"Unfathomable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with a mocking laugh. "If so, call me your fallen angel; for when I took the unfathomable leap which leads from innocence to guilt, your arms were outstretched to receive me. But pshaw! what bootless retrospection! I am here, Carl, true as steel; ready to stand or fall at your side. Feel my hand, it is warm—feel my pulse, it beats as evenly as though I had never slept a night ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Christian life is a personal life of pure inwardness, and of an ethical character. He speaks of the "flow of inner life by means of which Christianity far surpasses all other religions," and of the "unfathomable depth and immeasurable hope which are contained ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... said to be king of the twin isles; so I suppose he found means to oust his rival, and resume his sovereignty; though, how an American negro, as Sam undoubtedly was, ever managed to gain such a position, remains to me an unfathomable mystery. Certainly he did not reveal any such masterful attributes as one would have expected in him, while he served as ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... surely not so in the case of a good many words. Thus this very instance, 'fanatic,' which, among the Romans, implied one who had an extra share of devotion, is, among us—the better informed on this head—by a very curious and very unfathomable figure (disfigure?) of speech or logic, applied to one who has a peculiar penchant ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... shadowy, more remote world of awe and mystery which lay so near, outside the window, at the opening of a door, at the sound of a voice, the glance of an eye, and in which one's busy fevered life was set, like the print of the wind's footstep in the crisping wave, on the surface of some vast unfathomable sea. ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... only answer for the present, and say yes or no. I shouldn't trouble you to say either, if I didn't conceive that I had given you time to make up your mind. It doesn't take forever to know James Luttrel. I'm not one of the great unfathomable ones. We've seen each other more or less intimately for a good many weeks; and as I'm conscious, Miss Whittaker, of having shown you my best, I take for granted that if you don't fancy me now, you won't ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... number, who this very half-year has shared in all the business and amusements of this place, is passed already into that state where the meanings of the terms life and death are become fully revealed. He knows what it is to live unto God, and what it is to die to him. Those things which are to us unfathomable mysteries, are to him all plain: and yet but two months ago he might have thought himself as far from attaining this knowledge as any of us can do. Wherefore it is clear, that these things, life and death, ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... told him. Possibly no one could except the Dream Woman, and her he never saw again; so the mystery was unfathomable. He put the rose between the leaves of the Bible his mother had given him when he went to college, and which he had not opened since until that morning; and the rose became dry and faded as the years passed, quite as any ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... I loved Gladys Todd, and I did not have to stamp the floor to prove it. I was sure that I had lost her, and it was the sense of my loss that made my love well up from unfathomable depths to overwhelm me. I was angry. My pride was hurt. I counted over the years of my untiring devotion to her, and they seemed to sum up the best years of my life. That the telegram foreran a more explicit statement ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... only a mechanical effluence from things unseen to things unseeing,—from Stars, that did not shine, to Earth, that did not perceive,—the change, I say, of that blind vibration into the glory of the Sun and Moon for human eyes: so making possible the communication out of the unfathomable truth of that portion of truth which is good for us, and animating to us, and is set to rule over the day and over the night of our joy and ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... a slumber filled with troubled dreams. She was in a sandy wilderness, carrying a pitcher of clear, cold water, and though dying of thirst she would not drink, but perversely poured it upon the ground. She was falling down into unfathomable abysses and pushed aside the only hand stretched out to save her. She was drowning in deep water and she saw Le Gardeur buffeting the waves to rescue her but she wrenched herself out of his grasp. She ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... friends, as so many seem to think, but that we shall awake in his likeness and see his face. We shall be 'together,'—we have that comfort given us, but it will be 'together with the Lord.' He is to be the centre of attraction and delight always. What an unfathomable mystery it must be to the angels that he is not so with ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... himself to awaken from the chimera. He knew she was armed, and would use the weapon if only to call for help. For the first time in his career the chill of terror crept into his heart—not for himself, but an irresistible dread of some impending danger for this unfathomable woman who had shared his dangers so uncomplainingly during this last wonderful day. He racked his mind vainly for some plausible reason. "She knows I need her. Yet at the supreme moment of the game she disappears. Can she be like other women, when ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... Madam de Cartier's eye unflinchingly. There was an unfathomable twinkle in Madam's that meant much or little. Madam was naturally merry. Nevertheless, Sue, for all her bravado, was worried. She changed ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... ever be able again to unite the rim; if they did not, as the whole sank downwards, one atoll would be divided into two or more. In the Maldiva archipelago there are distinct atolls so related to each other in position, and separated by channels either unfathomable or very deep (the channel between Ross and Ari atolls is 150 fathoms, and that between the north and south Nillandoo atolls is 200 fathoms in depth), that it is impossible to look at a map of them without believing that they were once more intimately related. And ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... "the pictured rocks of sandstone" of the upper lake—a cliff that viewed from either side maintained its resemblance to a female profile looking sternly down at the water beneath it, which was here believed to be unfathomable. The Doom Woman still exists. Strange to say, under its sharp-cut features a steamer has since been wrecked and sunk, and its expression of gloomy fate is now awfully appropriate. Marie had visited "the great Sea Water" with her father. Nature's titanic and fanciful frescoing ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... startle you suddenly by such dreadful intelligence; but I hope you have now summoned up courage to hear the worst, and that, after at first giving way to natural and only too just anguish and tears, you will eventually submit to the will of God, and adore His inscrutable, unfathomable, and all-wise providence. You can easily conceive what I have had to endure, and what courage and fortitude I required to bear with composure seeing her become daily worse and worse; and yet our gracious God bestowed this boon on me. ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... steadily, counting his paces to keep his mind from wandering, and to his great joy he came suddenly on an opening in the wall which led towards welcome light, away from the horrors of that unfathomable pit. The woman waited for him there, looking very ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... greatly disappointed, in taking soundings of our most majestic mountain pools, to find them, in no case, verge on the unfathomable.] ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... crooked dolphin leap; Gasping for breath, the unshapen phocae die, 310 And on the boiling wave extended lie. Nereus, and Doris with her virgin train, Seek out the last recesses of the main; Beneath unfathomable depths they faint, And secret in their gloomy regions pant, Stern Neptune thrice above the waves upheld His face, and thrice was by the flames repelled. The Earth at length, on every side embraced With scalding seas, that floated ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... The female intellect is impregnated with the qualities of her sensitive nature. It acts rather through a channel of electricity than of reasoning. Its perceptions of truth come, as it were, by intuition. It is under the influence of the heart, that has deep and unfathomable wells of feeling; and truth is felt in every pulse, rather than reasoned out and demonstrated. You cannot offend a woman so quick, in any way, as to ask her why she wishes to do thus, or why she reaches such a conclusion. Her reply ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... The tired girl with the hunted look in her eyes had developed into an amazingly attractive young woman. Her fair skin had taken on a dazzling whiteness; her hair was richer and more luxuriant than of yore; but it was her eyes in which the chief alteration had occurred. These now held an unfathomable depth of tenderness, together with a roguish fear that the former alluring quality might be discovered. If her figure were not as unduly stout as the skinny virgins of Melkbridge declared it to be, there was no denying the rude health apparent in the girl's ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... Great Actor. He was sitting in a deep arm-chair, so buried in his own thoughts that he was oblivious of our approach. On his knee before him lay a cabinet photograph of himself. His eyes seemed to be peering into it, as if seeking to fathom its unfathomable mystery. We had time to note that a beautiful carbon photogravure of himself stood on a table at his elbow, while a magnificent half-tone pastel of himself was suspended on a string from the ceiling. It was only when we had seated ourself in a chair ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... in his uncle a deep, unfathomable feeling underlying his seeming godlessness. Topandy, on his side, suspected that some dark shadow had prematurely crossed the serenity of the young man's mind. Each tried to pierce the depths of the other's ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... kissed him on the shoulder and left the room without snuffing the candles or saying why he had entered. The most solemn mystery in the world continued its course. Evening passed, night came, and the feeling of suspense and softening of heart in the presence of the unfathomable did not lessen but increased. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... once becomes passionate. In presenting his Bill of Rights, in stepping forward as the champion of individual liberty, he seems to be possessed by a new spirit. He speaks like a martyr, or the defender of martyrs. The individual human soul, with its unfathomable endowments, and its capacity of growing to something undreamt of in our philosophy, becomes in his eyes a sacred thing, and every encroachment on its world-wide domain is treated as sacrilege. Society, the arch-enemy ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... positive struck into my vitals with a chill premonition, as of something unnatural and, to me, unfathomable. It was a sentiment which I can only call anti-human. Even as those of Sylvia's persuasion held that the clergy should be celibate, so it seemed to me they viewed all purely human loves, ties, emotions, sentiments, and interests generally with a kind of jealous suspicion, as influences ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... floating in the water. I cried aloud his name, beseeching him to save me, and got only his mocking laugh in return, as he struck out for the shore. I could not swim, and I felt myself sinking down—down to unfathomable depths. I felt cold as ice; there was a deafening roar in my ears, ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... nothing I wished for so much, and I never told Martyn of her little manoeuvres, knowing he would not stand them; and now what he will do, I can't think, unless you and Edward will take her off our hands. I believe you might do her good. She is an unfathomable mixture of sham and earnest, and she really likes you, and thinks much of you, as having a certain prestige, and being a woman of the world" (fancy that). "Besides, she is really religious in a sort of a way; much good you'll say it does her, but, as you know, there's a certain sort of ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... wild, the impassioned. A dreamer—a muse—filled with ambitious thoughts—proud, vain, aspiring after the vague, the unfathomable! What was her joy, now that she could speak her whole soul, with all its passionate fullness, to understanding ears! Stevens and herself had already spoken together. Her books had been his books. The glowing passages which she loved to repeat, were also the favorite passages ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... depths, and that, in fact, there remains for him, the aftercomer, nothing more to do. And how could one get courage only to put pen to paper, if one were conscious in an earnest, appreciating spirit, that such unfathomable and unattainable excellences ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... she had scarcely spoken to Ibrahim, and had not spoken to Hamza except to wish him good-night upon the bank of the Nile. She remembered now the expression in his almond-shaped eyes when he had returned her salutation—an unfathomable expression of ruthless understanding that stripped her nature bare of all disguises, and seemed to leave it as it was for all the men of ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... by pointing out their beauties—an office much needed, particularly by certain dullards, the magazine of whose souls are not combustible enough to take fire at the electric sparks shot forth up out of the depths of George Stephens's unfathomable genius! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... have long recognized the first chapter of Ezekiel as a strange and nearly unfathomable account of a vision. I suggest that it is strange only because it is written by a man far removed from us in time and experience, about a subject totally unfamiliar to men of his time. I do not think that ...
— The Four-Faced Visitors of Ezekiel • Arthur W. Orton
... Nevill Tyson turned on Stanistreet were not search-lights; they were wells of darkness, unsearchable, unfathomable. ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... words—was it a hint of tenderness?—renewed her failing strength. She commanded herself and raised her head. She scarcely recognised in the steady, square-chinned man before her the impulsive, round-faced boy she had left. There was something unfathomable about him, a hint of greatness that affected ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... His name is "a strong tower," running into which the righteous are safe. That tower is garrisoned and bulwarked by the attributes of His own everlasting nature. Among these attributes not the least glorious is His Love—that unfathomable love which dwelt in His bosom from all eternity, and which is immutably pledged never to be taken from ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... life is Memory: We walk upon a narrow path between Two gulfs—what is to be, and what has been, Led by a guide whose name is Destiny; Beyond is sightless gloom and mystery, From whose unfathomable depths we glean Chaotic hopes and terrors, dimly-seen Reflections of ...
— The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. - A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers • Various
... drawings, once in the possession of Vasari, were certain designs by Verrocchio, faces of such impressive beauty that Leonardo in his boyhood copied them many times. It is hard not to connect with these designs of the elder by-past master, as with its germinal principle, the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it, which plays over all Leonardo's work. Besides, the picture is a portrait. From childhood we see this image defining itself on the fabric of his dreams; and but for express historical testimony, we might ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... whom Bertram worships does not whisper in his ear the unfathomable baseness of this "lump of counterfeit ore," is a piece of dramatic retribution at once natural and just. Far as the joke is pushed upon Parolles, we never feel like crying out, Hold, enough! for, "that he should know what he is, and be that he is," seems an ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... her mother the explanation that she could not give herself? Having reached an unfathomable abyss, she dared not even lean over to look into its depths; and instead of going on in the path where she was pledged in spite of herself, she made every effort to return, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... say in its neighbourhood, "put on its cap and began to smoke its pipe," which, to speak more plainly, means that it is covered with clouds, and that the snow, driven upon it by a south-west wind, formed a long crest on its summit in the direction of the unfathomable precipices of the Brenva glaciers. This crest betrayed to imprudent tourists the route they would have taken, had they had the temerity to ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... continent to the other, from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in the north to within little more than one hundred miles from the Strait of Magellan in the south; and their way lay over boundless snowfields, across enormous glaciers gashed with unfathomable crevasses, up and down stupendous precipices, and along narrow, ice-clad ledges, where a single false step must have hurled them to death thousands of feet below. To journey amid such surroundings was of course bad enough in itself; but the hardship of it was increased tenfold for the ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... little before eleven o'clock that night—a haunted man—haunted for life by a vision of that face still lovely in death, floating alone upon the deep, and companioned only by the screaming mews—or perchance now sinking or sunk to an unfathomable grave. Well might such a vision haunt a man, the man whom alone of all men those cold lips had kissed, and for whose dear sake this dreadful thing ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... the full flower of her glorious youth—and I thought of Joyce. I felt that it was like her to have fallen in love simply but passionately at the mere lifting of the finger of Fate. It was only another demonstration of the unfathomable mystery, or miracle, which love is. Joyce was lucky, indeed favored of the gods, to have touched the spring in this girl's heart which no other man could reach, and by the rarest of chances—her coming out to this remote corner of the world. Lucky Joyce! ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... impossible to overstate the public excitement of the moment and the unfathomable sense of horror with which the community regarded an attack upon the chief executive of the nation, as a crime against government itself which compels an instinctive recoil from all law-abiding citizens. Doubtless both the horror and recoil have their roots ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... mamma would have said) which had tricked her into blurting out a secret scarcely even formulated before in her own inmost soul. That mysterious moment remained merely as an astonishment. It was the strangest thing that had ever happened to her; she had simply been swept away by some unfathomable madness. And at present Nature's first law was working in her with obliterating force. Would the man tell? Here in the sane and ordered surroundings, with mamma sleeping and satisfied one floor below, and a long, long letter ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... of her beauty in the coloring of flowers; the raven hue and sweeping length of of her tresses in the drowning shades of midnight and the entrancing veil of her lashes in deep mysterious woods; and when, in fancy, he looked beneath that veil into her eyes, as unfathomable as the ocean itself, he was struck dumb with reverence and wonder, for they held in keeping all the secrets of the moon and the stars, of dawn and sunset, of green things growing and flowers in bloom, of the butterfly in ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... intelligibility of its creed—one God, one prophet, one book—commends Mohammedanism to the minds of many. But simplicity is not a foible of the religious mind of India. It has always craved the complex, the mystical, and the unfathomable. It delights in inconsistencies, and indulges freely in the irreconcilable mysteries of faith. Hinduism, being the child of the Hindu mind, abounds in tropical exuberance of spiritual exercise and "amusements," which seem childish and inane ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... unfathomable mines Of never-failing skill, He treasures up His bright designs And works ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... quaking swamps. When, formerly, I have analyzed my partiality for some farm which I had contemplated purchasing, I have frequently found that I was attracted solely by a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog—a natural sink in one corner of it. That was the jewel which dazzled me. I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village. ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau
... Garnett; and all the mitigations of art could not conceal the fact that she was desperately in need of that restorative. There were moments, indeed, when he was sorrier for her than for her husband or her daughter; so black and unfathomable appeared the abyss into which she must slip back if she lost her hold on this last ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... answer a word; she could not take her eyes from him. There was an unnatural stillness in his face, a steady, unrepentant, unfathomable despair in his eyes that struck her with horror. She would have given worlds to be able to rise to her feet and fly ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... the list to Barney's name had always come Margaret's. She was like Barney in so many ways; strong like Barney in her relentless devotion to duty; she had Barney's fine sense of honour, of righteousness, and Barney's superb courage, and, more than anything else, the same unfathomable heart of love. One could never get to the bottom of it. No matter what the drain, there would ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... about twenty miles from Irkutsk. It is 420 miles in length, its breadth varying from ten to sixty miles. Its average depth is rarely less than 819 ft., but in parts the ground has been touched only at 4500 ft. The natives believe it to be unfathomable."—"Side Lights on Siberia," by ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... I came to a ledge beneath which the sheer cliff dropped away into unfathomable snowy depths. After short excursions to right and left I discovered that a section of the cliff had split off and dropped into the canyon, leaving only sheer rock walls that offered nothing in the way of footholds. Irresolutely, ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... precise instant the boy darted out of the cabin aft, just ahead of the skipper and Mr Rawlings, as if impelled by some unfathomable instinct, and bounding right to the spot where Seth was being swept away to destruction, clutched hold of the seaman's collar with one hand, and one end of the topsail-halliards with the other as they hung over ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... a song of summer by the sea, Of subtleties of change, of strange unrest; Of dreams unfathomable that form and flee Like drifts of mist above ...
