of manner, are the elements of Michael Angelo's style. By these principles, he selected or rejected the objects of imitation. As painter, as sculptor, as architect, he attempted—and above any other man, succeeded—to unite magnificence ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... Bard tremendous in sublimity! Could I behold thee in thy loftier mood, Wand'ring at eve, with finely frenzied eye, Beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood! Awhile, with mute awe gazing, I would brood, Then weep aloud in ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... as the enervating gospel of weakness and despair. Though we like to call ourselves Christian, we have no desire for—nay even make a jest of—that outstanding Christian virtue; yet men not held by Christian dogma have joyously surrendered to the sublimity of that divine idea. Hear Shelley speak: "What nation has the example of the desolation of Attica by Mardonius and Xerxes, or the extinction of the Persian Empire by Alexander of Macedon restrained from outrage? Was not the pretext for this ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... the maiden petals of a woman's soul; to get the delicious sensation of a reflex sorrow, he would wring a heart. All that saves his egoism from being hateful is, that, with its immense reaches, it cheats the sense into a feeling of something like sublimity. A patch of sand is unpleasing; a desert has all the awe of ocean. Lessing also felt the duty of self-culture; but it was not so much for the sake of feeding fat this or that faculty as of strengthening character,—the only soil in which real mental ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... after the preceding cataclysm. The Development proper is renewed in measure 298 and after a repetition of the interpolated theme in measures 320-335 the rhythm of the first theme asserts itself in all its majesty, carrying us upward to a veritable table-land of sublimity. From this we are brought down through a series of decrescendo, modulatory chords, like drifting mists, to an almost complete cessation of musical life—nothing but a pianissimo tremolo on the strings. From this hush there floats in upon us the rhythmic motive of the first ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... therefore is that it is the object of love; and though many other objects are in common language called beautiful, yet they are only called so metaphorically, and ought to be termed agreeable. A Grecian temple may give us the pleasurable idea of sublimity, a Gothic temple may give us the pleasurable idea of variety, and a modern house the pleasurable idea of utility; music and poetry may inspire our love by association of ideas; but none of these, except metaphorically, can be termed beautiful, ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... 20 invest the idea of Wisdom with still loftier sublimity, since they declare that it is an attribute of God Himself by which creation came into being. The meaning of the writer is inadequately grasped if we take it to be only that creation shows God's Wisdom. This personified Wisdom dwells with God, is the agent of creation, comes with invitations ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... at the sublimity of the young loafer's "cheek." Then they burst into a laugh that made the windows rattle. Tracy was too angry to realize that he had done a foolish thing. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Travailleurs de la Mer"), published in 1866, was written during his exile in Guernsey. Of all Hugo's romances, both in prose and in verse, none surpasses this for sheer splendour of imagination and diction, for eloquence and sublimity of truth. It is, in short, an idyll of passion, adventure, and self-sacrifice. The description of the moods and mysteries of the sea is well-nigh incomparable; and not even in the whole of Hugo's works can there be found anything more vivid than Gilliatt's battle with the devil-fish. The scene ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... half hour in Notre Dame. I love to sit in these majestic fanes, abstracting them from the superstition which does but desecrate them, and gaze upward to their lofty, vaulted arches, to drink in the impression of architectual sublimity, which I can neither analyze nor express. Cathedrals do not seem to me to have been built. They seem, rather, stupendous growths of nature, like crystals, or cliffs of basalt. There is little ornament here. That roof looks ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... pitch of astonishment and delight by one tone of her voice. 'O Dio!' as it comes from her breast, swelling over her lips, is of indescribable effect." Poetical and enthusiastic by temperament, the crowning excellence of her art was a grand simplicity. There was a sublimity in her expressions of vehement passion which was the result of measured force, energy which was never wasted, exalted pathos that never overshot the limits of art. Vigorous without violence, graceful without artifice, she was always greatest when ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... from thence lead to other terraces, all in shadow. And you climb and climb and climb, till at last, beyond a gray torii, the goal appears: a small, void, colorless wooden shrine,—a Shinto miya. The shock of emptiness thus received, in the high silence and the shadows, after all the sublimity of the long ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... said that history presents few greater characters—few that excite at once more love and admiration, and in which we see tenderness, humor, and a certain picturesque grace and poetic sensibility more happily combined with a lofty and magnanimous, if sometimes rugged, sublimity. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... indeed his distinguishing Excellence, lies in the Sublimity of his Thoughts. There are others of the Moderns who rival him in every other part of Poetry; but in the Greatness of his Sentiments he triumphs over all the Poets both Modern and Ancient, Homer only excepted. It is impossible for the Imagination ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... was spell-bound—motionless—speechless. Clothed with terror and sublimity, yet in all the flush of the most perfect beauty, a strange—mysterious being stood over me: and I knew not whether she were a denizen of this world, or a spirit risen from another. Perhaps the transcendent loveliness of ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... unendurable, she prostrates herself flat on her face against the earth, with her arms outstretched in the form of a cross; this is her only relief. In this attitude she prays for all the guilty in the universe. This is great to sublimity. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... which accordingly as it is improved or neglected, will give a colour to all your future story. Let not that amiable man, who has found the art of introducing heroism into common life, and dignifying the most trivial circumstances by the sublimity and refinedness of his sentiments, now, in the most important affair, sink below the common level. Now is the time to display the true greatness of your mind. Now is the time to prove the consistency of ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... in their temples, but in their tombs and pyramids and all the sculptured monuments of the Egyptians, there is the same insistence upon the sublimity, mystery and awefulness of life, which they seem to have felt so profoundly. But more than this, the conscious thought of the masters who conceived them, the buildings of Egypt give utterance also ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... phrases— was the literature comprised within the Bible. The superiority of the common English version of the Bible, made in the reign of James I., over all other versions, is a fact generally admitted by competent critics. The sonorous Latin of the Vulgate is very grand, but in sublimity of fervour as in the unconscious simplicity of strength it is surpassed by the English version, which is scarcely if at all inferior to the original, while it remains to-day, and will long remain, the noblest monument of English speech. The reason for this ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... leaves all these things behind to perish in "the misery of the soaking trench," we find the sublimity of sacrifice. The true soldier is indeed a hero. In this age, of all ages of human history, are we unable to give denial to this fact. Millions of men, on a dozen different battle-fronts, have recently taught us the heroisms which make war almost as glorious as it ...
— Heroes in Peace - The 6th William Penn Lecture, May 9, 1920 • John Haynes Holmes
... English towns, the houses clustered at their feet like subjects round some majestic queen, were images indeed of the civil supremacy which the Church of the Middle Ages had asserted for itself; but they were images also of an inner spiritual sublimity, which had won the homage of grateful and ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... were quite eclipsed by the Oriental splendours of Moscow, which naturally made a great impression upon a mind accustomed to the cold sublimity of Gothic ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... extending her arms to put them all away from her, Lucy bent over him and lifted him to her bosom. The nurse made a step forward to interfere, but then stepped back again wringing her hands. The mother had risen into a sort of sublimity, irresponsible in her great woe—if she had killed him to forestall her agony a little, as is the instinct of desperation, they could not have interfered. She sat down, and gathered the child close, close in her embrace, his head upon her breast, ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... tenderness, elasticity, and impressibility. The man who has gone, hammer in hand, over the surface of a romantic country, feels no longer, in the mountain ranges he has so laboriously explored, the sublimity or mystery with which they were veiled when he first beheld them, and with which they are adorned in the mind of the passing traveller. In his more informed conception, they arrange themselves like a dissected model: where another man would be awe-struck by the magnificence ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... fearful slaughter at Roncesvalles, we are rather moved to smile at the violence of their emotion than to weep over the dead, so little power has the poet to touch the springs of feeling. However, there are passages in which the poem rises to sublimity, and which have been ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... question was asked, "How shall they produce resurrection?" Ahura Mazda says: "The reply is this, that the preparation and production of the resurrection are an achievement connected with miracle, a sublimity, and afterwards also a wondrous appearance unto the creatures uninformed. The secrets and affairs of the persistent Creator are like every mystery and secret." [Footnote: Ibid., ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... Tibetan-trained yogi had satisfied my yearning for a guru. My heart needed no tutor for its recognitions, and cried its own "Bravos!" the more resoundingly because unoften summoned from silence. When I finally met my master, he taught me by sublimity of example alone the measure of a ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... pity in her soul for Giles as a man whom she had wronged—a man who had been unfortunate in his worldly transactions; while, not without a touch of sublimity, he had, like Horatio, borne ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... not disdain riches, O Ione! they know not what life is capable of who are not wealthy. Gold is the great magician of earth—it realizes our dreams—it gives them the power of a god—there is a grandeur, a sublimity, in its possession; it is the mightiest, yet the ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... being. The merit of his sacrifice is only enhanced in the eyes of superior beings, by the detestation that pursues him here, and the sufferings to which he is condemned. The belief that even his sister has deserted him, and gone over to his enemies, adds to his sublimity of feelings, and his confidence in divine ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... intellectual, a moral, and a religious faculty. It is the mother and mistress of faith, hope, and love. It is the source of great thoughts, of high aspirations, and of heavenly dreams. Without it the illimitable starlit expanse loses its sublimity, oceans and mountains their awfulness and majesty, flowers their beauty, home its sacred charm, youth its halo, and the grave its ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... system of instruction—such is the task which remains entrusted to your intelligence, and to your zeal. By employing the proffered materials with that discretion which is peculiar to your ministry, with that method which the tender minds of your pupils require, and with the love inspired by the sublimity and importance of the subject, yours will be the merit of having propagated the seeds of truth that will bring forth charity and universal edification; to me suffices the happiness of having, in some degree, contributed to ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... purpose and unfaltering power, are the early stages in the redemptive work—the unseen approach of that Kingdom whose strange mark is that it "cometh without observation." And these Kingdoms rising tier above tier in ever increasing sublimity and beauty, their foundations visibly fixed in the past, their progress, and the direction of their progress, being facts in Nature still, are the signs which, since the Magi saw His star in the East, have never been ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... such is the sublimity of those, doctrines, and their grandeur, that I suppose the age of a man is scarce sufficient to be instructed and perfected in the knowledge of them. I wish your welfare, my ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... slept, and in the sitting-room are the father and mother who have got wrinkle-faced, and stoop-shouldered, and dim-eyesighted in taking care of you, yet you will do better to come with me." I am amazed that any of us ever had the sublimity of impudence to ask such a transfer from a home assured to a home ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... steely analysis to that state of being which recognizes neither psychology nor element."—"Usefulness, if it requires action, seems less like existence than the desire of being absorbed in God, retaining consciousness.... Scorn trifles, lift your aims; do what you are afraid to do. Sublimity of character must come from sublimity ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... time of transition, he had imbued his mind with romance and with those higher aspirations of the poets of all ages and eras in which their utterances, growing religious, pertain to life in its love and light and lofty purity. Literature yields nothing more enthralling than those passages in which sublimity is seized, and the mind of man is commanded to rise above the pressing issue ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... illustrative of Almighty wrath and the just man's recompense? Who can gaze upon the majesty of this mount, towering above the 'high places' and the hills, and turn without repining to the plains beneath, where puny man has pitched his tent and wars upon his fellow, mocking the sublimity of Nature with his paltry tyranny? I felt as if I lived in other times, and my eye eagerly but vainly sought for some traces of that 'ark' which furnished a refuge and a shelter to the creatures ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 575 - 10 Nov 1832 • Various
... occupying positions of the most absolute and exalted power have been controlled, to a much greater degree, by caprice and by momentary impulse, than mankind have generally supposed. Looking up as we do to these vast elevations from below, they seem invested with a certain sublimity and grandeur which we imagine must continually impress the minds of those who occupy them, and expand and strengthen their powers, and lead them to act, in all respects, with the circumspection, the deliberation, and the far-reaching sagacity which the emergencies continually ...
