Shrinking

Famous quotes containing the word shrinking:

    The Anglo-Saxon hive have extirpated Paganism from the greater part of the North American continent; but with it they have likewise extirpated the greater portion of the Red race. Civilization is gradually sweeping from the earth the lingering vestiges of Paganism, and at the same time the shrinking forms of its unhappy worshippers.
    Herman Melville (1819–1891)

    “There is Hawthorne, with genius so shrinking and rare
    That you hardly at first see the strength that is there;
    A frame so robust, with a nature so sweet,
    So earnest, so graceful, so lithe and so fleet,
    Is worth a descent from Olympus to meet;
    James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)

    And my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within,
    That the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of
    Glynn
    Will work me no fear like the fear they have wrought me of yore
    When length was failure, and when breadth was but bitterness sore,
    And when terror and shrinking and dreary unnamable pain
    Drew over me out of the merciless miles of the plain,—
    Oh, now, unafraid, I am fain to face
    The vast sweet visage of space.
    Sidney Lanier (1842–1881)