— From The Lips of the Sea • Clinton Scollard
... vault, it is a limitless immensity, inconceivable, unfathomable, that surrounds us on all sides, and in the midst of which our globe is floating. THE HEAVENS ARE ALL THAT EXISTS, all that we see, and all that we do not see: the Earth on which we are, that bears us onward in her rapid flight; ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... two-and-twenty women were not aware of their own importance, nor could guess that History would ever concern herself with the date of their present undertaking; and second, for a reason whose roots are prehistoric, for they spring from the unfathomable depths of the feminine soul wherein abides inherently the love of purity, of order, and of tradition. Yes, in two hundred and seventy years the face of Nature, of empires, and of peoples has changed almost beyond recognition in ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... into caverns and fissures, the stream, one-fourth of a mile from its debouchure, breaks into a continuous cascade of remarkable beauty, consisting of a fall of five feet, succeeded by another of fifteen into a grotto formed by proximate rocks imperfectly arching it, whence from a crystal pool of unfathomable depth at their base, it lingers as if half reluctant to continue its course, or as if to renew its power, and then glides gracefully over a descending, almost perpendicular, ledge, veiling the rocks for the distance of eighty ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... as illustrious as that of Hermann. The German patriot was neither braver nor wiser than the Batavian, but he had the infinite forests of his fatherland to protect him. Every legion which plunged into those unfathomable depths was forced to retreat disastrously, or to perish miserably. Civilis was hemmed in by the ocean; his country, long the basis of Roman military operations, was accessible by river and canal, The patriotic spirit which ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Whereas life is full of them. There are secrets of birth, for instance. One carries them on to the grave. There is something comical...but never mind. And there are secret motives of conduct. A man's most open actions have a secret side to them. That is interesting and so unfathomable! For instance, a man goes out of a room for a walk. Nothing more trivial in appearance. And yet it may be momentous. He comes back—he has seen perhaps a drunken brute, taken particular notice of the snow on the ground—and behold he is no longer the same man. The ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... happening drew all his growing but still debatable intentions into one sharp point of resolution. It was such an afternoon as comes rarely, even in the exhilarating winter of New York—an afternoon when the unfathomable blue of the sky overhead runs through all the gamut of tones from lavender to indigo; when the air has the living keenness of that which the Spirit first breathed into the nostrils of man; when the rapture of the heart is that of neither passion, ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... of the whole ship's company depends on him, and there is the fine tradition, which British captains always live up to, that in case of any accident happening to the ship the captain must be the last man to quit her. Innumerable captains indeed have preferred to go down into the unfathomable depths with their ships sooner than leave them when they have ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... that relate to them. The greater the number of books written by human learning and ingenuity to expound them, the more advanced the intelligence and piety of mankind, the less, it is confessed, do we know of them in detail, the more they rise above our comprehension, the more unfathomable become their depths. Experience, history, the progress of light, all increase our sense of the impossibility of estimating the capacities of the human soul. So also we find that the higher we rise towards the Deity, in the ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... the blue waves of the vast Atlantic, as if we were far above the earth. Nothing was there for the weary eye to rest upon but a dreary expanse of ocean and sky. All was still as death, save the hissing at the bows of the vessel, as she parted the unfathomable deep. The crew loitered upon the decks listlessly; and we, as palantines, huddled together around the mainmast, were whiling away the time in songs, or talking of the homes we had left behind, and future hopes in a foreign land. We were suddenly ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... troops, he was the crusher of large bands of foes. Ever engaged in Duryodhana's good, he was always prepared to inflict woe on us! He was invincible in battle by the very gods with Vasava at their head. In energy and might he was equal unto the god of fire and the god of wind. In gravity he was unfathomable as the Nether world. The enhancer of the joys of friends, he was like the Destroyer himself unto foes! Having slain Karna (who was even so) in dreadful battle, by good luck it is that you two have come, like a couple of celestials after vanquishing an Asura! Today, O Acyuta and Arjuna, a great ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... very rough; one must climb up an almost perpendicular rocky wall. In certain places the road winds along upon rock ledges of only a metre in width, below which the sight drops into unfathomable abysses. May the Lord preserve the traveller from a fall! At one place, the way is upon long beams introduced into holes made in the rock, like a bridge, and covered up with earth. Brr!—At the thought that a ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... more deeply interesting. I now saw that never before had I really been in earnest about anything, that on winning her I had staked myself, and that myself was a wholly different person from what I had been imagining. In a word, I sat face to face with that unfathomable mystery of sex-affinity that every man laughs at and mocks another man for believing in, until he has himself felt it drawing him against will, against reason, and sense, and interest, over the brink of ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... is to invest it with an attribute that is Divine, and Pantheists carry such an explanation to its logical conclusion when they affirm that the universe is God. The existence of a single atom is an unfathomable mystery. Man cannot create or destroy even a particle of matter. How overwhelming, then, if we reject the simple statement of the Bible, is the mystery of the great universe, in whose extended space suns, planets, stars, and systems unceasingly revolve, and in which our own world is but a little ...
— Exposition of the Apostles Creed • James Dodds
... night at Belmont when they saw "how the floor of heaven is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold," and when the blissful lover, radiant with happiness and exalted by the sublime, illimitable, unfathomable spectacle of the star-strewn firmament, murmured, in such heaven-like cadence, of ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... Florentine mosaic, was a polished brass box containing a ship's compass. I had been from boyhood familiar with all these things, but I never tired of looking at them, especially at the albatross and the owl—the former so suggestive of Coleridge and the unfathomable depths of the far-away Indian Ocean, and the latter always leading my thoughts away back to the fierce-eyed Athene ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... eastward. The road of Santa Cruz lies on the east side of the island, at the end of a range of craggy hills, barren and very lofty, along with you sail west by south by compass into the road, with a sea unfathomable until near the shore. The anchoring ground may be accounted from fifty fathoms to twenty, or even fifteen. The bank is very steep and gives but little time to sound; for which reason it should be done effectually with a heavy lead, or a ship will be too near in before a stranger is aware of ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... no shadow of pity in those unfathomable eyes. I looked into them for a moment, but their shining jet revealed nothing below the surface—nothing ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the word of a man of respectability, who could have no motive whatever for deceiving us. But this was not all that we learnt from him respecting the reef. He declared that previous to the appearance of the island, the water in that very spot was unfathomable; and it was not till after it had sunk, that a single rock stood in the way to prevent the largest ship of war from anchoring within a ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... tapestry itself carries us back to the unfathomable East which has a trick at dates, making the Christian Era a modern epoch, and making of us but a newly-sprung civilisation in the history of the old grey world. After showing us that the East pre-empted originality for all time, the history of tapestry lightly lifts us over a few ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... of some has been the most splendid. Others, and they the greatest number, have fluctuated, and experienced at different periods of their existence a great variety of fortune. At the very moment when some of them seemed plunged in unfathomable abysses of disgrace and disaster, they have suddenly emerged. They have begun a new course and opened a new reckoning; and, even in the depths of their calamity, and on the very