"Sublimely" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... authority of mere old-fashioned politeness, as in some sort protective of higher things. It describes, with much grace and precision, a state of society by no means pre-eminently virtuous, or enthusiastically heroic; in which many people do extremely wrong, and none sublimely right. But as there are heights of which the achievement is unattempted, there are abysses to which fall is barred; neither accident nor temptation will make any of the principal personages swerve from ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... glorious declaration, "All men are created equal." The sun has never yet shone upon any of man's creations that can compare with this. The artist who can mold a statue worthy to crown magnificence like this, must be godlike in his conceptions, grand in his comprehensions, sublimely beautiful in his power of execution. The woman—the crowning glory of the model republic among the nations of the earth—what must ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is sublimely strong.—Mrs. Stowe. ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... English lays, and all sublimely great, Thy Homer warms with all his ancient heat; He shines in council, thunders in the fight, And flames with every sense of great delight. 50 Long has that poet reign'd, and long unknown, Like monarchs sparkling on a distant throne, In all the majesty of Greek retired, ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... of all Poets thou, Whose Titan intellect sublimely bore The weight of years unbent; thou, on whose brow Flourish'd the blossom of all human lore— How dost thou take us back, as 't were by vision, To the grave learning of the Sanhedrim; And we behold in visitings Elysian, Where waved the white wings of the Cherubim; But, through thy "Paradise ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... profession ceased to seem a mere bribe to his eagerness; it was charged with eagerness itself; it was a present reward and would somehow last. He moved rapidly toward her as with the sense of a gage that he might sublimely yet ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... then broke straight out. 'Do you know your conundrum has been keeping me awake? But in the watches of the night the answer came over me—so that, upon my honour, I quite laughed out. Had you been supposing I had to go to Paris to learn that? Even now, to see him still so sublimely on his guard, Peter's young friend had to laugh afresh. 'You won't give a sign till you're sure? Beautiful old Peter!' But Lance at last produced it. 'Why, hang it, the truth ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... want, he often made us all more than amends by diverting descriptions of the lives they were then passing in corners unseen by anybody but himself, and that odd old surgeon whom he kept in his house to tend the outpensioners, and of whom he said most truly and sublimely, that ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... was lured to the New World by the cheapness of land. He had sufficient property to enable him to furnish all his sons with ample farms in America. The Delaware, above Philadelphia, was at that time a silent stream, flowing sublimely through the almost unbroken forest. Here and there, a bold settler had felled the trees, and in the clearing had reared his log hut, upon the river banks. Occasionally the birch canoe of an Indian ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... mother so sublimely forbearing, in her heart she knew too well the bitterness of revolt against nature's cruelty; her own causes of suffering became almost insignificant in her view of the tragedy of life. Was not this calamity upon her surviving parent ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... disparage the justice of the trial. In all history, we remember nothing that ever issued from a baffled and mortified party more audacious than this. As, on the other hand, in all history we remember nothing more anxiously or sublimely conscientious than the whole conduct of the trial. More conspicuously are these qualities displayed, as it was inevitable they should, in the verdict. Never yet has there been a document of this nature more elaborate and fervent in the energy of its distinctions, than this most memorable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... than penning the first impressions of the mind; I wished for the pencil of a Salvator Rosa, or the pen of a Thompson, that I might be enabled to give to the enlightened world some just idea of this truly magnificent and sublimely grand object, which has from the commencement of time been concealed from the view of civilized man; but this was fruitless and vain. I most sincerely regreted that I had not brought a chimeeobscura with me by the assistance of which I could have ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... acres that led far back from the river; his clearness of thought was like that of his native springs which gush in crystal clearness, leaving a path of verdure along their course; his loftiness of purpose towered sublimely above average life, like the glorious outlines of ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... scenes in poetry more sublimely pathetic than this. We behold the sinking but still fiery glory of Wallenstein, opposed to the impetuous despair of Max Piccolomini, torn asunder by the claims of duty and of love; the calm but broken-hearted ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... the nearest inn that was open, sublimely indifferent to the delays and difficulties of the journey. He ordered refreshments with the air of a man who was performing a melancholy duty to himself, in ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... developed interest, urgently demanded consideration. This he proposed to bestow upon it. A Bengal tiger about to lunch off a toothsome native, discovering the anticipated meal withdrawn from his reach, could not be more sublimely wrathful than were gentlemen on Opposition benches. And LEIF JONES, too! The mildest-mannered man that ever turned ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... artist, after work, to think His own ideal Mary-smile should stand So very near him,—he, within the brink Of all that glory, let in by his hand With too divine a rashness! Yet none shrink Who come to gaze here now; albeit 't was planned Sublimely in the thought's simplicity: The Lady, throned in empyreal state, Minds only the young Babe upon her knee, While sidelong angels bear the royal weight, Prostrated meekly, smiling tenderly Oblivion of their wings; the Child thereat Stretching its hand like God. If any should, Because of some ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... inmost meaning of these two brief mottoes, we shall find that, about Jesus Christ's character, nothing was more conspicuous than the obedience of faith and self-surrender to God: and in His career, which we are bidden to follow, the renunciation of love, or self-sacrifice for man. The taunt was sublimely true: "He saved others, Himself He cannot save"; it was because he saved others that He could not save Himself. The seed must give up its own life for the sake of the crop; and he who will be life to others must, like his Lord, consent ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... shaggy glens, under toppled towers and battlements, by squalid villages, and within the sound of dashing streams. If they descended ever, it was to gain breath for a longer ascent; for now the mountain snows were above them on either side, and the Alps rose sublimely impassable in front. The hawks careened beneath them; the chamois above dared not look down for dizziness, and Hugenot said, at Ariola, that they were taking lunch in a balloon. The manner of Mr. Plade now altered marvellously. It might have been his breakfast that gave him spirit and speech; ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... under-human in other respects (love and the capacity of sympathy), and was therefore subject to the nobler moral nature of Prospero. Activity seems to be the only principle which Goethe advocates, activity and earnestness—especially in self-culture,—and in this last quality, which he sublimely advocates, I find the only comfortable element in his wonderful writings. He is ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... much more than that. He was, in fact, outwardly polite to the point of formality; but his attitude of mind towards the person he happened to be with seemed to her—when she examined it closely—to be sublimely insulting. No created thing, with the passions and affections common to his kind, ought to take up such a position with his fellow- creature—that which says, "I infer your existence from my sensations: apart from them, I cannot bring ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... Madison leading a dozen or more men in pursuit of half a dozen. That does not strike me as sublimely heroic." ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... that Holcomb was fickle and had fallen in love with another girl. There was nothing of the man about him, and it did not matter to his sublimely selfish caddishness whether he broke Frances Farquhar's heart or not. He got his freedom and he married Maud Carroll ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Fairholme, sublimely unconscious of this feminine weakness, continued to dilate upon the superlative excellences of Daubeney until they reached the ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... met my statement with the most unqualified, formal, and unhesitating denial. He accused me of impudently calumniating an innocent administration, and of propagating lies fabricated by the enemies of religion. His language was so sublimely authoritative, that I felt confounded, overpowered, crushed, and, for a moment, I asked myself whether I had not really ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... friend Jules, sublimely unconscious of the altercation going on outside, and of the special risk which he ran, was of course actually in the cellar, which he had reached before Racksole got to the railings for the first time. It was, indeed, a happy chance for Jules that his exit from the cellar ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... the ravens suddenly evaporated into nowhere. Probably no one had seen them go except Cob, and Cob was by now a lonely, dwindling speck away over the restless ocean. Then he was not. He was coming back, swinging along with great, easy, shallow half-flaps, so sublimely lazy that he seemed merely to swim through the gale. But he covered distance; there was speed as well as majesty in his flight, for ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... her coachman. Vesty saw her approach. Off there in the bay, sublimely guarding and making a gateway to its waters, were two little green mountain peaks of islands, just a narrow surge of the waters flowing between; the "Lions," the ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... which was acted on the stage instead of being coldly sung in a concert-room? What was the overture to Guillaume Tell but a symphony under another name? Had I heard Moses in Egypt? Would I listen to this, and this, and this, and say if anything more sublimely sacred and grand had ever been composed by mortal man?"—And without waiting for a word of assent or dissent on my part, looking me hard in the face all the time, he began thundering on the piano, and singing to it with ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... we have the evidence of a fine aristocracy among us still, it would seem as if it behooved us as a respectable host to let the redman guest entertain himself as he will, as he sublimely does, since as guardians of such exceptional charges we can not seem to entertain them. There is no logical reason why they should accept an inferior hospitality, other than with the idea of not inflicting themselves upon a strange host more than is necessary. ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... some of the laws of the force we call gravitation. But what do we know of its essence? How it appears to act we know a little, what it is we are profoundly ignorant. Few men ever discuss this question. All theories are sublimely ridiculous, and fail to pass the most primary tests. How matter can act where it is not, and on that with which it ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... submitted, and had retired for a few minutes into an adjoining apartment, our little lady of Cherbury strolled about the saloon in which she had been left, until her attention was attracted by a portrait of a young man in an oriental dress, standing very sublimely amid the ruins of some desert city; a palm tree in the distance, and by his side a crouching camel, and some recumbent followers slumbering amid ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... wished to see her deportment toward other young men, and now had the opportunity. The result flattered him in spite of himself. To others she was courteous, affable and sublimely indifferent. When he approached it seemed almost as if a film passed from her eyes, that she awakened into a fuller life and became an enchantress in her versatile powers. He responded with as fine a courtesy as her own, although quite different, but ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... flowers we brought her from our rambles, the sea-weeds, the wild birds she saw, all interested and pleased her. Everything in nature spoke to her of that great God who created all things, the grand and sublimely beautiful as well as the exquisite loveliness of minute objects. Above all, in the laws which science unveils step by step, she found ever renewed motives for the love and adoration of their Author and Sustainer. This fervour of religious feeling accompanied ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... there are lovely lichens all over the cold regions of the world, and there is far more interesting architecture in other countries than in Scotland. The essential character of Scotland is that of a wild and thinly inhabited rocky country, not sublimely mountainous, but beautiful in low rock and light streamlet everywhere; with sweet copsewood and rudely growing trees. This wild land possesses a subdued and imperfect school of architecture, and has an infinitely tragic feudal, pastoral, and civic history. And in the events ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... called from its shape the mandorla, "the almond;"[1] but in general she is seated above in a sort of ethereal exaltation, while the attendant saints stand on the earth below. This beautiful arrangement, though often very sublimely treated, has not the simple austere dignity of the throne of state, and when the Virgin and Child, as in the works of the late Spanish and Flemish painters, are formed out of earth's most coarse and commonplace materials, the aerial ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry. What is best in mathematics deserves ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... of heav'n unfold: Jove summons all The gods to council in the common hall. Sublimely seated, he surveys from far The fields, the camp, the fortune of the war, And all th' inferior world. From first to last, The sov'reign senate ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... and event into the superbly shaped lines of his story; the greatest political leaders have had it; Cromwell had it, organising an enthusiasm; Elizabeth, organising a national adventure.[1] Again, there is the energy of morality, ardently desiring justice and right fellowship, sublimely lived by men who have made goodness great, like Lincoln, sublimely spoken by men who made sermons passionate, like Ruskin and Carlyle. To take one other instance, there is the highly specialised energy that delights in the objective perception of differentiations of ...
— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater
... perfect inconvenience, and its conscience heavy with the doing to death of sundry general servants, it uplifted tin chimney-cowls to heaven and gloomily awaited the day of judgment for London houses, sublimely ignoring the axial and orbital velocities of the earth and even the reckless flight of the whole solar system through space. You felt that No. 91 was unhappy, and that it could only be rendered happy ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... it was the very finest baby he had ever seen, and was fonder and prouder of Gean than ever. As for Gean, she was sublimely happy, and was never tired of fondling and caressing her little one and attending ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... felt sublimely upborne with the idea that life is but a moment and love is immortal, and seemed, in a shadowy trance, to feel herself and him past this mortal fane, far over on the shores of that other life, ascending with Christ, all-glorified, all tears wiped away, and with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... ship, weighed anchor, and sailed triumphant and rejoicing from such a dangerous coast. After some weeks' sail they again descried land, to which they approached, and discovered a spacious harbour, round which rose a vast city, the buildings of which were sublimely lofty, adorned with flights of marble steps to the water's edge, and crowned with domes and minarets topped with pinnacles of gold. The enterprising lady having anchored, clothed herself and her companions in magnificent male habits; after which she ordered the boats to be hoisted ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... mine of truth, almost entirely neglected by the Christian world. Systematic classification is the first requisite for the profitable study of the Proverbs and the later Wisdom of Ben Sira. From these the student may pass on to the fuller treatment of the omnipresent human problem, so sublimely presented in the book of Job, and to the many fundamental questions raised by Eccleslastes ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... knotty point in the case with Mr. Marlow, and she rejoiced, for her object was not to emulate but to entangle. Sir Philip, however, went on to put her out of all patience by saying, "How the Romans, so sublimely virtuous at one period of their history, could fall into so debased and corrupt a state as we find described even by Sallust, and depicted in more frightful colors still by the latter historians of ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... eyes, with their look of introspection and insight; the whole expression of the countenance as of an ancient prophet. Such was the impression made by Beethoven on all who saw him, except in his moods of fierce wrath, which toward the last were not uncommon, though short-lived. A sorely tried, sublimely gifted man, he met his fate stubbornly, and worked out his great mission with all his might and main, through long years of weariness and trouble. Posterity has rewarded him by enthroning him on the highest peaks ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... Sublimely patient; infinitely compassionate; deep, silent, and pure, his very presence is a benediction; and when he speaks men ponder his words in their hearts, and by them rise to higher levels of attainment. Such is he who has entered into the Infinite, who by the power of utmost ...
— The Way of Peace • James Allen
... was cooking his breakfast he thought of Pee-wee—Pee-wee who was always so gay and enthusiastic, who worshipped Roy, and who "did not mind being jollied." He would be ashamed to face Pee-wee even if that redoubtable scout pacer were sublimely innocent of what ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... a very long letter, telling him some of the points about which I should feel curious. But on my life it is sublimely ridiculous, my making suggestions to such ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... theory of Indulgences,—had cast the excommunication and decretals of the Pontiff into the flames,—and, before the principalities and power of the Empire, one German against all Germany, had simply and sublimely indicated the identity of his doctrine with his nature, by declaring that he not merely would ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... dreams of social reform are obsolete. We of the new school adhere patriotically to social and religious ordinances of the Mother. All we agitate for is political independence." He unfurled the polysyllables, like a flag; sublimely unaware of having stated a contradiction in terms. "But your Sir Lakshman is ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... veteran's surprise The gun went off sublimely, And both his busy arms likewise Went off with ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... suppose you'd been a pretty wild young shark, and had kept your mother anxious and miserable, and had drifted into gambling and had gone pretty well to the dogs. Do sharks ever go to the dogs? Now, that's a poser. Sharks; dogs. Oh, what a very ridiculously, sublimely amusing old shark! Dreadfully discreet you are. Never disclose your hand except on a showdown. What a glum old villain ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... innocent again; for I will lie in my shroud, white with the blameless pallor of death. This is not in the least "mulish obstinacy." That mulish obstinacy of which you jestingly accused me is in a woman the result of confidence, of a vision of the future. Though my husband, sublimely generous, may forget all, I shall not forget. Does forgetfulness depend on our will? When a widow re-marries, love makes a girl of her; she marries a man she loves. But I cannot love the Count. It all lies in that, ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... a short distance from the creek to the gigantic forest, rising sublimely in its luxuriance, with scarcely an encumbering shrub of undergrowth. They entered the edge of the forest, built a hot fire, roasted their game, and, while their horses were enjoying the richest of pasturage, they, with their keen appetites, enjoyed a more delicious feast ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... which Frederick, and after him, Napoleon practiced inhaling snuff copiously, and with much waste, as though it were human life they were throwing away; the 'pinch malicious,' of which Pope was perfect master; the 'pinch dictatorial,' which burly Jonson established; the 'pinch sublimely contemptuous,' such as Reynolds took when some travelling virtuoso hinted at excellence away from Leicester-square, and ruffled his complacent vanity; and, above all, the 'pinch polite,' ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... of all the blood of all the Frenches—stepped out of the vulgar rank. It was only he who, by the trouble she discerned in him, had made her see certain things. It was only for him—and not a bit ridiculously, but just beautifully, almost sublimely—that their being "nice," her mother and she between them, had not seemed to profit by ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... exaggeration. But long study only serves to render this strange picture more and more attractive. Especially noticeable is the youthful angel clad in dark green who sustains Christ. He is a young man in the bloom of strength and beauty, whose long golden hair falls on each side of a sublimely lovely face. Nothing in painting surpasses the modelling of the vigorous but delicate left arm stretched forward to support the heavy corpse. This figure is conceived and executed in a style worthy of the Orvietan frescoes. Signorelli, for whose imagination angels had a ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... there. She found "Asleep in Jesus" and played it over and over on the piano. The bass was a trifle difficult, but that didn't matter. Then she found other hymns which were in accord with her mood: "Abide with Me"; "Nearer My God to Thee"; "One Sweetly Solemn Thought." The last was sublimely beautiful; it almost stole her favour away from "Asleep in Jesus." Not ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... this illicit but passionate and determined love, blinded even those calm and righteous listeners to its darker and more desperate phases. By an almost infallible instinct we discover true love amid fictitious, unworthy and evil elements; and when seen there is something so sublimely beautiful that we prostrate ourselves before it and believe against evidence, even, that sooner or later it will ennoble and consecrate ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... that field from which battle hath just departed! By as much as the valley was exquisite in its loveliness, is it now sublimely sad in its desolation. Such to me is the Bible, when a fighting theologian ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... of Smithers, that Smithers was nominated—made a speech in favor of Skyblue and Flammer, upon the force of which both were nominated—the wheel within a wheel worked elegant; and the organs next day were sublimely eloquent upon the result of the grand caucus—candidates—unanimity—etc., etc., of these subterranean politicians. So are our great men manufactured for ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... thereupon she would act like a madwoman. She would wipe her eyes and grumble: "Oh! I am very unfortunate! I can see that mademoiselle doesn't care for me any more!" Her spite against various people vented itself in sublimely ingenious complaints. "That woman always comes when it rains!" she would say, upon discovering a bit of mud that Madame de Belleuse had left on the carpet. During the week following New Year's Day, the week when all of Mademoiselle ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... towered upon our right, high over the slope of Delphi, which ere long appeared before us. Our approach to the sacred spot was marked by tombs cut in the rock. A sharp angle of the mountain was passed; and then, all at once, the enormous walls, buttressing the upper region of Parnassus, stood sublimely against the sky, cleft right through the middle by a terrible split, dividing the twin peaks which gave a name to the place. At the bottom of this chasm issue forth the waters of Castaly, and fill a stone trough by the road-side. On a long, sloping ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... hoped, for Peter found the letter, and of course nothing could be easier for the fairies than to turn the goat into a real one, and so that is how Peter got the goat on which he now rides round the Gardens every night playing sublimely on his pipe. And Maimie kept her promise, and never frightened Tony with a goat again, though I have heard that she created another animal. Until she was quite a big girl she continued to leave presents for Peter in the Gardens (with letters explaining how humans play with them), ...
— Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... sublimely wild And riven by the winds and waves, Thy fame is deathless from thy child, Whose glory filled ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... coarse vixen. Hazlitt, with that strange perversion of sentiment and want of taste which sometimes mingle with his piercing and powerful intellect, dismisses Isabella with a slight remark, that "we are not greatly enamoured of her rigid chastity, nor can feel much confidence in the virtue that is sublimely good at another's expense." What shall we answer to such criticism? Upon what ground can we read the play from beginning to end, and doubt the angel-purity of Isabella, or contemplate her possible lapse from virtue? Such gratuitous mistrust is here ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... may be hidden in the nether deeps, but some day the strained tension breaks, the balance reversing brings it to the light. Its spirit works for ever, like a ferment, hidden long, deep down in the Universal heart of things; for with majestic, unimpressionable tread, sublimely the silent force of human progress moves; slow and inevitably sure, the great indwelling spirit of a vast eternal energy leading man ever upward to ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... the very idea (not to mention the composition of the word) of a 'return' involve a previously having been in the place? And we can scarcely call that 'home' where we have never been before. So, that 'old Hebrew book' sublimely tells us that 'the spirit of the man returneth to God ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... lovely sloped shoulders, no beautiful bosom, no sweeping curve of robe down to the feet. No softness of cheek, or silky hair, or complexion, or taper fingers, or arched eyebrows; no sort of style whatever. They were mere wooden figures; and, in short, sublimely ugly. ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... my captive companion for a quarter of an hour to visit the cathedral of the sublimely eloquent Bossuet. In happier moments I should not have rested Without discovering and tracing the house, the chamber, the library, the study, the garden which had been as it were sanctified by his virtues, his piety, his learning, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... a Greek costume. Two French flags were held over her head. She then sang, quietly, sublimely, with expression at the same time restrained and inspiring, the Marseillaise. The countless variations of her voice were in admirable keeping with her animated and yet sculptural gesticulation, and the effect was thrilling, although certain passages in the song were hardly suitable to ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... "Pooh!" said Moses, sublimely regarding her while he settled the collar of his shirt, "you're a girl; and what can girls do at sea? you never like to catch fish—it always makes you cry ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... taking me by the hand, and that is how I now think of our splendid June day at Subiaco. The note of the wondrous place itself is conventional "wild" Italy raised to the highest intensity, the ideally, the sublimely conventional and wild, complete and supreme in itself, without a disparity or a flaw; which character of perfect picturesque orthodoxy seemed more particularly to begin for me, I remember, as we passed, on our way, through that ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... sound or struggle, The stars unhurrying march, Where Allah's finger guides them, Through yonder purple arch. These Franks, sublimely silent, Without a quickened breath, Went, in the strength of duty, Straight ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... the hotel, though he took the precaution to take his hat off his head and hang it on his finger, and twirl it round, as if laughing at it himself—back-firing against the ridicule of others. He who thought himself sublimely indifferent to the laughter of ignoramuses, now ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... he summoned. "Never in the history of the show business has there been anything resemblin' this. Come here—here—here—here! See Zorah, queen of the West and princess of the East, who is about to begin one of her most sublimely sensational dances. See her, see her, you may never again see her! Graceful, glittering, genteel. Graceful, glittering, gen-te-e-e-l. I am telling you about Zorah, queen of the West and princess of the East, in her ancient Asiatic dance, the most up-to-date little act in the entire ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... oneself in acrobatic pose, While mountain missiles graze one's sun-burnt nose! And if some future season I be doom'd To be by boulders crushed, or snow entombed, Still let me upward urge my mad career, And risk my limbs and life for honour dear! Sublimely acquiescent in my lot, I'll die a ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... Where th'Atlantic rolls sublimely, lashing round Port Ballintrae, Language cannot paint the grandeur of the waves, in awful play! Beating, breaking, wildly seething, whilst in restless, fitful roar, Deep to far-off deep is calling, answering round from shore to ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... (trouble and not poetry!), before I could consent to such a thing. Well!—and if I do not ... these people are just as likely to print them without leave ... and so without correction. What do you advise? What shall I do? All this time they think me sublimely indifferent, they who pressed for an answer by return of packet—and now it is past six ... eight weeks; and I ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... contempt towards the Negro together with their mother's milk. Of course no sane being could expect that feelings so deeply ingrained and nourished could be rooted out by logic or by any legislative enactment. But, indeed, it is sublimely creditable to [123] the American Government that, whatever might be the personal and private sentiments of its individual members as regards race, palmam ferat qui meruit—"let him bear the palm who has deserved it"—has been their ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... bottle—which had imposed on his colleagues might not move her much. It might be wiser to attack her on other grounds, grounds on which women lay more open. And self-pity whispered with a tear that the truth, than which he could conceive nothing more moving, nothing more sublimely sad, might go farther with a woman than bribes or threats or the most skilful inventions. He made up his mind. He would tell the truth, or something like it, something as like it as he ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... barbarians, or, turning far afield, we consider that mysterious and majestic art that flourished in Central and South America before the coming of the white men, in every case we observe three common characteristics—absence of representation, absence of technical swagger, sublimely impressive form. Nor is it hard to discover the connection between these three. Formal significance loses itself in preoccupation with exact representation ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... to forgive. But a woman's forgiveness does not necessarily make a man able to forgive himself. Nor does it always cleanse an unclean inner life. To many a man it has been just the fact that his fiance or wife was so sublimely willing and able to forgive that has revealed to him his own unworthiness and made it sting ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... blunders round about a meaning; And he whose fustian 's so sublimely bad, It is not poetry, ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... stars, the elements, and Heaven have made With blended powers a work beyond compare; All their consenting influence, all their care, To frame one perfect creature lent their aid. Whence Nature views her loveliness display'd With sun-like radiance sublimely fair: Nor mortal eye can the pure splendour bear: Love, sweetness, in unmeasured grace array'd. The very air illumed by her sweet beams Breathes purest excellence; and such delight That all expression far beneath it gleams. No base desire lives in that heavenly ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... to leave the pen alone and stick to his wax, that his family might not become chargeable to the parish. He neglected this good advice, and continued his studies; burning minerals and purifying metals one day, and mystifying the Word of God on the next. He afterwards wrote three other works, as sublimely ridiculous as the first. The one was entitled "Metallurgia," and has the slight merit of being the least obscure of his compositions. Another was called "The Temporal Mirror of Eternity ;" and the last his "Theosophy revealed," full of allegories ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... joys—"Nature's circle rolls beneath." Indeed, we remember no mind in poetic literature that seems to have absorbed less of the beauty and the healthy breath of the common landscape than Young's. His images, often grand and finely presented—witness that sublimely sudden ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... foaming in a state of the most horrid agitation. Robin Ruthven sat on the outskirts of the great assembly, listening with the rest, and perceived what they, in the height of their enthusiasm, perceived not the ruinous tendency of the tenets so sublimely inculcated. Robin kenned the voice of his friend the corby-craw again, and was sure he could not be wrong: sae, when public worship was finished, a' the elders an' a' the gentry flocked about the great preacher, ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... look back upon that admirable time, in which nothing was so romantic as our intense vision of the real. No fool's paradise ever rustled such a cradle-song. It was anything but Bohemia—it was the very temple of Mrs. Grundy. We knew we were too critical, and that made us sublimely indulgent; we believed we did our duty or wanted to, and that made us free to dream. But we dreamed over the multiplication-table; we were nothing if not practical. Oh, the long smokes and sudden ideas, the knowing hints and banished scruples! The great thing was for ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... lieutenant of sappers was a soldier marked out for strange destinies, no other than Gordon—Charles Gordon—then ripening into a hero, sublimely careless of self, and a warrior saint of the kind that Moslems rather than Christians are fondly expecting ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... the man went on, sublimely unconscious of his wife's indulgent attitude, "that the Memsahib knoweth the simplest words of Hindostani only; but Meredith Miss Sahib will render our speech unto her, making all ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... moment or two happily, sublimely ignorant of all the forces that warred between; of what caused the shadow; of the power of a dead face; of the pride of a resolute man; of that attractive Huguenot Dutchman biding ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... flirting their fans, and doubtless talking over the latest Court gossip. Nearby is a willow, not the stiff, ugly tree now seen upon tame and degenerate imitations of real old China pottery, but a graceful weeping-willow, whose drooping branches sweep the opposite shore, as sublimely indifferent to distance as ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... of some incomprehensible object, suspended over the antique mantelpiece. With methodical grace, and dignity which frowns with superlative contempt upon every thing very vulgar—for she says "she sublimely detests them very low creatures what are never brought up to manners at the north, and are worse than haystacks to larn civility"—my lady solicits a near inspection of this wonderful hieroglyphic, which she ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... spirit, which gives sap and form to the embryo, so that all parts and bulk of the body, which is made up in a few months and gradually formed into the likely figure of a man, do consist in, and are adumbrated thereby (most sublimely expressed, Psalm cxxxix.: "I will praise Thee, O Lord, for I am ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... view for which alone one might well sail the four thousand miles of sea from the American shores. Through open French windows one may step out on the terrace. If it is cold he may still enjoy this sublimely wonderful view behind the glass walls that reveal all its beauty and protect him from wind or chill. Elsewhere adjoining salons stretch away, where sunshine, music, reading matter, and dainty writing-desks allure the guest and create for him, indeed, ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... more than the idea of making any one unhappy. His fighting moods were big and often; but they had existence only in the world of men. He believed himself very wise in the ways of life, but he had not really begun to see, and he was quite sublimely unconscious of all the forces he was setting in motion by his evident pleasure in the horsemanship of Lou-Jane Hoomer and in their frequent ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... the spirit of her glance, by the unspoken message of this place, I swore—oh, why put down here all I swore? Men have stood beside solemn pools before, and women, too. Those who commune in the woods think more sublimely than they speak, so I can not speak now, in written words, my ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... was, prancing up and down, sublimely pleased with himself. Mr. Heard watched his perambulations with mixed feelings—moral disapproval combining with a small grain of envy at the fellow's conspicuous immunity ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... expression, and Alice fluttering from one to the other, assuring them that they were the handsomest couple she ever had seen, that they ought to be proud of each other, and that Mrs. Putnam ought to be proud of them, and that she was sure nobody in all the world ever, ever could be as sublimely, beatifically happy as they would be, and that they must be sure to let her ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... is set on one of them, no amount of general advice and opposition serves to prevent her marrying him. "I love him!" she says, sublimely. "I do not care what he has done. I will forgive ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... afternoon; I approached a charming vale, amidst sublimely high forests, awful shades! Darkness gathers around; far distant thunder rolls over the trembling hills: the black clouds with august majesty and power move slowly forwards, shading regions of towering ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... the godlike attributes men forced upon him. His whole life is one long argument for his loyalty to truth. He had but one answer for his worshippers, 'I am no more than a man; I am only human.' * * * He was sublimely confident of this single attribute that he was the messenger of the Lord of the daybreak, and that the words he spake came verily from him. He was fully persuaded that God had sent him to do a great work among his people in Arabia. Nervous to the verge of madness, subject to hysteria, given ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... of the night" are at times sublimely beautiful. Her star-decked vault of heaven, absolutely free from all mists and fogs and damps, seems so high and vast. The stars glisten and twinkle with wondrous clearness. The flashing meteors fade out but slowly, and ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... dimness. The twilight wind was pungent with the strange awakening smell of the sea. Forgotten now was the depression of the day; it had no place in the romance, the mystery, the promise of the northern night. She became suddenly conscious that there was something sublimely beautiful in life that she had never yet experienced, something that unknowingly she had been waiting for; something that must come to her at last. . . . She wondered if the young man sitting so close to her were ever stirred by such rapturous, intangible thoughts. With quickened ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... leaving it, except for execution. The relations of the dead man were potent in Paita, and clamorous for justice, so that the corregidor, in a case where he saw a very poor chance of being corrupted by bribes, felt it his duty to be sublimely incorruptible. The reader knows, however, that, amongst the relatives of the deceased bully, was that handsome lady, who differed as much from her cousin in her sentiments as to Kate, as she did in the extent ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... half afraid, Backward, abash'd to ask thy friendly aid? I know my need, I know thy giving hand, I crave thy friendship at thy kind command; But there are such who court the tuneful nine— Heavens! should the branded character be mine! Whose verse in manhood's pride sublimely flows, Yet vilest reptiles in their begging prose. Mark, how their lofty independent spirit Soars on the spurning wing of injur'd merit! Seek not the proofs in private life to find; Pity the best of words should be but wind! So to heaven's gates the lark's ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Yawning o'er his Arthurs see Whole Pages spun on one poor Simile. We grant he labours with no want of Brains, Or Fire, or Spirit; but He spares the Pains, One happy Thought, or two, may at a Heat Be struck, but Time and Study must compleat A Verse, sublimely Good, and justly Great. It call'd for an Omnipotence to raise The World's Imperial Poem in Six Days. But Man, that offspring of corrupting Clay, Subject to Err, and Subject to Decay: In Hopes, Desires, ...
— Discourse on Criticism and of Poetry (1707) - From Poems On Several Occasions (1707) • Samuel Cobb
... wailing for her, least of all for himself, not that their devoted souls were not on the rack: "As no words can express what I feel for you and our children, I shall not attempt it; complaint of any kind would be beneath your courage and mine"—but their souls, that were destined to suffer, came sublimely through the ordeal. When Tone left his children as a trust to his wife, he knew from the intimacy of their union what we learn from the after-event, how that trust might be placed and how faithfully it would be fulfilled. What a tribute from man to wife! How that trust was fulfilled ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... pleasure as an antique gem, so neat and brilliant is the execution of it; then, you come to the arched entrance to a mosque, which shoots up like—like what?—like the most beautiful pirouette by Taglioni, let us say. This architecture is not sublimely beautiful, perfect loveliness and calm, like that which was revealed to us at the Parthenon (and in comparison of which the Pantheon and Colosseum are vulgar and coarse, mere broad-shouldered Titans before ambrosial Jove); but these fantastic ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a stool, bowed his powerful neck whose nape was red, and with his hands stitched the air, ludicrous, sublimely imbecile and comprehensible. ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... hardly say that according to English custom the hat ought to have been removed inside the room. But my friend did not dare to take it off for fear of detection; and Kailas Balm and his old servant Ganesh were sublimely unconscious ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... demands, and must necessarily demand, implicit obedience. From the loyal it receives it. Those from whom it does not receive it are rebels, no matter how conscientious they may be, how lofty their moral elevation, how sublimely passive their resistance. So far as their disobedience extends they are the enemies of organized society, disrupters of the commonwealth, subverters of government, the allies and confederates of criminals and anarchists. It is worth noting, moreover, how easily their ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... would strangers loiter long, And muse as Fancy's woof grows strong; Yet cold the heart that could complain, Where POLLETT [Footnote: The boatman.] struck his oars again; For lovely as the sleeping child, The stream glides on sublimely wild, In perfect beauty, perfect ease; The awning trembled in the breeze, And scarcely trembled, as we stood For RUERDEAN Spire, and BISHOP'S WOOD. The fair domains of COURTFIELD [A] made A paradise of mingled shade [Footnote A: A seat ...
— The Banks of Wye • Robert Bloomfield
... here—I want you all, the whole kit o' you, to come to my house tomorrow morning to see Rebecca Mary. I'm going to say it over again. Tomorrow morning, to see Rebecca Mary!" setting apart the syllables with the pointing finger. "You can play in my back yard," said Aunt Olivia, sublimely unconscious of slang. ...
— Rebecca Mary • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... he bowed his head, as though in prayer. The far-off rumbling of cannon, sublimely rising from the distant horizon, might have been a deep-toned organ sending its hymn of victory through the vaulted space; and, while he listened, the little hand was raised again to touch his cheek, as the weak ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... that Julia would presently take something—she hardly knew what—away from her. That came of letting her imagination play too freely round Wilton Caldecott's friend. What was there to alarm her in the candid Julia? Wasn't it as if Julia, in their curious conversation, had given herself up sublimely for Freda to look at and see for herself that there was nothing in her to be ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... was a Wapping man; a lively, impudent young Cockney, who had the most miraculous faculty of telling lies—not only palpable lies, but lies absolutely impossible: yet they were so sublimely told often, and he contrived to lug into them such a quantity of gorgeous tinsel ornament, as, in his happier efforts, decidedly to carry the day against his opponent. The London hand had seen life too, of which, with ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... side, was sublimely devoted to his mother. He never left her chamber; answered tenderness by tenderness, cherishing her upon his heart. The spectacle was never afterwards forgotten by his friends; and they themselves, a band ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... that nonsense is a new literature (we might almost say a new sense) would be quite indefensible if nonsense were nothing more than a mere aesthetic fancy. Nothing sublimely artistic has ever arisen out of mere art, any more than anything essentially reasonable has ever arisen out of the pure reason. There must always be a rich moral soil for any great aesthetic growth. The principle of art for art's sake is a very good principle if it ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... for the words one has. This girl's extremity was very great, not to be set in words. Words cannot bring to earth that which, ethereal, defies our comprehension as life and death defy it and, like life and death, to our comprehension only sublimely IS. Words only can say her spirit, bursting from bondage, streamed up to cleave to his; how tell the anguish, how the ecstasy? Words only can say her spirit, like a live part of her drawn out of her, seemed to be rushing upwards from her body to her lips; words ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... sexes, all flaunted out in the gayest and richest attire, were already seated at the splendidly laid tables, every eye levelled a critical glance on her garb and figure. Many an elegant lady, in startling silks and astonishing ear-jewels, turned her nose sublimely skyward and exclaimed "No great fetch,—these folks!" Gentlemen, in surprising pants and prodigious vest buttons, said, with a princely contempt, "Aw, ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... appearance, remained sublimely unconscious of the tension which his words and appearance seemed to have created. He had strolled a little further into the room, and was looking down at the packet which ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Castrillon, meanwhile, was pirouetting sublimely before the long mirror in his dressing-room, while his valet, a sour-faced individual, looked on in great but gloomy interest. The Marquis was superbly dressed in a Louis Seize costume—an exact reproduction of the ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes |
