The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats, the unseen, amongst us. [ Shelley ]

Presume to lay their hand upon the ark
Of her magnificent and awful cause. [ Cowper ]

Awful Night! Ancestral mystery of mysteries. [ George Eliot ]

Night, sable goddess! from her ebon throne,
In rayless majesty, now stretches forth
Her leaden sceptre over a slumbering world.
Silence, how dead! and darkness, how profound!
Nor eye, nor listening ear, an object finds;
Creation sleeps. 'Tis as the general pulse
Of life stood still, and nature made a pause;
An awful pause! prophetic of her end. [ Young ]

But wisdom, awful wisdom! which inspects,
Discerns, compares, weighs, separates, infers,
Seizes the right, and holds it to the last. [ Young ]

How awful is that hour when conscience stings. [ Percival ]

There is something more awful in happiness than in sorrow. [ Hawthorne ]

O beautiful, awful summer day, what hast thou given, what taken away? [ Longfellow ]

Sweet tears! the awful language eloquent of infinite affection, far too big for words. [ Pollok ]

The wind moans, like a long wail from some despairing soul shut out in the awful storm! [ W. H. Gibson ]

Babylon in all its desolation is a sight not so awful as that of the human mind in ruins. [ Scorpe Davies ]

Death is but another phase of life, which also is awful, fearful, and wonderful, reaching to heaven and hell. [ Carlyle ]

Adversity is a great schoolmistress, as many a poor fellow knows that has whimpered over his lesson before her awful chair. [ Thackeray ]

It is a high, solemn, almost awful thought for every individual man, that his earthly influence, which has a commencement, will never, through all ages, have an end. [ Aughey ]

Light is, in reality, more awful than darkness; modesty more majestic than strength; and there is truer sublimity in the sweet joy of a child, or the sweet virtue of a maiden, than in the strength of Antaeus or the thunder-clouds of Aetna. [ John Ruskin ]

This is my seventieth birthday, and I wonder if you all rise to the size of that proposition, realizing all the significance of that phrase, seventieth birthday. The seventieth birthday! It is the time of life when you arrive at a new and awful dignity; when you may throw aside the decent reserves which have oppressed you for a generation and stand unafraid and unabashed upon your seven-terraced summit and look down and teach--unrebuked. You can tell the world how you got there. It is what they all do. You shall never get tired of telling by what delicate arts and deep moralities you climbed up to that great place. You will explain the process and dwell on the particulars with senile rapture. I have been anxious to explain my own system this long time, and now at last I have the right. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]