ruins of their country, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... entirely intelligible? Is it not obvious that to think here of the intelligent, or of the absolutely intelligible, is to go back to the Aristotelian theory of nature? No doubt it is better to go back to that than to stop short before instinct as before an unfathomable mystery. But, though instinct is not within the domain of intelligence, it is not situated beyond the limits of mind. In the phenomena of feeling, in unreflecting sympathy and antipathy, we experience in ourselves—though under a much vaguer form, and one too much penetrated with intelligence—something ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... his private envy by christening him 'Don Juan.' For Meredith fatally attracted women; and Barnard—cultured, cynical, Cambridge—was as fatally susceptible to them as a trout to a May-fly; but, for some unfathomable reason they would not; and in Anglo-India a man could not hide his failures under a bushel. Lance classified him comprehensively as 'one of the War lot'; liked him, and was sorry for him, although—perhaps ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... life, Joan was present when a man had the presumption to speak to his Maker direct from his own heart, without the mediation of a book. This she found odder than all the rest; she had never even heard of such a thing! So peculiar, so unfathomable were his utterances, that it never occurred to her the man might be meaning something; farther from her still was the thought, that perhaps God liked to hear him, was listening to him and understanding ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... hers, but it was a distinct one and it had a distinct echo. Lifting my eyes, for I sat so as to face the bed, I was startled to observe my patient leaning towards us from her pillows, and staring upon us with eyes too hollow for tears but filled with unfathomable ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... horse snorted with terror, reared up on his hind-legs, and before any help could be given, the maiden slid from the saddle and fell headlong into the river. The prince would have leaped in after her, but the soldiers seized hold of him and prevented him, for the river was of unfathomable depth, and no human aid could avail to remedy ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... other arm. Still it was vacancy. I stretched a little more violently; feeling forward, and on each side; and I seemed to be projected upon a point, my head and shoulders inclining over a dark abyss, which the imagination left unfathomable. ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... on a wide plain. On one side, it was bounded by thick woods, whose dark secret depths looked unfathomable to the eye: on the other, by hills, ever rising higher and higher yet, until they were lost in bright, beautifully white clouds, gleaming in refulgent sunlight. On the side above the woods, the sky was dark and vaporous. It seemed as if some thick exhalation ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... by her visitor, who had that flattering manner which, to those not experienced in the world's ways, seems to imply unfathomable depths of disinterested devotion. Then it was so delightful to look upon a perfectly appointed woman,—one who was as artistically composed as a poem or an opera,—in whose costume a kind of various rhythm undulated ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... good one, like Sophocles. He faces the horror; realises it; and tries to surmount it on the sweep of a great wave of religious emotion. The mother-murder, even if done by a god's command, is a sin; a sin to be expiated by unfathomable suffering. Yet, since the god cannot have commanded evil, it is a duty also. It is a ...
— The Electra of Euripides • Euripides
... was long-suffering under this series of somewhat peremptory questions. He replied very placidly, "I am afraid I have but a superficial outside acquaintance with the secrets, the unfathomable mysteries, of music. I can no more conceive of the working conditions of ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... some time before, and thought it very beautiful without being moved by it, but now he suddenly realized its unfathomable depth, for it seemed to him that on that evening he himself had ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... awful in their silence. The darkness deepened in the old parlor. There was a sound of voices passing in the street. The church bell broke the stillness. Softly the old calm crept over his brow, and he raised his face and looked at her with those great dark eyes—eyes of unfathomable tenderness and impenetrable fire, and she felt that her very soul stood naked before him. She trembled and sank on the couch at her side. His look was infinitely tender as ...
— Beth Woodburn • Maud Petitt
... and abjectly must I reckon of myself, how must I weigh it as nothing, if I seem to have nothing good! Oh, how profoundly ought I to submit myself to Thy unfathomable judgments, O Lord, when I find myself nothing else save nothing, and again nothing! Oh weight unmeasurable, oh ocean which cannot be crossed over, where I find nothing of myself save nothing altogether! Where, then, is the ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... will love, If thou shall or will have loved."—L. Murray's Gram., 2d Ed., p. 71; Cooper's Murray, 58; D. Adams's Gram., 48; and others. "Till religion, the pilot of the soul, have lent thee her unfathomable coil."—Tupper's Thoughts, p. 170. "Whether nature or art contribute most to form an orator, is a trifling inquiry."—Blair's Rhet., p. 338. "Year after year steals something from us; till the decaying fabric totter of itself, and crumble at ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... game of taking desperate chances, many a wild player lost, many a foolhardy one never reached the shore. No one will ever know the number of victims claimed by these black unfathomable waters. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... on the methods of chance and accident. The choice and transmission of the forty-eight chromosomes that give to each individual his character-potential are probably in accordance with some obscure biological law through which the unfathomable divine will operates. Now these chromosomes may be selected and combined after a fashion, and with a persistence of continuity, that would guarantee character-potential, for good or for ill, through many generations, or they might be so varied in their combinations that ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... morning, when eye and ear are on the alert to catch any transitory gleam and to welcome each distant echo, and the awful immovable stillness of noon, when Pan is sleeping, and will be wroth if he is awakened, when the whole life of nature is still, and we look down shuddering into its unfathomable depth! Standing on the heights of Tusculum, or on the sacred pavement of the Latian Jupiter, every glance we send forth into the objects around us, returns laden with matter to cherish forebodings and despondencies. The ruins speak of an immovable past, the teeming growths which mantle them, the ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... brown, parted irregularly in the middle, flowed in natural ringlets over her shoulders, and whenever she chanced to stoop, fell over and hid from view her lovely bosom. Gazing into the depths of her strange blue eyes, when she was in a contemplative mood, they seemed most placid yet unfathomable; but when illuminated by some lively emotion, they beamed upon the beholder like stars. The hands of Fayaway were as soft and delicate as those of any countess; for an entire exemption from rude labour marks the girlhood and even prime of a Typee woman's life. Her feet, though ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... Stadtholder. Adieu—we shall meet again." On finishing this speech the Unknown advanced to the lake. Immediately the waves bubbled up, and rose in vast billows; and opening with dreadful noise, exposed an unfathomable abyss. At the same moment thunder growled in the sky, the moon hid herself behind a veil of clouds, and the brewer's son, half choked with the smell of brimstone, fell insensible on ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... constantly accustomed to sustain the splendour. Bury all your books, when you feel the night of scepticism gathering around you—bury them all, powerful though you may have deemed their spells to illuminate the unfathomable—open your Bible, and all the spiritual world will be as bright ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... as if the Poly. put out feeler after feeler to draw him to itself. Only to one thing he would not be drawn. When Booty advised him to join the Poly. Ramblers he stood firm. For some shy or unfathomable reason of his own he refused to become a Poly. Rambler. When it came to the Poly. Ramblers he was adamant. It was one of those vital points at which he resisted this process of absorption in the Poly. Booty denounced his attitude as eminently ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... Never in my life did I feel the full happiness of it, the full sense of the words before. The sun burst out into shining, the birds into singing. The sky stretched over us—deep and unfathomable and blue,—the grass grew under our feet, a soft air of morning blew upon us; waving the curls of the children, the veils of the women, whose faces were lit up by the beautiful day. After three days of darkness what a resurrection! It seemed to ...
— A Beleaguered City • Mrs. Oliphant
... fatal news. Now, however, I hope that you have both prepared yourselves to hear the worst; and after giving way to the reasonable and natural impulses of your grief, to submit yourselves at last to the will of God, and to adore his inscrutable, unfathomable, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... find lakes of still, deadly-cold water, with hot springs at their verge, throwing the smoke over their surface, while they pour in their boiling water as if they would fain raise the temperature; depositing sulphur in cakes and crystals in their course. And in another spot there is a dark, unfathomable hole, called the Devil's Mouth: you approach it, and you hear low moanings and rumblings, as if nature had the stomach-ache; and then you will have a sudden explosion, and a noise like thunder, and a shower of mud will be thrown out to a distance of several yards. ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... the terrible shock to which it had been subjected without damage, though the brain within was, for a time, incapacitated from doing duty. When John rose again to the surface, after a descent into unfathomable water, he floated there in a state of insensibility. Fortunately the wind and tide combined to wash him to the shore, where a higher swell than usual launched him among the coral rocks, and left him there, with only his ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... which he Holds, and the abyss, and the immensity Of worlds and life, which I hold with him—No! I have a Victor—true; but no superior.[123] Homage he has from all—but none from me: 430 I battle it against him, as I battled In highest Heaven—through all Eternity, And the unfathomable gulfs of Hades, And the interminable realms of space, And the infinity of endless ages, All, all, will I dispute! And world by world, And star by star, and universe by universe, Shall tremble in the balance, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... the President was now rapidly nearing its climax and becoming a sort of frenzy. Andrew Johnson was no longer merely a "wrong-headed and obstinate man," but a "genius in depravity," whose hoarded malignity and passion were unfathomable. He was not simply "an irresolute mule," as General Schenck had styled him, but was devil-bent upon the ruin of his country; and his trial connected itself with all the memories of the war, and involved the Nation in a new and final struggle for its life. ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... Beauty, of which things on earth are only dim copies.... I have seen the future, the destinies of the human race; I have spoken to the mighty, the lofty, and the pure; I have learnt the wise Order which guides the apparent great disorder; I trembled at the unfathomable secret of the Universe of which I had a glimmering perception, and I felt the immensity of my ignorance. Plato, you shall write what I have seen. You shall teach the children of men to estimate things ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... looked at her with a ruminating eye. That eye, with unfathomable perspicacity, seemed to pry into her empty pockets and pierce her penniless state. He did not ask her if she wanted to be driven there, but intimated with a shake of his grey head that Paddington was a goodish walk. ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... three fingers of his left hand into his mouth and refused to say a word. His eyes widened with an unfathomable baby-emotion. ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... of in the hands of a clan or an order? Look out there into that sad Europe, and see it all! See, there, how the Catholic element everywhere marks itself with night, and drags the soul, and energies, and freedom of the people backwards and downwards into political and social inaction—into unfathomable quagmires of death! ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... the elements, and how often to the injustice of our social condition, which is the crowning injustice of man? Need we, at the sight of unmerited wretchedness, look to the skies for a reason, as though a flash of lightning had caused it? Need we seek an impenetrable, unfathomable judge? Is this region not our own; are we not here in the best explored, best known portion of our dominion; and is it not we who organise misery, we who spread it abroad, as arbitrarily, from the moral point of view, as fire and disease ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... assistance in order to save their lives, thus revealing themselves to their enemy, for the tenacious muck had a tendency to act in the same treacherous fashion as quicksand, clutching the victim and dragging him down, inch after inch into its unfathomable depths. ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... distractedly about, seizes HELMER'S domino, throws it round her, while she says in quick, hoarse, spasmodic whispers). Never to see him again. Never! Never! (Puts her shawl over her head.) Never to see my children again either—never again. Never! Never!—Ah! the icy, black water—the unfathomable depths—If only it were over! He has got it now—now he is reading it. Goodbye, Torvald and my children! (She is about to rush out through the hall, when HELMER opens his door hurriedly and stands with an ...
— A Doll's House • Henrik Ibsen
... evident to those who watched the rapid unfolding of Helen's faculties that it would not be possible to keep her inquisitive spirit for any length of time from reaching out toward the unfathomable mysteries of life. But great care has been taken not to lead her thoughts prematurely to the consideration of subjects which perplex and confuse all minds. Children ask profound questions, but they often receive shallow ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... phantom at the window, looking into the dark quadrange. A thin glimmering crescent hung in the frosty sky, and all heaven was strewn with stars. Over the steep roof at the other side spread on the dark azure of the night this glorious blazonry of the unfathomable Creator. To me a dreadful scroll—inexorable eyes—the cloud of cruel witnesses looking down in freezing brightness on my ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... this arise? what strange and unfathomable cause could render necessary a conduct so mysterious? he knew not, indeed, that she herself wished it changed, but he could not be ignorant that his chance with almost any woman would at least ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... I hear, before or since, of such a plunge into the muddy unfathomable, on the part of little George, who was an honorable creature, and dubitative to excess: and truly this rash plunge might have cost him dear, had not he directly scrambled out again. Or did Friedrich ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... her comprehend how blest I was, and what a darling Dora was. I entreated Agnes not to regard this as a thoughtless passion which could ever yield to any other, or had the least resemblance to the boyish fancies that we used to joke about. I assured her that its profundity was quite unfathomable, and expressed my belief that nothing like ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... with little change. It was the sole remaining thread of the ancient woof of a dawning culture which had been woven when Caprona was a fiery mount upon a great land-mass teeming with life. It linked the unfathomable then to the eternal now. And yet it may have been pure coincidence; my better judgment tells me that it is coincidence that in Caspak the term for speechless man is Alus, and in the outer world of our own ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... much in life that is cruel, from our standpoints," said Elnora. "It takes the large wisdom of the Unfathomable, the philosophy of the Almighty, to endure some of it. But there is always right somewhere, and at last ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... guide behind in Tokyo. Had Asako yielded at the last moment unable to dispense with her faithful squire? Or had he come of his own accord? and if so, why? These Japs were an unfathomable and exasperating people. ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... melancholy, choral response, wherein blend the voices of childish innocence, strong manhood, and plaintive age, hear us on to the close;—that threefold blessing which none may hear unmoved, and whose magnitude seems to transcend our poor belief, as we reverently bow, in awed silence, musing on its unfathomable import; while the deep, mellow voice that pronounced it still lingers on ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... had just left—her decks sinking from sight beneath the dark waters. The tall masts, and spars, and sails followed: down, down they went, drawn by an irresistible force! It seemed like some dreadful dream. Before I could secure myself on the bowsprit, they had disappeared in the unfathomable abyss. Not a cry or a groan reached my ears from my drowning shipmates—unwarned, unprepared they died. Such has been many a hapless seaman's fate. One only escaped. He had hold of the dolphin-striker. ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... impossible for me to accept a truth with that amount of evidence which satisfied her mind, and I doubted, at times, a future existence. But I do not doubt it now. I have had proof,—abundant proof; and, O, the joy that fills my soul is unfathomable. ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... in a far different way from his chum; instead of calling it an unfathomable mystery he stepped forward and took hold of the piece of cord that still hung ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... naked sword, and after that Dom. Consul had prayed aloud, "God the Father, dwell with us," likewise the Custos had led another hymn (I know not what he sang, neither does my child), we went on our way, according to the unfathomable will of God, after this fashion: the worshipful court went before, whereas all the folks to our great joy fell back, and the fellows with the pitchforks lingered a good way behind us, now that the sheriff ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... whom he knew at college. Nor are his criticisms by any means valueless. That upon the plays, especially 'Beau Austin,' is remarkably thoughtful and true. But it is a very singular fact, and goes far, as we say, to prove that Stevenson had that unfathomable quality which belongs to the great, that this admiring student of Stevenson can number and marshal all the master's work and distribute praise and blame with decision and even severity, without ever thinking for a moment of the principles of art and ethics ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... and dale. The commotion of the day and the driving lulled the old woman into deep sleep, and Uli, with tense muscles, held in the wildly racing Blackie to a moderately fast pace; Freneli was alone in the wide world. As far off in the distant sky the stars floated in the limitless space of the unfathomable blue ocean, each by itself in its solitary course, so she felt herself again to be the poor, solitary, forsaken girl in the great turmoil of the universe. When she had left aunt and uncle, when they were dead, she would have no one left on earth; ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... made no verbal reply, but took out his knife, and stepping to where the rope passed out from the stern, mooring them to a crag of rock that seemed to rise from unfathomable depths, he divided the strands, and the rope fell with a splash in the water. Then, going to the bows, where the other rope ran to one of the timbers of the Petrel, he cut that, ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... of those who would relieve them. This is the substance of Thomas Carlyle's advice; this is the matured fruit of his philosophic husbandry,—the grand result for which he has been all his life sounding unfathomable abysses or beating about in the thin air of Transcendentalism. Such is the substitute which he offers us for the Sermon on ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... against the errors he might put in their place. Reason and judgment come slowly, prejudices flock to us in crowds, and from these he must be protected. But if you make science itself your object, you embark on an unfathomable and shoreless ocean, an ocean strewn with reefs from which you will never return. When I see a man in love with knowledge, yielding to its charms and flitting from one branch to another unable to stay his steps, he seems to me like a child gathering ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... the most distinguished-looking man that I ever beheld, and no sensible person could meet him without instantly recognizing his superior mental endowment. His features were not only classic but grandly classic; and his eyes large, dark, luminous, unfathomable— looking into them was like looking into a deep well. His face seemed to give a pictorial reflection of whatever was taking place about him; and again became like a transparency through which one could see dim vistas of beautiful objects. The changes of expression on it were like the sunshine ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... here and there seemed to flit like clouds over a lower heaven. As to voyagers of an aerial Polynesia, the earth seemed like a larger island in the ether; on every side, even as low as we, the sky shutting down, like an unfathomable deep, around it, a blue Pacific island, where who knows what islanders inhabit? and as we sail near its shores we see the waving of trees, and hear ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... at the cabin Fay turned on the porch step and, with her face nearer a level with his, white and sweet in the moonlight, with her eyes shining and unfathomable, she ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... cure, raising his hat reverently, and looking out towards the cold, unfathomable waters of the great Gulf. "And, my child, there is only One who can help us on ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... halo and merged at length into the black sweep of the horizon. So passed Egypt from the sight of many; with the gurgling monotone of the propeller, they reeled off the knots of water which separated a past of careless happy-go-lucky days from a future of unfathomable depth. ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... through careful nursing, she really regained her consciousness and came up from those unfathomable abysses where she had been wandering, she opened her eyes upon the walls of a little chamber that looked out through an alcove into the living room of the ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... his indomitable will. Gudule was famous throughout the Ghetto as "the girl with the wonderful eyes," eyes—so the saying ran—into which no man could look and think of evil. During the earlier years of their married life those unfathomable brown eyes exercised on Ascher the full power of their fascination. A time came, however, when he alleged that those very eyes had been the cause of all ...
— A Ghetto Violet - From "Christian and Leah" • Leopold Kompert
... shone like silver. Every turn of the screw dashed a thousand flashes on either side, and the heaving of the lead was like the flight of a meteor, as it plunged with a luminous trail far down into the dark unfathomable ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... very broad views on that point; I never think about it. Besides, my late confessor helped me. "Do not seek too much," he always said to me, "do not try to understand that which is unfathomable." You did not know Father Gideon? He was a jewel of a confessor; I was extremely pleased with him. Not too tedious, always discreet, and, above all, well-bred. He turned monk from a romantic cause—a penitent was ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... with the blue of deep water. In seven fathoms water, the bottom can still be discerned on looking over the side of a boat, especially if it have patches of light-coloured sand; but in ten fathoms the depth of colour can scarcely be distinguished from the dark azure of the unfathomable ocean. This bed of reefs stretches along the coast of Australia, and across Torres Strait, nearly to the coast of New Guinea, a distance of one ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... it happen that so beautiful and inoffensive a being should taste, even to its dregs, the bitterest unhappiness? Oh, there must indeed be a mysterious, unfathomable meaning in the decrees of Providence which is beyond the comprehension of man; for no one on earth less deserved or needed "the uses of adversity" than Dumb Kate. Love, the mighty and lawless passion, came into the sanctuary of the maid's pure breast, and ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... is moral Kultur. Its superiority is rooted in the unfathomable depth of its moral constitution. Should it forfeit its moral purity, it would cease to be German.—PROF. O. V. GIERKE, D.R.S.Z., No. ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... appeal to the same human assurance, he falls back upon the unfathomable ways of Omnipotence. If the rifts in the argument are in any sense supplied, it is by the brief snatches of song which intervene between the Fancies, as the cicada-note filled the pauses of the broken string. These exquisite lyrics are ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... heavily-built youth, with enormous shoulders and thick, hard hands, and pale straw-coloured hair and brows and eyelashes—had amiably sauntered beside him, and was elucidating for his benefit now, in slow, halting undertones, some unfathomable mystery connected with the varying attitude of two distinct breeds of terriers toward rats. Across the room, just within reach of the flickering ruddy firelight from the hearth, the American guest, Miss Madden, was seated at the piano, ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... slab, and looked over into Italy, as men might lean from the battlements of a fortress. Behind lies the Alpine valley, grim, declining slowly northward, with wind-lashed lakes and glaciers sprawling from storm-broken pyramids of gneiss. Below spread the unfathomable depths that lead to Lombardy, flooded with sunlight, filled with swirling vapour, but never wholly hidden from our sight. For the blast kept shifting the cloud-masses, and the sun streamed through ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... without a ruffle on the surface of his unfathomable depths, drinking his old wine, and go down ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... could see nothing at all. There was but an unfathomable gulf beyond the glass. He stood up on the couch, and drawing the curtains behind his head to shut out the light, he once more stared out. Then he ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... had never seen. Very few had, or even wanted to, for its effects were as incomprehensible as they were tragic. Never employed in the exercise of private or individual malice, the death bone was an unfathomable and awful mystery. So dire was its influence that if a woman touched it or even ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... circle of Judge Troward's friends he will best and most gloriously be remembered as a teacher. In his magic mind the unfathomable revealed its depths and the illimitable its boundaries; metaphysics took on the simplicity of the ponderable, and man himself occupied a new and more dignified place in the Cosmos. Not only did he perceive clearly, but he also possessed that quality of mind even more rare ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... and his eyes were as unfathomable as a midnight sky. She turned to her horse and he helped her to the saddle with a ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... It was this head which held Grom's fascinated gaze, giving him more of the sensation of cold fear than he had ever known before. More than two-thirds of the head consisted of a pair of huge, globose eyes, without pupil, ethereally transparent, yet unfathomable. From the depths of them flamed a ceaselessly changing radiance of blue-green, purple and violet. Grom found the stare of those blank, ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... silhouette against the brilliant glare that came from its far slope. Petrified shrubs rambled here and there in sprawling zigzags. Fish rose in a body at our feet like birds startled in tall grass. The rocky mass was gouged with impenetrable crevices, deep caves, unfathomable holes at whose far ends I could hear fearsome things moving around. My blood would curdle as I watched some enormous antenna bar my path, or saw some frightful pincer snap shut in the shadow of some cavity! ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... dozen feet away. That gray and frosty wolf was gazing at him with the infinite wistfulness and yearning that glimmers and hazes so often in the eyes of Northland dogs. Smoke knew it well, but never got over the unfathomable wonder of it. As if to shake off the hypnotism, he set down his plate and coffee-cup, went to the sled, and began opening the ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... phrases, hither and thither, back and forward, in time and space; to focus all this about his own momentary personality; and then, drawing the ground from under his feet, as if by some cataclysm of nature, to plunge him into the unfathomable abyss sown with enormous suns and systems, and among the inconceivable numbers and magnitudes and velocities of the heavenly bodies. So that he concludes by striking into us some sense of that disproportion of things which Shelley has illuminated by the ironical flash of these eight words: The ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of one; his cries disturb us in the house." "How long has he been here?" "Oh, above three years." Nothing in the traditions of the Bastile could exceed these horrors, and yet they were not the product of intentional cruelty, but of unfathomable stupidity. ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... the truth of what she said. "Lance, I had to. T-there are some things I know about that you don't." A note of sudden urgency now tinged her voice. "Strange unfathomable things. Many of the other pilots who've come back have not been right. I think it has something to do with their having been outside ...
— Next Door, Next World • Robert Donald Locke
... and painful for that coarse and unfathomable vanity which is characteristic of every man, and which might be called malism, not to stir such a charming fire, to act the Joseph and the fool, to turn away his eyes, and, as it were, to put wax into his ears, like the companions of Ulysses ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... lips with her breath. She was giving up to her awful weakness. She was giving up to the power of love. She was letting herself sink into it as she would sink into deep water. The sense of drowning in this profound, unfathomable element, of shutting her eyes and opening her arms to it, was the highest she had ever touched; but all at once the memory of what she was leaving behind her, like a last glimpse of sky, swept her with fear. She ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... that hand presently, and, having sighed, lifted it to press it upon his brow, but did not complete the gesture. As his hand came within the scope of his gaze, levelled on the unfathomable distance, he observed that the fingers held a sheet of printed paper; and he remembered Florence. Instead of pressing his brow he unfolded the journal she had thrust upon him. As he began to read, his eye was lustreless, his gait slack and dreary; but soon his whole demeanour changed, it cannot ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington |
