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More "Loftiness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... controls a highly trained bureaucracy not unlike that of British India to-day, and his system of government is wonderfully effective so long as it is informed by his untiring energy and singular loftiness of purpose. ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... again, arise its infirmities. Thus, what will happen, if, because the truths which I utter here are obscure and do not at the first glance appear to conform to the requirements of logic, you hastily reject them with all the loftiness of your scornful reason, which would blush to admit what it did not understand! Poor reason! which in and of itself understands so little, and admits so many follies as soon as a scholar affirms them. The consequence will be that you will be strengthened in the error which flatters ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... charm wasted. I almost marvel that I did not rest completely satisfied with my life at that time; with its arduous study, and its growing fame, and Guy, with the delicious task of educating his supple intellect to my ideas, and penetrating his nature with my personality. Only the loftiness of my ideal saved it from making womanish shipwreck on this episode in its austere ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... not pure Schubert. About six years elapsed between this and the next sonata, in A minor (1823). Schubert had already written his B minor Symphony, and though the first two movements of the sonata will not compare with those of the former in loftiness of conception, there is a certain kinship between the two works. In both there are fitful gusts of passion, a feeling of awe, and a tone of sadness which tells of disappointed hopes, of lost illusions. The Finale, though ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... understand what this meant to such a man as Randolph. He was a high-bred, high-spirited man of thirty, descended from a long line of proud and chivalrous men; educated, refined, sensitive, generous, and brave. His fine talents, his dash, his polished manner, his industry, his integrity, his loftiness of character, had lifted him upon the shoulders of popularity and prosperity; so that, in the city of his home, there was not another man of his age, a member of his profession, the law, who was so well known, so well liked, or ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... palace-gate, which is a great pillared archway, of wonderful loftiness and state, giving admittance into a spacious quadrangle. A stout, elderly, and rather surly footman in livery appeared at the entrance, and took possession of whatever canes, umbrellas, and parasols he could get hold of, in order to claim sixpence on our departure. This had a somewhat ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... said his father. "When she is once your wife trust me to lower her loftiness, and make her as meek and humble as you could wish. Let us go in now. How wildly this storm is driving! I hope it may clear before the hour for the marriage arrives." Thus speaking, the father and son entered the hall ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... Latin poet, commended by Quintilian for the gravity of his sense and his loftiness ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... were carefully folded up and taken to the officer of the guard, who, when I left the box, at the end of the opera, brought them to me and offered to assist me in putting them on; but I refused them with true cavalier-like loftiness, and entered my carriage without either ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... flowers; a perfect specimen; in form and colouring and grace of carriage distinguished by a faultless beauty; carrying its elegant head a little bent, modest, but yet lofty above all the rest of the flower bed. Not with the loftiness of inches, however, for it was of lower stature than many around it; the elevation of which I speak was moral and spiritual. And so it was alone. The rest of the flowers were more or less fellows; this one in its apart elegance owned no social communion with them. Esther was a little like ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... something he had been conscious of from the first—the strangest thing in his friend's large little composition, a temper, a sensibility, even a private ideal, which made him as privately disown the stuff his people were made of. Morgan had in secret a small loftiness which made him acute about betrayed meanness; as well as a critical sense for the manners immediately surrounding him that was quite without precedent in a juvenile nature, especially when one noted ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... Sheikhs, and containing also some Turkish and Christian families. It lies near the foot of Tel Shohba, between the latter and the mountain; it was formerly one of the chief cities in these districts, as is attested by its remaining town walls, and the loftiness of its public edifices. The walls may be traced all round the city, and are perfect in many places; there are eight gates, with a paved causeway leading from each into the town. Each gate is formed of two arches, ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... "you talk of lofty views; but this is a pinnacle of loftiness to which I, for one, could never aspire. Positively, to rejoice in the extinction of the individual with his faculties undeveloped, his opportunities unrealized, his ambitions unfulfilled—why it's sublime! its Kiplingese—there's no other word for ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... the woman that is of chief interest. Adam is plainly bored. What if the woman has broken into the sanctuary of knowledge, she will only be the bigger fool, he seems to say. As for the professor in the red robes, his easy, patronizing manner is indicative enough of his mental top-loftiness toward the woman question. You can almost hear him say as he strokes ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... volatility, and visibility, and hue, are all complicated with those of shape. How is a cloud outlined? Granted whatever you choose to ask, concerning its material, or its aspect, its loftiness and luminousness,—how of its limitation? What hews it into a heap, or spins it into a web? Cold is usually shapeless, I suppose, extending over large spaces equally, or with gradual diminution. You cannot have in the open air, angles, and wedges, and coils, ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... of speech In loftiness of sound was rich; A Babylonish dialect, Which learned pedants much affect; It was a parti-color'd dress Of patch'd and piebald languages: 'Twas English cut on Greek and Latin, Like fustian heretofore on satin. It had an odd promiscuous tone, As ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... however scantily, the social and religious system which for the sake of convenience we call Hinduism will deny the loftiness of the philosophic conceptions which underlie even the extravagances of its creed or the marvellous stability of the complex fabric based upon its social code. It may seem to us to present in many of its aspects an almost ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... and the fancies have an odour as repulsive as Taylor's 'million of dead dogs.' But on the truths is founded a religious and moral system which, however erroneous it may appear to some thinkers, is conspicuous for its vigour and loftiness. Edwards often shows himself a worthy successor of the great men who led the moral revolt of the Reformation. Amongst some very questionable metaphysics and much outworn—sometimes repulsive—superstition, he grasps the central truths on which all really noble morality must be based. The mode ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... Esther. "But I don't suppose you will know these people, anyway," she added with an unconscious touch of loftiness in her voice. "The name ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... themselves; they are a small body of men, and there may be some among them who do not stand on very firm legs—a few may be fatalists, hypochondriacs, invalids; others may be enervated, and artificial,—such are those who would fain be artistic,—but all the loftiness and delicacy which still remains to this world, is in their possession. In this France of intellect, which is also the France of pessimism, Schopenhauer is already much more at home than he ever was in Germany, his principal work ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... first of a long series of antagonism and recoils, and as the child had matured, the purity and loftiness of her nature had by this very contact grown chilled toward austerity. Thus nature lends a gradual protective hardening to a tender surface during abrasion with a coarser thing. It left Isabel more reserved with her grandmother than with any one else of all ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... three distant ages born, Greece, Italy, and England did adorn. The first in loftiness of thought surpass'd, The next in majesty, in both the last. The force of Nature could no farther go; To make a third ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... Washington, with a loftiness of purpose truly characteristic of a great and good mind, refused to identify himself with either party. In forming his first cabinet, moved with a desire to heal the dissensions which distracted the country, he selected its members ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... not be even more than this? The character of John was strong, grand in its wild magnificence—like some Alpine crag, with the pines on its slopes and the deep dark lake at its foot; he had courage, resolution, an iron will, a loftiness of soul that could hold commerce with the unseen and eternal. He was a man capable of vast heights and depths. He could hold fellowship with the eternal God as a man speaks with his friend, and could suffer unutterable agonies in self-questioning and depression. ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... Burns is of a high order: in brightness of expression and unsolicited ease and natural vehemence of language, he stands in the first rank of poets: in choice of subjects, in happiness of conception, and loftiness of imagination, he recedes into the second. He owes little of his fame to his objects, for, saving the beauty of a few ladies, they were all of an ordinary kind: he sought neither in romance nor in history for themes to the ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... built in 1204, the choir in 1308, and the triforium in 1400. The sculptures of the portico are subjects from the life of St. Martin. Over the door on the left is a Descent from the Cross, by Nicolo di Pisa, 1233. Loftiness and simplicity, verging on plainness, characterise the interior of this church, as well as those of all the others in Lucca, with the exception of San Romano, which is profusely decorated. The windows are small and filled with modern glass, excepting the three at the eastern end, which are ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... a highly accomplished artist, the equal of any of his contemporaries, the superior of most. What made him something much more than this—something infinitely more important for us—was the vigor and loftiness of his imagination. Without his imaginative power he would have been an artist of great distinction, of whom any country might be proud; with it he became a great creator, able to embody in enduring bronze the highest ideals ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... Majesty, stateliness, elevation of manner. Dignity, grace, loftiness of manner. Title, name. Solitary, living by oneself. Crags, steep, rugged rocks. Base, foot, bottom. Plumes, feathers. Talons, claws. Eyrie, the nest of a bird that builds in a lofty place. Ledge, a ridge or projection. Rook, a bird resembling a crow, ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... native American myths, this one bears undeniable marks of its aboriginal origin. Its frequent puerilities and inanities, its generally low and coarse range of thought and expression, its occasional loftiness of both, its strange metaphors and the prominence of strictly heathen names and potencies, bring it into unmistakable relationship to the ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... efforts of Conspiracy and Conquest in France, the efforts of Conservatism and Constitution in England, produced a race of men whom nothing but the crisis could have produced, and who will find no rivals in the magnitude of their capacities, the value of their services, in their loftiness of principle, and their influence on their age; until some similar summons shall be uttered to the latent powers of mankind, from some similar crisis of good and evil. The eloquence of Burke, Pitt, Fox, and a crowd of their followers, in the senate ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... so swiftly at the Literary Club. The great are never greater than in the hearts of their homes and the simplicities of their friendships. At this club the gods forgot their power and high beings laid aside their loftiness. In the midst we find the man they teased the man most welcome; that one that all affected to despise, each in his inmost heart unfeignedly respected. The man most laughed at was most loved. Oliver Goldsmith made the mirth of things. He was always forbearing, and to this passive ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... losing the intense lustre of its littleness, but all its petty glory striving to be sublime. The magic transformation from the minute to the vast has not been so cunningly effected but that the rich adornment still counteracts the impression of space and loftiness. The spectator is more sensible of its limits than of ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... celebrated. The talents, indeed, of Caesar were not more conspicuous in arms than in his style, which was noted for its force and purity.[264] Caelius, whom Cicero brought forward into public life, excelled in natural quickness, loftiness of sentiment, and politeness in attack;[265] Brutus in philosophical gravity, though he sometimes indulged himself in a warmer and bolder style.[266] Callidius was delicate and harmonious; Curio bold and flowing; Calvus, from studied opposition to Cicero's peculiarities, cold, ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... the impression she herself made upon Violet, it was the same she made upon everyone. No one could look long at Florence Digby and not recognize the loftiness of her spirit and the generous nature of her impulses. In person she was tall and as she leaned to take Violet's hand, the difference between them brought out the salient points in each, to the great admiration of ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... countenance, the remarkable Burgundian deformity was likewise reproduced. He had the same heavy, hanging lip, with a vast mouth, and monstrously protruding lower jaw. His complexion was fair, his hair light and thin, his beard yellow, short, and pointed. He had the aspect of a Fleming, but the loftiness of a Spaniard. His demeanor in public was still, silent, almost sepulchral. He looked habitually on the ground when he conversed, was chary of speech, embarrassed, and even suffering in manner. This was ascribed partly to a natural haughtiness which he had occasionally ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... even generous emulation turns pale at the mention of his name. His productions, allowing for the very recent period in which he commenced author, are rather numerous. A saturnine critic might be apt to suspect that they were also hasty, were not the loftiness of their conceptions, the majesty of their style, the richness of their imagination, and above all, the energy both of their thoughts and language so conspicuous, that we may defy any man of taste to rise from the perusal, ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... I would urge the telling of Bible stories, as far as is allowed by the special circumstances of the school. These are stories from a source unsurpassed in our literature for purity of style and loftiness of subject. More especially I urge the telling of the Christ-story, in such parts as seem likely to be within the grasp of the several classes. In all Bible stories it is well to keep as near as possible to the original unimprovable text.[1] Some amplification can ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... the legends of Troy and Iceland, so also in the Nibelungen-lied, the story centres on a young hero glowing with beauty and victory, and possessed of loftiness of character; but who meets with an early and untimely death. Such is Baldur the Beautiful of Iceland, and such, also, are Hector and Achilles of Troy. These songs mark the greatness and the waning of the heroic world ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... from hence," cried he; "and how well he acquits himself on these solemn occasions! With what dignity, what loftiness, what high propriety, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... sort of loftiness that doesn't belong to her life, though she takes things with outward calmness, but I have a feeling that some day she will break out in an awful tempest, and I doubt her being that woman's daughter. Mrs. Boyd never talks frankly about her," Mrs. ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Guesclin knelt. To kneel for other purposes, Masonry does not require. God gave to man a head to be borne erect, a port upright and majestic. We assemble in our Temples to cherish and inculcate sentiments that conform to that loftiness of bearing which the just and upright man is entitled to maintain, and we do not require those who desire to be admitted among us, ignominiously to bow the head. We respect man, because we respect ourselves that he may conceive a lofty idea of his dignity as a human being free ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... brush-work, which was never brought to maturity in either Florence or Rome. Even in color he was fine for Florence, though not equal to the Venetians. In composition, modelling, line, even in texture painting (see his portraits) he was a man of accomplishment; while in grace, purity, serenity, loftiness he was the Florentine ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... words is hatred, as fixed as the knowledge is clear. God's supremacy and loftiness, and Christ's nature, are recognised, but only the more abhorred. The name of God can be used as a spell to sway Jesus, but it has no power to touch this fierce hatred into submission. 'The devils also believe ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... time of the Gracchi to his own, the tribunes who most served the people had sprung from the ranks of the patricians. His talent, unequalled for philosophy of thought, for depth of reflection, and loftiness of expression, was another kind of aristocracy, which could never be pardoned him. Nature placed him in the foremost rank; and death only created a space around him for secondary minds. They all endeavoured to acquire his position, and all ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... owned that, at his first glimpse of the countenance which was bowing and smiling from the barouche, Ernest did fancy that there was a resemblance between it and the old familiar face upon the mountain-side. The brow, with its massive depth and loftiness, and all the other features, indeed, were boldly and strongly hewn, as if in emulation of a more than heroic, of a Titanic model. But the sublimity and stateliness, the grand expression of a divine sympathy, that illuminated the mountain visage, and etherealized ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... away full of that undefined discomfort experienced by generous young spirits when their elders, more worldly-wise (or foolish), fail even to comprehend the purity or loftiness of motive which they themselves thoroughly believe. Yet, though she had infinitely more faith in Humfrey's affection than she had in that of Babington, she had not by any means the same dread of being used to bait the hook for him, partly because she knew his integrity too well to ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with the work for which you have assembled. Lay the corner-stone of a monument which shall adequately bespeak the gratitude of the whole American people to the Illustrious Father of his country! Build it to the skies, you cannot outreach the loftiness of his principles! Found it upon the massive and eternal rock, you cannot make it more enduring than his fame! Construct it of the peerless Parian marble, you cannot make it purer than his life! Exhaust upon it the rules and principles of ancient and modern art, you cannot make ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... my friend. I am poor at this moment. That is one of the reasons why I cling to my concealment, my mask, my impregnable fortress. I have read your last verses in the "Revue,"—ah! with what delight, now that I am initiated in the austere loftiness of your ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... of those ages been actual, those great men would have been wrong to complain. The man who thinks should accept simply and calmly the surroundings in which Providence has placed him. The splendour of human intelligence, the loftiness of genius, shine no less by contrast than by harmony with the age. The stoic and profound philosopher is not diminished by an external debasement. Virgil, Petrarch, Racine are great in their purple; Job is ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... directly endangered by contact with the realities of life, for instance by participation in local politics and other social contests, and by such practice of charity as must be accompanied by physical exertion and bad smells. Culture is, to them, the name for that serenity and loftiness of mind that can be attained and preserved only by keeping a safe distance from the madding crowd; and the cultured man is pictured by them as sitting in a comfortable chair, preferably with a book in his hand, and rapt ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... so much lusting for loftiness! There are so many convulsions of the ambitions! Show me that thou art not a ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... were the qualities most needful. He could neither arouse enthusiasm nor win friends. He was large visioned and adept at mapping out broad policies, but he lacked the elements of leadership requisite to carry his plans into effect. He scorned the everyday arts of politics, and by the very loftiness of his ideals he alienated support. In short, as one writer has remarked, he was "a weigher of scruples and values in a time of transition, a representative of old-school politics on the threshold of triumphant democracy. The people did not understand him, but they felt instinctively ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... imposing air, from their great size and loftiness: the wheels are six feet in diameter; but every part of the ornament is of the meanest and most paltry description, save only the covering of striped and spangled broad-cloth, the splendid and gorgeous effect of which makes up in a great measure ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... without a living soul in it. So (quoth Abdallah), 'I alighted and hobbling my she-camel, took courage and entered the city. When I came to the citadel, I found it had two vast gates, never in the world was seen their like for size and loftiness, inlaid with all manner jewels and jacinths, white and red and yellow and green. At this I marvelled greatly and entering the citadel, trembling and dazed with wonder and affright, found it long and wide, as it were a city[FN137] for bigness; and therein were lofty storied pavilions, builded of ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... especially deep study which haunts and rules the imagination, necessarily removes men from life, absorbs them in themselves; purifies their conduct, with some risk of isolating their sympathies; develops that loftiness of mood which is gifted with deep inspirations and indulged with great ideas, but which tends in its excess to engender a contempt for others, and a self-appreciation which is ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... of character, or to the 'wide, gray, lampless' depths of human destiny. We find the same national characteristic, though on an infinitely lower level, in Franklin's oracular saws. Among the French sages a psychological element is predominant, as well as an occasional transcendent loftiness of feeling, not to be found in Bacon's wisest maxims, and from his point of view in their composition we could not expect to find them there. We seek in vain amid the positivity of Bacon, or the quaint and timorous paradox of Browne, or the acute sobriety of Shaftesbury, for any ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... creator of Hamlet, Ophelia, Othello, Desdemona, Cordelia, Portia, Rosalind, Miranda, and Prospero as other than a man of a contrite spirit and a pure heart. As he surpassed his contemporaries in breadth and loftiness of intellect, so too he surpassed them in the reach and ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... above in antiphonal singing of the loveliest and most faultless sort. Strangers journeyed from afar over rough country roads to hear this wonderful chorus, and were moved in the depths of their souls with the indescribable sweetness and loftiness of the music, and with the charm and expressiveness of its rendering by these ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... gone to fetch something for his own supper, as well as for his guests Noor ad Deen and the fair Persian walked up and down the garden, till at last they came to the pavilion of pictures. They stood awhile to admire its wonderful structure, size, and loftiness; and after taking a full view of it on every side, went up many steps of fine white marble to the hall-door, ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 2 • Anon.
... The interior loftiness of Notre Dame, moreover, gives it a sublimity which would swallow up anything that might look gewgawy in its ornamentation, were we to consider it window by window, or pillar by pillar. It is an advantage of these vast edifices, rising over us and spreading ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... avarice! O vile thirst Of sordid gold! it doth not me astound So easily thou seizest soul, immersed In baseness, or with other taint unsound; But that thy chain should bind, amid the worst, And that thy talon should strike down and wound One that for loftiness of mind would be Worthy all praise, if ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... of illimitable loftiness the owner of the cardboard treasury looked down upon the squat commonplaceness of those three lives. The condition of Jane and Genesis and Clematis seemed almost laughably pitiable to him, the more so because they were unaware of it. They breathed ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... cascades-though none so imposing. But they are beautiful; and you will not soon forget the effect of one,—flanked at its summit by white-stemmed palms which lift their leaves so high into the light that the loftiness of them gives the sensation of vertigo.... Dizzy also the magnificence of the great colonnade of palmistes and angelins, two hundred feet high, through which: you pass if you follow the river-path from the cascade—the famed ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... teachings of its Founder." And again he says, "How much soever spiritual culture may advance, the natural sciences broaden and deepen, and the human mind enlarge, the world will never get beyond the loftiness and moral culture of Christianity as it shines and glistens in the Gospels."—Farhenlehre, ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... beauty of Roman buildings. The science of construction and large intelligence displayed in them, their strength, simplicity, solidity, and purpose, are their glory. Perhaps there is only one modern edifice—Palladio's Palazzo della Ragione at Vicenza—which approaches the dignity and loftiness of Roman architecture; and this it does because of its absolute freedom from ornament, the vastness of its design, and the durability of its material. The temple, called the Maison Carree, at Nismes, is also very perfect, and comprehended at one glance. Light, graceful, airy, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... "Yes, Your Loftiness. Many cycles ago we sent a ship against the Omans with a new device of destruction. The Omans must have intercepted it, drained it of power and allowed it to drift on. After all these cycles of time it must have come upon a small source ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... mists break over the hills of Dunbar, he hailed the sun-burst with the cry of David: 'Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Like as the smoke vanisheth so shalt thou drive them away!' Even to common minds this familiarity with grand poetic imagery in prophet and apocalypse, gave a loftiness and ardor of expression that with all its tendency to exaggeration and bombast we may prefer to the ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... builder, the creamy stone clear and sharp at every angle, and each moulding and flower true and perfect as the chisel had newly left it. The deep archway of the west front opened in stately magnificence, and yet with a light loftiness hitherto unknown in England, and somewhat approaching to the style in which the great French cathedrals were then rising. And its accompaniments were, on the one hand the palace and hall, on the other hand the monastery, with its high walled ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... mistress: the force of the tender passions was great over her, but the force of her mind was still superior; and the combat which her victory visibly cost her, serves only to display the firmness of her resolution, and the loftiness of her ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... together, to do anything nobler or stronger than that procession of window, with material of glass and stone—nor anything which shall look loftier, with so temperate and prudent measure of actual loftiness. ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... exercise of some common duty of humanity—that is poetry. Whenever we look upon the hard realities of life through a medium that softens and relieves them—that medium is poetry. Without poetry, there is no loftiness in friendship, no devotedness in love. The feelings even of the young mother watching her sleeping child till her eyes are dim with happiness, are one half poetry. Hark! there is music on the evening air, always a delightful incident in the most delightful scene; ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... his great books. Had the summons come to pack his effects to-morrow and, saying good-by to everything else, start on a journey to the congenial places where his mighty masters lived and wrought, he would have wished her alone to go with him, sharer of life's loftiness. Her companionship wherever he might be—to have just that; to feel that she was always with him, and always one with him; to be able to turn his eyes to hers before some vanishing firelight at an hour like this, with deep rest near ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... about Texas, we don't pay no speshul heed. It ain't three days, however, before it begins to break on us that for once Monte's right. Texas has certainly changed. Thar's a sooperior manner, what you'd call a loftiness, about him, which is hard to onderstand an' harder to put up with. It gets to be his habit constant to reemark in a wearied way, as he slops out his drinks, that we-all'll have to excoose him talkin' to us much, because he's got cares on his mind, besides bein' ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... consumed by the hidden fire of lofty thought, that is very effective. It does not destroy the effectiveness that the real cause of the darkened lids and cavernous orbits, when not antimony, is most probably internal disease; eyes of this sort stand for spirituality and loftiness of thought and intense womanliness of nature, and, as all men are neither chemists nor doctors, the simulation does quite as well ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... of St. Bartholomew, this answer is more than creditable. The Germans, who have either felt or affected great indignation at the want of reverence for their great poet shown by the authors of "Faust" and "Mignon," ought to admire Meyerbeer in a special degree for the moral loftiness of his determination and the dignified beauty of its expression. Composers like Kreutzer, Reissiger, Pierson, Lassen, and Prince Radziwill have written incidental music for Goethe's tragedy without reflecting that possibly they were profaning the sanctuary; ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... mentioned; he won the tragic prize five times; tinged with pessimism, he is nevertheless less severe than his great predecessors Sophocles and AEschylus, surpassing them in tenderness and artistic expression, but falling short of them in strength and loftiness of dramatic conception; Sophocles, it is said, represented men as they ought to be, and Euripides as they are; he has been called the Sophist ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... different rains of incompetence materialized in hired girl form, before Karen come. But Karen worshipped Jabez, his highest mounts of future eminence seemed too low for his footstool in her adorin' eyes, somehow the very loftiness of his airs to her, his own mother who supported him and bought his clothes, seemed to render him more precious in her eyes. Wimmen are ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... this age may be mentioned Speroni, whose writings are distinguished by harmony, freedom, and eloquence of style; Tasso, whose dialogues unite loftiness of thought with elegance of style; Castiglione (1468-1529), whose "Cortigiano" is in equal estimation as a manual of elegance of manners and as a model of pure Italian; and Della Casa, whose "Galateo" is a complete system of politeness, couched ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... insensible to the very existence of honor as a spring of human conduct; treating patriotism and disinterestedness with an elaborate sneer, and receiving the suggestions of duty with a horse-laugh. There is a difference not easily to be mistaken between the lessening of men which is occasioned by the loftiness of the platform whence the observation is made, and that which is produced by the malignant envy of the observer; between the gloomy judicial ferocity of a Pope or a Tacitus, and the villain levity which revels in the contemplation of imputed faults, or that fiendishness of feeling which ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... the tree of life, fresh in their lovely verdure, impregnated with the sweet odours of the Gospel. The author's contributions to religious literature are marked not less by their eminently evangelical and practical characters, their purity and loftiness of thought, than by their beautiful simplicity of language ...
— The Manual of Heraldry; Fifth Edition • Anonymous
... exercise of that profession. He had a singular force and solidity of thought, an admirable ardor of ambitious devotion to the service of poetry, a deep and burning sense at once of the duty implied and of the dignity inherent in his office; a vigor, opulence, and loftiness of phrase, remarkable even in that age of spiritual strength, wealth, and exaltation of thought and style; a robust eloquence, touched not unfrequently with flashes of fancy, and kindled at times into heat of imagination. The main fault of his style is one more commonly found ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... to literature were few, and, in comparison with his extraordinary learning, comparatively unimportant. He wrote upon Cardinal Wolsey (1877) and German Schools of History (1886). He was extremely modest, and the loftiness of his ideals of accuracy and completeness of treatment led him to shrink from tasks which men of far slighter equipment might have carried out with success. His learning and his position as a universally ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... armed mob, the army became again disciplined, valiant and reliable. While the masterly ability and soldierly vigor and decision of General Johnson must excite the profoundest admiration, those who remember him may be pardoned for dwelling quite as much upon the grandeur, the loftiness, the heroism of his character. In this we may look in vain for his peer, except to the great Virginian, his immortal comrade, the man whom every former Southern soldier must feel it is his religious duty to venerate. Through all that period of sickening doubt, amidst all ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... and notable generalizations have, however, already thrust themselves into these chapters to illustrate his appreciation of the loftiness of his theme, his candor, and his genuine sympathy with those to whose ill-fated heroism he gave ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy godmother in its own soul; it is to live in a nutshell and to count yourself the king of infinite ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... though less elevated and less pure than the old Zoroastrian creed, must be pronounced to have possessed a certain loftiness and picturesqueness which suited it to become the religion of a great and splendid monarchy. The mysterious fire-altars on the mountain-tops, with their prestige of a remote antiquity—the ever-burning flame believed ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... high-toned, too punctilious, to recognize me. I attribute this not to the loftiness of their highnesses nor to prejudice, but to the depth of their ignorance, and of course I forgive and forget. Others again are so "reckless," so "don't care" disposed, that they treat me as fancy dictates, now friendly, now vacillating, and now inimical. With these I simply ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... said, with a loftiness that was not less puzzling, though far more intelligible than the agitation which a moment before had embarrassed her manner, "that I am the last of a line eminent for centuries in ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... ill-starred Guelph sympathies of Florence for a foreign prince, which familiarized it with foreign intervention, came all the disasters which followed. But who does not admire the people which was wrought up by its venerated preacher to a mood of such sustained loftiness that for the first time in Italy it set the example of sparing a conquered foe while the whole history of its past taught nothing but vengeance and extermination? The glow which melted patriotism into one with moral regeneration may seem, when looked at from ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... height, altitude, elevation; eminence, pitch; loftiness &c. adj.; sublimity. tallness &c. adj.; stature, procerity[obs3]; prominence &c. 250. colossus &c. (size) 192; giant, grenadier, giraffe, camelopard. mount, mountain; hill alto, butte [U.S.], monticle[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Aemilia had explained to him all that she knew of her religion, but while admitting the beauty of its teaching, and the loftiness of its morals, he had not yet been able to bring himself to believe the great facts upon which it ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... history with later emperors. But the "Meditations" of the good emperor survive, like the writings of Epictetus, St. Augustine, and Thomas a Kempis: one of the few immortal books,—immortal, in this case, not for artistic excellence, like the writings of Thucydides and Tacitus, but for the loftiness of thoughts alone; so precious that the saints of the Middle Ages secretly preserved them as in accord with their own experiences. It is from these "Meditations" that we derive our best knowledge of Marcus Aurelius. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... eternal mountains; like gigantic watchers, they kept their vigil over the placid scene beneath—the vigil of untold centuries. Cloudless, unsympathizing, changeless, they had no part in the busy drama of human experience their loftiness overlooked, and now they loomed with shadowy outline, through the sanctifying light, habitants ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... strange that this code of the honest villager does not exclude in women either keen intelligence, a subtle mind, or loftiness of ideas. Their soul seems to have something of the humming-bird which flits in and out the thickest shrubs, without getting entangled in their branches, or touching a ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... are totally absent from his religious theory. Now, Dr. Cumming invariably assumes that, in fulminating against those who differ from him, he is standing on a moral elevation to which they are compelled reluctantly to look up; that his theory of motives and conduct is in its loftiness and purity a perpetual rebuke to their low and vicious desires and practice. It is time he should be told that the reverse is the fact; that there are men who do not merely cast a superficial glance at his doctrine, and fail to see its beauty or justice, but ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... his last work, 780, Presentation at the Temple. Rigaud was especially successful with the rich bourgeoisie of Paris, and later became court painter, supreme in expressing the grandiose and inflated pomposities of the age. He, says Reynolds, in the tumour of his presumptuous loftiness, was the perfect example of Du Pile's rules, that bid painters so to draw their portraits that they seem to speak and say to us: "Stop, look at me! I am that invincible king: majesty surrounds me. Look! I am that valiant soldier: I ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... reach them in this world; and we shall be at home up there. They will be 'my high places,' that I never could have got at by my own scrambling, but to which Thou hast lifted me up, and which, by Thy grace, have become my natural abode. I am at home there, and walk at liberty in the loftiness, and fear no fall amongst ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... servants were the severest sticklers for propriety, and the butlers of the old families rivalled each other in the loftiness of their standards. Jack, the butler of "the last of the Barons," was wide awake to the demands of his position, and when an old sea captain, an intimate friend of Mr. Huger, dining with the family, asked for ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... Parish Churches and Cathedrals of the country, and to it he added a Dome. There is one feature that these two apparent opposites have in common. Gothic Churches vary greatly, but many of them are notable for their appearance of loftiness. The clustered columns seem to lead the eye upwards to the roof, as if men naturally went about the world cramped and confined, and were now bidden turn their gaze to the heights. A dome has a somewhat similar ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... misrepresented his public conduct, but it will be found that those who knew him best, loved him most, and that many who were constrained to differ from him, in his management of public affairs, did full justice to the purity and generosity of his motives, to the nobility, loftiness, and ultimate success of his aims, and to the disinterestedness and value of his varied and manifold labours for the country, and ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... when she did her great work? Was it not by her indomitable perseverance, her great patience, and her enthusiasm for others that she won such an honored place for herself? You know almost before I say it, that there can be no loftiness of purpose, no enthusiasm, if there are not difficulties to be conquered, and you all know that complaining about sick people will never alter their characteristics, and that complaining about the nervousness of the relatives will never make less unreasoning, when they are fearful that a ...
— Making Good On Private Duty • Harriet Camp Lounsbery
... appareiit not by color but by light! Though I should call on genius, art, and use, I could not tell it so that it could ever be imagined; but it may be believed, and sight of it longed for. And if our fancies are low for such loftiness, it is no marvel, for beyond the sun was never eye could go. Such[1] was here the fourth family of the High Father, who always satisfies it, showing how He breathes forth, and how He begets.[2] And Beatrice began, "Thank, thank thou the Sun of the Angels, who to this visible one has raised thee ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... into it of "purposes" and "expediencies," is an invention, and independent of the emotion itself. The aim of the purely spiritual love of the second stage was not propagation, and yet it was an emotion whose loftiness cannot easily be surpassed. With the deification of woman love reached far beyond the beloved into infinitude, and the phenomenon of the love-death renders all the supposed generic purpose of love impossible. ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... the chaining of the Confederate Chieftain with indignation. His intimate association with Jefferson Davis had convinced him of his singular purity of character and loftiness of soul. That he was capable of conspiring to murder Abraham Lincoln was inconceivable. That the charge should be made and pressed seriously by the National Government was ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... Mr. Falkland departed. Through the interview he, no doubt, conducted himself in a way that did him peculiar credit. Yet the warmth of his temper could not be entirely suppressed: and even when he was most exemplary, there was an apparent loftiness in his manner that was calculated to irritate; and the very grandeur with which he suppressed his passions, operated indirectly as a taunt to his opponent. The interview was prompted by the noblest sentiments; but it unquestionably served to widen the breach ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... let the breach widen in this way was absurd. Wilton, when I said as much to him, said that it was due to her wonderful sensitiveness and highly strungness, and that it was just one more proof to him of the loftiness of her soul and her shrinking horror of any form of deceit. In fact, he gave me the impression that, though the affair was rending his vitals, he took a mournful pleasure in contemplating ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... them amiably. Her eyes were red, but the visitors observed that her mourning was very rich; they had never seen richer. They also remarked that she held her gray old head with a loftiness that she must have acquired in the past two weeks; no one of them had ever seen it before. She did not exactly patronize them; but that she appreciated her four millions ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... 'And the loftiness of man shall be bowed down, and the haughtiness of men shall be brought low: and the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day. And the idols shall utterly pass away. And men shall go into the caves of the rocks, and into the holes of the earth, from before the terror of the Lord and from the glory ...
— Thoughts on religion at the front • Neville Stuart Talbot
... popular misuse of the words Morality and Morals as some excuse for certain absurdities which are occasional fashions in speech and writing—certain old lay-figures, as ugly as the queerest Asiatic idol, which at different periods get propped into loftiness, and attired in magnificent Venetian drapery, so that whether they have a human face or not is of little consequence. One is, the notion that there is a radical, irreconcilable opposition between intellect and morality. I do not mean the simple statement of fact, which everybody knows, that remarkably ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... calculated on the possibility that her alliance should be declined by any individual of a family less than sovereign. She possessed, however, pride of character superior to her pride of rank, and strength of mind suited to the loftiness of her ambition. With dignity in her air and countenance, after a pause of reflection, she replied, "Count Albert Altenberg is, I find, equal to the high character I have heard of him: deserving of my esteem and confidence, by that which can ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... speaking in the broad sense," explained Dora, with the loftiness of one who addresses a throng from a pulpit. Then shaking a finger, "'The wicked flee when no man pursueth'—Proverbs, twenty-eighth chapter, and ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... that Bella and John and the cherub had made a covenant that they would not reveal to mortal eyes any appearance whatever of being a wedding party. Now, the supervising dignitary, the Archbishop of Greenwich, knew this as well as if he had performed the nuptial ceremony. And the loftiness with which his Grace entered into their confidence without being invited, and insisted on a show of keeping the waiters out of it, was the ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... the majority of Romney's works of this class will bear comparison with the best productions of his contemporaries, and that some of them evince in a remarkable degree his grace of manner, skill in expression, and loftiness of aim. ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... atmosphere of real life present in English tragedy is absent in French. The quasi-supernatural religious awe that reigned over Greek tragedy, French tragedy does not affect. You miss also in French tragedy the severe simplicity, the self-restraint, the statuesque repose, belonging to the Greek model. Loftiness, grandeur, a loftiness somewhat strained, a grandeur tending to be tumid, an heroic tone sustained at sacrifice of ease and nature—such is the element in which French tragedy lives and flourishes. You must grant your ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... dread more than they do an army terrible with banners, the Mason overcomes, and emerges from the contest victorious; or if he does not conquer, but is borne down and swept away by the mighty current of prejudice, passion, and interest; in either case, the loftiness of spirit which he displays merits for him more than a ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... prisoners, whilst from other sides embassies arrived in numbers; and amongst these a deputation from the Boeotians, anxious to learn what they should do to obtain peace. These latter Agesilaus, with a certain loftiness of manner, affected not even to see, although Pharax, (6) their proxenus, stood by their side to introduce them. Seated in a circular edifice on the margin of the lake, (7) he surveyed the host of captives and valuables as they ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... his youth when he first sang in New York, his voice was yet in perfect preservation. It lacked nothing that is to be expected in a tenor voice of the first class; and it had that mingling of manliness and tenderness, of human sympathy and seraphic loftiness which, for lack of any other or better word, we call divine. As a vocalist he was not in the first rank, but he stood foremost in the second. His presence was manly and dignified, and he was a good actor. But it was as a vocalist, pure and simple, that ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... and uninterrupted possession of the divine life in all its fullness, which involves an entire separation from the miseries and needs of men. He claims to be the Messiah of the Old Covenant, with all the fullness of meaning, and loftiness of dignity which clustered round that word and that thought. He claims not only to proclaim, but to bestow, the blessings of which He speaks. For He not only comes to 'preach good tidings to the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... then that my Cousin suddenly came down from his loftiness. He seemed to awake out of ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... to convey a just idea of the extraordinary amount of work which Handel's life comprised. One oratorio after another followed the 'Messiah,' none of them entitled to rank with that great work for either loftiness of subject or grandeur of expression, yet many containing passages of unrivalled beauty. 'Jephtha,' which was the last oratorio he composed, contains the magnificent recitative, 'Deeper and deeper still,' and the beautiful song, 'Waft her, angels.' It was while writing ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... few days to the pure loftiness of the mountains; the life of to-day is so practical, if full of shams that a day with nature is as a tonic to one's higher, ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... Monsieur de Garnache," said he with a fine loftiness, and in his heart he pondered what he would say and how he should say it; how he should stand, how move, and how look. His roving eye caught sight of his secretary. He remembered something—the cherished pose of being a man plunged ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... special reason to believe in the loftiness of human nature. Therefore he dissolved himself like a mist and returned to his gas-plugs without a word of apology. Bessie watched the flight with a certain uneasiness; but so long as Dick appeared to be ignorant of the harm that had been ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... Prince. Never before were more conspicuously seen the energies of a noble soul. At first it seemed that his reign could be extended only over gory corpses and smouldering ruins. Undismayed by the magnitude of the disaster, he consecrated all the activity of his genius and the loftiness of his spirit to the regeneration of the ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... (I wish somebody would!); but for thinking in let me have an attic up ten flights of stairs in the densest quarter of the city. I have all Herr Teufelsdrockh's affection for attics. There is a sublimity about their loftiness. I love to "sit at ease and look down upon the wasps' nest beneath;" to listen to the dull murmur of the human tide ebbing and flowing ceaselessly through the narrow streets and lanes below. How small men seem, ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... worthy of the occasion. He certainly was in splendid looks, his rich, profuse beard and hair were well arranged, and his fine bronzed face had not lost its grave expression when at rest, but had acquired a certain loftiness of countenance, which gave him more than ever the air, I was going to say, of a demigod; but he had now an expression no heathen Greek could give; it was more like that of the heads by Michael Angelo, where Christian yearning is added to ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his mental anguish acted like poison upon a weak and ailing body, now more than usually debilitated by insufficient food. In the winter of 1823, Clare found himself almost penniless; yet with inborn loftiness of mind, he hid the fact from his family, so as not to distress them. His wife and parents, therefore, lived as well as ever, while he, to save expenditure, got into the habit of absenting himself at meal-times, pretending to call upon friends and acquaintances. ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... justified; his use of abstract terms; the splendid use of mean associations by Shakespeare; Milton's wise avoidance of mean associations, and of realism; nature of his similes and figures; his use of proper names; his epic catalogues; his personifications; loftiness of his perfected style; the popularity of Paradise Last; imitations, adaptations, and echoes of Milton's style during the 18th century; his enormous influence; the origin of "poetic diction"; Milton's phraseology stolen by Pope, ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... possession of it as Troup poured out his diatribe; and this thought was, that he was no longer conscious of any greatness in him. Through all the conflicts, trials, and formidable obstacles of previous years he had been sustained by his consciousness of superlative gifts combined with loftiness of purpose. Had not his greatness been dinned into his ears, he would have been as familiar with it. But he seemed to himself to have shrivelled, his very soul might have been in ashes—incremated in the flames of his passions. He had triumphed over every one of his enemies in turn. ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... none of that involuntary admiration and religious awe, which the sight of an old English cathedral, or the splendid churches of Italy, never fails to produce. One of its greatest defects arises from want of loftiness in the dome, the diameter of which is one hundred and fifteen, while its height does not exceed twenty feet. There is an immense number of columns, the spoils of various heathen temples. Of these, eight, of porphyry, are from that dedicated to the Sun by the Emperor Aurelian; ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... loose philosophy so much as the elevated spirit of these works that solaced the unphilosophical bitterness of his life. This general impression will doubtless continue to be felt by all that study the best works of Brahmanism. The sincerity, the fearless search of the Indic sages for truth, their loftiness of thinking, all these will affect the religious student of every clime and age, though the fancied result of their thinking may pass without effect over a modern mind. For a philosophy that must be orthodox can never be definitive. But, if one turn ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... Nevertheless, although he occupied himself with such a variety of things, he never ceased drawing and working in relief, pursuits which suited his fancy more than any other. Ser Piero, having observed this, and having considered the loftiness of his intellect, one day took some of his drawings and carried them to Andrea del Verrocchio, who was much his friend, and besought him straitly to tell him whether Leonardo, by devoting himself to drawing, would make any proficience. Andrea was astonished to see the ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... friends and verified ideals were Mr. George Bradford, who always reminded me of a priest of the true type; and Miss Hoar, whose vestal soul, celebrating constant rites over the memory of her dead betrothed, made her the image of a nun. This welcome delicacy and loftiness of self-consecration my mother also observed in the ranks of the sometimes harshly criticised friars. At Fiesole, "A young monk unveiled the picture for us. He was very courteous, and had an air of unusual goodness and sincerity. ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... of Babylon, Nebuchadrezzar, recorded a prayer which reveals the loftiness of religious thought and feeling attained by men to whom graven images were no longer worthy of adoration and reverence—men whose god was not made by ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... beginning to give sign of what they were. Dr. Channing was already distinguished as an eloquent and powerful preacher, but the general public had not yet recognized in him that remarkable combination of loftiness of thought with magic charm of style, which was soon to be revealed in his essays on Milton and Napoleon Bonaparte. Ticknor and Everett were professors in Harvard College, giving a new impulse to the minds of the students by their admirable lectures; and the latter was also conducting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... without drawing rein to rest, but found the wall thereof as it were one block, without breach or way of ingress; and on the third day, he came again in sight of his companions, dazed and amazed at what he had seen of the extent and loftiness of the place, and said, "O Emir, the easiest place of access is this where you have alighted." Then Musa took Talib and Abd al-Samad and ascended the highest hill which overlooked the city. When they reached the top, they beheld beneath them a city, never saw ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... 'twas not in malice but in that thou wouldst fain have been reputed better than I that thou ensuedst it. Doubt then no more of me; nay, rest assured that none that lives bears thee such love as I, who know the loftiness of thy spirit, bent not to heap up wealth, as do the caitiffs, but to dispense in bounty thine accumulated store. Think it no shame that to enhance thy reputation thou wouldst have slain me; nor deem that I marvel thereat. To slay not one man, ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... and withered. And the birds chirped at times; but their note was mournful and complaining. All within this house, until Harley's arrival, had been strange and saddening to Helen's timid and subdued spirits. Lady Lansmere had received her kindly, but with a certain restraint; and the loftiness of manner, common to the Countess with all but Harley, had awed and chilled the diffident orphan. Lady Lansmere's very interest in Harley's choice—her attempts to draw Helen out of her reserve—her watchful eyes whenever Helen shyly spoke, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... rock, as the bottoms of the vallies happened to be broken into sudden descents by the course of the neighbouring hills. Some particular spots occurred in these vallies where the shade and fragrance of the contiguous woods, the loftiness of the overhanging rocks, and the transparency and frequent cascades of the streams, presented scenes of such elegance and dignity, as would with difficulty be rivalled in any other part of the globe. Here, perhaps, the simple productions of unassisted nature may be said to excel all the fictitious ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... met the order to close his doors with smiling loftiness, easy understanding of what he read it to mean. Astonished to find his offer of money silently and sternly ignored, Peden had grown contemptuously defiant. If it was a bid for him to raise the ante, Morgan was ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... consolidation. Th' head iv this colledge believes in thrainin' young men f'r th' civic ideel, Father Kelly tells me. Th' on'y thrainin' I know f'r th' civic ideel is to have an alarm clock in ye'er room on iliction day. He believes 'young men shud be equipped with Courage, Discipline, an' Loftiness iv Purpose;' so I suppose Packy, if he wint there, wud listen to lectures fr'm th' Profissor iv Courage an' Erasmus H. Noddle, Doctor iv Loftiness iv Purpose. I loft, ye loft, he lofts. I've always felt we needed ...
— Mr. Dooley's Philosophy • Finley Peter Dunne
... hour. At first, still half dreaming, he mistakes her for an angel (he had already seen one in his sleep), but subsequently, growing suspicious, he repels her with a dignified disdain. For I must tell you that, whatever the guide-book may allege about the loftiness of her designs, the music gave her away. It reverted, in fact, to the motive of those passages which had already accompanied and illustrated the nuptial dance, the dance (as Herr Tiessen ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, July 1, 1914 • Various
... beautiful cascades from rock to rock, as the bottoms of the vallies happened to be broken into sudden descents by the course of the neighbouring hills. Some particular spots occurred in these vallies where the shade and fragrance of the contiguous woods, the loftiness of the overhanging rocks, and the transparency and frequent cascades of the streams, presented scenes of such elegance and dignity, as would with difficulty be rivalled in any other part of the globe. Here, perhaps, the simple productions of unassisted ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... see that all men were not fitted for the work. It needed a beefy person with fat legs and a large amount of inexplicable dignity, a regular God-knows-why loftiness. Truth, in those days, real talent was usually engaged in some form of rascality, barring the making of books and sermons. When one remembers the impenetrable dulness of the great mass of the people, the frivolity of the gentry, the arrogance and wickedness of the court, one ceases to wonder ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... completely satisfied with my life at that time; with its arduous study, and its growing fame, and Guy, with the delicious task of educating his supple intellect to my ideas, and penetrating his nature with my personality. Only the loftiness of my ideal saved it from making womanish shipwreck on this episode in its austere ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... the infamy of those ages been actual, those great men would have been wrong to complain. The man who thinks should accept simply and calmly the surroundings in which Providence has placed him. The splendour of human intelligence, the loftiness of genius, shine no less by contrast than by harmony with the age. The stoic and profound philosopher is not diminished by an external debasement. Virgil, Petrarch, Racine are great in their purple; Job is ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... on the other hand, there is a gain, for the expectation of total transformations and millenniums on earth is a very crude illusion, while the relation of the soul to nature is an open question in philosophy, and there will always be a great loftiness and poetic sincerity in the feeling that the soul is a stranger in this world and ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... my heart beating; until custom had changed the colour of the curtains, made the clock keep quiet, brought an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of flowering grasses, and distinctly reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling. Custom! that skilful but unhurrying manager who begins by torturing the mind for weeks on end with her provisional arrangements; whom the mind, for all that, is fortunate in discovering, for without the help of custom it would never ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy godmother in its own soul; it is to live in a nutshell and to count yourself the king of infinite ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... the mental lucidity, the spiritual loftiness of his changed mood, his visitor wished to take leave of him with this image in her memory; but just then a half-paralyzed Jewish graybeard made his appearance, and Heine's instant dismissal of him on her account made it difficult not to linger a ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... science of construction and large intelligence displayed in them, their strength, simplicity, solidity, and purpose, are their glory. Perhaps there is only one modern edifice—Palladio's Palazzo della Ragione at Vicenza—which approaches the dignity and loftiness of Roman architecture; and this it does because of its absolute freedom from ornament, the vastness of its design, and the durability of its material. The temple, called the Maison Carree, at Nismes, is also very perfect, and comprehended ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... equally costly. It takes but few teachers, but few years, and but little study, to make a farmer or a mechanic: the generative effort and—if I may venture to use such language—the period of social gestation are proportional to the loftiness of the capacity. But while the physician, the poet, the artist, and the savant produce but little, and that slowly, the productions of the farmer are much less uncertain, and do not require so long a time. Whatever be then the capacity of a man,—when this capacity is once ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... other means of support, prostitution becomes her only refuge, and the character is quickly depraved by circumstances over which the poor wretch has little power, unless she possesses an uncommon portion of sense and loftiness of spirit. Necessity never makes prostitution the business of men's lives; though numberless are the women who are thus rendered systematically vicious. This, however, arises, in a great degree, ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... household possessions, fully as much in England as in America, and we need not enumerate them. They are famous not so much for originality, as for their calm, spiritual, purifying messages. They are full of good-will, aspiration, trust, and real loftiness of tone. Indeed, Longfellow "loved to make clear his discipleship to him whose ministry was love, whose flock was all humanity, whose kingdom ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... his boys' education. Moreover, the state in which he found the place, with everything to repair, had no doubt induced the owner to be accommodating. Thus M. d'Espard had been able to go to some expense to settle himself suitably without being accused of extravagance. The loftiness of the rooms, the paneling, of which nothing survived but the frames, the decoration of the ceilings, all displayed the dignity which the prelacy stamped on whatever it attempted or created, and which artists discern to this day in the smallest relic ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... go hand-in-hand—when the broad objects of a luminous and enlarged policy lie before you like a chart, and you can calculate every step of the way without peril of being lost. Ah, let them still call loftiness of purpose and whiteness of soul the dreams of a theorist,—even if they be so, the Ideal in this case is better than the Practical. Meanwhile your position is not one to forfeit lightly. Before you is that throne in literature which ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... philosophers of this age may be mentioned Speroni, whose writings are distinguished by harmony, freedom, and eloquence of style; Tasso, whose dialogues unite loftiness of thought with elegance of style; Castiglione (1468-1529), whose "Cortigiano" is in equal estimation as a manual of elegance of manners and as a model of pure Italian; and Della Casa, whose "Galateo" is a complete system of politeness, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... order to close his doors with smiling loftiness, easy understanding of what he read it to mean. Astonished to find his offer of money silently and sternly ignored, Peden had grown contemptuously defiant. If it was a bid for him to raise the ante, Morgan was starting off on a lame leg, he said. Ten dollars a night was as much as the ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... thoughtful. He was a handsome man, turning forty. His face was strong, clean shaved, except a light mustache, with full sensual lips and an unusually fine brow. It was the brow of intellect—all in front. Behind and above there was no loftiness of ideality or of veneration. His smile was constant, and though slightly cold, was always approachable. His manner was decisive, but clever always, ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... on the gazer's mind, partake of none of that involuntary admiration and religious awe, which the sight of an old English cathedral, or the splendid churches of Italy, never fails to produce. One of its greatest defects arises from want of loftiness in the dome, the diameter of which is one hundred and fifteen, while its height does not exceed twenty feet. There is an immense number of columns, the spoils of various heathen temples. Of these, eight, of porphyry, are from that dedicated to the Sun by the Emperor Aurelian; ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... complaining. All within this house, until Harley's arrival, had been strange and saddening to Helen's timid and subdued spirits. Lady Lansmere had received her kindly, but with a certain restraint; and the loftiness of manner, common to the Countess with all but Harley, had awed and chilled the diffident orphan. Lady Lansmere's very interest in Harley's choice—her attempts to draw Helen out of her reserve—her watchful eyes whenever ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... animated, he brought together words, that were astonished to find themselves in each other's company, and created a language of his own, a language rich and impressive, that might sometimes infringe established rules, but compensated this happy fault, by giving more loftiness and vigour ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... of the purpose and significance of life and the universe, and yet the same satisfaction. It is certainly not less possible to disbelieve religiously than to believe religiously. This accord of mind, this emulation in freedom and loftiness of soul, this kindred sense of the awful depth of the enigma which the one believes to be answered, and the other suspects to be for ever unanswerable—here, and not in a degrading and hypocritical conformity, is the true gratification ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... Dunbar, he hailed the sun-burst with the cry of David: 'Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Like as the smoke vanisheth so shalt thou drive them away!' Even to common minds this familiarity with grand poetic imagery in prophet and apocalypse, gave a loftiness and ardor of expression that with all its tendency to exaggeration and bombast we may prefer to the slip-shod ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... stood the eternal mountains; like gigantic watchers, they kept their vigil over the placid scene beneath—the vigil of untold centuries. Cloudless, unsympathizing, changeless, they had no part in the busy drama of human experience their loftiness overlooked, and now they loomed with shadowy outline, through the sanctifying light, habitants alike of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... a mountain called Himalaya where all gems are found. It is the king of mountains. Its proud loftiness is everywhere the theme of song. The sun himself has not seen ...
— Twenty-two Goblins • Unknown
... time, extends. It is a stratified arch, whence you gaze down two hundred feet upon the flowing water; its sides are rock, nearly perpendicular. Popular conjecture reasonably deems it the fragmentary arch of an immense limestone cave; its loftiness imparts an aspect of lightness, although at the centre it is nearly fifty feet thick, and so massive is the whole that over it passes a public road, so that by keeping in the middle one might cross unaware of the marvel. To realize its height ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... tin box or a wooden bowl filled with these and duly watered will give a winter-garden to the smallest lodging. Sun and light are, as Mr. Toots says, of "no consequence" to the moss family. But if one be above such trifles as mosses, and with Young American loftiness aspire to full-grown trees, there is still plenty to do in the most ordinary woodlands. After a chapter of Mr. Ruskin upon Claude and Poussin and Turner, there is nothing like going to the original documents. In default of the National Gallery from London and the Pitti Palace from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... to be made the virtue and standing rule of this poem? Is the grande sophos of Persius, and the sublimity of Juvenal, to be circumscribed with the meanness of words and vulgarity of expression? If Horace refused the pains of numbers and the loftiness of figures are they bound to follow so ill a precedent? Let him walk afoot with his pad in his hand for his own pleasure, but let not them be accounted no poets who choose to mount and show their horsemanship. Holyday is not afraid to say that there was never such a fall as from ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... N. height, altitude, elevation; eminence, pitch; loftiness &c. adj.; sublimity. tallness &c. adj.; stature, procerity[obs3]; prominence &c. 250. colossus &c. (size) 192; giant, grenadier, giraffe, camelopard. mount, mountain; hill alto, butte [U.S.], monticle[obs3], fell, knap[obs3]; cape; headland, foreland[obs3]; promontory; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Honora's room; nor did the noble solitude of the place permit the thought of an excursion into the realms of any sort of dalliance. Moreover, though Karl's words might have led her to think of him as ready to play with a sentimental situation, the essential loftiness of his gaze forbade her to ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... were delivered with that stilted loftiness which dignitaries are wont to assume on great occasions. All the same, there were tears of joy in Jan's eyes and he had hard work to keep ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... that!" said his father. "When she is once your wife trust me to lower her loftiness, and make her as meek and humble as you could wish. Let us go in now. How wildly this storm is driving! I hope it may clear before the hour for the marriage arrives." Thus speaking, the father and son entered the hall and ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... for his own supper, as well as for his guests Noor ad Deen and the fair Persian walked up and down the garden, till at last they came to the pavilion of pictures. They stood awhile to admire its wonderful structure, size, and loftiness; and after taking a full view of it on every side, went up many steps of fine white marble to the hall-door, which ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 2 • Anon.
... repulsive as Taylor's 'million of dead dogs.' But on the truths is founded a religious and moral system which, however erroneous it may appear to some thinkers, is conspicuous for its vigour and loftiness. Edwards often shows himself a worthy successor of the great men who led the moral revolt of the Reformation. Amongst some very questionable metaphysics and much outworn—sometimes repulsive—superstition, he grasps the central ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... But no matter; into my grief will enter all that you saw of beauty and comfort, and into my joy there will pass all that was great in your sadness, if indeed my joy be on the same plane as your sadness. It behoves us, the first thing of all, to prepare in our soul a place of some loftiness, where this idea may be lodged; as the priests of ancient religions laid the mountain peak bare, and cleared it of thorn and of root for the fire to descend from heaven. There may come to us any day, from the depths of the planet ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... beginning of her reign to its end, with the single exception of Leicester, precisely the right men for the work she set them to do sprang in great measure from the noblest characteristic of her intellect. If in loftiness of aim the Queen's temper fell below many of the tempers of her time, in the breadth of its range, in the universality of its sympathy it stood far above them all. Elizabeth could talk poetry with Spenser and philosophy with Bruno; ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... claims can never be allowed. Then, besides, what folly to attempt to contend with me! Me, the strongest, bravest, and most terrible of the Greeks, and the special favorite of many deities." With this introduction Achilles went on to set forth the greatness of his pedigree, and the loftiness of his pretensions to superiority over all others in personal prowess and valor, in a manner very eloquent indeed, and in a style which it seems was very much admired in those days as evincing only a proper spirit and energy,—though in our times such a harangue would be very apt to be regarded as ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... attains its effect by the combination of numerous parts, each possessing an individual character of its own. In its loftiness, graceful outlines, and rich effect of light and shade, it speaks of noble aspirations, of freedom, of intellectual thought, of talent and skill, all generously given for a high purpose, the foundation of which was a ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... was very large, and of excessive loftiness. Flat, rectagonal pillars of a rose-tinted, variegated marble, rose from the floor almost flush with the walls, finishing off at the top with gilded capitals of a Corinthian design, which supported the ceiling. The ceiling ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... A certain loftiness, likewise, took possession of Mr Wegg; a condescending sense of being in request as an official expounder of mysteries. It did not move him to commercial greatness, but rather to littleness, insomuch that if it had been within the possibilities ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... near Mount Holly was born and lived John Woolman, a Quaker who became eminent throughout the English speaking world for the simplicity and loftiness of his religious thought as well as for his admirable style of expression. His "Journal," once greatly and even extravagantly admired, still finds readers. "Get the writings of John Woolman by heart," said Charles Lamb, ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... an immense success, and was greeted invariably by a specially selected choir chanting the Hymn of Hate. And yet the damage done was not very great from the material point of view. It was the mental jolt, the jar to their spiritual loftiness, that tickled the dear ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... 48 And it came to pass that the servant said unto his master: Is it not the loftiness of thy vineyard—have not the branches thereof overcome the roots which are good? And because the branches have overcome the roots thereof, behold they grew faster than the strength of the roots, taking strength unto themselves. Behold, I say, is not this the cause that ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... yet thrilled her with its loftiness. She thrilled to him suddenly, too. She saw that she was within the aura of a fiery spirit—a business man aflame. And she saw in a white light that the builders of things, even of perishable things, are as great as the weavers of immortal words—not so well remembered, of course, for posterity ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... such an Apology—to be woven into the plan of a treatise in defence of the Christian religion—seems beyond doubt. He had himself, according to the statement of his nephew, unfolded such a plan to his friends, in a lengthened conversation about the year 1657 or 1659. They were charmed with the loftiness of his design, and listened to his exposition of it for two or three hours with unabated interest. He was to commence with an analysis of human nature, and to advance from the contemplation of its mysteries, obscurities, and perplexities, to the consideration of the various ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... prayer and by vigil. The devil, seeing himself vanquished thus, took the shape of a young and lovely woman and imitated the most lascivious actions in order to beguile him, but Antony raising his thoughts towards heaven and considering the loftiness and excellence of the soul which is given to us, extinguished these burning coals by which the devil hoped to inflame his heart through this deception, and ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... with her, Sir Richard." Winter leant down, loosening the rug. His usual, undemonstrative speech took on a loftiness of tone. "Mrs. William Ormiston and her daughter have driven over with Mrs. Cathcart."—The butler was not without remembrance of that dinner on the day following Dickie's birth. Socially he had never considered Lady Calmady's sister-in-law quite up ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... into a sallow rigidity in which his murky eyes alone seemed to keep what was left of his previous high color. But what was more singular, in spite of his enforced calm, something of his habitual old-fashioned loftiness and oratorical exaltation appeared to be returning to him as he placed his hand on his inflated breast and ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... purpose, it rises over the land and over the sea; and, visible, at their homes, to three hundred thousand of the people of Massachusetts, it stands a memorial of the last, and a monitor to the present, and to all succeeding generations. I have spoken of the loftiness of its purpose. If it had been without any other design than the creation of a work of art, the granite of which it is composed would have slept in its native bed. It has a purpose, and that purpose gives it its character. That purpose enrobes it with dignity and ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... reprehension, to such of whom we receive alms, we know not well how to begin it, or in what words to dress it. Or if our zeal emboldens us to speak freely, our words have less effect upon them, because they treat us with an assuming air of loftiness, as if that which we received from them had made them our masters, and put them in possession of despising us. What I say, relates chiefly to a sort of persons, who are plunged in vice, who would willingly be credited with your friendship, and will endeavour ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... wildest guess Of Love's most innocent loftiness Had dared to dream of its own worth, Till Heaven's bold sun-gleam lit the earth. Christ's marriage with the Church is more, My Children, than a metaphor. The heaven of heavens is symbol'd where The torch of Psyche flash'd despair. But here I speak of heights, ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... much lusting for loftiness! There are so many convulsions of the ambitions! Show me that thou art not a ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... required in the higher spheres of statesmanship [are not] those of a hero or a saint. Passionate earnestness and self-devotion, complete concentration of every faculty on an unselfish aim, uncalculating daring, a delicacy of conscience and a loftiness of aim far exceeding those of the average of men, are here likely to prove rather a hindrance than an assistance. The politician deals very largely with the superficial and the commonplace; his art is in a great measure ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... that Vlassitch himself called heroic actions or noble impulses seemed to him a useless waste of force, unnecessary blank shots which consumed a great deal of powder. And Vlassitch's fanatical belief in the extraordinary loftiness and faultlessness of his own way of thinking struck him as naive and even morbid; and the fact that Vlassitch all his life had contrived to mix the trivial with the exalted, that he had made a stupid marriage and looked upon it as an act of heroism, ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... which the wonderful words he read there must ever have to a thoughtful mind. But the charm which the words had for his patient listener was something quite different from this. It was not the grandeur or sublimity of the style, or even the loftiness of the thought, that made her listen with such interest. She liked the simplest passages best. The simple narratives of the evangelists never lost their power to please her. Some word or promise, in which he saw little beauty, had often power to excite her ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... Locality loko. Loch lago. Lock sxlosi. Lock seruro. Lock (hair) buklo. Lock (of canal, etc.) kluzo. Lockjaw tetano. Locomotive lokomotivo. Locksmith seruristo. Lodge (small house) dometo. Lodge (dwell) logxi. Lodger luanto. Lodgings logxejo. Loft (corn) grenejo. Loftiness (character) nobleco. Lofty altega. Log sxtipo. Logarithm logaritmo. Logic logiko. Logogriph logogrifo. Loins lumboj. Loiter vagi. Lone, lonely sola. Loneliness soleco. Long longa. Long for sopiri pri. Longitude longo. Long time longatempe. Long ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... forked Skiddaw hovers in the distance. There is little mention of mountainous scenery in Mr. Wordsworth's poetry; but by internal evidence one might be almost sure that it is written in a mountainous country, from its bareness, its simplicity, its loftiness, and its depth! ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... awe-struck distance. But we need that the righteousness shall be loving, and that the love shall be righteous, in order that the one may be apprehended in its tenderest tenderness and the other may be adored in its loftiest loftiness. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... intelligence; not a band of hereditary lords, but a company of well-chosen leaders. Their value will depend not so much upon their technical knowledge and skill as upon the breadth of their mind, the clearness of their thought, the loftiness of their motives, the balance of their judgment, and the strength of their devotion to duty. For the cultivation of these things I say—pardon the apparent contradiction of what you said—I say the study of the ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... verified ideals were Mr. George Bradford, who always reminded me of a priest of the true type; and Miss Hoar, whose vestal soul, celebrating constant rites over the memory of her dead betrothed, made her the image of a nun. This welcome delicacy and loftiness of self-consecration my mother also observed in the ranks of the sometimes harshly criticised friars. At Fiesole, "A young monk unveiled the picture for us. He was very courteous, and had an air of unusual goodness and sincerity. He is one of ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... severe bleedings had, indeed, rendered his complexion perfectly colourless; but there was something in this, as well as in the height which the loss of hair gave his brow, which, added to the depth and loftiness of countenance that this long period of patience and resolution had impressed on his naturally fine features, without taking away that open candour that had first attracted Diane when he was a rosy lad. ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a bad bargain-driver. David's nature was of the sensitive and affectionate type that shrinks from a dispute, and gives way at once if an opponent touches his feelings. His loftiness of feeling, and the fact that the old toper had himself well in hand, put him still further at a disadvantage in a dispute about money matters with his own father, especially as he credited that father with ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... which he imbibed to drown his mental anguish acted like poison upon a weak and ailing body, now more than usually debilitated by insufficient food. In the winter of 1823, Clare found himself almost penniless; yet with inborn loftiness of mind, he hid the fact from his family, so as not to distress them. His wife and parents, therefore, lived as well as ever, while he, to save expenditure, got into the habit of absenting himself at meal-times, pretending to call upon friends and acquaintances. ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... an exacting conscience; and they believe that all mankind can be brought to labour in their own spirit. The world would be a much happier place if their state of mind could be made universal. But the great mass of men are of a humdrum sort, not born with any marked bent or any loftiness of character. Moreover, most of the world's work for the satisfaction of our primary wants must be of a humdrum sort, and often of a rough and coarse sort. There must be ditching and delving, sowing and reaping, hammering and sawing, and all the severe physical exertion which, however lightened ...
— Progress and History • Various
... imagination and mathematics together, to do anything nobler or stronger than that procession of window, with material of glass and stone—nor anything which shall look loftier, with so temperate and prudent measure of actual loftiness. ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... about the floor of the church a few minutes longer, though they found but little to interest them in what they saw except the vastness of the enclosed interior and the loftiness of the columns and walls. There were several colossal monuments standing here and there; but in general the church had a somewhat empty and naked appearance. The immense magnitude, however, of the spaces which the party traversed, and the lofty heights of the ...
— Rollo in London • Jacob Abbott
... her lips and burnt her gasping mouth, but there was no draught to allay it. And even so food failed of its office. Kindly hands brought to her, whose queenliness asserted itself to their souls with an innocent loftiness, careless of pomp or insignia, all delicate dates and exquisite viands; but neither the keen and stimulating odors of savory meat, the crisp whiteness of freshest bread, nor the slow-dropping gold of honeycomb could tempt her to eat. The simplest peasant's fare, in measure too ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... back in the beginning. One of your countrymen, Alexander, by the way; an American student whom she met in Paris, I believe. I dare say it's quite true that there's never been any one else." Mainhall vouched for her constancy with a loftiness that made Alexander smile, even while a kind of rapid excitement was tingling through him. Blinking up at the lights, Mainhall added in his luxurious, worldly way: "She's an elegant little person, and quite capable of an extravagant ...
— Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ • Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes
... other way. Let me stay." She said the last words, in spite of all her pride, appealingly. But still, there was a note of high pride in all this—in all she said and did, in her attitude and movement, in the tones of her voice, in the loftiness of her carriage and the steadfast look of her open, starlit eyes. Altogether, there was something so rarely lofty in herself and all that clad her that, face to face with it and with her, my feeble attempt at moral precaution ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... at the same time he could not conceal from himself the fact that Margaret's passion for the poetic cut, so to speak, both ways. He admired and loved the loftiness of her soul, but, on the other hand, it was a tough job having to live up to it. For Archibald was a very ordinary young man. They had tried to inoculate him with a love of poetry at school, but it had not taken. Until he was thirty ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... loftiness of Notre Dame, moreover, gives it a sublimity which would swallow up anything that might look gewgawy in its ornamentation, were we to consider it window by window, or pillar by pillar. It is an advantage of these vast edifices, rising ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that this code of the honest villager does not exclude in women either keen intelligence, a subtle mind, or loftiness of ideas. Their soul seems to have something of the humming-bird which flits in and out the thickest shrubs, without getting entangled in their branches, ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... the dignity of Bucolicks is sufficiently cleared, for as much as the Golden Age is to be preferred before the Heroick, so much Pastorals must excell Heroick Poems: yet this is so to be understood, that if we look upon the majesty and loftiness of Heroick Poems, it must be confest that they justly claim the preheminence; but if the unaffected neatness, elegant, graceful smartness of the expression, or the polite dress of a Poem be considered, then they fall short ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... of the Puritans. Not to mention that his works have never been condensed into fresh pith and modern portableness by any congenial Fawcett, they never did exhibit the pathetic importunity and Demosthenic fervor of Baxter. In his Platonic loftiness Howe always dwelt apart; and there have been no glorious dreams since Bunyan woke amidst the beatific vision. Like a soft valley, where every turn reveals a cascade or a castle, or at least a picturesque cottage, Flavel ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... after flash, for an hour and a half! Some day or other, perhaps you will see some of the glittering splinters that I gathered up. I have written under his print these lines, which are not only full as just as the original, but have not the tautology of loftiness and majesty: ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... comical sense of duty) he made me look him over to see if he were worthy of the occasion. He certainly was in splendid looks, his rich, profuse beard and hair were well arranged, and his fine bronzed face had not lost its grave expression when at rest, but had acquired a certain loftiness of countenance, which gave him more than ever the air, I was going to say, of a demigod; but he had now an expression no heathen Greek could give; it was more like that of the heads by Michael Angelo, where Christian yearning is added to ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... does not alone avail to explain the transcendent lowliness. You need the former motive to be joined with it, because it is only love which bends loftiness to service, and turns the consciousness of superiority into yearning to divest oneself of the superiorities that separate, and to emphasise the emotions ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... has broken into the sanctuary of knowledge, she will only be the bigger fool, he seems to say. As for the professor in the red robes, his easy, patronizing manner is indicative enough of his mental top-loftiness toward the woman question. You can almost hear him say as he strokes his ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... have heard the pride of Moab, (he is exceedingly proud,) his loftiness, and his arrogance, and his pride, and his haughtiness ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... appreciation and modest self-effacement which it would not be easy to match, and to which literary men who work together are not over-prone. Nothing else could bear more eloquent testimony to the loftiness of character and sincerity of purpose of ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... Studies altogether confined to the Stage, but had excursions into other kinds of Poetry, witness his Poem of the Rape of Lucrece, and that of Venus and Adonis; wherein, to give you a taste of the loftiness of his Style, we shall insert some few Lines of the beginning of ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... the internal arrangements of the ancient town beyond the fact of the closeness and loftiness of the houses. Externally Aradus depended on her possessions upon the mainland both for water and for food. The barren rock could grow nothing, and was moreover covered with houses. Such rainwater as fell on the island was carefully collected ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... their poor and invincible ancestors were not distinguished from the meanest of the soldiers, by the delicacy of their food, or the splendor of their apparel. But the modern nobles measure their rank and consequence according to the loftiness of their chariots, [37] and the weighty magnificence of their dress. Their long robes of silk and purple float in the wind; and as they are agitated, by art or accident, they occasionally discover the under garments, the rich tunics, embroidered ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... Paris, being narrow, are favourable for defence, and the loftiness of the houses, consisting of many stories, from which great annoyance might be given, secured them against nocturnal enterprises; and the night was spent in providing themselves with every sort of weapon they could make or procure: guns, swords, blacksmiths' hammers, carpenters' ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... those peculiarities of which it is so loudly accused in its solitary occupations—that loftiness of spirit, those quick jealousies, those excessive affections and aversions which view everything as it passes in its own ideal world, and rarely as it exists in the mediocrity of reality. If this irritability of genius be a malady which ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... said he with a fine loftiness, and in his heart he pondered what he would say and how he should say it; how he should stand, how move, and how look. His roving eye caught sight of his secretary. He remembered something—the cherished pose of being a man plunged ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... independent savage communities can not long exist within the limits of a civilized population. The progress of the latter has almost invariably terminated in the extinction of the former, especially of the tribes belonging to our portion of this hemisphere, among whom loftiness of sentiment and gallantry in action have been conspicuous. To civilize them, and even to prevent their extinction, it seems to be indispensable that their independence as communities should cease, and that the control of the United ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... of their grievances—thy loyal Cyprian pride—thy staunchness to the House of Lusignan—make thyself charming to these great Cyprian nobles; help the Queen to see the need of their conciliation, and stoop a little from thy loftiness to win it for them. To two such women, the impossible is ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... merry hours that sped so swiftly at the Literary Club. The great are never greater than in the hearts of their homes and the simplicities of their friendships. At this club the gods forgot their power and high beings laid aside their loftiness. In the midst we find the man they teased the man most welcome; that one that all affected to despise, each in his inmost heart unfeignedly respected. The man most laughed at was most loved. Oliver Goldsmith made ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... 'drasidae' (a mistake for 'druidae'). The study of nature and of the heavens is here attributed to the second class of seers (vates). The highest class, that of the Druids, were, he says, in accordance with the rule of Pythagoras, closely linked together in confraternities, and by acquiring a certain loftiness of mind from their investigations into things that were hidden and exalted, they despised human affairs and declared the soul immortal. We see here the view expressed that socially as well as intellectually the Druids lived according ...
— Celtic Religion - in Pre-Christian Times • Edward Anwyl
... of his friends, induced him occasionally to exercise the functions of the Christian ministry. Hence he sought and received ordination according to the usages of the Congregational churches, and in that relation stood in his lot. With what earnestness and pureness of motive, with what loftiness of purpose and fidelity in his high calling, and acceptance to those who heard him, I need not try to express. But I may say that it was not for want of solicitation that he did not exchange his professorship for places of considerable public importance in the other calling. It was his duty, ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... not yet formed into an isolating chain that refinement of mind and loftiness of character which your want of self-control may convert into misfortunes instead of blessings. Whenever, even now, a sense of total want of sympathy forces itself upon you, you console yourself ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... 17 And the loftiness of man shall be bowed down, and the haughtiness of men shall be made low; and the Lord alone shall be ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... of that profession. He had a singular force and solidity of thought, an admirable ardor of ambitious devotion to the service of poetry, a deep and burning sense at once of the duty implied and of the dignity inherent in his office; a vigor, opulence, and loftiness of phrase, remarkable even in that age of spiritual strength, wealth, and exaltation of thought and style; a robust eloquence, touched not unfrequently with flashes of fancy, and kindled at times into heat of imagination. The main fault of his style is one more commonly found in the prose ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... begins his history with later emperors. But the "Meditations" of the good emperor survive, like the writings of Epictetus, St. Augustine, and Thomas a Kempis: one of the few immortal books,—immortal, in this case, not for artistic excellence, like the writings of Thucydides and Tacitus, but for the loftiness of thoughts alone; so precious that the saints of the Middle Ages secretly preserved them as in accord with their own experiences. It is from these "Meditations" that we derive our best knowledge of Marcus Aurelius. They reveal the man,—and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... of Jesus were written from thirty to a hundred years after his death. In these records memory and imagination are intimately blended. On the one hand, the power and loftiness of his character and words stamped certain traits unmistakably and indelibly on the minds of his followers. But on the other hand, he was so suggestive and inspiring—there were among his disciples natures so susceptible, responsive, yet untrained, ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... indicate these qualities. What admirable characteristics does the whole selection exhibit? Simplicity, directness, and eloquence of language, noble emotion, loftiness of character, ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... for his obliging intention, but absolutely refused, with great loftiness of demeanour, to appropriate to his own use any part of the money which Pickle had gained, and seemed affronted at the other's entertaining a sentiment so unworthy of his character. He would not even accept, in the way of loan, such an addition to his ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... night. In this "Cincinnatus of the West" resided a liberal mind, broad as his sunny 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 the ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... honor as a spring of human conduct; treating patriotism and disinterestedness with an elaborate sneer, and receiving the suggestions of duty with a horse-laugh. There is a difference not easily to be mistaken between the lessening of men which is occasioned by the loftiness of the platform whence the observation is made, and that which is produced by the malignant envy of the observer; between the gloomy judicial ferocity of a Pope or a Tacitus, and the villain levity which revels in the contemplation of imputed ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... left hand clench tighter on his arm, and this spurred him on in his guilty purpose. Katharina herself had suggested to his mind the course he must pursue to attain his end. He went on to influence her jealousy by praising Paula's charm and loftiness, excusing himself in his own eyes by persuading himself that a lover was justified in inducing his betrothed to save his happiness and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... abstract terms; the splendid use of mean associations by Shakespeare; Milton's wise avoidance of mean associations, and of realism; nature of his similes and figures; his use of proper names; his epic catalogues; his personifications; loftiness of his perfected style; the popularity of Paradise Last; imitations, adaptations, and echoes of Milton's style during the 18th century; his enormous influence; the origin of "poetic diction"; Milton's phraseology stolen by Pope, ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... Heretofore, her song had disdained the ordinary topics of the youthful ballad-monger. She had uttered her apostrophes to the eagle, soaring through the black, billowy masses of the coming thunder-storm; to the lonely but lofty rock, lonely in its loftiness, which no foot travelled but her own; to the silent glooms of the forest—to the majesty of white-bearded and majestic trees. The dove and the zephyr now shared her song, and a deep sigh commonly closed it. She was changed from what she was. The affections ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... he onbosoms himse'f of that howl about Texas, we don't pay no speshul heed. It ain't three days, however, before it begins to break on us that for once Monte's right. Texas has certainly changed. Thar's a sooperior manner, what you'd call a loftiness, about him, which is hard to onderstand an' harder to put up with. It gets to be his habit constant to reemark in a wearied way, as he slops out his drinks, that we-all'll have to excoose him talkin' to us much, because he's got cares on his mind, besides bein' played out on account ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... that begirt with darkness my master's soul, and disturbed the sleep of his nights. You wanted to have Henry Howard in your power; and this crafty and hypocritical earl knew how to conceal his guilt so securely under the mask of virtue and loftiness of soul! But I knew him, and behind this mask I had seen his face distorted with passion and crime. I wanted to unmask him; but for this, it was necessary that I should deceive first him, and then for the hour even yourself. I knew that he burned with an ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... What, sir, would you call the phenomenon of to-day? What is the outstanding feature of modern life? The bankruptcy, the proven fatuity, of everything that is bound up under the name of Western civilization. Men are perceiving, I think, the baseness of mercantile and military ideals, the loftiness of those older ones. They will band together, the elect of every nation, in god-favoured regions round the Inland Sea, thee to lead serener lives. To those how have hitherto preached indecorous maxims of conduct they will say: 'What is all this ferocious nonsense ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... in relation to fugitive slaves, proposed that negotiations should be instituted to require Spain to surrender, as the States did then surrender, all fugitives escaped into their limits. Hamilton and Sedgwick from the North, and Madison from the South, made that report—men, the loftiness of whose purpose and genius might put to shame the puny efforts now made to disturb that which lies at the very foundation of the Government under ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... more injuries. He said: "You'll don' got money enough, Mr. Durgin, by gosh! to reduce my wages," and he started down the hill toward Whitwell's house with as great loftiness as could comport with a ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of Thomas Campbell, "The Pleasures of Hope" is one of the most finished epics in the language; it is alike faultless in respect of conception and versification. His lyrics are equally sustained in power of thought and loftiness of diction; they have been more frequently quoted than the poems of any other modern author, and are translated into various European languages. Few men evinced more jealousy in regard to their reputation; he was keenly sensitive to criticism, and ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... The loftiness of the Moor's nature, and his conscious pride were by the peculiar delivery of the second line, as perfectly unfolded as they could be by ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... Her natural loftiness of spirit breaks out where she is menaced and reviled by the King, as one whom his son has degraded himself by merely looking on; she bears the royal frown without quailing; but the moment he is gone, the immediate recollection of herself, and of her humble state, of her hapless ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... despatch of business. Work I must for the welfare of all, and the root of the matter is in effort." He controls a highly trained bureaucracy not unlike that of British India to-day, and his system of government is wonderfully effective so long as it is informed by his untiring energy and singular loftiness of purpose. ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... poets in which, like coarser people, they mistake the voluptuous for the beautiful; but in Mr. Arnold there is no trace of any such tendency; pure, without effort, he feels no enjoyment and sees no beauty in the atmosphere of the common passions; and in nobleness of purpose, in a certain loftiness of mind singularly tempered with modesty, he continually reminds us of his father. There is an absence, perhaps, of colour; it is natural that it should be so in the earlier poems of a writer who proposes aims such as these to himself; his poetry is addressed to the intellectual, ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... in your mind as an uncommonly large, well-conditioned wolf, whose habits and tastes had been so far civilized as to admit of his tolerating the companionship of man and subsisting on a mixed diet; but at the second glance, noting his color, and the shape of his head, with a certain loftiness of mien and suppleness of backbone—neither of which is ever to be found in the wolf—you would have pronounced him a little lion, shorn of his brindled mane. On further acquaintance, however—I cannot ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... moving steel, the floor plates under Solomon Rout's feet, the floors of iron grating above his head, the dusk and the gleams, uprose and sank continuously, with one accord, upon the harsh wash of the waves against the ship's side. The whole loftiness of the place, booming hollow to the great voice of the wind, swayed at the top like a tree, would go over bodily, as if borne down this way and that by ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... to do, without giving us the least strength wherewith to do it. It condemns us for not doing right, even when we have no power to do anything but what is wrong. It shows us a great ideal of goodness to which we ought to aspire, and discourages us by the very loftiness of the standard. It tells us in the same breath that we are sinners, and that we ought to be angels. It seems at the same time to elevate and degrade us. It elevates us by giving a great object to life, and making it ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... of his sense of form. We have just seen the essential cause of this insufficiency to lie in the nonesthetical attitude of his mind, and we have tried to show one of the roots of such an attitude in the very loftiness and earnestness of his purpose. Yet, there are others, for living nature is many-rooted as it is many-branched. It cannot be doubted that a certain refractoriness to form is a typical feature of the Basque character. The sense of form is closely in ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... French. The quasi-supernatural religious awe that reigned over Greek tragedy, French tragedy does not affect. You miss also in French tragedy the severe simplicity, the self-restraint, the statuesque repose, belonging to the Greek model. Loftiness, grandeur, a loftiness somewhat strained, a grandeur tending to be tumid, an heroic tone sustained at sacrifice of ease and nature—such is the element in which French tragedy lives and flourishes. You must grant your French tragedists this ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... into contact; by which I mean that Miss Churm, keeping an appointment or coming to make one on days when I had much work in hand, encountered her invidious rivals. The encounter was not on their part, for they noticed her no more than if she had been the housemaid; not from intentional loftiness, but simply because as yet, professionally, they didn't know how to fraternise, as I could imagine they would have liked—or at least that the Major would. They couldn't talk about the omnibus—they always walked; and they didn't know what else ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... presented itself on entering. A numerous group of young women, dressed almost entirely in white, with white caps and veils, were singing a sort of evening hymn— which I understood to be called the Chaplet of the Virgin. Their voices, unaccompanied by instrumental music, sounded sweetly from the loftiness of the roof; and every singer seemed to be touched with the deepest sense of devotion. They sang in an attitude with the body leaning forward, and the head gently inclined. The silence of the place—its distance ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... into my pocket-book. I don't exactly know why I did it at the time, but I felt desperate. I was taking a great interest in you. It seemed to me that if you did wrong I was doing wrong myself. It seemed to me that if by any chance your soul was smirched, or made unhappy, or blackened, or any of its loftiness and its god-like quality removed, my own soul was smirched too, my own nature lowered. But I thought no special harm of you, although I was troubled; and that night I learned for the first time that I was interested in you because I loved you, ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... forms lavished on every one, like the air and the sun in a word, respirable for the entire population, they were in unison, and they almost conversed. M. Fauchelevent talked well, and even with a certain loftiness of language—still he lacked something indescribable. M. Fauchelevent possessed something less and also something more, than a ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... prompted by a disinterested concern for our welfare; and this solicitude is not only pardonable, but may justly be demanded from those who choose us for their companions. This state of things was more slow to arrive at on this occasion than on most others, on account of the gravity and loftiness ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... time is more completely mastered by sentiment. In the very circumstance of being free from such conventions as the cameo relief, the picturesque costume details, the goldsmith's work characteristic of the Renaissance, now so much in vogue, M. Rodin's things acquire a certain largeness and loftiness as well as simplicity and sincerity of sentiment. The same model posed for the "Saint Jean" that posed for a dozen things turned out of the academic studios, but compared with the result in the latter cases, that in the former is even more remarkable for sentiment than ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... "heavy, hanging lip, vast mouth, and monstrously protruding lower jaw. His complexion was fair, his hair light and thin, his beard yellow, short, and pointed. He had the aspect of a Fleming, but the loftiness of a Spaniard. His demeanor in public was silent, almost sepulchral. He looked habitually on the ground when he conversed, was chary of speech, embarrassed, and even suffering in manner." Such is the new king as we see him; and Motley ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... exposed to the shafts of calumny and scorn because of your fidelity to your God; encountering, it may be, the coldness and estrangement of those dear to you, who can not, perhaps, sympathize in the holiness of your walk and the loftiness of your aims, "consider Him that endured such contradiction of sinners against Himself, lest ye be weary and faint in your minds!" What is your "contradiction" to His? Soon your cross, whatever it be, will have an end. "The seat of the scorner" has no place in yonder glorious heaven, ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... tinged with pessimism, he is nevertheless less severe than his great predecessors Sophocles and AEschylus, surpassing them in tenderness and artistic expression, but falling short of them in strength and loftiness of dramatic conception; Sophocles, it is said, represented men as they ought to be, and Euripides as they are; he has been called the Sophist ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... me, but all that vehemence and loftiness of spirit which had so lately characterized his features, were flown. Fallen muscles, a forehead contracted into folds, eyes dim with unbidden drops, and a ruefulness of aspect which no words can describe, were ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... valiant and reliable. While the masterly ability and soldierly vigor and decision of General Johnson must excite the profoundest admiration, those who remember him may be pardoned for dwelling quite as much upon the grandeur, the loftiness, the heroism of his character. In this we may look in vain for his peer, except to the great Virginian, his immortal comrade, the man whom every former Southern soldier must feel it is his religious duty to venerate. Through ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... from childhood, and it was a severe blow to him when she shunned the amusements they had so long shared together. He admired indeed the excellency of her second life, the beauty of her aspirations, the loftiness of her aims, but he felt deeply the want of that unity in hope and purpose which had existed between them. He felt, at times, indignant, as if something had been taken from himself. Therefore, he strove by many a device to lure her into the path he was treading. ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... receive the bequest, then the whole hundred million francs shall definitely, all later claims notwithstanding, accrue to my friend Don Luis Perenna. I know him well enough to feel assured that he will employ this fortune in a manner which shall accord with the loftiness of his schemes and the greatness of the plans which he described to me so enthusiastically in our ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... than Christianity, as presented in the life and teachings of its Founder." And again he says, "How much soever spiritual culture may advance, the natural sciences broaden and deepen, and the human mind enlarge, the world will never get beyond the loftiness and moral culture of Christianity as it shines and glistens in ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... Knight of the Rueful Countenance, sends by me to say may it please your highness to give him leave that, with your permission, approbation, and consent, he may come and carry out his wishes, which are, as he says and I believe, to serve your exalted loftiness and beauty; and if you give it, your ladyship will do a thing which will redound to your honour, and he will receive a most ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... free from any superstitious belief in any one procedure as a sure specific which he follows always in a monotonous bondage. This can only happen when he is capable of the highest method. The teacher has arrived at the highest point of ability in teaching when he can make use of all means, from the loftiness of solemn seriousness, through smooth statement, to the play of jest—yes, even to the incentive of ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... that actually created a furious storm of applause is of the calmest character that can be conceived; always powerful, it leaves the all-controlling sensation of loftiness and purity." "The union of decoration, poetry, music and dramatic representation in a wonderfully beautiful picture, that with impressive eloquence points to the new testament—a picture full of peace and mild, conciliatory ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... appeals made to him as genuine expressions of humanitarianism and as manifestations of the opinion of mankind concerning the part that the United States ought to take in the reconstruction of the world. His high-mindedness and loftiness of thought blinded him to the sordidness of purpose which appears to have induced the general acquiescence in his desired system of mandates, and the same qualities of mind caused him to listen sympathetically to proposals, the acceptance of which would ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... found, deep down in your love—this it is that will help you to fashion your life. If you have been deceived, it is not the deception that matters, but the forgiveness whereto it leads, and the loftiness, wisdom, completeness of this forgiveness—by these shall your life be steered to destiny's haven of brightness and peace; by these shall your eyes see more clearly.... Let us always remember that nothing ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... his best one must turn to the Confessions and to the other papers which describe his life, particularly those which recount his marvellous dreams. In these papers we find the passages where De Quincey's passion rises to the heights which few other writers have ever reached in prose, a loftiness and grandeur which is technically denominated as "sublime." In his Essay on Style, published in Blackwood's, 1840, he deprecates the usual indifference to form, on the part of English writers, "the tendency of the national mind to value the matter of a book not only as paramount to the manner, ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... distinguished scholar with a retentive memory and a wide knowledge of literature and art. His private life was exemplary, and he impressed his contemporaries with the loftiness of his character. His manner was reserved, and as a speaker he was weighty rather than eloquent. In public life he was remarkable for his generosity to his political opponents, and for his sense of justice and honesty. He did not, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... thought and on which he had not something remarkable to say."[22] In consultations upon public affairs, when the most important things hung in peril, his contemporaries speak with amazement of the gigantic strength of his mind, the unexampled acuteness of his intellect, the breadth and loftiness ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... removed; and the first phrase she read was Fuji no yama (the Mountain of Fuji), which she interpreted as signifying loftiness of rank. And then she met with such phrases ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... considered,' he replied, with cold loftiness that would have silenced any one, not of the same ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... gracious and altogether charming this woman can be! Again I can only compare her to the sun's rays, so warm and comfortable she makes one feel. There is a nobleness and a loftiness about her which causes even ordinary things she says to sound like fine sentiments. No wonder Mr. ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... indeed Poland's downfall. The Trio in A flat, with its kaleidoscopic modulations, produces an impression of vague unrest and suppressed sorrow. There is loftiness of spirit ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... talking about, who is a cross between a rich farmer and a poor gentleman, would go into the lodging-house business." I couldn't help agreeing with Jone, and I didn't like it a bit. The gentleman hadn't said anything or done anything that was out of the way, but there was a benignant loftiness about him which grated on the ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... himself up with a sudden loftiness of look and gesture, which, though prompted but by offended vanity, improved the expression of the countenance, and restored to it much of its earlier character. Mrs. Crane gazed on him, startled into admiration, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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