Word: firmament
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Obverse Puritanism. This is a generation of dazzling diversity, encompassing an intellectual elite sans pareil and a firmament of showbiz stars, ski whizzes and sopranos, chemists and sky watchers. Its attitudes embrace every philosophy from Anarchy to Zen; simultaneously it adheres above all to the obverse side of the Puritan ethic-that hard work is good for its own sake...
...Barney Hill and his wife Betty were driving home to Portsmouth, N.H., after a holiday in Montreal. A brilliant waxing moon sailed through a cloudless and star-fretted sky. As the Hills watched, first idly and then in terrified astonishment, one of the stars detached itself Tom the firmament and came down to earth-so near that the Hills could see it was no star. What happened thereafter forms the narrative of this book...
This most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire-why it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors...
Liechtenstein, the tiny, 253-year-old principality nestled between Austria and Switzerland, ranks near the bottom of the world's temporal powers. Its boundaries barely encompass 61 sq. mi. But in the art world, little Liechtenstein shines as one of the brightest stars in the firmament. Reason: within its confines is the richest old-master collection still in private hands, including a score of Rubenses and Van Dykes along with Raphaels, Brueghels, Titians and Tiepolos...
...There he saw the orderly beauties of Greco-Roman antiquity, heightened through the Renaissance eyes of Mantegna and Da Vinci. Their cool confidence in man vied with his apocalyptic Gothic attitudes. He never got over all of them, recorded a nightmare in 1525: "Many big waters fell from the firmament, with great violence and with enormous noise, and drowned the whole land." But he asserted the new idea that the visible world was the true subject...