Steadfast

She was truthful when lying was the common speech of men; she was honest when honesty was become a lost virtue; she was a keeper of promises when the keeping of a promise was expected of no one; she gave her great mind to great thoughts and great purposes when other great minds wasted themselves upon pretty fancies or upon poor ambitions; she was modest, and fine, and delicate when to be loud and coarse might be said to be universal; she was full of pity when a merciless cruelty was the rule; she was steadfast when stability was unknown, and honorable in an age which had forgotten what honor was; she was a rock of convictions in a time when men believed in nothing and scoffed at all things; she was unfailingly true to an age that was false to the core; she maintained her personal dignity unimpaired in an age of fawnings and servilities; she was of a dauntless courage when hope and courage had perished in the hearts of her nation; she was spotlessly pure in mind and body when society in the highest places was foul in both—she was all these things in an age when crime was the common business of lords and princes, and when the highest personages in Christendom were able to astonish even that infamous era and make it stand aghast at the spectacle of their atrocious lives black with unimaginable treacheries, butcheries, and beastialities.

It was an earnest, steadfast gaze, but she often doubted whether there were much admiration in it, and sometimes it seemed nothing but absence of mind.

There waiting, silent and still in the space before the Gate, sat Gandalf upon Shadowfax: Shadowfax who alone among the free horses of the earth endured the terror, unmoving, steadfast as a graven image in Rath Dínen.

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night, And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like Nature’s patient sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors: No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

I conclude, therefore that, fortune being changeful and mankind steadfast in their ways, so long as the two are in agreement men are successful, but unsuccessful when they fall out.

“By the same heav’n,” said he, “and earth, and main, And all the pow’rs that all the three contain; By hell below, and by that upper god Whose thunder signs the peace, who seals it with his nod; So let Latona’s double offspring hear, And double-fronted Janus, what I swear: I touch the sacred altars, touch the flames, And all those pow’rs attest, and all their names; Whatever chance befall on either side, No term of time this union shall divide: No force, no fortune, shall my vows unbind, Or shake the steadfast tenor of my mind; Not though the circling seas should break their bound, O’erflow the shores, or sap the solid ground; Not though the lamps of heav’n their spheres forsake, Hurl’d down, and hissing in the nether lake: Ev’n as this royal scepter” (for he bore A scepter in his hand) “shall never more Shoot out in branches, or renew the birth: An orphan now, cut from the mother earth By the keen ax, dishonour’d of its hair, And cas’d in brass, for Latian kings to bear.” When thus in public view the peace was tied With solemn vows, and sworn on either side, All dues perform’d which holy rites require; The victim beasts are slain before the fire, The trembling entrails from their bodies torn, And to the fatten’d flames in chargers borne.

A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds.

I will say—” “Do you think you are engaged with a pygmy like yourself?” said Bertuccio, in so calm a tone, and with so steadfast a look, that Andrea was moved to the very soul.

It was not all Paradise by any means, but everyone was better for the division of labor system; the children throve under the paternal rule, for accurate, steadfast John brought order and obedience into Babydom, while Meg recovered her spirits and composed her nerves by plenty of wholesome exercise, a little pleasure, and much confidential conversation with her sensible husband.

He was of humble origin, of strong will and steadfast faith, of austere appearance, but of deep tenderness, though he obviously concealed it as though he were almost ashamed of it.

How divinely do vault and arch here contrast in the struggle: how with light and shade they strive against each other, the divinely striving ones.— Thus, steadfast and beautiful, let us also be enemies, my friends!

I weary of your sullen ways, I weary of your steadfast gaze, your somnolent magnificence.

―They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities hardly record its breach.

They will seek their quiet security thereafter only with extreme caution and steadfast preparation.

Instantly all the indignations which had been dominating him and the spiritual dramas through which he had struggled became pallid and absurd before the ancient and overwhelming realities, the standard and traditional realities, of sickness and menacing death, the long night, and the thousand steadfast implications of married life.

Ursula, steadfast in her purpose, sought an interview with Roger Ackroyd that very afternoon, and revealed the truth to him.

Yonder stands the South Dome, its crown high above our camp, though its base is four thousand feet below us; a most noble rock, it seems full of thought, clothed with living light, no sense of dead stone about it, all spiritualized, neither heavy looking nor light, steadfast in serene strength like a god.

He had no sense of humor and little imagination, but he was steadfast.

Say if my sire, the reverend Peleus, reigns, Great in his Phthia, and his throne maintains; Or, weak and old, my youthful arm demands, To fix the sceptre steadfast in his hands?

But his doom Reserved him to more wrath; for now the thought Both of lost happiness and lasting pain Torments him; round he throws his baleful eyes, That witnessed huge affliction and dismay, Mixed with obdurate pride and steadfast hate.

When Don Quixote saw it, rendered in such lifelike style that one would have said Christ was speaking and Paul answering, “This,” he said, “was in his time the greatest enemy that the Church of God our Lord had, and the greatest champion it will ever have; a knight-errant in life, a steadfast saint in death, an untiring labourer in the Lord’s vineyard, a teacher of the Gentiles, whose school was heaven, and whose instructor and master was Jesus Christ himself.” There were no more images, so Don Quixote bade them cover them up again, and said to those who had brought them, “I take it as a happy omen, brothers, to have seen what I have; for these saints and knights were of the same profession as myself, which is the calling of arms; only there is this difference between them and me, that they were saints, and fought with divine weapons, and I am a sinner and fight with human ones.