Vastness

“ The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the fair earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in the awful vastness of the universe. ”

“ One hundred and seventeen million times larger than the Sun! itself, for all its vastness, not more than half one million times bigger than this earth. To some such globe we may let our fancies float, and anchor there our yearnings after heaven. It is a glorious thought, such as imagination loves; and a probable thought, that commends itself to reason. Behold the great eye of all our guessed creation, the focus of its brightness, and the fountain of its peace. ”

“ In face of the contemplation of the vastness of creation, of its boundlessness the question ever obtrudes itself,—What place have we mortals in the universal cosmos? What place have we finite creatures, who inhabit this speck of matter we call the earth, in this mighty scheme of suns and systems and never-ending space. ”

“ The sublimity connected with vastness is familiar to every eye. The most abstruse, the most far-reaching, perhaps the most chastened of the poet's thoughts, crowd on the imagination as he gazes into the depths of the illimitable void. The expanse of the ocean is seldom seen by the novice with indifference ”

“ By what measure shall I compute the vastness of eternity? The sun is ninety millions of miles from me. Light travels twelve millions of miles a minute, and yet the light from the nearest fixed star takes three and a half years to reach me. ”

“ For that which we foolishly call vastness is, rightly considered, not more wonderful, not more impressive, than that which we insolently call littleness, and the infinity of God is not mysterious, it is only unfathomable, not concealed, but incomprehensible: it is a clear infinity, the darkness of the pure unsearchable sea. ”

“ A vastness, as a neighbor, came, —
A wisdom without face or name,
A peace, as hemispheres at home, —
And so the night became. ”

“ What a wonderful and amazing Scheme have we here of the magnificent Vastness of the Universe! So many Suns, so many Earths, and every one of them stock’d with so many Herbs, Trees, and Animals, and adorn’d with so many Seas and Mountains! And how must our Wonder and Admiration be increased when we consider the prodigious Distance and Multitude of the Stars? ”

“ The earth itself seemed far away, and he was toiling among vastnesses, himself a giant with colossal frame and huge, sprawling limbs. It was like a gruesome vision of the night, when the body is an elusive, stupendous mass that falls into space after a confused struggle with immensities. ”

“ You've got to study relative distance and heights—say, the size of a man as against the size of the building—in order to get some idea of the "vastness" of the work or structure, and when you have got it of what use is it to you? ”

“ Descriptions of such vast and striking objects often fail to excite corresponding ideas; so that however accurate or poetical may be the accounts of this class of the prodigies of nature, no just notions of their vastness can be conveyed, by any written or graphical representation. The magnitude of an object must be seenseen to be duly conceived; and the mountain-wonders of the world will best be understood and felt by those who have visited Wales, Scotland, Switzerland, or the mountainous regions of America or Asia. ”

“ Distance, my friend, is like futurity. A dim vastness is spread before our souls: the perceptions of our mind are as obscure as those of our vision; and we desire earnestly to surrender up our whole being, that it may be filled with the complete and perfect bliss of one glorious emotion. But alas! when we have attained our object, when the distant there becomes the present here, all is changed: we are as poor and circumscribed as ever, and our souls still languish for unattainable happiness. ”

“ Looking upwards into the deep azure of the sky, intently gazing into space and forgetting for a while the life around and beneath, there comes into the mind an intense desire to rise, to penetrate the height, to become part and parcel of that wondrous infinity which extends overhead as it extends along the surface. ”

“ Grand Is the Seen Grand is the seen, the light, to me—grand are the sky and stars, Grand is the earth, and grand are lasting time and space, And grand their laws, so multiform, puzzling, evolutionary; But grander far the unseen soul of me, comprehending, endowing all those, Lighting the light, the sky and stars, delving the earth, sailing the sea, (What were all those, indeed, without thee, unseen soul? of what amount without thee?) More evolutionary, vast, puzzling, O my soul! More multiform far—more lasting thou than they. ”

“ The mountain, judged by the scale of remembered toil, grows wonderfully in height. The eye thus trained begins to realise and even to exaggerate the vast scale on which peaks are built. But along with this gain in the truthful sense of scale comes the loss of mystery. The peak which was in heaven is brought down to earth. It was a mere thing of beauty to be adored and wondered at; it has become something to be climbed. ”

“ When we pass from the tame and narrow scenery of our own country, and stand on those spots of earth in which nature puts on her wilder and more awful forms, we are conscious of something of the grandeur which belongs to the thought of space. Go where the strong foundations of the earth lie around you in their massive majesty, and mountain after mountain rears its snow to heaven in a giant chain, and then, when this bursts upon you for the first time in life, there is that peculiar feeling which we call, in common language, an enlargement of ideas. ”

“ By Greatness, I do not only mean the Bulk of any single Object, but the Largeness of a whole View, considered as one entire Piece. Such are the Prospects of an open Champain Country, a vast uncultivated Desart, of huge Heaps of Mountains, high Rocks and Precipices, or a wide Expanse of Waters, where we are not struck with the Novelty or Beauty of the Sight, but with that rude kind of Magnificence which appears in many of these stupendous Works of Nature. Our Imagination loves to be filled with an Object, or to grasp at any thing that is too big for its Capacity. ”

“ The height, the magnitude, the immovableness of the objects, the wild contrast, the deep tones, the dance and play of the landscape from the change of our direction and the interposition of other striking objects, the continued recurrence of the same huge masses, like giants following us with unseen strides, stunned the sense like a blow, and yet gave the imagination strength to contend with a force that mocked it. ”

“ Space that was not Space: I was myself, and not myself. When I could find voice, I shrieked aloud in agony, “Either this is madness or it is Hell.” “It is neither,” calmly replied the voice of the Sphere, “it is Knowledge; it is Three Dimensions: open your eye once again and try to look steadily.” ”

“ Who has not for the moment imagined that he could realise the infinity of space, as, when gazing at some bright star, he strives to measure the distance of the blue curtain spread behind, which, ever receding, so mocks the efforts of the ambitious eye, that its powers become bewildered in the unfathomable depths of immensity ”

“ The space under immediate view from our standpoint, fifty miles long and ten to twelve wide, is thronged with a great multitude of objects so vast in size, so bold and majestic in form, so infinite in their details, that as the truth gradually reveals itself to the perceptions, it arouses the strongest emotions. ”

“ With cubic existence (and its correlative three-dimensional space) , with weight and texture we have therefore got from the contemplated shape to a thought alien to that shape and its contemplation. The thought, to which life and its needs and dangers has given precedence over every other: What Thing is behind this shape, what qualities must be inferred from this aspect? After the possibility of occupying so much space, the most important quality which things can have for our hopes and fears, is the possibility of altering their occupation of space; not our locomotion, but theirs. ”

“ My eyes were blinded, my soul rocked and reeled.
The chasm beneath me — ten thousand feet;
The ground I stood on, only a foot wide.
If you have not exhausted the scope of seeing and hearing.
How can you realize the wideness of the world? ”

“ And what does it matter after all, under the great Dome, a few hordes of factmongers more or less, glimmering and wonderless, crawlers on the bottom of the sea of time, lovers of the ooze of knowledge, feeling with slow, myopic mouths at Infinite Truth?
But when I see my four faces—the faces of my four special boys, when I hear the college bells ringing to them, it matters a great deal. My soul will not wait. What is the ridge-pole of the world? The distance of a ridge-pole does not count. The extent of a universe does not seem to make very much difference. ”

“ Your sense of the huge mass of the building is deepened by the fact that though the central steeple is of double the elevation of the others, you see it, from some points, borne back in a perspective which drops it to half their stature and lifts them into immensity. ”

“ First comes the immense surrounding space—a space measured in each arc of the circumference by sections of at least fifty miles, limited by points of exquisitely picturesque beauty, including distant cloud-like mountain ranges and crystals of sky-blue Apennines, circumscribing landscapes of refined loveliness in detail, always varied, always marked by objects of peculiar interest where the eye or memory may linger. ”

“ How does it deal with infinite space as something singular which comprehends both picture and spectator as mere centres of gravity of a spatial dynamic? The full Faustian life-feeling, the passion of the third dimension, takes hold of the form of the picture, the painted plane, and transforms it in an unheard-of way. ”

“ Grandeur of bulk and mass is conjoined with splendor and fulness of detail; form and shape are crowned with soaring peak and matchless line; and the summits mingle with that sky which seems to be the only fitting background for the eternal hills. ”

“ Hence, throughout the picture, the expression of space and size is dependent upon obscurity, united with, or rather resultant from, exceeding fulness. We destroy both space and size, § 16. Space and size are destroyed alike by distinctness and by vacancy.either by the vacancy, which affords us no measure of space, or by the distinctness, which gives us a false one. The distance of Poussin, having no indication of trees, nor of meadows, nor of character of any kind, may be fifty miles off, or may be five; we cannot tell—we have no measure, and in consequence, no vivid impression. ”

“ When we see an object we have the sensation and intuition of extension. The space perceived or sensed is, in this case, the extension itself perceived. We imagine a multitude of extended objects, and a capacity which contains them all. We imagine this capacity as the immensity of the ethereal regions, a boundless abyss, a dark region beyond the limits of creation. ”

“ That is to say, the ultimate source of all vitality is in that other dimension, or region, where the dandelion blooms, and which men have called heaven, and which now they call the fourth dimension: which is only a way of saying that it is not to be reckoned in terms of space and time. ”

“ No matter how vast may be the depth which our instruments have sounded, there is yet a beyond of infinite extent. Imagine a mighty globe described in space, a globe of such stupendous dimensions that it shall include the sun and his system, all the stars and nebulæ, and even all the objects which our finite capacities can imagine. ”

“ As he ascended, men suddenly diminished in size. The earth looked as if some giant hand had smoothed its surface, diversified only by moving shadows, while the outlines of objects became stronger, so that they seemed to be cut in relief. ”

“ The distant sight of a human figure far away on the wide space of the moors, clambering over the granite slabs of a stile, turned his thoughts to a more perceptible danger. If he could see that man more than half a mile away, his own figure must be apparent over a long distance in that clear brown expanse. ”

“ If the earth’s only an awful small speck in a great big space, think how much smaller we livin’ people must show up—down here on it. I don’t mean in size, Billy, I mean importance. Well, then, if you were God, away off up in the heavens, what would one little earth like this amount to, anyhow? ”

“ The dimensions of life in every direction seem to be enlarged. We seem to be able to look at things from a broader, bigger point of view, as well as a higher. We ourselves and the world at large are all on a larger scale than we had hitherto suspected. And while on a broader scale, we feel that things are always working upward and converging towards some lofty but distinct, defined summit. This also do we feel, as we look upon the view, that with all the bigness and massiveness and loftiness there is the very finest tenderness as well—such delicacy as we had never before imagined. ”

“ The peak is calculated to enchain the eye by its towering height and faultless symmetry. Did Nature herself design and fashion it for its strange destiny? Was it indeed reserved for its present consecration? Who may know? Life is a chain of sequences divinely ordered. ”

“ All the mass and the interest and the suggestion of the downward lines and of the magnificent perspective toward the left, and the effect of the whole space composition is of superb largeness of life and feeling. ”

“ For if grandeur be one main ingredient in the sublime, when an object such as a seemingly boundless level, or rolling plain, the extent of which the eye is unable to scan, lies before you, when, after long marches, it still appears interminable, the mind is perhaps more impressed with the idea of magnitude than by large masses, however enormous, with defined outlines presented to the view. ”