“Go, view the settling sea: the stormy wind is laid. The billows still tremble on the deep. They seem to fear the blast.”
"Conlath and Cuthona"
The Poems of Ossian
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James Macpherson 46
Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician 1736–1796Related quotes
"Sonnet II" in Scribner's Monthly Vol. IX (November 1874 - April 1875), p. 359.
March. Reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Attributed
“Distinct as the billows, yet one as the sea.”
The Ocean, Line 54.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
“The pilot cannot mitigate the billows or calm the winds.”
On the Tranquillity of the Mind
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Lecture XX, "Conclusions"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Context: Science... has ended by utterly repudiating the personal point of view. She catalogues her elements and records her laws indifferent as to what purpose may be shown forth by them, and constructs her theories quite careless of their bearing on human anxieties and fates. Though the scientist may individually nourish a religion, and be a theist in his irresponsible hours, the days are over when it could be said that for Science herself the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Our solar system, with its harmonies, is seen now as but one passing case of a certain sort of moving equilibrium in the heavens, realized by a local accident in an appalling wilderness of worlds where no life can exist. In a span of time which as a cosmic interval will count but as an hour, it will have ceased to be. The Darwinian notion of chance production, and subsequent destruction, speedy or deferred, applies to the largest as well as to the smallest facts. It is impossible, in the present temper of the scientific imagination, to find in the driftings of the cosmic atoms, whether they work on the universal or on the particular scale, anything but a kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing, achieving no proper history, and leaving no result. Nature has no one distinguishable ultimate tendency with which it is possible to feel a sympathy. In the vast rhythm of her processes... she appears to cancel herself. The books of natural theology which satisfied the intellects of our grandfathers seem to us quite grotesque, representing, as they did, a God who conformed the largest things of nature to the paltriest of our private wants. The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals. The bubbles on the foam which coats a stormy sea are floating episodes, made and unmade by the forces of the wind and water. Our private selves are like those bubbles—epiphenomena, as Clifford, I believe, ingeniously called them; their destinies weigh nothing and determine nothing in the world's irremediable currents of events.
“When the stormy winds do blow.”
Ye Gentlemen of England, (c. 1630), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "When the battle rages loud and long, And the stormy winds do blow", Thomas Campbell, Ye Mariners of England.
“He ceased; but still their trembling ears retained
The deep vibrations of his witching song.”
Canto I, Stanza 20.
The Castle of Indolence (1748)
"The Hard Road" (行路難) I http://wengu.tartarie.com/wg/wengu.php?no=82&l=Tangshi, trans. Witter Bynner