Verily, to the
loftiest height had I to fly, to find again the well of delight!
All the members of that family, especially the feminine half, were pictured by him, as it were, wrapped about with a mysterious poetical veil, and he not only perceived no defects whatever in them, but under the poetical veil that shrouded them he assumed the existence of the
loftiest sentiments and every possible perfection.
But the Pequod was only making a passage now; not regularly cruising; nearly all whaling preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully competent to, so that there was little or nothing, out of himself, to employ or excite Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for that one interval, the clouds that layer upon layer were piled upon his brow, as ever all clouds choose the
loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon.
Even if Pierre were not a Frenchman, having once received that
loftiest of human appellations he could not renounce it, said the officer's look and tone.
Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though the
loftiest and the brightest.
By and by a delicate, spiritual sort of effulgence spread itself by imperceptible degrees over the
loftiest altitudes of the snowy wastes--but there the effort seemed to stop.
If the twins could but do some crowning act now to climax it, something usual, something startling, something to concentrate upon themselves the company's
loftiest admiration, something in the nature of an electric surprise--
Coming down to the epoch of the second charter, Hutchinson thought of the ship-carpenter Phips springing from the lowest of the people and attaining to the
loftiest station in the land.
To this end I left the more frequented regions, the wooded valleys, the corn-fields, and the meadow-lands, and proceeded to mount the steep acclivity of Wildfell, the wildest and the
loftiest eminence in our neighbourhood, where, as you ascend, the hedges, as well as the trees, become scanty and stunted, the former, at length, giving place to rough stone fences, partly greened over with ivy and moss, the latter to larches and Scotch fir-trees, or isolated blackthorns.
So that the Portillo, the
loftiest line in this part of the Cordillera, is not so old as the less lofty line of the Peuquenes.
Here was heroism at its last and
loftiest possibility, its utmost summit; this was challenging death in the open field unarmed, with all the odds against the challenger, no reward set upon the contest, and no admiring world in silks and cloth of gold to gaze and applaud; and yet the king's bear- ing was as serenely brave as it had always been in those cheaper contests where knight meets knight in equal fight and clothed in protecting steel.
Lusitania had a Viriatus, Rome a Caesar, Carthage a Hannibal, Greece an Alexander, Castile a Count Fernan Gonzalez, Valencia a Cid, Andalusia a Gonzalo Fernandez, Estremadura a Diego Garcia de Paredes, Jerez a Garci Perez de Vargas, Toledo a Garcilaso, Seville a Don Manuel de Leon, to read of whose valiant deeds will entertain and instruct the
loftiest minds and fill them with delight and wonder.