— Darius the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... in sublimity and beauty which I, and those who pursue the same path with me, oppose," replied Hermon. "Nature is sufficient for us. To take anything from her, mutilates; ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and abhor the military pictures, the thrilling and sentimental ideas of the warrior with which the civilian head is so generously crammed. I love military servitude, and the humble life of the men in the ranks, but I have a genuine horror of heroes and their sublimity. ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... a force that brings men, events and prospects before the eye with the vividness of reality. In this power of verbal delineation Mr. Borrow has never been outdone. . . . His descriptions of scenery have a peculiar sublimity and grace." A little later, W. Bodham Donne, a Norfolk man and acute critic, said, "We all read Mr. Borrow's books," but lamented his "plunge into the worse than Irish bogs of Polemical Protestantism." Mr. Saintsbury, ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... especially towards the mountains, which are heaped upon the backs of one another, making a most stupendous appearance of savage nature, with hardly any signs of cultivation, or even of population. All is sublimity, silence, and solitude. The people live together in glens or bottoms, where they are sheltered from the cold and storms of winter: but there is a margin of plain ground spread along the sea side, which is well inhabited ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... be allowed to abandon myself to the recollections of my own distant travels, I would instance, among the most striking scenes of nature, the calm sublimity of a tropical night, when the stars, not sparkling, as in our northern skies, shed their soft and planetary light over the gently-heaving ocean; or I would recall the deep valleys of the Cordilleras, where the tall and slender palms pierce the leafy vail ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... met her gaze. From her feet perfect lawns sloped down to a gracious waterway, which shuddered occasionally in a gentle wind; on every side pleasing trees were massed into shady and grateful woods; overhead the noonday sun lit up a deep-blue sky. Perhaps the sublimity of the scene played upon her softer emotions. Perhaps all intense beauty is pathetic, and makes one think of poor illusions and unavailing dreams. Lady Gray wondered why she could not feel, on this serene morning, ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... style to a higher pitch of material perfection than its inventor himself had been able to achieve. The gifted but unequal Pordenone, who showed himself so incapable of sustained rivalry with our master in Venice, had moments of a higher sublimity than Titian reached until he came to the extreme limits of old age. That this assertion is not a mere paradox, the great Madonna del Carmelo at the Venice Academy and the magnificent Trinity in the sacristy of the ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... Mr. Ross in maintaining his sublimity to dress like a cleric—black, modest suits of straight lines, white shirts, small, black ties. But he also wore silk socks, which he reflectively scratched while he was dictating. He was of an elegance in linen handkerchiefs, in a chased-gold cigarette-case, in cigarettes with a monogram. ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... consisted in this, that she kept her husband informed of the state of her heart and gradually led him to perfect renunciation of her. By what sacrifices and struggles this was attained can be easily guessed; what rendered her success possible, could only be the depth and sublimity of her affection, devoid of every selfish thought, which gave her the power to show it to her husband in such a light that he, when she finally threatened him with her death, had to abstain from her and had to prove his unshakable ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... no other land can nature in her varied aspects of sublimity and grandeur as regards celestial phenomena, be better studied than in the wild north-land. Her cyclonic storms in summer and her blizzard blasts in winter are at times not only terrific in their ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... this misuse of analogy. Feeling, imagination, instinct are too many for her; and any mood, from fun to earnest, from nonsense to sublimity, may hear a responsive note when ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... have wished, however, that you had prepared not only the tragedies of Racine, Corneille, and Voltaire, but also some of the comedies of Moliere. You know how highly I esteem them. But the Germans would not understand them. We must show them the beauty and sublimity of our tragic theatre; they will appreciate it better than the profound wit of Moliere. Make it indispensable for the actors, and very particularly the actresses, to speak as distinctly and loudly as possible, that the Emperor ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... religion would be like repudiating our parents because we did not like their manners and clothes. The religious impulse is the art impulse, and both are manifestations of love, and love is the basis of our sense of sublimity. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... etc. Such was the advice given to the Emerson boys by their aunt, Miss. Mary Moody Emerson: "Scorn trifles, lift your aims; do what you are afraid to do; sublimity of character must come from sublimity of motive." Upon her monument are inscribed Emerson's words about her: "She gave high counsels. It was the privilege of certain boys to have this immeasurably high standard ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... over, especially if accompanied by a cold collation, including a salad of the Avon crawfish, and a little iced punch. It would be still better for good pedestrians to walk the distance by the fields and push on to the inn for refreshment, without which all tame scenery is so very flat. In the sublimity of the Alps, the Pyrenees, or even the great Highland hills, a man may forget his dinner; but, when within the verge of the horizon church-towers and smoking chimneys of farm-houses continually occur, visions of fat, ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... the rich stores of mythology that Epicharmus drew his fables; but what was sublimity with the tragic poet, was burlesque with the comic. He parodied the august personages and venerable adventures of the gods of the Greek Pantheon. By a singular coincidence, like his contemporary Aeschylus [323], he was a Pythagorean, and it is wonderful ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... now that each character "rushed to its index." It was now—within the very shadow of death—in the most awful crisis that can test the soul—that these men rose into the grandeur and sublimity of true heroism. They looked death in the face with serene and cheerful composure. So far from requiring consolation, it was they who strove most earnestly to console the grieving friends they were leaving behind; imploring of them to exhibit resignation to the will of ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... country, I must consider myself as fortunate in having obtained a pension of one thousand livres." "And do you account as nothing, sir, the liberty of addressing me thus?" replied Le Kain, with all the sublimity and conciseness of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Church at Everton, of which the Reverend Mr. Eubanks was rector. The audience had never heard a colored man preach before. And Crummell's dignity and bearing in the pulpit, his polish and refinement, his lucid exposition of the text, his sublimity of thought, beauty of diction, and fire and force of utterance for nearly an hour held that cultured audience spellbound. Crummell made history for the race on that Sunday morning in 1848. And I suppose that Crummell's eulogy on Clarkson, delivered in New York ...
— Alexander Crummell: An Apostle of Negro Culture - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 20 • William H. Ferris
... the Grand Canyon. "Those who have long and carefully studied the Grand Canyon of the Colorado do not hesitate for a moment to pronounce it by far the most sublime of all earthly spectacles. If its sublimity consisted only in its dimensions, it could be set forth in a single sentence. It is more than two hundred miles long, from five to twelve miles wide, and from five thousand to six thousand feet deep. ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... had caught the fire of the future statesman in his dark eye; perhaps she had heard the ring of sublimity in the melodious voice that afterward said "Honor thy father and thy mother." Perhaps she had seen the shrewdness of the future great diplomat in his maneuvers to have his baby way, and being a bright woman she set her wits to work to defy the ...
— Fair to Look Upon • Mary Belle Freeley
... am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is, what are you going to do with all these things? . ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... approximation to that central form or habitual idea of mediocrity, from which every deviation is so much deformity and littleness? Michael Angelo's figures are raised above our diminutive race of beings, yet they are confessedly the standard of sublimity in what regards the human form. Grandeur, then, admits of an exaggeration of our habitual impressions; and 'the strong, marked, and peculiar character which Michael Angelo has at the same time given to his works' does not take ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... noble threshold to a great continent and New York Bay a fitting portal. The traveler who enters the Narrows for the first time is impressed with wonder, and the charm abides even with those who pass daily to and fro amid her beauties. No other river approaches the Hudson in varied grandeur and sublimity, and no other city has so grand and commodious a harbor as New York. It has been the privilege of the writer of this handbook to see again and again most of the streams of the old world "renowned in song and story," to behold sunrise on the Bay of Naples and sunset at the Golden Gate of ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... whistle, he was instantly joined by a huge brindled dog of grim and formidable aspect. As he passed by the door where his mistress sat, in her mute, tearless, motionless grief, he turned to her for a moment, cap in hand, and with terrible sublimity said: "Miss Jemimy, you see me come back wid Bushie, or you neber see yo' ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... less than his former residence by the mouth of the Exe, he admitted that "in the walks to St. Anthony, the tufted creeks, the opening sea, the prospect of Pendennis Castle, there was picturesque beauty—there was even sublimity." Polwhele was magistrate as well as parson, and on one occasion the famous Captain Bligh (himself a Cornishman) was brought before him, charged with plots of treachery by the officious Manaccan constables; he had been detected surveying the harbour ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... Othello the position of Desdemona is precisely that defined with such quaint sublimity of fancy in the old English byword—"between the devil and the deep sea." Deep and pure and strong and adorable always and terrible and pitiless on occasion as the sea is the great soul of the glorious hero to whom she has given herself; and what likeness of man's ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... relative, conditional, experimental, from which we view the vast realm that stretches out unknown before us, and perhaps for ever unknowable; inspiring men with an elevated awe, and environing the interests and duties of their little lives with a strange sublimity. 'We emerge from the Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge again into the Inane.... But whence? O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only that it is through ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... to expand the body and inform it with the quality of immortality; Ajax, in his magnificent gesture of defiance, is all spirit. Cleggett, with his hand on his hip, uttered these words, not without their sublimity: ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... that tragedy, in no small degree, owed its downfall to Euripides. Poetry was gradually superseded by rhetoric, sublimity by earnestness, pathos by reasoning. Thus, Iphigenia and Macaria give so many good reasons for dying, that the sacrifice appears very small, and a modern wag in the upper regions of the theatre would, at the end of the speech of the latter heroine, almost have exclaimed, ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... geologist is right; and due reflection on his teachings, instead of diminishing our reverence and our wonder, adds all the force of intellectual sublimity to the mere aesthetic intuition ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... the plot. Soon came the wonderful scene between Orpheus and the furies who guard the gates of Avernus. The beseeching tones of Orpheus, and the inexorable "No!" of the furies, made every listener tremble. Even Hasse, overcome by the sublimity of the music, bowed his head with the rest; and Metastasio, enraptured with the words, murmured, "Ah, che poesia divina!" Murmurs of applause were heard from every side of the theatre; they grew with every scene, ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... one truly great man, Christopher Wren; and the fire which laid London in ruins had given him an opportunity, unprecedented in modern history, of displaying his powers. The austere beauty of the Athenian portico, the gloomy sublimity of the Gothic arcade, he was like almost all his contemporaries, incapable of emulating, and perhaps incapable of appreciating; but no man born on our side of the Alps, has imitated with so much success the magnificence of the palacelike churches of Italy. Even the superb Lewis has left ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... fictitious earnestness as the humourist views it from the standpoint of a lady's patches. It was equally impossible to deal with the fiercer passions and subtler emotions of man. Shakspere's humour and sublimity, his fitful transitions from mood to mood, his wild bursts of laughter, his passion of tears, Hamlet or Hamlet's gravedigger, Lear or Lear's fool, would have startled the readers of the "Spectator" as they would startle the group in a ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... masterly imitation, not only of the peculiar style, but of the taste, temper, and manner of description of that most original author. * * * It does not aim, of course, at any shadow of his pathos or moral sublimity, but seems to us to be a singularly faithful copy of his passages of ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... want, misery, and neglect, yet still remembering his long-lost benefactor, and collecting the last effort of expiring nature to give a sign of joy and gratulation at his return, hides his face and wipes away the tear! This is true sublimity of character, which is always mixed with tenderness—mere sanguinary ferocity being terrible and odious, but never sublime. [Greek: Agathoi polydakrytoi andres]—Men prone to tears are brave, says the proverbial Greek hemistich; for courage, which does ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... Valour yesterday, the sublimity of self-sacrifice, had appealed to them with irresistible force, even though they did not understand the force that had set these great virtues in motion. The hero of yesterday should be the chosen of to-day, the god of to-morrow; ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... emotion of the human soul, in persons of a sensitive physical organization, tends to tears; and Xerxes's heart, being filled with exultation and pride, and with a sense of inexpressible grandeur and sublimity as he looked upon this scene, was softened by the pleasurable excitements of the hour, and though, at first his countenance was beaming with satisfaction and pleasure, his uncle Artabanus, who stood by his side, soon perceived ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... as they named the Redeemer, Lowly louted the boys, and lowly the maidens all courtesied. Friendly the Teacher stood, like an angel of light there among them, And to the children explained he the holy, the highest, in few words, Thorough, yet simple and clear, for sublimity always is simple, Both in sermon and song a child can seize on its meaning. Even as the green-growing bud is unfolded when Spring-tide approaches Leaf by leaf is developed, and, warmed by the radiant sunshine, Blushes with purple and gold, till at last the perfected blossom Opens its odorous ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... study his Bible with a new interest, to seek the mystery of the Saviour's majestic meekness. In the light of a new experience, he read the amazing story of the life, sufferings, and death of Christ. Oh, nothing in the whole history of mankind could approach this, for beauty, for sublimity, and for completeness; nothing had ever so warmed, inspired, and elevated his soul as this; this was perfect; answering all the needs of his spirit. The great heroes and sages of history might be very good and useful as examples and references in the ordinary trials and temptations ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... by time, precede time: else shouldest Thou not precede all times. But Thou precedest all things past, by the sublimity of an ever-present eternity; and surpassest all future because they are future, and when they come, they shall be past; but Thou art the Same, and Thy years fail not. Thy years neither come nor go; whereas ours both come and go, that they all may come. Thy years ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... genius; for the music is as weird and passionate as the libretto, and moreover perfectly in keeping with its plot. It would be difficult to do justice to it, for in order to appreciate its complicated grandeur, one must have heard it performed. It combines sublimity with asceticism and wickedness, in ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... that my attention was arrested, notwithstanding my eagerness for the sight that awaited my turning around. But it was upon turning around and looking in the direction from which we had come that the grandeur and sublimity entered into the scene. There was, indeed, no one great dominating feature in this prospect as in the view of Denali from the Rampart portage, but the whole background, bounding the vision completely, was one vast wall of lofty white peaks, stretching without a break for a hundred miles. Enormous ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... aware of her deplorable circumstances, she began to weep, and, in spite of the amorous rhetoric with which his Lordship was prompt to comfort her, rebuked him for unmanly conduct, with sublimity and fire, and depicted the horrors of her present predicament in terms that were both just ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... discovers to promote Natural Knowledge: As it justifies the Discernment of that Assembly, to pitch upon Your Lordship for their President, so does it no less discover the Candor, yea, I presume to say, the Sublimity of your Mind, in so generously honoring them with your Acceptance of the Choice they ...
— Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets • John Evelyn
... gentleman, "to define all his images in such a manner as to bring them within the circle of our vision, and to subject them to the power of the pencil, renders him little better than grotesque, where Milton has since taught us to expect sublimity." It is true that Dante has never shrunk from embodying his conceptions in determinate words, that he has even given measures and numbers, where Milton would have left his images to float undefined in a gorgeous haze of language. Both were right. Milton did not profess to have been in heaven or hell. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of Oxford. His legs were the pillars of Hercules, his body a brewer's butt, his face the sun rising in a red mist. We have been told that magnitude is a powerful cause of the sublime; and if this be true, the dimensions of his lordship certainly had a copious and indisputable claim to sublimity. He seemed born to bear the whole hierarchy. His mighty belly heaved and his cheeks swelled with the spiritual inflations of church power. He fixed his open eyes upon me and surveyed me from top to toe. I too made my remarks. 'He is a true son of the church,' ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... that we are being taken back to an age more childlike than our own; and when the sonneteers vie with each other on the themes of sleep, death, time, and immortality, the door often stands open toward sublimity. Then when the sonnet-cycle was consecrated to noble and spiritual uses in Chapman's Coronet for his Mistress Philosophy, Barnes's Divine Century of Spiritual Sonnets, Constable's Spiritual Sonnets in Honour of God and His Saints, ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... more within their reach than the pathetic; for they never attempted that comprehension and expanse of thought which at once fills the whole mind, and of which the first effect is sudden astonishment, and the second rational admiration. Sublimity is produced by aggregation, and littleness by dispersion. Great thoughts are always general, and consist in positions not limited by exceptions, and in descriptions not descending to minuteness. It is with great propriety that subtlety, which in its original import means exility of particles, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... immense stake depending on the result, the grandeur of Napoleon's isolated efforts against the flower of the European forces, and the awful responsibility resting on the head of their great leader, give to this conflict a romantic sublimity, unshared by all the manoeuvring of science in a hundred commonplace combats of other wars. It forms an epoch in the history of battles. It is to the full as memorable, as an individual event, as it is for the consequences ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... already dusky with twilight. The stream, of the most exquisite translucent azure-green colour, rolled between us; and the mountain crests towered so far above, that our necks ached as we looked upwards. I have seen but one valley which in depth and sublimity can equal the Naerodal—the pass of the Taurus, in Asia Minor, leading from Cappadocia into Cilicia. In many places the precipices were 2000 feet in perpendicular height; and the streams of the upper fjeld, falling from the summits, lost themselves in evanescent ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... Keen as had been his curiosity as to what was beyond the shadowy walls the fire dimly revealed, he had formed no conception of the extent and sublimity of the various galleries, chambers, glittering vaults, and falling waters, embosomed ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... however, to dispute respecting the merits of the two systems: both are noble in their place; the Northern decidedly the most scientific, or at least involving the greatest display of science, the Italian the calmest and purest, this having in it the sublimity of a calm heaven or a windless noon, the other that of a mountain flank tormented by the north wind, and withering into grisly furrows of ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... naked trees, the rustling of the withered leaves which strewed the glades, the repeated halloos of the different parties, which often drew them together in expectation of meeting the objects of their search, gave a cast of dismal sublimity to ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... decorations, was the most perfect ever executed. Its dimensions of two hundred and twenty-eight feet by a hundred and two, with a height of sixty-six feet to the top of the pediment, were sufficiently great to give an impression of grandeur and sublimity, which was not disturbed by any obtrusive subdivision of parts, such as is found to diminish the effects of some larger modern buildings, where the same singleness of design is not observed. In the Parthenon, whether viewed at a small or ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... when "the morning stars sang together." Mind made the "plant of 509:24 the field before it was in the earth." The periods of spiritual ascension are the days and seasons of Mind's creation, in which beauty, sublimity, purity, and holiness 509:27 - yea, the divine nature - appear in man and the ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... is an original, powerful man, unequal in his performances: sometimes he hits, sometimes he misses; sometimes he rises to the sublimity of powerful speaking, and at others sinks below the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... undoubtedly possesses the greatest range of mere talent, the most varied executive ability, and never fails to surprise and delight one anew at each hearing; but being mostly an imitator, he never approaches the serene beauty and sublimity of the hermit thrush. The word that best expresses my feelings, on hearing the mockingbird, is admiration, though the first emotion is one of surprise and incredulity. That so many and such various notes should proceed from one throat is a marvel, and we regard the performance with feelings ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... meaningless front. A mountain covered by pure snow 10,000 feet high has but little more effect on the imagination than a mountain of snow 1,000 feet high—it is but more of the same thing; but a facade of seven systems of rock has its sublimity multiplied sevenfold. ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... influence their ideas were slowly and with great difficulty spiritualized and made to approach his own in some degree. But it is unquestionably true that they never not even after his death arrived at a clear appreciation of the full sublimity, the pure spirituality, the ultimate significance, of his mission and his words. Still, they did cast off and rise above the grossly carnal expectations of their countrymen. Partially instructed in the spiritual nature of Christ's kingdom, and partially biassed ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... beautiful head, those wonderful eyes, that stately carriage, that Jove-like front, led men to call him "the godlike Daniel." When he appeared upon the Strand in London a great crowd followed him, and a British statesman described Webster as one describes a majestic landscape or the sublimity of a mountain. But during the last years of his life his face took on a strangely pathetic sorrow. With the language of a Dante his biographer has pictured for us an Inferno, in which we see one, sublime of reason, walking in the ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... up this mountain the better, I find that kings are called mountains in Scripture; and good kings are so called, for these three, 1. For their sublimity; as mountains are high above the valleys, so are kings lifted up in majesty above their subjects: some apply that place to kings, "Hear ye, O mountains, the Lord's controversy, and ye strong foundations of the earth." 2. They are called mountains for their strength ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... be too much to designate the bare and lofty cliffs, which piled themselves upwards in confused masses, with the name of mountains; they nevertheless conveyed ideas of sublimity which I had not associated with other landscapes of a similar nature. The Pass, narrow and enclosed on either side by winding rocks, brought us at length down a rather steep declivity to a sort of basin, ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... for the first six months of 1823—if it can be called living, to leave food untasted, and go in neglect of person and dress. He wrestled so desperately with the difficulties, that anybody but the Cointets would have seen the sublimity of the struggle, for the brave fellow was not thinking of his own interests. The moment had come when he cared for nothing but the victory. With marvelous sagacity he watched the unaccountable freaks of the semi-artificial substances called ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... prophets of the restoration are younger than Ezekiel and Daniel. The minor prophets exhibit a great diversity of manner and style—the rugged and sententious, the full and flowing, the oratorical, and the simple and unadorned. In them are passages attaining to the sublimity of Isaiah, to the tenderness and pathos of Jeremiah, and to the vehemence of Ezekiel. Nowhere do we find sin rebuked with more awful severity, the true meaning of the law more clearly expounded, or the future glory of Zion more confidently predicted. That some of these writings are obscure and ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... heavenly music as they go on their way. But be not surprised at the magnitude of the change, for is it not written in Revelation, 'I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away'? Nor can we be surprised at vastness, sublimity, and beauty such as never was conceived of, for do we not find this in His word, 'Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him'? ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... believe, have protested against such a mode of dealing with his words. True, his structures are castles in the air, but he had no idea himself that they were so. In the twenty-fourth chapter there is a ridiculous descent from the sublimity of the two preceding. We are told that the possessor of entire sincerity is like a spirit and can foreknow, but the foreknowledge is only a judging by the milfoil and tortoise and other auguries! But the author recovers himself, and resumes his theme about sincerity as conducting ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge
... and be joyful; let us even meditate on a good meal as an ardent maiden consecrates her thoughts to a love-poem which she will write in her album in honor of her beloved. Truly there are fools who in the sublimity of their folly wish to appear indifferent to such earthly pleasures, declaring that they are necessary evils, most uncomfortable bodily craving, and nothing more. They are fools who do not understand that eating and drinking is an art, a science, the soul of the soul, ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... shall have dissolved away their grosser actualities by steeping them long in a powerful menstruum of thought. And seeking to actualize them again, we do but renew the crust. If this were otherwise,—if the moral sublimity of a great fact depended in any degree on its garb of external circumstances, things which change and decay,—it could not itself be immortal and ubiquitous, and only a brief point of time and a little neighborhood would be spiritually nourished by ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and sublimity of the stupendous works of the great Author and Creator of the Universe, when contrasted with the insignificance of the powers and achievements of a vivified atom of earth modeled into human form, are probably under no circumstances more strikingly exhibited and felt ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... too, was a master of magnificent prose painting, painting worth a wilderness of makers of frozen mediaeval patterns. Mr. Henry B. Fuller, the author of the Chevalier di Pensieri-Vani, once spoke of the "cosy sublimity" in Raphael's Vision of Ezekiel; one might paraphrase the epigram by describing the pictures of Velasquez as boxed-in eternities. Dostoievsky knew such a sensation when he wrote of "a species of eternity within the space of a square foot." But there ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... claps with random facility on to every imaginable school. This artist or group of artists goes in for the real—the upright, noble, trumpery, filthy real; that other artist or group of artists seeks after the ideal—the ideal which may mean sublimity or platitude. We summon every living artist to state whether he is a realist or an idealist; we classify all dead artists as realists or idealists; we treat the matter as if it were one of almost moral importance. Now ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... What had she known of color? No wonder artists failed adequately and truly to paint mountains, let alone the desert space. The toiling millions of the crowded cities were ignorant of this terrible beauty and sublimity. Would it have helped them to see? But just to breathe that untainted air, just to see once the boundless open of colored sand and rock—to realize what the freedom of eagles meant would ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... believe that the stars governed our fortunes, and were we reminded of fate whenever we looked at them, we should similarly tend to imagine that this belief was the source of their sublimity; and, if the superstition were dispelled, we should think the interest gone from the apparition. But experience would soon undeceive us, and prove to us that the sensuous character of the object was sublime in itself. Indeed, on account of that intrinsic sublimity ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... peculiar manner. With a clear piping voice and colloquial style he held his audience in rapt attention, disdaining all the tricks of sensational oratory. Twice I heard him deliver his somewhat celebrated discourse on "The Day of Judgment;" it was a masterpiece of solemn eloquence, in which sublimity and simplicity were combined in a way that I have never seen equaled He used to say that the right course for an old man to keep his mind from senility was to produce some piece of composition every day; and he continued to write his practical articles for the ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... have been reading some transcendent passage in one of the world's masterpieces we experience that mental sensation which Longinus declares to be the test of true sublimity, to wit, our mind "undergoes a kind of proud elation and delight, as if it had itself begotten the thing we read." We are disposed by such literature very much as we are disposed by the Sistine Madonna or before the Aphrodite ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... excite our sympathies; "he would have combined all possible emotions with the utmost variety of probable or real character; all domestic, politic, religious relations—whatever is not local in virtue and in vice; and the sublimity of the greatest events would have been merely the minister of sympathies and passions." The latter mode of representing the subject, that of Raffaelle, he considers dramatic. The distinction is, however, doubtful: we do not see why the mode of M. Angelo may not be held to be equally dramatic. The ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... been presented with such sublimity of expression, such noble simplicity and force of thought, as in the majestic and touching legend of Job. But its completeness, as a presentation of the human tragedy, is impaired by the excessive prosperity which is finally supposed to reward the patient ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... dramatic; but he has all the pathos of sentiment and romance—all that belongs to distant objects of terror, and uncertain, imaginary distress. His strength, in like manner, is not strength of will or action, of bone and muscle, nor is it coarse and palpable—but it assumes a character of vastness and sublimity seen through the same visionary medium, and blended with the appalling associations of preternatural agency. We need only turn, in proof of this, to the Cave of Despair, or the Cave of Mammon, or to the account of the change of Malbecco into Jealousy. The following stanzas, in the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... idee! And there are thirty-six cars hitched to it, and sixty persons can ride in each car. So you can figger it out jest how much that huge spider-web catches when it gits in motion. Wall, my feelin's when I wuz a-bein' histed up through the air wuz about half and half—half sublimity and orr as I looked out on the hull glory of the world spread at my feet, and Lake ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... with more force of imagination, is the train of gloomy scenes which appears in Blair's "Grave." In Akenside's "Pleasures of Imagination," a vivid fancy and an alluring pomp of language are lavished on a series of pictures illustrating the feelings of beauty and sublimity; but, theorizing and poetizing by turns, the poet loses his hold of ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... was exceedingly hot, and we wended our way slowly along the plains of Old Castile. With all that pertains to Spain, vastness and sublimity are associated: grand are its mountains, and no less grand are its plains, which seem of boundless extent, but which are not tame unbroken flats, like the steppes of Russia. Rough and uneven ground is continually occurring: here a deep ravine and gully worn by the wintry torrent; yonder an eminence ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... visit to the Minister's Bridge, not far distant, a place very wild and savage, but not comparable in sublimity with the Devil's Bridge, I determined to ascend the celebrated mountain of Plynlimmon, where arise the rivers Rheidol, Severn and Wye. I caused my guide to lead me to the sources of each of the three rivers. That of the Rheidol is a small, beautiful lake, overhung on two sides ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... it as entirely flat. But this edge of it at least stands up on the horizon, as a line of wrinkled and hollow hills like the scalps of bald men; or worse, of bald women. For it is impossible not to think of such repulsive images, in spite of real sublimity of the call to the imagination. There is something curiously hostile and inhuman about the first appearance of the motionless surges of that dry and dreadful sea. Afterwards, if the traveller has happened to linger here and there ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... bias in its favour. But (as I pointed out) the rollicking Radicalism of Bishops has to be restrained. The man who writes the notes in the weekly paper called the Outlook feels that it is his business to restrain it. The passage has such simple sublimity that I must ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... in idea. Few actors or readers can be found to agree respecting Shakespeare's conception of the character. This, however, may be safely asserted, that no criticism on Hamlet will ever be permanent which does not recognize the sublimity of his nature. Horatio understood Hamlet better than anyone, and his judgment of him doubtless expressed ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... elegant writer, "which break down and subdue the spirit of man, and prostrate him in the dust, seem to call forth all the energies of the softer sex, and give such intrepidity and elevation to their character, that at times, it approaches to sublimity." Who does not perceive that this sex enjoys pre-eminent advantages for the culture of that spiritual union with God required of the Christian? And in sustaining the ordinary trials of our lot, as social beings; in cherishing forbearance toward the ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... recovered himself sufficiently to know what to say, the conversation between the other two had assumed a form to which his late experiences inclined him to listen with some degree of interest. But, his pride sternly forbidding him to join in it, he sat sipping his wine in careless sublimity. ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... crudities. We feel the worse side of the eighteenth century when Burke tells us that a thirst for Variety in architecture is sure to leave very little true taste; or that an air of robustness and strength is very prejudicial to beauty; or that sad fuscous colours are indispensable for sublimity. Many of the sections, again, are little more than expanded definitions from the dictionary. Any tyro may now be shocked at such a proposition as that beauty acts by relaxing the solids of the whole system. But at least one signal merit remains to the Inquiry. It was a vigorous ...
— Burke • John Morley
... something hovering in the .. centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through. —It's the Black Sea in ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... distance into one harmony, and freed from those harsh discordances which jar the ear when heard more near, combining with the murmuring brook, and the wind which sung among the old firs, affected me with a sense of sublimity. All nature, as invoked by the Psalmist whose verses they chanted, seemed united in offering that solemn praise in which trembling is mixed with joy as she addressed her Maker. I had heard the service of high mass in France, celebrated with all the ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... intelligence? The air we breathe is made up of four elements, at least: oxygen, nitrogen, carbonic acid gas, and knowledge. There is something quite delightful to witness in the absorption and devotion of a genuine specialist. There is a certain sublimity in that picture of the dying scholar in ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the festival, is not in itself a great event: but I know not any words in human language that teach a more piercing lesson than the conclusion of this similitude. The frame is constructed of common materials; the sublimity lies in the spiritual truth which that frame sustains. This conception, like that of the hen gathering her chickens under her wing, seems so common and so common-place, that we would not have ventured in dignified discourse to employ it; in the hands of Jesus the similitude becomes at once ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... possesses not all the vastness of the ocean, is yet equal in sublimity. In gazing upon its surface, whether spread out like a vast mirror reflecting the varying tints of the sky, or ruffled by gently curling waves, or lashed into fury by the tempest, one is impressed with the idea of the Infinite. It is known to be the largest ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... on the sense of beauty alone, exempt from the necessity of "creature comforts," a sea-voyage would be delightful. To the landsman there is sublimity in the wild and ever-varied forms of the ocean; they fill his mind with living images of a glory he had only dreamed of before. But we would have been willing to forego all this and get back the comforts of the shore. At New York we took passage in the second cabin of the Oxford, which, ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... Platonical metaphysics, have as little to do with the power of his poetry over us, as the imputed Arianism or any other aspect of the theology of Paradise Lost has to do with the strength and the sublimity of Milton, and his claim to a high perpetual place in the hearts of men. It is best to be entirely sceptical as to the existence of system and ordered philosophy in Wordsworth. When he tells us that "one impulse from a vernal wood may teach you ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... fitted for her; he toasted her; he praised her; he exhausted his knowledge of mythology in her honour, calling her Melpomene, the tragic Muse, for had she not made men weep with her song that very night? Song, did he say? nay, hymn it was! She was Polyhymnia, singer of sublimity. He named her Philomele, and desired the lute of Orpheus that he might play an accompaniment to her wondrous singing. He asked her in which enchanted ocean she had lived. 'Mademoiselle Sirene, lurer of ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... wearisome days and nights, protracted through months and years, are passed, before the arena even is entered, where the race commences in earnest! How many struggling emotions between hope and fear, encouragement and doubt, promise and despair, mark the experience, and clothe it with the sublimity and interest that belong to action ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... continental divide, the scenery moment by moment growing in sublimity and grandeur. Darrell soon sank into a sleep, light and broken at first, but which grew deeper and heavier. For more than an hour he slept, unconscious that the rugged scenes through which he was then passing were to become part of his future life; that each ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... tale, 'The Revolt of Islam' is a failure. In his next great poem he was to pursue precisely the same aims, but with more success, because he had now hit upon a figure of more appropriate vagueness and sublimity. The scheme of 'Prometheus Unbound' (1819) is drawn from the immortal creations of ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... beautiful?" concurred P——, turning his eyes in the direction of the mountains. "There is nothing in the world to be compared to the sublimity of this scenery, defined as the outlines are by the clearness of the atmosphere and its deep blue tint." After a short pause he continued, "When we can see at one glance such an immensity of space, and know that this vast tract of ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... of Philo's connection with Palestinian Judaism, his account of the temple and its service, apart from the general standpoint of his writings, proves to us that he was a loyal son of his nation, and loved Judaism for its national institutions as well as its great moral sublimity. His aspiration was to bring home the truths of the religion to the cultured world, and therefore he devised a new expression for the wisdom of his people, and transformed it into a literary system. Judaism forms the kernel, but Greek philosophy ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... for its singularity as its cheapness. That he might wean himself from sublunary objects, he broke off all connections with his friends and family, and never dwelt a moment in one place; lest habit should beget new connections, and depress the sublimity of his aerial meditations. He frequently wandered into the woods, and passed whole days in hollow trees without company, or any other amusement than his Bible. Having reached that pitch of perfection as to need no other book, he soon advanced ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume |
