|
|
|
More "Unimaginable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to boundless reaches away from me; but only from the point of view of present Good being present God did the value of the Infinite come to lie in its nearness rather than in its power of filling unimaginable space. On my part it was inverse mental action, seeking God where I was capable of finding Him, and not in regions I could ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... infinite &c 105. large as life; plump as a dumpling, plump as a partridge; fat as a pig, fat as a quail, fat as butter, fat as brawn, fat as bacon. immeasurable, unfathomable, unplumbed; inconceivable, unimaginable, unheard-of. of cosmic proportions; of epic proportions, the mother of all, teh granddaddy ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... arrantly superstitious they were, most of them. They had been brought up on ghosts and witches and evil spirits, and, fearless as they might be of things mortal and natural, all that bordered on the unknown and uncanny held for them unimaginable terrors. The dead man might serve a useful purpose after all; and ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... Clifford, seeming to shrink from its stern glance. "Whenever I look at it, there is an old dreamy recollection haunting me, but keeping just beyond the grasp of my mind. Wealth, it seems to say!—boundless wealth!—unimaginable wealth! I could fancy that, when I was a child, or a youth, that portrait had spoken, and told me a rich secret, or had held forth its hand, with the written record of hidden opulence. But those old matters are so dim with me, nowadays! What ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... live under a roof and suddenly condemned to live in the open suffers nothing for the first few hours. Then there gradually comes upon him a weariness and distress almost unimaginable to those who have not experienced it. He craves not only for a roof but for walls around him to protect him from the great open spaces that seem sucking away his individuality. A man living absolutely in the open without tent or cave or house wherein to concentrate himself ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... light flickering on the tarnished and rusty metal. He watched it quietly; he hardly felt afraid; it was rather a sentiment of sadness and fatality that filled him, of gloomy forebodings of something unknown, unimaginable. He sat and watched the thing disappear in the gathering dark, his hand on his pistol as it lay by him on the great chest. There was no sound but the regular breathing of the sleeping boy on ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... in a mist of uncertainty, setting his heel upon all reflection, avoiding every issue. To-night he could escape those accusing thoughts no longer; to-night he was more than ever bitter with himself. What folly was this which had sprung up in his life—folly colossal, unimaginable, as unexpected as though it had fallen a thunderbolt from the skies! What had happened ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... living in the artificial world of the Russian court, and each throwing back, in her own way, the mystic influences derived from the sky of Alexandria, affected him as the exciting perfume exhaled by two rare plants nourished in a hot-house. It is unimaginable what lofty, exquisite, and mysterious sentiments they exchange. Their naked souls and minds, with all their workings, are visible in these ingenuous and crowded letters, as in a glass hive we can study the industry of bees. Saint-Beuve affirms, that the later difference ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... the present time.... Records of vast geological periods are entirely buried beneath the ocean ... beyond our reach. Most of the gaps in the geological series may thus be filled up, and vast numbers of unknown and unimaginable animals which might help to elucidate the affinities of the numerous isolated groups which are a perpetual puzzle to the zoologist may be buried there, till future revolutions may raise them in turn above the water, to afford materials for the study of whatever race of intelligent ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... the extent of aid I ever received from my husband in any of my domestic difficulties. He is a first-rate abstractionist, and can see to a hair how others ought to act in every imaginable, and I was going to say unimaginable case; but is just as backward about telling people what he thinks of them, and making everybody with whom he has anything to do toe the mark, ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... general ruin. It was said that they meant to throw the gates of Bedlam open, and let all the madmen loose. This suggested such dreadful images to the people's minds, and was indeed an act so fraught with new and unimaginable horrors in the contemplation, that it beset them more than any loss or cruelty of which they could foresee the worst, and drove many sane ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... this unimaginable event (the Last Judgment) been grappled with in its Verity; not typically nor symbolically, but as they may see it who shall not sleep, but be changed. Only one traditional circumstance he has received, with Dante and Michael Angelo, the Boat of the Condemned; but the ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... came before," he went on, quickly and miserably. "First a sense of something that was not mere darkness, infinitely distant, but swooping down upon me at an unimaginable speed, broadening more quickly than the sense could follow—and then it was daylight all about me, and I was in the world, seeing, hearing, and—yes, and speaking, speaking, ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... marked her out from everyone he knew. She seemed to him as one consecrated. Then this lover in his mystic passion passed in the contemplation of his well-beloved from the earthly to the invisible soul. He saw behind and around her a form unseen by others; a form, spiritual, pathetic, of unimaginable beauty, on which the eternal powers kept watch, which they nourished with their own life, and on which they inflicted their own pain. This form was crowned, but with a keen- pointed radiance from which there fell a shadowy dropping. As he walked to and fro in the white dawn he made for ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... often a strange one that my last sight and reminiscence of that fatal ship should be a pillar of smoke on the horizon. To so many others besides myself the same appearance had played a part in the various stages of that business: luring some to what they little imagined, filling some with unimaginable terrors. But ours was the last smoke raised in the story; and with its dying away the secret of the Flying Scud became ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Ieyasu preserved a calm and dignified mein, merely replying that his country was open to all comers, and that, if other nations had quarrels among themselves, they must not take Japan for battle-ground, it is nevertheless unimaginable that he did not strongly resent such interference with his own independent foreign policy, and that he did not interpret it as foreshadowing a disturbance of the realm's peace by ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Prospero's masque—Selwoode and its gardens, the great globe itself, "the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples" were all as vanished wraiths. There was only Peggy left— Peggy with that unimaginable misery in her eyes that he must drive away somehow. If that was what she thought, there was no way for him to ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... means of ten thousand ladders, over the walls, and rushing through the gates, with no ear for mercy, commenced the slaughter of the inhabitants. The city was set on fire in all directions, and a scene of horror ensued indescribable and unimaginable. The barbarians, laden with booty, and satiated with blood and carnage, encamped on the plain outside of the walls, exulting in the entireness of their vengeance. Moscow, the gorgeous capital, was no more. The dwellings ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... compared with which the gilding of our autumn woodlands is as dross compared with gold. Far away into the illimitable distance stretched long avenues of these gaseous forests, dimly transparent, and painted with prismatic hues of unimaginable brilliancy. The pendent branches waved along the fluid glades until every vista seemed to break through half-lucent ranks of many-colored drooping silken pennons. What seemed to be either fruits or flowers, pied with a thousand hues, lustrous ...
— The Diamond Lens • Fitz-James O'brien
... about her that had fascinated him when first he saw her. She was so near that he could have thrown a rose to her—a red rose, full blown and full scented. He forgave the theatre—or rather he forgot it—in the unimaginable delight of being so near her. And when at length she left the stage, he had no jealousy of the poor people who remained there to go through their marionette business. He hoped they might all become great actors and actresses. He even thought he would try to get to ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... an extraordinary, an unimaginable one, but it had to be met. When he returned to the box, Prosper had himself in hand, and, sitting a little farther back than before, he watched the second act with a sufficiency of ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... under its choicest and most favourable conditions of culture, in its yet fresh, untamed, unbroken, northern vigour, was at last subjected to the stimulus and provocation which the ancient learning brings with it to the northern mind—to the now unimaginable stimulus which, the revival of the ancient art and learning brought with it to the mind of Europe in that age,—already secure, in its own indigenous development, already advancing to its own great maturity under the scholastic culture—the meagre Scholastic, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... with an utter horror, which no repetition of his words can give the sense of. "It would be unimaginable." ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... of anthropomorphic beauty shrink appalled, and sigh for a lodge under some low Grecian heaven and in the bosom of some old myth-peopled Nature, as he trembled before the apocalypses of modern sidereal science, which has dropped its plummet to unimaginable depths through the nebulous abysses of space, shoaled with systems of worlds as the sea is with its finny droves. The Nature and the Physical Universe of the old ethnic Greek formed only a little niche and recess, on the walls of which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... is the pole star. Just imagine the string the axis of a great globe in which the stars are fixed, and that it goes round from your right hand to your left." But to Miriam, although she had so strong an imagination, it was unimaginable. It was odd that she could create Verona and Romeo with such intense reality, and yet that she could not perform such a simple feat as that of portraying to herself the revolution of an ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... had time," he said gently. "All those months and months, when you were at an unimaginable distance from me, actually and morally, - and prospectively, - do you think I had no chance to exercise myself in the lesson of submission? I ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... up "Barabbas" as quickly as possible by "The Sorrows of Satan," thus carrying out the preconceived intention I had always had of depicting, first, the martyrdom which is always the world's guerdon to Absolute Good,—and secondly, the awful, unimaginable torture which must, by Divine Law, for ever be the lot ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... was a chequer-board of Queen-Victoria-streets. To-day its area is appalling, its architecture grandiose. It is the young giant among the cities of the earth, and it stands but on the threshold of its destiny. It embraces in its unimaginable amplitude every extreme of splendour and squalor. Walking in Dearborn-street or Adams-street of a cloudy afternoon, you think yourself in a frowning and fuliginous city of Dis, piled up by superhuman and apparently sinister powers. Cycling round the boulevards ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... He saw unbelievable, unimaginable things, things so unspeakable that his soul seemed to die within him. The word glory made him shudder. There was a duty to do, and he did it to the best of his ability, without noise, without fear. Wherever he looked around ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... into the field of battle from all imaginable and unimaginable quarters;—and you now see before you all the cats in Edinburgh, Stockbridge, and the suburbs—about as many, I should suppose, as the proposed constituents of our next ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 484 - Vol. 17, No. 484, Saturday, April 9, 1831 • Various
... to avoid confusion I must call him that from the start. Indeed, looking backward down the years, I wonder how he could ever have been anything else than Paragot. That Phoebus Apollo could once have borne the name of John Jones is unimaginable. ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... passage I meant, and it shows that Whitman, at any rate, did not share Wilson's feeling that the immortality of the soul is unimaginable." ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... fear had reared, he would have seen at either gate a silent figure guarding the walk, and recalled, perhaps, the horror of other days when at the contemplation of such a prospect, his spirit recoiled upon itself in unimaginable horror and revolt. And yet, who knows! Life's passions fade when the heart is at peace. And Archibald Ostrander's heart was at peace. Why, his ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... reader, the Child himself has answered; but for Ben-Hur there were only the words of Balthasar, "On the earth, yet not of it—not for men, but for their souls—a dominion, nevertheless, of unimaginable glory." ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... horror of that which spurred him to unimaginable exertion in the wilderness in order to escape the detectives on his track; to put them off the scent; to lead them to the Canada border and so induce them to cross it in their search. He had succeeded; and thereafter his ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... think, "I am made different by this love that expects so much of me, and if I am not yet quite so wonderful as my beloved thinks me, I shall soon become so, for this expectation spurs me to hitherto unimaginable efforts." ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... due east of Ypres, and that is where the advance parties from each battalion of the division found them. The first impression was: "What a contrast with Havrincourt!" It was the exact antithesis in every respect. This was a country where the desire to kill and destroy had developed to an unimaginable intensity. Nothing of use was to be left by either side, and every yard of ground almost was searched by the gunners to carry ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... knew, by that, that she had got his letter, the first love-letter of his life. But she had not cared enough to answer it. Or else, his faith in her argued, something had happened, there had been some unimaginable reason to prevent her answering. That the letter had been lost was so commonplace a solution that it did not occur to him. One does not think of mice setting off gunpowder magazines. At all events he was facing a stone wall; there was no further ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... but the reward is great. So he escapes from illusion and error, from ignorance and failure. Directing his thoughts and energies no longer according to his own impressions, but according to the truth of things, he finds himself in possession of an unimaginable power alike of understanding and of acting. To a truly marvellous extent he ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... all crowded near to listen. It was now the social hour for campers. By the camp-fire more reminiscences followed; and the two guides chimed in it with moose stories, bear stories, panther stories, wild tales of every imaginable and unimaginable kind of adventure, until the lads thought no mythology which they had ever learned could rival in marvels the ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... herself on singing a certain weird and exalted part which in ancient days used to be called counter, and which wailed and gyrated in unimaginable heights of the scale, much as you may hear a shrill, fine-voiced wind over a chimney-top; but altogether, the deep and earnest gravity with which the three filled up the pauses in the storm with their quaint minor key, had something singularly impressive. When the ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... have counted the price of her name as very little to set against his salvation from himself. She would have given that and much more, for her love, as she would freely give all for him and even for his memory, if he were dead, and if by some unimaginable circumstances her ruin before the world could keep his name spotless, and his glory unsullied. For there is nothing that a true-hearted loving woman will not give and do for him she loves and believes and trusts; and though she will give the greatest thing last of all, she ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... not quite able to tear his mind and thoughts from this completely unimaginable mass of plunder. Then intelligence came into his eyes—as much as could appear there. He grinned suddenly. He ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... individual life. Certainly the conditions under which existence maintains itself in that other state must be far other than those which obtain here, for there man is destitute of his bodily environment. The conditions of such a life are wholly unpicturable, wholly unimaginable, but not inconceivable. These are high matters, like the truths of sublimest philosophy, wherein it is impious to intrude with so inferior a faculty as imagination, and demand that an image or representation of a bodiless existence be presented to it. ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... Every morning, wet or fine, crowds of picturesque peasants would gather about the little side door of our hospital, women in blazing coloured hand-woven skirts, like Joseph's coat, children in unimaginable rags, but with the inevitable belt tightly bound about their little stomachs, men covered with tuberculous sores and so forth, on some days as many as a hundred. Jo, having finished breakfast, had then to assume a commanding air, and to stamp down the steps into the crowd, sort out the probable ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... out of the village, and passing the pretty garden of the Gendarmerie, reached a scene of unimaginable, unforgettable beauty. Never shall I forget the splendour of the olive trees set around a wide, brilliantly green meadow; near the farmhouse groves of pomegranate, orange and lemon with ripening fruit; beside these, medlar and hawthorn trees (cratoegus azarolus), the ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... a hundred fairy hues, but just before him they were clear as a flawless mirror. The fields around him glistened with dews, and a little wandering wind, blowing lightly from some bourne in the hills, strayed down over the slopes, bringing with it an unimaginable odour and freshness, and fluttered over the pond, leaving a little path of dancing silver ripples across the mirror-glory of the water. Birds were singing in the beech woods over on Orchard Knob Farm, answering to each other from shore to shore, until the very air was tremulous with the ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... bathing tub of King Tchingthang to this effect: "Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again." I can understand that. Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... the utter absence of all generous help or encouragement from those who can both measure their toil and appreciate their success, and the shrill, shallow laughter of those who can do neither the one nor the other—these are strangest of all—unimaginable unless ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... necessary. But through the narrow door Jane caught branching vistas of room after room heaped up with the pillage of a sacked and ravaged globe, and of a stairway which led with a wide sweep to regions of unimaginable glories above. ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... have not taught you whist perfectly. Would it not be better to substitute a curia vult avisare in place of a decision? But, Anne, have you nothing to say? Is this your gratitude for all Thomas's martyrdoms of readings of I know not what unimaginable nonsense; and holdings of skeins of silk, more difficult to unwind than the labyrinth through which Ariadne's thread conducted Theseus; and pickings up of whatever your feminine carelessness chose to drop on the carpet; and endurance of all the legions of annoyances ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... shot out a huge paw like a shoulder of mutton, and grabbed my hand with as much fervour as though I had saved his life, or done him some other unimaginable kindness. And, as he did so, his old broad sweet smile came back again. He ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... utterly purposeless, turns out, in the end, to have been impelled the most surely on a preordained and unswerving track. Chance and change love to deal with men's settled plans, not with their idle vagaries. If we desire unexpected and unimaginable events, we should contrive an iron framework, such as we fancy may compel the future to take one inevitable shape; then comes in the unexpected, and shatters our ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... possess their wives, had come to him, but it had caused such an ungovernable ferment in his blood, and savoured withal of such temerity, that he had been fairly afraid to indulge it. In the horizon of his mind it had hovered as a dream of unimaginable felicity which might some day in the far future come to pass; but that ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... the future. He seemed to me—I say it deliberately and with forethought—to possess the unparalleled power not merely of disentangling in retrospect, but of unravelling in prospect, and I have known him to relate coming events with unimaginable minuteness of precision. He was nothing if not superlative: his diatribes, now culminating in a very extravaganza of hyperbole—now sailing with loose wing through the downy, witched, Dutch cloud-heaps of some quaintest tramontane Nephelococcugia of thought—now ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... have sufficient discernment to know that there is only one place in which a man could bestow himself. Finally, if by some devilish inspiration he has made himself so small that he has squeezed into some unimaginable lurking-place (for we may expect anything from a celibate), well, either your wife cannot help casting a glance towards this mysterious spot, or she will pretend to look in an exactly opposite direction, ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... weed-choked shallows wherein to pasture, to wallow at will, to hide his giant bulk from his enemies if there should be found any formidable enough to make hiding advisable. Swarms of savage insects, to be sure, were giving him a hot reception—mosquitoes of unimaginable size, and enormous stinging flies which sought to deposit their eggs in his smooth hide, but with his giraffe-like neck he could bite himself where he would, and the lithe lash of his tail could flick off tormentors from ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... maddening. Overhead, huge cranes were swinging great bulks of steel from one end of the cavernous shed to the other; vague figures were moving obscurely in the murk; the floor was piled and littered with heaps of iron-work of unimaginable shapes. After a time we made our way into another area where there was more quiet but no less confusion. I yelled to my guide, "Such a rumpus and row I never saw; it is chaos come again!" And he replied, "Why, to me it is all a perfect order. Everything is in its place. Every man has his special ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... where no evil could befall us, the abundant home where all wants were supplied, and where the shyest and timidest child could feel at ease and secure. It is all coming again, brother, and amidst the august and unimaginable glories of that future the old feeling of being little children, nestling safe in the Father's house, will fill ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... ineffable sigh which Milton ascribes to the planet when man accomplished his mysterious rebellion. The idea of such a sigh, of a whisper circling through the planet, of the light growing thick with the unimaginable charge, and the purple eclipse of Death throwing a penumbra; that may, but nothing else ever can, equal the unutterable sublimity of that buzz—that rumour, that susurrus passing from mouth to mouth—nobody ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... our ears, as we approached, a certain wailing melody, thin, quavering, distant, weird. As it rose upon the hot afternoon air it seemed absolutely strange, unimaginable, impossible. The spine ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... in repair. The "Five-storied Pagoda" which flames in red at one of its angles, is a striking feature in the view. As we sat on stone seats by stone tables in what might be called its shadow, under the cloudless heaven, with the pure Orientalism of the Tartar city spread out at our feet, that unimaginable Orientalism which takes one captive at once, and, like the first sight of a palm or a banana, satisfies a longing of which one had not previously been conscious, a mundane disappointment was severely felt. We had been, as ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... sobbing vehemence he had grown calm. These words were so unimaginable on her lips that he could make no reply save stubborn repetition of his refusal. And having uttered that he went from the room, changing the key to the outside and locking her in. Fear lest he might be unable ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... steadily building up a world-empire, penetrated with the forces of a modern age, France, loaded with debt, was taxing a people crying for bread—taxing a starving people for money to procure unimaginable luxuries and pleasures for Madame du Barry, who had succeeded to the place once, held by Madame de Pompadour. Did she desire a snowstorm and a sleighride in midsummer, these must be created and made possible. And one may see to-day at Versailles the sleigh in which ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... him. It was some child, passing on an unimaginable errand through the deep woods, ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... ourselves in other than our present circumstances; the most commonplace future is as unimaginable as the most extravagant." ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... do melt like frosty rime, That in the morning whiten'd hill and plain And is no more; drop like the tower sublime Of yesterday, which royally did wear His crown of weeds, but could not even sustain Some casual shout that broke the silent air, Or the unimaginable touch of Time. ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... of the tragic conflicts of life, the same sense of the greatness, the splendour of human nature, which is most triumphant when most it seems to fail; and on the other side at least something of that exquisite, that almost unimaginable grace of the romantic comedy, of the world of Portia and Viola and Beatrice and Miranda. I do not think that the unity of the great art of Europe, the comparative insignificance of merely national characteristics and historical ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... full of a haunting light, as of sunsets upon graves. But it was the Russians who electrified and dazzled her. When she glimpsed with her eyes of a young girl those strange souls simple as children's and yet mosaiced with unimaginable and barbarous splendors, she stood blinking and half blinded, awed, fascinated, and avid to know more of that sky-scaling passion ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... do so much as move a little finger or lift an eyelid, when the intolerable nausea would begin. She was calm now, until she made the attempt to think what it was that had so prostrated her, and then the anguish spread through her being and convulsed her with unimaginable distress of mind ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... unimaginable lodge For solitary thinkings; such as dodge Conception to the very bourn of Heaven, Then leave the naked brain; be still the leaven That, spreading in this dull and clodded earth, Gives it a touch ethereal, a ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... smiled her moonlight smile. She was giddy with the intoxicating, heady air, with the brilliant sunset light, with Babe's loud cordiality. She wanted desperately to like Babe; she wanted even more desperately to be liked. She was in an unimaginable ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... of Strange Things you used to know In dim, dead lives, lived long ago, Some madly mirthful Merriment Whose lingering light is yet unspent,— Some unimaginable Woe,— Your strange, sad smile forgets these not, Though you, ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... coral enclosed a tranquil lagoon, to which the green shores of the island gently sloped. The beauty of this lagoon would need a Ruskin's pen to reproduce it in all its exquisite and manifold colouring. Submarine coral forests, of every hue, enriched with sea-flowers, anemones, and echinidae, of unimaginable brilliancy; shoals of the brightest fish flashing in and out like rainbow gleams; shells of gorgeous lustre, moving slowly along with their living inmates; fairy foliage of fantastic sea-weeds stirred into tremulous motion by the gliding wave; ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... has been generally taught, it is utterly unintelligible, and owes all its proselytes to the propensity so common among men, to mistake distinct images for clear conceptions; and vice versa, to reject as inconceivable whatever from its own nature is unimaginable. But as soon as it becomes intelligible, it ceases to be materialism. In order to explain thinking, as a material phaenomenon, it is necessary to refine matter into a mere modification of intelligence, with ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... and no thought-out policy said, "Behold, we will build railways and steamships and telegraphs, and presently you will see the condition and way of life of every man and woman and child in the nation totally changed; unimaginable changes of law and custom will follow, in spite of anything that anybody can do ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... big black ants in my garden do not seem to need any sympathy. They have weathered the storm in some unimaginable way, while great trees were being uprooted, and houses blown to fragments, and roads washed out of existence. Yet, before the typhoon, they took no other visible precaution than to block up the gates of their subterranean town. And the spectacle of their triumphant toil to-day impels ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... she commanded utterance, and her agitation touched him in a way quite other than he was prepared for. In truth, he knew not what experience he had anticipated, but the reality, now that it came, this unimaginable blending of memory with the unfamiliar, this refinement of something that he had loved, this note of pity struck within him by such subtle means, affected his inmost self. Immediately he laid stern control upon his feelings, but all the words which he had designed to speak were driven from memory. ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... was unimaginable disaster. She had never dreamt that Marian, the still, gentle Marian, could be driven to revolt. And it had come with the suddenness of a thunderclap. She wished to ask what had taken place between father and daughter in the brief interview before dinner; but Marian gave her no chance, ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... the falling of distant water in marble fonts; the large bells of Montsalvat peal louder and louder, and to music of unimaginable stateliness the knights, clad in the blue and red robes of the Grail, enter in solemn procession, and take their seats at two semicircular tables which start like arms to the right and left of the holy shrine. Beneath it lies Titurel entranced, and upon it is presently deposited ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... drag my thoughts from that sick room, and the anticipated stir of that lovely form into conscious life and suffering. Her eyes—I could see her eyes wakening upon the world again, after her long wandering in the unknown and unimaginable intricacies of ungoverned thought and delirious suggestion. Eyes of violet colour and infinite expression; eyes which would make a man's joy if they smiled on him in innocence; but which, as I well knew, had burned more than once, in her short but strenuous life, with fiery ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... fellow scientists, within the spheroid confines of our atomic projectile. The agony of enduring—even for seconds—the required acceleration, will forever remain in my mind as the ultimate in torture. But at last the agony was gone, as we traveled at unimaginable speed toward the planet which we hoped would ...
— Walls of Acid • Henry Hasse
... the third day she walked alone for some time, and I perceived, to my great concern, that she was more than once in tears. You will see that my heart was already interested more than I supposed. She had a firm yet airy motion of the body, and carried her head with unimaginable grace; every step was a thing to look at, and she seemed in my eyes to breathe ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he had not known it. As for the things he had known, horrible, curious and incredible things, such as Rickman's, Mrs. Downey's, St. Pancras Church, and the editor of The Museion (whose last letter he had left unanswered), they belonged to an infinitely remote and unimaginable past. It seemed the entirely obvious and natural thing that he should be sitting there alone with Lucia Harden. He was never very far from her. The east window looked across the courtyard to the window of her drawing-room; he could see her there, sitting ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... setting, our Universities, planted by the same instinct on lawns watered by pastoral streams, have suffered so little and received as much from the years that now we can hardly conceive of Oxford or Cambridge as ruined save by 'the unimaginable touch of Time.' Of all the secular Colleges bequeathed to Oxford, she has lost not one; while Cambridge (I believe) has parted only with Cavendish. Some have been subsumed into newer foundations; but always the process has ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... system. It is not at all developed in the vegetal kingdom, hardly at all in some branches of the animal, and there may conceivably be an infinite number of other "kingdoms" in which it may be either undeveloped, or very differently developed, or superseded by some other manifestation by us unimaginable. Its development indeed seems to be concurrent with the development of a locomotive faculty—a striking confirmation of the theory that it is in our activity that we derive the suggestions which call forth the exercise of the Understanding ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... is harsh and shattering, and is pitched in a higher key than that of the growl. To me the growl was far more awe-inspiring than the roar; it carried a suggestion of stealth combined with latent ferocity and unimaginable force in reserve. The adjective "thunderous" does not fit the roar at all; the latter suggests, more than anything else, the tones of a mighty, cavernous brass trumpet. Most terrifying, however, is the suspicion that a lion is silently padding round your camp ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... and to see it eddying beneath the overhanging eaves of frailest crystal-frosted snow. All is so silent, still, and weird in this white world, that one marvels when the spirit of winter will appear, or what shrill voices in the air will make his unimaginable magic audible. Nothing happens, however, to disturb the charm, save when a sunbeam cuts the chain of diamonds on an alder bough, and down they drift in a thin cloud of dust. It may be also that the air is full of floating crystals, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... and love and worship. Their voices, blending with the child's voice, reached me with a vague sense of a caress. The three figures, charming in themselves, composed a lovely scene in a glorious landscape, filling it with a pervasive unimaginable grace. A delicately fair woman, radiant with smiles, a child of love, a young man with the irresistible charm of youth, a cloudless sky; nothing was wanting in nature to complete a perfect harmony for the ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... drown the roar of the omnibuses and the clatter of the cab-horses' hoofs if anything could. The little gardens of the houses back together and form innumerable shelters and pleasaunces for them. The simple beauty of these umbrageous places is unimaginable to the American city-dweller, who never sees anything but clothes-lines in blossom from his back windows; but they exist nearly everywhere in London, and a more spacious privacy can always be secured where two houses throw their gardens ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... thou and I have wandered from the highway And found with hearts reborn This swift and unimaginable byway Unto the hills of morn, Shall not our love disdain the unworthy uses Of ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... all the gold, obtained in consequence of the Rishi's boon, disappeared. The ignorant and senseless robbers struck one another. And striking one another thus, they perished and with them that wonderful prince on the earth. And those men of wicked deeds sank in an unimaginable and awful hell. Seeing that son of his, obtained through the Rishi's boon thus slain, that great ascetic, viz., king Srinjaya, afflicted with deep sorrow, began to lament in piteous accents. Beholding the king afflicted with grief on account of his ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... yet for most of those who strove to obey their consciences, purgatory, when essential, though occasionally giving us a bitter twinge, is a joy-producing state. Not all the glories imaginable or unimaginable could make us happy, were our consciences ill at ease. I have advanced slowly, yet some things are given us at once. After I realized I had irrevocably lost your love, though for a time I had hoped to regain it, I became ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... the plague. He hated to admit it, but he was afraid of her, not so much of falling in love with her and going through tragedy, which was probably what it would come to, as of the terrible force so skillfully hidden in that white and delicate body, of a powerful personality fortified by an unimaginable past. She gave the impression of a woman who had been at grips with life and conquered it, from first to last. Formidable creature! An extraordinary achievement if true. But was it? Women, no matter how beautiful, wealthy, highly placed and powerfully organized, got the worst of it one way ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... was evidently experimental, and the author expresses his estimate of its value in the following words, —"What unimaginable nonsense!" He then goes on to make the following memoranda as to the plot. It should be remembered, however, that all this part of the romance was written ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... not answered, except with a few words of a telegram. He knew, by that, that she had got his letter, the first love-letter of his life. But she had not cared enough to answer it. Or else, his faith in her argued, something had happened, there had been some unimaginable reason to prevent her answering. That the letter had been lost was so commonplace a solution that it did not occur to him. One does not think of mice setting off gunpowder magazines. At all events he was facing a stone wall; there was no further step to take; she must be in Germany; he did not ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... Stamp your bleedin' 'obnyles (hobnails) on his fice, and fetch it hout! This wye!" As he took the rifle from number five, the sergeant major's face seemed to be transformed into a living embodiment of envenomed hate, his attack, thrust, recovery, gathering in intensity until with unimaginable fury he leaped upon the prostrate figure, drove his bayonet through to the hilt, stamped his hobnails upon the transfixed enemy, jerked his weapon out, and stood quivering, ready for any foe that dared to approach. The savage ferocity of his face, the fierce energy in his every movement, culminating ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... was steadily building up a world-empire, penetrated with the forces of a modern age, France, loaded with debt, was taxing a people crying for bread—taxing a starving people for money to procure unimaginable luxuries and pleasures for Madame du Barry, who had succeeded to the place once, held by Madame de Pompadour. Did she desire a snowstorm and a sleighride in midsummer, these must be created and made possible. And one may see to-day at Versailles the sleigh in which ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... not, as it were, what these thoughts were; he did not wish to stir them up, but he felt them continually. At times they would come to him all of a sudden, oppress him more and more, and begin to crush him with their unimaginable weight, as though the vault of a rocky cavern were slowly and terribly descending ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... she had seen a mysterious door close and shut a human being out for ever from the world. The sight had filled her with dread unimaginable, for she had no words for the thing, no religion or philosophy to explain it away or gloss it over. Just recently she had seen an equally mysterious door open and admit a human being; and deep down in her mind, in the place where the dreams were, the one great fact had explained ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... which logic gives to this psychological phenomenon. The fact that the mind stops abruptly and breaks into irreconcilable contradictions when it is confronted with unfathomable space is simply a proof that space without an end is as unimaginable as space with an end. It is no proof that space is merely a subjective category of the human mind. One, thing, however, it is a proof of. It is a proof that the universe can never be satisfactorily ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... lie stretched out and still! How cold I was, words cannot tell; yet I grew colder and colder—and welcomed the cold yet more and more. I grew continuously less conscious of myself, continuously more conscious of bliss, unimaginable yet felt. I had neither made it nor prayed for it: it was mine in virtue of existence! and existence was mine in virtue of a Will that dwelt ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... chequer-board of Queen-Victoria-streets. To-day its area is appalling, its architecture grandiose. It is the young giant among the cities of the earth, and it stands but on the threshold of its destiny. It embraces in its unimaginable amplitude every extreme of splendour and squalor. Walking in Dearborn-street or Adams-street of a cloudy afternoon, you think yourself in a frowning and fuliginous city of Dis, piled up by superhuman and apparently sinister powers. Cycling round the boulevards of a sunny morning, ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... even the creative artist cannot escape from the fascination of this ever-changing environment, where the unsystematised present obtrudes its fresh discontents, and the unknown future is pregnant with possibilities of good and the alternative of unimaginable evil. All perceive that something must be done to direct the plunging course of this hydra-headed democracy which, as its onrush is in any case irresistible, may at any moment deviate from the path and fling itself headlong to perdition. When the guns are firing and the ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... and ranks Of all the hosts and hierarchs of heaven, Moved by one universal impulse, urged Their steeds of swiftness up the arch of light, From sphere to sphere increasing as they came, Till world on world was emptied of its race. Upward, with unimaginable speed, The myriads, congregating zenith-ward, Reached the far confines of the utmost sphere, The home of Truth, the dwelling-place of Love, Striking celestial symphonies divine From the resounding sea of melody, That heaved in swells of soft, mellifluous sound, ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... and intentions of that Self. The highest Brahman, whose nature is fundamentally antagonistic to all evil and essentially composed of infinite knowledge and bliss—whereby it differs from all other souls—possesses an infinite number of qualities of unimaginable excellence, and, analogously, a divine form suitable to its nature and intentions, i.e. adorned with infinite, supremely excellent and wonderful qualities— splendour, beauty, fragrance, tenderness, loveliness, youthfulness, ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... preparation was found in his training of Judaism; which to those whose hearts were hearts of flesh, not stony and charmed against hearing, had already anticipated the first outlines of Christian ideas. Sin, purity, holiness unimaginable, these had already been inoculated into the Jewish mind. And amongst the race inoculated Christ found enough for a central nucleus to His future Church. But the natural tendency under the fever-mist of strife and passion, evoked ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... black ants in my garden do not seem to need any sympathy. They have weathered the storm in some unimaginable way, while great trees were being uprooted, and houses blown to fragments, and roads washed out of existence. Yet, before the typhoon, they took no other visible precaution than to block up the gates of their subterranean town. And the spectacle of their triumphant toil to-day ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... appetite. Then, the conversation as the meal progressed—the wonderful, almost incredible, stories of past adventure related by Marshall and Bascomb, both of whom had already once visited the Indies, and the confidence with which all anticipated their return to England laden with wealth unimaginable—exercised an almost irresistible fascination over the two newcomers, one at least of whom— Philip Stukely to wit—began to feel, before the meal was over, that he cared not a jot though he should be compelled by force of circumstances to join those daredevil ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... ever seen the effect on the sea of a powerful gale continued without intermission for three or four days and nights, and to those who have not I believe it must be unimaginable, not from the mere force or size of surge, but from the complete annihilation of the limit between sea and air. The water from its prolonged agitation is beaten not into mere creaming foam but into masses ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... North in its happiest union of developments, under its choicest and most favourable conditions of culture, in its yet fresh, untamed, unbroken, northern vigour, was at last subjected to the stimulus and provocation which the ancient learning brings with it to the northern mind—to the now unimaginable stimulus which, the revival of the ancient art and learning brought with it to the mind of Europe in that age,—already secure, in its own indigenous development, already advancing to its own great maturity under the scholastic culture—the meagre Scholastic, and the rich Romantic culture—of ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... Fielding met his bunter Muse, And, as they quaff'd the fiery juice, Droll Nature stamp'd each lucky hit With unimaginable wit." ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... features. We have reached the time when we will not suffer anybody to turn our great ones into gods or demigods, and to remove them far from us to dwell, like absentee deities, on a remote Olympus, or in an unimaginable Paradise; we must have them near, intimates whom our souls can converse with, and our hearts love. Such an intimate was Roosevelt living, and such an intimate will he be dead. Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt—those are the three whom Americans will cherish and revere; each of them a leader and ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... and the trader in its production, manufacture, and sale, and by the consumer in its use, and by the general interference with vital activity and consequent decreased productive capacity, there is represented an almost unimaginable sum of money. Certainly the people at large are not so well fed both as to quantity and quality, or so thoroughly clothed, or so hygienically housed that they can afford this gigantic ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... into its musty interior and drove them through the foggy brown of a London winter dawn. Unimaginable cheerlessness enveloped them. The world wore an air of disgust at having to get up on such a morning. The atmosphere for thirty yards around them was clear enough, with the clearness of yellow consomme, but ahead it stood thick, like a puree of bad ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... over insurmountable barriers to uninhabitable realms; promises insupportable possibilities; lures to an unimaginable goal. Yet ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... wants absolute equality, friend Jonathan, for it is as undesirable as it is unimaginable. What Socialism wants is equality of opportunity merely. No Socialist wants to pull down the strong to the level of the weak, the wise to the level of the less wise. Socialism does not imply pulling anybody down. It does not imply ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... of ruts and bumps, and from Langy to Villiers there was hardly a corner but what showed signs of the invaders' passage. Over these green and fertile fields whose crops had proudly waved their heads about the lovely Marne, were strewn straw and empty bottles in unimaginable quantities. Thousands of blackened or charred spots dotting the countryside, told of campfires and hasty bivouacs, and as we silently plodded on towards Charny, the growing evidences of recent battle met ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... that pomp of colour on the way to the Kobuk has come suddenly upon me, and always with a bounding of the spirit. I can shut my eyes now and see that incomparable sunrise; I can see again that vision of mountains filling half the sky with their unimaginable ardency, and I think that this world never presented nobler sight. Surely for its pageantry of burning, living colour, for purity and depth and intensity of tint, the Far North with its setting of snow surpasses all other regions ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... her out from everyone he knew. She seemed to him as one consecrated. Then this lover in his mystic passion passed in the contemplation of his well-beloved from the earthly to the invisible soul. He saw behind and around her a form unseen by others; a form, spiritual, pathetic, of unimaginable beauty, on which the eternal powers kept watch, which they nourished with their own life, and on which they inflicted their own pain. This form was crowned, but with a keen- pointed radiance from which there fell a shadowy dropping. ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... mystery of the universe. The theologians and the metaphysicians have tackled these problems from every side without giving us the least hope of solving them. Among those which life sets us, there is none to which our brain seems more definitely and strictly closed; and they remain, if not as unimaginable, at least as incomprehensible as on the day when they were first perceived. What corresponds, outside us, with what we call time and space? We know nothing about it; and Kant, speaking in the name of the "apriorists," who hold that the idea of time is innate in us, does not teach ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... manifestation of that instinct, a cold intellectual concept and never a dominating thought! We are not driven to procreate. In fact, every child born into the world competes hard for its morsel. Under our unimaginable economic regime all increase in population ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... may be briefly stated thus: Edwards believed in an eternity of unimaginable horrors for "the bulk of mankind." His authority counts with many in favor of that belief, which affects great numbers as the idea of ghosts affected Madame de Stall: "Je n'y crois pas, mais je les crains." ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... given, but Desargues seems not to have arrived at the metrical properties which result when the infinite elements of the plane are introduced. Thus he says, "When the traversal is at an infinite distance, all is unimaginable." ...
— An Elementary Course in Synthetic Projective Geometry • Lehmer, Derrick Norman
... thought of the little newsboy of Cartagena, to whom she had long since begun to send monetary contributions—and of her unanswered letters—of the war devastating her native land—of rudely severed ties, and unimaginable changes—and she would start from her musing and brush away the gathering tears, and try to realize that her present situation and environment were but means to an end, opportunities which her God had given her to do His work, with ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Prodicus's friends, being solid, somewhat pragmatic men—neither young sports nor philosophers—steer a middle course. There is a flute girl present, because to have a good symposium without some music is almost unimaginable; but she is ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... to slide, rescuing me from perils, sicknesses, poverty, bondage, public shame, evil chances; keeping me from perishing in my sins, and waiting patiently for my full conversion. Glory be to Thee, O Lord, glory to Thee, for Thine incomprehensible and unimaginable goodness toward me of all sinners far and away the most unworthy. The voices and the concert of voices of angels and men be to Thee; the concert of all thy saints in heaven and of all Thy creatures in heaven and on earth; and of me, beneath their feet an unworthy and wretched sinner, Thy abject ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... Bunyanesque, Herculean, Gargantuan; infinite &c 105. large as life; plump as a dumpling, plump as a partridge; fat as a pig, fat as a quail, fat as butter, fat as brawn, fat as bacon. immeasurable, unfathomable, unplumbed; inconceivable, unimaginable, unheard-of. of cosmic proportions; of epic proportions, the mother of all, teh ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the light of accepted astronomical theories (which regard our earth as uttterly insignificant compared with the rest of the universe) have pointed out the irrationality and absurdity of supposing that the Creator of all this unimaginable vastness of suns and systems should have any special interest in so pitiful a creature as man, an imperfectly developed inhabitant of one of the smaller planets attached to a second or third rate sun, while that He should have selected ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... of himself dead, might so have looked, the one upon the other. An awful survey, in a lonely and remote part of an empty old pile of building, on a winter night, with the loud wind going by upon its journey of mystery— whence or whither, no man knowing since the world began—and the stars, in unimaginable millions, glittering through it, from eternal space, where the world's bulk is as a grain, and its hoary age ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... I followed up "Barabbas" as quickly as possible by "The Sorrows of Satan," thus carrying out the preconceived intention I had always had of depicting, first, the martyrdom which is always the world's guerdon to Absolute Good,—and secondly, the awful, unimaginable torture which must, by Divine Law, for ever be the ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... presents itself to me without those pleasing mirages that during the day still delude me; during those moments I appear to have a more vivid realization of the rapid flight of the years, the crumbling away of all that I endeavor to hold to, I almost realize the final unimaginable nothingness, I see the bottomless pit of death, near at hand, no longer ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... almost fainted in relief. He had been imagining the unimaginable. He had pictured her down in that hell out of which he had just come. He had conceived that she might have followed her uncle into Bridgetown, or committed some other imprudence, and he turned cold from head to foot at the mere thought of what ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... its height. There is no better instance of this than the passage in the second Book of the Excursion, where he describes with a fidelity, at once realistic and poetic, the worn-out almsman, his patient life and sorry death, and then the unimaginable vision in the skies, as they brought the ancient man down through dull mists from the mountain ridge to die. These hundred and seventy lines are like the landscape in which they were composed; you can no more appreciate the beauty of the one by a single or a second perusal, ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... skin-deep morality, and I could have sworn that if he was firmly pressed with a question that could not be evaded he would either refuse to answer or tell the truth. But what had I just heard? No answer to any question. A voluntary statement, precise in terms, that was utterly false. The unimaginable had happened. It was almost as if one's dearest friend, in a moment of closest sympathy, had suddenly struck one in the face. The blood rushed to my head, and I stood still on the grass. I stood there ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... length, she stood for a second or two to gather her strength. She still felt ill and dizzy, as though the world she knew had suddenly fallen away from her and left her struggling in unimaginable space, like a swimmer in deep waters. But she conquered her weakness, and, drawing aside the tent-flap once ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... Whatever the banker might have felt, or whether his body had now become a mere machine mechanically carrying on a life-long habit of action, the impression was one of the tremendousness of the man's consistency. A great effort was demanded to summon up the now almost unimaginable experience of his confidence; of the evening when, almost on that very spot, he had revealed to Hodder the one weakness of his life. And yet the effort was not to be, presently, without startling results. In the darkness of the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Things you used to know In dim, dead lives, lived long ago, Some madly mirthful Merriment Whose lingering light is yet unspent,— Some unimaginable Woe,— Your strange, sad smile forgets these not, Though you, ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... of a few minutes only the frightfulness of the thing could no longer be endured. Beth had been all but torn from her seat by the sheer weight and impact of the wind. All the world was roaring prodigiously. The sand and dust, driving with unimaginable velocity, ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... the shimmering forests. Here rose the solitary tower where Echo tarried for the Hornblower. And straight before us, across that level floor, beyond a tremulous cloud of foam and light and colour, lurked the unseen, the unimaginable, ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... mighty brain, a brain re-enforced by the many perverted but powerful intellects which Roger had won over to his cause. It was powered by the incalculable force of cosmic radiation, powered to drive its unimaginable mass through space, against any possible attractions, for an indefinite number of years. It was armed and equipped to meet any emergency which Roger's coldly analytical mind ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... I know we all wept, but we were speechless, for a new glory and terror had been added to the earth. It is the most unutterable of wonderful things. The words of common speech are quite useless. It is unimaginable, indescribable, a sight to remember for ever, a sight which at once took possession of every faculty of sense and soul, removing one altogether out of the range of ordinary life. Here was the real "bottomless pit"—the "fire which is not quenched"—"the ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... with fire all round him,— Who moved along the molten west, And over the round hill's crest That seemed half ready with him to go down, Flame-bitten and flame-cleft,— As if there were to be no last thing left Of a nameless unimaginable town,— Even he who climbed and vanished may have taken Down to the perils of a depth not known, From death defended though by men forsaken, The bread that every man must eat alone; He may have walked while others hardly dared Look on to see him stand where many fell; ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... Glow'd bright, as, like a viewless river, swell'd The deepening music!—Silence came again! And where I gazed, a shrine of cloudy fire Flamed redly awful; round it Thunder walk'd, And from it Lightning look'd out most sublime! Here throned in unimaginable bliss And glory, sits The One Eternal Power, Creator, Lord, and Life of All: Again, Stillness ethereal reign'd, and forth appear'd Elysian creatures robed in fleecy light, Together flocking from celestial haunts, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various
... atoms came into existence, he can only reply, "Behind the veil, behind the veil;" for it is at this point at last that he becomes agnostic.[63] The notion of creation is rejected (after Spencer) as inconceivable, because unimaginable, as though the origination of every change in the phenomenal world were not just as unimaginable; we see movement in process, and we see its results, but its inception is unimaginable, and its ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... once—nay, more than a hundred times—he had actually spoken! Spoken! But how? He had told his hearers that he was altogether vile, a viler companion of the vilest, the worst of sinners, an abomination, a thing of unimaginable iniquity; and that the only wonder was, that they did not see his wretched body shrivelled up before their eyes, by the burning wrath of the Almighty! Could there be plainer speech than this? Would not the people start up in their seats, by a ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... from the verge of a lofty precipice. It is wholly grim and stern; no touch of beauty relieves the austere majesty of that presence. At the foot of Cape Eternity the water is of unknown depth, and it spreads, a black expanse, in the rounding hollow of shores of unimaginable wildness and desolation, and issues again in its river's course around the base of Cape Trinity. This is yet loftier than the sister cliff, but it slopes gently backward from the stream, and from foot to crest it is heavily clothed with a forest of pines. The woods that hitherto ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... where reined a semi-tropical splendour and luxuriance of vegetation and where, protected from time immemorial by the Indian hunters themselves, all the other animals thatconstitute its prey roved and ranged in unimaginable numbers. To the earliest Kentuckians who cut their way into this, the most royal jungle of the New World, to wrest it from the Indians and subdue it for wife and child, it was the noiseless nocturnal cougar that filled their imaginations ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... this mode of service; they would be helped to buy; unequal to the task of making up their minds, they welcomed any aid toward it; and therefore preferred Mr. Turnbull, who gave them every imaginable and unimaginable assistance, groveling before them like a man whose many gods came to him one after the other to be worshiped; while Mr. Marston, the moment the thing he presented was on the counter, shot straight up like a poplar in a sudden calm, his visage bearing witness that his thought was already ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... naught but marvel and danger, the two Merucaans followed close behind their guide. Even so would you or I cling to the Martian who should land us on that ruddy planet and pilot us through some huge, inchoate and grotesque growth of things to us perfectly unimaginable. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... disfigure the shore. Each tank holds 4,000 tons of oil, 30,000 tons per month being the usual export. Kerosene taints the air, but is considered to be innocuous, and to drive away the curse of mosquitos. The unimaginable and ferocious heat makes every step a terror, during a snail's progress up a wooded road. Sun-hat and white umbrella scarcely mitigate the scorching rays on this perilous promenade, but there is only a day at disposal, and it cannot be wasted. ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... Yule this was unimaginable disaster. She had never dreamt that Marian, the still, gentle Marian, could be driven to revolt. And it had come with the suddenness of a thunderclap. She wished to ask what had taken place between father and daughter in the brief interview before dinner; but Marian gave ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... when this seems but a poor nation: boastful, corrupt, violent, and preparing, as it is now, to steal another country by fraud and war; yet the stars on the flag always make me happy and confident. Do you see the constellations swinging above us, such unimaginable vastnesses, not roving or crashing through the illimitable at haphazard, but moving in more excellent measure, and to a finer rhythm, than the most delicate clockwork man ever made? The great ocean-lines mark our seas with their paths through ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... around one but frail curtains, and a world of illimitable night, whisperings at a distance, correspondence going on between darkness and darkness, like one deep calling to another, and the dreamer's own heart the center from which the whole network of this unimaginable chaos radiates, by means of which the blank PRIVATIONS of silence and darkness become powers the ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... achievement for recent idealism to have made the world hang together in these directly representable ways instead of drawing its unity from the 'inherence' of its parts—whatever that may mean—in an unimaginable principle ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... with predatory life, and more drenched with blood, both animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied ship, scuds through space with unimaginable speed, and turns alternate cheeks to the reverberation of a blazing world, ninety ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... examined his person as though it were a tailor's mannikin? He had tried several times to get into a Government department which would utilise his brains, but without success. And the club hummed with the unimaginable stories related by disappointed and dignified middle-aged men whose too eager patriotism had been rendered ridiculous by the vicious foolery of Government departments. No! He had some work to do and he was doing it. People were looking to him for decision, for sagacity, ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... strangest old woman in the world—active, industrious, clean and faithful, but an unimaginable grumbler. She grumbles by day, and I think by night, when asleep. She grumbles whilst making the butter, she grumbles when feeding the poultry, she grumbles even at her meals. She grumbles at other people, and when she is alone she grumbles at herself. I never meet her ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... highest types, surpassing all others in exquisite beauty of form, brilliant colouring, and perfect melody, can never be known to our woods and groves. These rarest avian gems may not be removed from their setting, and to those who desire to know them in their unimaginable lustre, it will always be necessary to cross oceans and penetrate into remote wildernesses. We must go rather to regions where the conditions of life are hard, where winters are long and often severe, where Nature is ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... be nonsense. Barbara and I protested, growing warmer in our protestations as the argument continued. Nothing would give us such unimaginable pleasure as to entertain Mrs. Prescott. Liosha laid her hand on ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... dawned on Eden, a morn of unimaginable beauty, Adam waked Eve from her restless slumbers, and heard her troubled dreams, in which she had been tempted to taste of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. He comforted her, and after their ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... my last sight and reminiscence of that fatal ship should be a pillar of smoke on the horizon. To so many others besides myself the same appearance had played a part in the various stages of that business; luring some to what they little imagined, filling some with unimaginable terrors. But ours was the last smoke raised in the story; and with its dying away the secret of the Flying Scud became a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... calm his wrath; but to-day, if Caesar had set the world in flames, he would only have added fuel to the fire, for who could more surely upset the firmly established power of this emperor and son of emperors as Caracalla himself? The people of Rome had endured unimaginable sufferings at his hands; but the cup was full, and, judging from Caesar's looks, he would cause it to overflow this day. Then the rising flood which tore the son of an idolized father from the throne, might possibly bear him, the child of lowliness ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... how arrantly superstitious they were, most of them. They had been brought up on ghosts and witches and evil spirits, and, fearless as they might be of things mortal and natural, all that bordered on the unknown and uncanny held for them unimaginable terrors. The dead man might serve a useful purpose after all; and the ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... and grubs and 'offal. This would be a hell to him; and if he had any wisdom he would know that his own civilization is a hell to the savage—but he hasn't any, and has never had any; and for lack of it he shut up those poor natives in the unimaginable perdition of his civilization, committing his crime with the very best intentions, and saw those poor creatures waste away under his tortures; and gazed at it, vaguely troubled and sorrowful, and wondered what could be the matter with them. One is almost betrayed ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... forward the supreme proof of it. She was too proud—in her brooding and her mystery—to do so. The supreme proof was that at this time she herself was secretly engaged to be married to Edward Coe, who had conquered her heart with unimaginable swiftness a few weeks before she was about to sit for a musical examination at Manchester. "Let us say nothing till after my exam," she had suggested to her betrothed. "There will be an enormous fuss, and it ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... men looked inquiringly into the unfathomable depths beyond. Descartes (1596-1650) revived the old Greek idea of a gradual evolution of the heavens and the earth from a primitive chaos of particles, taught that the stars stood out at unimaginable distances in the ocean of ether, and imagined the ether as stirring in gigantic whirlpools, which bore cosmic bodies in their orbits as the eddy in the river causes the cork ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... watch it bathing, you may see it dip its breast just as much under the water as a porpoise shows its back above. You can only rightly describe the bird by the resemblances, and images of what it seems to have changed from,—then adding the fantastic and beautiful contrast of the unimaginable change. It is an owl that has been trained by the Graces. It is a bat that loves the morning light. It is the aerial reflection of a dolphin. It is the tender ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... the stage of history shifted from the mainland to the Ionian colonies on the coast of Asia Minor. Cities such as Ephesus and Miletus became immensely prosperous, Mausolus of Halicarnassus, the Attalids of Pergamon, possessed wealth that would have been unimaginable to the Greeks of Marathon. The City State, fighting desperately for its existence, inspired by high ideals of patriotism and religion, was a thing of the past. These Greeks of Ionia were well content to enjoy the comfort and prosperity ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... million years old has never been seen. This, prima facie, indicates an extremely slow rate of formation. And our calculations quite support the conclusions that the growth of a halo, if this has been uniform, proceeds at a rate of almost unimaginable slowness. ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... were placed at their disposal. The camp was formed near the town, on low and marshy ground, and the worst of the business was that another convoy having occupied the spot the day before, the field was absolutely invisible under the superincumbent filth; it was no better than a common cesspool, of unimaginable foulness. The sole means the men had of self-protection was to scatter over the ground some large flat stones, of which they were so fortunate as to find a number in the vicinity. By way of compensation they had a ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... like frosty rime, That in the morning whiten'd hill and plain And is no more; drop like the tower sublime Of yesterday, which royally did wear His crown of weeds, but could not even sustain Some casual shout that broke the silent air, Or the unimaginable touch of Time. ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... a terrible flash and roar—a chaos of unimaginable sound. It seemed as though the whole world had split into fragments and were rocketing off into space; and, in quick succession, came the rumble of falling beams and masonry, and the dense dust of disintegrated plaster mingling with the fumes of ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... of this argument, and paint How nature by collateral interest And by extrinsic passion peopled first My mind with beauteous objects: may I well Forget what might demand a loftier song, For oft the Eternal Spirit, He that has His Life in unimaginable things, And he who painting what He is in all The visible imagery of all the World Is yet apparent chiefly as the Soul Of our first sympathies—O bounteous power In Childhood, in rememberable days How often did thy love renew for me Those ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... I felt the horror of nightmare seize me, for it bore a striking resemblance to Ombos. A dreadful exuberance and vitality seemed to shine through the thing, an exuberance wholly malign, a vitality that foamed and frothed with unimaginable evil. Evil beamed from the deep cavernous eyes; it leered in the demon-like ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... Unimaginable horrors would come to pass upon the earth were Power as well as Knowledge put into the hands of the ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... and my patriotism and allegiance to the State into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o'-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor fire-fly has shown me the causeway to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features. The walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town sometimes finds himself in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... imagine ourselves in other than our present circumstances; the most commonplace future is as unimaginable as the ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... vast but connected universe we are not the only self-conscious beings. Life is working here as elsewhere, for some sublime purpose. The day is at hand when we shall turn from the child-like amusements and excitements of physical science to the unimaginable adventures of super-physical discovery; and in that day we shall not only flash our messages to the stars, but hold communion ...
— The Comrade In White • W. H. Leathem
... it was the beauty and winsomeness of the London ladies, looking on, that nearly drove the foreigners wild. In 1606, upon the entry of the king of Denmark, the chronicler celebrates "the unimaginable number of gallant ladies, beauteous virgins, and other delicate dames, filling the windows of every house with kind aspect." And in 1638, when Cheapside was all alive with the pageant of the entry of the queen mother, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... was there sign of human life. If their enemies were upon their track, they knew it not—perfect peace, perfect solitude seemed to encompass them. Still the Indian was vigilant; covering their trail with unimaginable ingenuity, taking advantage of every running stream, every stony hillside, building a fire only in some hidden hollow or fold of the hills, using his bow and arrow to bring down the deer or wild fowl which furnished them ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... that it was he who was doomed, that already behind the curtains of life destiny was staging his death—and what a death!—he could no more foresee than he foresaw the Paliser Case, which, to the parties subsequently involved, was then unimaginable, yet which, at that very hour, a court of last ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... I doubt not it is—it behoves us to be careful how we thrust our noses into that city of Cartagena yonder. Yet go I must, and will; for it is not to be thought of that our Captain may be in their accursed Inquisition, perhaps suffering torments unimaginable, and we doing nothing to help him. Therefore, in view of the possibility of those troops having arrived, and having been secreted somewhere in the town, I think we must modify our plans a little, to the extent, that is to say, of making the landing-party ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... frieze, and the smoke of the cauldron that drifted up continually or brought a reek of tar to my nostrils. And, again, all this would pass; and I would feel that it was not hell but heaven that waited; and that all was but as a thin veil, a little shadow of death, that hung between me and the unimaginable glories; and that at a word all would dissolve away and Christ come and this world be ended. So, then, the minutes passed for me: I said my Paternoster and Ave and Credo and De Profundis, over ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... Capital in its distracted and fluctuating state; —all political phaenomena that marked the dreary reality of dominion in the declining days of the Roman Commonwealth. But Bracciolini puts before us nothing like this;—only incongruous, unimaginable and un-Romanlike personages,—people who gibber at us, as idiots in their asylums, as that unfortunate simpleton, the Emperor Claudius;—murderous criminals who glower and scowl upon us, as those two monsters of iniquity, Tiberius and Nero;—pimps ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... shortly after three o'clock that the vision came in reality, more marvelous, more exquisite, more unimaginable than the conception of all my reveries—a dim shadow in the far offing, a dark speck in the lofty clouds, a mass of towering green upon the blue water, the fast unfoldment of emerald, pale hills and glittering reef. Nearer ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... that they said of him was probably true. And even supposing that this girl was no more than a fiend in seraphic shape, what conceivable reason could she have for such infamous suppression? Motive was unimaginable.... No, the fault must be his own. He had pressed too hard, pried too tactlessly and inquisitively, not made her understand sufficiently the dire swiftness of the poor ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... beneath which roll the rivers of hell, for whom the daughters of Ocean are ministers, to whose primeval birth the gods of Olympus are the upstarts of a day, whose soul is the treasure-house of a secret which threatens the realm of heaven, and for whose unimaginable doom earth reels to its base, all the might of divinity is put forth, and Hades itself trembles as it receives its indomitable and awful guest! Yet, as I have before intimated, it is the very grandeur of Aeschylus ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to understand this little earth of ours, and the part we play in it. Look at the midnight sky, streaming with the light of infinite suns, and filled with an unending procession of worlds in which the spirit of life clothes itself in an unimaginable variety of forms. This clot of dust on which we live will grow cold, and break and scatter in the abysses of space. But it is not our home; we are only passengers, and when our journey here is done, fairer mansions are waiting ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... us, (sons of Britons,) that most unrighteous edict, TAXATION without REPRESENTATION! and then, because in the spirit of our gallant fathers, we bravely opposed him, he broke up the very fountains of his malice, and let loose upon us every indescribable, unimaginable curse of CIVIL WAR; when British armies, with their Hessian, and Indian, and tory allies, overran my afflicted country, swallowing up its fruits and filling every part with consternation; when no thing was to be seen but flying crowds, burning houses, and young men, (alas! ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... huge paw like a shoulder of mutton, and grabbed my hand with as much fervour as though I had saved his life, or done him some other unimaginable kindness. And, as he did so, his old broad sweet smile came back again. ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... the father's house meant the inexpugnable fortress where no evil could befall us, the abundant home where all wants were supplied, and where the shyest and timidest child could feel at ease and secure. It is all coming again, brother, and amidst the august and unimaginable glories of that future the old feeling of being little children, nestling safe in the Father's house, will fill our ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
Copyright © 2025 e-Free Translation.com
|
|
|
