"Sublime" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Faithful, ever faithful, in joy and in sorrow, in life and in death"—"Penir, penir-asha, sartir nu cohta, lebeck nu tanim." It is the last formula,—the ceremony is accomplished. This may seem very simple and ridiculous; to me it appeared almost sublime. Opinions ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... talked sheer commonplace. He had ridden to the spur of the mountains, and had put up the mare, and groomed and fed her, not permitting another hand to touch her: all very well, and his praises of the mare likewise, but he had not a syllable for the sublime of the mountains. He might have careered over midland flats for any susceptibility that he betrayed to the grandeur of the scenery she loved. Ultimately she fancied the miniature had been overlooked in his hurry to dress, and that he was now merely excited by his lively gallop to a certain ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the reprobate, they also would be saved.(214) Why, then, is it not bestowed? Why this fearful limitation of the divine mercy? Can the justice of God be manifested only at the expense of his mercy, and his mercy only at the expense of his justice? Or, is the everlasting mercy of God, that sublime attribute which constitutes the excellency and glory of his moral nature, so limited and straitened on all sides, that it merely selects here and there an object of its favour, while it leaves thousands and millions, equally within its reach, exposed to the eternal ravages of the spoiler? If so, ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... never offered grander opportunity to the nations for leadership—not for leadership in military splendor, but for leadership in the sublime paths of peace. For the United States this call means not only opportunity but even obligation. Already this country has performed well her duty in fostering international arbitration. She has been a party to half of the cases where disputes between nations ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... knew how he should most please; and whether his practice is more agreeable to nature, or whether his example has prejudiced the nation, we still find that on our stage something must be done as well as said, and inactive declamation is very coldly heard, however musical or elegant, passionate or sublime. ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... in words equally simple and sublime: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." We have here, first, the idea of God. The word God has in the Bible a definite meaning. It does not stand for an abstraction, for mere force, for law or ordered sequence. God is a spirit, and as we are spirits, ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... ancient or modern, the sacred Scriptures afford us the highest instances of the sublime. The descriptions of the Deity, in them, are wonderfully noble; both from the grandeur of the object, and the manner of representing ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the whole of my reading. The collection of songs was my companion, day and night. I pored over them driving my cart, or walking to labour, song by song, verse by verse; carefully noting the true, tender, or sublime, from affectation and fustian. I am convinced I owe to this practice much of my critic-craft, ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... alluring than any I see in that thoroughfare. But then again vaster thoughts visit me, remote metaphysical musings; those faces like moons I imagined all wane as moons wane, the passers-by vanish; and immortal Reason, disdaining the daymoth she dwells with, turns away to her crystalline sphere of sublime contemplation. I am lost out of time, I walk on alone in a ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... of these, the most refined, sublime, extensive, and astonishing constitution of policy, that ever was conceived by the mind of man, was framed by the Romish clergy for the aggrandisement of their own order. All the epithets I have here given ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... all very charming, however," she said, "if you only had not such a reprehensible way of jumping from the sublime to the ridiculous, like a ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... had to treat a subject worthy of himself, his style, habitually nervous and concise, rose to the level of his grand conceptions: it became majestic and sublime. ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... enough to believe in it and in its complete disinterestedness; for what return could she ever make for all he had done? And now, was this a crowning service, an offer of brotherly kindness which was almost sublime, or—what was it? She looked at him as if she could see into his soul. "Oh," she said, "I know your generosity. I feel as if I could not trust you when you say it doesn't matter. How could I ever forgive myself if you were ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... the dances on the lawn, to the suppers under the trees; he who used to talk with her as she sat near the lamp in the rear of the shop on the long winter evenings; he who shared her crust of bread moistened with the sweat of her brow, and her love at once sublime and poor; he, that same man, after having abandoned her, finds her after a night of orgie, pale and leaden, forever lost, with hunger on her lips ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... noble lyric poems ever written by an English pen. If our poetasters talk with Wordsworth of the dignity and pathos of the commonest human things, they will find them there in perfection; if they talk about the cravings of the new time, they will find them there. If they want the truly sublime and the awful, they will find them there also. But they will find none of their own favourite concetti; hardly even a metaphor; no taint of this new poetic diction into which we have now fallen, after all our abuse of the far more manly and sincere ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... For with that sublime confidence in him begotten of her love, she never for a moment doubted which of the two alternatives he would choose, when once they were placed before him. He would sacrifice himself for her; he would prefer to die a thousand deaths so long as ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... things. Sensible of the importance of the object, I felt it my duty to leave no proper means unemployed to acquire for our flag the same privileges that are enjoyed by the principal powers of Europe. Commissioners were consequently appointed to open a negotiation with the Sublime Porte. Not long after the member of the commission who went directly from the United States had sailed, the account of the treaty of Adrianople, by which one of the objects in view was supposed to be secured, reached this country. The Black Sea was understood to be opened to us. Under the supposition ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Jackson • Andrew Jackson
... painter of a sublime picture, nor the writer of an heroic poem, should introduce any trivial circumstances that are likely to draw the attention from the principal figures. Such compositions should form one great whole: minute ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... The incomprehensible and sublime nature of God surpasses all the creatures in heaven and earth, for whatever the creature conceives is creature. But God is above every creature, and within and without every creature, and all created comprehension is too strait to comprehend Him. In order that the creature may conceive ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... do, to cook his own rations; and fancy through all this, the army preserving their courage and patience, as they have done, and being now eager (the old ones as well as the young ones) to be led into the trenches. There was something sublime in the spectacle." ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... blessing which you have so long had. Your gratitude to God, the author of every good and perfect gift, ought to be in proportion to your grief. It is to be remembered, also, that he was not cut down prematurely in the midst of his days, but had passed the period which Moses, the man of God, in his sublime and pathetic prayer (Psalm xc.) considers as the ordinary boundary of human life, and retained all his powers and faculties to the last; and that during this long life he had not been absent from his family, at least not from Lady Robinson (if I am not ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... leafless pine-wood — for who can call its foliage leaves? — with the chilly wind of a northern spring morning blowing through it with a wailing noise of waters; and beneath a weird fir-tree, lofty, gaunt, and huge, with bare goblin arms, contorted sweepily, in a strange mingling of the sublime and the grotesque — beneath this fir-tree, Margaret sitting on one of its twisted roots, the very image of peace, with a face that seemed stilled by the expected approach of a sacred and unknown gladness; a face that would blossom the more gloriously because its joy ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... life, feeds every green and fruitful thing upon the bosom of the earth. This movement of the oceans upon the continents through the illimitable channels of the sky is, in some ways, the most mysterious and the most sublime of those miracles which each day testify to the presence and majesty of that Spirit behind Nature of whom the greatest of modern ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... sit at your feet. A man who avows his weakness with your good faith, who rebuilds his fortune from the same motive that made him wreck it, for love's sake, for the sake of an irresistible passion, oh, Paul, that man is sublime! Therefore, fear nothing; go on, through all obstacles, not doubting your Natalie—for that would be doubting yourself. Poor darling, you mean to live in me? And I shall ever be in you. I shall not be here; I shall be wherever you ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... support in life and in death. The later prophets advance further, as Isaiah: "Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake, and sing, ye that dwell in the dust: for thy dew is as the dew of herbs. The earth also shall cast out her dead." This, taken with the sublime spectacle of Hades in the fourteenth chapter, seems a forecast of the future, but Jesus instructed Mary and her sister and Lazarus; and Martha without hesitation spoke of the resurrection at the last day as a familiar doctrine, far in advance ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... one in the country knew that the Man from Bitter Creek was holding down the Chisum place that season, and the action was nothing more nor less than a direct challenge. It did not matter whether sublime ignorance or sublime daring prompted it; it was defiance in either case. There was only one thing for Gallagher to do—get the killing over in quick time. Moreover he must attend to the affair by himself—for just as surely as he took others to help, his prestige was going to be ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... latter continually reminds one of the "pomp and circumstance of glorious war." It was, indeed, a perpetual contest for victory, or an arbitrary or despotic exaction of homage to his superior talents. It was strong, acute, prompt, splendid, and vociferous; as loud, stormy, and sublime as those winds which he represents as shaking the Hebrides, and rocking the old castle which frowned ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... and unimaginative as he was he could not help reflecting that the same house had contained two women, one of whom, justly dishonored, had left it poor with 1,500,000. francs under her cloak, while the other, unjustly stricken, but sublime in her misfortune, was yet rich with a few deniers. This parallel disturbed his usual politeness, the philosophy he witnessed appalled him, he muttered a few words of ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... don't run this far. But I thought yours did. Why don't you fire 'em bodily; tell 'em their number is 23—skiddoo! Aren't you the Sublime Porte—the court of ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... or malachite, every petal a precious stone; swelling domes and rose-pink minarets of the Jumna Musjid rising superbly from a network of narrow streets and shabby toppling houses. For, in India, the sordid and stately rub shoulders with sublime disregard for effect. In the cool aloofness of tombs and temples, or among crumbling fragments of them on the plain, or away beyond the battered Kashmir Gate—ground sacred to heroic memories—he could wander at will for hours, isolated in body ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... debauch thee only once, And thou'rt the greatest wanton in the world! O cousin Lanciotto—ho, ho, ho! [Laughing.] Can a man die of laughter? Here we sat; Mistress Francesca so demure and calm; Paolo grand, poetical, sublime!— Eh! what is this? Paolo's dagger? Good! Here is more proof, sweet cousin Broken-back. "In thoughts of love, we'll lay our weapons by!" [Mimicking PAOLO.] That's very pretty! Here's its counterpart: In thoughts ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... Hanique, as we called him. I always excite the wonder of the realists when I tell them that I have seen with my own eyes, a type which, owing to their scanty knowledge of human society, has never come beneath their notice, viz., the sublime conception of a hall-porter who has reached the most transcendent limits of speculation. Hanique in his humble lodge was almost as great a man as M. Pinault. Those who aimed at saintliness of life consulted him and ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... thought, the speeches Lincoln made separately at other places afforded him a freer opportunity. A quotation from his language on one of these occasions is therefore here added, as a better illustration of his style and logic, where his sublime theme carried him into one of his more ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... with glee. It was really too good to be true! Carpenter, in the course of his talks with strikers, had learned where their soup-kitchen was located, the relief-headquarters where their families were being fed; and he now had the sublime audacity to take the picture magnate to ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... moments sweep Down, down the eternal gulf of Time; And we, like gilded bubbles, keep Our course amid their waves sublime, Till, mingled with the foam and spray, We flash our lives of joy away; Or, drifting on through Sorrow's shades, Sink as ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... in light, Sublime above the starry height, Whose arms thine own creator pressed, A Suckling at thy sacred breast. Through the dear Blossom of thy womb, Thou changest hapless Eva's doom; Through thee to contrite souls is given An opening to their home in heaven. ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... rise to that height. I do not believe it. I believe we can rise to it. Every ordinary unselfish act is a proof of the capacity to rise to it; and the mother's denial of all care for her own happiness, if she can but make her child happy, is a sublime anticipation. It may be called an instinct, but in the course of time it will be possible to develop a wider instinct in us, so that our love for the truth shall be even maternally ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... waves across the whole surface of the Heavens; and there was a curious stillness everywhere, as though earth itself were conscious of a sudden and intense awe. Standing on the dizzy edge of her favourite point of vantage, Mary Deane gazed upon the sublime spectacle with eyes so passionately tender in their far-away expression, that, to Angus Reay, who watched those eyes with much more rapt admiration than he bestowed upon the splendour of the sunset, they looked like the eyes ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... sang at their birth, In the first beginnings of time. What voice of dolour or of mirth At their last funeral made moan,— Ashes to ashes—earth to earth, And stone to stone,— Chanting the liturgy sublime. ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... burgrave^; laird &c (proprietor) 779; collector, commissioner, deputy commissioner, woon^. the authorities, the powers that be, the government; staff, etat major [Fr.], aga^, official, man in office, person in authority; sircar^, sirkar^, Sublime Porte. [Military authorities] marshal, field marshal, marechal^; general, generalissimo; commander in chief, seraskier^, hetman^; lieutenant general, major general; colonel, lieutenant colonel, major, captain, centurion, skipper, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... India has always felt that the way of knowledge or Jnana was the true way. The favourite thesis of the Brahmans was that a man should devote his youth to study, his maturity to the duties and ceremonies of a householder, and his age to more sublime speculations. But at all periods the idea that it was possible to know God and the universe was allied to the idea that all ceremonies as well as all worldly effort and indeed all active morality are superfluous[169]. All alike are unessential and trivial, ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... of his happiest efforts, and given in this volume a tale which will stand the test of the most rigid criticism, and be read by all lovers of literature that embodies the true, the thrilling, the powerful, and the sublime. In fact, we would have thought it impossible to produce such a tale of the Republic in these latter days; but here we have it—Sergius Cataline, Cethegus, Cassius, and the rest of that dark band of conspirators, are here displayed in their true portraits. Those who have read ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... concerned, which has so continuously elicited admiration from these saturnine pamphlets! A mountain, to be sure, by the mere sentiment of physical magnitude which it conveys, does impress us with a sense of the sublime—but no man is impressed after this fashion by the material grandeur of even "The Columbiad." Even the Quarterlies have not instructed us to be so impressed by it. As yet, they have not insisted on our estimating Lamartine by the cubic foot, or Pollock by the pound—but ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... inaugurated. To compare small things to great—as we may, for the same laws run all through Nature and Society—this scheme corresponds to the ancient Ptolomaean system of astronomy, with its painfully elaborate epicycles, which preceded and led on to the sublime simplicity of the Copernican system. We need not anticipate that the transitional stage of national insurance will endure as long as the ancient astronomy. Professor Moore estimated that it would lead to a completely national medical service in twenty-five years, and since the introduction ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... his carriage the sublime Sir Richard Blackmore used to rhyme, And, if the wits don't do him wrong, 'Twixt death and epics passed his time, Scribbling and killing all day long; Like Phoebus in his car at ease, Now warbling forth a lofty song, Now murdering the ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... was singularly gifted with these qualifications, particularly with that sublime possession of the mind, which constitutes the essence of ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... the sublime politeness of an ancient people. A bulky, blue-chinned man in white clothes, his name red-lettered across his lower shirtfront, spluttering from under a green-lined umbrella almost tearful appeals to be introduced to the Unintroducible; naming loudly the Unnameable; dancing, as ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... distinguished in the refined arts of fighting and whiskey-drinking,) when they call for a rope to put about the neck of every man not sufficiently stupid to acknowledge himself a secessionist. We imagine ourselves the gigantic and sublime theatre of chivalry, as we have a right to do; we raise up heroes of war and statesmanship, compared with whom your Napoleons, Mirabeaus, and Marats-yes, even your much-abused Roman orators and Athenian philosophers, sink into mere insignificance. Nor are we bad imitators of that art displayed ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... mouses among the sublime creations of the Old Masters, trying to acquire the elegant proficiency in art-knowledge, which he has a groping sort of comprehension is a proper thing for a traveled man to be able to display. But what is the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... objections with so much force as almost to make them his own, would have shown a more considerate and not less reasonable philosophy, if they had considered the religion of Moses with reference to the age in which it was promulgated; if they had done justice to its sublime as well as its more imperfect views of the divine nature; the humane and civilizing provisions of the Hebrew law, as well as those adapted for an infant and barbarous people. See Hist of Jews, i. 36, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... sturdy Roundhead sentinel on guard before the gates of the Constitution. Holding in profound contempt what he termed spread-eagle oratory, his only gesticulations were up-and- down motions of his arm, as if he were beating out with sledge- hammers his forcible ideas. His peroration was sublime, and every loyal American heart has since echoed the last words, "Liberty and ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... in his tone. "As Casimir suggests, I am a bad philosopher. I do not pretend to more than the ordinary attributes of an ordinary man; it is fortunate, if I may be permitted to say so, that the rest of the word's inhabitants are very like me, for if everyone reached to the sublime heights of science and knowledge that you ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... 'Midst tissues of Cashmere, The Soul sublime reposes, And knows not hope nor fear; Here all she sees her own is, And musical her moan is, O'er Caxtons and Bodonis, ...
— Rhymes a la Mode • Andrew Lang
... of the Duke of Wellington, as indeed it was a far finer subject. May I inquire the name of the writer? Mr. Everett's speech also is superb, and how very much I prefer the Marshfield funeral in its sublime simplicity to the tawdry pageantry here! I have had fifty letters from persons who saw the funeral in St. Paul's, and seen as many who saw that or the procession, and it is strange that the papers have omitted alike the great successes and the great failures. My young neighbor, a captain in the ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... has neither the courage nor the skill necessary to weather it. Eloquence in a high degree, knowledge in matters of account, and order, are distinguishing traits in his character. Ambition is his first passion, virtue his second. He has not discovered that sublime truth, that a bold, unequivocal virtue is the best handmaid even to ambition, and would carry him further, in the end, than the temporizing, wavering policy he pursues. His judgment is not of the first order, scarcely even of the second; his resolution frail; and upon the whole, it is ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... crowd the platform, some standing moveless as the pillars beside them, their long pipe in their hand—noble specimens of humanity, if intellect breathed within: some reclining against the rails, others seated in groups, or solitary as if buried in "lonely thoughts sublime"; while the rush of the falling waters is sweeter music than that of the pipe and the guitar, that faintly strive to be heard. The cataract in the plate is a very fine one; on its foam the moonlight was lovely: we passed many an hour ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... last, we have obtained some conception of the sublime scale on which the stellar universe is constructed. Yet even these plates cannot represent all the stars that the heavens contain. We have every reason for knowing that with larger telescopes, with more sensitive plates, with more prolonged exposures, ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... we stood on the bluff, dismounted, to gaze on the flying flames—which appeared in the distance like a huge fiery snake of some miles in length, writhing in torture—my wonder increased. The spectacle was fearful and sublime, and the conflagration nearest to us resembled the breakers of the deep that dash on a rocky shore, only formed of fire, roaring and destroying, preceded by thick clouds of smoke. Before then, I had been accustomed to sights and scenes of peril, and had witnessed the burning of short ...
— History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians • George Mogridge
... that there are only two ways in which a father can lose his son. One is by talking too much, the other's by not talking enough. The old trouble of the devil and the deep, blue sea; the frying-pan and the fire. Come, we've been bandying the sublime; let's get down to the level of stomachs and smile. The greatest thing about man is the range of ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... useless to concentrate interest in the countenances, in a picture of enormous size, ill lighted; and he preferred giving full play to the powers of line-grouping, for which he could have found no nobler field. Let us not by unwise comparison mingle with our admiration of these two sublime works any sense of weakness in the naivete of the one, or of coldness in the science of the other. Each painter has his own sufficient dominion, and he who complains of the want of knowledge in Orcagna, or of the display of it ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... is the second; though I really don't know whether he is not quite as great in his way as Wellington, upon my honour. The last pair of trousers he made for Lawless were something sublime, too good for this wicked world, ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... and convoluted sides almost entirely surround it, and rising above their floor-like tops, and in fine contrast with their sombre brown tints, appear the blue outlines of the distant mountains. Pike's Peak, fifty miles to the north, and the Spanish Peaks, the Wawatoyas, ninety to the south, are sublime objects of which the eye never grows weary; while the Sierra Mojadas bank up the western horizon with a frowning mountain-wall. A notch in the distant range, forty miles to the north-west, indicates the place where the Arkansas River breaks through the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... plenty. But most of the group that bade them good-by thought it a foolish enterprise and spoke lightly of Samson when they were gone. America has undervalued the brave souls who went west in wagons, without whose sublime courage and endurance the plains would still be an unplowed wilderness. Often we hear them set down as seedy, shiftless dreamers who could not make a living at home. They were mostly the best blood of the world and the noblest of God's ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... that by such comparatively small mouthfuls he could keep up the vitality diffused through so broad, baronial, and superb a person. But, doubtless, this noble savage fed strong and drank deep of the abounding element of air; and through his dilated nostrils snuffed in the sublime life of the worlds. Not by beef or by bread, are giants made or nourished. But Queequeg, he had a mortal, barbaric smack of the lip in eating —an ugly sound enough —so much so, that the trembling Dough-Boy almost looked to see whether any marks ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... not raise his eyes towards Heaven, nor stir from the spot, where he seemed nailed to the floor, his eye intently fixed upon the king his brother. He reproached him with a sublime silence for all misfortunes past, all tortures to come. Against this language of the soul the king felt he had no power; he cast down his eyes, dragging away precipitately his brother and sister, forgetting his mother, sitting motionless ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... writers of the eighteenth century with no notice of a book which, seldom now read, is nevertheless perhaps the most solid piece of work that modern Europe had as yet to show in any branch of literary criticism. This is Burke's treatise On the Sublime and the Beautiful. Few will now be prepared to accept the material basis which Burke finds for the ideas of the imagination. [Footnote: Burke traces our ideas of the sublime to the sense of physical pain; our ideas of the beautiful to that of ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... Parthenon while the sun threw his latest, brightest ray over that hallowed spot: but never did I feel as among the ruins of Girgenti. On all these former scenes, the combination of nature and art has fixed the impress of mere beauty; here their union is sublime. ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... voices, dog-whistles, trumpets. Each time it is something more and more absurd, so that at last we are overcome with uncontrollable fits of laughter. Last of all, an aged Japanese optician, who assumes a most knowing air, a look of sublime wisdom, goes off to forage in his back shop, and brings to light a steam fog-horn, a relict from ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... fierceness in his ire— A maddened majesty that leaps Along his veins in blood of fire, Until the path his vision sweeps Spins out behind him like a thread Unraveled from the reel of time, As, wheeling on his course sublime, The ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... he admitted some few to his friendship for the agreeableness of their natures, and their undoubted affection to him, that his familiarity and friendship for the most part was with men of the most eminent and sublime parts, and of untouched reputation in point of integrity; and such had a title ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... how the idea and recollection of Uncle Brian had permeated through every branch of the Harper family. Almost every family has some such personage, mythical, sublime, exciting the wonder and hero-worship of all the young people. Little Brian opened wide his large grey eyes at the ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... family, passed on the years of Josephine's infancy. She had every thing which could be procured. Beloved by her parents, by her two sisters, worshipped by her servants and slaves, she lived amid a beautiful, splendid, and sublime nature, in the very midst of wealth and affluence. Her father, casting away all ambition, was satisfied to cultivate his wide and immense domains, and to remain among his one hundred and fifty slaves as master and ruler, to whom unconditional and cheerful ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... about the task of finding a colleague to share the risks and glory of my enterprise. I did not conceal from myself that upon him would devolve a role far more difficult and complicated than my own. From me, the subject of the proposed experiment, was only required sublime heroism for the sacrifice. But the man who should perform the operation must possess moral courage to face public criticism, perhaps opprobrium; a trained intellect, already habituated to discussion of the problem in question, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... be," she declared. "You people of temperament, of genius, of aspirations, are never quite satisfied, you cannot be. You are always trying, always seeking the higher attainment. Achievements of the past, though to the rest of us wonderful and sublime, are to you—as you say, 'rot.' That is it, is it not?" Albert said he guessed it was, and wandered away, seeking seclusion and solitude. When the affair broke up he found Madeline and Blanchard still enjoying each other's ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... more empirical arts, music is given as an example; this, although affirmed to be necessary to human life, is depreciated. Music is regarded from a point of view entirely opposite to that of the Republic, not as a sublime science, coordinate with astronomy, but as full of doubt and conjecture. According to the standard of accuracy which is here adopted, it is rightly placed lower in the scale than carpentering, because the latter is more capable of being reduced ...
— Philebus • Plato
... as a celebrity in politics or in trade gains largely in our esteem, if we discover that he has some intellectual taste or skill: as when we learn of Lord Fairfax, the Long Parliament's general, his passion for antiquarian studies; or of the French regicide Carnot, his sublime genius in mathematics; or of a living banker, his success in poetry; or of a partisan journalist, his devotion to ornithology. So, if, in travelling in the dreary wildernesses of Arkansas or Texas, we should observe on the next seat a man reading Horace, or Martial, or Calderon, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... might ripen their minds by diligent reading; balance their judgment by precepts of wisdom, correct their compositions with an unsparing pen, hear at length what they ought to imitate, and be convinced that nothing can be sublime when it is designed to catch the fancy of boys, then the grand style of oratory would immediately recover the weight and splendor of its majesty. Now the boys play in the schools, the young men are laughed ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... outgrown its historic origin, and would have moderately flourished even had the North Staffordshire railway been annihilated. By its sober grandeur and its excellent cooking it had taken its place as the first hotel in the district. It had actually no rival. Heroic, sublime efforts had been made in the centre of Hanbridge to overthrow the pre-eminence of the Five Towns Hotel. The forlorn result of one of these efforts—so immense was it!—had been bought by the municipality and turned into a Town Hall—supreme instance ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... life, very much what we shall be to the end of the chapter. We shall not, in this world, be much better; let us humbly trust that we shall not be worse. Yet, if there be an undefinable sadness in looking at the marred material of which so much more might have been made, there is a sublime hopefulness in the contemplation of material, bodily and mental, of which a great deal more and better will certainly yet be made. Not much more may be made of any of us in life; but who shall estimate what may be made of us in immortality? Think of a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... Enriquez, with a pause, a fixed look at me, and a sublime gesture. "Who SHOULD it ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... exert greater and greater influence on the American short story as the translations of his work increase, and these five volumes prove him to be fully equal to Dostoievsky in sustained and varied spiritual observation. These stories range through the entire gamut of human emotion from sublime tragedy to the richest and most golden comedy. If I were to choose a single author of short stories for my library on a desert island, my choice would inevitably ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... dream, he had been lured by the crystal murmur of a spring up a steep path. There, beneath a laurel-tree, he had beheld—and from her hand had received upon his brow water from the sacred fount,—a woman of a beauty grave and sublime: the Muse ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... stands up serenely against the condemnation and vengeance of mankind, rising above them literally by a whole body,—even though he were of late the vilest murderer, who has settled that matter with himself,—the spectacle is a sublime one,—didn't ye know it, ye Liberators, ye Tribunes, ye Republicans?—and we become criminal in comparison. Do yourselves the honor to recognize him. He needs ...
— A Plea for Captain John Brown • Henry David Thoreau
... Sublime' indeed!" thought Doris, gurgling with laughter in the passage. As soon as she had steadied her face she opened the studio door, and perceived Lady Dunstable's prospective daughter-in-law standing in the middle of the studio, head thrown back and hands outstretched, ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... profoundly than she knew. Flowers are beautiful things, but a spot red as a rose on a cheek would suggest the hectic flush of fever, and if a girl's complexion were as white as a lily she would be shunned as a leper. In hyperbole the step between the sublime and the ridiculous is often a very short one; yet the rose and lily simile is perpetrated by erotic poets to ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... melancholy it may be dyspepsia. You do not form your estimate of what the glorious light of the sun does in gladdening and beautifying the earth, by its vain struggles with mists and fogs; it may fail to make a potato patch sublime or grand, and yet be in itself both sublime and grand. No, you judge of it by objects in themselves calculated to reflect its excellence, by the life and joy it diffuses on all animated nature, and especially by the exquisite beauty it imparts to some lovely valley, or to grand old mountains ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... the writer visited England from the colonies, he was constantly astonished to find the Wilberforceans, or saints, as they were called, influenced by the wildest enthusiasm upon the sublime theory of liberty; urging immediate emancipation of the slave, and yet totally uninformed as to its destructive consequences to their future welfare, in their present uneducated condition, without some provision being made to so enlighten them ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... vindictive wrath! Are not human weaknesses rightful claimants to a divine protectorate? Are not the crowning glories of these grand figures of Hebrew imagery in their pathetic antitypes? Is not the progressive evolution of the ages more sublime than spontaneous precocity? Restoring to normal functions ear, eye, and tongue is not so miraculous as are continuous creations of auricular and visual senses, with all the wondrous resulting harmonies of speech, sound, and song. Healing an 'unclean' ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... his paternal home he had persuaded himself that he was a very lucky fellow; and he had paid Mademoiselle Frehlter some pretty little stereotyped compliments, and had listened with sublime patience to her pretty little stereotyped songs. He left the young lady profoundly impressed by his merits; he left his own household supremely happy; and he carried away with him a heart in which Madelon Frehlter's image had ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... ambition of being the heroine of a novel. Now there are but two conditions that entitle one to that rank; one must be a shepherdess or a princess. Well, content yourself, said the giant, you will die an empress, without being either the one or the other! But what sublime reason had you for lengthening your name so unaccountably? It is a custom in my family, said she: all my ancestors were learned men, who wrote about the Romans. It sounded more classic, and gave a higher opinion of their literature, to put ...
— Hieroglyphic Tales • Horace Walpole
... over the plain, and dooming to everlasting barrenness the once productive fields. In surveying such scenes, it is difficult to resist the impression that nature pronounced a primal curse of perpetual sterility and desolation upon these sublime but fearful wastes, difficult to believe that they wore once, and but for the folly of man might still be, blessed with all the natural advantages which Providence has bestowed upon the most favored climes. But the ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... wandering, each his several way Pursues, as inclination or sad choice Leads him perplexed, where he may likeliest find Truce to his restless thoughts, and entertain The irksome hours, till his great Chief return. Part on the plain, or in the air sublime, Upon the wing or in swift race contend, As at th' Olympian games or Pythian fields; Part curb their fiery steeds, or shun the goal With rapid wheels, or fronted brigades form: As when, to warn proud cities, war appears Waged in the troubled sky, and armies rush To battle in the clouds; before each ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man,—present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... his vicious whacking of Duncan's asters and conveyed his stick to its decorous Sabbath position behind him. His friend's sublime spirituality always cooled ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... utterly, free. He had found ultimate salvation, the final triumph of the soul.'[5] Such a complete identification with the supreme Spirit, however, was not easily come by and often many existences were required before the yogi could achieve this sublime end. ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... not in a world like this, And thou shalt know ere long, Know how sublime a thing it is ...
— Peak's Island - A Romance of Buccaneer Days • Ford Paul
... the smaller sections of the New World, like the larger areas, should be led onward, undisturbed by the rivalries of the Old World. Fill the lap of England with distant lands, but exact from her the most sublime service to them- that of a mother. If Sir George had been supported, New Caledonia would have ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... and contentment reign throughout our borders, and our beloved country presents a sublime moral spectacle to ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... which they lived and flourished; to sacrifice, as the very basis of the national and religious polity, they owed the vigor, the young vigor, of humanity. Their literature was grandiose; their architecture magnificent; their art sublime. The traces of divinity ran through the whole of it. But, beautiful as it was, it would not have been well that it should have lasted, for had it been so, mankind would have grown to depend too much ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... which were issued hourly from the royal palace. The King's illness gave the finishing touch to his popularity; devotion to affairs of State had brought on brain-fever, and the more desperate the symptoms of the illness could be made to appear, the more sublime became the moral character of its august victim, and the more deeply-rooted ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... react upon it, bound by a thousand ties of natural piety, is it probable, nay is it possible, that they, and they alone, should have no order in their seeming disorder, no unity in their seeming multiplicity, should suffer no explanation by the discovery of some central and sublime law of mutual connexion? ...
— The Darwinian Hypothesis • Thomas H. Huxley
... he felt their united weight too much for his strength. "Courage, old fellow!" I shouted, and made a desperate plunge with my boat to reach them. The impetus of the rising billow sent me past them. The father, for such I knew him to be, with sublime self-sacrifice relaxed his hold, and turning his death-pale face toward me, uttered some words which were lost amid the howling of the blast, and sank forever from my sight. Relieved of the double weight, Hector now gallantly struck out for my boat, and in a short ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... pleasing aspects of objects? Or must we do violence to usage and so stretch the word "Beauty'' as to make it cover all qualities or aspects of objects which have aesthetic value, including those "modifications of the beautiful'' which we know as the sublime, the comic and the rest? But the wider we try in this way to make the denotation of the term the vaguer grows the connotation. We are thus left equally incapable of saying what the quality is, and in which aspect or attribute of the object ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... but his eye was fixed on the distant shore, and he was evidently unconscious of the roaring billows, the blocks of ice, the discouragement of his men, or the danger and death that might await him. Napoleon crossing the Alps was not half so sublime, and with one voice the audience cried, "Washington crossing the Delaware!" while the band burst forth with, "See, the conquering hero comes!" all out of tune, but bound to play it or die ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... Norfolk, he met and fell in love with a lady of French extraction. Not one drop of East Anglian blood was in the veins of Borrow’s father, and very little in the veins of his mother. Borrow’s ancestry was pure Cornish on one side, and on the other mainly French. But such was the sublime egotism of Borrow—perhaps we should have said such is the sublime egotism of human nature—that the fact of his having been born in East Anglia made him look upon that part of the world as the very hub of ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... jobs of life and death with the same detached coolness as if their hunters were being saddled, or they were waiting for the referee's whistle in Rugby football. Their attitude was infernally exasperating; yet you couldn't help taking off your hat to their sublime nerve and indifference. ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... Mrs. Baines, rising miraculously to the situation with a calm benevolence of tone and gesture that remained for ever sublime in the stormy heart of Sophia, "do not hold me." With infinite gentleness she loosed herself from those clasping hands. "Have you sent for the doctor?" she ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... men, simple and wise. Whereat the idle multitude lift up their voices, gratulating, celebrating sky-high; in rhyme and prose announcement, more than plentiful, that now the New Era, and long-expected Year One of Perfect Human Felicity has come. Glorious and immortal people, sublime French citizens, heroic barricades; triumph of civil and religious liberty—O Heaven! one of the inevitablest private miseries, to an earnest man in such circumstances, is this multitudinous efflux of ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... all the Nine inspire, 675 And bless their Critic with a Poet's fire. An ardent Judge, who zealous in his trust, With warmth gives sentence, yet is always just; Whose own example strengthens all his laws; And is himself that great Sublime he draws. 680 ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... it from me to enter into competition with students who have been practising the sublime art of theme and forensic writing for two years.—Harvardiana, Vol. ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... cough; the sexton looked at him for a moment, and then, bowing his head, closed the door—in a moment more the music ceased. I took up a prayer-book, on which was engraved an earl's coronet. The clergyman uttered, "I will arise, and go to my father." England's sublime liturgy ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... ask me questions, how far was that bridge, and could I see their pickets, and where did that cross-road go to. The aide was apparently ornamental and did not do anything but guess. I answered with sublime confidence, as my mind got thawed a little and the colonel ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... field stood a large tulip tree, apparently of a century's growth, and one of the most gigantic. It looked like the father of the surrounding forest. A single tree of huge dimensions, standing all alone, is a sublime object. ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... no one speaking, and, it might almost be said, no one breathing, so strong was the general desire to catch the minutest sound that should come from the shore. But the same solemn, we might, indeed, say sublime, quiet reigned as before; the washing of the water, as it piled up against some slight obstruction, and the sighing of the trees, alone interrupting the slumbers of the forest. At the end of the period mentioned, the snapping of dried ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... such sublime scenery existed," replied his companion. "I have travelled in Switzerland and Norway, but this surpasses both. Truly it was worth while to give up our gold-digging ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... charm, in the tone of the Veiled Woman's voice, my will seemed to take a force more sublime than its own. I folded my arms on my breast, and stood as if rooted to the spot, confronting the column of smoke and the stride of the giant Foot. And ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... building towering above you. Big trees, lofty cliffs, grand canyons, tremendous waterfalls, huge banks of clouds, the illimitable expanse of the sea, demonstrate cogently the strong appeal of the big. Perhaps the big is not necessarily grand, but the grand or sublime must be big or somehow suggest bigness. The question is, then, what it is in us that responds to the appeal ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... and special impulse . . . Like prophets and deliverers of oracles, these poets have their reason taken away, and become the servants of the gods. It is not they who, bereft of their reason, speak in such sublime strains, it is the god who speaks to us, and speaks through them." George Grote, from whose volumes on Plato I quote this translation of the passage, placed "Ion" among ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... with Catherine because his children had all died but one, and that was a manifest token of the wrath of Providence. The capacity for convincing himself of his own righteousness is the most effective weapon in the egotist's armoury, and Henry's egotism touched the sublime. His conscience was clear, whatever other people might think of the maze of apparent inconsistencies in which he was involved. In 1528 he was in some fear of death from the plague; fear of death is fatal to the peace of ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... in Homer: "For verily there is no creature more afflicted than man, of all that breathe and move upon the earth." But that other, the Serapis, is above care of every kind; on his countenance is a divine placidity, a supernal blandness; he gazes for ever in sublime and passionless reverie. ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... he, 'this is a sublime moment! To see you, the gay companion, the good fellow, the butterfly, I may say, of other days, a member of this great body is certainly soul-stirring! So you have realized your ambition? What next? The Senate? And ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... supplied all that Mr. Casaubon's words seemed to leave unsaid: what believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime. ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... cannot but think that Mr. Biglow has been too hasty in attributing it to me. Though Time be a comparatively innocent personage to swear by, and though Longinus in his discourse {Peri Hypsous} has commended timely oaths as not only a useful but sublime figure of speech, yet I have always kept my lips free from that abomination. Odi profanum vulgus, I hate your swearing ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... is represented in the piece, not as a heroine actuated purely by patriotic motives in seeking the destruction of a tyrant who inflicted such wounds on her country, but by the less sublime one of avenging the death of her lover. This, in my opinion, lessens the interest of the drama, and atones not for the horror always inspired by a woman's arming herself for ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... Italy; grand tour, with eligible French Tutor,—whom he once drew sword upon, getting some rebuke from him one night in Venice, and would have killed, had not the man been nimble, at once dexterous and sublime:—it availed not. The first thing he did, on re-entering Dessau, with his Tutor, was to call at Apothecary Fos's, and see the charming Mamsell; to go and see his Mother, was the second thing. Not even his grand passion for war could eradicate those; he went ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... reason's plain: That blissful day which prophets paint Perhaps may come: perhaps again It mayn't: And ere these ages blest begin (For Rome, I've heard historians say, Was only partly finished in A day) In men of sentiments sublime 'Tis possible we yet may trace The influence of mellowing Time And PLACE:— O who can tell? Ere Labour rouse Its ever-multiplying hordes To mend or end th' obstructive House Of Lords, And bid aristocrats begone, And their hereditary pelf Bestow with generous hand upon Itself— Why, Mr. George,—his ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... the dazzle and accumulation of incongruous impressions that send him, weary and stupefied, out of some famous picture-gallery. But what is thus admitted with regard to art is not extended to the (so-called) natural beauties: no amount of excess in sublime mountain outline or the graces of cultivated lowland can do anything, it is supposed, to weaken or degrade the palate. We are not at all sure, however, that moderation, and a regimen tolerably austere, even in scenery, are not healthful ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have no good news to send. In all that regards the affection, the tenderness of all, the desire to root out the evil weeds which encumber the path of my life, mother and children are sublime; but the chief thing of all is still subject to entanglements and delays, which make me doubt whether it is God's will that your brother should ever be happy, at least in that way; but as regards sincere mutual love, delicacy and goodness, it would be impossible ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... nature vulgar, were resplendent, transfigured with the expression of the sublime grief of those souls whose plaint is not heard. Thief, pauper, and peasant had vanished and given place to supraterrestial creatures in the ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... not below; and still more so, when I heard their clear, sweet voices, at the summit of the tree, singing the evening hymn, as if to sanctify our future abode. They had climbed the tree, instead of descending, and, filled with wonder and reverence at the sublime view below them, had burst out into the hymn of ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... great men all remind us, We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... admit the objection, that it is preposterous to trouble ourselves about the history of the Roman Empire, because we do not know anything positive about the origin and first building of the city of Rome! Would it be a fair objection to urge, respecting the sublime discoveries of a Newton, or a Kepler, those great philosophers, whose discoveries have been of the profoundest benefit and service to all men—to say to them—"After all that you have told us as to how the planets revolve, and how they are maintained ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... noble lords and peers; I greet you, lovely dames. O heaven begemmed with golden spheres! Who knows your noble names? In hall of splendor so sublime, Close ye, mine eyes—'tis not the time To gaze ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... animosity had had time to cool, there were several features in his character, which make it doubtful whether he were the most competent person, in any event, for an emergency demanding at once the greatest coolness, consummate address, and acknowledged personal authority. His sublime enthusiasm, which carried him victorious over every obstacle, involved him also in numerous embarrassments, which men of more phlegmatic temperament would have escaped. It led him to count too readily on a similar spirit in others,—and to be disappointed. It gave an exaggerated coloring to ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... day came (20th Prairial, June 8, 1794), he clothed himself with more than even his usual care. As he looked out from the windows of the Tuileries upon the jubilant crowd in the gardens, he was intoxicated with enthusiasm. 'O Nature,' he cried, 'how sublime thy power, how full of delight! How tyrants must grow pale at the idea of such a festival as this!' In pontifical pride he walked at the head of the procession, with flowers and wheat-ears in his hand, to the sound of chants and symphonies and choruses ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... clouds of mist! I took one look, then looked up the Valley to the great Half Dome, to Glacier Point, from there to Sentinel Peak and the Cathedral Spires, and I concluded that the Yosemite is too beautiful for description, too sublime for comprehension and too magnificent for immediate human understanding. In the presence of those awful cliffs, towering, with an average height of over three thousand feet, above the floor of the valley; those immense waterfalls, as they thundered over the canyon ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves |
