"Grandiose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... richness of the Venetian plain. Here the painter found greater variety, greater softness in the play of light, and a richness more suitable to the character of Venetian art. All these tracts of country, as well as the more grandiose scenery of his native Cadore itself, he had the amplest opportunities for studying in the course of his many journeyings from Venice to Pieve and back, as well as in his shorter expeditions on the Venetian mainland. How far Titian's Alpine origin, and his early bringing-up among needy ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... distance of 750 versts; but mainly, the fever of building which seized the whole town, all the banks and financial institutions, and all the houseowners. Factories for making brick sprang up on the outskirts of the town like mushrooms. A grandiose agricultural exposition opened. Two new steamer lines came into being, and they, together with the previously established ones, frenziedly competed with each other, transporting freight and pilgrims. In competition they reached such a state, that they lowered their passenger ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... made in the Lords—had exquisitely justified itself by its result. For it was as a Knight of the Garter that he had set the perfect seal on his dandyism. Yes, he reflected, it was on the day when first he donned the most grandiose of all costumes, and wore it grandlier than ever yet in history had it been worn, than ever would it be worn hereafter, flaunting the robes with a grace unparalleled and inimitable, and lending, as it were, to the very insignia a glory ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... with the leaders of the now fallen Anfu Club. He allowed himself to be deceived into thinking that they were ready to turn against the Japanese if he would give them his support; and his nationalist imagination was inflamed by the grandiose schemes of little Hsu for the Chinese subjugation ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... results a gain of the quality of artistic grandeur in the books. For it is less the fortunes of the individual colliers than the Rights of Labour and their chances of recognition which form the true theme of Germinal; whilst in Ringan Gilhaize we are called to gaze upon nothing less than the grandiose spectacle of a nation in death-grips with a race of mansworn sovereigns. Hence, in either case, the individual characters, measured by the greatness of the issues at stake, sink into comparative insignificance. But this very insignificance serves to illustrate a fundamental ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... of his mind, Phil had been conscious of that, but it had seemed an insignificant threat against the excitement arising from the grandiose impudence of the plan, the perhaps rather small-boyish delight at being able to put something over, profitably, on the greatest power of all. Even now it might have been only a natural wariness that brought the threat up for a final ...
— Watch the Sky • James H. Schmitz
... that is drawn, warm from sleeplessness or alcohol; it is engulfed in the depths of empty stomachs, dispersed in the shops as they are opened, and the dark courts, or even to the fireless attics. That is the reason why there remains so little of it out of doors. But in that spacious and grandiose region of Paris, which was inhabited by Jenkins's clients, on those wide boulevards planted with trees, and those deserted quays, the fog hovered without a stain, like so many sheets, with waverings and cotton wool-like flakes. The effect was of a place inclosed, secret, almost sumptuous, ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... from memory—I remember this solemn admonition: "Let all thy words have the accent of heroic truth." The accent of heroic truth! This is very fine, but I am thinking that it is an easy matter for an austere emperor to jot down grandiose advice. Most of the working truths on this earth are humble, not heroic; and there have been times in the history of mankind when the accents of heroic truth have moved it ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... year 1640. He wrote several theological tracts, edited sundry agricultural works, including, among others, those of Sir Richard Weston, and published his own observations upon the shortcomings of British husbandry. He also proposed a grandiose scheme for an agricultural college, in order to teach youths "the theorick and practick parts of this most ancient, noble, and honestly gainfull art, trade, or mystery." The work published under his name entitled ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... Browning's writings, appear singularly appropriate that so cosmopolitan a poet was born in London. It would seem as though something of that mighty complex life, so confusedly petty to the narrow vision, so grandiose and even majestic to the larger ken, had blent with his being from the first. What fitter birthplace for the poet whom a comrade has called the "Subtlest Assertor of the Soul in Song," the poet whose writings are indeed a mirror of ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... things in general, the Prince conducts us to Napoleon in particular, and enters largely into a discussion of the merits of the imperial system. Our author speaks of the Emperor's advent in the following grandiose way:— ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... much of wild-cat schemes and fraudulent speculations, but they were voted cranks by the majority, and the Consolidated Provident Savings Company grew and flourished. It paid large dividends, and its stockholders were duly impressed with the magnificence of its buildings and the grandiose tone of its officials. ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... out into the lemon-colored light and smiled wanly at the next house, as Edith's grandiose phrase came to mind, "the old Vertrees country mansion." It stood in a broad lawn which was separated from the Sheridans' by a young hedge; and it was a big, square, plain old box of a house with a giant salt-cellar atop for a cupola. Paint had been spared ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... wisdom to conciliate Little Missouri's hostile population. He began with the only man who, in that unstable community, looked solid, and appealed to Gregor Lang, suggesting a union of forces. Lang, who did not like the grandiose Frenchman, bluntly refused to entertain ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... VI (see above), suffering from auditory hallucinosis (superior temporal atellitosis, data of the late W. L. Worcester); X, delusion of birth to superior station, possibly the object of mixed emotions, probably not pleasant; and XI, manic-depressive exaltation with grandiose utterances, long prior to death (if there had been lung tuberculosis at the basis of the ileac ulcers, ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... which sometimes takes the form of elaborate affectations of which the favorite 'conceit' is only the most apparent. 5. It was in part a period of experimentation, when the proper material and limits of literary forms were being determined, oftentimes by means of false starts and grandiose failures. In particular, many efforts were made to give prolonged poetical treatment to many subjects essentially prosaic, for example to systems of theological or scientific thought, or to the geography of all England. 6. It continued to ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... had forgotten all the "conflagrations" except that in Chicago. There was something grandiose and unforgettable in the tales which told of the madly fleeing crowds in the narrow streets. These accounts pushed back the walls of my universe till its far edge included the ruined metropolis whose rebuilding was of the highest importance to us, for it was not only the source ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... dirty and ruined place, that was once so splendid, with a regret that modern Italy, which is so eager to build grandiose banks and every sort of public building, is yet so regardless of old things that one might fancy her history only began in 1860. Mr. Le Mesurier, in the interesting book already referred to, has suggested ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... library: those in search of sheer romantic adventure can purchase plenty of it at any book-stall. But the majority want something different from either of these. They want, first of all, to know what the country is like-not in vague and grandiose "word paintings," nor in strange and foreign sounding words and phrases, but in comparison with something they know. What is it nearest like-Arizona? Surrey? Upper New York? Canada? Mexico? Or is it totally different from anything, ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... between the trees that border the river the deep-blue sky appears, with beautiful small cumulus clouds suspended in the atmosphere. With the exception, perhaps, of a large blue kingfisher sitting in solitary state on a branch extending over the water, or a distant hornbill with its cheerful grandiose laugh, there are no evidences of animal life, nevertheless the exquisite scenery seems to lure the beholder on and on. To pass through this superb and silent realm was like a pleasant dream. There are no mosquitoes and consequently ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... rope, and they mounted together. On the way up he had time to explain that the clerk, who usually ran the elevator when they had no elevator-boy, had kicked, and they were just between hay and grass, as you might say. He showed Lemuel into a grandiose parlour or drawing-room, enormously draped and upholstered, and furnished in a composite application of yellow jute and red plush to the ashen easy-chairs and sofa. A folding-bed in the figure of a chiffonier ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... point feudalism in Japan was finer and more sensitive, if it was less grandiose, than feudalism in Europe. There is nothing in Japan to compare with the churches and cathedrals of the West, for there is no stone architecture at all. But there is nothing in the West to compare with the living-rooms of Japan. Suites of these dating ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... Let us add a quantity of fine, amusing, and varied streets, like the Rue de Rivoli, and I do not despair of Paris presenting to the eye, when viewed from a balloon, that richness of line, that opulence of detail, that diversity of aspect, that grandiose something in the simple, and unexpected in the beautiful, which characterizes ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... Gentleman,—a very opulent, splendid city. A point of transit of much that is remarkable, and of permanence for much that is respectable. A great money-centre. San Francisco with the mines above-ground,—and some of 'em under the sidewalks. I have seen next to nothing grandiose, out of New York, in all our cities. It makes 'em all look paltry and petty. Has many elements of civilization. May stop where Venice did, though, for aught we know.—The order of its development is just this:—Wealth; architecture; upholstery; painting; ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... reminiscence at meeting with the name of Gorges, which is perpetuated by a stately monument at the end of the north aisle of the cathedral. Sir Thomas Gorges, Knight of Longford Castle, may or may not have been of the same family as the well-remembered grandiose personage of the New England Pilgrim period. The title this gentleman bore had a far more magnificent sound than those of his contemporaries, Governor Carver and Elder Brewster. No title ever borne among us has filled the mouth quite so full as that of "Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Lord Palatine ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... from these fantasies of mine. I start with surprise as I note one good thing after another, and tell myself that this is the best thing I have ever read. My head swims with a sense of satisfaction; delight inflates me; I grow grandiose. ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... St. Peter's falling even as the temple of Olympian Jupiter had fallen, Catholicism strewing the grass with its ruins whilst elsewhere schism burst forth: a new faith for the new nations. Of this Pierre had a grandiose and tragical vision: he beheld his dream destroyed, his book swept away amidst that cry which spread around him as if flying to the four corners of the Catholic world "Evviva il Papa-Re! evviva il Papa-Re! Long live the Pope-King!" But even in that hour of the papacy's ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... the other. The singing became general. Quite close to us, in the trenches themselves, in the distance, round their brightly lighted trees, to the right, to the left, it resounded, softened by the distance. What a stirring, nay, grandiose, impression those hymns made, floating over the vast field of death! I felt intuitively that all this had been arranged long before, that they might celebrate their Christmas ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... of the people of Villa Seca by the "formality" of his behaviour and language; for he tells us that in such remote places might still be found the gravity of deportment and the grandiose expressions which are scoffed at as exaggerations in the romances. He speaks of himself in one place as strolling about a town or neighbourhood, entering into conversation with several people whom he met, shopkeepers, professional men, and others. Near ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... now fairly evident that the present war is but a violent phase in the unfolding of a grandiose ground idea—the subjugation of Europe by the Teuton—which was being steadily realized ever since the close of the Franco-German campaign of 1870. It is likewise clear that, despite her "swelled head," Germany's ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... designs. Here and there the hedge held up a spindling umbrella of greenery, sometimes a double umbrella—a little one above the big one—and over the gateway at the centre; as a sort of final triumph, rose a grandiose arch of interlaced branches upon which the artist had outdone himself in marvels ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... and there, amongst the rest, were the sketches and fragments, often the grandiose fragments, which represented his 'buried life'—the life which only Eugenie de Pastourelles seemed now to have the power to evoke. When some hours of other work had weakened the impulse received from her, he would look at these things ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... secure of popularity were soon consigned to oblivion. It is a significant fact that Donizetti's lighter works have stood the test of time more successfully than his more serious efforts. Though the grandiose airs and sham tragedy of 'Lucia' have long since ceased to impress us, we can still take pleasure in the unaffected gaiety of 'La Fille du Regiment' and 'Don Pasquale.' These and many similar works were written currente calamo, and though their intrinsic musical interest is of course very slight, ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... not habitually grandiose, or monumental, or beautiful, what is it? I should say, with much fear of contradiction and scornful laughter, that it was pretty, that it was endearingly nooky, cornery, curvy, with the enchantment of trees and flowers everywhere mixed with its civic ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... was a grandiose performance, and has been the theme of much ridicule by later writers. Hawthorne suggested its being dramatized, and put on to the accompaniment of artillery and thunder and lightning; and E. P. Whipple declared that "no critic in the last fifty ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... all more or less connected with the sea, were dining in a small river-hostelry not more than thirty miles from London, and less than twenty from that shallow and dangerous puddle to which our coasting men give the grandiose name of "German Ocean." And through the wide windows we had a view of the Thames; an enfilading view down the Lower Hope Reach. But the dinner was execrable, and all the feast ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... take place till full six months after the period to which our story has brought us. Baronets with twelve thousand a-year cannot be married off the hooks, as may be done with ordinary mortals. Settlements of a grandiose nature were required, and were duly concocted. Perhaps Mr. Die had something to say to them, so that the great maxim of the law was brought into play. Perhaps also, though of this Herbert heard no word, it was thought inexpedient to hurry matters while any ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... awful sources of the smell in the house of Cervantes at Valladolid, but I do not remember what blameless origin the concierge assigned to the odor, or whether it had anything to do with the horses and the hens which a chance-opened back door showed us stabled in the rear of the hotel's grandiose entrance. ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... that he was grandiose. Hear him on the theme of a completed line, a newly-opened tunnel, or a finished viaduct—it was a Poem! Such a picture of gushing beatitude as he could paint! It was the golden age—prosperity, happiness, and peace on ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... words, and they walked on. A light wind had risen and the fog was now breaking rapidly. As it gave way, the moonlight poured into the breaches that the wind made; the vast black-and-silver spectacle, the Falls, the gorge, the town opposite, the bridge, the clouds, began to appear in fragments, grandiose and fantastical. ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Everywhere are evidences of ancient grandeur, mingling with memories of enormous wealth and violent scenes of strife. The narrow, winding streets, characteristic of oriental cities; the Moorish architecture displayed in the grandiose palaces and churches; the grated, unglazed windows, through which still peep timid senoritas, as in the romantic days of yore; the gaily painted balconies, over which bepowdered doncellas lean to pass the day's gossip in the liquid tongue of Cervantes, all transport ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... all that, though it is not an easy thing to put into words, there is a certain grandiose and sonorous beauty, fresh and free and utterly unaffected, about these verses, and many others in ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... ballet-manager. To any truth-loving person all this must seem like a charade performed by puppets.—But the festival is colossal, well calculated to stimulate the imagination and excite pride through physical excitement.[1139] On this grandiose stage the delegates become quite intoxicated with their part; for, evidently, theirs is the leading part; they represent twenty-six millions of Frenchmen, and the sole object of this ceremony is to glorify the national ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the author of a well-known mediaeval treatise on composition in various poetical styles of which he gave examples. Chaucer's irony is therefore directed against some grandiose and affected lines on the death of Richard I., intended to illustrate the pathetic style, in which Friday is addressed as "O Veneris lachrymosa dies" ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... in his bed. And Miss Larrabee hurried out to Aunt Martha's to get the facts about his life for the paper. It was a bright October morning as she went up the walk to the old brick house, and she heard someone playing on the piano, rolling the chords after the grandiose manner of pianists fifty years ago. A voice seemed to be singing an old ballad. As the girl mounted the steps the voice came more distinctly to her. It was quavering and unsure, but with a moan of ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... Essay wanders about, and we may acknowledge ourselves more interested in the mental attitude which it displays than in the detail of its criticism. The author insists, with much force, on the value of a grandiose melancholy and a romantic horror in creating a poetical impression, and he allows himself to deplore that Pope was so ready to forget that "wit and satire are transitory and perishable, but nature and passion are eternal." We need not then be surprised when Joseph Warton ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... he sat in state, wearing a grandiose yellow dressing-gown. The change was accomplished just in time. Mr.. Bryany entered, and not only Mr.. Bryany but Mr.. Seven Sachs, and not only these, but the lady who had worn ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... persons who think they have been completely cured. Both these diseases are fatal. Before causing death, locomotor ataxy causes intolerable pain for several years. General paralysis first gives rise to grandiose ideas, and after disintegrating the human personality bit by bit, ends by transforming the individual into a being much inferior to animals, and of an aspect as miserable as it is repulsive. A general paralytic in his last stage is little more than a vegetating ruin, in whom ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... melancholy landscape, the vast, desolate plain that stretches from Nanterre to Saint-Cloud, broken only by an occasional clump of trees or the smoke from some factory chimney. Perhaps, too, in a measure, to the disproportion between the humble hamlet of Judaea and that grandiose structure, that villa in the style of Louis XIII., built of small stones and mortar, and showing pink through the leafless branches of the park, where there were several large ponds with a coating of green slime. Certain it is that on passing the place one's heart contracted. When one ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... mean in Julius II.; his very faults bore a grandiose and heroic aspect. Turbulent, impatient, inordinate in his ambition, reckless in his choice of means, prolific of immense projects, for which a lifetime would have been too short, he filled the ten years of his pontificate ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... Trotsky, "that no wide industrial mobilization will succeed, if we do not capture all that is honorable, spiritual in the peasant working masses in explaining our plan." And the plan that he referred to was not the grandiose (but obviously sensible) plan for the eventual electrification of all Russia, but a programme of the struggle before them in actually getting their feet clear of the morass of industrial decay in which they are at present involved. Such a programme has actually been ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... wings what I can only describe as the atmosphere of Infancy,—and a touching atmosphere it is too—is strengthened by keeping all the figures small and heightening this suggestion by contrast with a grandiose architecture. In both, too, the sacred scenes reveal themselves like visions unseen by the Oberriedt family, who face outward toward the altar and are supposed to be lighted by the actual lights of the church. ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... according to their moral character. The Jews and the Persians went a step further, and conceived of a final general judgment, a final winding-up of human history, and a permanent reconstruction of the world on a basis largely moral, though tinged with local religious elements—a grandiose idea that has maintained itself up to the present time, embodying the conviction that the outcome of life depends on character, and that ethical retribution is ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... theme repeated again and again, and the full effect of the device is only felt when, with the change of scene, we hear the passage in all its nobility and splendour. Wotan's greeting to his new castle is rather grandiose than really fine: one feels the theatrical baritone; one feels also that the quality of homeliness which makes Sachs a great character is sadly lacking. In the Valkyrie this unpretentiousness, so to speak, is always present, and the music gains proportionately in impressiveness. Wotan's opening ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... in her red dress amid that rather drab assembly as a leaping flame. She turned about, fronting the perplexed and agitated congregation, her head carried high, her face austere for all its youthful softness, an heroic quality, something, indeed, superlative and grandiose in her bearing and expression, causing a shrinking in those who saw her and a certain sense ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... possessing an individuality of its very own, this now important prefecture has much to remind us of its past. History, archaeology, and "mere antiquarian lore" abound, and, in its grandiose Cathedral of St. Corentin, one finds a large ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... also in dress and air, founded upon strict distinctions in law. The landed aristocrat with his laces and ruffles, his silks and his gold and silver ornaments and his expensive tableware, his consciously superior air and tone of grandiose authority, was far removed in established position from the mechanic or the laborer with his coarse clothes and mean habitation. Laws were long in force in various provinces which prohibited the common people from ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... blue and white damask, formerly the curtains of the state-bed, was draped with ample portieres and window curtains lined with white silk. Pictures, evidently from old panels, plant-stands, various pretty articles of modern upholstery, handsome lamps, and a rare old cut-glass chandelier, gave a grandiose appearance to the room. The carpet was a Persian rug. The boudoir, wholly modern, and furnished entirely after Madame Moreau's own taste, was arranged in imitation of a tent, with ropes of blue silk on a gray background. The classic divan was there, of course, with its pillows and footstools. The ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... winnings. Take it. I never started nothing in my life I couldn't see the finish to. Take it and forget it!" He crammed the bill into her reluctant fingers, closed them over it, and sealed her little fist with a grandiose pat. "Forget it, Doll!" ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... writer of English fiction was a new and interesting figure in English literature. Disraeli, indeed, had flashed into the literary world with 'Coningsby,' that eloquent vindication of the Jewish race. His grandiose 'Tancred' had revealed to an astonished public the strange life of the Desert, of the mysterious vastness whence swept forth the tribes who became the Moors of Spain and the Jews of Palestine. Disraeli, however, stood in no category, and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... cool million by securing the abrogation of an extravagant contract entered into by Mr. ASQUITH'S Government. The EX PREMIER, however, insisted that if a mistake had been made the Railway Department of the Board of Trade could have corrected it just as well as its grandiose successor and at an ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 30th, 1920 • Various
... and his daughter had a small party staying with them at their seaside place on the South-Western coast. Seagate Hall the place was called. It was not much of a hall, in the grandiose sense of the word. It had come to Sir Rupert through his mother, and was not a big property in any sense—a little park and a fine old mansion, half convent, half castle, made up the whole of it. But Helena was very fond of it, and, indeed, ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... progeny of these grandiose villains are to be included those of Lewis and Maturin, and the heroes of Scott and Byron. We know them by their world-weariness, as well as by their piercing eyes and passion-marked faces, their "verra wrinkles Gothic." In The ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... me even during the few minutes in which we conversed before dinner was announced, that his character showed a new phase with his new fortunes. He talked in a grandiose style of the duties of station and the woes of wealth. He seemed to be very much afraid of spending, and still more appalled at the idea of being cheated. His temper, too, was ruffled; the steward ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... inlaid work in coloured stone, and within the gateway, on the smooth slabs of the pavement, the wheel-ruts are still visible. Connect them with those metal war-chariots in Homer, and you may see in fancy the whole grandiose character of the place, as it may really have been. Shut within the narrow enclosure of these shadowy citadels were the palaces of the kings, with all that intimacy which we may sometimes suppose to have been ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the components of the "struggle for existence," such as Fabre has described it, but with no other motive than to describe what he has observed and seen. Such are the ordinary themes of the grandiose battles which he has scattered through his narratives, and never did circus or arena offer more thrilling spectacles; no jungle ever hid more ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... long afterwards he came very much to the fore in larger affairs. He blossomed out into something definite. He filled the public eye as the manager on the spot of the Tropical Belt Coal Company with offices in London and Amsterdam, and other things about it that sounded and looked grandiose. The offices in the two capitals may have consisted—and probably did—of one room in each; but at that distance, out East there, all this had an air. We were more puzzled than dazzled, it is true; but even the most sober-minded among us began to think that ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... stone, which rose from the waste at about two hundred yards from the tents to the east. Although they could see so little, however, they were impressed with a sensation that they were on the edge of some vast vision, of some grandiose effect of Nature, that would bring to them a new and astonishing knowledge of the desert. Perhaps it was the sight of the distant tower pointing to the grey clouds that stirred in them this almost excited ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... voice rose as he approached. "You let the m'sieu' row you ashore! You——" A square, heavy boot shot out from beneath his cassock into the boy's stomach. "Cochon!" said the priest, turning to Simpson. His manner became suddenly suave, grandiose. "These swine!" he said. "One keeps them in their place. I am Father ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... assigned to the United States a great part of the territory through which the line was projected, and the promoters gave up. Then in 1845 the railway mania in England brought a revival of all colonial schemes. Sir Richard Broun took up the plan for a line from Halifax to Quebec, along with other grandiose projects connected with his endeavour to revive the lost glories of the baronetage of Nova Scotia, but did not get past the stage of forming a provisional committee. This discussion revived the flagging hopes of ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... more or less loosely given. They were usually of massive proportions and of extreme elaboration of marquetry. The North Italian cabinets, and especially those which were made or influenced by the Florentine school, were grandiose and often gloomy. Conceived on a palatial scale, painted or carved, or incrusted with marble and pietra dura, they were intended for the adornment of galleries and lofty bare apartments where they were not felt to be overpowering. These North Italian cabinets ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... all outsiders she was sedulously screened. Paul could imagine her, in her great humiliation, solitary among the ruins of her high destiny, hiding her wounds; too sensitive to face the curiosity, too proud to brook the pity, of the world. She seemed to him a very grandiose and tragic figure, and he lost himself musing of her—her with whom he had played at being married, when they were children here, so long, so long ago. She was the daughter, the only child and heiress, of the last Duc de la Granjolaye de Ravanches,—the same ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... stands out in these passages—Bluebeard, morbid, erotic, megalophonous megalomaniac, with his grandiose air and outlandish accoutrements! ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... follows up with the determination of a real Gorkyan hero. The life of the people appears to him in its sublime simplicity. And it is in the midst of a dazzling apotheosis—which reminds one of the most grandiose pages of Zola's "Lourdes"—that he finally confesses the God of his ideal: ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... the elder Mr. Harper sitting at the head of his own dinner-table was a real pleasure. He never looked so well at any other time. His grandiose air was then so mixed with genuine kindliness that it only enriched his courtesies, like the "body" in mellow old wine. He leaned graciously back in the arm-chair peculiarly his own, surveying the long table shone over by soft wax-lights, and ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... Hillport way. He was aware of a slight abrasion inside his left cheek. No matter. He must be more careful. There were six scruts still to be negotiated. He knew that what he was doing was a thing grandiose, unique, epical; a history-making thing; a thing that would outlive marble and the gilded monuments of princes. Yet he kept his head. He did not hurry, nor did he dawdle. Scrut by scrut, he ground slowly but he ground exceeding small. And while he did so he talked wisely and well. He passed ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... these treasons on a foreign shore, "deafening the sound of the westerly wave, and riding against the blast as thunder goes," to borrow O'Connell's graphic and grandiose phrases, had reached the country in advance of Mr. Garrison. The national sensitiveness was naturally enough stung to the quick. Here is a pestilent fellow who is not content with disturbing the peace of the Union with his new fanaticism, ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... took up the cudgels for the poet, in Lady Geraldine's Courtship, and upheld the nobility of the untitled poet almost too strenuously, for his morbid pride makes him appear by all odds the worst snob in the poem. The less dignified contingent of the public annoys the poet by burlesquing the grandiose manners and poses to which his large nature easily lends itself. People are likely to question the poet's powers of soul because he forgets to cut his hair, or to fasten his blouse at the throat. ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... and although, of course, it does a great deal more beside, certainly doing the high work of poetry effectively. For his background he has chosen, has made his own and conveys very vividly to his readers, a district of France, gloomy, in spite of its almonds, its [123] oil and wine, but certainly grandiose. The large towns, the sparse hamlets, the wide landscape of the Cevennes, are for his books what the Rhineland is to those delightful authors, Messrs. Erckmann-Chatrian. In Les Courbezon, the French ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... incommode et le plus disgracieux, que la mode ait jamais invente, c'est surtout au milieu des champs que tous ses inconvenients et toutes ses laideurs revoltent.... Au milieu de ce cadre austere et grandiose, qui transporte l'imagination au temps de la poesie primitive, apparaisse cette mouche parasite, le monsieur aux habits noirs, au menton rase, aux mains gantees, aux jambes maladroites, et ce roi de la societe n'est ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... overcome even more difficult problems than the foregoing, and by what colossal forces the levers of his far-flung tale are moved, and how eventually the horizon will become extended until everything assumes a grandiose and a lyrical tendency. Yes, many a verst of road remains to be travelled by a party made up of an elderly gentleman, a britchka of the kind affected by bachelors, a valet named Petrushka, a coachman named Selifan, and three ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... and a beautiful binding, for three and six, and I am exceedingly indebted to Messrs. Newnes for creating that volume. It was sheer genius on their part to do so. I get charming sensations from it, but sensations not so charming as I should get from Mrs. Paget Toynbee's many-volumed and grandiose edition, even aside from Mrs. Toynbee's erudite notes and the extra letters which she has been able to print. The same letter in Mrs. Toynbee's edition would have a higher aesthetic and moral value for me than in the "editionlet" ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... appointed its general counsel, the duties of which post he discharged for fifteen years. One of the great cases in which he thus took a leading and distinguished part was that of the quadruplex telegraph; and later he acted as legal adviser to Henry Villard in his numerous grandiose enterprises. Lowrey thus came to know Edison, to conceive an intense admiration for him, and to believe in his ability at a time when others could not detect the fire of genius smouldering beneath the modest exterior ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... naturalism. Such a school, the creation of an alien Muslim dynasty, would at first sight seem unlikely to produce illustrations of Hindu religion. Its main function was to illustrate works of literature, science and contemporary history—a function which resulted in such grandiose productions as the Akbarnama or Annals of Akbar, now preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum.[74] None the less there are two ways in which Mughal painting, as developed under Akbar, contributed to the Krishna story. ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... behind either the general, or the pilot, or any one else, in his saving power, for he sometimes saves whole cities. Is there any comparison between him and the pleader? And if he were to talk, Callicles, in your grandiose style, he would bury you under a mountain of words, declaring and insisting that we ought all of us to be engine-makers, and that no other profession is worth thinking about; he would have plenty to say. Nevertheless you despise him and his art, and sneeringly call him an engine-maker, ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... clear-headed: they are not far-sighted, but they can see the fact before their eyes: they are ill equipped with theoretical knowledge, but they understand the working of institutions and have a good eye for judging character: they have little constructive imagination of the more grandiose sort, but they have an instinct for the 'next step' which has often set them on paths which have led them far further than they dreamed; above all, they have a relatively high standard of individual character and public duty, without which no organization involving ...
— Progress and History • Various
... the victorious British. So well did Allenby plan that the British losses were far the smallest suffered in any large operation of the entire war. It was the swiftest and most decisive victory of any scored by the Allies. It ended the grandiose dream of Germany for an invasion of Egypt in stark disaster, and swept the Holy ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... following him obediently; it was hard to tell. Perhaps they were doing a little of both. Perhaps some power unseen and unsuspected propelled them all. He was aware that he was going to make a proclamation to the People of the Earth, aware of certain grandiose phrases floating in his mind as the thing he meant to say. Many little things happened, and then he found himself with the man in yellow entering a little room where this proclamation of his ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... symphony, but becomes more and more transfigured in its passionate loveliness when it aids the beatification of the more than ghoulish princess. There is no escape from the power of the music when it soars to grandiose heights in the duet between Salome 'and the prophet, the subsequent intermezzo and the wicked apotheosis. It overwhelms the senses and reduces the nervous system of the listeners ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... to sing, to dream. And wilt thou believe that I, who have still sound judgment to the value of a sestertium, and sense to the value of an as, let myself be borne away by these fantasies, and I do this for the reason that, if they are not possible, they are at least grandiose and uncommon? Such a fabulous empire would be a thing which, some time or other, after long ages, would seem a dream to mankind. Except when Venus takes the form of Lygia, or even of a slave Eunice, or when art beautifies ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... compared with that immediately following ("With the Faithful deign to place us"), a tenor solo of a quaint and pastoral character. The next number for chorus ("While the wicked are confounded") affords still another striking contrast, being in the grandiose style and very dramatic, closing with phrases for the solo voices expressive of submission and contrition. Up to this point the "Dies Irae" has been monotonous in its sameness of general style; but the next verse ("Day of Weeping, ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... the Caesars on the Palatine are a grandiose ruin that stirs the artist and makes the philosopher think; but if one sets himself to measure them, to conjecture from the remains the proportions of the entire edifices, he does not conjure up buildings that rival large modern constructions. ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... The furniture imported or (in Melbourne) made by the large upholsterers is, with few exceptions, more gorgeous than pretty; whence one may reasonably infer that the taste of their customers—when they have any—is better suited by the grandiose than the artistic. But most of the expensively furnished houses show plainly that the upholsterer has been given carte blanche to do what he will. Look at his shop-window, and you may make a shrewd guess ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... the preceding; born in 1793; subordinate in the mayor's office at Alencon in charge of registry. A sort of poet, liberal in politics and filled with ambition; weary of poverty and overflowing with grandiose sentiments. In 1816 he loved, with a passion that his commonsense combated, Mme. du Bousquier, then Mlle. Cormon, his senior by more than seventeen years. In 1816 the marriage dreaded by him took place. He could not brook the blow and drowned ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... the unimaginable or the sublime in quantity, it is also the incomprehensible, that which escapes the understanding and that which troubles it, which can serve to give us an idea of the super-sensuous infinity. As soon as this element attains the grandiose and announces itself to us as the work of nature (for otherwise it is only despicable), it then aids the soul to represent to itself the ideal, and imprints upon it a noble development. Who does not love the eloquent disorder of natural ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... her eyebrows as though he puzzled her. She never had liked him, and by now all her instincts were hostile to him. His clumsy figure, and slovenly dress offended her, and the touch of something grandiose in his heavy brow, and reddish-gold hair, seemed to her merely theatrical. Her information was that he had been no use as a campaigner. Why on earth ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... community. Again and again did he bemoan the blunders he had made. In the eclaircissement that followed the arrest of Celestine and Parsons he had striven to pose as the champion of Miss Forrest and to redouble his devotions. There was no doubt of his devotion: the grandiose old beau was completely fascinated by the brilliancy, daring, and self-control of that indomitable Queen of Bedlam. After the first shock and a few hours of solitude, in which she refused to see or talk with anybody, Miss Forrest had emerged from her room in readiness ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... he began now to recall the existence of that outer world of men and women, though by means of certain indefinite channels only. And the things he remembered were not what the world calls important. They were moments when he had known—beauty; beauty, however, not of the grandiose sort that holds the crowd, but of so simple and unadvertised a kind that ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... with the government of England if it plays a grandiose drama before hostile spectators who refuse to take part in it. It will go hard with the nation, for it will be ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... marked. Such a contrast between youth and age is a very favourite one. Bellini, in the same church, draws it between SS. Sebastian and Job, and Alvise Vivarini, in his last painting, balances a very youthful Sebastian with St. Jerome. This is the most grandiose, the least of a genre picture of all Carpaccio's creations, although he does make Simeon into a pontiff with attendant cardinals bearing his train. One of his last works is the S. Vitale over the high altar ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... sadder. At moments, when he stopped to catch breath, the chorus of singers repeated the last verse; then Nero cast the tragic syrma from his shoulder with a gesture learned from Aliturus, struck the lute, and sang on. When he had finished the lines composed, he improvised, using grandiose comparisons in the spectacle unfolded before him. His face began to change. He was not moved, it is true, by the destruction of his country's capital; but he was delighted and moved with the pathos of his own ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... own knowledge was comparatively defective. He reserved to himself what may be called the "literary" aspect of his theme, recording the place of each animal in history, and relating its habits with such gusto as his ornate and grandiose style permitted. ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... of a saloon in an old-fashioned country house (Florence Towers, the property of Count O'Dowda) has been curtained off to form a stage for a private theatrical performance. A footman in grandiose Spanish livery enters before the curtain, on ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... future. Soon I shall actually have decided!... Life is very queer!" She had as yet no notion whatever of what she would do with her liberty and her income and the future; but she thought vaguely of something heroic, grandiose, ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... Soon a couple of cars creep quietly up. One by one the casualties are lifted in or climb in stiffly. The doctor who has come up with them chats with the M.O., and the local gossip is exchanged for the wider knowledge (or more grandiose rumours) of the field ambulance. Our Jock, who has a bullet in his chest, is lifted in. Straps are fastened securely and tarpaulins tied. 'All aboard, sir!' 'Right! Well, so long, Hadley!' 'Cheero, Scott!' The ambulances start very cautiously, and crawl up the road. It is in execrable condition, ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... trunks and parcels, leaving the scene of her struggles and her defeat, whither she had once come as slim as a wand, to return stout and heavy, and heavy-hearted, to her childhood; content to live with her grandiose sister until such time as she should be ready for burial! The grimy and impassive old house perhaps heard her heart saying: "Only yesterday they were little girls, ever so tiny, and now—" The driving-off of a waggonette can be a ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... to have her again—their own Lucy, as she still was, though somewhat of the grandiose style and self-consequence of her husband had overlaid the original nature. She was as good-natured and obliging as ever, and though beginning by conferring her favours as condescensions, she soon would forget that ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... then, to be sure, we come upon something that makes us hesitate again whether, after all, Dryden was not grandiose rather than great, as in the ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... an estuary of some four hundred feet across, in which it pours its blackish waters, coming from the west-northwest, after having watered the territories of the Cacena Indians. At this spot the Amazon appears under a truly grandiose aspect, but its course is more than ever encumbered with islands and islets. It required all the address of the pilot to steer through the archipelago, going from one bank to another, avoiding the shallows, shirking the eddies, ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... present, when they entered the cathedral, as wholly as if they had taken hold of the horns of the altar, though they were far from literally doing this in an interior so grandiose. There area few rococo churches in Italy, and perhaps more in Spain, which approach the perfection achieved by the Wurzburg cathedral in the baroque style. For once one sees what that style can do in architecture and sculpture, and whatever one may say of the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... absurd material is, you will say, merely stupid. Well, I'm sorry. I know no other way to make it save life's own, and I know that the tragedy of William's life hung upon a silly little ink-stained 'J' pen. I would pretend that it was made of much more grandiose material if I could. But the facts are as I shall tell you. And surely if you fulfil that definition of man which describes him as a reflective being, if you ever think on life at all, you must have noticed how even the great tragedies that go in purple in the great poets all ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... Unobserved, they received, and made their own preparations for utilising, the legacy of the mid-Victorian novel—moral thesis, plot, underplot, set characters, descriptive machinery, landscape colouring, copious phraseology, Herculean proportions, and the rest of the cumbrous and grandiose paraphernalia of Chuzzlewit, Pendennis, and Middlemarch. But they received the legacy in a totally different spirit. Mark Rutherford, after a very brief experiment, put all these elaborate properties and conventions reverently aside. Cleverer ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... lone and remote villages, like those of the Sagra. There he will find all that gravity of deportment and chivalry of disposition which Cervantes is said to have sneered away; and there he will hear, in everyday conversation, those grandiose expressions, which, when met with in the romances of chivalry, are scoffed at ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... exclamation at the end, his summary of modern society, a solemn grandiose figure of speech found in the legendary souvenirs of a glorious antiquity, a classic reminiscence of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the event. On March 6 the 'Philiki Hetairia' at Odessa had opened its own operations in grandiose style by sending a filibustering expedition across the Russo-Turkish frontier under command of Prince Alexander Hypsilantis, a Phanariot in the Russian service. Hypsilantis played for a general revolt of the Ruman population ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... are our other novelists much better. Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible 'points of view' his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire. Mr. Hall Caine, it is true, aims at the grandiose, but then he writes at the top of his voice. He is so loud that one cannot bear what he says. Mr. James Payn is an adept in the art of concealing what is not worth finding. He hunts down the obvious with the enthusiasm of a short-sighted detective. As one turns ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... used, entirely beyond parallel in art. Like the Titans of old, he would scale the very heavens in his daring. In one of his works he does not hesitate to use three orchestras, three choruses (all of full dimensions), four organs, and a triple quartet. The conceptions of Berlioz were so grandiose that he sometimes disdained detail, and the result was that more than one of his compositions have rugged grandeur at the expense of symmetry and balance ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... The sense of breadth in composition is continually satisfied through this ascent by the fine-drawn lines, faint tints, and immense air-spaces of Italian landscape. Each little piece reminds one of England; but the geographical scale is enormously more grandiose, and the ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... Coumelie, the mule-path to the Cirque de Troumouse leading through a field above us, as we reached the zigzag's top. Still gently ascending round the foot of the Coumelie, the pointed summit of the lofty Taillon (10,323 ft.) came into view ahead, with the grandiose Campbieil (10,418 ft.) up the Heas valley; and the Pic de Saugue immediately above on the right, from whose height the splendid Cascade d'Arroudet, dashing past the shepherds' cottages, launches its foaming showers into the river below. A few more graceful curvings of the road and ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... the King's speech to his Parliament, and he read it nervously in a voice that had not learned to control itself. But the speech was sufficiently emphatic, and its words were grandiose and even florid. ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... connection; so under these circumstances, probably the classical style was as suitable as any other, chosen on such narrow and exclusive grounds. There was even a certain fitness in it, a capability of much expansion on theatrical and grandiose lines. Its unbending demeanor toward craft talent of the humbler kind at once flattered the vanity of the cultured, and cowed ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... sort of sense easily recognizes in historic types the parallels of modern experience. It avoids the error of thinking history a mistake and making of the men and women who appear there something remote from humanity, extreme, and either stilted or grandiose. ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... house to house designing and cutting out gowns for women no longer able to afford dressmakers but still anxious to please. She hopes in time to be employed in one of the great dressmakers' establishments, having renounced all thought of being an artist in a more grandiose sense. Meanwhile she keeps the family from starving while her mother and sisters do the housework. Her brothers are in the military colleges and will be called out in due course if the war continues long enough to absorb all the youth ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... her leisure hours of weaving, with Helen and her heroic canvas, and the army of grandiose Biblical folk, and let us come westward into Europe in short review of the textiles called tapestry which were produced from the early Christian centuries to the time of the Crusades, and thus will ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... present state. And an extraneous influence has worked in the same direction—the gradual softening of manners within historical times, that demasculinization which is an inevitable concomitant of increasing social security. Divinity reflects its human creators and their environment; grandiose or warlike gods become superfluous, and finally incomprehensible, in humdrum days of peace. In order to survive, our deities (like the rest of us) must have a certain plasticity. If recalcitrant, they are quietly relieved of their functions, and forgotten. ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... newspapers, and I have also talked with the officer who commands the military guard on the Ile Royale, when in the course of my travels I reached Cayenne. I believe the story to be in the main true. It is the sort of story that no man, I think, would ever invent about himself, for it is neither grandiose nor flattering, nor yet funny enough to ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... truss-manufactory; Sir William Harcourt's attempt to "develop a system of unsectarian religion from the Life of Mr. Pickwick;" the "portly jeweller from Cheapside," with his "passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life;" the grandiose war-correspondence of the Times, and "old Russell's guns getting a little honey-combed;" Lord Lumpington's subjection to "the grand, old, fortifying, classical curriculum," and the "feat of mental ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... There was something about her husband that was grandiose and princely, whenever he escaped from his accursed Machiavel, and gave fair play ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... composer of the grandiose, the magnificent. This appears in his earliest works. In 1837 he composed his Requiem, for the funeral obsequies of General Damremont. This work is of unprecedented proportions. It is scored for chorus, solos and orchestra, the latter occasionally of extraordinary appointment. In the "Tuba Mirum," ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... Afric's forest huge and poisonous Pigmies dare. But, to avoid the lonely traveller's pain, From Ludgate Circus drag the well-linked chain; As Amurath to Amurath succeeds, So COOK to COOK! THOMAS's grandiose deeds What Tourist may forget? The great one's gone, But his vast enterprise shall still march on. What THOMAS started, is pursued by JOHN. Peace to the dust of the Great Pioneer, "Great COOK is dead, long live Great ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 30, 1892 • Various
... of North America have been flung up into a continental divide, the country in many of its aspects is still terrible. In extent alone this mountain empire is grandiose. The swiftest transcontinental trains approaching its boundaries at night find night falling again before they have fairly penetrated it. Geologically severe, this region in geological store is the richest of the continent; physically forbidding beyond all other stretches of ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... There are faults, of course, though the fact that the horse ambles need not be considered an error. But the relative proportions of the horse and rider are not quite accurately preserved, Gattamelata being, if anything, rather below the right scale. The monument is, however, so massive and grandiose that criticism seems out of place; indeed, in the presence of the statue one feels that everything is subordinated to the power and mastery of Gattamelata himself. The general is bareheaded, and the strong courageous ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... their day, whose fame has passed away with their dissolving theories. Read Dr. Bartlett's comparison of the famous Benjamin Rush with his modest fellow-townsman Dr. William Currie, and see the dangers into which a passion for grandiose generalizations betrayed a man of ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... a present to each of the little girls (if not too big and grandiose) of six pence (for which I send stamps), who are going to collect seeds for me: viz., Lychnis, white, red, and flesh-colour (if ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... a painting representing St. Francois, the patron of the house. Those were the only artistic decorations of the modest habitation. The nobleman often said: "I have freed myself from the tyranny of objects." But with that marvellous background of grandiose ruins and that sky, the simple spot was an incomparable retreat in which to end in meditation and renouncement a life already shaken by the tempests of the senses and of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... fabulists. The modern Ahasuerus has no surety of an eventual peace. We have seen the German War Lord flitting hungrily from Lorraine to Poland, from Flanders to Nish, watching the failure of his troops before Nancy and Ypres, inditing grandiose proclamations to Europe, prophesying a peace which never comes. He is a figure worthy of Greek tragedy. The [Greek: hubris] which defied the gods has put him outside the homely consolations of mankind. He has devoted his people to the Dance of Death, and himself, ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... interpretation to electricity, they may not, on the contrary, give an electrical interpretation to the phenomena of matter and motion, and thus merge mechanics itself in electricity. One thus sees dawning afresh the eternal hope of co-ordinating all natural phenomena in one grandiose and imposing synthesis. Whatever may be the fate reserved for such attempts, they deserve attention in the highest degree; and it is desirable to examine them carefully if we wish to have an exact idea of the ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... integrity on this point would work his instant downfall. The pathological limitations of his vision turn the man of convictions into a fanatic—Savonarola, Luther, Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon—these types stand in opposition to the strong, emancipated spirit. But the grandiose attitudes of these sick intellects, these intellectual epileptics, are of influence upon the great masses—fanatics are picturesque, and mankind prefers observing ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... Perdita, men and women of all time. They live; Calderon's people, like Ben Jonson's, move. There is a resemblance between the autos of Calderon and the masques of Jonson. Jonson's are lyrical; Calderon's less lyrical than splendid, ethical, grandiose. They were both court poets; they both made court spectacles; they both assisted in the decay of the drama; they reflected the tastes of their time; but Calderon is the more noble, the more splendid in imagination, the more intense in his devotion ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... the breach than the observance, and in any event whose sincerity will bear question; nor have I tales to tell after the manner of Paul Barras, whose Memoirs have earned him an immortality of infamy. Neither shall I emulate the grandiose volubility and self-complacent posing of Metternich and Talleyrand, whose pretentious volumes rest for the most part unopened upon dusty shelves. I aspire to none of the honors of the historian. It shall be my aim as far as may ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... in Frederick Edwin Church. Church was born in 1826, and lived with Cole in his house in the Catskills until the latter's death. He then established himself in New York, and proceeded to visit the four corners of the earth in search for grandiose scenes. For he made the mistake of thinking that the greatness of a landscape lay in its subject rather than in its execution; so he painted views of the Andes, and Niagara, and Cotopaxi, and Chimborazo, and the ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... America were obliterated in the gust of affectionate noise. Minutes elapsed before that great audience remembered that it was at the play, and that the Prince had come to see the play. It sat down reluctantly, saving itself for his departure, watching him as he entered into enjoyment of the brave and grandiose spectacular ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... herself in sentimentalism. That dangerous vertigo nature in her case adopted, and was to make respectable. As it sometimes happens that a grandiose style, like that of the Alexandrian Platonists, or like Macpherson's Ossian, is more stimulating to the imagination of nations, than the true Plato, or than the simple poet, so here was a head so creative of ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli |
