Word: abyss
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Dates: during 1870-1879
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...gabbling like a gosling." This he calls "fearlessly acting in accordance with the dictates of a manly conscience, with absolute disregard of popular opinion." Granted that there is a "principle at stake," granting that H. H. is "going to the dogs," does "G. E." rescue him from the abyss of ruin by intimating, "delicately but intelligibly," that he is "gabbling like a gosling"? No; he admits that he only expects the reprobate to reflect upon the sally of wit in the future. He does not hope to improve his morals. Then his only motive in speaking must be the assertion...
...echoes from each granite-walled abyss...
...begins his work by pointing us down into the abyss of the unknowable. Alpine travellers tell us that sometimes a terrible abyss is bridged over by a reach of hard drifted snow, so solid that one can walk over it, for the most part, in security; so thin that a stroke of the alpenstock will pierce it, leaving an opening through which may be discerned the blue vacancy beneath. Herbert Spencer drives his staff through the thin stratum of drifted words, of consolidated forms of thought, of congealed tradition which we have felt to be so solid beneath our feet...