"Colossal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Sir James) Macdonell [d. 1857], "a man of colossal stature," who occupied and defended the Chateau of Hougoumont on the night before the battle of Waterloo. (See Gronow, Reminiscences, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... father came suddenly into his mind. After all, was it not a little absurd to boggle over one small deception when the whole enterprise, as now suddenly revealed, was to be nothing but one continuous and colossal one? ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... year I determined to emerge from the chrysalis. I dreamed a dream of my second incarnation as universal tradesman. And the fabric of my dream, Mr. Polycarp, you behold around you.' He waved the cigar. 'It is the most colossal thing ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... place above the little inlet, directly across from the burning Peristyle. The fire had burned itself out now, and was dying with protests of reviving flame spurting here and there from the dark spots of the Court. The colossal figure rising from the lagoon in front of the Peristyle was still illuminated,—the light falling upon the gilded ball borne aloft,—solemnly presiding even in the ruins of the dream. And behind this colossal figure of triumph the noble horseman still reined in his frightened chargers. The velvet ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... their destination was altogether different. The group of pyramids of Ghizeh and at Sakhara in Egypt; the triangular pyramid of the Queen of the Scythians, Zarina, which was a stadium high and three in circumference, and which was decorated with a colossal figure; the fourteen Etruscan pyramids, which are said to have been enclosed in the labyrinth of the king Porsenna, at Clusium—were reared to serve as the sepulchres of the illustrious dead. Nothing is more natural to men than to commemorate the spot where rest the ashes ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... the ancients were, in comparison with the small scale of ours, of colossal magnitude, partly for the sake of containing the whole of the people, with the concourse of strangers who flocked to the festivals, and partly to correspond with the majesty of the dramas represented in them, which required to ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... lips of Hebe—will be invited to reign as l'ambassadrice! If I am not as mad with jealous despair as Othello, attribute my escape either to a sublime faith in your adorable constancy and incorruptibility, or to my own colossal vanity, fatuous ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... over there did mean something to us—more, much more than money or neutral rights or sympathetic charities. Not that I was apprehensive of an immediate German raid on New York, the crumbling of her sky-scrapers and the exaction of colossal indemnities. For it looked to me that Germany might well have other occupation after peace was made in Europe, whichever way the war should go. The German peril did not lie, I thought, in her big guns, her ships, her "Prussianized machine." It lay deeper, in herself, in her ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... heard at the beginning, 'Oh! the blessedness of the man that delights in the law of the Lord,' holds on persistently, like a subdued and almost bewildered undercurrent of sweet sound amid all the movements of some colossal symphony, through tears and sobs, confession and complaint, and it springs up at the close triumphant, like the ruddy spires of a flame long smothered, and swells and broadens, and draws all the intricate harmonies into its own rushing tide. Some of you remember the great ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... to relate, and the frightened household ascended with alacrity to take their chances in a purer atmosphere. In every part of the town the shells kept falling. Beaconsfield appeared to be the most favoured hunting ground, for its Sanatorium was not only a colossal structure but the home of the Colossus himself. Hundreds of shells dropped in its vicinity, while the millionaire went round the city in a cart, to all outward seeming as little concerned as the most penurious of men. Some weeks ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... honest sincerity in what he said of others, as well of grief and despair in respect to his own unhappy lot. The current of opinion which had begun before to set strongly in favor of destroying the horse, was wholly turned, and all began at once to look upon the colossal image as an object of sacred veneration, and to begin to form plans for transporting it within the limits of the city. Whatever remaining doubts any of them might have felt on the subject were dispelled by the occurrence of a most extraordinary phenomenon just at this ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... panic, reminding himself that no man living could hear such words without terror. His egotism, never colossal, stood feebly between him and Mrs. Farron's estimate of him. He seemed to sink back into the general human species. If he had felt inclined to detail his own qualities, he could not have thought of one. There was a long silence, while Adelaide sat with a look of docile teachableness upon ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... of a laudatory type sprang like tears to a mind still healthy enough to dash them away again, as though they had been real tears; but it was with all the nervous exaltation of the unsuspected desperado that he inquired his way of a colossal constable at the corner of Pall Mall and ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... under yellow-tinted trees, of rustic bridges going nowhere in particular, and of a kind of brickwork ruined castle, greatly decayed and ivy-grown, in which we sat for a long time looking out upon a lawn and a wide gravel path leading to a colossal frontage of conservatory. ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... weather. The sky was a miracle of purity, a miracle of azure. The sea was polished, was blue, was pellucid, was sparkling like a precious stone, extending on all sides, all round to the horizon—as if the whole terrestrial globe had been one jewel, one colossal sapphire, a single gem fashioned into a planet. And on the luster of the great calm waters the Judea glided imperceptibly, enveloped in languid and unclean vapours, in a lazy cloud that drifted to leeward, light and slow: a pestiferous cloud ...
— Youth • Joseph Conrad
... throughout the region. The presence in the Cahuilla village of a rich Mexican gentleman who spent gold like water, and kept mounted men riding day and night, after everything, anything, he wanted for his sick sister, was an event which in the atmosphere of that lonely country loomed into colossal proportions. He had travelled all over California, with four horses, in search of her. He was only waiting till she was well, to take her to his home in the south; and then he was going to arrest the man who had murdered her husband, ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... did not know it. He has colossal nerve, I must say. But divorce is pretty common over here. Most anybody can ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... tariff or some other, because it is the best for her and is therefore our duty—not because it is ours, and therefore, under the Constitution of the United States, her right and her fate. The admission of that ill-omened and unfounded claim would be, at the bar of politics, a colossal blunder; at the bar of ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... shoot into the air from various parts of the foreground, and slowly drift away across the hill-top. Suddenly there is a descending shriek, drawn out for a second or more, coming terrifyingly near; a crash far louder than the nearest thunder; a colossal thump to the earth which seems to move the whole world about an inch from its base; a scatter of flying bits and all sorts of under-noises, rustle of a flying wood splinter, whir of fragments, scatter of falling earth. Before it is half finished another shriek exactly similar ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... portions, each separately walled, the northern or Manchu city and the southern or Chinese. The former contains the Purple Forbidden city, in which are the Imperial palaces; surrounding it is the August city, in which are a colossal copper Buddha and the Temple of Great Happiness. Outside this are the government offices, foreign legations, the temple of Confucius, a great Buddhist monastery, a Roman Catholic cathedral, and Christian mission stations. The Chinese city has many temples, mission stations, schools, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... that there should be no biography written of him, a position that might indicate extreme modesty, colossal conceit, or distinct cowardice. Whatever the reason, it has not been entirely obeyed, and rightly. A man of the power of Thackeray cannot live without the world being in some way better; it is only good that those who never ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... delay and sudden yielding of flowers and fruit together, of a wisdom which economises all forces for an opportunity of sudden and sure effect. The fame of Leonardo had gone before him, and he was to model a colossal statue of Francesco, the first Duke of Milan. As for Leonardo himself, he came not as an artist at all, or careful of the fame of one; but as a player on the harp, a strange harp of silver of his own construction, shaped in some curious likeness to a horse's skull. The capricious spirit ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... were exhausted, and his patience. The wizard swore stoutly that the lake was there, millions and millions of barrels of oil, but he deemed it expedient to leave the country in a hurry, because Uncle Jap intimated to him in the most convincing manner that there was not room in it for so colossal a fraud. The wizard might have argued the question, but the sight of Uncle Jap's old Navy six-shooter seemed ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... up for astrological labors, and provided with celestial Charts, with Globes, Telescopes, Quadrants, and other mathematical Instruments—Seven Colossal Figures, representing the Planets, each circle in the background, so that Mars and Saturn are nearest the eye.—The remainder of the Scene, and its disposition, is given in the Fourth Scene of the Second Act.—There must be a Curtain over the Figures, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... as He said so many centuries ago—'My House is called the house of prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves!' Is it not truly a den of thieves? What has the Man of Sorrows to do with all the evil splendour of St. Peter's?—its bronzes, its marbles, its colossal statues of dead gods, its glittering altars, its miserable dreary immensity, its flaring gilding and insolent vulgarity of cost! Oh, what a loneliness is that of Christ in this world! What a ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... first book of his history shows that it was written, or at all events published, after the first and before the second closing of the temple of Janus by Augustus, in the years 29 and 25 B.C. For forty years thereafter he continued this colossal task, which, like the Decline and Fall, was published in parts from time to time. He lived to bring it down as far as the death of Drusus, the younger son of the Empress Livia, in the year 9 B.C. The ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... object in it. From a fifty-foot distance, he swept his hand from one end to the other of the wrecked ship. Flame leaped up. The magnesium-alloy vessel burned with a brightness that stung and dazzled the eyes. A monstrous, a colossal flaming flare leaped and soared ... and died. Too late, Soames fumbled for his camera. There was no longer a wrecked ship on the ice. There were only a few, ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... most part not in continuous blocks, but set in larger or smaller enclosures, stretched in every direction. Every quarter contained large open squares filled with trees, among which statues glistened and fountains flashed in the late afternoon sun. Public buildings of a colossal size and an architectural grandeur unparalleled in my day raised their stately piles on every side. Surely, I had never before seen this city, nor one comparable to it. Raising my eyes at last towards the horizon, I looked westward. ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... several stages, first astonishment, then pique, and finally something very like passion, or a fair semblance of devotion, backed, of course, since all natures are more or less mixed, by the fact that this attractive figure of the woman was thrown into high relief by the colossal fortune behind her. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... evidence—carries with it an attendant disadvantage. Since he lays his evidence bare before the reader, he makes it simpler for the reader to detect him in a lie. The romantic says, "These things are so, because I know they are"; and unless we reject him at once and in entirety as a colossal liar, we are almost doomed to take his word in the big moments of his story. But the realist says, "These things are so, because they are supported by actual facts similar to the imagined facts in which I clothe them"; and we may answer at any point in the story, "Not at all! On the very basis ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... varied. Expert after expert, in the jam about the table, scribbled down his bets and numbers in vain attempts to work out his system. They complained of their inability to get a clew to start with, and swore that it was pure luck, though the most colossal streak of it they ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... power, however, between man and woman was in a measure established when home wielded a strong enough attraction to make men accept its obligations. But at last the time has come when the material ambition of man has assumed such colossal proportions that home is in danger of losing its centre of gravity for him, and he is receding farther and farther from ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... neighbourhood, on the road between Two Bridges and Tavistock, is found the singular-looking granite rock, bearing so remarkable a resemblance to the Egyptian sphynx, in a mutilated state. It is of similarly colossal proportions, and stands in a district almost as lonely as that in which the Egyptian sphynx looks forth over the sands of the ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... it of me, perhaps, it is the truth that I am a man both timid and tender-hearted. I never dared in the early days of your hope, or the central days of your supremacy, to tell you this; I never dared to break the colossal calm of your face. God knows why I should do it now, when my farce has ended in tragedy and the ruin of all your people! But I say it now. Wayne, it was done as ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... and feet, to which the other parts are wanting, let one see, or at least guess; what colossal figures were once belonging to them; yet somehow these celebrated artists seem to me to have a little confounded the ideas of big and great like my countryman Fluellyn in Shakespear's play: while the two famous demi-gods Castor and Pollux, ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... listen to reason. I assure you, you've got hold of the wrong man. I'm hopeless at a game like that. Ask Jeeves about the time I got lugged in to address a girls' school. I made the most colossal ass ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... behind the gun's muzzle in resentful affright. He lowered his palms in appeal to her wisdom. "It's the right thing, Anna, the only safe way! I've known it was, ever since Steve Mandeville's wedding. Oh! it takes a colossal assurance to talk to you so, Anna Callender, but I've got the colossal assurance. I've got that, beloved, and you've got all the rest—my heart—my ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... men, in white cravats, making the boxes. At the bottom of the shop are three elderly accountants, posting the vast financial transactions accruing from the Pill in three enormous ledgers. Over the door are my name, portrait, and autograph, expanded to colossal proportions, and surrounded in flowing letters, by the motto of the establishment, 'Down with the Doctors!' Even Mrs. Wragge contributes her quota to this prodigious enterprise. She is the celebrated woman whom I have cured of indescribable agonies from every complaint under the ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... as the military were nicknamed, soon taught their masters, "the Rumpers," silence and obedience: the latter having raised one colossal man for their own purpose, were annihilated by him at a single blow. Cromwell, five years after, turned them out of their house, and put the keys into his pocket. Their last public appearance was in the fleeting days of Richard Cromwell, when the comi-tragedy ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... remains of architecture and sculpture in India seem to prove an early connection between that country and Africa.... The Pyramids of Egypt, the colossal statues described by Pausanias and others, the Sphinx, and the Hermes Canis, which last bears a strong resemblance to the Varaha Avatar, indicate the style of the same indefatigable workmen who formed the vast excavations of Canarah, ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... destroy the illusion. One takes care not to see them too often, or to be alone with them for too long together. It's a pleasant illusion, but if you're thinking of the risks of marriage, it seems to me that the risk of marrying a person you're in love with is something colossal." ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... Greater New York was 4,700,000 and the new party had a task of colossal proportions. It had to appeal to native Americans of all classes and conditions and to thousands of foreign born. It sent its forces to local political conventions; held mass meetings; issued thousands of ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... in the habit of visiting undesirable persons; and finally she informed him that Jacqueline had gone to Italy with an old Yankee and his daughter—he being a man, it was said, who had laid the foundation of his colossal fortune by keeping a bar-room in a mining camp in California. This last was no fiction, the cut of Mr. Sparks's beard and his unpolished manners left no doubt on the subject; and she wound up by saying that Madame d'Avrigny, whom no one could accuse of ill-nature, had been grieved at meeting ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Underground lift, but it was not Sisily. The end of the week saw him returning from uncharted areas of outer London to the more familiar thoroughfares of the city's life, for in that time his dauntless spirit had realized the colossal folly of any attempt to search London by system. He had no intention of abandoning his quest, but he now felt that it did not matter where his footsteps led him, because it was only by a piece of wonderful luck that he could ever hope to meet Sisily. He did not even know if she was in London. But ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... the same; little houses ten feet high, or else big ones two hundred; tramways, telegraph-poles, enormous signs, holes in the pavement, oceans of mud, commis-voyageurs, young ladies looking for the husband. On the other hand, no beggars and no cocottes—none, at least, that you see. A colossal mediocrity, except (my brother-in-law tells me) in the machinery, which is magnificent. Naturally, no architecture (they make houses of wood and of iron), no art, no literature, no theatre. I have opened some of the books; mais ils ne se laissent pas lire. No ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... a more colossal diplomatic feat than this treaty, by which Europe has been neatly divided into two sections: victors and vanquished; the former being authorized to exercise on the latter complete control until the fulfilment of terms which, even at an optimistic point valuation, would ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... came away last August, you said you wanted me to tell you about our travels, particularly about China. Like most Americans, you have a lurking sentimental feeling about China, a latent sympathy and interest based on colossal ignorance. Very well, I will write you as fully as I can. Two months ago my ignorance was fully as overwhelming as yours, but it is being rapidly dispelled. So I'll try to do the same for you, as you said I might. Rash of ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... returned home, she was all eagerness; but his mind was filled with the things he had seen and heard abroad. He realised that they had come to the parting of the ways, but he would have liked to delay it, prevent it, if possible. He showed her in great living pictures the functioning of the colossal gigantic machinery of the State, he tried to explain to her the working of the wheels, the multifarious transmissions, regulators and detents, unreliable pendulums and untrustworthy ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... her, and the gods had heard her prayer. They had given her back Geoffrey, and with a careless generosity they had given her twice as much of him as she had expected. She had asked for the slim Apollo whom she had loved in Wales, and this colossal changeling had ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... fineness, something became visible and audible, something that shakes and pervades one to the depths. One hears—he does not seek; he takes—he does not ask who gives; like lightning gleams out a thought, of necessity, formed without hesitation—I have never had a choice. An ecstasy, whose colossal strain breaks in the middle with a stream of tears, in the course of which the step becomes, involuntary, now raging, now slow; a state in which one is completely beside himself, with the distinctest consciousness of countless shudderings and quiverings, even to the toes of his feet; a ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... that position. He, Dickens, was to have the command of the story, and the artist was to illustrate him. How far these altered relations would have worked quite smoothly if Seymour had lived, and if Dickens' story had not so soon assumed the proportions of a colossal success, it is idle to speculate. Seymour died by his own hand before the second number was published, and so ceased to be in a position to assert himself. It was, however, in deference to the peculiar bent ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... I had acquired a colossal fortune, some four hundred thousand pounds, by the Armenian way of doing business, but suddenly awoke in dreadful perplexity as to how I should dispose ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... I know not what of uncouth but colossal,—like the chant, in the old lyrical tragedy, of one of those mythical giants, who, proud of descent from Night and Chaos, had held sway over the elements, while still crude and conflicting, to be crushed ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... has become so strong in Germany that it might be supposed that the German Socialists would no longer fear a test of strength. But this is not the case. They feel, on the contrary that every delay is in their favor, as they are making colossal strides in their organization and propaganda, while the political situation is ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... The colossal groups on the Arches of the Nations symbolize the meeting of the peoples of the East and West, brought together by the Panama Canal, and here uniting to celebrate its completion. In the group of the Nations of the East the elephant bears the Indian prince, ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... dared him to a trial of his spells, Which challenge he accepted, having heard From white men of a coming sun-eclipse. Then, shrewdly noting day and hour, he called Boldly his followers round him, and declared That he would hide the sun. They stood and gazed, And, when the moon's colossal shadow fell, They crouched upon the ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... hundred years the empire of the Czar has made slow progress; but great bodies move slowly, and Russia is colossal. Two such republics as the United States with our great storm door called Alaska, could go into the Russian empire and yet leave room enough for Great Britain, ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... heart would have glowed over this realisation in colossal figures of his cherished principle! You remember his formula to young Copperfield: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six; result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 13, 1914 • Various
... a year London, owing to its greatly increased defences, had been free from attack. Then, on the night of October 19, Germany made a colossal effort to make good their boast of laying London in ruins. A fleet of eleven Zeppelins came over, five of which found the city. One, drifting low and silently, was responsible for most of the casualties, which totalled 34 ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... works in wood-carving were the altars, which finally came to be colossal in size, and with their multitude of reliefs, statuettes, and ornaments were marvellous monuments to the industry and skill of the wood-carvers. The reliefs in these works are usually arranged on landscape backgrounds, and so much resemble pictures in many ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... me the other day that he remembered his (B.'s) father with nearly nothing, and that out of the house which he founded not less than six or seven millions must have been taken. Several colossal fortunes have been made out ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... the habits of a long life, the astrologer raised his eyes and, after a glance at the double row of granite pillars, the colossal statues and obelisks in the fore-court, fixed them on the starlit skies. Even amid his grief a bitter smile hovered around his sunken lips; to-night the gods themselves were deprived of the honors which ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... you know, Ellen," said Mr. Hartrick to his sister, "and pays for doing up. Why, a house like this in any habitable part of England would fetch a colossal fortune." ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... time at the lovely view, we turn our attention to the very interesting church of Notre Dame de la Garde. On the highest pinnacle is a colossal gilt figure of the Virgin Mary, looking over the seas, and, as it were, guarding her poor sailor devotees ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... and thrilled joyously when face to face with danger. He was exuberant, extravagant, enthusiastic, reckless, stupendous, fantastic. It is only by the cumulation of epithets that one can characterize a being so colossal in proportion, so many-sided in his phases, so manifold in operation. He was a brilliant of the first water, whose endless facets were forever gleaming, now here, now there, with a gorgeous, but irregular light. No ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... evidence for the defence of the two runagates, in an article by my very dear master Father Lecomte, who is found pleasing in the sight of the immortal gods. By which token, here is a book which I have not the time, just now, to read, a book recommended, it would seem, by that colossal fellow. He regards, or so they tell me, its author, one Bergotte, Esquire, as a subtle scribe, more subtle, indeed, than any beast of the field; and, albeit he exhibits on occasion a critical pacifism, a tenderness in suffering fools, for which it is impossible ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... men to make in home-building just as serious mistakes as are made by wild animals and savages. For example, among the men of our time it is a common mistake to build in the wrong place, to build entirely too large or too ugly, and to build a Colossal Burden instead of a real Home. From many a palace there stands forth the perpetual question: "Why ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... without needing a voice. "If you're going to throw me out, this is the best time to do it." Dark brown skin of one of the dark races, jet black straight hair, a dark pair of eyes that were merry and watchful and had the impact of something dangerous. Colossal gall, Bryce characterized it to himself. He might be as good as he thinks he is. He was probably selling the Brooklyn Bridge, and he should never have gotten in, but the fact that he had somehow gotten past Kesby made him worth a few questions ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... one hundred recalls ten. There were the very same lines, the same length of clean muscular neck well set on the same deep and grandly-placed shoulders, the same arching of the loins, the same contour of hips and quarters, but all in proportions so colossal that every one who saw him, no matter how indifferent to horseflesh in general, remained transfixed in admiration of a living machine of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... agents by the hundred; the smallest room was let for its weight in gold. The workmen who made the paper for the bank-notes could not keep up with the consumption. The most modest fortunes suddenly became colossal, lacqueys of yesterday were millionaires to-morrow; extravagance followed the progress of this outburst of riches, and the price of provisions followed the progress of extravagance. Enthusiasm was at its height in favor of the able author ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... struggle, and the defection of their children—when they saw their airy castles end in this yellow drawing-room, whose shabbiness they could only conceal by drawing the curtains, they were overcome with bitter rage. Then, as a consolation, they would think of plans for making a colossal fortune, seeking all sorts of devices. Felicite would fancy herself the winner of the grand prize of a hundred thousand francs in some lottery, while Pierre pictured himself carrying out some wonderful speculation. They lived with one sole thought—that of making a fortune immediately, ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... with science is that too often it leaves out love. If you agree that we cannot treat men like machines, why should we put animals in that class? Why should we fall into the colossal ignorance and conceit of cataloging every human-like action of animals under the word "instinct"? Man delights in thinking of himself as only a little lower than the angels. Then why should he not ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... with feelings of undisguised awe, astonishment and delight, and was often sorely perplexed within himself as to whether he or Captain Wopper was the greater man. Both were colossal in size and energetic in body, and both were free and easy in manners, as well as good-humoured. No doubt, as Gillie argued with himself (and sometimes with Susan), the Professor was uncommon larned an' deep, but then the Captain ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... often meant wickedness. It was a duty to be cheerful and gay.[2244] "Terribleness was a word which came into vogue to describe Michael Angelo's grand manner. It implied audacity of imagination, dashing draughtsmanship, colossal scale, something demonic and decisive in execution."[2245] Virtu meant the ability to win success. Machiavelli used it for force, cunning, courage, ability, and virility. "It was not incompatible with craft and dissimulation, or with the indulgence of sensual vices."[2246] Cellini used ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... brief outline, had been the origin of the two men's acquaintance. Since George's return they had been constantly together. Fontenoy had thrown his whole colossal power of work into the struggle for the Market Malford seat, and George owed ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Gauthier's shop, arranged in storied box Of triple epoch, we survey the rocks, A learned nomenclature! Behold in time Strange forms imprison'd, forms of every clime! The Sauras quaint, daguerrotyped on slate, Obsolete birds and mammoths out of date; Colossal bones, that, once before our flood, Were clothed in flesh, and warm'd with living blood; And tiny creatures, crumbling into dust, All mix'd and kneaded in one common crust! Here tempting shells exhibit mineral stores, Of crystals bright and scintillating ores! Of milky mesotypes, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... possible,—and as quickly as possible. This was his duty, not only as a lawyer employed in a particular case, but as a man who would be bound to prevent any great evil which he saw looming in the future. In his view of the case the marriage of Lady Anna Lovel, with a colossal fortune, to Daniel Thwaite the tailor, would be a grievous injury to the social world of his country,—and it was one of those evils which may probably be intercepted by due and discreet precautions. No doubt the tailor wanted money. The man was entitled to some considerable reward for all ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... that the great railroad had its nucleus, its impetus, and its completion in such a center as this! Here were the frock-coated, soft-voiced, cigar-smoking gentlemen among whom Warburton and his directors had swung the colossal enterprise. What a vast difference between these men and the builders! With the handsome white-haired Warburton, and his associates, as they smoked their rich cigars and drank their wine, Neale contrasted Casey and McDermott and many another burly spiker or teamster out on ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... go forth at once," he said, "and make known the good tidings that the fields are sown, the League formed. Henceforth there are no barriers between nations, and the reign of perpetual Peace is assured. It is colossal." ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... after twelve years' interval, the nursery of my childhood expanded before me: my sister was moaning in bed; and I was beginning to be restless with fears not intelligible to myself. Once again the elder nurse, but now dilated to colossal proportions, stood as upon some Grecian stage with her uplifted hand, and, like the superb Medea towering amongst her children in the nursery at Corinth, [13] smote me senseless to the ground. Again I am in the chamber with my sister's corpse, again the pomps of life ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... besides—absolutely nothing—no other merit. Well yes. He had another name, but that's pure luck—his own name of de Barral which he did not invent. I don't think that a mere Jones or Brown could have fished out from the depths of the Incredible such a colossal manifestation of human folly as that man did. But it may be that I am underestimating the alacrity of human folly in rising to the bait. No doubt I am. The greed of that absurd monster is incalculable, unfathomable, ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... to an unregenerate Turk than to an English baronet. Considering the opportunities of evil afforded you by the possession of a practically unlimited allowance, and a brazen cheek which can only be described as colossal, the fact that you have not long since gone headlong to the devil fills me with ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... 8,496 feet, is the only known defile over the Hindu Kush practicable for artillery. This valley was one of the chief centres of Buddhist worship, as gigantic idols, mutilated indeed by fanatical Mussulmans, conclusively prove. Bamian, with its colossal statues cut out in the rock, was among the wonders described by the Buddhist monks who traversed Central Asia in the fourth century. The statues are found on a hill about three hundred feet high, in which are a ...
— Afghanistan and the Anglo-Russian Dispute • Theo. F. Rodenbough
... that tumult of the blood; he felt on his face the frantic heating of the wind; lashing and destroying, then stopping suddenly, cut off by an Herculean will. That Titanic soul entered his body, blew out his limbs and his soul, and seemed to give them colossal proportions. He strode over all the world. He was like a mountain, and storms raged within him—storms of wrath, storms of sorrow!... Ah, what sorrow!... But they were nothing! He felt so strong!... To suffer—still to suffer!... Ah, how good it is to be strong! How good it is ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... with silver. Far away to the east floats the mirage of a lake, calm as a blue lagoon. Westward, where desert merges into sky, are high tablelands, and flat-topped mountains with carved sides, desert architecture, such as might have suggested Egyptian temples and colossal sphinxes. ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... drawing two years afterward on ascending the river Magdalena. The distich-leaved stalk of this gramen often reaches the height of fifteen or twenty feet.* (* Lata, or cana brava. It is a new genus, between aira and arundo. This colossal gramen looks like the donax of Italy. This, the arundinaria of the Mississippi, (ludolfia, Willd., miegia of Persoon,) and the bamboos, are the highest gramens of the New Continent. Its seed has been carried to St. Domingo, where its stalk ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... passions read Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away. ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... cricket-field or river-side cads. Often one dimly recognises the scenes, and the acquaintances of years ago, in University novels. The mildest of men suddenly pose as heroes of the Guy Livingstone type, fellows who "screw up" timid dons, box with colossal watermen, and read all night with wet towels bound round their fevered brows. These sketches are all nonsense. Men who do these things do not write about them; and men who write about them ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... reflecting with added strenuousness—"then, by Heaven! we're up against something that's going to take it out of us before we get at the truth. That's a dead certainty. If this is all conspiracy, it's a big 'un—a colossal thing! ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... without mortar. The lower strata of these divisions were large, the upper tapered to pieces not much larger than a brick, at least they seemed so from a distance. The whole appearance of this singular mount was grand and awful, and I could not but reflect upon the time when these colossal ridges were all at once rocking in the convulsive tremblings of some mighty volcanic shock, which shivered them into the fragments I then beheld. I said the hill we had ascended ended abruptly in a precipice; by going farther round we found a spot, which, ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... Hercules, he returned to the pulvina, and a mignon on one side, a mistress on the other, ordered the guard to massacre the spectators and set fire to Rome. After entering the arena six or seven hundred times, and there vanquishing men whose eyes had been put out and whose legs were tied, the colossal statue which Nero had made after his own image was altered; to the top came the bust of Commodus, to the base this legend: THE VICTOR OF TEN THOUSAND GLADIATORS, ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... eye, in a mass and without confusion, with their innumerable details of statuary, carving, and sculpture, joined powerfully to the tranquil grandeur of the whole; a vast symphony in stone, so to speak; the colossal work of one man and one people, all together one and complex, like the Iliads and the Romanceros, whose sister it is; prodigious product of the grouping together of all the forces of an epoch, where, upon each stone, one sees the fancy of the workman disciplined by the genius of the artist start ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... Cleopatra." The model of Shylock was evidently some "old clo'" dealer in Petticoat Lane. The figure of Armado ("Love's Labour's Lost") is so wonderfully put together that his anatomy must sooner or later fall to pieces; the ghost of Hamlet's father is the ghost of some colossal statue, certainly not the shade of one who had worn the guise of ordinary humanity. The head of the gentle Juliet might derive benefit from the application of a bottle of invigorating hair wash. The figure of the monk in "Romeo and Juliet" literally cut out of wood, carries ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... against war? Whence could he draw any vapor of hope to sustain his preliminary steps? And in framing his plot, which way did he set his face to look out for accomplices? Revolving this question in times past, I came to the conclusion—that, perhaps, this colossal project of a war against war, had been first put in motion under a misconception (natural enough, and countenanced by innumerable books) as to the true historical origin of wars in many notorious instances. If ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... from his flocks, marching unattended and unarmed, save with his shepherd's staff and sling, to confront the colossal Goliath with his massive armor, is the sublimest audacity the ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... It was his colossal pride which he thus avenged, without avowing it even to himself—nay, laboring for a length of time, sometimes for a whole twelvemonth together, to persuade himself that the interest of the State was concerned in the matter. Ingenious in connecting his private affairs with the affairs of France, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... favorite we have seen was Shamash. The great temple of Nin-ib stood in Calah, which Ashurnasirbal chose as his official residence, and it was in this temple that the king deposited a long inscription commemorating his deeds. In the temple, he also places a colossal statue of the god. Upon the completion of the edifice, he dedicates it with prayer and sacrifices. The special festivals of the god are fixed for the months of Shabat and Ulul,—the eleventh and sixth months,—and provision is made for ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... where the Archivarius, casting his eyes aloft, stood still; and Anselmus got time to feast himself on the glorious sight which the simple decoration of this hall afforded. Jutting from the azure-colored walls rose gold-bronze trunks of high palm-trees, which wove their colossal leaves, glittering like bright emeralds, into a ceiling far up; in the middle of the chamber, and resting on three Egyptian lions, cast out of dark bronze, lay a porphyry plate; and on this stood a simple Golden Pot, from which, so soon as he beheld it, Anselmus ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... human nature, and admitted no distinction between Christians and Frenchmen, regarded the first constitution as a colossal statue of Corinthian brass, formed by the fusion and commixture of all metals in the conflagration of the state. But there is a common fungus, which so exactly represents the pole and cap of liberty, that it seems ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... The sun pays tribute to them in gold; the rain, in mosses and ferns; the Spring, in lupine flowers. And the swallows, nesting in the portico of the Temple of Bacchus, above the curious frieze of egg-decoration,—as curious, too, their art of egg-making,—pour around the colossal columns their silvery notes. Surely, these swallows and ferns and lupine flowers are more ancient than the Acropolis. And the marvels of extinct nations can not hold a candle ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... man who has a house, who lives in the very house you can see through the trees. 'What kind of a man is he?' they ask. 'He must be a nice man to live in such a nice house. I almost feel I know him. I'll try his Cure.' Don't you think it's a colossal idea?" ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... to express my indebtedness to the investigations of many workers, which I have striven to recognise in the many references throughout the work, but most of all I am indebted to Messrs. MacGibbon and Ross in their colossal work, the Ecclesiastical Architecture of Scotland—a ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... I shall be leaving either to-morrow or the next day—for a short time. Now, Don Sebastian Alvaros, disgrace to the uniform that you wear, unmitigated blackguard and scoundrel, mean, contemptible coward, and, as I believe, colossal liar, listen to me! As I told you a moment ago, I am leaving Cuba within the next day or two. But I shall return, Senor; and if it should ever prove that the infamous story which you have just told is even approximately true, I will not kill you, but I will inflict upon you such a fearful punishment ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... colossal head had rested was about four feet in depth, and narrowed towards the bottom. I put down my hand and drew out—a human thigh-bone. The touch of this would have turned me sick again, had not the statue's face ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... supervision. When, therefore, twelve hundred singers from all parts of Saxony gathered around me in the Frauenkirche, where the performance took place, I was astonished at the comparatively feeble effect produced upon my ear by this colossal human tangle of sounds. The conclusion at which I arrived was, that these enormous choral undertakings are folly, and I never again felt inclined ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... centre of thought and speculation, prayers and supplications were addressed to her, and more than once did she appear in beatific vision to some illumined worshipper. It was in the midst of this glow of feeling that Cimabue painted his colossal and wondrous Madonna and Child with the Angels, the largest altar piece which had been produced up to that time. Cimabue was then living in the Borgo Allegri, one of the suburbs of Florence, and there ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... though high-born and accomplished, is a hysterical wildcat. You did well, my child; you did extremely well. So long as I have found you, nothing matters; but, nothing at all. As my great, my gigantic friend, my colossal preserver, el Capitan Gimmo, ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards
... To adorn the new city, the cities of Greece and Asia were despoiled of their choicest treasures of art. In the Forum was placed a lofty column of porphyry, one hundred and twenty feet in height, on whose summit stood a colossal statue of Apollo, supposed to be the work of Phidias. In the stately circus or hippodrome, the space between the goals, round which the chariots turned in their swift flight, was filled with ancient statues and obelisks. Here was also a trophy ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... and artistic achievement colossal in the aggregate, and perfectly appalling in the case ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... inaccessible polar regions of a magnitude such as no human being had ever conceived, in curdling temperatures that no man could endure; which had beheld the crash of icebergs and the slide of snow-hills by the shooting light of the Aurora; been half blinded by the whirl of colossal storms and terraqueous distortions; and retained the expression of feature that such scenes had engendered. These nameless birds came quite near to Tess and Marian, but of all they had seen which ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... may come and realize their highest possibilities, and consequently this nation must be held together and developed as a whole in all its resources, and not cut up into small, ineffective, quarrelsome factions. To allow that would mean the ruin of a colossal ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... walls, gables, and roofs of the Etruscan temples were once decorated, as their still extant ruins show, and by the trade which can be shown to have existed in such articles from Etruria to Latium. Casting in copper occupied no inferior place. Etruscan artists ventured to make colossal statues of bronze fifty feet in height, and Volsinii, the Etruscan Delphi, was said to have possessed about the year 489 two thousand bronze statues. Sculpture in stone, again, began in Etruria, as probably ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... and devils of Milton. The style of the Athenian had, as we have remarked, something of the Oriental character; and the same peculiarity may be traced in his mythology. It has nothing of the amenity and elegance which we generally find in the superstitions of Greece. All is rugged, barbaric, and colossal. The legends of Aeschylus seem to harmonise less with the fragrant groves and graceful porticoes in which his countrymen paid their vows to the God of Light and Goddess of Desire, than with those huge and grotesque labyrinths of eternal granite in which Egypt enshrined ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... sing-song girl idea, magnified many diameters. In this hour its colossal selfishness ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... which surround and cover the site of ancient Memphis. At one time the most important of Egypt's capitals, Memphis has almost completely disappeared into the soft and yielding earth, and little trace of the former city now remains beyond a few stones and the colossal statue of Rameses II., one of the oppressors of Israel, which now lies prostrate ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... breathes God's air. But my experience has been that Neapolitan capitalists are about the cleverest and slipperiest financiers in the world. We could have financed it twenty times over in Naples in a day, but neither Moliterno nor I was willing to trust them. The thing is enormous, you see—a really colossal fortune—and Italian law is full of ins and outs, and the first man we talked to confidentially would have given us his word to play straight, and, the instant we left him, would have flown post-haste for Basilicata and grabbed for himself the two thirds of the field not yet in our hands. Moliterno ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... was massive in intellect, colossal in culture, prodigious in memory, weighed nigh three hundred pounds, and had prejudices to match. He was possessed of a giant's strength, and occasionally used it like a giant—for instance, when he felled an offending bookseller ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... years, when I think now of that ugly little room, with its painted pine furniture, with its coloured glass vases, filled with dried cat-tails, upon the mantelpiece, with its crude red and yellow print of a miniature David attacking a colossal Goliath, with its narrow window-panes, where beyond the "prize" red geranium the wind drove the fallen leaves over the brick pavement, with its staring whitewashed walls, and its hideous rag carpet—when I think of these vulgar details it is to find that they are softened in my memory by ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... ideal monster might pass for an innocent conceit; and there appears even consummate wisdom in erecting a colossal power for our common security; but Hobbes assumed that Authority was to be supported to its extreme pitch. Force with him appeared to constitute right, and unconditional submission then became a duty: these were consequences ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... stables, where he had been regaling himself with the company of his fellow-creatures the horses ever since breakfast. But that was no matter to my little namesake; as soon as the colossal person of her father darkened the door, she uttered a shrill scream of delight, and, quitting her mother's side, ran crowing towards him, balancing her course with outstretched arms, and embracing his knee, threw back her head and ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... That colossal power which France had been long erecting in America, with vast labor and expense; which had been the motive for one of the most extensive and desolating wars of modern times, was thus entirely overthrown. The causes of ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... national game. In a perfectly natural way, he went from manager of the local team to proprietor of the New York Giants. He was a Bismarck in plan and a Napoleon in execution. His aim was pre-eminence and he won place by the consent of all. The recent spectacular outpouring of people and colossal financial exhibit in the struggle for the pennant between New York and Boston were but the legitimate ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... came up over the water; and in the well-paved alleys the ghosts of eighteenth-century fashion might have met each other in their old haunts, and exchanged stately congratulations upon its vastly bettered condition, and perhaps puzzled a little over the colossal lady on Bedloe's Island, with her lifted torch, and still more over the curving tracks and chalet-stations of the Elevated road. It is an outlook of unrivalled beauty across the bay, that smokes and flashes ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... fashioned divinely, were those unpretentious yet colossal characters, Paul and Jesus. Theirs were modes of mind cast in the moulds of Christian Science: Paul's, by the supremely natural transforming power of Truth; and the character of [10] Jesus, by his original ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... of the colossal war has been achieved in these seven months. It has been demonstrated that no single nation in any part of the world can dominate the other nations, or, indeed, any other nation, unless the other principal powers consent to that ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... matter of fact, we had the whole house to chat in, and were everlastingly intruding upon each other. I invaded the retirement of his study where the principal feature was a colossal silver inkstand presented to him on his fiftieth year by a subscription of all his wards then living. He had been guardian of many orphans of land-owning families from the three southern provinces—ever ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... hid in the depths of the land; the things Rachel had seen were merely trifles picked up in the course of one short journey. He thought there might be giant gods hewn out of stone in the mountain-side; and colossal figures standing by themselves in the middle of vast green pasture lands, where none but natives had ever trod. Before the dawn of European art he believed that the primitive huntsmen and priests had built temples of massive stone slabs, had formed out of the dark ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... excellent designs in basso-relievo, representing the combat of the Athenians with the Amazons; besides six columns, white as snow, and of the finest architecture. Near the Propylaea stood the celebrated colossal statue of Minerva, executed by Phidias after the battle of Marathon, the height of which, including the pedestal, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... time to this the work has been colossal, and almost incredible, and without serious collision with the working classes. Vast new buildings have been erected all over England, and a huge staff, running into thousands, set in action. The new Minister has set out with determination ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... grief, if the superfluously jealous interference of Napoleon's sister had not extended itself to a little dog from Vienna, which, it was insisted, must be sent back, though this cost Marie Louise many tears." The acquisition of a colossal empire did not console the sovereign for the loss ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... dawn Martina led me back to the colossal statues, and we waited there, hoping that we should hear them sing, as tradition said they did when the sun rose. Yet the sun came up as it had done from the beginning of the world, and struck upon those giant effigies as it had done for some two thousand ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard
... principle holds good for the amniotes, the reptiles, birds, and mammals, although in this case the processes of coelomation are more modified and more difficult to identify on account of the colossal accumulation of food-yelk and the corresponding notable flattening of the germinal disk. However, as the whole group of the amniotes has been developed at a comparatively late date from the class of the amphibia, their coelomation must also be directly ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... Persia and Afghanistan in the south and China in the east. At present, while the dominion of Russia in Europe comprises about 2,000,000 square miles, that in Asia is more than 6,500,000 square miles, the total area of this colossal empire being more than equal in area to the entire ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... something that no ordinary human figure could suggest. It is in its huddled attitude, its ghastly face, its staring, unseeing eyes, which gaze out in every direction, as the jolting of the cart turns and twists the body from side to side. There is something colossal, something strangely stirring in the suggestion of purpose in the figure. There is something to inspire wonder in the most sluggish mind. It tells a story of some sort of heroism. It tells a story of a master mind triumphing over bodily weakness and suffering. It tells a story ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... exclaimed, turning and looking squarely at Cowperwood, who faced him quite calmly, undisturbed and unashamed.] Think of it! Think of the colossal nerve of the man—the Machiavellian subtlety of his brain. He knew he was going to fail. He knew after two days of financial work—after two days of struggle to offset the providential disaster which upset his nefarious schemes—that he had exhausted every possible resource save one, the ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... and to tell of revolutions that are coming at some unlooked-for moment, but soon. Still I believe in his wisdom and foresight about as much as in any other man's. There are no such things. He is a merchant, and meditates settling in London, and making a colossal fortune there during the next ten or twenty years; that being the period during which London is to hold the exchanges of the world, and to continue its metropolis. After that, New York is to be the world's ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... terrace overlooking the canon, a sheer drop of two thousand feet, while over in the distance, as if across the canon, one can see the rolling foot-hills and lofty peaks of the Rockies, with Pike's Peak in the distance, snow-capped and colossal. It is late in the afternoon, and, as the scene progresses, the quick twilight of a canon, beautiful in its tints of purple and amber, becomes later pitch black, and the curtain goes down on an absolutely black ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... journeyed with all possible speed, he was come a day too late, and he heard with inexpressible alarm and chagrin of the imprudent manifesto issued by the Duke but the day before. Surely no other great general of the world ever made so colossal, so fatal a blunder. In that arrogant and sanguinary manifesto could be heard the death-knell of the unhappy King of France, or so it seemed to Calvert, who was so deeply impressed with the rashness and danger of his Grace's diplomacy that he made no attempt to conceal the alarm he felt. ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... the country is very remarkable. A strip of land, rarely exceeding twenty leagues in width, runs along the coast, and is hemmed in through its whole extent by a colossal range of mountains, which, advancing from the Straits of Magellan, reaches its highest elevation - indeed, the highest on the American continent - about the seventeenth degree south, *2 and, after crossing the line, gradually subsides into hills of inconsiderable magnitude, as it enters the ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... dimensions, comically indecent, covered with tinsel and decorated with laurels, they stood shivering, awaiting the command to "Go!" to run the gauntlet of all this sinister crowd, overwelling with long-repressed venom, seething with taunts and lewdness. At last a mounted officer gave the word, and, amid a colossal shout of glee from the mob, the half-naked, grotesque figures, with their strange Oriental faces of sorrow, started at a wild run down the Corso. The goal was the Castle of St. Angelo. Originally the race-course ended with the Corso, but it had been considerably ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... perhaps of earlier date. Street and gate were built or rebuilt by Nebuchadnezzar. He, as he declares in various inscriptions, 'paved the causeway with limestone flags for the procession of the Great Lord Marduk.' He made the Istar Gate 'with glazed brick and placed on its threshold colossal bronze bulls and ferocious serpent dragons'. Along the street thus built the statue of Marduk was borne in solemn march on the Babylonian New Year's Day, when the king paid yearly worship to the ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... flowers. It seemed to me a strange spectacle,—a forest of monocotyledonous trees with a dicotyledonous undergrowth; the inferior plants thus towering above and sheltering the superior ones. Among the lower trees were many Leguminosae,—one of the most striking, called Fava, having a colossal pod. The whole mass of vegetation was woven together by innumerable lianas and creeping vines, in the midst of which the flowers of the Bignonia, with its open, trumpet-shaped corolla, were conspicuous. The capim was bright with the blossoms of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... the mechanism of animal locomotion, recognize the fact that our knowledge is not yet advanced enough to hope to succeed in making real walking machines. But they conceive that the time may come hereafter when colossal figures will be constructed whose giant strides will not be arrested by the obstacles which are impassable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... more infinite than the citizen, and human life than political life. However partial the industrial revolt may be, it conceals within itself a universal soul: political revolt may be never so universal but it hides a narrow-minded spirit under the most colossal form. ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... than the design upon a lacquered casquet or enameled vase,—the figure upon a workman's trowel not less than the pattern of the girdle of a princess,—the shape of the paper doll or wooden rattle bought for a baby, not less than the forms of those colossal Ni-O who guard the gateways of the ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... does Tolstoi regard War? For on this high matter the judgment of such a man cannot but claim earnest scrutiny. Examining his writings, even from The Cossacks, through such a masterpiece as War and Peace, colossal at once in design and in execution, on to his latest philosophical pamphlets or paragraphs, one phase at least of his thought reveals itself—gradually increasing vehemence in the expression of his abhorrence of all war as the instrument ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... see, broad streets extended, lined with structures rivaling in splendour and beauty those unforgotten "topless towers." Temples, palaces, and public buildings rose, storey upon storey, built of hewn stones of great size; and noble arches faced an open square before a temple of colossal masonry crowning an eminence in the centre of the city. Directly in line with this eminence rose the mountain upon whose summit stood the far-seen pillars ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... the country, would be merged. in a monopoly to strangle competition in cotton manufacture. Likewise, the first stretch of railroad joined another, and this a third, and so on, until there had arisen a vast railway system under a single management from New York to San Francisco. Now, while these colossal monopolies had grown up so naturally, responding to the wonderful expansion of the population they served, the laws and regulations which applied to them, having been framed in the days when they were young and ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... Mr. Hornor, in his colossal undertaking, has "devised a mean" to draw us out of the way; and a successful one it has already proved. As a return for the interest which his enterprise has excited, we are, however, induced to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 356, Saturday, February 14, 1829 • Various
... of his essay is the growth, almost peculiar to that country, not of large, but of those colossal fortunes, which have certainly had no parallel in the past history of the world. The position of "X" is that the growth of such fortunes is deplorable, partly because they are possible instruments of judicial and political corruption, and partly because they excite antagonism against ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... Asiatic, and a soldier in a colonial regiment. Of a colossal stature, short hair, a nose extremely large, an enormous mouth, dark complexion, he made a most hideous appearance. At first he had placed himself in the middle of the raft, and, at each blow of his fist, knocked down every one who opposed him; he ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... said the scientist; "of the most colossal. For it is a discovery you have of him made he is new ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... that period when Nan had stepped into the picture. With pride, and a great satisfaction, he remembered her weeks and months of devotion to the injured man. Her sleepless, tireless watch. Her skill and patient tenderness. These things had been colossal. To him it had been a vision of a mother's tender care for an ailing child. And the thought of it now stirred him to a touch of bitterness in his feelings toward ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum |
