We pick our steps, by lanthorn light indeed, and slowly, but still surely and safely, along a dark and difficult road: but just as we are beginning to pride ourselves on having found our way so cleverly, we come to an edge of darkness; and see before our feet a bottomless abyss, down which our feeble lanthorn will not throw its light a yard.

" X. "That shapeless phantom sinking slow "Deep down the vast abyss below, "Darts, thro' the mists that shroud his frame, "A horror, nature hates to name!" "Mortal, could thine eyes behold "All those sullen mists enfold, "Thy sinews at the sight accurst "Would wither, and thy heart-strings burst; "Death would grasp with icy hand

And this oscillation proceeds from such natural cause as this: one of the chasms of the earth is exceedingly large, and perforated through the entire earth, and is that which Homer speaks of, 'very far off, where is the most profound abyss beneath the earth,' which elsewhere both he and many other poets have called Tartarus.

I performed all evolutions there by means of that divine Soul which I fashioned there, and which had remained inoperative in the watery abyss.

The earth opened in many places, forming frightful abysses; while, at a small distance, it rose into hills.

All of us move darkly in that awful abyss of Self, and as the fourth Maxim says, "When a Man hath travelled never so far, and discovered never so much in the world of Self-love, yet still the Terra Incognita will take up a considerable part of the Map."

On the contrary, a man who is used to contemplate and reflect carries his looks further, and curiously considers the almost infinite abysses that surround him on all sides.

A student of architecture, he conquered a tendency to giddiness by standing on pinnacles and walking on narrow rafters over perilous abysses.

The confession was wrung from him; more and more the man felt dazzled and overpowered by the pure light of heaven; he seemed falling into a measureless abyss, the abyss of his own nakedness and unworthiness.

He travels through primeval forests, stands upon dizzy abysses, plies through roaring whirlpools, all of which are symbolic of the soul's wayfaring, until at last, "When on the threshold of the green recess," his dying glance rests upon the setting moon and the sufferer finds eternal peace.

And on the high roads where they went abreast she was apt to be carried away by the pageant of earth and sky; the solid darkness that came up from the moor; the gray, aerial abysses of the dale; the awful, blank withdrawal of Greffington Edge into the night.

No thunderbolt had blazed forth from that dome of cloudless blue; no marksman had approached the inaccessible spot; yet, without vestige of hurt, the eagle dropped lifeless, falling sheer down into the unfathomable abyss below.

There had been a short touch of cold in the air at the end of August, and breezes from the north that poured down from the heights behind the castle, into the tremendous abyss below, and shot up again to the walls and the windows, even as high as the dungeon tower.

As it flows on towards the sea, it loses its force and its motion, and at last, as it were, becomes lost and mingled with the mighty abyss of waters.

When everything germinates and grows around one, when one has determined on unreserved fruitfulness; on continuous creation and increase, how awful is the recall to the ever-present dim abyss in which the world is fashioned, on the day when misfortune falls, digs its first pit, and carries off a loved one!

Noble families were scattered, beggared, decimated; and their dependants, often dragged along with them into the flaming abyss, in many instances suffered the last dire extremities of human ill.

He represents the nature-philosophy of Romanticism and especially of Schelling, a philosophy so vast and unsubstantial that all values of conduct and all incentives to action disappeared in its featureless abyss.

And Simpson, as he lay there, watching the darkness through the open flap of the tent, ready to plunge into the fragrant abyss of sleep, knew first that unique and profound stillness of a primeval forest when no wind stirs ... and when the night has weight and substance that enters into the soul to bind a veil about it....

For a moment he stayed there, peering down first at the impenetrable abysses below, then up at the unmoved stars above.

The human world ends off, as it were, precipitously; and beyond there is an endless, impracticable abyss in which dwells the secret governance of things, an unknowable and implacable fate"Wyrd"neither malign nor benevolent, but simply inscrutable.

But what abysses of scorn, inconceivable to any modern, would they have reserved for an aesthetic type and movement which violated morality and did not even find pleasure, which outraged sanity and could not attain to exuberance, which contented itself with the fool's cap without the bells!

From the moment when Iago sets his machination to work, they are like people sliding down an ice-slope to an inevitable abyss.

Fasting in sackcloth and ashes they came, both the king and his people, Came to the mountain of oaks, to the house of the terrible sea-gods, Hard by the gulf in the rocks, where of old the world-wide deluge Sank to the inner abyss; and the lake where the fish of the goddess, Holy, undying, abide; whom the priests feed daily with dainties.

Peace and strife, time and eternitythe mad noisy flesh, and the silent immortal spirit,the frivolous game of life's outside show, and the terrible earnest of its inward abysses, jarred together without and within him.

Banish vision, and the material universe shrinks for us to that which we may touch; sight alone sets us free to pierce the limitless abyss of space.