"Fantastic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that the garden is speedily to be remodeled. Yonder you may observe the two whose requirements are to rid the place of all fantastic unremunerative notions; and who will develop the natural resources of this garden according to generally ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... cultivated, with houses and villages at intervals upon the banks of the river or inland, alternating with cemeteries and pyramids of bags of salt, producing a charming and ever varying landscape. When night approached, lanterns of every hue, fastened to the masts and rigging of the yachts, produced the fantastic effect of many-coloured lights. ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... its moments of fantastic hysteria, and when it is on the rampage the only thing for a rational man to do is to climb a tree and let the cataclysm go by. And so, some time ago, when the word nature-faker was coined, I, for one, climbed into my tree and stayed there. I happened ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... spray from the roaring breakers that ceaselessly dashed against the mighty wall, rising, grim and sheer, hundreds of feet above them. Everywhere the rock was stained a deep red, indicating the presence of iron, and everywhere it had been rent or shattered into a thousand fantastic forms. At short intervals the massive cliffs were wrenched apart to make room for narrow fiords, of unknown depth, that penetrated for miles into the land, where they formed intricate mazes of placid waterways. ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... blame me, 'cause I thus describe them. Flatter I may not, lest thereby I bribe them To have a better judgment of themselves, Than wise men have of babies on their shelves.[9] Their antic tricks, fantastic modes, and way, Show they, like very boys and girls, do play With all the frantic fopperies of this age, And that in open view, as on a stage; Our bearded men do act like beardless boys; Our women please themselves with childish toys. Our ministers, long time, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... it. There you'll lie In noon's delight, with bees to flash above you, Drown amid buttercups that blaze in the wind, Forgetting all save beauty. There you'll see With sun-filled eyes your one great dome of cloud Adding fantastic towers and spires of light, Ascending, like a ghost, to melt in the blue. Heaven enough, in truth, if you were there! Could I be with you I would choose your noon, Drown amid buttercups, laugh with the intimate grass, Dream there forever.... But, being older, sadder, Having not you, ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... the gentle, yet too haughty Alice! A power that she little dreamed of had laid its grasp upon her maiden soul. A will, most unlike her own, constrained her to do its grotesque and fantastic bidding. Her father as it proved, had martyred his poor child to an inordinate desire for measuring his land by miles instead of acres. And, therefore, while Alice Pyncheon lived, she was Maule's slave, in a bondage more humiliating, a thousand-fold, than that which binds its chain around ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that it was the morning after Mid-Lent. So he was much surprised at the spectacle, at the same time fantastic and hideous, which was presented to his view when he walked through a part of the exterior boulevard which he crossed on his ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... example, of the schools of Oxford, where, at immense expense, the barbarous, fantastic, and ignorant architect has chosen to represent the whole five orders of architecture on the front of ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... of enemies—he knew that. Had one of them chosen this fantastic method of declaring war on him? In that case he could certainly afford to ignore the letter as coming from a source unworthy of serious consideration. A worth-while enemy does not give a warning; he strikes. The cheapest thing about a rattlesnake is its rattle. Varr started to run over a list of ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... friend as well as my patient. No need to tell you men, who knew him, why I was fond of him. I don't suppose any one ever came in contact with that fantastic and smiling humanity of his without loving him for it. "Immortal hilarity!" The phrase might have been coined ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... said at last, turning to him and speaking in her usual voice; "it is worse than useless to look back at a horrible past. It plays tricks with one's nerves and makes one imagine all sorts of impossible things. We will NEVER talk about that subject again, Cesare, or I shall see fantastic likenesses to Arthur in every face I meet. It is a kind of hallucination, like a nightmare in broad daylight. Just now, when that odious little fop came up, I ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... such a suggestion as fantastic only a month ago; but now with the Archimandrite in his mind he began to be suspicious. What price, monetary or political, might not the Free Churchmen be paying for their bishoprics, what secret bargain of which it was no one's duty ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... grovelling Ebionite, and the fantastic Docetes, were rejected and forgotten: the recent zeal against the errors of Apollinaris reduced the Catholics to a seeming agreement with the double nature of Cerinthus. But instead of a temporary and occasional alliance, they established, and we still embrace, the substantial, indissoluble, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... the belief that children can be educated by the eye is more plausible than well supported. In any case, it is good that the illustration should be well drawn, well coloured; given that, whether it be realistically imitative or wholly fantastic is quite a secondary matter. As we have had pointed out to us, the child is not best pleased by mere portraits of himself; he prefers idealised children, whether naughtier and more adventurous, or absolute heroes of romance. And here a strange ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... bi Amrillah, sixth Fatimite Khalif of Egypt (A.D. 995-1021), cruel and fantastic tyrant, who claimed to be an incarnation of the Deity. He was the founder of the religion of the Druses, who look to him to reappear ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... as Ned knew, no other human being was anywhere near. The loneliness in the presence of those tremendous ruins was overpowering. He longed for human companionship. A peon, despite the danger otherwise, would have been welcome. The whole land took on fantastic aspects. It was not normal and healthy like the regions from which he came north of the ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... storm at sea and drowned a Scottish King. And so with the French Revolution. What the Encyclopaedists and other pioneers of that movement really did for the European peoples in that matter, was not to elaborate fantastic schemes of constitution making, but by their argumentation to achieve the destruction of old political sophistries—Divine Rights of Kings and what not—and to enable one or two simple facts to emerge clearly and unmistakeably, as that the object of government is the good of the governed, ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... talked on and on, wandering from country to country, and age to age, till it all seemed to her like a strangely beautiful poem, full of yellow light and gleaming shadow, sometimes passionate and intense, at others fantastic and almost ethereal. Now and then she half closed her eyes, and his words, and their meaning, the form and the substance, seemed to come to her like richly blended music, stirring all her senses ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... one who could speak of his own knowledge concerning Nyssia, having never spoken of her, the Sardians were left to their own conjectures in her regard; and their conjectures, it must be confessed, were fantastic and altogether fabulous. The beauty of Nyssia, thanks to the veils which shrouded her, became a sort of myth, a canvas, a poem to which each one added ornamentation as ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... evolved wisely or happily disposed, will long continue to be received as a welcome legacy by our studious youth; and as for his errors in a literary point of view, and with reference to British use, practically considered they are the mere breadth of fantastic colouring, which, being removed, does ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... our hero, "is the caprice of a female heart, fickle as the wind, uncertain as a calm at sea, fixed to no principle, but swayed by every fantastic gust of passion, or of whim. Congratulate yourself, therefore, my friend, upon your happy deliverance from such a domestic plague—upon the voluntary exile of a traitor from your bosom.—Recollect the dictates of your duty, your discretion, and your glory, and think ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... individuality of the colours of animals and plants that attracts our attention—the fact that the colours are localised in definite patterns, sometimes in accordance with structural characters, sometimes altogether independent of them; while often differing in the most striking and fantastic manner in allied species. We are thus compelled to look upon colour not merely as a physical but also as a biological characteristic, which has been differentiated and specialised by natural selection, ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... to say that you do yourself no good by all those confoundedly unconventional ideas of yours. If you had your chance to-morrow, it's my belief you'd throw it away by insisting on some fantastic ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... eye as he suddenly reaches the top. A fantastic sea, as it were, of hills, like the waves of a storm-tossed ocean, encircles him, and at his feet, green and wooded, lies a long fertile valley. Stretching far away into the gates of distance in its vast expanse, glitters the Lake of Scutari. ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... every one of the company regarded this as a real omen. The mill-loft was prepared for the joyous dance; but scarce had the fantastic toes (some of them were not light ones) begun to move through the mazy rounds, when the loft-floor broke down beneath the bounding feet of the happy-hearted miller; for, unfortunately, he considered not that his goodly body was heavier than his spirits. It was omen upon omen—the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... these houses without admiring the enormous oaken beams, their ends carved into fantastic figures, which crown with a black bas-relief the lower floor of most of them. In one place these transverse timbers are covered with slate and mark a bluish line along the frail wall of a dwelling covered by a roof en colombage ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... and questioning his authority to impose such unreasonable and ruinous commands, they passed to calumny and ridicule, and as these weapon are forged by evil imaginations and their exercise is unhampered by the restrictions of truth, many fantastic accusations were invented against Las Casas, and diligently circulated. The most frugal and abstemious of men was accused of gluttony and intemperance; his learning, which was certainly varied if not vast and was by no means mediocre, was declared to be superficial and insufficient to enable him ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... afterwards, both of them, rise to knighthood, are—what are they not?—soldiers, scholars, Christians, discoverers and 'planters' of foreign lands, geographers, alchemists, miners, Platonical philosophers; many-sided, high-minded men, not without fantastic enthusiasm; living heroic lives, and destined, one of them, to die a heroic death. From them Raleigh's fancy has been fired, and his appetite for learning quickened, while he is yet a daring boy, fishing in ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... textbooks. Talking about the revolt of the colonies on Mars and Venus. Talking about something he calls the Terran Federation, some kind of a world empire. Or something he calls Operation Triple Cross, that saved the country during some fantastic war he imagined...." ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper
... added Jack, in an awestruck voice, and he gazed on the chill and desolate scene all about them; the great pinnacles of rocks, in fantastic form; the immense black caverns of craters on either hand; ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... pride in his work. With Cervantes' own declaration, more than once repeated, of the purpose of his book the critics will not be content. So good a book must have had a better reason for being than Cervantes' dislike of the fantastic books of the later chivalry. Who, then, was the man—the original of Don Quixote? Against whom was the satire levelled? Of course nothing was then known to the world outside of poor Don Rodrigo de Pacheco, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... boiled over, and sent the ashes flying about our heads. It was bumpers and no heeltaps, and we were full to the throat. Then to the nard; and enter to us guitar and light fantastic toe. Thereafter, one shinned up the ladder, on post-prandial japery intent, another beat the devil's ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... the mask of flesh. You are masked for ever by your own flesh—what can be more ingenious? The Comprachicos worked on man as the Chinese work on trees. They had their secrets, as we have said; they had tricks which are now lost arts. A sort of fantastic stunted thing left their hands; it was ridiculous and wonderful. They would touch up a little being with such skill that its father could not have known it. Et que meconnaitrait l'oeil meme de son pere, as Racine says in bad ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... under a purple sky gilding the tree-tops and lighting us on our way. Owing to the nature of the ground we could not see far before us, but the backward view, with its wood-crowned heights, deep ravines, and sombre mountains looming in the distance, was fairy-like and fantastic, and the higher we rose the ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... "busy." So, when I cannot entertain her, I have to make the nearest approach I can to the truth, and tell her I am sick, or something of that kind; but nothing avails, with her, short of the absolute truth. She is so very fantastic and entertaining, that I should cultivate her acquaintance more, if it were not for this deficiency in the language, which makes it impossible to convey the idea to her when I want to get rid of her. As old as she is, she still carries home the great sacks of flour—a hundred pounds—on her ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... of Hudson's ship, the Half Moon, having chanced on one of these orgies, were so impressed by the fantastic spectacle that they gave the name Duyvels Dans-Kamer to the spot. Years afterwards, when Stuyvesant ascended the river, his doughty retainers were horrified, on landing below the Dans-Kamer, to discover hundreds of painted figures frisking there in the fire-light. ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... Earl was approached, with several fantastic congees, by a person quaintly dressed in a doublet of black velvet, curiously slashed and pinked with crimson satin. A long cock's feather in the velvet bonnet, which he held in his hand, and an enormous ruff; stiffened to the extremity of the absurd taste of the times, joined ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... and fantastic at the close as at this dark and splendid opening, and throughout, past description, Elizabethan. This single poem must bind Campion to that period without question; and as he lived thirty-six years in the actual reign of Elizabeth, and printed his Book of Airs with Rosseter ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... the first time, Osnomians clothed. The great room was filled with the highest nobility of Kondal, wearing their heavily-jeweled, resplendent robes of state. Every color of the rainbow and numberless fantastic patterns were there, embodied in ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... return. So skillfully was this managed that one of the city officials was on the point of offering a reward for the discovery of the missing Diedrich. This little man in knee-breeches and cocked hat was the germ of the whole "Knickerbocker legend," a fantastic creation, which in a manner took the place of history, and stamped upon the commercial metropolis of the New World the indelible Knickerbocker name and character; and even now in the city it is an undefined patent of nobility ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... American these Sicilian people looked very much alike. They were all a bit fantastic, and the scene reminded him of a fancy-dress ball where all the men represented brigands. Many of them were, or seemed to be, of truculent countenance; some wore piratical ear-rings, others had shawls wrapped about their heads as if for concealment. ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... checked-bordered handkerchief tied over a stiff, cambric frame, entirely envelops the head. The four ends of this handkerchief are tied in an odd way, two being left upstanding like rabbits' ears! This striking head-dress gives the Fanoe wife a fantastic appearance. When the good-natured, smiling faces of these women are hidden behind a mask, the combination of dress and mask makes them awesome-looking folk. The men of the island are nearly all fishermen; ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... said that he was engaged in some gigantic project, the nature of which Dan understood but dimly—a plan for the disarmament of the world, or something like that. As he remembered them here in the cold light of day, her words of the night before seemed more than a little fantastic; but perhaps he had not understood, or perhaps she had spoken figuratively. "The nations of the world in the hollow of his hand"—that, of course, was figurative. And, equally of course, Vard's plan would come to nothing. But it ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... is too great or too small, sleep does not follow; but in its place an intoxication, accompanied by fantastic ideas, and a strong desire to skip about, although one can not for a moment balance himself on his legs. I felt these last symptoms for sixty hours the first time I tasted this Polynesian liquor. The effects ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... I worked with other investigators to solve the mystery of the disks. We checked a hundred sighting reports, frequently crossing the trail of Project "Saucer" teams and F.B.I. agents. Old records gave fantastic leads. So did Air Force plans for exploring space. Rocket experts, astronomers, Air Force officials and pilot gave us clues pointing to a startling solution. Many intelligent persons—including scientists—believe that the saucers contain spies from ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... longitudinal cracks, which unitedly had cut up the ice into blocks of all shapes and sizes. These, as their position shifted, had become isolated, more or less,—and being partially melted by the sun, had assumed all sorts of fantastic shapes. There were ice-bridges, ice-caves, and ice obelisks and spires, some of which latter towered to a height of fifty feet or more; there were also forms suggestive of cottages and trees, with here and there real rivulets rippling down their ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... hid his treasures away in a cave. Then, accosted by Minerva in disguise, he gave a fantastic account of himself, to which she lent an amused ear, before assuring him of her identity and of his wife's fidelity. She then reported the insolence of the suitors lying in wait to murder Telemachus at his return, and suggested that Ulysses, in the guise of an aged beggar, should visit his faithful ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... municipalities. From my heart I pity the condition of a respectable servant of the public, like this war minister, obliged in his old age to pledge the Assembly in their civic cups, and to enter with a hoary head into all the fantastic vagaries of these juvenile politicians. Such schemes are not like propositions coming from a man of fifty years' wear and tear amongst mankind. They seem rather such as ought to be expected from those grand compounders ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... I have said, has all the attributes of government in common with her stouter and more famous sisters. She has a governor, and an upper house and a lower house of legislature; and she is somewhat fantastic in the use of these constitutional powers, for she calls on them to sit now in one town and now in another. Providence is the capital of the State; but the Rhode Island parliament sits sometimes at Providence ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... to get used to 'the light fantastic' sometime," remarked Oswald, as, after a successful five minutes' practice, he and Rona sat ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... be extemporized by adding a little hot milk to lemonade, and then straining it through a jelly-bag. Then there are "Wine punch," "Tea punch," and "French punch," made with lemons, spirits, and wine, in fantastic proportions. But of all the compounds of these materials, perhaps, for a summer drink, the North-American "mint julep" is the most inviting. Captain Marryat gives the following recipe for its preparation:—"Put into a tumbler about a dozen sprigs of the tender ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... their birthplace—where their home? Lighter than foam upon the crested wave, Fleeter than shadows of the passing cloud, They are of such fantastic substance made That quick as thought they change their fickle forms— Now grander than the waking vision views, Now stranger than the wildest fancy feigns, And now so grim and terrible they start The hardened conscience from its guilty sleep. In troops they come, trooping they fly away, ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... weeks. During the whole of this time we were passing up the center of a long narrow sandy plain, reaching like an outstretched belt nearly to the Rocky Mountains. Two lines of sand-hills, broken often into the wildest and most fantastic forms, flanked the valley at the distance of a mile or two on the right and left; while beyond them lay a barren, trackless waste—The Great American Desert—extending for hundreds of miles to the Arkansas on ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... and mysterious as they could wish, for its high sides kept out the sun and in the gloom the trunks of trees seem twisted into fantastic shapes. The ferns and brakes were very luxuriant, and they waded about in them ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... a vast volume of black vapour rolled up over the Sierra Madre, and rested upon the peaks of the mountains. From this, ragged masses, parting in fantastic forms and groupings, floated off against the concavity of the sky as though the demons of the storm were breaking up from an angry council. Each of these, as it careered across the heavens, seemed ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... dangling her feet from the apple-tree, or tripping along the tree-trunk in the glen, teasing him? tempting him. It was impossible. He could only think of her in, the gloom of the prison. That filled his mind with terrors. Sometimes in the dark hours his enfeebled body beset his brain with fantastic hallucinations. Calling for paper and pens, he would make show of writing a letter, producing no words or intelligible signs, but only a mass of scrawls and blotches. This he would fold and refold with great elaboration, and give to Jem y-Lord with an air of gravity ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... evening he paced the same streets in which he had heard those footsteps following him, peering under every fantastic, discreditable bonnet, in the hopes of once more meeting Esther, and addressing her in a far different manner from what he had done before. But he returned, night after night, disappointed in his search, and at last gave ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... diplomatic circles, were alike looking forward to the splendid ceremony, and to the great breakfast at Peter Van Ariens' house, and to the ball which Madame Jacobus was to give in the evening. None of the younger people had ever been in madame's fantastic ballroom, and they were eager for this entry into her wonderful house. For their mothers—seeing things through the mists of Time—had, innocently enough, exaggerated the marvels of the Chinese lanterns, the feather flowers and gorgeously plumed birds, the cases of ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... found that the great majority of the men of science to whom I first applied protested that mental imagery was unknown to them, and they looked on me as fanciful and fantastic in supposing that the words 'mental imagery' really expressed what I believed everybody supposed them to mean. They had no more notion of its true nature than a color-blind man, who has not discerned his defect, has of the nature of color. They had ...
— Power of Mental Imagery • Warren Hilton
... three classes of people that we have to consider in dealing with a scheme of this kind. There are the extremists, who nurse fantastic dreams that some day they will drive us out of India. In this group there are academic extremists and physical force extremists, and I have seen it stated on a certain authority—it cannot be more than a ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... time enfranchised. Congress decided to recommend that the representation of the South should be greater or less according to the extent to which the Negro population were admitted to the franchise or excluded from it. This clause was re-cast more than once in order to satisfy a fantastic scruple of Sumner's concerning the indecency of mentioning the fact that some people were black and others white, a scruple which he continued to enforce with his customary appeals to the Declaration of Independence, until even his ally Stevens lost all patience with him. But in itself it ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... attention to imitating every detail of costume and every personal peculiarity of the model from which they worked. This tended to weaken and narrow their own designs, and the whole effect of their work is fantastic and exaggerated—an effect quite opposed to the noble and harmonious treatment of the whole which the best Italian ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... rises from it, in the deep crystalline pools which mirror its hanging shore, in the broad lake and glancing river;—finally, in that which is to all human minds the best emblem of unwearied, unconquerable power the wild, various, fantastic, tameless unity of the sea;—what shall we compare to this mighty, this universal element, for glory and beauty? or how shall we follow its eternal changefulness of feeling? It is like trying ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... on all sides. The porphyry, jasper, and marbles are still in their places; the splendid glass mosaics, which artists from Byzantium came to make, still sparkle like jewels in the walls; the daring architecture of the sanctuary, with its fantastic crossed arches, is still as imposing as ever; the courtyard is still leafy with the orange trees that prolong the vistas of columns. As one stands before the loveliness of the great mosque, the thought goes back to the days of the glories of Cordova, the palmy days ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... their road ran through fantastic-looking mangrove trees rooted in the mud, that in the mist resembled, Alan thought, many-legged arboreal octopi feeling for their food, and tall reeds on the tops of which sat crowds of chattering finches. Then just as the sun broke out, strongly, cheering ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... had moved on at last. In the muffled silence and darkness Stonehouse's thoughts became shadowy and fantastic. Though he did not grieve he knew that a stone had shifted under the foundations of his mental security. Death took on a new aspect. It seemed unlikely that it was so simply ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... came forward and offered to build a lighthouse upon the terrible rocks. Those who knew this ambitious amateur were dubious of his success, and wondered what manifestation his eccentricity would assume on this occasion. Nor was their scepticism entirely misplaced. Winstanley raised the most fantastic lighthouse which has ever been known, and which would have been more at home in a Chinese cemetery than in the English Channel. It was wrought in wood and most lavishly embellished ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... been more worthy of such high gifts that one is conscious of deficiency or misfortune. And can one help asking whether the Emperor Max might not have given Duerer his Bible or his Virgil to illustrate, instead of demanding to have the borders of his "Book of Hours" rendered amusing with fantastic and curious arabesques; whether Duerer's learned friends, instead of requiring from him recondite or ceremonious allegories, might not have demanded title-pages of classic propriety; or whether the imperial bent of his ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... the Serpentine, and commenced quadrilles, polkas, and divers figures; in a few minutes their erratic motions were illuminated by red, blue, crimson, and green fires, lighted on the banks, and by rockets and other lights. This fantastic and beautiful exhibition was repeated on ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... have killed an ordinary man did not injure Ellsworth. His iron frame seemed incapable of dissolution or waste. Circumstance had no power to conquer his spirit. His hearty good-humor never gave way. His sense of honor, which was sometimes even fantastic in its delicacy, freed him from the very temptation to wrong. He knew there was a better time coming for him. Conscious of great mental and bodily strength, with that bright outlook that industry and honor always give a man, he was perfectly secure of ultimate success. His plans mingled in a singular ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... saw the gray house-chimneys of the lonely house reputed to be haunted. Opposite its door stood an old fort on a little hill, a noted resort of the fairies. Any summer gloaming at all, you might see their hundreds of little lamps threading a fantastic measure in and out on the rath. I never heard that any one saw more of them than those lights, which floated away if any were bold enough to approach them, like glorified balls of that thistledown of ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... had listened and made himself agreeable to her at first, in order to get a footing in Washington Square; and at present he needed all his self-command to be decently civil. It would have gratified him to tell her that she was a fantastic old woman, and that he should like to put her into an omnibus and send her home. We know, however, that Morris possessed the virtue of self-control, and he had, moreover, the constant habit of seeking to be agreeable; so that, although Mrs. Penniman's demeanour only ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... consists of one immense stone cleft throughout, and a little earth and sand gathered round it, on which are trees and shrubs of the freshest verdure; some of the other islets are bare, and some again have houses and villages on them: the whole scene is terminated by the Organ Mountains, whose spiry and fantastic summits attracting the passing clouds, secure an everlasting variety ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... bondage, and, as we passed through the already crowded streets, our fantastic dresses and strange appearance generally, collected a mob at our heels, which, in broad daylight, was certainly rather annoying. However, we soon reached the theatre, and ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... glimpse of the sea; but Robert turned the car, and driving between two gigantic hotels, ran down to a beach with sands of gleaming gold, and a background of wind-blown dunes billowing away as far as the eye could reach. The very wildness of this background gave a bizarre sort of charm to the fantastic buildings which made up ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... and demeanour, communicated a tone of anxiety to Sir Bale; and they stood still, side by side, in total silence for a time, looking toward the forest glades; between themselves and which, on the level sward of the valley, stood many a noble tree and fantastic group of forked birch and thorn, in the irregular formations into which ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... exquisite awakened, to an emotion so genuine that what judgment he had was now obscured by the eagerness of his passion; the situation apparently so easily malleable; the beautiful safety of it all for himself. And it did not really matter if the whole fantastic plot failed! ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... does the physicist Mach, with reference to such views and tendencies, speak of a 'mechanical mythology in opposition to the animistic mythology of the old religions' and considers both as "improper and fantastic exaggerations based on a one-sided judgment." "My position on the question just stated becomes apparent from the consideration that the living organism is not only a complex of chemical materials and a bearer ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... after a busy day among his piece-goods, he had walked afield with Heywood, and back by an aimless circuit through the twilight. His companion had been taciturn, of late; and they halted, without speaking, where a wide pool gleamed toward a black, fantastic belt of knotted willows and sharp-curving roofs. Through these broke the shadow of a small pagoda, jagged as a war-club of shark's teeth. Vesper cymbals clashed faintly in a temple, and from its open ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... of bad taste enlisted to a man in this new war. Scudery was standard-bearer; astounded that such fantastic beauties should have seduced knowledge as well as ignorance, and the court as well as the cit, and conjuring decent folks to suspend judgment for a while, and not condemn without a hearing Sophonisbe, Cesar, Cleopdtre, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... disorder and misrule. Never would Charles V. have held the position he occupied had he come after an ordinary man, instead of after an able and sagacious reformer like that Maximilian who is popularly regarded as a fantastic caricature of a knight-errant, marred by avarice and weakness ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... on the point of the promontory, where the land made its final slope, ending in a precipitous descent to the shore. Beneath lay rocks of all sizes and of fantastic forms, some fallen from the cape in tempests perhaps, some softly separated from it by the slow action of the winds and waves of centuries. A few of them formed, by their broken defence seawards, the unsafe natural harbour which was all the ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... such is the case with the humorous competition of advice between Justinus and Placebo, ("Placebo" seems to have been a current term to express the character or the ways of "the too deferential man." "Flatterers be the Devil's chaplains, that sing aye Placebo."—"Parson's Tale."), or with the fantastic machinery in which Pluto and Proserpine anticipate the part played by Oberon and Titania in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." On the other hand, Chaucer is capable of using goods manifestly borrowed or stolen for a purpose never intended in their ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... find that she had taken the fantastic little tale invented to amuse her as truth; but the poor babe had never read books or heard stories, and the fairy tale had been too much for her starved little imagination. I remember that once on another occasion I told a pathetic ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... animistic belief is to be found in most if not all peoples living in the ante-predatory, savage stage of culture. The primitive savage takes his animism less seriously than the barbarian or the degenerate savage. With him it eventuates in fantastic myth-making, rather than in coercive superstition. The barbarian culture shows sportsmanship, status, and anthropomorphism. There is commonly observable a like concomitance of variations in the same respects in the individual temperament of men in the civilized communities ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... confident and serene, alert, adventurous, and unwearied. It is very natural in its methods withal, far more so than many fantastic enterprises and sentimental experiments, and hence its singular success. I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from Long ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... devote yourself exclusively to pieces calculated to show the skill of the performer. Why desire always to show off your power in octave passages, your trills, your facility in skips, your unprecedented stretches, or other fantastic feats? You only produce weariness, satiety, and disgust, or, at least, you make ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... watch with us. Clarence had unfastened the alarum bell from my shutters, and taken down the bar after the curtains had been drawn by the housemaid, and he now opened them. It was a frosty moonlight night, and the lawn lay white and crisp, marked with fantastic shadows. The others looked grave and pale, Emily was in a thick white shawl and hood, with a swan's down boa over her black dress, a somewhat ghostly figure herself, but we were in far too serious ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is, perhaps, the most inconsistent thing in all nature; and in nothing is it more capricious than in the manifestations of its passions; and in no passion is it so fantastic as in that which it miscalls love, but which is ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... local festivals, or the completion of some great public enterprise, such as the railway between T[o]kio and Yokohama. In rich costume, decoration, and representation most of the cultus-objects were marvels of art and skill. Besides the gala dresses and uniforms, the fantastic decorations and personal adornments, the dances which represented the comedies and tragedies of the gods and the striking scenes in the Kojiki, there wore colossal images of Kami, Bodhisattvas, Gon-gen, Dai Mi[o] Jin, and of ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... place, the shape of art, of poetry, painting, sculpture. Romanticism blossomed in 1830, and bore fruit for ten years. The religious reaction was a punier thing; the great Abbe, who was the Newman of France, was himself unable to remain within the fantastic church that he built out of medieval ruins. In England, and especially in Oxford, the aesthetic admiration of the Past was promptly transmuted into religion. Doctrines which men thought dead were resuscitated; and from Oxford came, not poetry or painting, but the sermons of Newman, ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... alliance with those forms of magic and erotic mysticism which are called Saktism[24]. It is difficult to estimate the extent of the corruption, for the singularity of the evil, a combination of the austere and ethical teaching of Gotama with the most fantastic form of Hinduism, arrests attention and perhaps European scholars have written more about it than it deserves. It did not touch the Hinayanist churches nor appreciably infect the Buddhism of the Far East, nor even (it would seem) Indian Buddhism outside Bengal and ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... door-stone, worn smooth by feet that long since have travelled beyond earthly limits, and now tread celestial fields and sunny slopes of Paradise. Far across the meadow lies the shadow of the old house,—a strange, fantastic suggestion of a dwellings vague and enticing as the gray turrets of the Castle of St. John, which, as the legend says, are to be shaped at twilight from the crags and ravines of the lonely mountains, but vanish ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... of his desire for it, he had never dared ask her to pass the night with him. During the day he would only betray himself by his sad or fantastic temper; but at night, with such dreams as came to him, might not some word ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... design, to hinder the enemy from utilizing the shelter, and its red rage of destruction bepainted the clouds that hung so low above the chimneys and dormer-windows. To the east, the woods on the steeps had been shelled, and a myriad boughs and boles riven and rent, lay in fantastic confusion. Through the mournful chaos the wind had begun to sweep; it sounded in unison with the battle clamors, and shrieked and wailed and roared as it surged adown the defiles. Now and then there came on the blast the fusillade of dropping shots from the south, where the skirmish line of ...
— The Lost Guidon - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... politicians considered that he was the mouthpiece of schemers for a Russo-French alliance in his repeated and successful endeavors to gain Napoleon's good-will, he was adroitly sounding the French emperor's mind and character. He soon convinced himself that it was shallow and fantastic, and he built upon this conviction one of the most hazardous designs which ever originated in a brain observant of realities—that identical design which eventually led Prussia, some years later, first to Schleswig and then to Sadowa, with the "arbiter of Europe," as Napoleon ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... that will evolve the descent into the world of so many pleasure-bound spirits of retribution and the experience of fantastic destinies; and this crimson pearl blade will also be among the number. The stone still lies in its original place, and why should not you and I take it along before the tribunal of the Monitory ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... display of more than regal magnificence within.—For such follies, even in childhood, I had imbibed a taste and now they came back to me as if in the dotage of grief. Alas, I feel how much even of incipient madness might have been discovered in the gorgeous and fantastic draperies, in the solemn carvings of Egypt, in the wild cornices and furniture, in the Bedlam patterns of the carpets of tufted gold! I had become a bounden slave in the trammels of opium, and my labors and my orders had taken a coloring from my dreams. But these absurdities ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... hall he could hear shrieks and the grind of a phonograph. As Tanis opened the door he saw fantastic figures dancing in a haze of cigarette smoke. The tables and ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... Jay-Bird's Altar; and Skip-to-My-Lou; and The Juniper Tree; and Go In and Out the Window; and The Jolly Old Miller; and Captain Jinks; and lots more of them. Boyds and Burnses and Smythes tripping the light fantastic with them, and not half a dozen dresses better than alpacas in the crowd, and the men many of them in drilling trousers—and half of them with hayseed in their hair from the load on which they rode to the party! So, ye Iowa aristocracy, put that in your ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... be done, and none left out, Ere the blabbing eastern scout, The nice Morn on the Indian steep, From her cabined loop-hole peep, 140 And to the tell-tale Sun descry Our concealed solemnity. Come, knit hands, and beat the ground In a light fantastic round. [The Measure. Break off, break off! I feel the different pace Of some chaste footing near about this ground. Run to your shrouds within these brakes and trees; Our number may affright. Some virgin sure (For so I can distinguish by mine art) Benighted in ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... wildness almost fantastic in the view of the river from Stirling Castle, the course of which is seen for many miles, making ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... Wantest thou eyes at trial, madam?] It may be observed that Edgar, being supposed to be found by chance, and therefore to have no knowledge of the rest, connects not his ideas with those of Lear, but pursues his own train of delirious or fantastic thought. To these words, At trial, madam? I think therefore that the name of Lear should be put. The process of the dialogue will ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... A few poor fishermen, however, still continued to dry their nets on those cliffs, on which now a town, more than twice as large and populous as the Bristol of the Stuarts, presents, mile after mile, its gay and fantastic front ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... period, to the history of England, and no longer to that of France. We will, however, recall a few facts to show how fruitless, for the cause of Christendom in the East, was the prolongation of his stay and what strange deeds—at one time of savage barbarism, and at another of mad pride or fantastic knight-errantry—were united in him with noble instincts and the most heroic courage. On the 20th of August, 1191, five weeks after the surrender of St. Jean d'Acre, he found that Saladin was not fulfilling with sufficient promptitude the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... my butler concluded that his labor was done, and he offered up a short prayer of thankfulness and relief. Heavens, what mad, fantastic impulses had seized him while he was passing the soup! Supposing he had spilled the hot liquid down Karloff's back, or poured out a glass of burgundy for himself and drained it before them all, or slapped his late colonel on the back and asked him the ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... might have scared the devil; for the roused Indian—cowed as is his present nature by a hard-bought conviction of his inferiority—is yet a fearful object to behold when decked in paint and plume and all his horribly fantastic war array. ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... philosopher, he was not a great naturalist, he was not a great poet, but as a nature-writer and an original character he is unique in our literature. His philosophy begins and ends with himself, or is entirely subjective, and is frequently fantastic, and nearly always illogical. His poetry is of the oracular kind, and is only now and then worth attention. There are crudities in his writings that make the conscientious literary craftsman shudder; there are mistakes of observation that make the serious naturalist ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... night's encampment and the crest was 7,000 feet) it took us an hour to do every thousand perpendicular feet. The view on the Kotal as the sun was rising was a sight never to be forgotten; near and around us the hills clad in white with different tinges of red showing, and clouds rising in fantastic shapes, and disclosing to view the blue and purple of the distant and lower ranges. I was very fortunate in having a clear morning, as it enabled me to bring my plane-table into great use. As the ...
— Memoir of William Watts McNair • J. E. Howard
... utmost at the close of the ceremony. But then the sight becomes as horrible as one can well imagine any thing. They vie with one another in yelling and howling, and torture their faces, heads, and bodies into an infinite variety of fantastic attitudes. The roaring, which resembles that of wild beasts, and the dreadful spasmodic contortions of the actors' countenances, render this religious ceremony ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... up to from below, mirrors the contents of the tanks so perfectly that it is difficult to tell where the reality ends and the image begins, were it not that the duplicated creatures move about with their backs downward in a scene all topsy-turvy. The effect is most fantastic. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... WILL.—As dreams do not consist of an insignificant medley of elements drawn from the experiences of waking life, but, in spite of their fantastic character, bear some semblance of ordered reality, so the impulses of even the most unintelligent and inconsequent of human beings are not wholly chaotic, but differ only in the degree of their organization from those of the most rational ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... amber radiance around them, flinging mysterious shadows about the kopjes, shedding an unearthly splendour upon the endless veldt. It spread like an illimitable ocean in soundless billows out of which weird rocks stood up—a dream-world of fantastic possibilities, but petrified into stillness by the spell of its solitudes—a world that once surely had thrilled with magic ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... as fantastic and fascinating a character now as he was 300 years ago, Lysistrata and her girls as freshly bodied as any girl kissed to-day. Therefore the serious part of the play is that which deals with them, the frivolous part that in which Rogers detects ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... hardly be matter of rejoicing to those who have made mediaeval history one of the chief studies of their lives." Freeman's pedantry was, as Matthew Arnold said, ferocious, and he seems to have cherished the fantastic delusion that particular periods of history belonged to particular historians. Before writing about Becket Froude should, according to this primitive doctrine, have asked leave of Freeman, or of Stubbs, or of an industrious clergyman, Professor Brewer, ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... she's proud, fantastic, apt to change, Restless at home, and ever prone to range: With shows delighted, and so vain is she, She'll meet the devil, rather than not see. Our wise Creator, for his choirs divine, Peopled his heaven with souls all masculine.— Ah! why must man from woman take his birth? Why was this ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... dealing with euphuistic tendencies only, since in the style of Ascham and his predecessors, alliteration and antithesis are not employed consistently, but merely on occasion for the sake of emphasis. Other marks of euphuism, such as the fantastic embroidery of mythical beasts and flowers, are absent. Even in North's Diall alliteration is not profuse, and similes from natural history are comparatively rare. In George Pettie, however, we ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... Georgie sat down to practise, and Candace settled herself in a deep cushioned chair in the library with Motley's "Dutch Republic," which she was reading for the first time. It was the chapter on the siege of Leyden; and the wild, fantastic nocturne by Chopin which Georgie was playing, seemed to blend and mix itself with the tragic narrative. Candace did not know how long the reading and the music had been going on, each complementing the other. She was so absorbed in her book as not ...
— A Little Country Girl • Susan Coolidge
... nee Joan O'Shaughnessy, was the second daughter of the family, and had been christened Esmeralda "for short" by the brothers and sisters of whom she had been alternately the pride and the trial. The fantastic name had an appropriateness so undeniable that even Joan's husband had adopted it in his turn for use in the family circle, reserving the more dignified "Joan" ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... give her, she should become more and more precious to me? It was not wonderful, either, I think, that she should identify me with that hope, that solace, and should suffer herself to lean upon me, in a reliance infinitely sweet and endearing. But what a fantastic ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... distributing his gifts to the people,—granting as many as a thousand tickets a day, some of them entitling the bearers to slaves, ships, houses, and lands. Domitian compelled the senators and knights to participate in the lotteries, in order to debase them; and Heliogabalus, in his fantastic festivities, distributed tickets which entitled the bearers to camels, flies, and other odd things suggested by his madness. In all this, however, the distinctive character of modern lotteries was totally absent: the tickets were always gratuitous; so that if the people ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... Shall I tell you the secret—or what he often laughingly said was the secret? It lies hidden in a verse which he wrote in his fantastic hand on the desk at which he stood for so many years with unremitting industry. First came two dates "1854—1908," ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... prospects dark, uncertain, sombre as night's sable curtain, Filled them, thrilled them with fantastic funkings seldom felt before; So that now, to still the beating of faint hearts, they kept repeating Futile formulas, entreating Closure for the "Obstructive Bore"— With a view to Truth defeating, such they dubbed "Obstructive ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 23, 1890. • Various
... poetry Pope has declared that with words the same rule holds that applies to fashion,—"Alike fantastic if too new or old." Fashion changes, not only the fashions of millinery but of literature also. When the world is tired of the brilliant wit of Byron, it turns in relief to the contemplative verse of Wordsworth; when Longfellow ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... specially insists. What he does demand is that these shall be not merely outward adornments, but the instinctive utterance of a deeper harmony within; that they shall be such as not merely to "furnish a languid mind with fantastic shows and indolent emotions, but to incorporate the everlasting reason of man in forms visible to his sense, and suitable to it". [Footnote: Miscellanies, i. 297.] The "reason" is no less necessary to poetry ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... voice. The bass is a snarl, and the treble is made up of a shrill rattle. It was curious how this 'bus managed to retain withal its fantastic atmosphere. ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... Moravian preacher happening to come to that quarter where they lived, insinuated himself into their family, and partly by conversation, and partly by the writings of Jacob Behman, which he put into their hands, filled their heads with wild and fantastic ideas. Unhappily for the poor family those strange notions gained ground on them, insomuch that in one year they began to withdraw themselves from the ordinances of public worship, and all conversation with the world around them, and strongly to imagine they were the only family ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... How very fantastic those rocks were, but cheerless—so cheerless! Even the sea birds that circled around them seemed screaming a dirge. An opening in a wall of rock took us at length into a long, winding fiord, or arm of the sea, ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... a further complaint against Mr. HENLEY. He presumes, in the most fantastic manner, to alter the well-known titles of celebrated poems. "The Isles of Greece" is made to masquerade as "The Glory that was Greece"; "Auld Lang Syne" becomes "The Goal of Life," and "Tom Bowline" is converted into "The Perfect Sailor." This surely (again I use the words of Mr. HENLEY) ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 30, 1892 • Various
... sensations different from those which we ordinarily experience. For example, when I am sitting quietly at my table engaged in writing this book, I can conceive the sensations that a soldier, a woman, an artist, or an Englishman would experience in such and such a situation. But, however fantastic the conceptions may be that we form, we do not cease to be conscious withal of our own personal existence. Imagination has taken flight fairly in space, but the memory of ourselves always remains behind. Each of us knows that he is himself and not another, that he did this ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... of the rigid and somewhat ungraceful costumes before them." Walpole, in his "Anecdotes of Painting," says, "Lely supplied the want of taste with clinquant; his nymphs trail fringes, and embroidery, through meadows and purling streams. Vandyke's habits are those of the times; Lely's, a sort of fantastic night-gown fastened with a single pin." Lely's ladies are not unfrequently en masque, and are habited in the conventional dresses adopted for goddesses in the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... between the rock and the mainland that no swimmer could stem it; and then I come up here, and look down from above upon it. It's the finest point on all our Cornish coast, this point we stand on. It has the widest view, the purest air, the hardest rock, the highest and most fantastic tor ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... this is to your ladyship's orders; but as I shall have dull dinners and triste evenings enough when I return to England, all your kindness cannot persuade me to sacrifice my pleasures here, too. Many of my opinions are fantastic; perhaps this is one, that nothing produces gout like doing any thing one dislikes. I believe the gouts like a near relation, always visits one when one has some other plague. Your ladyship's dependence on the waters of Sunning-hill is, I hope, better ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... on a scrap of beach—beach which was more like a reef, for it lacked any covering comparable to sand except for some cupfuls of coarse gravel locked in rock depressions. Rocks, red as the rust of dried blood, rose in fantastic water-sculptured shapes around the small semi-level space ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... gradually made its way through the North of Germany (where his Freyschuetz was played in 1823) to England, induced the managers to offer him liberal terms for an opera on the subject of Oberon, the well-known fairy tale on which Wieland has reared his fantastic, but beautiful and touching comic Epos. He received the first act of Planche's manuscript in December, 1824, and forthwith began his labours, though he seems to have thought that the worthy managers, in the short time they were ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... all good-night and climb the attic stairs to my loft. There the three beds arrayed in soggy striped comforters greet me. Old boots and downtrodden shoes are thrown into the corners and the lines of clothing already describe fantastic shapes in the dark, suggesting pendant sinister figures. Windows are large, thank Heaven! In the mill district the air is heavy, singularly lifeless; the ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... house a fantastic figure of the gibbon is carved on the ends of all the main crossbeams of the house, and the chief said that this has been their custom for many generations. He told us that it is the custom, when these beams are being put up, to kill a pig and divide ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... the dream of my life to revisit the United States. Not once, but fifty times, have I dreamed that the ocean (which loomed absurdly large even in my waking thoughts) was comfortably crossed, and I was landing in New York. I can clearly recall at this moment some of the fantastic shapes the city put on in my dreams—utterly different, of course, from my actual recollections of it. Well, that dream is now realised; the gates of the Western world are opening to me. What experience awaits me I know not; but this I do know, that the emotion with ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... declares he never passes McPhail's imitative-gold mart without thinking of Ben D'Israeli's speeches, as both of them are so confoundedly full of fantastic ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... they were near the ships again. Mel wondered what kind of reprimand the crewmen of the Martian Princess could give him, and what fantastic justification they might offer ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones
... Indian jungle, the weird beasts that people it, and the stranger humans that battle with them in it. The magic pen of a Kipling alone could do justice to that wonderful realm of mountain and forest that is called the Terai—that fantastic region of woodland that stretches for hundreds of miles along the foot of the Himalayas, that harbours in its dim recesses the monsters of the animal kingdom, quaint survivals of a vanished race—the rhinoceros, the elephant, ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... all know what it was that we came down here for. It sounded foolish in New York, I acknowledge. Even in these surroundings, our enterprise may have appealed to some of you as a bit fantastic. But—Torchy, will you and Captain Killam ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... been raised to such a height by the credulity of the public was himself more gullible than any of his depositors. He had been the prey of all sorts of swindlers, adventurers, visionaries and even lunatics. Wrapping himself up in deep and imbecile secrecy he had gone in for the most fantastic schemes: a harbour and docks on the coast of Patagonia, quarries in Labrador—such like speculations. Fisheries to feed a canning Factory on the banks of the Amazon was one of them. A principality to be bought in Madagascar was another. As the grotesque details of these incredible transactions ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... still. The wholesale market covers I know not what acreage, and if you enter at some central point, you find yourself amid endless prospectives of sides, flitches, quarters, and whole carcasses, and fantastic vistas of sausages, blood-puddings, and the like artistic fashionings of the raw material, so that you come away wishing to ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... latter class that Eagle Claw and his band belonged. Gaudy paint, vemillion and yellow, smeared their faces in all the fantastic designs which their grotesque imaginations could invent. The tanned buckskin leggins, fringed and beaded, were supported at the waist by a belt of leather embroidered and figured. A blanket thrown carelessly over ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... have looked a tiger in the teeth. And when we finally went home with Maguire to see his other trophies, it seemed to me like entering the tiger's lair. But an astounding lair it proved, fitted throughout by one eminent firm, and ringing to the rafters with the last word on fantastic furniture. ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... elephant, with his great, overgrown rump turned uncivilly toward the gap where the people have to pass. Following round the panorama, you come to the Ossipees and the Sandwich Mountains, peaks innumerable and nameless, and of every variety of fantastic shape. Down their vast sides are displayed the melancholy-looking slides, contrasting with ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... above the heads of the subdued and almost terrified beholders, for no one is ever altogether prepared for the absolute awfulness of such a spectacle, were glowing with the fierce light which the fires threw upon them. Weird illuminations played fantastic tricks in the foliage from which the startled shadows had vanished. The roar of the ever-increasing fires became louder and louder, until in very terror Pepeeta crept into David's arms for protection, while the child who had fearlessly produced this scene of awful grandeur and destruction ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... I had a fancy that I should fare well today. But my whole thoughts were bent upon you. "Surely," thought I, "we mortals who dwell in pain and sorrow might with reason envy the birds of heaven which know not either!" And my other thoughts were similar to these. In short, I gave myself up to fantastic comparisons. A little book which I have says the same kind of thing in a variety of ways. For instance, it says that one may have many, many fancies, my Barbara—that as soon as the spring comes on, one's thoughts become ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... blue when she was young, but she says now she is too big and red to wear anything but brown or black. You must have a taxi to go in. I will attend to it for you. I hope Miss Kean will not do herself up in any fantastic, would-be artistic get-up, but will do you and your daughter credit, to say nothing of me, after I have got her this invitation," and Mrs. Pace bustled off, filled ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed |
