"Fathomless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of vantage, in my mind's eye I saw this mighty vessel as she had been, the heave of the fathomless sea below, the whirling battle-smoke about her, the air full of the crashing thunder of her guns as she quivered 'neath their discharge. I heard the humming drone of shells coming from afar, a hum that grew to a wail—a shriek—and the sickening crash ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... human lives when the storm-spent mind, tossing on the waves of heaving emotion, tugs and strains at the ties which moor it to reason, until they snap, and it sweeps out into the unknown, where blackness and terror rage above the fathomless deep. Such a crisis had entered the life of the unhappy priest, who now held in his shaking hand the garbled publication of his life's most sacred thoughts. Into whose hands his notes had fallen on that black day when he had sacrificed ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... journalist, had started up, trembling from head to foot.... Their glances met, challenging, each seeking to quell, to subjugate the other.... It seemed to the onlookers that they were witnessing an intense struggle between two very strong natures separated by a deep, a fathomless gulf; that a veil, dark as night, hanging between them had been rent asunder, giving passage to an illuminating flash; that this luminous ray carried with it all the revelations and the ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... courageous of their number, when taunted by his more skilful companions with being afraid, struck out boldly beyond the prescribed bounds. He had not gone much further than his own length, however, along the surface of the fathomless sea, when his heart failed him, poor little man; and along with his confidence away also went his power of keeping his head above the water. So down he sank rapidly, to the speechless horror of the other boys, who of course, could lend the ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... Sigismund. To him the roaring tempest was mute, the boiling and hissing lake had no horrors, and he had plunged into the fathomless Leman as recklessly as he could have leaped to land. The shriek, the "Sigismund! oh, Sigismund!" of Adelheid, was in his ears, and her cry of anguish thrilled on every nerve. The athletic young Swiss was a practised and expert swimmer, or it is improbable ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... wendest hence alone: Thou shalt find a path in the desert, and a road in the world of stone; It is smooth and deep and hollow, but the rain hath riven it not, And the wild wind hath not worn it, for it is but Fafnir's slot, Whereby he wends to the water and the fathomless pool of old, When his heart in the dawn is weary, and he loathes the ancient Gold: There think of the great and the fathers, and bare the whetted Wrath, And dig a pit in the highway, and a grave in the Serpent's path: Lie thou therein, O Sigurd, and thine hope ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... sighing because of him. Not once did he think of his brother's despair, of the ghastly drama they were to leave behind them. He saw a sweet little pale face resting beside his in the railway train, a blooming lip within reach of his lip, and two fathomless eyes looking at him by the soft light of the lamp, to the soothing accompaniment of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Cornelia's feet, upon a little wooden cricket which stood in the window, and had taken one of her hands in both of hers. Cornelia glanced down at her somewhat indifferently; she had scarcely attended to what her sister had been saying. But the fathomless expression of happiness upon Sophie's uplifted face struck through her gloom and pain. She had never seen any thing like it before, and probably at no moment of her life had Sophie's earthly ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... Birth of a Nation. It is a photoplay paradise, the spoken theatre is practically banished. Unfortunately the local moving picture managers think it necessary to have orchestras. The musicians they can secure make tunes that are most squalid and horrible. With fathomless imbecility, hoochey koochey strains are on the air while heroes are dying. The Miserere is in our ears when the lovers are reconciled. Ragtime is imposed upon us while the old mother prays for her lost boy. Sometimes the musician with this variety of sympathy abandons ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... white chrysanthemums. The snow lay a foot deep in the gulches, with its hard, smooth surface marked by the feet of innumerable birds and beasts. Ice bridges had formed across all the streams, and I crossed them without knowing when. Gulches looked fathomless abysses, with clouds boiling up out of them, and shaggy mountain summits, half seen for a moment through the eddies, as quickly vanished. Everything looked vast and indefinite. Then a huge creation, ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... who seemed to possess a magic power in painting every shady nook and mossy wayside spring of the human heart. No old, gray rock or fathomless shadow of feeling seemed to escape that observing eye. And there were clear, bold strokes sometimes which showed a strength not often given to a woman's hand. Through all her writings ran a thread of light reflected from God's word, though bent out ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... the great waves thundering along as if seeking to devour our tiny craft. Now the schooner hung poised for a moment on the edge of a mountainous wave; the next instant it seemed to be dashing headlong into a fathomless, black abyss. The wind tore on with a fierce shriek, and we scudded before it under bare ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... author labors in regard to the book is the confusion naturally resulting from the effort to get literature right side up when it has got upside down. The writing is a kind of pugilism— the strokes being made straight out from the shoulder. The account-book is always carried about with her in a fathomless pocket overflowing with the aggregations of a housekeeper who can throw nothing away, to wit: matchboxes, now appointed to hold buttons and hooks-and-eyes; beeswax in the lump; the door-key (which in Venice takes a formidable size, and impresses you at ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... minds to eat them. The Germans eat a great deal of meat; and we were obliged to take meat when we preferred vegetables. Now, when a deep dish is set before you wherein are chunks of pork reposing on stewed potatoes, and another wherein a fathomless depth of sauerkraut supports coils of boiled sausage, which, considering that you are a mortal and responsible being, and have a stomach, will you choose? Herein Munich, nearly all the bread is filled with anise or caraway seed; it ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... suppositions. Yet no other explanation came to lighten the mystery of the occasion, and dazed as I was by the horror of my position and the mortal dread I felt of the man who in one instant had turned the heaven of my love into a hell of fathomless horrors, I soon had eyes for the one fact only, that the woman lying before me was sufficiently like myself to inspire me with the hope of preserving my secret and keeping from my would-be slayer the knowledge of my having escaped the doom ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... a soundless sound like softly bruised silk; They poured into the bowl of the sky with the gentle flow of milk. In eager, pulsing violet their wheeling chariots came, Or they poised above the Polar rim like a coronal of flame. From depths of darkness fathomless their lancing rays were hurled, Like the all-combining search-lights of the navies of the world. There on the roof-pole of the world as one bewitched I gazed, And howled and grovelled like a beast as the awful splendors blazed. ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... back to the homestead, Dan suggesting that the "missus might like to have a look at the dining-room," we turned into the towering timber that borders the Reach, and for the next two hours rode on through soft, luxurious shade; and all the while the fathomless spring-fed Reach lay sleeping on ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... silence broke, As one who long has lain in wait, With purpose to retaliate, And thus he dealt the avenging stroke. "In such a company as this, A tale so tragic seems amiss, That by its terrible control O'ermasters and drags down the soul Into a fathomless abyss. The Italian Tales that you disdain, Some merry Night of Straparole, Or Machiavelli's Belphagor, Would cheer us and delight us more, Give greater pleasure and less pain Than your grim ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... remarkable that in no part of the world, in any age, has the sea been selected as a burial place for the dead. Indeed, the idea of being drowned at sea, or dying on shipboard to be intombed in the fathomless ocean, is so abhorrent to many individuals that it is with fear and trembling they trust themselves on the water. It was a belief of the ancients, that to insure happiness hereafter, the dead body of a ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... fathomless combination of philosophy and religion. Minos remained pensive, and relapsed ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... indiscreet confidant of their vanity, Russell's revelations establish firmly the broad historical—not gossipping—fact, that before and after Sumter, the most absolute want of earnestness, of statesmanlike foresight, and the most childish but fathomless vanity inspired all the actions of the American Secretary of State. I am one of the few who, having often met Russell here, never fawned to him, nay who not even took any notice of him; but I am grateful to him for his falsely-called indiscreetness—for ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... this was not the fact in Aster's case. Her eyes were the colour which men like Theophile Gauthier attribute to Venus: they were not blue, neither were they brown; but they presented in the most fascinating ensemble a grey which at night was a fathomless dusk, and by day that green which you perceive where the sea is a hundred fathoms deep. With the light upon her eye there was a glint of emerald, that witching glare which made Becky Sharpe irresistible. ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... about one with exactly the effect of stirring, swaying water. Although the way was quite clear and the road broad I felt as though at any moment our advance would be stopped by an impenetrable barrier, a barrier of bristled thickets, of an iron wall, of a sudden, fathomless precipice. Of course to both Trenchard and myself there were, during this drive, thoughts of his dream. We both recognized, although at this time we did not speak of it, that this was the very place ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... effectually crushed without annihilating slavery, the sole and supreme cause of the rebellion. Such lukewarmness and untimely peace sentiments, widely diffused through the loyal States, would be truly alarming. Those who feel and talk thus, are like blind men on the verge of a fathomless abyss; and should a majority ever be animated by such ideas, we are gone—hopelessly fallen under the dark power, never perhaps to rise again in our day or generation. But we have no fears of such a dismal result; the nation is in the divine hands, and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... bow of the ship; the grampus, slowly heaving his huge form above the surface; or the ravenous shark, darting, like a spectre, through the blue waters. My imagination would conjure up all that I had heard or read of the watery world beneath me; of the finny herds that roam its fathomless valleys; of the shapeless monsters that lurk among the very foundations of the earth; and of those wild phantasms that swell the ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... the faith of the flush of knowledge, and of the investigation of the depths of qualities and things. Cleaving and circling here swells the soul of the poet: yet is president of itself always. The depths are fathomless, and therefore calm. The innocence and nakedness are resumed— they are neither modest nor immodest. The whole theory of the special and supernatural, and all that was twined with it or educed out of it, departs as a dream. What has ever ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... from feeling uneasy, Mr. van Koppen smiled at the thought of how his millions, backed by the opinion of a connoisseur of international reputation, had enabled him to play yet one more trick upon that great Republic whose fathomless gullibility no one had ever exploited to a better purpose than himself. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... he gazed at his leader. What fathomless purpose lay beneath that stern, bearded face? Jackson's eyes expressed nothing. He and he alone knew what was ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... in such a place. It was an unfinished little town, with brick-fronted stores, arc-lights swaying over fathomless mud, big superintendent's and millowner's houses of bastard architecture in a blatant superiority of hill location, a hotel whose office chairs supported a variety of cheap drummers, and stores screeching in an attempt at metropolitan smartness. ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... a little stream gushed from the side of the rock, and fell into a fathomless well. The torches were held over it, and the visitors looked down. Solid darkness was below. Carl took from ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... the horizon, and her white lateen sails only just dimly discernible to a sharp eye that was looking out for her, under the rays of the rising moon, which now emerged from the waste of water that surrounded the two vessels with its fathomless expanse. But who on board the merchant ship suspected that they were pursued or looked out for the felucca, dead astern as she was, and only a ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... ages past, already swallowed up! Peering around in this pensive mood, in which the joy of being mixed with the uneasy doubt of its tenure, my eye fell at last on the spire of a little church, rising like a pencil of light to heaven, out of the fathomless waste. And there my soul alighted and found rest. Like some sea mark to the voyager, that slender shaft, reared by the social religion of the world, stood to tell me where in the universe I was; the common Christian consciousness reinforced my own, and dark queries and agitating ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... sailor sick. Whether the water in the lowest depths of Lakes Superior and Ontario be salt or fresh, we can not ascertain; for the greater density of the former may keep it always below, or there may be a communication with the fathomless abysses of the ocean."—Montgomery ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... base in a misty raiment of purple, the royal hill lifted above the valley an Olympian crest of porphyritic rock into the fathomless blue. Here not Jupiter and his court looked serenely down upon the struggling race, "indifferent from their awful height," but a dark-hued god, in Aztec vestments, gazed beyond the meadows to the floating flower beds, the gardens with their baths, and the sensuous dancing girls. ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... Your Majesty can conceive the magnitude and violence of the natural forces which overwhelmed their country with moving sheets of ice not less that 5,000 coprets in thickness, grinding down every eminence, destroying (of course) all animal and vegetable life and leaving the region a fathomless bog of detritus. Out of this vast sea of mud Nature has had to evolve another creation, beginning de novo, with her lowest forms. It has long been known, your Majesty, that the region east of the Ultimate Hills, betwen them and the Wintry Sea, was once the seat of an ancient ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... a long breath of amazement broke from those other dames of Paris. Not one of them but was sated with the blaze of diamonds, the rich, red light of rubies and the fathomless radiance of sapphires. Silks and satins and cloth of gold and silver had few novelties for them. The costumers of Paris, center of the world of art, even in those times of unrivaled extravagance and unbridled self-gratification, ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... own, for it passes through many ancient bayous, and is fed by many of the old "hatchees" which the canoes of the red man explored long ago. Upon one side of the Yazoo comes the Sunflower, deep cut into the fathomless loam; yet sometimes the Sunflower is reversed in current; and the Sunflower and the Hushpuckenay may be one stream or two; and the latter may run as the levees say, or as the floods dictate; while above them both, at the ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... Education, I tremble before thy dreaded name. The cruelties of Nero, of Caligula, what were they?—a few crunched limbs in the amphitheatre; but thine, O Education, are the yearning of souls sick of life, of maddening discontent, of all the fearsome and fathomless sufferings of the mind. When Goethe said "More light," he said the wickedest and most infamous words that human lips ever spoke. In old days, when a people became too highly civilised the barbarians came down from the north and regenerated that nation with darkness; but now there are ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... the cushions; his hand lay limp in her clasp. "Yes, little one," he said, "Yes. Your heart is like your voice, fathomless and pure. The carriage has stopped now, and there is the candle, burning up yonder under the eaves. Can you find your way alone, without help? I ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... booty then to devour their victim, vengeful creatures, seated to banquet at bottom of sea; but at break of day, by my brand sore hurt, on the edge of ocean up they lay, put to sleep by the sword. And since, by them on the fathomless sea-ways sailor-folk are never molested. — Light from east, came bright God's beacon; the billows sank, so that I saw the sea-cliffs high, windy walls. For Wyrd oft saveth earl undoomed if he doughty be! And so it came that I killed ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... one desire, which, in spite of a fathomless purse, seemed difficult at first to fulfil. What she wants is to play a sonata with the orchestra of the Conservatoire, rien de moins! She begged me to ask Auber how much it would cost. After due reflection he answered, twelve hundred ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... gall of thy bitterness," Thou hast taught me in vain, oh, teacher! I neither blame thee nor bless; If bitter is sure and sweet sure, These vanish with form and feature— Can the creature fathom the creature, Whose Creator is fathomless? ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... vague in any picture of the time and place that we can bring before us. There are the fathomless forests, broken by the prairies and rivers; there are the Indian towns widely scattered along the larger streams throughout the whole region; there are the French posts on the northern border, with each a priest and a file of soldiers, and a few Canadian farmers ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... again the sorrows of their troubled record. When the morning broke through the dull gray of the eastern sky rim, he would be a heartless surgeon of emotions who attempted to probe the pathos of their thoughts, and a dull and vulgar rhetorician who should attempt to parse the fathomless ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... produced in the spectator of hanging dizzily above the lake, with infinite air below him, and, then, the magical effects of dawn and evening, when wreaths of mist would blot out the valley and the lake, and leave the eye of the watcher face to face across the fathomless abyss with the majestic mountain mass, and its attendant retinue of clouds, as though they and he ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... alive, and eventually recovers, in the midst of a roaring rock-bound river, and suppose him (a thing we confess, in his case, not quite conceivable) to have hooked a twenty-pound salmon at the tail of the stream, just where it subsides into some vast, almost fathomless, and far-extended pool, and that the said salmon, being rather of a restless disposition, and moreover somewhat disquieted by feeling an unaccustomed barb in his cheek or tongue, takes his 300 yards down the deep water at a single run, and then goes helter-skelter over a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... of sorcery, and around his bended head there hovered a dim silvery nimbus. Thanatos alone was a man fully grown; and on his calm and colourless face there were blended an unutterable sadness, and an unspeakable peace; his eyes were fathomless, far-reaching, heavy laden with thought, as though they had seen at once the heights of heaven and the depths of hell; and he, having thus seen, and knowing all things, had learned that there was but one good possible in all the universe,—that ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... creative energy in the soul, emerging from fathomless abysses, can enable the soul to endure until death the most infernal torments, the fact remains that since the attribute of sensation, which depends entirely upon the existence of the bodily senses, is one of the soul's basic attributes and has its ground in ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... sharp contest whether the terminus on the Bay should be Nelson or Churchill. Churchill is one of the best harbors in the world, land locked, rock protected and fathomless; and Nelson is probably one of the worst—shallow, with sand bars caused by the confluence of the two great rivers emptying here, exposed to open sea. But the balance of favor on the Bay is how long can navigation be kept open. Navigation ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... malice and folly." Indeed, after the explorers were lost sight of in the wilderness which they were to traverse, many people in the States declaimed bitterly against the folly that had sent these unfortunate men to perish miserably in the fathomless depths of the continent. They no longer treated it "as a philosophism," or wild prank, but as a wicked scheme to risk life and property in a search for the mysteries of the unknown ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... is figurative. By Manasa is not meant the trans-Himalayan lake of that name, which to this day is regarded as highly sacred and draws numerous pilgrims from all parts of India. The word is used to signify the Soul. It is fathomless in consequence of nobody being able to discover its origin. It is pure and stainless by nature. It is represented here as having Truth for its waters and the Understanding for its lake. Probably, what is meant by this is that the Understanding, containing the waters of Truth, forms a part of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... gently to the summit; others so steep a squirrel could hardly climb them; fatherly mountains, with their children clustered about them, clothed in birch, pine, and cedar; mountain streams, sparkling now in the sunlight, then dashing down into apparently fathomless abysses. ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... together, Aasa came and sat down at Vigfusson's feet; her long golden hair flowed in a waving stream down over her back and shoulders, there was a fresh, healthful glow on her cheeks, and her blue, fathomless eyes had a strangely joyous, almost triumphant expression. The father's gaze dwelt fondly upon her, and the collegian was but conscious of one thought: that she was wondrously beautiful. And still so great was his natural timidity and awkwardness in the presence of women, that it was only ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... not indeed under the water and worse still), strengthens me in my higher endeavors,—and you, dear friend, will have to bear some of the responsibility if I go on writing more such "confused," "formless," and, for the every-day critic, quite "fathomless" things. ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... boarding-house. One plump hand—with dimples where the knuckles should have been—rested upon the unresponsive marble, in the other she held the slate. She was a teacher of some of the lowest classes in Miss Christina Eldridge's academy for young ladies, and only Miss Christina knew the almost fathomless depths ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... Hercules, Mercury, &c., used as household gods. "I expected that he would be dancing attendance upon her during the whole of the evening; but, curiously enough, soon after his arrival he suddenly disappeared, and was not seen again until nearly two o'clock." Then, looking straight in the girl's fathomless eye, he added, "Do you know, Gabrielle, I don't like that ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... burdened heart would sink In fathomless despair But for an angel on the brink— In mercy standing there: An angel bright with heavenly light— And born of loftiest skies, Who shows her face to mortal race, In Friendship's ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... ditches and in the woods. Winter, dark, long, and spiteful, was hardly over; spring had come all of a sudden. But neither the warmth nor the languid transparent woods, warmed by the breath of spring, nor the black flocks of birds flying over the huge puddles that were like lakes, nor the marvelous fathomless sky, into which it seemed one would have gone away so joyfully, presented anything new or interesting to Marya Vassilyevna who was sitting in the cart. For thirteen years she had been schoolmistress, and there was no reckoning how many times during all those years ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... read again. She read of the prodigal son, and of Him who would not condemn the woman that was a sinner. It was a solemn and terrible moment. The fathomless depths of the girl's voice, breaking once and again to a low wail, then rising to a piercing cry, went with the words themselves like an arrow to the heart of the dying man. Still no peace came to him. Chill was the inmost ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... In a recent Symposium, where the question as to "The influence upon Morality of a decline in Religious Belief," was discussed at length by writers of whom this century is justly proud, there appears scarcely so much as a recognition of the fathomless chasm separating the leading terms ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... Creator. And that low And sordid gravitation of his powers To a vile clod, so draws him with such force Resistless from the centre he should seek, That he at last forgets it. All his hopes Tend downward, his ambition is to sink, To reach a depth profounder still, and still Profounder, in the fathomless abyss Of folly, plunging in pursuit of death. But ere he gain the comfortless repose He seeks, and acquiescence of his soul, In heaven renouncing exile, he endures What does he not? from lusts opposed in vain, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... car, he glanced now and then up at the dusky skies growing thick with swarming worlds, and meditated dreamily whether it might not be within the range of possibility to be lifted with Sah-luma, chariot, steeds and all into that beautiful, fathomless empyrean, and drive among planets as though they were flowers, reining in at last before some great golden gate, which unbarred should open into a lustrous Glory-Land fairer than all fair ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Assiniboine River joins the Red, and the city of Winnipeg stands to-day. It was reported that game was plentiful here. Two hundred tepees of Assiniboines were awaiting the explorer. His forces were worn with their marching, but in a few weeks the glaze of ice above the fathomless drifts of snow would be too rotten for travel, and not until June would the riverways be clear for canoes. But such a scant supply of goods had his partners sent up that poor De la Verendrye had nothing to trade with the waiting Assiniboines. Sending his sons forward to ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... will not enter into it now, whether my feeling the first few months was one of fathomless despair. Everything is relative. I know only that my whole being was absorbed by one woman, and I understood for the first time the void created by the death of a dearly ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... the fathomless mine My tireless arm doth play; Where the rocks ne'er saw the sun's decline, Or the dawn of the glorious day. I bring earth's glittering jewels up From the hidden cave below; And I make the fountain's granite cup With ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... swaying of the dismal contrivance, drawn by the amphibious horses of the region; until at last he hears the waves begin to dash against it, and it comes to a pause in a depth which he feels must be fathomless. Then comes a thumping at the door, and he knows that the bathing-woman is hungrily awaiting his issuing forth. Nothing else is so terrible in the world—nothing even in Alice in Wonderland—to a small, naked, shivering boy as the British bathing-woman. ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... nor Nought existed; yon bright sky Was not, nor heaven's broad woof outstretched above. What covered all? what sheltered? what concealed? Was it the water's fathomless abyss? There was not death—yet was there nought immortal, There was no confine betwixt day and night; The only One breathed breathless by itself, Other than It there nothing since has been. Darkness there was, and all at first was veiled In gloom profound—an ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... the eye, to the ear, to the taste, to the heart, to the head, to the concentrated light of the soul, to the imagination as well as to the understanding. If they do not rouse good aspirations, cast them into the fathomless ravine, there to perish, a fitting food for the poisonous fungi that ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... been in such a situation, a just idea of the feverish impatience, the sinking and mounting of hope, as we watch the crablike movement of a vessel that is clawing off a lee-shore, in a gale. In the present case, it being well known that the sea was fathomless, we had run so near the danger that not even the smallest of its horrors was veiled ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... more heard growling afar off, like distant thunder mingling with the rushing of a mighty wind, waxing louder and louder as it approached, and upheaving the sure and firm—set earth into long undulations, as if its surface had been the rolling swell of the fathomless ocean. The house rocked, pictures of saints fell from the walls, tables and chairs were overturned, the window frames were forced out of their embrasures and broken in pieces, beams and rafters groaned and screamed, crushing the tiles of the roof into ten ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... could he disown them? The creations of love and right were upon him, misfortune had unbound his sensations; his own offspring stood before him clothed in trouble thick and dangerous. His follies have entailed a life-rent of misery upon others; the fathomless depth of the future opens its yawning jaws to swallow up those upon whom the fondness of a father should have been bestowed for their ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... Could he possibly get out to where the boat was? There might be one way, but there could be only one, and even that appeared a desperate and utterly futile venture. It was to find a footing somehow, to let go his vise-like grip of the rail, and leap out into the darkness across the black and fathomless gulf of water surging up between the hull and the vessel's main boom in the hope of landing in the belly of the sail; to be able to keep his balance and walk out breast high through the rushing water into the blackness ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... man I could have no reserves, and I freely asked his advice on the plunge which I was about to make into that fathomless tide of good and ill, the world. I mentioned the Church as the profession which my mother had suggested, but for which I did not conceive either my temper or my ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... yet ascend higher. On the next day's journey their outlines appeared more irregular and ragged. Drawing still nearer, their base presented a long, dark strip stretching throughout their whole course, ever widening until it seemed like a fathomless gulf, separating the world of reality from the realms ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime Dark-heaving;—boundless, endless, and sublime— The image of Eternity—the throne Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime The monsters of the deep are made; each zone Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone. Lord Byron. ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... grave be in the fragrant shade, or in the fathomless ocean, among our kindred, or in the midst of strangers, the day is coming when we shall all appear at one universal bar, and receive from a righteous Judge the award of our deeds. He that is wisest, penetrates the future ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... O fathomless, soothing Night! Thou art a balm to my restless spirit, I nestle gratefully in thy bosom, Dark, gracious mother! Like a dove, I rest in thy bosom. Out of the uncharted, unthinkable dark we came, And in a little time we shall return ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... vivid flash of lightning cut from one black hill in the clouds and buried itself behind another. As if piercing the fathomless blanket and renting holes in its inky cover, a downpour of rain broke through, and even before reaching the earth it could now be seen descending in a heavy ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... my business agents to convert certain negotiable assets into cash, and to arrange for an extension of my credit with the banks. I now propose to follow N.O. & G. to the bottom—if there be one—and if not I shall drop with my money into the fathomless void ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... thought. It was less purpose than a despairing instinct. It was to support the child who had been intrusted to him— the Lilly Lalee—above water as long as he should have strength; and then to go down along with her into that vast, fathomless tomb, that leaves no trace ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... officer showed not the fathomless depths and feelings of his true heart, which throbbed with a renewed emotion. With a sense of utter loneliness he lamented the bitter misfortune which had been his attendant since he had left the peaceful home of ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... yoga-nidra, the deep sleep under the spell of spiritual meditation. It is the refuge of Mainaka fearful of falling thunder, and the retreat of the Asuras overcome in fierce encounters. It offers water as sacrificial butter to the blazing fire issuing from the mouth of Varava (the Ocean-mare). It is fathomless and without limits, vast and immeasurable, and the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... seated across from them at the same table behind a pile of telegrams a foot high, and was very busy opening the messages, making notes on them as he read. He was an interesting looking man with dark, fathomless eyes, swarthy complexion and iron gray hair, but he bore a youthful look that made one feel he had not the right of years to the gray hair. His expression was gloomy and not altogether pleasant, but when he smiled he displayed a row of dazzling white teeth and his eyes lost the sad look and held ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... marble rocks. This fall of their sacred stream the people call the 'Dhuandhar', or 'the smoky fall', from the thick vapour which is always seen rising from it in the morning. From below, the river glides quietly and imperceptibly for a mile and a half along a deep, and, according to popular belief, a fathomless channel of from ten to fifty yards wide, with snow-white marble rocks rising perpendicularly on either side from a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet high, and in some parts fearfully overhanging. ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... The bullet bored its way through the bronzed skull of the Indian, who, with an ear-splitting screech, flung his arms aloft, leaped several feet from the ground, toppled sideways over the edge of the trail and went tumbling, rolling and doubling down the precipice far beyond sight, into the almost fathomless abyss below. ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... that my father left me was a great talent for sleeping. I think I can say, without boasting, that in a sleeping match I could do as well as any man. I can sleep long, I can sleep often, and I can sleep sound. When I put my head on the pillow I pass into a fathomless peace where no dreams come, and about eight hours later I emerge to consciousness, as though I have come up from the deeps ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... changed at her words, but she could not see very clearly. She had begun to slip down and down, faster and ever faster into a fathomless abyss of darkness from which there was no deliverance. And as she went she heard his voice above her, brief, distinct, merciless: "And you will pay the price." ... The ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... a plunge in the sea— The Sun will be warming other shores— Happy the tribes of that land of calm! Fathomless, deep is my love 10 To thee, my ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... The vault of clouds seemed to rise and heighten and suddenly, through a rift, a long ray of sunshine fell upon the fields, and presently the clouds separated, showing the blue firmament, and then, like the tearing of a veil, the opening grew larger and the beautiful azure sky, clear and fathomless, spread over the world. A fresh and gentle breeze passed over the earth like a happy sigh, and as they passed beside gardens or woods they heard occasionally the bright chirp of a bird as he ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... conversation which followed, old Jombatiste, exploring at last Cousin Tryphena's mind, leaned giddily over the abyss of her ignorance of political economy and sociology, dropping one exploring plummet after another into its depths, only to find them fathomless. He went shakily back to his ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... time."(890) The law of God, which Satan has reproached as the yoke of bondage, will be honored as the law of liberty. A tested and proved creation will never again be turned from allegiance to Him whose character has been fully manifested before them as fathomless love ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... he knelt beside her, "how can you hope to have a man ever talk to you in a sane fashion? You shouldn't have such eyes, Patricia! They are purple and fathomless like the ocean, and when a man looks into them too long his sanity grows weak, and sinks and drowns in their cool depths, and the man must babble out his foolish heart to you. Oh, but indeed, you shouldn't have such eyes, Patricia! ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... the river, which, at Harper's Ferry, presents as striking a vista among the hills as a painter could desire to see. But a beautiful landscape is a luxury, and luxuries are thrown away amid discomfort; and when we alighted in the tenacious mud and almost fathomless puddle, on the hither side of the Ferry (the ultimate point to which the cars proceeded, since the railroad bridge had been destroyed by the Rebels), I cannot remember that any very rapturous emotions were awakened ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... he'd give 'em a lesson! On second thought, he rebaited the window-ledge with a can of Special Juicy Apricot Preserve. At ten o'clock he turned in, determined to sleep lightly, and immediately plunged into fathomless depths of unconsciousness, lulled by a singing wind and the drone ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... early next morning; changing position during the night just often enough to deprive us of rest. As we started out toward Harrison's Landing the rain was pouring in sheets; and throughout the day it continued to deluge the country. The roads were rivers of almost fathomless mud; and our tired men could scarcely drag themselves along. But at four in the afternoon we halted under cover of our gunboats, and bivouacked for the night. Such a deplorable scene as was here, was enough to melt the heart of the stoutest. As ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... the strange events of the night seemed as unreal as the vanishing night-shadows. The bluest skies of a blue-sky land curved in fathomless majesty over the yellow valley of the Santa Fe. Against its borders loomed the silent mountain ranges—purple-shaddowed, silver-topped Ortiz and Jemez, Sandia and Sangre-de-Christo. Dusty and deserted lay the trail, save that here and there a group of dark-faced ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... could not entirely shake off the ties of kindred and human love so long as her spirit continued in its earthly tenement. So far from this, every glance she cast on one or all of us denoted the fathomless tenderness of her nature, and was filled with its undying affection. She was weak, frightfully so I fancied; for death appeared to hasten in order to release her as swiftly and easily as possible; yet did her interest in me and in Lucy sustain her sufficiently to enable her to ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... dispensation; but the rule has its exceptions—its terrible exceptions. When a man is brought in an instant, by some sudden accident, to the very verge of the fathomless pit of death, with all his recollections awake, and his perceptions keenly and vividly alive, without previous illness to subdue the tone of the mind as to dull its apprehensions—then, and then only, ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... answered, wondering at the ingenuity and complexity of her mind—and of his own, for that matter—of all mind indeed. Deep below deep it lay, staggering him at times by its fathomless reaches. "I hope you will take seriously what I am going to say, for it will explain so much. When I began to be interested in your picture I was so because it coincided with the ideal I had in mind—the thing that you think changes swiftly. That was nearly seven years ago. Since then it has never ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... of the fathomless depths of the peace of God, fair with flowers of hope; of still places wrought in man; of mirrors that reflect, in light uncomprehended, the ...
— The Grey Brethren and Other Fragments in Prose and Verse • Michael Fairless
... in the light of the window waiting for me. Her face was pale but steady, there was a proud light in her fathomless eyes, a slight smile parted her lips, and she carried ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor
... of the fathomless depths of vanity and selfishness that lie under that pimple. It's a monument more sublime than the Matterhorn. Think of the poor fellow that has to marry that human millstone, and be the clerk ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... daughter named Sarianna, after her mother, and Clara. His wife was a woman of singular beauty of nature, with a depth of religious feeling saved from narrowness of scope only by a rare serenity and a fathomless charity. Her son's loving admiration of her was almost a passion: even late in life he rarely spoke of her without tears coming to his eyes. She was, moreover, of an intellectual bent of mind, and with an artistic bias having its readiest ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... go out to toil and care and anxiety and change and suffering and conflict, and yet to bear within our hearts the unalterable rest of God. Deep in the bosom of the ocean, beneath the region where winds howl and billows break, there is calm, but the calm is not stagnation. Each drop from these fathomless abysses may be raised to the surface by the power of the sunbeams, expanded there by their heat, and sent on some beneficent message across the world. So, deep in our hearts, beneath the storm, beneath the raving winds and the curling ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... said Peter, out of his fathomless ignorance. "For my part I think that women are often ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... bleed over his sins. Honor and pride, it may be, forbid her disclosing his errors, and the fire must consume her spirit in solitude. Needs she no support in this exigency? What can the world give her, adequate to her fathomless wants? ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... however poetic, never slaked a dry throat. To enjoy Caprona's romantic suggestions we must have water, and so we came in close, always sounding, and skirted the shore. As close in as we dared cruise, we found fathomless depths, and always the same undented coastline of bald cliffs. As darkness threatened, we drew away and lay well off the coast all night. We had not as yet really commenced to suffer for lack of water; but I knew that it ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the wash of some unseen ship, and a silver-gray wave broke over the bow, leaving on the deck a sheet of sediment—the gray broth that has its place in the fathomless deeps of the sea. A sprinkling of the wave fell on my face, and it was so cold that it stung as boiling water stings. The dead and most untouched deep water of the sea had been heaved to the top by the submarine volcano—the chill still water that kills all life and smells ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... asked. "There, don't look so solemn. We're not going to be sorry for a single thing we've done today, are we?" She stood close to him holding the lapels of his jacket in either hand, searching his face wistfully with her fathomless ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... peaceful," she said, as if in explanation of her sigh. Not a single person was in sight, and the stir of the wind in the branches, that sound so seldom heard by Londoners, seemed to her as if wafted from fathomless oceans of sweet ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... about the world they wended and deemed it fair and good, And they loved their life-days dearly: so came they to the wood, And the lea without a shepherd and the dwellings of the deer, And unto a mighty water that ran from a fathomless mere. Now that flood my brother Otter had haunted many a day For its plenteous fruit of fishes; and there on the bank he lay As the Gods came wandering thither; and he slept, and in his dreams He saw the downlong river, ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... the open the rest of that day, recharging the storage batteries and getting ready for the search which, Tom calculated, would take them some time. As he had explained, it would not be easy to locate the Pandora in the fathomless ...
— Tom Swift and his Undersea Search - or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic • Victor Appleton
... and unbounded benevolence, he devoted himself from earliest youth for his brethren and fellow creatures. He has united a character highly simple and inartificial, with the wisdom of a true politician. Not by the mean subterfuges of a professed negociator; not by the dark, fathomless cunning of a mere statesman; but by an extensive knowledge of the interest and character of nations; by an undisguised constancy in what is fit and reasonable; by a clear and vigorous spirit that disdains imposition. He has met the accommodating ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... mountains, not unfrequent, which is on one side abrupt and bounded by a wall of almost fathomless precipice, and on the other descends to the plain in a cataract of billowy undulations. It had one feature which, although peculiar, is by no means unprecedented. At one point, where the huge rock wall towers up from the ghastly depth of a broad ravine, there ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... or so, they started to leave, they did not notice in an obscure corner a greyish-bearded, somewhat bald person, nor did they perceive two fathomless, burning eyes that followed ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... "the field," a vast domain of four acres or thereabout, by the measurement of after years, bordered to the north by a fathomless chasm,—the ditch the base-ball players of the present era jump over; on the east by unexplored territory; on the south by a barren enclosure, where the red sorrel proclaimed liberty and equality under its drapeau ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and was suspended. But she felt him quiver, and she came down involuntarily nearer upon him. He could not help himself. Her fingers had him under their power. The fathomless, fathomless desire they could evoke in him was deeper than death, where ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... secret complacency the agreeable alternatives of power and wealth open to his choice. Alas! How different! Distracted, restless, supine, burning with fury, or frozen with terror, he felt a dread as fathomless as the sea creep upon him from every side. That rogue of a doctor had to come out with his information. That was clear. It would be of no use to him—alone. He could do nothing with it. Malediction! ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... caverned earth and fathomless thought, Of Life and Death, and their twin mysteries, Before and After, on my spirit press Tempting and awful, with high promise fraught, And guardian terrors, whose out-flashing swords Beleaguer Paradise ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... and delicately made, stood before him, a girl with an exquisite grace and a nameless charm—the something that lurks in the fragrance of the violet. Her eyes were not the quiet, solemn eyes of the little princess of his fairy tales, but the deep, fathomless eyes of a maiden. ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... interest of Tosari centres round the stupendous Bromo, possessing the largest crater in the world, a fathomless cavity three miles in diameter, veiled in Stygian darkness, and suggesting the yawning mouth of hell. This bottomless pit, bubbling like a boiling cauldron, pouring out black volumes of sulphureous smoke, and clamouring with unceasing thunder, was for ages a blood-stained altar ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... proof against the perpetual contact of the parties concerned; and as it is far better to revive the old days of courtship, when men's mouths are honey-combs: and, to make them still sweeter, the ladies the bees which there store their sweets; when fathomless raptures glimmer far down in the lover's fond eye; and best of all, when visits are alternated by absence: so, like my dignified lord duke and his duchess, Samoa and Annatoo, man and wife, dwelling in the same house, still kept up their separate quarters. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... eternal sunshine every mountain, from Mont Blanc to Monte Rosa and the Jungfrau. What, again, in the lower regions, can equal the mysterious charm of gazing from the edge of a torn rocky parapet into an apparently fathomless abyss, where nothing but what an Alpine traveller calls a "strange formless wreathing of vapour" indicates the storm-wind that is raging below us? I might go on indefinitely recalling the strangely impressive scenes that frequently ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... trying to fill the Bottomless Pit. To my childish imagination the upturned wheelbarrows and wasted trucks and rails always suggested the banks of the Red Sea after the awful disaster had swept over Pharoah and his host. How the returning tide used to sweep through that to us fathomless gulch! It made the old river seem ever so much more wonderful, and ever so ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... anything—or, had he betrayed his feelings? In Paris the waiter who shows that he has ears, or eyes, or a heart, except in the exercise of his functions, is lost. He is bound to be caught and his telltale humanity scourged by instant dismissal. So when those fathomless eyes glittered in his direction, his knees trembled, and a ball of copper invaded his throat. He could barely drag himself to her side and ask if he could help her. A burst of impertinent laughter greeted ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... to tell you, and then dismiss it," Dixie said, her pretty lip twitching, the dark curves under her eyes lending sharp contrast to their fathomless lustre. "I had everything ready, and went to meet him, but he didn't come. I went to the post-office and got a letter. He was—was taken sick—so the letter said. He was pretty bad off. In fact, Alfred, the truth is, he's dead; ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... frequently released them, to make those vivid gestures with which Neapolitans frequently clinch their phrase. His most remarkable feature was his eyes, of a greenish grey: extraordinary eyes, not for beauty, but for their fathomless depth, and for the sympathy which one felt welling up in them from the soul beneath. This was especially noticeable as our conversation fell upon the question of Art and upon the many problems bound up with it. I do not know how long that first interview lasted, but ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... on came the chief, in his fierceness and wrath, Nor saw he the wide gulf that yawned in his path,— And soon, in the depths of its fathomless tide, The warrior and war-steed ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... limpid-eyed girl, I would take every chance, If only the prize Were a love-flashing glance From your fathomless eyes. ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... with a little dog she held under her arm and talking to a young man who sat facing her—a man whose face burned like fire, and the laugh on whose lips died away when he saw us—for it was De Ganache. The Duchess followed his glance, and turned in our direction. As her fathomless eyes fell on mademoiselle her ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... Huntings of Death—'Death that lays man at his length'—for panting pursuit, and breathless flight, and the last crashing horror of the bomb, in some hell-darkness at the end of all:—these haunted her. Or she saw visions of men swinging from peak to peak above fathomless depths of ice and snow on the Italian front; climbing precipices where the foot holds by miracle, and where not only men but guns must go; or vanishing, whole lines of them, awfully forgotten in the winter snows, to reappear a frozen and ghastly host, with the ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Skag knew fear. It was cold—long—metallic. It was invincible—without pity. He heard human voices and the sound of running water—in a dream. Near by, he heard a low sweet laugh. The eyes of fathomless splendour beside him were not looking into his, but they were full of that love which transcends fear. And the birthright of Sanford Hantee rose ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... Its whiteness and delicacy aroused no voluptuous thoughts; it was obviously the manifestation of a cold and almost cruel chastity of nature. His hair, which fell to the nape of his neck, also was white; but again, from vigour, not decay. His eyes were black, quiet and fathomless. He was still a young man, but so stern were his features that he had the appearance of a lawgiver, and this in spite of their great beauty ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... the beginning all was chaos, in which was a fountain that sent forth twelve rivers. These streams flowed so far from their source that the waters froze, and the ice, defying the modern law of nature, sank till the fathomless deep was filled up. Far south of the world of mist, in which this miracle was wrought, was a world of fire and light, whence proceeded a hot wind that melted the ice, from the drops of which came the ice-giant, whose name was Ymir, and from whom proceeded ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... out, for all her smiles and her cheerfulness, was busy and weary with futilities. She too, like the fifty daughters of Danaus, was condemned to the idiot's labour of eternally drawing water in sieves from fathomless wells. ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... adventure or philanthropy, gain or religion, was strong upon the souls of men, and thousands sought the New World, where their imagination saw the realization of all their dreams. Bravely they crossed the fathomless deep which heaved beneath them, cutting them off so absolutely from the loved ones left at home, from the wise counsels of those on whom they were accustomed to depend, and from the strong arm of the Government under whose promised protection they sailed, ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... most wonderful part of my dream. As I thus rested against his heart, I seemed to see into it; and mine was filled with loving wonder, and an utterly blessed feeling of home, to the very core. I was at home—with my Father! I looked, as it seemed, into a space illimitable and fathomless, and yet a warm light as from a hearth-fire shone and played in ruddy glow, as upon confining walls. And I saw, there gathered, all human hearts. I saw them—yet I saw no forms; they were there—and yet they would be there. To my waking reason, ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... the sprightly beam of morning With twilight meek of tender eve, Brightness interfused with softness, Light and shade did weave: And gave to candor equal place With mystery starred in open skies; And, floating all in sweetness, made Her fathomless mild eyes. ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... Gwendoline smiled and kissed her:- "Am I not sadder than you, my Sister? Expecting joy is a happy pain. The Future's fathomless mine of treasures, All countless hordes of possible pleasures, Might bring their store to my ...
— Legends and Lyrics: Second Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... It is the knell of my departed hours. Where are they? with the years beyond the flood! It is the signal that demands dispatch: How much is to be done! My hopes and fears Start up alarm'd, and o'er life's narrow verge Look down—on what? A fathomless abyss! A dread eternity! How surely mine! And can eternity belong to me, Poor pensioner on the bounties of an hour? How poor, how rich, how abject, how august, How complicate, how wonderful is ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... yet higher o'er my head! Back, back, horizon; widen out my world! Rush in, O fathomless sea of the Unknown! For, though he slay me, I will trust ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... my brave comrades—three days shall decide." He sails—but no token of land is in sight; He sails—but the day shows no more than the night; On, onward he sails, while in vain o'er the lee The lead is plunged down through a fathomless sea. The second day's past, and Columbus is sleeping, While mutiny near him its vigil is keeping. "Shall he perish?" "Ay, death!" is the barbarous cry. "He must triumph to-morrow, or, perjured, must die!" Ungrateful and blind! shall the world-linking sea, He ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... affection, friendship, the desire to penetrate the mysteries of creation. And yet this question is not to-day a problem of astronomy, nor can we see any prospect that it ever will be, for the simple reason that science affords us no hope of an answer to any question that we may send through the fathomless abyss. When the spectroscope was in its infancy it was suggested that possibly some difference might be found in the rays reflected from living matter, especially from vegetation, that might enable us to distinguish them from rays reflected by matter not endowed with life. ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... and that means that all the creatures' responsive love must find sweet relief in a song that it will take eternity itself to end. In our Father's House we only "begin to be merry," and end nevermore, as we sound the depths of a wisdom that is fathomless, know a "love that passeth knowledge";—singing, singing, nothing but singing, ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... over Genoa.) This majestic city mine! (Spreading out his arms as if to embrace it.) To flame above it like the god of day! To rule over it with a monarch mind! To hold in subjection all the raging passions, all the insatiable desires in this fathomless ocean! 'Tis certain, though the cunning of the thief ennoble not the theft, yet doth the prize ennoble the thief. It is base to filch a purse—daring to embezzle a million,—but it is immeasurably great to steal a diadem. As guilt extends its sphere, the infamy decreaseth. (A pause, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... about his death, as there was in his life. His head was massive, and his face handsome without being attractive. [Footnote: This, however, was near the close of his life.] The brow was finely chiseled, and the eyes beneath it were dark, luminous and fathomless. I never saw him smile, except slightly ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... their spirits; and the Marquise felt, with a woman's wonderful intuition, that to give any expression to the sorrow in her heart would be to make an advance. If, even now, each one of those words was fraught with significance for them both, in what fathomless depths might she not plunge at the first step? She read herself with a clear and lucid glance. She was silent, and ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... express his own personality and imagination. The result is that varied forms and colors in the different courts and buildings blend truly into the whole picture of an Oriental city, set in the midst of a vast amphitheater of hills and bay, arched by the fathomless blue of ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... he looked at her, staring with resentful black eyes. But the mother glanced at him again, almost vacantly. And the very vacancy of her look inflamed him. She had wide grey-brown eyes with very dark, fathomless pupils. He felt the fine flame running under his skin, as if all his veins had caught fire on the surface. And he went on ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... form of a debauch of sentimentalism. The poetry of real passion came back into literature and people wept for joy to find that they had hearts. Love was no longer a frivolous game played for the gratification of lust, but a divine rapture of fathomless and ineffable import. It was now the era of the beautiful soul, of tender sentiment, of virtuous transports and of endless talk about all these things. Love being natural,—a part of that nature to which the world was now resolved to return,—it was sacred, and superior to ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... a reverent, responsive, receptive silence in my heart, take me out beyond my pleadings into the limitless visions and the fathomless satisfactions of communion with Thyself. Speak to ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... eyebrows, with the plaintive ripple of irregularity bending their line, the languid lips, the mournful eyelids, the soft contours of cheek and throat,—were a veil for the coldness of her eyes. To look into them was like coming suddenly through dusky woods to a lonely mountain tarn, lying fathomless and icy beneath a moonlit sky. Gregory was aware, as if newly and more strongly than before, of how ambiguous was her ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... which followed Stephen's last remark, a fascinating perception, then an alluring conviction, flashed along the brain of both. The perception was that an immediate marriage COULD be contrived; the conviction that such an act, in spite of its daring, its fathomless results, its deceptiveness, would be preferred by each to the life they must lead ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... the worm beneath thy feet! The Fathomless has care for meaner things Than thou canst dream, and has made pride for those Who would be what they may not, or would seem 765 That which they are not. Sultan! talk no more Of thee and me, the Future and the Past; But look on that which cannot ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the fine, tested quality of his patience stood him in good stead. He might long to draw near, to clasp the snowy hand, to study the fathomless dusk of the eyes, and note the frightened droop of the fringed lids; but he held aloof. Still he went to Larch Avenue night after night; he dropped in of a morning when least expected, occasionally finding her alone for a few moments; he walked ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... with a fair wind down the Frith, and soon left the Bass and the May behind us. I must confess, I was a little afraid, when, for the first time, I was out of sight of land. It is a dismal thought to have nothing but sea and sky around, and only a frail plank between us and the fathomless depths of ocean. This was my first voyage; but many a day and month and year have I spent on the water ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 343, November 29, 1828 • Various
... tremblingly beating— What troubleth thee? There where the waves from the fathomless water come greeting, Wild with their glee! Or rush from the rocks, like a routed battalion ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... without one envious cloud to obscure the refulgence of her beams, which were reflected upon the water in broad and wavering lines of silver. The blue wave was of a deeper blue—so clear and so transparent that you fancied you could pierce through a fathomless perspective, and so refreshing, so void of all impurity, that it invited you to glide into ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... let them in their souls submit to some greater soul than theirs. At present, when they say they want a leader, they mean they want an instrument, like Lloyd George. A mere instrument for their use. But it's more than that. It's the reverse. It's the deep, fathomless submission to the heroic soul in a greater man. You, Aaron, you too have the need to submit. You, too, have the need livingly to yield to a more heroic soul, to give yourself. You know you have. And you know it isn't love. It is life-submission. ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... by the monster's rapid drive upward, passed after it into space. Far overhead there was one fleeting glimpse of a pinpoint of dull opalescence reflecting the rays of the dying sun. Then the pinpoint disappeared in fathomless space. With his gravity regulator adjusted to the point where it almost neutralized his weight, he fell slowly back ...
— The Planetoid of Peril • Paul Ernst
... the sweat cold under the knapsack that swung upon my back; stopped, faced about and became human again. Ridge over ridge to my right the mountain summits fell away against a fathomless sky; and topping the furthermost was a little paring of silver light, the coronet of the rising moon. But the glory of the full orb was in the retrospect; for, closing the savage vista of the ravine, stood up far away ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... strange and bewildering, for it lies far beyond the horizons of human thought. There are no familiar landmarks, nothing on which you can lay hold. You "wander to and fro," as the mystics say, "in this fathomless ground"; surrounded by silence and darkness, struggling to breathe this rarefied air. Like those who go to live in new latitudes, you must become acclimatised. Your state, then, should now be wisely passive; in order ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... all the pictures were blotted out, and his whole world was gulfed by a rush of water in which he sank to fathomless depths. ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe |
